SOURCE: “Andreas Capellanus: A Reading of the Tractatus,” in MLN, Vol 88, No. 6, December, 1973, pp.1288-1315.

[In the following essay, Singer contends that Capellanus's rejection of courtly love in the third book of De Amore is made reluctantly, after he has tried and failed to reconcile it with religious love.]

In the modern world many writers have been fascinated by the image of courtly love as a doctrine originating in 12th-century France. If one looks for major texts in that period, however, one finds that they are very few in number. The troubadours of Provence mainly wrote poetry; and though their verse is often philosophical, they made no efforts to codify their views. Theirs is a conglomeration of scattered expressions, diverse ideas. Only in its northern version does French courtly love receive a doctrinal formulation. Even then, there is only one great text: the Tractatus amoris & de amoris remedio, written by Andreas Capellanus around 1185 and condemned by the Bishop of Paris almost a hundred years later.

Andreas' Tractatus is divided into three books: the first, concerned with the nature of love and its acquisition; the second, with the retaining of love; the third, with its elimination and rejection. That Andreas should have ended his treatise by condemning the very ideas that he himself expounds in the earlier books has caused much speculation on the part of scholars in the field. Some deny that Andreas actually wrote the third book. This would save him from the charge of inconsistency, but there seems to be little if any evidence to support the theory of a second author. Others explain the structure of the Tractatus by saying that Andreas is merely imitating Ovid, who also wrote a book of remedies. But though Andreas was clearly influenced by Ovid, their final books are significantly different. Ovid never renounces love. He only wishes to remedy its more extreme, less beneficial, symptoms. Andreas does renounce sexual love, attacking it as offensive to God and inimical to that religious love for which all Christians ought to aspire. It would seem, then, that Andreas was either insincere—affirming one thing in the first books and then its denial in the third—or else intimidated by the church or else strangely given to self-contradictions. Scholars have held all these positions, but I think they are mistaken.

The most promising solution to the problem comes from the work of Alexander Denomy. In his book The Hersey of Courtly Love, he notes that when Andreas' treatise was condemned in 1277 it was grouped with the writings of those “who say that things may be true according to philosophy but not according to Faith, just as if there were two contradictory truths.” (p. 40) This position, which the Averroists upheld and Aquinas attacked, is sometimes called the belief in “double truth”: natural reason being a means to truths that may indeed contradict the truths available through faith. As good Christian, one who believes in double truth will reject the truths of reason that oppose those of faith, but he does so as an act of faith rather than reason—in a sense, renouncing reason as he would also wish to renounce the world itself. On this interpretation, Andreas emerges as neither insincere nor intimidated nor self-contradictory. In the first parts of his Tractatus, he would be following natural reason and accounting for love in the courtly manner coherent with the truths of reason. In the final book, he would be recognizing that these truths are incompatible with those of faith and expressing a preference for the latter.

There is much in Andreas to support Denomy's argument, but there are also difficulties. For one thing, Andreas himself never distinguishes between reason and faith, which is not surprising since the Christian Averroists did their work some fifty years after he wrote the Tractatus. When Andreas rejects courtly love, he appeals to the teachings of the church but not to faith as opposed to reason. Indeed, he makes an effort to show that the third book does not really contradict the first two. At the outset of his “Rejection of Love,” he denies ever having recommended love in the earlier books. He says that he was merely providing instructions so that “invigorated by the theory and trained to excite the minds of women to love, you may, by refraining from so doing, win an eternal recompense and thereby deserve a greater reward from God.” (p. 187) [In this essay I use the John Jay Parry translation throughout (entitled The Art of Courtly Love). It is now available in several versions, including a Norton paperback. Pagination refers to that edition.] That this should be the case Andreas explains by saying that God is more pleased with one who is capable of sinning but does not do so than with a man who has had no such opportunity. Andreas does not suggest that the reason of love is to be supplanted by the faith of Christian dogma, and he explicitly gives reasons for resisting love which “any wise man” would recognize.

Furthermore, Denomy's interpretation fails to account for the fact that most of Andreas' ultimate objections to courtly love are to be found in the first book as well as the third. Most of the first book consists of dialogues between men and women, who vary from dialogue to dialogue according to their social status—middle class, simple nobility, higher nobility, and clergy. Within these dialogues, which actually number more than half the pages of the Tractatus, questions about courtly love are discussed from different points of view, including those of the church. Although one may seriously doubt that Andreas uses these dialogues simply as vehicles of information and without a desire to recommend that courtly love towards which they are certainly slanted, they often voice condemnation of love. This being so, I believe that one should approach the entire Tractatus as a work of dramatic ambivalence, as itself a dialogue between two aspects of the medieval soul, two ways of life brilliantly elaborated and dialectically confronted with one another. Andreas does not alternate between reason and faith, but rather between nature and God or the secular and the holy. Nor does his allegiance to the natural ever free itself from its dialogue with the holy. In the 12th century a complete separation must surely have been impossible.

In recent years D. W. Robertson Jr. and John F. Benton have suggested that the Tractatus be interpreted as a work of irony and intentional ambiguity. It does not follow, however, that Andreas is to be treated as satirical or “humorous” anymore than Plato—though certainly there are elements of both satire and humor in these as in many other philosophers. There is no reason to believe that Andreas pervasively “meant to be funny,” as E. Talbot Donaldson claims. If one requires a suitable model to account for Andreas' ambivalent approach, one should look to the writings of St. Bernard. In the book on The Love of God and in the Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles, St. Bernard describes the degrees of love as beginning with man's natural self and slowly, step by step, leading him upwards towards the spiritual. On the first step, love is carnal, the heart being attracted to the humanity of Christ. Only later does the soul of man ascend to a purely religious love—“passing through nature to eternity,” as Shakespeare was to say. It is this, I think, that sets the pattern for Andreas, the framework within which he presents the ideas of courtly love, articulating it as a dramatic voice that may speak its lines here on earth, in nature, but that must ultimately be silenced for the greater glory of God.

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Seen from this perspective, Andreas may be read as an attempt to harmonize courtly and religious love. The former will have to be subordinated to the latter, but not until its implications have been fully explored. And in exploring the implications of courtly love, Andreas interprets it in a way that harmonizes the various strands within the northern tradition: on the one hand, the troubadours and trouvères with their Platonic idealism; on the other, Ovid and his sense of sexual reality. How Andreas combines the influence of both Plato and Ovid is evident from the very first sentence of the first chapter: “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embrace.” (p. 28) From Plato, Andreas derives the idea that love is an inborn suffering, eros being a function of human insufficiency, man's inevitable lack of goodness. In Plato the love of absolute beauty or goodness (as Diotima describes it, for instance) consists of metaphysical intuition quite different from either sight or meditation, but at various times Plato speaks poetically of the “vision” of the Good, as if it were somehow comparable to them. In the allegories of the cave and of the sun, he mentions sight and meditation with the understanding that these are mere symbols for that transcendental faculty which perfect love employs. In a way that resembles the troubadours' use of Platonistic themes, Andreas has obviously dropped the metaphysical reference of the empirical symbols and defined love in terms of them alone. Sight and meditation are thus to be taken at their face value, as the psychological processes with which we are familiar, the beauty of the opposite sex being something apparent to common sense whether or not it also symbolizes absolute goodness. This in turn enables Andreas to avail himself of the Ovidian emphasis upon reciprocity, each lover wanting the embraces of the other as an expression of sexual oneness—“the common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embrace.” So far does Andreas extend in this direction that his description of the actual genesis of love reminds one of Lucretius reducing passion to sexual desire plus erotic imagery: “For when a man sees some woman fit for love and shaped according to his taste,” Andreas says, “he begins at once to lust after her in his heart; then the more he thinks about her the more he burns with love, until he comes to a fuller meditation.” (p. 29)

In other ways too, Andreas shows the influence of thinkers like Ovid and Lucretius. It is present in his severely limiting love to heterosexual relations, in his deriving the word amor from the latin word for hook—“which means ‘to capture’ or ‘to be captured,’ for he who is in love is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture someone else with his hook”—in his asserting that everyone capable of performing the act of Venus is subject to Cupid's arrows, in his practical and sometimes cynical advice to men about the flattering words with which to accost a woman, in his assurance that only love got with difficulty is highly prized, in his advocating jealousy and even occasional deception as a means of preserving love, and so on. For all these Ovidian borrowings, however, Andreas retains his character as a moral philosopher in the idealistic tradition. At every point, he recognizes the demands of nature but also wishes to fit them into a system of personal and social morality. Like Ibn Hazm or the troubadours themselves, Andreas praises love for elevating men towards virtuous behavior they could not otherwise have attained. It makes the low-born act with nobility, and the proud man it makes humble. Men in love rise above the meanness of self-interest. They become “accustomed to performing many services gracefully for everyone.” (p. 31) Moreover, love is sharply distinguished from mere sexuality. In a manner that he might have acquired from the Platonistic tradition but certainly not from the Ovidian, Andreas insists that love adorns a man with the virtue of relative chastity. Though love arises from an indiscriminate lust, it fixes upon a single beloved so that “he who shines with the light of one love can hardly think of embracing another woman, even a beautiful one.” (p. 31)

Exclusiveness of this sort contravenes Plato's dedication to absolute beauty since the Platonic philosopher emancipates himself from all empirical attachments by loving beautiful objects one after the other, or even all at once, never allowing himself to be ensnared by anything short of the Beautiful itself. But even so, Plato would have recognized that Andreas is showing persons who are not philosophically trained how they too can overcome their carnal inclinations. Through love a man restricts his sexual appetites to a single woman, and in his relationship with her they are made to serve the ends of moral aspiration. Though Andreas is not a Platonist, his ideas about love (as opposed to sex itself, where he seems to permit almost anything) are clearly those of the idealistic tradition which derives from Plato.

That Andreas subordinates his Ovidian tendencies to others which are more Platonistic, he also reveals in discussing the five means by which love may be acquired. These are: a beautiful figure, excellence of character, great facility of speech, wealth, and readiness to grant favors. The last two are immediately eliminated, and verbal facility given only secondary importance. Andreas remarks that a man or woman who can speak well makes it easy for love to arise in another person; but he also states that readiness of speech is not enough, and to what I said earlier about his giving men advice on how to praise a woman I must add the fact that he (unlike Ovid) never confuses these tactical moves with the evidence of an authentic love. Andreas insists that true love is acquired only through beauty of figure or excellence of character, and of these two the latter is given the greatest importance. Though a beautiful face or body may elicit love, Andreas considers a courtly relationship inferior unless beauty is accompanied by goodness. In one place he relates the beauty of youth to what he calls “the natural instinct of passion,” reserving love of a nobler sort to persons who have knowledge, virtue, and good manners. In general, he cautions the eager lover against the allurements of a beautiful appearance. With respect to men and women alike, it is only excellence of character that assures the kind of love Andreas is prepared to defend. Since perfect courtly love involves mutuality of affection, it can only exist between a man and a woman who are both virtuous. Where the lovers are equally praiseworthy, even physical defects will not count as impediments: “A person of good character draws the love of another person of the same kind, for a well-instructed lover, man or woman, does not reject an ugly lover if the character within is good.” (p. 35)

A statement of this sort reminds one of Aristotle as well as Plato, of philia as well as eros. The sense of community is there, the idea of goodness at either end of a friendly relationship, and likewise an implied concern about the welfare of the other. But of course Andreas is not referring to a fraternal bond between philosophers in a Greek city-state. The communion he is thinking of obtains between men and women who wish to direct their indiscriminate lustfulness towards some member of the opposite sex whose inherent goodness can serve to dignify the relationship. Where religious love in the middle ages distinguishes between cupiditas and caritas, the former being carnal and the latter purely spiritual, Andreas suggests a third alternative. His variety of courtly love envisages a kind of earthly paradise, a libidinal oneness which is also spiritual, a love that aspires upwards (unlike cupiditas) but makes no attempt to approximate caritas, to seek union with the Christian God, or in any way divest itself of bodily pleasures compatible with moral goodness.

In presenting this alternative, Andreas investigates problems in morality that no one else had really considered. For although he will eventually reject courtly love as ultimately irreligious, he first examines the implications—both practical and philosophical—that follow from accepting it as a way of life. In this respect, his Tractatus is possibly unique in medieval moral philosophy. At times one feels that Andreas was born too early, that humanistic thinking had not yet advanced to a point where his kind of problem could be adequately resolved. But in one way or another, he raises most of the questions about love between the sexes that later philosophers were to re-examine so carefully. Had he not lived when he did, they might not have been able to.

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The most interesting problems in Andreas are the ones debated in the dialogues of Book I. In all of them, the man tries to convince a woman to take him as her lover. He makes this attempt solely by means of argument, offering reasons to support his plea, reasons that are generally moral though sometimes prudential. To the modern reader, these argumentative dialogues may well appear ludicrous. Who ever heard of a man getting a woman to love him as the outcome of a philosophical debate? Ovidian flattery, language artfully used to facilitate seduction, subtle appeals to the instincts and the appetites—this we can understand. I can even hear a twentieth century cynic advising the man to lose the argument if he wants to win the woman. But the modern reader is often too literal-minded. He easily misconstrues the function of the dialogues. Andreas knows that love is governed by emotion as well as reason. He knows that reasons merely bring forth other reasons. Why should they not? For his are philosophical dialogues in the manner of Plato or Hume, not speeches to be memorized by aspiring lovers. They are imaginative devices for considering human problems from diverse points of view, and need not be taken as anything else. Andreas lived in an age when Abélard and Guillaume de St-Thierry had made dialectics into a veritable method for doing theology. Why should he not attempt something similar within the field of erotic morality?

Dialectics involving a rational confrontation between opposites, it often—invariably, Hegel says—assumes the form of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Andreas, at least, this is generally the case. For instance, notice how the first dialogue considers what kind of man a woman ought to choose in taking a lover. From the description of love with which the Tractatus begins, it is apparent that true lovers must have excellent character. But does this mean that excellence of character precedes love or issues from it? When a woman chooses a lover, should she seek the most worthy man she can find or should she use her love as a means of inducing worthiness in her lover? The troubadours would surely have chosen the second alternative. Their kind of man is always seeking the benefits that accrue from loving a “perfect” woman. Compared to her, he himself is inevitably unworthy. But once the concept of reciprocal love is introduced, all this must change. For the woman will also seek a “perfect” man, one who is antecedently worthy of her love, as she is worthy of his.

Speaking in the different voices of his dialogue, Andreas argues first for one alternative, then for the other, and finally tries to reconcile them within a synthesis. On the one hand, we are told that women should love men as a way of rewarding them for moral excellence, for having “done many praiseworthy deeds, extended many courtesies, offered numberless services to everybody.” (p. 39) As in the court of the Heavenly King those who have the greatest merit receive the greatest rewards, so too on earth a woman of character ought to give herself in love to the worthiest man she can find. At least, a man has the right to plead for love on the basis of his noble character. Men may not verbalize such pleas, but why else would they strive to distinguish themselves, to shine in a woman's eyes, to inspire in her that admiration without which love cannot occur? On the other hand, we are reminded that love is itself the source of goodness. The man who cannot lay claim to deeds of excellence that would make him worthy of the woman's love is told to argue as follows: “… no man could do good deeds unless the persuasion of love impelled him, and you ought to grant me the love I seek, so that men will think you did it to make me do well and that through you my manners may be improved and may ever remain so. For I know that it will be considered more to your credit if out of your grace alone you give me your love, or the hope of it, than if you grant it to me in payment for what I have done; that would be like paying a debt, but the other remains pure generosity.” (p. 40-41) Against this, the woman claims that the argument is subversive to morality since it puts a premium upon the negligent man instead of rewarding the one who has done good deeds. In giving his reply, the man makes a distinction that enables the dialogue to reach a synthesis. If the lover is a mature person who has opportunities to act well but in fact has not done so, then he ought to be passed over in favor of a more worthy man. If, however, the suitor is still young and has had no such opportunities, he ought to be loved for the sake of the goodness in character that will be created in him. In a way that conflicts, at least contrasts, with the previous references to heavenly rewards, the speech continues as follows:

For as the Heavenly King rejoices over the conversion of one sinner more than over ninety-nine just, because of the good that follows therefrom, so a woman does better if she takes a man who is none too good, makes him praiseworthy through her good character, and by her instruction adds him to the court of Love, than if she makes some good man better.

(p. 42)

The passage then ends with the claim that society gains more from the improvement of a man who is not good than from the increasing of goodness in one who is already good. Still, the importance of prior excellence is not to be neglected either. In order to give the problem its final resolution, the dialogue goes on to establish an integrated series of steps that ought to be followed in choosing a lover. In the first stage, the woman encourages the man, allowing him to hope for her love; in the second, she accords him a kiss; in the third, the superficial contact of an embrace; and only much later, in the fourth stage, “the yielding of the whole person.” In view of the fact that the fourth stage culminates and completes the relationship, it is to be reserved for the man who proves himself worthy. Sexual union thus serves as an incentive to good action on the part of the aspiring lover. Since it is the last of the four stages, it is a reward that may always be withheld if the man has not succeeded in rendering himself excellent in character and behavior. At the level of the other three stages, however, the woman is free to choose a youth who is none too good. By giving him hope and the lesser delights of physical contact, she will encourage him towards noble action. If he fails, the woman withholds the final consummation and goes in search of someone else who either is already worthy of her or may become so with her assistance.

In reaching this synthesis, the dialogue is harmonizing more than may initially appear. By adding the fourth stage to the first three, the argument combines troubadour fin' amors with Ovidian eros. The goal of love is no longer calculated frustration, as it was for the troubadours, but rather sexual fulfillment within a moral system. In making the system specifically moral, the relationship being based on excellence of character, Andreas goes far beyond Ovid. But in giving the fourth stage the importance that he does, he also goes beyond fin' amors, which limits itself only to the first three. That he should be synthesizing the alternatives he considers is also significant. It is not by chance that Andreas cites heavenly rewards that merit earns, and then contrasts them with divine grace extended to the unworthy sinner. For, in effect, his solution to the moral problem is a replica of the caritas synthesis. As God's agapē is fundamental to religious love, so is the woman's gracious giving of herself the basis of courtly love. In both God and the woman, love is the source of goodness, that without which no human goods could possibly exist. It is therefore prior to goodness and may be visited upon the unworthy man as well as one who has earned it. At the same time, love is also the reward for which men strive, the goal and culmination of upward aspiration. Andreas has his stages of love just as the medieval theologians had their degrees of salvation. Both hierarchies belong to love as a striving for goodness, which must integrate itself with love as a free bestowal in order for there to be that harmonious union, that completed circuit of give and take, which the middle ages wished to institute on earth as well as in heaven.

As the humanization of caritas, Andreas' version of courtly love encounters problems similar to those that faced the religious synthesis. For instance, if love is something freely given—by the woman, as it is by God—then it may also be arbitrarily denied. In religious love such freedom bespeaks the infinite authority of a supernatural God. And yet, outpouring love is said to be the essence of the deity. How then can he withhold it, deny his grace in any manner whatsoever either to the righteous or the sinning? Similarly, how can the courtly lady refuse to love, rejecting lovers regardless of their worth and despite their future promise? Before the awesome character of the religious question, finite man can only humble himself. Not even the church can hope to understand how God is love but also free to limit or control the giving of his goodness. And in the corresponding problem for courtly love, Andreas also reaches no solution. On the one hand, his voices frequently assert that love depends upon the woman's free bestowal of herself, and that nothing avails the lover unless the woman offers love by her own free will. On the other hand, women are threatened with the penalties love reserves for those who refuse to join his army. In one place, the man denies that any good and wise woman would actually withhold herself. Since nothing could be more desirable than love, how can a lady who is not acting out of ignorance or perversity refuse to love? But the man in this dialogue does not push his advantage, and when the woman insists that she knows what she is doing, he merely laments the choice she has freely made.

In the sixth dialogue Andreas examines this problem systematically. First the man begs the woman not to reject his love unless she finds him unworthy of her. She replies that however worthy a suitor may be the woman is always free to refuse him, and that he has no right to feel injured since the beloved is under no obligation “to give something to someone who asks for it.” The man does not agree, however; he tries to prove that the woman cannot properly deprive him of her love. He argues that since no human being can be happy or moral unless he loves, it is always improper to spurn a loving heart: “If a person of either sex desires to be considered good or praiseworthy in the world, he or she is bound to love.” (p. 88) This being so, the woman must accept either a man who is bad or one who is worthy. By what is called “Love's precept,” the woman is forbidden to love bad men, and therefore she does the suitor an injury unless she can show that he is not really good. To much of this, the woman readily acquiesces. She here admits that one must not reject love and yet that one must only love those who are good. But she now defends her freedom to choose a particular person only, whichever good man she prefers over all others. In general, courtly love attacked promiscuity as the church also attacked polytheism. As there was only one God, so was there only one man and one woman who could properly satisfy the ideal longings of the other. On this basis, the woman might readily acknowledge the worthiness of a man but still deny that he is right for her. That does not, of course, satisfy the lady's interlocutor, who engages in a diversionary tactic we need not consider. In order to answer him, however, the woman finally confesses to loving another man whom she desires with her heart. However greatly her head may incline her towards the suitor we have been listening to, she gives as the final reason for not accepting him the fact that “I have no fondness or affection in my heart for you.” (p. 90)

Andreas leaves the matter there, and perhaps we should not be surprised that he cannot resolve the problems he has been presenting. His version of courtly love being an attempt to harmonize vastly different elements, it inevitably struggles with the irreconcilable—as does Christianity itself. Each derives its rational component from the Greeks, ultimately Platonic philosophy, and each seeks to combine it with a vital but unclear emotion transmitted through the Roman dispensation: on the one hand, feelings of the heart that belong to passion and Ovidian sexuality; on the other, the sense of mysterious descent and the arbitrary giving of oneself incorporated in the New Testament. Nor is Andreas unmindful of what he is doing. At times he even constructs the dialogues out of a studied conflict between his disparate sources.

The first dialogue has an especially interesting structure in this respect. In it Andreas confronts Platonic beliefs about the objective value of the beloved with other ideas, stemming from Lucretius as well as Ovid, about the delusoriness of love. First, Andreas advises the man to flatter the woman, to commend her in any way he wishes since women delight in being praised. But he also says—and he says it twice in three sentences—that these remarks have nothing to do with love. That shows itself only when the man goes on to tell the woman that God has made her with no defects in her beauty or good sense, and therefore that one must marvel to see that she has no lover. This, of course, is what we expect from one who loves in the manner of the Platonistic tradition. The object must be loved for the sake of its inherent goodness; to love a woman who is lacking in beauty or character is inconceivable. In this particular dialogue the woman denies that she is either beautiful or outstanding in any other way. The man then replies that if she does believe she is not beautiful, so much the better! Why? Because it should prove to her that he really loves her, since “to me your beauty excels that of all other women; and love makes even an ugly woman seem very beautiful to her lover.” (p. 37-8) Now that is not what Platonism taught, as least not in respect to “true love,” and its inclusion makes sense only if we think of Andreas struggling towards a synthesis with the realism of someone like Lucretius or Ovid. That this is indeed his intention appears from one of the speeches in the fourth dialogue. There the man says that love's arrows are not unloosed by the beauty of the beloved, but rather “it is love alone that impels men's hearts to love.” (p. 55) The next sentence, however, seems to say something quite different. We are now told that when a man loves a woman, “her beauty is always very pleasing to him even though others find her misshapen and spiritless.” (p. 65) Here it is suggested that the woman is indeed objectively beautiful, but that love is required as a means of detection. Further down, the speech slips back into the Platonic tradition—as if Andreas felt the need to articulate all the alternatives—and the man tells the woman that he loves her “because of your dazzling beauty and the fame of your excellent character.” (p. 65)

As a synthesis, this is not much of a success. But the problems have been presented, and not until latter-day Romanticism dropped the belief in objective goodness prior to love could anyone within the idealistic tradition make much headway with them. Something similar holds for the question of reciprocity. As I have said, Andreas differs from the troubadours in building the concept of mutuality into his version of courtly love. But at times he also sounds very much like the troubadours, except that he feels the need to compensate for their extreme position by ending up with one that contradicts it. When he finally rejects courtly love, he not only knocks women from their pedestal but also debases them in the mire and denies the possibility of their reciprocating love. In Andreas one finds more than just a statement of these opposing attitudes, but less than a viable synthesis.

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Within the structure of the Tractatus, troubadour subservience to the beloved takes on special interest because it is something the woman herself demands. To this extent, one might say that the doctrine of fin' amors has already been modified. In the original troubadour poetry women are not generally represented as expecting anything of their lovers. They are simply there, like Mount Everest. They embody ideals which matter to the poets, but which they themselves hardly seem to comprehend. Nor is this too surprising when one considers that fin' amors developed out of a Hispano-Arabic world in which women were kept uneducated, in which the beloved might even be a slave girl. In Provençal poetry the woman occasionally expresses sexual interest which the troubadour must resist—as in some lines of Bernard de Ventadour—for the sake of retaining his aloof devotion. More involvement than this, one hardly finds in the troubadour lady. What a difference, therefore, to see women argue their case in the dialogues of Andreas! A kind of mutuality is achieved simply by having men and women agree about the elevation of the beloved: that she retains the right to choose her lover; that he must prove himself worthy of her and so advance upwards, step by step, towards a culminating union at her level; that everything noble and virtuous, everything that makes life worth living, proceeds from women, who are even described as the source of goodness itself. But though the troubadour relationship has been altered by the fact that the lady discourses with her lover, the men frequently cast themselves into the troubadour posture. On their knees, hands clasped, they beg the woman to accept their love, their life, their service, and to do with them as she pleases. This mood is especially evident in the third dialogue, where a man of the middle class speaks with a lady of the higher nobility; but this social difference alone cannot account for the way in which the man treats the woman like a divinity.

At the same time, the troubadour element in Andreas is clearly secondary. Most of his women are quite uncomfortable in their role as goddesses. In the seventh dialogue the woman complains against the awkwardness of being praised immoderately. The man has just finished telling her that the whole world extols her virtue, wisdom, beauty etc. and that merely to serve her “is to reign over everything in this life.” As against this, the lady points out that praising her so effusively detracts from the worth of other women and that saying one reigns over everything by serving her is actually an insult to all other ladies, particularly those better than herself. The man gets out of it by promising to serve women in general for the sake of his love towards her in particular. Still, the lady has made her point: she is not wholly pleased with being exalted as the embodiment of an ideal. She is, however, willing to encourage a lover to do good deeds on her behalf; and in another dialogue, the man argues that since women are the cause of goodness, they have an obligation to return the love of men who have been inspired to noble acts by them. In this relationship, the beloved enjoys a reciprocal love. She participates as a very special human being, not as a goddness.

That reciprocity is indeed the ideal of Andreas' lovers appears at various places in the Tractatus. In the eighth dialogue, both interlocutors seem to agree that no one is properly joined in love if “the character of the man is not as good as that of the woman or when the pure affection of the heart is not equal on both sides.” (p. 134) In a later chapter, on how love may come to an end, Andreas goes even further. As if he were writing a critique of Ovid, he explicitly classifies “inequality of love” with “fraudulent and deceitful duplicity of heart,” these being things that inevitably destroy true love. A deceitful man cannot really love, he says, regardless of how worthy he may otherwise be. The position is fully summed up when Andreas concludes: “Love seeks for two persons who are bound together by a mutual trust and an identity of desires, and other people lack all merit in love and are considered strangers to his court.” (p. 156)

Unfortunately, this paradise of blissful mutuality is not free of serpents. Although Andreas would seem to be criticizing Ovid's reliance on deceit, his chapter on how to increase love once it has been consummated shows unmistakable traces of the Roman poet. He says that the feeling of love, as well as the desire for exchanging solaces, will augment if lovers can be made to meet rarely and with difficulty. He also claims that jealousy increases love, and in fact he calls jealousy “the nurse of love.” Both of these points—on jealousy and the importance of difficulty—are also discussed in the seventh dialogue. There the man speaks of them as ingredients in the very definition of love, so much so that their absence from married life makes it impossible for love to exist between husband and wife. “For what is love,” says the man in a line that Ovid would have admired, “but an inordinate desire to receive passionately a furtive and hidden embrace?” (p. 100) The man goes on to argue that in marriage embraces cannot be furtive, since neither husband nor wife need fear the objections of anyone, and therefore married people cannot be said to love. He concludes that jealousy, which is a disgrace between husband and wife, should be welcomed as a means of helping love to grow.

When the woman objects to this, saying that jealousy is “nothing but a shameful and evil suspicion” and that furtive embraces are less desirable than those which are easily attainable, the man sharpens his argument. He distinguishes between “true” or “real” jealousy and “shameful suspicion.” Real jealousy he defines as an “emotion whereby we greatly fear that the substance of our love may be weakened by some defect in serving the desires of our beloved, and it is an anxiety lest our love may not be returned, and it is a suspicion of the beloved, but without any shameful thought.” (p. 102) Real jealousy thus consists of three elements: a fear of one's own moral inadequacy, a fear that the woman does not reciprocate one's love, and a fear that she loves someone else. Since the woman is free to love whomever she wishes, the jealous man cannot condemn her in any way. His emotion is therefore different from a suspicion that she has acted shamefully. Andreas seems to use the phrase “shameful suspicion” ambiguously—at times referring to the man's shamefulness in suspecting the woman; at other times, the suspicion of shameful conduct by the woman. In either event, shameful suspicion is foreign to love since it presupposes a condition in which the woman has no right to love anyone other than this particular man. For that reason, it must not be confused with (real or true) jealousy. A husband cannot be jealous of his wife, only suspicious in a manner that involves shamefulness either on his part or hers or both, depending on his attitude and the nature of her conduct. Lovers being free in a way that married persons cannot be, since marriage is contractual and love is not, a lover's jealousy need never be shameful suspicion. The latter destroys love; but true jealousy contributes to it.

In making this distinction, Andreas clearly disassociates himself from Ovid. Though Ovid supplies the notion that love and marriage do not mix, and even the idea that one depends on freedom whereas the other is bound by law, he is too shallow a moralist to recognize the subtle point Andreas makes. Andreas wishes to defend love as a search for mutual goodness. Consequently, he must show that even jealousy, which he like Ovid considers integral to love, can be justified on purely moral grounds. It must not be confused with shameful suspicion, or any other failing that belongs to some other way of life. Nevertheless, the character of true jealousy—as Andreas describes it—already contains the seeds of love's own destruction. For jealousy is defined as fear. It is fear of oneself, fear of the beloved, fear of the absence of mutuality. That reciprocated love should depend upon, and even be fostered by, this kind of fear seems hard to believe. One may well imagine a critic of love, Lucretius for instance, condemning it as something that ultimately reduces to jealous anxieties. One may well imagine a defender of religious love, St. Bernard for instance, rejecting all other kinds precisely because they are predicated upon fear. That Andreas should make this the basis of a courtly love he is advocating, at least presenting sympathetically, seems odd and paradoxical. In its beginnings, Andreas had told us, love is a suffering—“for before the love becomes equally balanced on both sides there is no torment greater” (p. 28); but once reciprocity has been achieved, one would have thought that this can no longer be the character of love.

.....

Given this dilemma, perhaps we can better understand Andreas' final rejection of courtly love. In addition to the religious reasons, he confounds lovers with an argument internal to courtly love itself: “The mutual love which you seek in women you cannot find, for no woman ever loved a man or could bind herself to a lover in the mutual bonds of love.” (p. 200) Further on, he says “no woman is attached to her lover or bound to her husband with such pure devotion that she will not accept another lover, especially if a rich one comes along, which shows the wantonness as well as the great avarice of a woman.” (p. 208) Here we have it then: it's all the woman's fault. She is by nature incapable of that mutuality which courtly love requires. She fails in this because—as Andreas' women themselves seemed to think—it is too absurd to speak of her as the embodiment of goodness. With that misogyny by which the medieval establishment sought to protect itself against the troubadour ideals, Andreas proclaims:

Furthermore, not only is every woman by nature a miser, but she is also envious and a slanderer of other women, greedy, a slave to her belly, inconstant, fickle in her speech, disobedient and impatient of restraint, spotted with the sin of pride and desirous of vainglory, a liar, a drunkard, a babbler, no keeper of secrets, too much given to wantonness, prone to every evil, and never loving any man in her heart.

(p. 201)

And so the circle comes full sweep! It only remains for Andreas to quote Solomon (he means Ecclesiastes): “There is no good woman.” (p. 209)

In rejecting courtly love with such vehemence, Andreas reveals how deeply divided the medieval mind must have been. Some writers, de Rougemont for instance, try to explain this division by arguing that courtly love was inherently anti-social, a subversive and radically revolutionary movement. I myself find little in the writings of Andreas to support de Rougemont's opinion. It is true that in its groping towards reciprocity and sexual philia Andreas' kind of courtly love envisages a society different from—though in many ways congruent with—the secular and ecclesiastic fellowships that ruled the feudal world. It is also true that women in his dialogues claim social rights previously denied them: the right to choose their own lovers, for one thing, but also the right to love a man who belongs to a higher class, and even to make amorous overtures if this can be done “gracefully and courteously.” Finally, it is true that the Courts of Love, whose decisions Andreas occasionally cites, were devices for women to proclaim their liberation and extend their social power. What is not true, however, at least not evident from texts such as Andreas', is the assumption that all this derives from a rebellious, resentful, hostile attitude towards society at large, particularly the society of the middle ages.

In his brief discussion of Andreas in De l'amour, Stendhal focusses upon the social significance of the Courts of Love. He is obviously fascinated by the sheer fact that they existed, that ladies in the 1180's could discuss matters considered taboo in 1822. But he also wonders whether the Courts of Love had any other importance, for instance whether public opinion enforced their decisions. Stendhal honestly confesses that he does not know, but the question he asks as if to suggest a possible answer is actually very penetrating: “Was it just as shameful to disregard them as it is in these days to shirk an affair dictated by honor?” Now this seems to me the right idea. In the nineteenth century, romantic love may very well have been subversive and anti-social, but the code of honor certainly was not. It was merely a development within society, like a gentleman's club or the senior common room in an English college. Considerations of honor, or status in club or college, may conflict with other social ideals without ever tending to undermine society itself. Similarly, courtly love often parodies other, more dominant ways of life in the middle ages; but it does so from within, as an attempt to take over the society rather than destroy it. Courtly lovers belong to the feudal order as well as the Army of Love. The very fact that love is said to have an army, a society to which all lovers belong just by being lovers—as all Christians shared the fellowship of Christ just by believing in him—is itself significant. Romantic love set each pair of lovers apart from everything and everyone else; they could not belong to an army of lovers because their love was generally a way of protesting against all societies. Romantic lovers are “seuls au monde,” to use Sartre's phrase—alone in the world and separate from it. Courtly love belongs to two worlds: the world of medieval society in general and the world of love in particular. These worlds are inter-dependent, and in many respects one and the same.

It is in this context, I believe, that Andreas lists the Rules of Love. They provide a voluntary code of honor from which the Courts of Love derive whatever social authority they may actually have had. As a matter of fact, however, the Rules add very little to what Andreas discusses elsewhere. Of greater social importance than the Rules is the problem he examines in the second dialogue. There a man of the middle class speaks with a woman of the nobility, who spurns him because of his lower rank. The suitor argues not only that love cuts across the barriers of society, excellence of character being the sole criterion, but also that nobility itself is determined by a man's goodness. Thus when the woman says that every man should seek for love within his own class, the suitor agrees but then claims to belong to the same order as she: “If I have cultivated a character excellent through and through, I think that puts me inside the walls of nobility and gives me the true virtue of rank.” (p. 49)

This may seem to be subversive, and in a sense it is egalitarian. Instead of limiting nobility to considerations of birth, the argument relates it to “good character and manly worth and courtesy” of a sort that anyone might conceivably attain. But actually the position is not at all subversive to society, nor foreign to the frequently disorganized character of medieval life. Nowhere does the man cast doubt upon the necessity of class distinctions, nowhere does he say anything to diminish the authority of the nobility. He merely desires to join them, not because all men are really equal but rather because he—like the nobles—is better than most. As also applies to the troubadours, love is a means of social ascension. The man wishes to attain the noblewoman on her level; he is not a Mellors trying to take Lady Chatterley “away from all that.”

Though Andreas' emphasis upon character does not subvert society, it does force the nobles to prove themselves worthy of the rank to which they were born. In making this demand, courtly love merely duplicates the moral principles officially proclaimed by every feudal state. At the same time, however, it is interesting to note that the second dialogue ends with the aspiring man's defeat. As if to remind him that reality scarcely conforms to official ideals, the woman continues to reject the man for reasons of class distinction. In words that sound like those of the troubadours, the lover promises to continue his suit forever, partly in the hope that God will alter the woman's determination, but also for the benefits he derives merely by loving her—fruitless as that may otherwise be.

Having presented these opposing positions so emphatically, Andreas begins the next dialogue by offering a resolution in his own voice. In principle he accepts the idea that love need not be limited to one's own class; and elsewhere he shows how a woman may aspire to a higher rank, while her lover moves downwards for reasons of love. Nevertheless, Andreas clearly thinks that traffic between the social orders can be justified only in extraordinary cases. A man of the middle class cannot hope to achieve the love of a noblewoman unless he is a person “with innumerable good things to his credit, one whom uncounted good deeds extol.” (p. 53) This makes it sound almost, though not quite, hopeless. That a woman of the nobility should choose a commoner whose virtue is anything less than overwhelming, Andreas considers very shameful. As a general rule, he concludes, a woman of the nobility should not accept a man of the middle class if she can find a nobleman who is more or equally worthy; but if she fails in this endeavor, she may satisfy herself with an exceptional member of the middle class. Needless to say, Andreas never considers anything lower. The bottom of the social pyramid may be used for purposes of brute sexuality, but not for love.

With some of the other social problems courtly love encounters, Andreas has greater difficulty. Marriage is an institution he wishes to uphold as much as the privileges of nobility; and yet his version of courtly love offers itself as an alternative to the married state. In the dialogue that analyzes jealousy, the woman refuses to believe that love cannot take place between husband and wife. The matter is taken to the Countess of Champagne, whose verdict runs as follows:

We declare and hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other. For lovers give each other everything freely, under no compulsion or necessity, but married people are in duty bound to give in to each other's desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing.

(p. 107)

This passage is often quoted, but generally misunderstood. For one thing, it must not be taken as an attack on marriage. Nowhere in Andreas does anyone ever disparage the married state. The verdict just quoted specifically refers to the relationship between husband and wife as one that is governed by correlative obligations. The morality, even the holiness, of marriage is presupposed. In the same dialogue, when the man argues for extra-marital love, he goes out of his way to recognize the “affection” that married persons are expected to feel for one another. The woman complains that he is undermining marriage, and in a sense she is right: courtly love competes with married love, offering to husbands and wives emotional possibilities marriage itself cannot afford. All the same, the man makes it very clear that he recognizes the goods which married life does provide. He merely denies that love (as the courtly tradition defines that term) can actually exist in marriage. Just as father and son may feel great affection for one another without their being friends, he says, so too may husband and wife feel “every kind of affection” without their being lovers.

The matter is not merely a verbal issue. Quite obviously, the man is recommending that marriage be supplemented by courtly love whereas the woman wishes to limit herself to marital affection. Like many women in the western world, she opts for the security of marriage rather than the furtiveness of an extra-marital attachment. “I ought therefore to choose a man to enjoy my embraces who can be to me both husband and lover.” (p. 102) This is a defense not of marriage but of marital love, which the man would call a contradiction in terms. Presumably, Andreas sides with the man inasmuch as he ends the dialogue with the statement by the Countess of Champagne. In one sense, this establishes the exclusiveness of courtly love, since love between human beings cannot be found elsewhere; but in another sense, it freely and cheerfully offers to the Caesar of marriage that which belongs to Caesar. Marriage justifies itself as a system of mutual rights and duties; to this courtly love adds a method of moral development and reward which the married state cannot provide. That, I think, is how we must take the Countess' rhetorical question: “How does it increase a husband's honor if after the manner of lovers he enjoys the embraces of his wife, since the worth of character of neither can be increased thereby, and they seem to have nothing more than they already had a right to?” (p. 107) Only if marriage claimed to be the single source of goodness, the sole vehicle of love, could this position be considered subversive. But prior to the modern period few people had ever made such an extraordinary claim for marriage. One may even argue that Andreas has idealized married life to the extent that he emphasizes the place of affection in it. In a later chapter, devoted to decisions in cases of love, he even suggests the inappropriateness of saying that greater affection exists between lovers than between married people. He cites the following as a “logical answer” to the problem: “We consider that marital affection and the true love of lovers are wholly different and arise from entirely different sources, and so the ambiguous nature of the word prevents the comparison of the things and we have to place them in different classes.” (p. 171)

Nevertheless, one cannot deny that Andreas' courtly love mimics medieval marriage, just as fin' amors imitated devotion to the Virgin. Why else, in the legend of Tristan, to which one of the dialogues refers, should the beloved have had the same name as the woman the hero later marries? In that legend, love and marriage conflict dramatically, Tristan sleeping with another man's wife and refusing to sleep with his own. But this results not from any subversive intention but merely from the ambivalence of courtly love. One of Andreas' Rules of Love ordains that “it is not proper to love any woman whom one would be ashamed to seek to marry.” (p. 185) Courtly love is an imaginative play upon the established code of marital society, men and women acting sexually with one another as if they were husband and wife but within a context of greater moral potentiality. Without the institution of marriage courtly love could not have existed, anymore than poetry can exist without prose or dreams without reality. Romantic love may have tried to substitute dreams for reality; but courtly love holds on to both, in conflict or in harmony, and in the hope that each will purify the other.

Of course, the Andreas type of love is subversive to medieval marriage in merely being adulterous. However much he may recognize the value and authority of married life, Andreas undermines it to the extent that he permits infidelity. And yet, of greater importance, I think, is the fact that adultery poses such a tremendous problem for him. Ovid clearly thinks that stealing from another's orchard is half the fun of making love. Not so Andreas, despite his emphasis upon jealousy and the search for difficult or furtive embraces. Andreas sounds as if he would like courtly love to avoid adultery; and yet he always leaves open its possible occurrence, regretfully perhaps but also with a sense of proud obedience to the realities of nature. In this vein, one of his interlocutors distinguishes between pure and mixed love in one of the dialogues. Pure love, the man says, binds the hearts and minds of lovers without culminating in sexual intercourse. In words obviously taken from the troubadours, he states: “It goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted to those who love purely.” (p. 122) Mixed love is more than simply carnal, for that would not be love at all; but unlike pure love, mixed love “gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.”

Having made this distinction, the man then goes on to recommend pure love as preferable to the mixed. While mixed love dies out quickly, injures one's neighbor, and offends the Heavenly King, pure love is free of danger or defect. It neither injures nor offends, saves the beloved from the jeopardy of losing her reputation, and increases without end. But obviously, Andreas is making a minimal effort on behalf of pure love. Nowhere do we find him extoling the benefits of frustration, or even suggesting the creative utility of self-denial, as troubadour after troubadour had done. Reminding one of what Othello was later to say, the woman's speech roundly ridicules the idea of pure love: “You are saying things that no one ever heard or knew of, things that one can scarcely believe. I wonder if anyone was ever found with such continence that he could resist the promptings of passion and control the actions of his body. Everybody would think it miraculous if a man could be placed in a fire and not be burned.” (p. 123)

[Cp. the following exchange:

Iago: Or be naked with her friend in bed

An hour or more, not meaning any harm?

Othello: Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm!

It is hypocrisy against the devil:

They that mean virtuously, and yet do so,

The devil their virtue tempts, and they tempt heaven. (IV,i)] And even the man in the dialogue states that mixed love is not to be condemned. It too “is real love, and it is praiseworthy, and we say that it is the source of all good things, although from it grave dangers threaten.” (p. 122-3) Andreas himself, in a later chapter where he speaks in his own voice, tells us that pure and mixed love are not really different, though they may seem to be. The substance of love is the same for both; they originate with “the same feeling of the heart”; and nothing fundamental changes when two persons move from pure love to mixed love. Elsewhere, he even encourages women to yield to the solicitation of a lover if he persists in it—“for all lovers are bound, when practicing love's solaces, to be mutually obedient to each other's desires.” (p. 167) The need for reciprocity in love is more important to Andreas than an arbitrary distinction between partial and total consummation. Whatever he may think about the menaces of adultery, his philosophy of love has virtually no defense against its inevitable occurrence.

.....

For this reason alone, Andreas must ultimately condemn his own teachings. In the final chapter, where he lists many reasons for rejecting courtly love, the first one deals with God's hatred of those who propitiate Venus outside of wedlock. But actually the conflict between the two sides of Andreas goes much deeper. The sinfulness of adultery matters to him primarily as an instance of the sinfulness of passion itself. Though marriage was a holy sacrament and adultery a violation of God's law, courtly love might have been tolerated had it not represented an interest inimical to religious love. That interest—the passionate bestowal of, and search for, value in another human being—could not be reconciled with medieval ideas about the love of God. [For detailed discussion of this, cf. my book The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther (New York, Random House, 1966). Cf. also the chapter on “The Sensuous and the Passionate” in my book The Goals of Human Sexuality (New York, W. W. Norton, 1973).] For in courtly love two persons seek to love each other as the embodiment of goodness, for the sake of excellence in character that each presumably has or will attain. They do not love each other as the instruments for ascending the ladder of caritas; they do not try to use one another as the means towards any love beyond their own. At least in Andreas' formulation, courtly love is the human replica of that spiritual marriage which Christian dogma reserved for the union with God. Courtly love promises its own kind of heaven, and so it can only be heretical.

Thus, even if courtly love were not extra-marital, Andreas would have felt the need to reject it. Immediately after saying that God hates those engaged in adultery, he adds “or caught in the toils of any sort of passion.” (p. 187) That is why he hardly allows the woman who defends the love between husband and wife to pursue the implications of her strange idea. Being a woman and obviously given to the cravings of the flesh, she can only reason that “love seems to be nothing but a great desire to enjoy carnal pleasure with someone, and nothing prevents this feeling existing between husband and wife.” (p. 102) To have her say this is, of course, to give her the weakest possible defense of marital love. Her statement not only conflicts with the courtly attempt to distinguish between love and lust, but also with the church's views about the role of sex in marriage. As the man points out in his reply, it is a sin for married people to offer one another solaces that are not inspired “by the desire for offspring or the payment of the marriage debt.” (p. 103) What he means by payment of the marriage debt is unclear, but that passion is to be excluded seems evident from his subsequent reference to apostolic law: “An ardent lover of his wife is an adulterer.” This saying, which is to be found in St. Jerome, typifies the ecclesiastical attitude towards sexual conduct between married persons. It is not designed to limit married love in the sense of affection—if anything, that is to be increased. Nor is it intended as a way of encouraging abstinence, a wholly different consideration. “Ardent” is the crucial word. A man may not love his wife with passion. For that conflicts with religious devotion. Whether or not the participants are married, the passion which courtly love idealizes necessarily negates the primacy of God.

In The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis cites various texts to prove that in the middle ages the ecclesiastical authorities generally believed that the sex act was inherently innocent. It was only the desire or the pleasure or the intention which accompanied sexual behavior that they considered guilty or sinful. In the case of Aquinas, the matter is more complicated. He says that sexual desire or pleasure are not in themselves blameworthy, but only as they tend to subjugate reason. For our purposes, however, it is clear that each of these alternative views would condemn courtly love. It does not advocate desire or pleasure for their own sake, only as ingredients within a relationship governed by moral ideals; yet it treats desire and pleasure as the source of goodness, the basis of love. Even at its coolest, in the playful discourse of lovers for instance, it could not have satisfied the scruples of Aquinas. For he means by reason something other than the mere appraisal and appreciation of excellence. He is referring to a faculty that enables one to see the orderliness of God's creation as well as its dependence upon the reality of God himself. This faculty is submerged not only in passionate coitus, but also in every relationship that inflates the importance of desire or pleasure. Nor is the situation changed by substituting pure love for mixed love. Just as St. Jerome had said that the ardent love of one's wife is adultery, so too does Aquinas condemn the kissing and touching of women for reasons of delight, whether or not the activity culminates in sexual intercourse. Though he antedates Aquinas, Andreas lived in a world that was dominated by ideas such as these. In his final pages he renounces all sexual indulgence, marriage itself being justified not merely as a holy bond but also because “with a wife we overcome our passion.” (p. 196, my italics)

Yet even here, at the tail-end of the dialectic, Andreas seems to be searching for a synthesis. The Tractatus ends with the rejection of courtly love, but most of the negative arguments had already been answered in the earlier pages. In the eighth dialogue, for instance, the man denies that God is “seriously offended” by the courtly love he has been proposing. For love is practiced under the compulsion of nature, which means it can be easily expiated; and anyhow, “it does not seem at all proper to class as a sin the thing from which the highest good in this life takes its origin.” (p. 111) At the same time, the man recognizes that the love of God is a “very great and an extraordinarily good thing,” so that one who prefers a purely religious love acts in a highly commendable way. To love God, however, is to renounce the world; and few people are capable of that. If the woman in question does not wish to devote herself entirely to the Heavenly Country, she ought not to take refuge in the arguments of religious love. Either she relinquishes her natural condition, or else she tolerates her immersion in nature. In the latter event, she must accept her human frailty, admit she is not a saint, and give herself to the highest love of which she is capable—courtly love. In a similar vein, Andreas later condemns but in a sense condones courtly love on the part of the clergy. He says it is very clear that a clerk (as he was himself) ought to “renounce absolutely all the delights of the flesh.” But immediately afterwards he shrugs his shoulders and gives permissive advice more suitable for men who cannot escape their nature: “… since hardly anyone ever lives without carnal sin, and since the life of the clergy is, because of the continual idleness and the great abundance of food, naturally more liable to temptations of the body than that of any other men, if any clerk should wish to enter into the lists of Love, etc., etc.” (p. 142)

Within this context, Andreas' rejection of love need not be taken as either fraud or inconsistency. It is but the other-worldly perspective against which the medieval mind continually tests that love of nature which meant so much to it and which courtly love represents. Ultimately, and for those who can attain it, the religious life must win out. The world must be renounced, and all its creatures. The human will must be abased for the greater glory of God. Andreas is still on Plato's ladder, and he must reject courtly love in order to move higher. Insofar as courtly love conflicts with the love of God, it is inevitably guilty love. But the guiltiness of courtly love, in Andreas as well as the Tristan myth, is always something external to it, something that appears from a rung of the ladder higher than itself. If only for that reason, Andreas' synthesis can never succeed. His philosophy subordinates the courtly to the religious, but finds no way to make them interpenetrate. Their conflict is too strident: the aspiring soul must finally choose between this world and the next. If it chooses this world, it has settled for a lesser good; if it chooses the next, it has lost its place in nature. For the two worlds to be harmonized, either courtly or religious love had to be reconstituted. In the Italian Renaissance, both were. But until that happened, no authentic synthesis was available to the erotic imagination of western man.