Courtly Love and Courtliness

Abstract

COURTLY LOVE is a species of that movement inherent in the soul of man towards a desired object. It is this object, the final object, which specifies love and differentiates its manifestations one from the other. When the object of love is the pleasure of sense, then love is sensual and carnal; directed towards the spiritual, it is mystic, towards a person of the opposite sex, sexual, towards God, divine. Courtly Love is a type of sensual love and what distinguishes it from other forms of sexual love, from mere passion, from so-called platonic love, from married love is its purpose or motive, its formal object, namely, the lover's progress and growth in natural goodness, merit, and worth. That is the very essence of the love of the troubadours and from it are derived those characteristics that are integral to Courtly Love and are no less important or irrevelant to it than are corollaries to a geometrical proposition. Since sexual love is represented as the sole source of man's ennoblement on earth, then its practice is incumbent on every one. Since man is worthless unless he acts under the compulsion of love, then no one can be excused from taking an active part in it: marriage, vows, orders, virginity are no bar to it. What is done, moreover, under Love's compulsion cannot be sinful or immoral; rather it is virtuous and righteous as a necessary source of natural goodness andworth. For that very reason the love of the troubadours must be directed towards a beloved who is superior, usually in rank but always in worth, so that love of so exalted an object may lift the beloved up, as it were, in the scale of goodness and virtue to her exalted position. Since complacency in the attainment of the beloved may lead to quiescence in the beloved object and so to satiety, troubadour love must remain desire, a yearning that is unappeased. In its purest form, it eschews physical possession because, once consummated, desire decreases and tends to vanish. On the contrary, desire for union is to be intensified, fanned, and inflamed by every physical delight short of carnal possession, because it is desire which is the means to the end and purpose of Courtly Love: the ennobling of the lover. Despite the sensuality that such love implies in Christian eyes, for the troubadours such love was spiritual in that it sought a ullion of hearts and minds rather than of bodies; it was a virtuous love in so far as it was the source of all natural virtue and worth. Such a conception of love differs radically from every other type of sexual love known, celebrated, or taught in the literature of Western Europe before its appearance in the lyrics of the Provengal troubadours. In skeleton form, it is the surge of the lover to rise in worth and virtue towards the beloved through the force and energy of desire. Search for its origins began practically in the days of the troubadours and has gone on un'til ours. Scholars have found models and sources for the metrical form and the genres of poetry of the troubadours in