Andreas Capellanus, Scholasticism, and the Courtly Tradition

8. Love and the Moral Order: Courtly Values and Christian Ethics

8 ≥ LOVE AND THE MORAL ORDER Courtly Values and Christian Ethics In any society, love between the sexes has significant moral implications and raises important moral problems; in none more so than in the Christian society of the Middle Ages. Throughout the period , the clergy of the Christian Church struggled, more or less successfully depending on time and place, to impose on secular society the ideals of sexual austerity inherited from the Fathers. As a member of the clergy, Andreas Capellanus was not indifferent to the requirements of Christian morality regarding sexual love, despite the obvious influence on his treatise of the secular, courtly circles in which he also moved. The shock between these two distinct, often antagonistic cultures in which the Chaplain participated doubtless forms the most important single focus of interest in his work. The moral problems that it poses constitute the aspect of the De amore that has received the most attention from the critics. This subject is generally addressed globally, in terms of whether Andreas was for or against sexual love: whether he really meant to promote it in the first two books, whether he was sincere in rejecting it in Book Three, how and to what degree these two apparently antithetical thrusts of his discourse can be reconciled. The matter is more complex, however, than a simple dichotomy between “for” and “against” would indicate. Long before his rejection of love in the third book, the Chaplain had undertaken in the first two books a systematic effort to accommodate the troubadours’ secular love ethic to the standards of Christian morality. 287 This effort, which included several separate strands, deserves a more detailed examination. As previously observed, the moral questions raised by love are often intertwined with psychological or social considerations. Certain of the psychological questions treated, such as that of “excessive abundance of pleasure,” are really moral problems in disguise. We have also seen that Andreas’s treatment of social themes gives rise to a self-contained secular ethic based on the social value of love. The focus of the present chapter will be morality in a narrower sense, limited essentially to Christian morality. Even within this narrow focus, the Chaplain’s approach to love and morals involves several components other than the straightforward rejection of love. It includes the Christianization of the secular love ethic of the vernacular literature, as well as various attempts to limit sexual activity within love relationships between the sexes. Also included in our discussion will be social questions, such as love and marriage or love and the clergy, in which Christian morality plays a major role. The Christian tradition obviously provides a major source for this part of the Chaplain’s doctrine. This includes the Bible and the Fathers, contemporary canonists and theologians, and many Christian commonplaces . The other major source for this part of the work is the vernacular love poetry of the troubadours and trouvères, whose secular love ethic is systematically opposed to the teachings of Christian morality . The opposition is not total, however, for without abandoning the sensuality of physical love that provides their initial inspiration, the troubadours manage to incorporate into their love conceptions a high degree of sublimation and idealization, including many Christian elements . It is thus at least conceivable that, unlike the urbane, cynical hedonism of an Ovid, their secular love ethic could be reconciled with Christianity. This is apparently the challenge that Andreas takes up in the first two books of his treatise, before finally rejecting love in Book Three. This entire effort, including both of its antithetical components, must be viewed together as forming the major constituent of the generic vector that we have called sapientia. 288 p ro b l e m s o f m e a n i n g Love and virtue One of the most important and original aspects of the poetry of the troubadours is their tendency to idealize physical love between the sexes . Even such a critic of the notion of “courtly love” as E. Talbot Donaldson recognizes in their works a general propensity to what he calls “sublimation” of the sexual instinct.1 The claim made by Bernart de Ventadorn that love, even (or perhaps especially) unrequited, makes him a better person (Chantars no pot gaire valer [P.-C. 70, 15], vv. 13–16) is repeated by many later colleagues. Recognizing the social and moral...