A Natural History of Love (10 page)

When they weren’t at war, knights engaged in tournaments staged by nobles with time to kill and a yen for a human version of a cockfight. As much as a week might be devoted to a tournament, with all sorts of events interspersed with the fighting. A hundred or so knights would contest with one another, in pairs or in groups. Just as a horse race or soccer match is usually surrounded by parties and ballyhoo, the tournaments justified feasts and merriment. They attracted people from all classes, including gamblers, conmen, prostitutes, souvenir sellers, and groupies. If a knight died during a tournament, the Church considered it suicide, which meant direct passage to hell. Even that didn’t deter the knights, who had much to gain in prizes and fame, and women to impress. Tournaments gave them a chance to win armor and horses, and rehearse the codes of chivalry in a small, safe setting. Faced with the rigors of all-out warfare, etiquette and form might be the last things on their minds.

During the first thirty years of the twelfth century, half the knights in France rode to the Crusades, joined by knights from England and Spain. The first Crusade was a blood-and-thunder success, driving the Muslims farther and farther south and out of Jerusalem. Knights returning from the Holy Land were conquering heroes. Imagine the wild temper of revelry and vindication they must have felt, not to mention divine favor. All had seen friends die savagely at sword point. Many would be suffering from what we now call posttraumatic stress syndrome. Spirited young men full of spunk and mischief, they were accustomed to bloodshed, intrigue, and new hungers. They brought back a taste for the exotic spices of the Orient; brilliant silks and sensuous perfumes tempted the western appetite. The knights sang songs of conquest, bawdiness, bravery. At their most exquisite, they praised nature for allowing them pretty fields in which to slaughter their enemies. Heroic epics such as the
Song of Roland
celebrated the warriors’ brotherhood, and since castles revolved around knights and war, it was just these songs that rang from their parapets.

While the men were away fighting, it often fell to the women to manage the estates. Although both Church and society dismissed women as frail, incompetent beings who were lifelong children, women handled the estates with an aplomb that raised their image and self-esteem. When necessary, they even took disputes to court. This didn’t radically alter their position in French society, but it gave them confidence, it widened their social contacts, and it improved their legal status. As new decision makers, they had greater freedom of action, of course, but, more important, they had greater freedom of thought. And with that came the fantasizing about love, the hiring of troubadours, and the indulging in affairs.

Mind you, the Christian tradition preached that erotic love was dangerous, a trapdoor leading to hell, which was not even to be condoned between husband and wife. He was allowed to kiss, fondle, and caress her—provided he didn’t really enjoy it. Sexual appetite was normal and acceptable; passion was not. Any man who felt too much erotic passion for his wife was committing an act of adultery. Instead they were supposed to live together like business partners, who felt affection for each other, got on amiably, and just happened to have children. The idea of all-out love lay elsewhere.

BOOKS OF LOVE

Most ideas about love came from reading the pagan or Christian thinkers. Books were rare, but students could find some in the libraries of monasteries and cathedrals. There they might read a smattering of Greek and Roman authors, some of whom were just being translated. Plato was popular because he renounced the material world and abandoned the delights of the flesh. Distrust of the body, while seeking the spiritual, fit neatly into Christian teachings. Plato and Cicero both celebrated lofty, nonerotic love between men, and that appealed to the celibate clergy. From Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas, students learned of love as a demented passion, a mix of bliss and raw danger. People could die from love, so surely it was an affliction, a deadly humour, a plague. Ovid’s smart-alecky
Art of Love
introduced them to the frank country joys of lust, where every lover was a soldier in the trenches. But in Ovid’s writings, they also found descriptions of the tender love he felt for women. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice taught them about the heroics of love, which led deep into the Underworld and out again.

They learned from the Christian writers of a loving and merciful God, an idea we now take for granted; but to the ancients it was a startling thought. The pagan gods didn’t waste affection on human beings, whom they often toyed with as rather peevish pets. Gigantic, alien, and magically endowed, the gods were nonetheless all too human in their sadism, whimsy, and churlishness. In contrast, the Old Testament God, obsessed with love, commands his people first and foremost to “love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” It is one’s moral duty to feel love. This continues into the New Testament, where we learn that “God is love,” that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” and that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself. With what poignancy St. Paul describes this new importance of love:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing…. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

The Bible teaches that God’s love is unconditional, a gift given by a doting parent. It needn’t be won, and it doesn’t go only to those who deserve it. Altruism appears as a moral good, even if loving one’s neighbor does have a missionary zeal to it. No one can be saved who doesn’t convert to Christianity, so converting a neighbor is the greatest gift you can give him.

Heterosexual love in the Old Testament is sometimes down to earth, very material, and deliciously sensual, as when Solomon tells his future bride:

You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters.

I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches.

Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples,

And your kisses like the best wine that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth …

But, in the New Testament, sex becomes nonerotic and full of self-denial.
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Paul advises that “It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” but he concedes that marriage is a last resort for those who can’t be celibate. Because pent-up desires can lead to fornication or adultery, “each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.” Their duty is to use sex as a safety valve and to produce children. Divorce is forbidden. “To the unmarried and the widows,” Paul warns, “I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn.” And better to marry than to burn with desire, which he depicts as a private hell in which sin walks one’s nerves as if they were so many tightropes. In this mix of traditions, Plato’s call for sublimating one’s desires blended neatly with Christianity’s, and at times celibacy seems to be enjoyed as a reverse erotics all its own. St. Augustine describes his vow of abstinence like this: “Now was my soul free from the biting cares of canvassing and getting, and weltering in filth, and scratching off the itch of lust.” That’s rather spirited self-sacrifice.
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Then something happened that would change the course of love in the western world.

TROUBADOURS

When he returned from a spotty career in the Crusades, William IX, duke of Aquitaine (1071–1127), began composing songs of love and yearning, which we now recognize as the first troubadour love songs. He may well have been inspired by Moorish writers, who sang of love as an ennobling force and women as transcendent goddesses. Arabia and Spain regularly exchanged artists as well as ambassadors, and their culture spread into southern France. Best known was the Andalusian poet Ibn-Hazm, who wrote in his classic
The Ring of the Dove
(1022) that “the union of souls is a thousand times more beautiful than that of bodies.” His attitude was deeply Platonic as well as Muslim, especially when he spoke about the need to become one with the beloved. It was a natural need, common as sand but powerful as radium, because love is the reunion of souls that, before creation, were made from the same primordial stuffs that became divided later in the physical universe. “The lover’s soul,” he says, “is ever seeking for the other, striving after it, searching it out, yearning to encounter it again, drawing it to itself it might be as a magnet draws the iron.”

Beauty is the lure. The soul is beautiful and it feels drawn to physical beauty. But if sex is the only appeal, then the soul can’t grasp the beautiful object long enough for love to take shape; it needs the glue of finding a kindred spirit. Arguing that lust is a vulgar emotion, though reveling in the other’s senses is magnificent, he depicts the lover as his mistress’s slave, who should address her either as
sayyidi
(“my lord”) or
mawlaya
(“my master”). He cautions the lover against actually possessing his beloved, details the torment of love-sickness, and even offers this guide to help read love’s facial semaphores:

To make a signal with the corner of the eye is to forbid the lover something; to droop the eye is an indication of consent; to prolong the gaze is a sign of suffering and distress; to break off the gaze is a mark of relief; to make signs of closing the eyes is an indicated threat. To turn the pupil of the eye in a certain direction and then to turn it back swiftly, calls attention to the presence of a person so indicated. A clandestine signal with the corner of both eyes is a question; to turn the pupil rapidly from the middle of the eye to the interior angle is a demonstration of refusal; to flutter the pupils of both eyes this way and that is a general prohibition. The rest of these signals can only be understood by actually seeing them demonstrated.

Ibn-Hazm’s lovers become transformed by love, growing strong and brave, dignified and generous. His countrymen wrote love stories with similar concerns, steeped in the senses; they relied heavily on natural imagery, and were usually accompanied by musical instruments. The sensuous world of the East would have been as welcome as perfume in French society, at a time when the upper class was becoming richer and idler.

On crusade, William and his fellow knights discovered harem women, beautiful but remote and unknowable, hushed behind walls, their chastity an inaccessible garden. Arab men gazed at their shy eyes and spun luxurious fantasies. With their emotions hidden, faceless as psychoanalysts, these women were blank slates for the men’s imaginings. In the Mideast, knights enjoyed exotic games that sparked their senses and challenged their intellect, board games such as chess, war games with peculiar weaponry, and also games of the flesh—new sexual techniques, new varieties of desire.

William wrote his songs in the street language of Provence, and this gave them an immediacy and a certain vulgar reality that appealed to his contemporaries at court. Sassy, ribald, audacious, and a bit of a rogue, he thought nothing of snatching someone’s wife when her husband was out of sight, or painting a portrait of his mistress’s body on his shield. When eyebrows raised at this, he saucily replied that she had carried him often enough on the shield of her hips. He once bragged that he had bedded the wives of two well-known lords 188 times in one week. Whether or not we believe his bravado, or libido, he betrayed the rules of courtly love by boasting. It must have been tempting to rattle the abacus of one’s self-regard, but secrecy was the code in courtly love, not just because it heightened the excitement, but because there was hell to pay if a wife was caught being unfaithful. For her, in the early Middle Ages, infidelity was a capital offense; and, in later years, it usually meant being banished to a convent. The husband was even within his rights to murder her and her lover, if he wished. With so much at stake, it’s small wonder women put men through exhausting tests to make sure of their sincerity.

Most of the troubadours were commoners, the medieval equivalent of traveling folksingers who played other people’s songs along with some of their own. If they were talented and lucky, and could find a hospitable lord or lady with money, they performed regularly at a castle. That small world could get smaller by the hour in idle moments. There were no novels of romance, no gossip magazines, no thrillers to watch at the cinema. A clever singer, full of soap-operalike stories and bloodcurdling adventures, was a welcome guest. Thanks to the troubadours, affairs of the heart became a favorite theme of poetic sagas, and so the love story first entered European literature. The compass of heroism widened, and the idea of “the couple”—two people served by a single verb—began to tantalize society.

THE HEART’S REBELLION

One of the great changes of the Middle Ages was a shift from unilateral love to mutual love. That love could be shared, that two people could feel passionate concern and desire for each other, was at first an avant-garde and dangerous idea. Because the Church taught that love was appropriate only for God, it found the idea of mutual love simply impossible. After all, one was to love God without ransom, expecting nothing in return. To the churchman’s mind, love was not a collaboration of hearts, not a pas de deux, not a two-way street, not an exchange of goods and services, but a solitary state.

I don’t think the troubadours believed they were being subversive by saying that the lightning of love could flow between two people, not just toward heaven. Nonetheless, by making love available on earth, between mortals, they could be charged with encouraging the worship of false idols. They introduced the image of the lovers, a society of two, as something noble and valuable. They honored pairs who felt passionate love for each other. Until then, love between men and women was thought to be sinful and vulgar. As often as not, it led to madness. And it was always degrading. To portray love as majestic, an ideal to be searched for, was truly shocking. To accept that sexual desire might be a natural part of love, but that the total feeling was more spiritual, an intense oneness, didn’t jibe with classical teachings. After all, in Greek tragedy, love was an affliction, a horror that led to cruelty and death. For theologians, human love was a poor reflection of the real thing, which could be found only in spiritual rapture. Insisting that women were equal participants in love, even ennobled by it, seemed outlandish because it tampered with the natural order of feudal life, where men served their lords, and women were faithful to their men. If one’s lover deserved one’s total dedication, where did one’s feudal master fit into the equation?