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2 Historical Currents D I V I N E S E RV I C E : C H I VA L RY A N D T H E T R O U B A D O U R S It is, of course, a leap to go from the first centuries of the Christian era to the Middle Ages, but we must do so in order to trace the Western esoteric traditions . It is true that there were important intervening figures like John Scotus Eriugena, but here we are sketching the broad outlines of historical currents drawing on individual works, so much must be left to catalogue elsewhere. When we consider the emergence of Western esoteric traditions in the modern era, we cannot help but recognize there the influence of chivalry, and so must inquire whether the chivalric current had esoteric dimensions like those that we glimpsed in antiquity in Gnostic and other movements. Here I am not arguing that the chivalric or troubadour movements were gnostic, only investigating whether there are elements corresponding to the mysticism of the word that we saw in antiquity. That there were profound correspondences between the chivalric and the troubadour movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of Europe is incontestable , for both are known to us through literature that reveals fundamentally similar attitudes. The chivalric ideals were conveyed through stories, and the troubadours’ tradition was conveyed through poetry or song. Both the chivalric and the troubadour traditions were centered on service or duty, and entailed a moral code much higher than that of the rest of society. The knight in swearing fealty to his lord is engaged in a social relationship that can also have spiritual implications: to act properly as a knight is also to fulfill one’s higher responsibility as a warrior for the divine. The troubadour, in giving honor to his beloved, sees her (or him, if the poet is a woman) as the divine incarnate. 35 Thus there is implicitly a dual quality to much of the writing associated with each of these traditions. When a story is about a knight’s remaining true to his word, it is implicitly also about his relationship to the divine; likewise, a troubadour ’s poem also can be read on at least two levels, as referring to an actual beloved woman and to the divine. When the troubadour or the knight pledges troth to a woman, in the background is also his relationship to the invisible, and thus there inherently are hidden dimensions to such poems or stories. And so the chivalric and the troubadour traditions are fertile ground for esotericism, that is to say, for hidden meanings not accessible to outsiders. But was there any explicitly esoteric content in these traditions? In other words, we have already seen the explicitly esoteric nature of Gnosticism and other movements of the first few centuries C.E. Can we find anything approximating this earlier explicitly gnostic esotericism in the chivalric tales or the songs of the troubadours? The answer, I think, is no. Both of these movements are fundamentally social in nature, particularly the chivalric tradition. There is esotericism visible on occasion in the stories written by individual authors or in particular cycles, as for instance in the Grail cycles or in Parzival; there is esotericism visible in the songs of the troubadours. But when we look at these movements as a whole, they do not reflect what we see in those Merkabah or Gnostic or Hermetic traditions explicitly devoted to knowledge of the transcendent. Instead, the esotericism that we find in the chivalric or troubadour tradition is allusive and elusive, even surreptitious, relying on implication and multivalent symbols, never explicitly discussing, for example, the soul’s liberation as one finds in Gnostic treatises. Undoubtedly much of this allusiveness had to do with the strictures imposed by the Roman Catholic church. One does find an outright gnostic esotericism in the writings and sermons of Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, but these were not part of either the chivalric or troubadour lines, and indeed even they ran afoul of church censors alert for any signs of Gnosticism’s recurrence. Of course, the troubadour movement was close to esotericism proper, in that it remained an individual and somewhat anarchic tradition that one joined by self-election, and that may have also in some quarters engendered initiatory groups. One such group was the fedeli d’amore, or love’s faithful, who conveyed their mysteries through poetic references and...

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