We'll always have Paris
What Lewis doesn't consider, it seems to me, is the subtext.
In the Iliad there is beautiful book set up by having Hector return to the city. It is an odd fact about the Iliad that the two most powerful and beautiful bits in it take place not on the battlefield but when Hector returns behind the walls of Troy and when Priam visits Achilles in his tent. That ought to give us pause.
But for now we'll note that Homer needs an excuse to send Hector inside. Hector is a hero and his whole purpose is to be a warrior so we need a MacGuffin to justify the trip. And the MacGuffin is that Priam orders Hector to go in and sacrifice his mother's best robe to Athena in the hopes that this will lead the goddess to look favourably on Troy. It's a MacGuffin because Athena isn't going to change her mind. Its sole purpose is to give Hector a purpose to be going somewhere.
But we might note what Hector is asked to burn on Athena's altar. A robe is a thing of domestic life and the epic tells us here what must be sacrificed to what.
On his trip in two seemingly random encounters enter into the story. The first is that Hector meets his wife and son. The child is scared of his father until Hector takes his helmet off. Meanwhile his wife Andromache pleads with Hector not to return to battle to die. Hector gives a very eloquent non-answer to this the gist of which is that he is a hero and heroes must be heroes and that means to die heroically.
The next encounter is with Paris who is dawdling in bed with Helen, loving her, rather than fighting. Paris is quite literally making love not war. The whole point of this scene is to make it clear to us what a shameful person Paris is. Helen too, of course, but that seems to have been taken as normal for a woman by Homer.
So what's the subtext? Well, no one would go to all the trouble to create these scenes if domestic life and erotic love hadn't been challenges to the heroic ideal. Homer and his readers may have wanted to be very clear that Paris's life was shameful but that kind of life had to really exist in order for it to be argued against in the first place. Stesichorus, unlike Homer, does not take it for granted that love of a beautiful woman is a shameful thing compared to war and praises Helen after being struck blind for insulting her. This heroic domesticity and erotic love had its appeals and had to be constantly fought against by the ancient poets of warfare and by the medieval theologians of monasticism.
A similar subtext exists in the middle ages. The texts passed along to us—the texts Lewis relies on so heavily—were written by churchmen and courtiers. These people had pretenses to hold up and they did so against other ways of life. These ways of life are in the subtext.
By focusing on the great theologians Lewis assumes a unity of life and vision that simply did not exist in the middle ages. If we read those medieval authors themselves we will see plenty of subtext that tells us that they well knew that their world was barely holding together. The unity of vision Lewis takes for granted was, in fact, merely a fond hope for the theologians who wrote about love. They wrote knowing that most people would not be even remotely interested in what they had to say about love or anything else for that matter.
When courtly love springs up in poetry in Provence we should make two reasonable assumptions. The first is that this passion had long existed and was well known to everyone even if it did not appear in any writing before this time. The second is that the Provençal troubadours, like the medieval theologians, were desperately trying to impose a unity on the world. The courtly love they wrote about was certainly much more varied in real life than what appears on the page. It came complete with conventions and assumptions that distorted reality.
We need go no further back than the 1950s to see this. To read the literature of the time, you would think that 99 percent of brides were virgins. This was not the case. And the bridegrooms? Well, the literature is odd there. It tends to avoid the subject while at the same time assuming that guy will somehow know what to do on his wedding night. The reality was considerably more varied.
In our own era, the reverse is the case. teenagers tend to have less sex experience than anyone following the media might guess.
There was something different about the middle ages, however. And that, as I say, above, was the complete lack of cultural and political unity. There was all sorts of stuff going on underground. When considering courtly or romantic love, we shouldn't concern ourselves with the origins so much as with the weakness of its opponents. Remember that the medieval theologians had been fighting against Eros for centuries. The odd thing about medieval Provence is not that opposition sprung up but that the high culture of the theologians and kings was unable to resist it. These people could not create a unified culture but they could at least control what happened in the very small world of the court and the learned clerics. All of sudden, something shook the bottle underneath this little cap of order and the effervescence threatened to blow the lid off.
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