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From Ovid’s Ars Amatorica to Andreas’ De amore…

 The Imagery of Horse and Rider…

The Myth of Mars and Venus…

And the Allegory of the Fall…

     Let’s now fast-forward twelve centuries from Ovid’s Art of Love to the De amore of Andreas Capellanus (the chaplain to the countess Marie at the court of Champagne), who is thought to have codified the rules of “courtly love” as they were being promulgated in the “courts of love” supposedly presided over by his patroness.

Here are a few examples of the same as Andreas has summarized them at the end of book II:

Marriage is no real excuse for not loving [i.e., outside of it].
He who is not jealous cannot love.
When made public love rarely endures.
The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of it makes it prized.
Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.
When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved, his heart palpitates.
A man in love is always apprehensive.
Real jealously always increases the feeling of love.
Jealousy, and therefore love, are increased when one suspects his beloved.
He whom the thought of love vexes, eats and sleeps very little.
Every act of a lover ends in the thought of his beloved.
A lover can never have enough of the solaces of his beloved.
A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved.
Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women.

(Andreas’ prescriptions should sound familiar enough from Ovid, and the question begs whether they—having by medieval readers been taken to be ironic in the Roman poet–should suddenly now be taken in earnest when they come from a Christian cleric who is paradoxically credited with having codified a wholly new and un-Christian doctrine extolling adulterous lust.)

Andreas tells us that he is writing his advice on love at the request of a friend named “Walter” (who may be a literary fiction or a real person).  There is no doubt, in any case, about Walter’s condition.  In his preface, Andreas says that he has been recently wounded by an arrow of Cupid and “cannot manage his horse’s reins”:  that is, he cannot control his flesh with the reins of temperance as he should.  The image of the human soul as a man riding a horse, that is, as reason controlling and restraining the bodily appetites or passions, has been a commonplace since it was first used by Plato.  Not being able to control one’s horse is a serious moral problem, as Andreas observes, because the servant of Venus can think of nothing except how to “enmesh himself further in her chains”.

 

Once again, the imagery of the passions as the chains that keep the reason in bondage to the flesh is, like the cognate image of the body as the prison of the soul, a Platonic commonplace.  In classical mythology, the most notorious exemplum of this ethical calamity was the fable of Mars caught with Venus in flagrante delicto in the net fabricated by Venus’ metallurgist husband Vulcan, and displayed for the uproarious amusement of the assembled Olympians.

As interpreted allegorically, the fable of Mars and Venus conventionally illustrates the idea that the chains of Vulcan are really forged by the unrestrained desires of the lover himself, who as Andreas suggests, having become enslaved to Venus (that is, to lust), tends to stoke the flames of his own passion.  Mars, the great warrior, is an object of sport precisely because he has made himself into one of Ovid’s soldiers of love.  He has exchanged the manly hardships of the battlefield for the plush comforts of Venus’ bedroom; in the language of moral allegory, he has made masculine virtue a slave to feminine sensuality.

The myth of Mars and Venus, in other words, was interpreted in precisely the same terms as the biblical Fall.  Like Adam and Eve, Mars and Venus were conventionally regarded as symbols of universal psychological or moral tendencies.

Not being able to control one’s horse—to subject one’s reason to one’s carnal appetites– is clearly an unfortunate position for a man to be in; thus Andreas reminds Walter that it is not proper for a prudent man to engage in this kind of “hunting” on horseback.  Even though as a friend, Andreas cannot refuse Walter’s request, he assures him that after he has learned all about love, he will certainly be more “cautious”.

The task that Andreas sets for himself, therefore, is to furnish instructions for the young man that will seem to advance him toward his goal, but at the same time encourage him to be sensible about his condition.  This was a condition that, of course, had already been thoroughly diagnosed by Plato, the Stoics, Ovid, Boethius, not to mention St. Paul, who wrote that in his fallen state, man’s flesh forever lusteth against his spirit.  The moral problem of lust did not therefore suddenly arise in the twelfth century, having been completely overlooked by ancient or Christian philosophy.

At the end of his work, Andreas seems to think that he has successfully carried out the purpose he sets out in his preface.  He tells Walter that if he follows his instructions, he will find in them a double lesson:  Walter will obtain the delights of the flesh; but, at the same time, he will lose the grace of God, the companionship of his true friends, and his good name and honour. He adds, unambiguously, “If you will study carefully this little treatise of ours, and understand it completely and put into practice what it teaches, you will see clearly that no man ought to misspend his days in the pleasures of love.”

The Allegory of the Fall in the Parson’s Tale…

As the Archetype of the Universal Pattern of Sin…

The Pattern related to “Courtly Love”…

Ovid’s Ars Amatorica…

    That John’s allegory of the Fall is utterly conventional is demonstrated by the fact that it is repeated in every essential detail in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, almost five hundred years later.  After paraphrasing the narrative in Genesis, the Parson explains:

There may ye seen that deedly synne hath, first, suggestion of the feend, as sheweth here by the naddre [serpent]; and afterward, the delit of the flessh, as sheweth here by Eve; and after that, the consentynge of the resoun, as sheweth here by Adam.  For trust wel, though so were that the feend tempted Eve, that is to seyn, the flessh, and the flessh had delit in the beautee of the fruyt defended [i.e. French defendu, “forbidden”], yet certes, til that resoun, that is to seyn, Adam, consented to the etynge of the fruyt, yet stood he in th’estat of innocence.

For the Parson, then, the characters in the scriptural narrative of the Fall are pre-eminently symbols of certain universal interior moral processes and realities.  Moreover, it is remarkably similar to that described by John the Scot:  i.e., first the object of beauty is suggested or presented to the senses (the first stage, represented, according to the Parson, by the Satanic serpent); then, in the second stage, Eve, that is the flesh or the senses (or what John calls the woman), sees that the object is “fair to the eyes” and takes delight in its beauty; finally, Adam, that is, the reason (or the Man, as John calls the innermost region of the psychic garden), consents to its enjoyment for its own sake.

Above all, the eventsof the Fall (its inner, allegorical istoria) are recapitulated every time a man commits sin:

For certes, ther is no deedly synne, that it nas first in mannes thought, and after that in his delit, and so forth into consentynge and into dede.

The crucial stage for the Parson, as in John’s allegory of the Fall, is the second one, when the beautiful object becomes fixed in the sensuality as the object of pleasurable contemplation; and it is this “delit of the flesh” that ought to be repented as much as the act of sin itself:

Wherefore I seye that many men are repenten hem nevere of swiche thoughts and delites, ne nevere shriven hem of it, but oonly of the dede of grete synnes outward.  Wherefore I seye that swiche wikked delites and wikked thoughts been subtile bigileres of hem that shullen be dampned.

Naturally, anything of physical beauty can become the object of delightful thought—can be cupidinously abused rather than charitably used, to put it in Augustinian terms–including the beauty of a woman.  It would be odd, indeed, if the philosophical ethos that we have been exploring in these essays, in which the sensible things of this world–regarded as merely transient and mutable goods and pleasures to be distrusted, and at best, to be used as symbols by which the mind can rise to the contemplation of the invisible things of God–should suddenly make an exemption for the beauty of a woman’s form, and the carnal enjoyment of it.

The idea is absurd, of course, and along with it, the modern notion that, in the Middle Ages, Christian knights (miles Christi) were encouraged to become adherents of a new religion of “courtly love”:  to worship and pledge absolute allegiance to their god Cupid, and in his service, to submit to the humiliating antics that qualify them for the blissful enjoyment of the object of their adulterous passions.

 

The origins of this supposed system of courtly love are usually traced to a poet of love whom Chaucer, amongst others, invokes as his auctour and magister:  Ovid.  In the Art of Love Ovid propounds a formal “set of rules” according which the “game of love” is to be be played.  First, real love cannot exist between a man and his wife; rather, it must be adulterous, whereby Ovid provides elaborate advice on how the husband of the object of one’s illicit ardour may be effectively deluded.  The trouble that arises if the lady’s husband finds out about the affair is good enough reason to keep it secret; besides, secrecy makes the affair even pleasanter.

Other Ovidian ideas anticipate certain so-called “courtly” conventions:  Ovid’s Cupid is the great and jealous God of a religion of love, in whose service the lover must consecrate himself; or Cupid is a great general who demands total obedience from his miles amoris, his “soldier of love”, if he is to successfully prosecute his amatory campaign; in love and war, all is fair:  the lover should be truthful, but if his suit falters, it’s permissible to deceive his lady.

This, however, can be dangerous, since in love the woman’s power is second only to that of Cupid, and the lover must obey her every whim:  he must keep watch day and night outside her door; undergo all sorts of agonizing trials; become pale and sick; sigh and moan; forgo sleep and meat; and generally waste away to a shadow of his former self, if he is to prove the sincerity of his affection.

Now, clearly, Ovid was having a bit of good-natured fun here.  His “manual” of love is a parody, his advice is ironic, and his description of the lover’s ridiculous behaviour is patently satirical and didactic.  As the eminent medievalist E.K. Rand put it, Ovid “left it for those who could detect his satire to find…that ridicule is the most potent enemy of folly.”

No one–certainly, no one in antiquity or the Middle Ages–would have failed to recognize the moral irony behind the Ars Amatorica.  As a fourteenth-century manuscript of the poem explains in its introduction, although the work seems to encourage adulterous passion, the author “detests lecherous love and exhorts us to love virtuously”.  Similarly, a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Remedia Amoris(Ovid’s handbook of cures for the sickness of love, which seems to have been written by him as a sort of antidote to the folly he describes in his earlier work) informs us, the Remedia is “not contrary” to the Art of Love, since “the purpose of both is to remove pernicious love”.

The Two Songs and Two Dances of Love…

 The Edenic Garden as the Archetype of Medieval Literary Gardens…

The Edenic Garden and the Garden of the Soul…

The Garden of the Soul in John the Scot’s Allegory of the Fall…

     Either of the two songs might plausibly be accompanied by a dance.  In fig. 40 we see an angel leading the saints in a dance; the music he is playing is clearly the heavenly harmony of praise for the Creator which–since the angels inhabit the planets and stars as their animating souls or “intelligences”–is also, as we have seen, the harmony of the spheres.  (The idea of the movements of the planets as a dance is once again traditional, going back to Plato’s description of them in the Timaeus.)

     In fig. 41, we see, by contrast, the dance that accompanies the decidedly earthly music of bagpipe and drum.

 

This dance may be compared to the one illustrated in an illumination (fig. 42) from a ms. of theRoman de la Rose.  It shows the dance that takes place in the pleasure garden of Deduit (Sir Mirth), led by Gladness (Sir Mirth’s consort), who plays the bagpipes.

I’ve had occasion to mention the Roman de la Rose many times thus far, and it now seems appropriate to look at it somewhat more extensively, since it is the prototypical poem of “courtly love”.   Not coincidentally, therefore, the Roman gives expression to all of the themes and oppositions—music in its celestial and earthly modes; love in its celestial and earthly modes—that we have been treating.

But before we turn to this celebrated medieval poem, there are a few more commonplace ideas and themes connected with the medieval doctrine of love that we must consider.

The action of the Roman, as you may know, takes place in a beautiful walled garden:  a garden that strikes the dreamer-protagonist as a “terrestrial Paradise”.  In anticipation of what is soon to follow, let me just say that in pre-modern Christian literature, almost every garden cannot help but evoke the biblical garden of Eden, the archetype of all literary gardens.  As Chaucer’s Parson explains, every sin is, morally and psychologically speaking, a recapitulation of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and inasmuch as every sin occurs within the depths of the soul, every human soul is also, morally and psychologically speaking, a garden.

 

The garden of the soul is another ubiquitous allegorical commonplace.  In the first series of these essays, Involuted Mysteries, we discussed the topos of the garden of the virtues and vices, as it was inflected, for instance, in the thirteenth-century treatise on the virtues and vices, called the Somme le roi.

In the garden depicted by the author of the Somme le roi, both the Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins were conventionally conceived as the branches of two trees, the former, the Tree of Life, the latter, the forbidden Tree of Knowledge; the trees on which the virtues and vices are represented are thus the two trees of the Edenic garden; but Eden here is obviously enough also a figure for the spiritual garden that resides universally in the human interior.

The most famous, and for us, the most relevant, allegorical exposition of the biblical Paradise as a symbol of the garden of the soul is that of John the Scot, the ninth-century Christian Platonist and exegete who is known pre-eminently as the translator and commentator on the works of the seminal sixth-century mystic Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite.

In his treatise On the Division of Nature, John envisages Paradise as a figure for human nature in its totality, which is divided into an inner and outer region:  the inner region is the “Man”, also called Nous(hence this is the habitat of the mind or reason), and in it dwells the Logos, that is, the eternal Reason of God.  This region of the garden also contains the Tree of Life, and the Fountain of Life, from which flow the four rivers of Paradise (which are in turn the four classical or cardinal virtues).  The interior region of the human garden should, moreover, be “married”, as John admonishes, to the exterior; in the same way that Christ, the head and sovereign of the human person, is married to the Church, his body.

The outer region, then, is the “Woman”, also called Aethesis (that is, the science of Beauty), since it is the habitat of the corporeal senses and, as John writes, the “vain and false fantasies” that arise from them.  In this part of the garden are placed the Tree of Knowledge and the Serpent, called “delightful thought”.

Now it is obvious that in a figural garden of this kind, whatever sensible image that impresses the outer region as beautiful must be referred to the inner region for judgment.  But this does not always happen, since men are frequently inclined to act “effeminately”, rather than virtuously.

John explains these moral choices using the hypothetical example of a golden, gem-encrusted vase which is brought before two men, one wise, the other avaricious.  The image of the precious vase enters the corporeal senses (the Woman) of both men; but the wise man immediately refers its beauty “to the praise of the Creator of natural things”.  (He practices, as we will see, what Augustine calls caritas:  the use of the beautiful things of this world for the sake of the contemplation of the Creator who is the Source and Archetype of Beauty per se.)  The avaricious man, on the other hand–instead of understanding the beautiful vase as a symbol of the invisibilia dei–, retains its sensible image in the “Woman”, which delights in its beauty for its own sake, or for the sake of personal vanity or gain, so that it becomes lodged, as an object of fascination, in the Woman’s imagination; whence the avaricious man eventually “plunges into a foul pool of cupidity”.

Once again, John’s allegory of the Fall is to be understood as an exemplary description of a process that is re-enacted by every sinner.  The critical stage occurs when the image of a beautiful thing is received in the corporeal sense (in the “Woman”, Aesthesis) and then becomes fixed there, as the focus of pleasurable thought.  If this delight is not nullified by the reason–if the reason consents to it–, the result is the corruption of the inner garden, just as Eve corrupted Adam.

If, on the other hand, the image of beauty becomes the vehicle for the contemplation of the Beauty of the Creator, the “Man” remains “married” to the “Woman”; that is, the reason retains its proper hierarchical ascendancy over the senses; the spirit continues to guide its servant, the body; and there is no “adultery” committed.

The Old Song and the New…

In Biblical Texts…

In Manuscript Illuminations…

Instruments of the Flesh…

     In Christian theological terms, the melodies of the two loves are the “New Song”, sung by St. Paul’s “New Man”, and the “Old Song” of the “Old Man”.  A locus classicus of the theme is St. Augustine’s sermon De cantico novo, in which the New Song is, of course, charity, and the Old Song, cupidity.

The biblical texts upon which this opposition was hung are, in the Old Testament, from Psalms:

Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an instrument of ten strings. Sing unto him a new song. (Ps. 33)

O sing unto the Lord a new song:  sing unto the Lord, all the earth.  Sing unto the Lord, bless his name; show forth his salvation from day to day.  Declare his glory among the heathen… (Ps. 96)

O sing unto the Lord a new song; for he hath done marvelous things: his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory.  The Lord hath made known his salvation… (Ps. 98)

The same formula is repeated in Ps. 144 and 146; but it is in Second Isaiah that it has the typological potential that claimed the attention of the early Christians.  In chapter 42, Isaiah addresses the Suffering Servant as a “bruised reed that shall not break”, and a “light of the Gentiles to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house”.   This isfollowed by the verse:

Behold, the former things are come to pass, and all new things do I declare:  before they spring forth I tell you of them.  Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth…

The New Song of the New Things is, in Christian typological allegory,  the New Law, as opposed to the Old Law that has passed away.  It is this song that is sung by the four and twenty elders before the Lamb in John’s vision in Revelation 4, and again, in 14, accompanied by the 144 thousand redeemed of the earth:

And I looked and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads.  And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder; and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps:  And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders:  and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth.

 

Manuscript illuminations of medieval Psalters illustrate the opposition between the New Song, as the sacred song of praise of God, and the Old Song, as the sort of carnal “melodye” made by such so-called courtly lovers as Chaucer’s Nicholas and Absolon.  In fig. 29, we see David in the upper panel leading the musicians in the Canticum Novum, while in the panel below, the devil plays the drums and leads a group of dancers and jongleurs in the song of the flesh.

   

In fig. 31, we see, in the initial, the ringer of bells, the conventional representation of sacred harmony, and in the lower margin, a contrasting image of the melody of the flesh played by a young man to his lady. 

In fig. 32, the same bellman appears again in the initial, while the male grotesque on the left plays a bagpipe for the amusement of the female grotesque in the lower right. 

For reasons that have much to do with its, shall we say, anatomy, the bagpipe is commonly the instrument of the medieval “courtly” lover.  We see it again in the lower margin of fig. 33, its music inspiring the lady to do somersaults, while in the initial above, David is seated at his harp, the celestial city rising in the background.   Below, an image of David’s victory over Goliath symbolizes the defeat of pride, carnality, and worldliness.

But instruments other than bagpipes might do just as well as phallic symbols, as we see it in fig. 38, where the moral humour depends upon a sort of visual pun on the Latin word instrumentum, which means both musical instrument and the male member:  thus, in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the Wife is often encouraging her husband to use his “sely instrument”.

 

Finally, the meaning of the music of the flesh can be illustrated explicitly, as we see in fig. 34 (the “Ymago Luxuriae”, or emblem of Lust), from Guido Faba’s treatise on the vices.  Here the man clutching the vielle and the man clutching the woman in bed are to be identified as making the same “melody” upon their instruments.

The Two Kinds of “Melodye” and the Lover’s Malady

in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, concluded…

     The hende Nicholas has a rival, however; indeed one who is even more ridiculous in his courtly pretensions.  Directly after the melodious consummation of her adultery, we read of Alisoun:

Thane fil it thus, that to the paryssh chirche,
Cristes owene werkes for to wirche,
This goode wyf went on an haliday…

Now was ther of that chirche a parissh clerk,
The which that was ycleped Absolon.
Crul was his heer, and as the gold it shoon,
And strouted [stretched out] as a fanne large and brode;
Ful straight and evene lay his joly shode [parted hair].

(That this “good wife” should go immediately to Church to do “Christ’s work”, without a contrite thought for the work she had just been doing with Nicholas, tells us that in praising her piety Chaucer is, as usual, exercising the muscles of irony.)

Absolon’s beautifully coiffed blonde hair, along with the fashionable shoes and “gay” surplice that are subsequently described—“gay”hardly being the appropriate adjective to modify an ecclesiastical vestment–are somewhat out of keeping with his employment as a parish clerk.  Chaucer has named his character, in fact, after the biblical Absolom, who betrayed his father King David, and whose luxuriant blond mane was, in scriptural commentaries, taken once again as a symbol of his moral effeminacy.

As it turns out, this rival for the old carpenter’s wife is also an accomplished musician:

In twenty manere koude he trippe and daunce
After the scole of Oxenforde tho [then],
And with his legges casten to and fro,
And pleyen songes on a small rubible [rebeck];
Thereto he song som tyme a loud quynyble [high treble];
And as wel koude he pleye on a giterne.
In all the toun nas brewhous ne tavern
That he ne visited with his solas [entertainment],
Ther any galard tappestere [merry barmaid] was.

Absolon’s elegant shoes, hair, and surplice bespeak the sort of fashion-conscious dandy who knows the twenty latest dances on the Oxford hit parade; his high treble merely completes the picture.

We then learn that not only does he enjoy visiting the wenches of the taverns but, in execution of his ecclesiastical duties, he goes round the parish with his censer to sanctify his parishioners, paying particular attention, as it happens, to the wives.  On one such holy errand Absolon meets the carpenter’s wife, who was so “likerous” to look on that, as Chaucer comments,

I dar wel seyn, if she hadde been a mous,
And he a cat, he wolde hire hente [seize] anon;
This parish clerk, this joly Absolon,
Hath in his herte swich a love-longynge.

Naturally, every night, Absolon pours out his lust-sick heart in a kind of music that is anything but the harmony of the spheres:

The moone, whan it was nyght, ful brighte shoon,
And Absolon his gyterne hath ytake;
And forth he gooth, jolif and amorous,
Til he cam to the carpenteres hous
A litel after cokes ycrowe,
And dressed hym up by a shot-wyndowe
That was upon the carpenteres wal.
He syngeth in his voys gentil and smal [high],
“Now, deere lady, if thy wille be,
I praye yow that ye wole rewe on me”,
Ful wel acordaunt to his gyternynge.

Besides nocturnal concertizing and praying that his lady have mercy on him, Absolon in due course exhibits all the classic symptoms of the lover’s malady:

Fro day to day this joly Absolon
So woweth hire that hym is wo bigon.
He waketh al the nyght and al the day;
He kembeth his lokkes brode, and made him gay [pretty];
He woweth hire by meenes [go-betweens] and brocage (use of agents],
And swoor he wolde been hir owene page;
He syngeth, brokkynge [trilling] as a nyghtyngale;
He sente hire pyment [spiced wine], meeth, and spiced ale,
And wafres, piping hoot out of the gleede [oven]…

Meanwhile, hende Nicholas, whose academic specialty is astrology, convinces John, the old carpenter, that he has read in the stars that there is to be a reprise of Noah’s Flood, and that John must build and provision three boats and hang them from the rafters if they are to be saved.  Thus, on the evening before the Flood is to occur (according to Nicholas’ arcane astrological calculations), they duly take their positions in the boats.  John, exhausted from his labours, falls quickly and deeply asleep, as signaled by his loud and rhythmic snoring, which is the cue for Nicholas to put his plan into action:

Doun of the ladder stalketh Nicholay,
And Alisoun ful softe adoun she spedde;
Withouten words mo they goon to bedde,
Ther as the carpenter is wont to lye.
Ther was the revel and the melodye;
And thus lith Alison and Nicholas,
In busyness of myrthe and of solas,
Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge,
And freres in the chauncel gonne synge.

Here again, the nocturnal “melodye” of mirth is contrasted with the singing of lauds in the morning by the brothers in their monastic chancel.

Meanwhile, the jolly Absolon, whose mouth has been itching all day long, takes this as a sign that he is about to enjoy a feast of kissing, and so decides to venture another visit to his beloved Alisoun.

Whan that the firste cok hath crowe, anon
Up rist this joly lovere Absolon,
And hym arraieth gay, at point-devys [in every detail].
But first he cheweth greyn and lycorys,
To smellen sweete, er he hadde kembd his heer.
Under his tonge a trewe-love [sprig of herb] he beer,
For therby wende he to ben gracious.

Having combed his golden mane and freshened his breath in anticipation of his banquet of osculation, Absolon sets himself under Alisoun’s low-hanging bedroom window and tries to rouse her with these words:

“What do ye, hony-comb, sweete Alisoun,
My faire bryd [bird; pun on bride], my sweete cynamome?
Awaketh, lemman myn, and speketh to me!
Wel litel thynken ye upon my wo,
That for youre love I swete ther I go.
No wonder is thogh that I swelte [faint] and swete;
I moorne [yearn] as dooth a lamb after the tete.
Ywis, lemman, I have swich love-longynge
That lik a turtel [turtledove] trewe is my moornynge,
I may nat ete na moore than a mayde.”

Sweating, fainting, unable to eat, Absolon is suffering sorely from the lover’s malady, which, of course, is nothing more than an uncontrollable carnal itch.  His “courtly” behavior therefore seems all the more affected, especially when he is addressing the equally feral Alisoun with the exalted words of the Song of Songs, the epithalamion or marriage song that–as it was allegorically interpreted—expressed the love between the heavenly Bridegroom, Christ, and his Bride, the Church.

 

Since I don’t want to reveal the joke to those who haven’t read the Tale, let me say only that Absolon gets his kiss, although, in the dark, Alisoun offers up to his lips an unexpected part of her anatomy. This, as the poet says explicitly, quickly cured him of the lover’s malady:

His hoote love was coold and all yqueynt [quenched; another pun];
For fro that tyme that he hadde kist hir ers,
Of paramours he sette nat a kers [cress:  something of no value],
For he was heeled of his maladie.

I leave the conclusion of the Tale for your adult reading pleasure.  It is only one of many literary expressions of the opposition between the two kinds of “melodye”, as the carnal kind gives rise, in turn, to the lover’s malady that inevitably afflicts those who practise it.

 The Music of “Love” and The Lover’s Malady in

Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale

      As I have said, libido has its own “melody”, which we hear to our amusement throughout the Canterbury Tales.  My personal favourite is the Miller’s Tale, which chronicles the cuckolding of a rich old carpenter by his much younger, trophy wife Alisoun, with the “hende Nicholas”, a poor scholar from Oxford who lodges with them.

Nicholas is one of Chaucer’s typical “courtly lovers”, so-called:

This clerk was cleped [called] hende [courteous] Nicholas
Of derne [secret] love he koude [was capable] and of solas [pleasure];
And thereto he was sleigh and ful privee [discreet],
And like a mayden meek for to see.
A chamber had he in that hostelrye
Allone, withouten any compaignye,
Ful fetisly [elegantly] ydight [adorned] with herbes swoote [sweet];
And he himself as sweete as is the roote
Of lycorys…

Nicholas’ ability to make discreet, “courteous” love is of a piece with his “fetisly” perfumed chamber and body, and his girlish appearance, all of which convict him of moral effeminacy.  His own favourite herbal scent, lycorys, is a typical Chaucerian pun, since “likerous” is the Middle English antecedent of the Modern English “lecherous”.

And then we read of the instrument with which he was wont to “maken melodye”:

[Above his bed] there lay a gay sautrie [psaltery],
On which he made a-nyghtes melodie
So sweetly that all the chambre rong;
And Angelus ad virginem he song.

The psaltery is the instrument of David, composer of the Psalms he intoned in praise of the Creator; and the music that Nicholas plays is the sacred song sung by the Angel of the Annunciation; but a few lines later, we hear the music that this “courteous” Nicholas is especially good at:

                   so bifel the cas
That on a day this hende Nicholas
Fil with this yonge wif to rage [sport] and pleye,
Whil that hir housbonde was at Oseneye [Osney],
As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte [clever; a pun, as below]
And prively he caught hire by the queynte [see above],
And seyde, “Ywis, but if ich have my wille,
For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.” [die; pun on—you figure it out]
And heeld her harde by the haunchebones,
And seyde, “Lemman, love me al atones,
Or I wol dyen, also God me save!”…
This Nicholas gan mercy for to crye,
And spak so faire, and profred him so faste,
That she hir love hym graunted atte laste…

Whan Nicholas had doon thus everideel
And thakked hire aboute the lendes [loins] weel,
He kiste hire sweete and taketh his sawtrie,
And pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie.

Nicholas’ tearful entreaties for mercy from his pitiless Lady, and his declaration that he will die for love if she does not quench his ardour, are the stock-in-trade of the courtly lover–pretentions that were later so beautifully undercut by Shakespeare in Rosalind’s famous comment (As You Like It), “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love”.

In Chaucer, any pretense that Nicholas’ lover’s malady is the noble suffering of a martyr for true love is similarly undercut by his own actions:   by the crude groping and thwacking, which makes it clear that the lady is merely the object of a rather unromantic animal lust.  The post-coital melody that he plays on his psaltery is merely the musical expression of that lust, which stands in obvious contrast to theAngelus ad Virginem he piously recites every night before bed.  The latter is, clearly, the music of the heavenly, the former, of the vulgar Venus.

 The Iconography of the Vulgar Venus in Medieval Commentary…

and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale…

     When Chaucer finally comes to the description of the Temple image of the vulgar Venus, he follows an iconographical schema that had remained more or less constant since antiquity:

The statue of Venus, glorious for to se,
Was naked, fletynge in the large see,
And fro the navele doun al covered was
With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas.
A citole in hir right hand hadde she,
And on hir heed, ful seemly for to se,
A rose garland, fresh and wel smellynge;
Above hir heed hir dowves flikerynge.
Biforn her stood hir sone Cupido;
Upon his shuldres wynges hadde he two,
And blynd he was, as it is often seene;
A bowe he bar and arwes brighte and kene. (Knight’s Tale, 1955 ff.)

Venus’ attributes, as enumerated here, are entirely conventional, as are the allegorical significations that are immediately implied by them.  The goddess is depicted floating in the sea because she was born from the foam caused by the impact, appropriately enough, of the severed membrum virile of Uranus, where it fell into the Mediterranean near the island of Cythera (hence, her epithet, the Cytherean, and her Greek name Aphrodite, from aphros, foam or spray).  Moraliter, as the sixth-century Bishop Fulgentius writes in his Mythologiae, the meaning is that the “sailor of Venus” loses all his possessions and suffers shipwreck; or as Petrus Berchorius, the author of a fourteenth-century commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, observes, it is “because she wishes to be immersed in delights”.  She is naked because, as the Third Vatican Mythographer explains, “the crime of libido is hard to conceal”, and lust “denudes its victim of reason”.

Venus’ roses were another commonplace, and the explanation offered by Fulgentius is traditional: they blush and prick with their thorns just as lust blushes with shame and pricks with the sting of sin. Like lust, moreover, and the fleeting pleasures it confers, roses quickly fade of a season.  Chaucer’s Venus is also accompanied by doves, since these birds (as the Third Vatican Mythographer forthrightly puts it) are “especially fervent in coitus”.

But our poet departs from the conventional iconography in one instructive detail:  instead of carrying a conch shell, Venus holds a “citole”, a kind of medieval harp.  Chaucer’s authority for this substitution may be a passage from the aforementioned Ovidius moralizatus of Berchorius:

She is said to carry a conch shell in her hand into which she is forever singing and full of light airs…whence the nude whore is seen to say in the Scriptures [Isa. 23: 10, 16]:  “Pass thy land as a river, O daughter of the sea, thou hast a girdle no more….Take a harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten:  sing well, sing many a song, that thou mayst be remembered.”

The vulgar Venus’ music is thus the song of a prostitute; and as a “daughter of the sea”, it was natural enough to identify her with the Whore of Babylon, “the mother of all fornication” who in the Apocalypse rides upon the beast that rises out of the sea at the end-time.  Wishing to emphasize the connection that Berchorius draws between the vulgar Venus and the kind of music performed by her harlot-devotees, Chaucer presumably substituted the “citole” for the traditional shell.

The Two Venuses in Medieval Commentary…

 The Vulgar Venus and the Lover’s Malady in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale…

     The classical theme of the two Venuses–and the two antithetical loves they separately inspire–was one that continued to be rehearsed, with no alteration of meaning, through the Christian Middle Ages (and, indeed, well into the eighteenth century).  Thus, in a ninth-century commentary on the pagan poet Statius’ Thebaid (first-century A.D.),  Remigius of Auxerre writes, “There are two Venuses, one the mother of sensuality and lust…, the other chaste, who rules over honest and chaste loves.”  An anonymous eleventh-century commentary on Ovid’s Fasti makes the two Venuses responsible for “virtuous love” and “unlawful passion” respectively.  And in his brilliant commentary on the Aeneid,Bernardus Silvestris explicitly calls the heavenly Venus “mundana musica”, that is, the music that composes the world in order, proportion, and harmony:

We read that there are two Venuses, a legitimate goddess and a goddess of lechery.  We say that the legitimate goddess is mundana musica, that is, equal proportion of the parts of the world, which some call “Astraea” [goddess of Justice] and others “natural justice”.  For she is in the elements, in the stars, in times, in inanimate things.  But the shameful Venus, the goddess of sensuality, we call concupiscence of the flesh, which is the mother of all fornication.

For Bernard, then, the “legitimate” Venus presides over the entire providential order, as it had been identified, since time immemorial, with the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres.  His “shameful” Venus, on the other hand, incites the sins of lust, sensuality, and the whole range of carnal and worldly appetites.

 

Like her celestial counterpart, the vulgar Venus was frequently associated with music in medieval and Renaissance literature and iconography, so that whenever a character is said or shown (in Chaucer’s aforementioned phrase) to “maken melodye”, we are obliged to ask which of the two opposing kinds of music and love his or her actions exhibit:  whether Bernard’s mundana musica–the music of the spirit in harmony with God and the natural order–, or that of the “shameful Venus”–the music, that is, of the flesh, as it seeks inferior goods and pleasures for the satisfaction of its own concupiscence.

The close relation between music and love, and the contrast between their two species, is one of Chaucer’s favourite themes, and he invariably employs it to great comic, which is to say also, moral effect.

At the conclusion of the Knight’s Tale, for instance, the wise Duke Theseus (King of Athens, and therefore symbol and embodiment of reason) prefaces his decree that a marriage should take place with this famous philosophical oration:

“The Firste Movere of the cause above,
When he first made the faire cheyne of love,
Wel wiste he why, and what thereof he mente,
For with that faire cheyne of love he bond
The fyr, the eyr, the water, and the lond
In certeyn boundes, that they may nat flee.
That same Prince and that Movere”, quod he,
“Hath stablished this wrecched world adoun
Certeyne days and duracioun
To al that is engendred in this place,
Over the whiche day they may nat pace…
Then may men by this ordre wel discerne
That thilke Movere stable is and eterne.
Wel may men know…
That every part derryveth from his hool,
For nature hath nat taken his bigynnyng
Of no partie or cantel [portion] of a thyng,
But of a thyng that parfit is and stable,
Descendynge so til it be corrumpable.
And therefore, of his wise purveiaunce,
He hath so wel biset his ordinaunce
That speces of thynges and progressiouns
Shullen enduren by successiouns…

Theseus is about to set in order the murderous strife that has torn apart his kingdom by declaring a marriage, the social institution in which nature’s orderly regeneration and succession occur amongst men.  He appeals, accordingly, to the cosmic harmony that binds the warring opposites and disposes the entire universe in a hierarchical “chain of love”, from the eternal at the top, “descending to the corruptible” at the bottom, of God’s creation.  He invokes, that is, the divine principle of order that is mythologized alternatively as mundana musica or the heavenly Venus.

The cause of all the discord that has destroyed the peace of his kingdom has been the love of two Theban cousins and once-fast friends, Palamon and Arcite, for the same woman, Emily, whom they first glimpse, framed, as usual, by a pululant spring garden, through the bars of their prison of war —a prison that is an objective correlative of their own self-imprisonment to the vulgar Venus.  Without even so much as saying hello to the object of their affections, they are stricken by what Chaucer, following the medical practitioners of his day, calls the “lover’s malady”.

Here is how the poet describes Arcite, in the moments after he has been released from his Athenian cell and banished to his native Thebes:

Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was,
Ful ofte a day he swelte [grew faint] and seyde, “Allas!”
For seen his lady shal he nevere mo.
And shortly to concluden al his wo,
So much sorwe hadde nevere creature
That is, or shal, whil that the world may dure.
His slep, his mete, his drynke, is hym biraft,
That lene he wex and drye as a shaft;
His eyen holwe and grisly to beholde,
His hewe falow and pale as asshen colde,
And solitarie he was and evere allone,
And awaillynge al the nyght, makynge his mone;
And if he herde song or instrument,
Thane wolde he wepe, he myghte nat be stent.
So feble eek were his spiritz, and so lowe,
And changed so, that no man koude knowe
His speche nor his voys, though men it herde.
And in al his geere [behaviour] for al the world he ferde [behaved]
Nat only lik the loveris maladye
Of Heros, but rather lik manye [mania]
Engendred of humour malencolik
Biforen, in his celle fantastic [a pun:  his physical prison; his imprisoning imagination—the fantasizing part of the brain].
And shortly, turned was al up so doun
Bothe habit and eek disposicioun
Of hym, this woful lovere daun Arcite.

 

The lover’s malady is yet another enduring literary topos of which we have already seen one example in Lucretius, and will encounter many more along the way; like Lucretius, I trust that you can see that this is hardly behavior that Chaucer invites his readers to emulate.  It is foolish and sinful, and therefore supremely funny.  Arcite is not only a grown man, but a soldier; his dissolving into tears whenever he hears “song or instrument” is amusing in the same way that Robert De Niro’s character in Analyze Thisis amusing when he weeps at a financial planning commercial on late-night television that shows a son and his elderly father out fishing together.  De Niro is a Mafia boss and killer, so his familial tenderness is rank sentimentality; Arcite’s weeping is similarly based on no genuine feeling of love, since he still has not uttered a word to its object.  It is merely the ludicrous behaviour of one who has been driven insane by a maniacal fixation on the image of the physical beauty of his beloved, which has become lodged in his “celle fantastik”.

 

In due course, the jealous rivalry between Palamon and Arcite destroys their ancient friendship and sets them on a path of mutual distrust and hatred that inevitably leads to a joust in which one dies by the hand of the other.  Lest there be any doubt about the cause of this tragedy, Chaucer has them both first make pilgrimages to the temple of Venus in supplication of the goddess’ help in the prosecution of their rival suits.  The poet’s description makes it clear enough that this is definitively not the Venus invoked by Theseus in his hymn on the “fair chain of love”.

Notably, the immediate source of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale is Boccaccio’s Teseide (i.e., “story of Theseus”), in a commentary whereon Boccaccio himself writes:

To make these things clear it is necessary to know first of all that just as Mars is said above to represent the irascible appetite, so Venus represents the concupiscible appetite.  And this Venus is double.  The first one should be understood as the one through whom arises every honest and legitimate desire, like the desire to have a wife in order to have children, and other desires like this one.  This Venus is not relevant here.  The second Venus is the one through whom every lascivious thing is desired, and who is commonly called the goddess of love.  And it is this one for whom the author [i.e., Boccaccio himself] describes the temple and the things connected with it, as the text shows.  (My italics)

Painted on the walls of Chaucer’s Temple of Venus, the reader confronts images of the natural results of the “concupiscible appetite” that Boccaccio’s vulgar Venus inspires:  broken sleeps, sighs, tears, lamenting, fiery flushes of desire—all the unfortunate symptoms of the lover’s malady.  Thereafter follow

Festes, instrumenz, caroles, daunces,
Lust and array, and all the circumstaunces
Of love.

As Boccaccio explains, feasts, music, and dance incite the lascivious appetite and are fitting occasions for the act of Venus.

But Chaucer goes beyond Boccaccio by placing the Temple in a garden whose porter, he says, is Idleness, and one of whose inhabitants is the unfortunate Narcissus.  Venus’ temple garden is, in other words, the same Garden of Delights as that described by Guillaume de Lorris in his Roman de la Rose.

     Idleness (Oiseuse) is the porter of that garden, as she is of the garden of Venus, because, as Ovid had written in his Ars Amatorica, “if you take away idleness, you take away the arrows from Cupid’s bow”.  According to the moral commentators, idleness, along with drunkenness,  is one of those perilous moral conditions that is especially conducive to the act of Venus.  Finally, in medieval mythographyNarcissus is the signal victim of the lover’s malady, having died for a “love”, so called, that amounted to nothing more than a maniacal fixation upon a visual image indeed.

 The Two Venuses and the Two Loves, continued…

The Vulgar Venus and the Lover’s Malady in Lucretius’ De natura rerum…

 The Vulgar Venus and “Courtly Love”…

     Chaucer’s moral satire–as we will see, in rather greater detail, in future installments–is founded on the fundamental disjunction between the Two Loves.  Even while they are on the road to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury (on the road, figuratively, to the Heavenly Jerusalem), his pilgrim-lovers regularly indict themselves as fervent adherents of the vulgar Venus.

This is the Venus, once again, whom Lucretius describes in the fourth book of his De rerum natura–by such obvious contrast, that is, to the sacred goddess he too had invoked at the very beginning of his poem.   The passage is long one, but it is too important—and too much a comic masterpiece–to abridge, insofar as it anticipates in such clinical detail the risible trials and tribulations of the medieval and Renaissance “courtly lover”, and the unnatural madness of the “lover’s malady” from which he suffers.

Lucretius’ gratuitous sermon on the dangers of the vulgar Venus arrives in the context of what purports to be a matter-of-fact description of the organs and function of human reproduction.  But in pre-modern thought, scientific objectivity quickly modulates into moral didacticism:

     In this last case, as I have explained, the thing in us that responds to the stimulus is the seed that comes with ripening years and strengthening limbs.  For different things respond to different stimuli or provocations.  The one stimulus that evokes human seed from the human body is a human form.  As soon as this seed is dislodged from its resting-place, it travels through every member of the body, concentrating at certain reservoirs in the limbs, and promptly acts upon the generative organs.  These organs are stimulated and swollen by the seed.  Hence follows the will to eject it in the direction in which tyrannical lust is tugging.  The body makes for the source from which the mind is pierced by love.  For the wounded normally fall in the direction of their wound; the blood spurts out toward the source of the blow; and the enemy who delivered it, if he is fighting at close quarters, is be-spattered by the crimson stream.  So, when a man is pierced by the shafts of Venus, whether they are launched by a lad with womanish limbs or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he strives towards the source of the wound and craves to be united with it and to transmit something of his own substance from body to body.  His speechless yearning is a presentiment of bliss.

This, then, is what we term Venus.  This is the origin of the thing called love—that drop of Venus’ honey that first drips in our heart, to be followed by numbing heart-ache.  Though the object of your love may be absent, images of it still haunt you and the beloved name chimes sweetly in your ears.  If you find yourself thus passionate enamoured of an individual, you should keep well away from such images.  Thrust from you anything that might feed your passion, and turn your mind elsewhere.   Vent the seed of love upon other objects.  By clinging to it you assure yourself the certainty of heart-sickness and pain.  With nourishment, the festering sore quickens and strengthens.  Day by day the frenzy heightens and the grief deepens.  Your only remedy is to lance the first wound with new incisions; to salve it, while it is still fresh…; to guide the motions of your mind into some new channel.

Do not think that by avoiding grand passions you are missing the delights of Venus. Rather, you are reaping such profits as carry with them no penalty.  Rest assured that this pleasure is enjoyed in a purer form by the healthy than the love-sick.  Lovers’ passion is storm-tossed, even in the moment of fruition, by waves of delusion and incertitude.  They cannot make up their mind what to enjoy first with eye or hand.  They clasp the object of their longing so tightly that the embrace is painful.  They kiss so fiercely that the teeth are driven into lips.  All this because their pleasure is not pure, but they are goaded by an underlying impulse to hurt the thing, whatever it may be, that gives rise to these shoots of madness.

In the actual presence of love, Venus lightens the penalties she imposes, and her sting is assuaged by an admixture of alluring pleasure.  For in love, there is the vain hope that the flame of passion may be quenched by the same body that kindled it.  But this runs counter to the course of nature.  This is the one thing of which the more we have, the more our breast burns with the evil lust of having.  Food and fluid are taken into our body; since they can fill their allotted places, the desire for meat and drink is thus easily appeased.  But a pretty face or a pleasing complexion gives the body nothing to enjoy but insubstantial images, which all too often fond hope scatters to the winds.

When a thirsty man tries to drink in his dreams but is given no drop to quench the fire in his limbs, he clutches at images of water with fruitless effort and while he laps up a rushing stream, he remains thirst in the midst.  Just so in the midst of of love Venus teases lovers with images.  They cannot glut their eyes by gazing on the beloved form, however closely.  Their hands glean nothing from those dainty limbs in their aimless roving over all the body.  Then comes the moment when with limbs entwined they pluck the flower of youth.  Their bodies thrill to the presentiment of joy, and it is seed-time in the fields of Venus.  Body clings greedily to body; moist lips are pressed on lips, and deep breaths are drawn through clenched teeth.  But all to no purpose.  One can glean nothing from the other, nor enter in and be wholly absorbed, body in body; for sometimes it seems that that is what they are craving and striving to do, so hungrily do they cling together in Venus’ fetters, while their limbs are unnerved and liquefied by the intensity of rapture.  At length, when the spate of lust is spent, there comes a slight intermission in the raging fever.  But not for long.  Soon the same frenzy returns.  The fit is upon them once more.  They ask themselves what it is they are craving for, but find no device that will master their malady.  In aimless bewilderment they waste away, stricken by an unseen wound.

Add to this that they spend their strength and fail under the strain.  Their days are passed at the mercy of another’s whim.  Their wealth  slips from them, transmuted to Babylonian brocades.  Their duties are neglected.  Their reputation totters and goes into decline….A hard-won patrimony is metamorphosed into bonnets and tiaras or, it may be, into Grecians robes, masterpieces from the looms of Elis or of Ceos.  No matter how lavish the décor and the cuisine—drinking parties (with no lack of drinks), entertainments, perfumes, garlands, festoons and all—they are still to no purpose.  From the very heart of the fountain of delight there rises a jet of bitterness that poisons the fragrance of the flowers.  Perhaps the unforgetting mind frets itself remorsefully with the thought of life’s best years squandered in sloth and debauchery.  Perhaps the beloved has let fly some two-edged word, which lodges in the impassioned heart and flows there like a living flame.  Perhaps he thinks she is rolling her eyes too freely and turning them upon another, or he catches in her face a hint of mockery.

And these are the evils inherent in the love that prospers and fulfills its hopes.  In starved and thwarted love the evils you can see plainly without even opening your eyes are past all counting.  How much better to be on your guard beforehand, as I have advised, and take care that you are not enmeshed!

To avoid enticement into the snares of love is not so difficult as, once entrapped, to escape out of the toils and snap the tenacious knots of Venus.  And yet, be you never so tightly entangled and embrangled, you can still free yourself from the curse unless you stand in the way of your own freedom.  Fist you should concentrate on all the faults of mind or body of her whom you covet and sigh for.  For men often behave as though blinded by love and credit the beloved with charms to which she has no valid title.  How often do we see blemished and unsightly women basking in a lover’s adoration!…A sallow wench is acclaimed as a nut-brown maid.  A sluttish slattern is admired for her “sweet disorder”.  Her eyes are never green, but grey as Athene’s.   If she is stringy and woody, she is lithe as a gazelle.  A stunted runt is a sprite, a sheer delight from top to toe.  A clumsy giantess is “a daughter of the gods divinely tall”.  She has an impediment in her speech—a charming lisp, of course.  She’s as mute as a stockfish—what modesty!  A waspish, fiery-tempered scold—she “burns with a gem-like flame”.  She becomes “svelte” and “willow” when she is almost too skinny to live; “delicate” when she is half-dead with coughing.  Her breasts are swollen and protuberant:  she is “Ceres suckling Bacchus”.  Her nose is snub—“a Faun”, then, or “a child of the Satyrs”.  Her lips bulge:  she is “all kiss”….

 

I remind you that Lucretius is a disciple of Epicurus, popularly (although wrongly) understood to be antiquity’s first exponent of the Playboy Philosophy.  But if an Epicurean can be so repelled by the sin of lust, and so contemptuous of those who allow themselves to be caught in its snare, the idea that an antique Platonist, Stoic, or medieval Christian could extol it in the form of a courtly “religion of Cupid” is absurd on its face.

As we will see presently, the classical source of the medieval courtly love tradition is Ovid, whose mocking and ironic encouragement (in his Ars amatorica) of the sort of vulgar venereal behaviour that Lucretius clearly ridicules, was taken at face value by nineteenth-century literary critics, who imagined that love poets such as Chaucer or the author of the Roman de la Rose were, in spite of the Christian morality they affected to profess, somehow sympathetic to adulterous lust.

But this is a subject we’ll return to in a moment; I mention it here only because Ovid in his Fasti also plainly refers to Venus as the mother of “twin loves”, and he does so while jokingly brushing aside the notion that he is there setting out to describe the same disreputable mother of the vulgar love he treats of in the Ars amatorica.

The Celestial Venus in Lucretius’ De rerum natura…

Lucretian Echoes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…

The Earthly Pilgrimage and the Choice of Love…

     Inevitably, we meet the two Aphrodites again and again throughout the history of philosophy, literature, and art.

The Venus who is invoked by Lucretius, for example, at the beginning of his first-century B.C. philosophical poem, De rerum natura, and the Venus we meet later on in the fourth book, symbolize two very different cosmological influences and functions.

The goddess upon whom Lucretius calls for inspiration in his invocation is the

 Mother of Aeneas and his race, delight of men and gods, life-giving Venus,

whose doing it is

that under the wheeling constellations of the sky all nature teems with life…Through you all living creatures are conceived and come forth to look upon the sunlight.  Before you the winds flee, and at your coming the clouds forsake the sky.  For you the inventive earth flings up sweet flowers.  For you the ocean smiles, the sky is calmed and glows with diffused radiance. When first the day puts on the aspect of spring, when in all its force the fertilizing breath of Zephyr is unleashed, then, great goddess, the birds of air give the first intimation of your entry; for yours is the power that has pierced them to the heart.  Next the cattle run wild, frisk through the rough lush pastures and swim the swift flowing streams…So throughout seas and uplands, rising torrents, verdurous meadows and the leafy shelters of the birds, into the breasts of one and all you instill alluring love, so that with passionate longing they reproduce their several kinds.  Since you alone are the guiding power of the universe…, yours is the partnership I seek in striving to compose these lines…

The goddess who pacifies the commotions of sky and sea, orders the courses of the “wheeling constellations”, and modulates the seasons, ensures thereby that, during that great annual vernal festival of rebirth in which she is celebrated, the seasonal vegetation revives, and all of God’s creatures breed according to their kind.

We might well wonder how it is that the rutting of bulls might be included under the influence of this divine and heavenly force.  But inasmuch as it belongs to the universal natural order of things, this too is a reflection of the Creator’s guiding love for his creation, and is thus the result of the benignant influence of the celestial, rather than the vulgar, Venus.

 

With the passage from Lucretius in mind, and before we look at his description of the other Venus in book four of the De rerum natura, let me might skip ahead some fourteen centuries to the famous opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which the ancient Lucretian echoes are palpable and deliberate:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of Mach hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smalle fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…

I’ve rendered some of the explicit echoes of Lucretius in italics; but, more important, everything in the passage makes it clear once again that it is the heavenly Venus who is being hymned, and that the contrast with her earthly counterpart is everywhere implied and crucially present.

      It is April, which is the month of Venus, the mother of the god of Love; the sun is in the constellation of Taurus, which is Venus’ house; the world is reviving from its winter sleep; the tender shoots of the new crops are pushing upward; the birds, stimulated by primordial instincts, like all animals at this time of year, are seeking their mates, singing and doing those other things which Chaucer habitually implies by the phrase “maken melodye”.

But, at this point in the proem, there is a magnificently ironic anticlimax:  “Thanne”, says the poet, “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”.

In the spring, our conventional expectation is that (as the proverb has it) a young man’s fancy turns to love; indeed, all of the first eleven lines of the Canterbury Tales seem to lead inexorably to some human romantic culmination.  Going on a religious pilgrimage is about the last thing the reader expects.

But again, the sacred pilgrimage is all about love, albeit not of the romantic kind.  The love of God and the invisibilia dei, which temporarily detaches the Christian adherent from the gravity of the world and puts him on the road to Canterbury or St. James of Compostella (to architectural loci, as we have seen, that are earthly symbols of the Heavenly Jerusalem) is the same love as that which holds the planets and the seasons in their courses and inspires the fecundity of all nature.

Of course, that this is not always the love that motivates Chaucer’s pilgrims is the source of his satire.  The Canterbury Tales thereby poses the fundamental moral problem of the choice that every earthly pilgrim has to make as to which of the two loves he will prosecute:  whether his thoughts are fixed on the vulgar Venus’ carnal delights or on a love of a higher kind; whether he sees in all this vernal rebirth and fecundity the regeneration and rebirth of the soul, as betokened by Christ’s springtime resurrection, or the re-invigoration of his merely biological energies; whether he recognizes in the resurgent spring vegetation an image of the celestial paradise or an invitation to create paradise on earth (as the followers of Sir Pleasure try to do in his Garden of Earthly Delights in the early 13^th centuryRoman de la Rose, or as January affects to do with May in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale).

This choice of love will determine if the pilgrim’s progress is toward the earthly City of Babylon or the Heavenly Jerusalem:  whether his destination–symbolically speaking, once again–is this world or the next; and whether the melodye he makes is that of the harmony of the spheres or the sort of beautiful music that the world’s most romantic skunk, Pepe le Pew, yearns to make with his Looney Tune paramours.

 

The springtime imagery with which the Canterbury Tales so famously opens is thus neither merely decorative and conventional, as some critics have insisted, nor merely ironic.  It declares the moral beginning and end-points between which the pilgrims’ journey will be undertaken.  As Petrus Berchorius (fourteenth-century commentator on Ovid’s Metamorphoses) explains, spring is the season of Lent, and thus the “time of penitence for sin”.  Accordingly, the Parson’s sermon on penance with which the Tales close is of the greatest relevance to Chaucer’s introductory proem; the Parson’s Tale reminds the pilgrims of the proper spirit in which they ought to have embarked on their journey.