Romantic love began to appear in Europe at around the same time or after the Virgin Mary came to be more commonly depicted in art and prayed to throughout the West. It sort of makes sense from a logical and aesthetic perspective if people who were praying for the intercession of a sacred virgin all the time would come to value virginity highly.
But that would be a bit of a mistaken conclusion — virginity tends to be (and tended to be) highly valued almost everywhere, both civilized and non-civilized, throughout history. The particular character of romantic love, on the other hand, is close to unique, with all of its overbearing displays of devotion, exchanges of letters, singing of songs, and occasional self-mutilations.
When people in previous times venerated virginity, they did it in the service of other virtues — namely those of chastity, diligence, patience, prudence, temperance, self-control, and loyalty. It was also connected to religion, as it is today within more pious communities. That’s not to say that in the past there were no people who didn’t live up to those virtues. That’s why they’re virtues and not character aspects which we simply expect from everyone.
It’s common to say that romance is dead — in the real world — at the same time as romance explodes in popularity in the world of fantasy.
In fantasy worlds which are popular today, men are tough knights, space marines, grizzled cops, and Italian plumbers with incredible vertical leaps. In the fantasies of women, they’re virgins in the firm hands of a respectable billionaire pervert. While the stories might be a little odd, stories are always odd.
So, while Romance the genre remains the most popular Western genre of fantasy, romance the concept has come to be widely denigrated, almost universally so. I have trouble even thinking of a contemporary figure who’s not also ridiculous who argues for romantic behavior as it was once understood.
There is a veneration of romantic passion — passion has come to be seen the moral justification for sex — but romantic gestures have come to be seen as outmoded and ridiculous. Mostly, it’s men who are especially slow on the cultural uptake still make them, and they tend to earn mockery for it.
Romance simply makes no sense at all outside of the framework of virtue in which it was conceived, because a moral framework in which absolutely everything is permitted is one in which it loses all of its coherence.
Today, we tend to make fun of people who mistake the vestigial expectations formed by romantic fantasy tales for what should be expected in ‘reality.’ But still, people return to the stories, because they stir their hearts, only to have those same hearts bashed against a wall of indifference to virtue and worship of vice.
Part of the trouble that people have with romance — despite its enduring appeal — is that it tends not to get along with anyone‘s idea of what ought to be good and legitimate. Many romances which aren’t fantasies are tragedies, because they’re more true to life. Romeo and Juliet really can’t be together, and the conclusion of the play depicts the consequences of star-crossed love in a way that encourages pity more than it does imitation. Abelard and Heloise did not go to a good end, but the impression drawn from the story of what happened to them was not really supposed to be that the passions ought to be unleashed to run over every fixed institution.
Today, we tend to emphasize romance and romantic love far more than we do virtue. Some have attempted to tie the experience of romantic passions to the perception of virtue in another person, to limited success — after all, there are plenty of examples of people being overwhelmed by passionate affection for someone who is bad.
Anyway, the point of this wandering post is to say that because the cult of the virgin — and respect for virginity itself — has diminished, so has romance. Fantasy fiction takes on a more urgent role as people fumble at the hole that’s left behind. Their lives become dulled, with only pop fiction to make any sense of it at all.
Women and men alike also tend to want the rewards of virtue without really needing to be virtuous. Chivalrous gestures are inane when there’s no chastity or modesty. The left expends enormous amounts of effort on denigrating both of those things, and making them especially impractical for young people. Conservatives tend to demand extraordinary self-control from young people crammed together in co-educational institutions, and then became enraged when nature proceeds to take its course.
Social Pathologist wrote well on this the other year:
The continual conflation of physiological sexual attraction with moral parameters (either positive of negative) seems to be a problem of Christianity when it comes to an analysis of sexuality. Good Christian men can’t understand why they are not sexually attractive, despite living according to God’s law. Living in the hope that God will send them a good woman who will not be like the “others”. This deficiency in the understanding of the biological dimension of sexuality means that no practical advice is given on how to improve the success rate with the ladies, apart from pray. Most of the other advice is next to useless. On the other hand, due to this hostility to the “flesh” men and women who are sexually attractive are deemed to be morally bad. Amongst weaker minds there almost appears to be an associative incompatibility between being “hot” and being “Christian”. Drab women and grey men.
The Trads seem to be unable to recognise that he attraction a woman feels for a man is involuntary, i.e. it is morally neutral. How she chooses to act on the attraction gives her actions a moral dimension. But they continually conflate the two. The fact that Jessica is attracted to Bill, the bad boy, does not mean she will be attracted to dweeby Ben, who is also morally bad but lacks erotic capital. Morals have nothing to do with the issue, attraction is decided by the flesh.
This tradition of conflation in my opinion stems of Christianity’s aversion to “flesh”. The overtly erotic was simply seen as the express route the Hell and Christianity did all it could to suppress it. As a result, Christianity developed a good tradition of fighting the flesh and neglected to develop an understanding of it or accord it any legitimacy. The result has been that Christianity can’t evaluate sexuality on the biomechanical level and insists to continually evaluate it on the moral one. The resistance to this common sense understanding is perplexing. It’s as if the Trads do not want to acknowledge a carnal nature to our sexual desires and instead continue with their understanding of human sexuality as if the mechanics of sexual attraction did not matter, only its moral evaluation; still, which they nearly always view in the negative.
This historical position has had practical real world sequelae. Admittedly, Christianity is not responsible for the excesses but it provided for a a cultural fault line which was waiting to be exploited.
- For good or ill, the Church was the dominant cultural force in the West till about the end of the 19th Century, it’s suppression of the erotic, not procreative, component of sexuality, meant that as the Church lost power, the pendulum swung the other way. Nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of any theology of desire the world developed it’s own. Predictably it was stupid. Today’s sluttery is due to yesterdays prudery.
- It has made a meaningful discussion on sexual polarity difficult since the spirit was more important that the flesh. Yet our sexual polarity is intrinsically tied to our carnal bodies. Gender equality/interchangeability is easy when the flesh is irrelevant. Cue feminism.
- It has conditioned people towards evil by making sexual evil fun and virtue boring.
- It has encouraged physical ugliness by neglecting or erotic complementarity. Desire is supercharged in bodily perfection and diminished in dysmorphia. The Fat acceptance movement is based on the idea that we shouldn’t be so “superficial” and judge people on appearances.
I get a lot of heat for taking this position, but here is an interesting question I’ll wish you to ponder: Why has “bad boy” become synonymous with sexual attraction and “good boy” with sexual repulsion? Perhaps it’s because contemporary Christianity lacks the capability to be sexy and good. The flipside to this is the notion that the erotic and good are incompatible. See what I’m getting at?
This tendency hasn’t really gone away. The differences between most contemporary conservatives and liberals in these matters is slight. We see similar tendencies in how they handle ‘supercharged desire’ and dysmorphia.
Christian Trad here, but I almost entirely agree. The contemporary Christian dialog on this subject is pretty broken, as it partakes of the same fallacy as the left, by asserting that the body which participates in sex and romance should be of no import compared to the spirit, so spiritual qualities are all that should matter when choosing a mate. This is basically the same fallacy as the left has, though the left uses it to justify sodomy and transgenderism.
A Christian Right which took the body seriously would be stricter about modesty (from men and women), but also be realist along red-pill lines when it came time for young men and women to marry and mate.
One nitpick, though, is to note that the prudery of the 19th century is both overstated, but also is not the historical norm. The Victorians were exceptional for how thoroughly the suppressed public sexual talk, and most other Christian eras were more open, even while they continued to elevate virginity.
I’ve seen this in some secular groups, also, transposed from one moral system to the other.
Like you mention, the left has it in ‘beauty at any size and mind-blowing sex into your 60s.’
In terms of modesty… while I can’t speak as an authentic moral authority on these sorts of matters, there’s an obvious disconnect when girls wear short athletic shorts to confession and yoga pants to Mass.
I don’t trust my own conception of the Victorians right now, because they’re so often abused as a rhetorical football nowadays. We also have to remember that sexual morality has always had sharp class distinctions, which was one of the reasons why the earlier socialists focused on breaking it down so fervently in the children of the bourgeoisie.
Henry, excellent post.
If Christians want to rehabilitate their understanding of romantic love, they should probably first start by realizing that the “romantic love” they’re influenced by was largely a literary invention from medieval times and contained a series of gestures that had no real basis in real life. Moreover, the courtly love tradition was frequently mocked during the middle ages and even satirized for how badly it went against the teachings of the church fathers. I would argue — and I realize this is controversial — that medieval Christianity was actually better equipped to handle the harsh realities of human biodiversity than most Western Christians are today. The reason was because they felt that mankind was truly fallen, and so human nature was something automatically bad. This allowed them greater freedom to explore the depravity of the human condition with no moral compunctions. When renaissance humanism came along, human nature started to be seen as a good thing, and so the idea of viewing humanity as “fallen” became a compromised position.
And this is a big, important issue, because when we think of romance, we think of chivalry — knights from medieval times. We think of goofy dudes genuflecting and saying “m’lady” and stuff. The medievals understood human sexuality and talked about it with much greater freedom than we do now (nowadays we crassly display it, but we don’t talk about it in a way that rises above the level of banality). They not only had better morals about it, but they had a better grasp of its reality.
If ppl don’t believe me, I would suggest that they read the following pieces of evidence.
(Primary sources)
1. The Romance of the Rose (continuation by Jean de Meun)
2. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (Chaucer)
3. Eric and Enide (Chretien de Troyes)
4. Discussions on women from medieval estates satires (The Mirror of the Mankind by John Gower being probably the most solid example)
(Secondary sources)
1. “The Myth of Courtly Love,” ET Donaldson
2. Preface to Chaucer, Ch. 5, DW Robertson
3. The Roman de La Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography, John V Fleming
The primary sources are not too crass or vulgar, but they definitely constitute “red pill wisdom” or whatever. It is shocking how relevant these texts are, even today. Read “The Advice of Friend” from Romance of the Rose, and you will hear every goofy-ass male feminist you’ve ever met speaking through this character’s voice.
Courtly love, on the other hand, was largely confined to some lyric poems and romances, and most moderns do not understand the neoplatonic ideas behind this literature. There are definitely some more worldly theories for why it originated, with class differentiation being a more compelling one (much of courtly love lit is about lower class men wooing higher noble women). But it is disappointing to me how many people actually think the extreme emotional states of these poems accompanied equally hyperbolic “noble deeds” and stuff like that in real life… like, y’know, genuflecting and saying m’lady and stuff.
No one has ever done a comprehensive study on just how well the medievals “got” sexual biomechanics, so I might have to do it some day, but I would need more research on hypergamy and sex attraction preferences from the Evolutionary Psych guys for my claims to have a basis. Furthermore, it does not help that most medieval historians are either A) trad. Catholics who are deathly afraid of the theory of evolution and HBD, or B) cultural Marxists who are deathly afraid of the theory of evolution and HBD.
There’s a whole lot of reality waiting to be exposed and bite 21st century conservatives on the ass.
I had hoped that I hadn’t botched the material too much. The first draft was a little bit botched.
That’s OK, some of my own comment is botched! (I should have specified: the original courtly love guys, the French troubadours, were of humble origins and wrote of wooing women — later courtly love literature isn’t too much about wooing women of higher position, since it turned into a sort of pastime exclusive to the higher estates)
I should also say, love letters have always been “a thing,” so you will always find stuff like that (you could actually argue that love letters were, in evo-psych terms, a method of high IQ fitness signalling, since the written portion of the letter was meant to be poetical and intricate). And nobles would do things like fight to the death over women through jousts — just as men in the 19th century had pistol duels over women. Just as guys fight over them now. The redpill people are right to say that eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. But the post-Romantic and Victorian conception of chivalric love has overall been a horrible, horrible thing for the popular imagination, and I will confess to getting annoyed every time I see a pre-Raphaelite Arthurian painting on some alt-right web site. Andreas Capellanus, the guy who “wrote the book” on courtly love, was writing in jest. C.S. Lewis, as amazing as he was, didn’t help anything either in his interpretation from The Allegory of Love.
OK! Enough rambling!
I looked a little at that Lewis book and found it a bit outside my possible comprehension.
There’s an enormous record of intricate love letters, but the telephone seems to have made a big dent in the practice. It’s also sort of not the same thing.
I’ve always found it interesting that records went through eight tracks and cassette tapes before returning to their circular shape in the form of c.d.s. Then, too, with letter writing, it was replaced by the phone, only to be reorganized into email. Generally, after some new-fangled reach, there is a return to tradition.
Romance by internet connection is faaaaar better than letter. It is so easy to share reading material, write in real time, include pictures, travel via Google Earth, etc. Mark took me to Colombia, places he used to live in the U.S. as an adult and even as a child, all through the wonder of the internet.
In contrast to what people think, this form of connection can be extremely emotionally intense, bordering, if not invading, the spiritual realm. There is every physical connection attendant you care to create, the safest such bond that can be made before marriage.
The internet is an amazing tool. The limits are only the limits of your imagination.
@Izak
Good comment. Serious question though, just how reflective are the literary works to the lives of the average people of the period? See, sometimes I think we get a distorted view of the past by seeing it through the lens of the period’s chronographers, who tend to be at the upper end of the social strata. Arty people are historically known to be habitual embracers of the flesh.
The thought that I sometimes entertain is that “courtly love”, whilst not necessarily part of the Church, managed to gain traction by appealing to the “ascetic” tendencies of it. They were synergistic, so to speak, so that over time medieval “physicalism” gave way to ascetic romanticism in more modern times. Still, the underlying weakness was an ascetic Christianity which tended to denigrate corporeality and emphasise spirituality. It’s interesting that JPII felt that there was a need to develop a “theology of the body” something one would not think the Church needed if there was a pre-existing theological tradition of it.
Some guy at the gym had the radio on some Christian station, which meant I, once again, was forced to contemplate its evils. Contemporary Christian music are love song, allegedly about God, but mostly about self- as is evidenced by all the pronouns and emphasis on feelings.
The problem has been around at least since the thirteenth century- probably longer- as women at various times tended to become wealthy in the West, and once the need for their patronage was felt, romantic (and in some cases erotic) impulses were overlooked as long as they were directed toward God.
One of the songs I heard yesterday contained a self-emasculating male singing “have your way with me” in high voice, which reminded me of many of the points you brought up in this post. The girls are either going to try and make Jesus their boyfriend, or go find a bad boy, because this pathetic wimp isn’t remotely interesting.
It seems to me the parameter of God as perfection, perfection as the goal (not heaven), and the Trinity a sort of explanation as to how perfection seeks man as much as men seek perfection- thus providing a validation of the struggle for perfection- leads to a society that would seek to improve itself.
Probably expressed best not in Christian pop, but by Depeche Mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNcPjPgbR5M
It’s an icy, ironic guide on how to redirect the same impulse which you mention here. Women in particular like this have obvious places to latch hooks onto. The notion that every need can be fulfilled by spiritual means is a bluff which can be called, trivially.
“the depravity of the human condition with no moral compunctions. ”
I’m certainly not enough of a Medievalist to add anything to this excellent discussion, but isn’t the doctrine of total human depravity more of a Calvinist thing rather than Medieval? Just wondering…
Also, here’s to the Social Pathologist! He’s the only Christian Traditionalist I know of who is willing to admit that there was anything at all wrong with pre-Reformation Christianity, which, given its interpretation by flawed humans, there almost certainly was. Just like the 1960’s, the Reformation may (or may not) have been a tragedy and a mistake, but it didn’t come from nowhere, and Luther wasn’t seeing nothing. The way out of the current mess for Christianity requires hitting this issue (among others) head-on, but few trads have the stomach for it. It’s so much easier to just blame Luther, or Henry VIII, or Vatican II, but the SP won’t settle for that. He may or may not be getting the right answers, but he’s one of the few asking the right questions…
Toddy Cat: I am not an expert on Calvin, so I cannot speak too authoritatively there. This response will be sort of sketchy. From what I understand, Calvin looked back to Saint Augustine, and he cherry-picked Augustine’s ideas, kicking them into hyper-drive, sort of turning them into doctrinal declarations whereas before they were only sort of there in a latent sense. Like for instance, if I remember right, he thought his own idea of predestination was totally in conjunction with Augustine’s ideas on divine grace, when that wasn’t really right, since he ignored some of what Augustine had to say on free will (for Calvin, I think free will = automatic evil choice).
But Augustine just sort of felt that people all have some sin that they’re born with because, as people, we are fallen. He never said the automatic impulse of humanity is towards depravity; he just recognized that it’s a part of who we are, though we can choose to fight against it (my understanding of Augustine is that he thinks we have free will to do good, but it must be met in equal measure by divine grace).
I think much Calvinist theology responded to the advent of humanism by taking the more outright hostile attitudes against human nature found in the doctrine of original sin. This set off a sort of dialectic within Anglo-Saxons, where they jump back and forth endlessly between sexual lust and sexual guilt, and I think this mentality informs much of modern feminism alongside the conservative inability to keep it at bay. Calvin was an interesting dude. I remember reading that he was an ardent believer in miasma (the idea that you can get a disease by smelling something foul), and he felt that human feces was an expression of how horrible and sinful man truly was in his essence. Medievals sort of laughed at poop; one French poet called it “the joyous substance.”
Henrydampier:
Well, letter writing was pretty interesting in the medieval period. The letter would never actually convey the useful information.
A noble would write a letter and make it very much like a poem, then he would send it off and tell a messenger the important, practical info. The messenger would provide the letter, and then he’d say “So-and-so has been doing well, he has gotten a new position in the court, he was ill on Friday but is fine now, blah blah blah” — the mundane stuff. . So the letter itself would be some amazing work of Latin that would require high intelligence to decipher, both on the grammatical and sometimes allegorical level, and the lady would read it privately and go “awwww” or something. (This blend of speaking and writing is a very old tradition — the Anglo-Saxon poem The Husband’s Message is from the perspective of a rune-staff that a messenger carries to a woman. The staff “speaks” in the poem, even though historically it would just be a token with some rune words, and the messenger would do the talking)
Such a situation is kind of impossible to have now. The ability to write (and know Latin, and have access to highly expensive parchment, etc) is probably why “proper love language” was thought to be an attribute exclusive to the elites. There are actually medical texts that say stuff like “love sickness is a disease that only the elites can have.” And this is why I think love letters were functionally used signal high IQ and prestige. As time went on, the intellectual requirements were forgotten, but the womanish doting and emoting remained. Nowadays, people still think they’re practicing “chivalry” when they write bad poetry and send it to some girl. They’re not. They’re embarrassing themselves because the logistics are never considered. Neither phone nor email can recreate the conditions in which this kind of love writing could ever be useful.
But you don’t even need to force people to consider the logistics, I don’t think, to make them realize such circumstances could not possibly be replicated today. If people took the satire of Jean de Meun, adapted it to a modern production of some sort, and made sure to keep its satirical intent intact without any cultural Marxist nonsense added, a major blow would be dealt to the naivete of people on what “chivalry” has really meant to the history of the West. I say: let that, and other examples of “medieval misogyny” into the literary canon, and make them into film adaptations. There’s a huge market of frustrated people who can be consoled by the sheer honesty of the past. No one could look at that sort of cynicism regarding human nature and walk away with the conclusion that this sense of love is in any way desirable.
Slumlord, I take “average” to mean the third estate AKA the peasantry and upper laymen/artisans, and it’s extremely difficult to say. Actually, nydwracu posted a fun little blog piece on sin a while back: https://nydwracu.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/a-golden-age-of-morality/
It’s hard to say how well literary works depict the third estate — and that includes the estates satires, which always viciously attack the worst tendencies of all the estates. Also, if you look at the fabliau tradition, those poems basically treat the peasantry as a bunch of dirty fornicators who jump around, banging all the time. We don’t really know if it was just mocking nobles/upper-laymen writing this, insulting the more base tendencies of their inferiors, or if the peasants liked hearing those poems recited by minstrels and thought they were great (because people often do enjoy laughing at themselves). I personally don’t think that promiscuity was as widespread then as it is now, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more overall sex, between married partners.
The thing about courtly love is that it’s presented as a courtly thing, which means an upper-class thing, and the big examples of “courtly love” were actually satirical pieces, making fun of how the nobility conducted itself. The biggest example is The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus, which was thought by 19th century post-Romantics to be a legitimate work that advocated adultery, explained “game” to people by encouraging them to persuade women to sleep with them through logical argument, etc. The thing is, it wasn’t. It was a satire, and its whole goal was to explain how the excesses of romance were terrible.
But my thought is, these satirical “courtly love” works also demonstrated exactly what you never do when trying to woo women — not just because it’s immoral, but because it wouldn’t make sense. They’re “anti-game” pieces.
Another point: compare two poems by Chretien de Troyes: Erice and Enide versus Lancelot.
E&E is about a married couple. Eric marries a beautiful peasant girl, winning her through chivalric deeds, and she becomes a noble. Then, over time, Eric gets lazy and hangs around their house a lot. She gets disgusted with him and thinks he’s a loser. Apparently he cannot rest on his laurels. So his solution is to force her to accompany him on adventurous knightly deeds, and he forces her not to talk, basically scaring the shit out of her every time he’s about to get killed by rival knights. After their adventure, she loves him again. Is this not a mirror-perfect representation of everything you’ve ever read on some game website about hypergamy and the man’s imperative to constantly be away from the house? It’s astoundingly consonant with human biomechanics, and it doesn’t really have anything to violate scriptures.
Now look at Chretien’s Lancelot. Lancelot is a story about a knight who bangs King Arthur’s wife. Chretien starts off with a prologue that says basically, “Look, I don’t condone what Lancelot does, I’m a Christian. I was commissioned to write this by my patron, Marie of France, the Countess of Champagne.” In Lancelot, the main character is so lovestruck by Guinevere that he lets himself go into a cart (used normally to display petty criminals to shame them), and he sits in a cart being carted around by a midget while everyone makes fun of him. He also crosses a “sword bridge” to get to her, which wounds his hand and feet (it is a nice demonstration of him aping Christ in order to commit a sin). At one point, he gets into a tournament and has to swordfight a guy. While he’s swordfighting, he sees Guinevere looking on from her window and he starts sighing, with his head turned behind him staring at her, while fighting a guy in front of him. She has to yell at him, “Go back to the fight! Lancelot!” and he’s sort of like “Uh, oh yeah!” Sadly, we never even get to hear the end of the story, because Chretien never finishes it. Now, does this sound serious? This is the kind of nonsense that people in the 19th century looked at and said, “Ah! The magic of courtly love! This is paganism creeping into Christianity! Look at the romance! The devotion! The dedication of the true lover! Love conquers all, even marital vows! Hurrah!” Thank God some sensible scholars came along and said “No, this interpretation is absolute nonsense.”
So to answer your question, in my roundabout way, I think that — barring a few early exceptions — courtly love literature often painted a negative or distorted picture of reality, but if you look for clues according to how well (or poorly) a character’s behavior accords with scripture and patristic writings, you can figure out its true intent. And then, once you figure out its true intent, you can ask yourself: does its true intent correspond to reality, or not? Does it reflect a solid understanding of biomechanics, or no? Is Lancelot a good lover, or is he embarrassing himself, not only violating the scriptures but also practicing “bad game”?
So we are being trolled by 500-year-old trolls and missed the joke?
Absolutely!
And this is why the only evaluative contemporary reference that we have to Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore (Art of Courtly Love) — from the 13th c. Frenchman Drouart la Vache — described it as pretty funny.
@Izak,
You understood me correctly. You also raise another important point.
This is the kind of nonsense that people in the 19th century looked at and said, “Ah! The magic of courtly love! This is paganism creeping into Christianity! Look at the romance! The devotion! The dedication of the true lover! Love conquers all, even marital vows! Hurrah!”
Firstly, thank you for you considered response.
Secondly,one of the things that really irks me is the failure of the Right to recognise romanticism as one of the more toxic “solvents of modernity”. There is a longstanding tradition of attributing today’s evils to excessive rationality and totally ignoring the romantic poison which, in many instances, is lauded and in my opinion far more dangerous.
But the question I pose to you, and I am seriously interested here, given your knowledge of Middle Ages literature, is, why do you think realspeak about the sexes gave way to the courtly love tradition? In my opinion, the dichotomy between flesh and spirit–with the negative evalution of the flesh– left the door wide open to Neoplatonic capture. Even though we were trolled, why did we fail to notice?
@Toddy,
Thx for your kind words.
So, “Sumlord” and “Social Pathologist” are the same person? Wow. Why do I have this feeling that all the people whose views I admire on the internet are actually the same person?
I thought it was common knowledge! But I don’t get around that much.
Part of the problem is that in the past most marriages were arranged at some level. You did not have women out on the dating scene trying to find a guy to marry, and men out there trying to figure out which women were “fun” material and which were “marriage” material. So there was less emphasis on attraction in finding a mate.
In the past, people might end up married to someone they weren’t attracted to, hence you had affairs with their “true love” who they were actually attracted to.
Nevertheless, for most people this situation worked. We’ve really screwed up by putting young hormonal people in close contact with each other for a decade or more and telling them to figure it out themselves. It’s a recipe for disaster. You get either the trads telling them to hold off their very powerful desires, or the hedonists telling them to “explore their sexuality.” Neither way works.
Or, I think the most common way that people interpret it is ‘both at the same time,’ which tends towards chaos.
Slumlord,
Well, this is a very complicated question, because I think neoplatonic love contemplation was originally a good, useful sort of thing, but it became corrupted and is still with us in a degraded fashion.
The whole point of platonic love contemplation was to realize that you will never consummate your love with the woman (or whoever) in any satisfactory way, no matter what you do, so instead of appreciating the woman *for the woman* you recognize her more as kind of a mirror, pointing up to the heavenly forms. You realize that the consolation of earthy love is being able to transmute it into a love for the form of love itself, woman itself, beauty itself. For Saint Augustine, who was influenced by Plotinus, this was a very key point. He actually felt strongly that humans should never enjoy anything for its own sake. Instead of enjoying (fruor) anything attractive, they should use (utor) that thing as a conduit leading ultimately to the heavenly forms and then up to the resplendent glory of God. Augustine took this attitude so seriously that he felt deep guilt about reading beautiful pagan poems like Virgil’s Aeneid and caring about the plotline as if it was real. He says, “I should have been only considering the use of the poem for how it could allow me to appreciate God!”
There are some problems with this theory perhaps, because he is basically saying, “Humans should use each other.” But in sum: God was the end point, not woman.
Now, more to your question, I think two things happened that degraded our condition on love and romance.
1. We started overvaluing human accomplishment (starting most conspicuously in the renaissance) and forgot the lesson of man’s fall from grace. This set off a situation where we Westerners couldn’t be honest with ourselves about what human nature truly is, and what parts of it we should avoid. To be “human” started to mean being “good,” and this mentality has poisoned a lot of things, least of all our ability to evaluate sex objectively.
2. We started to think aesthetically about appreciating objects for their own sake. We appreciate woman for her own sake. Woman appreciates man for his own sake, we love art for its own sake (ars gratia artis). The neoplatonic love tradition remained, and it still remains today, but the end point was forgotten, and the focus became on woman herself. So when we think of what “beauty” means, it always has a moral connotation, and we owe this to neoplatonism. A “beautiful” woman is both attractive and morally good. But before, “morally good” meant “likely to lead one to God,” and now it means “good for its own sake.”
So what am I getting at, here? To answer the question, you have to consider what the neoplatonic love tradition is about. It’s about obsessing over the woman, fretting over the woman, making hyperbolic declarations about the woman, ceaselessly exciting oneself about the woman, and then the ideal end is to realize that the woman is irrelevant; just a proxy for the great beauty and enjoyment of God (Petrarch’s poems are largely about this — he obsesses over a little church girl whom he can never have, and he even continues to do so after she dies early). When you take away that end point, the tradition becomes: we make a big brouhaha about woman, and then our great reward is being able to “be with her” in a “morally good” way, which means that banging isn’t even a factor. What a gyp, right?! Instead of the woman’s hot looks leading us to salvation, they’re meant to complement “her inner person,” which is the new ideal we must look towards (Hey, Henry Dampier! Are you getting why I’m not a fan of Roger Scruton now?) And this is where cockamamie feminist theories like “the male gaze” stake their territory. When we stare at a woman’s hot looks, we’re not considering her “true self,” and that’s why we’re being morally bad. The moral attitude of the neoplatonic tradition remains, but it’s only a leftover from a cladistic development rooted in faith, and it’s now totally useless — kind of like having tonsils, or men having nipples.
That’s just my theory, anyhow.
Yes, now I understand your position better.
Thanks.
I never understood the beauty= moral goodness thing. The phenomenon of the femme fatale being a case in point. Still, for Neo-platonic ideas to have gained traction into Western society (and lets admit, the idea of loving a woman and not wanting to bang her is unnatural) there must have been some sustaining element that enabled the idea to flourish. Cue the institutional admonition against the ways of the flesh.
BTW, I find Scruton impenetrable. I sometimes get the impression that he rationalises from intuition. In fact, I think he actually does.
Are you making the assumption that everone in the English-speaking world shares the morals and world-view of a left-leaning liberal American? As a conservative Englishman I am oft-times shocked at the casual immorality I see every day. Any girl over the age of 14 who is still a virgin is looked on as a freak. Any woman who does not indulge in casual sex or post self-shot porn on the internet is seen as a prude. I may jus return to celibacy on the grounds that I have an honest sense of values.
It’s not everyone. Just maybe 80%. But yes.