Priceton.org

Ulysses and the Sirens in Christian Allegorical Commentary…

     As usual, early and medieval Christian commentators preserved all the main outlines of the pagan allegorical interpretation of the Sirens and merely fitted them into the new Christian frame.  Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship becomes a figure for Christ upon the Cross; the sea remains the sea of passion and worldly temptation; but the ship is now the Church and the wax with which Odysseus-Christ stops up the ears of his sailors becomes the teaching of Scripture.

     These ideas were already conventional when Clement of Alexandria invoked them in his Protrepticus at the end of the second century A.D.:

Let us flee, comrades, let us flee from this wave.  It belches forth fire [i.e., from hell-mouth]; it is an island of wickedness heaped with bones and corpses, and she who sings therein is pleasure, a harlot in the bloom of youth, delighting in her vulgar music:

Hither, renowned Odysseus, great glory of all the Achaeans:  Bring thy ship to the land, that a song divine may entrance thee. [Od. XII, 184-185]

She praises thee, sailor, she calls thee renowned in song; the harlot would make the glory of the Greeks her own.  Leave her to roam among the corpses; a heavenly wind comes to thine aid.  Pass by pleasure; she beguiles…Sail past the song; it works death.  Only resolve, and thou has vanquished destruction; bound to the wood of the cross thou shalt live freed from all corruption. The Word of God shall be thy pilot, and the Holy Spirit shall bring thee to anchor in the harbours of heaven. (Protrept. xii)

Gathered together in this passage are all of those images and themes that had been repeatedly sounded by the pagan commentators of classical antiquity:  the sea-voyage as the proving-ground of the soul which tries to avoid shipwreck on the shoals of carnality while buffeted by the storms of the passions; the Sirens of flattery and pleasure; the Logos as helmsman of the soul; the soul’s return to safe-harbour in heaven; the beguiling but vulgar melody of the world as opposed to the divine music of the realm above.  As usual, Clement has borrowed, and peremptorily “Christianized”, these venerable allegorical commonplaces.

     Throughout the Middle Ages, the Christian interpretation of the myth of Odysseus and the Sirens remained fundamentally unchanged;  in his early-sixth-century Mythologiae, for example, bishop Fulgentius’ moralization might well have come straight from the handbooks of the ancient Platonist and Stoic commentators:

The Sirens’ name means “attractors”, for most men are attracted in various ways by the enticement of love, either by a song, or a pretty face, or a way of acting—for some are loved for the beauty of their faces and some for their lewd habits.  Those whom Ulysses’ companions pass by with their ears blocked, he himself passes bound.  Ulysses’ name is the Greek olonxenos, that is, “stranger to all”, and since wisdom is a stranger to all the things of this world, it is ingeniously called “Ulysses”.  Thus he both hears and sees—that is, perceives and judges—the Sirens (that is, the enticements of pleasure), and yet passes by.  And because they are heard, they are dead, for in the senses of the wise man every passion dies away.  They are flying things because they quickly penetrate the minds of lovers, and they have chickens’ feet because the passion of lust scatters all that it grasps, and finally that is why they are called “Sirens”, so sirene is in Greek, “draw, attract”. (Mythologiae, ii, 8)

   In the twelfth century, shortly before the writing of the Roman de la Rose, the Sirens continued to be an obligatory theme of both mythographers and theologians. The anonymous Third Vatican Mythographer interprets Ulysses as a holy pilgrim, “for wisdom makes men pilgrims among all terrestrial things”.  The Sirens represent carnal pleasures, and the ears of the mariners are stopped with the “precepts of salvation” so that they do not hear the modulationes carnis.  Tied to the mast, Ulysses hears these melodies, but he is restrained by virtue from their enjoyment, so that he moves toward his home in eternal blessedness.

      For Honorius of Autun, Ulysses is the wise man tied to the Cross of Christ, and the island of the Sirens is the delight of the mind in worldly things.  Honorius goes on to distinguish each of the three sirenic temptresses according to the music they perform:  she who sings is avarice; she who plays the pipe, boasting; she who plucks the lyre, lechery.  These, says Honorious, reflect the three temptations of Adam (the world, the flesh, and the devil).

 The Garden of Deduit as a Type of the Biblical Paradise…

 The Sirens…

     Idleness boasts to the dreamer that her dearest friend is Seigneur Deduit, the genteel beau who owns the garden.  Deduit in Old French means “divertissement amoureux” or “plaisir”;  whence we might call him in English Sir Pleasure or Sir Amorous Fun and Games.  He is, in other words, the keeper of a kind of brothel for horticulturalists–a Hugh Heffner with a green thumb.

When Idleness says that Sir Pleasure is her closest companion, the allegory is clear enough:  the sin of idleness and the sorts of amorous delights enjoyed in this garden go together.  But the dreamer is not very good at understanding allegorical irony, even irony as straightforward as this.  If the porter of the garden had introduced herself as Lady Disease, a close friend of Sir Death, perhaps the dreamer would have known what to do; but apparently he does not recognize Dame Idleness as a dangerous seductress, even though when we read the sentence, “The gate by Idleness was opened wide”, it’s impossible not to hear in it the sort of moralizing metaphorical idiom that one hears in a sermon.  Still, the dreamer still wants in.

He then describes the garden of Sir Pleasure in terms that make it impossible for the reader not to call to mind the garden of Eden, and the garden of the soul of which it is a symbol:

You may right well believe I thought the place
Was truly a terrestrial paradise,
For so delightful was the scenery
That it looked heavenly; it seemed to me
A better place than Eden for delight.

And then he lists all the species of birds he finds in this “paradise”.

In general, as I said, any literary or artistic garden in the pre-modern period cannot help but evoke (explicitly, as here; but sometimes implicitly) the archetypal garden:  the biblical paradise of Eden.  A pre-modern garden might therefore be a genuine paradise, morally and spiritually speaking, or a hypocritically false one:  a place, that is, in which, under the pretext of having created a heavenly paradise of sanctity and innocence, the inhabitants devote themselves to the enjoyment of distinctly carnal and earthly pleasures.  This, after all, is the dual signification of the biblical Eden itself:  a garden of innocence, but also the scene of capital sin, through which man’s original beatitude and salvation were tragically lost.  The irony of no small number of medieval and Renaissance works of literature turns exactly on this, the misperception or deliberate mischaracterization of an earthly garden as a celestial one. (In Chaucer’s poems alone, one can think of several examples.)

The dreamer, needless to say, either thinks, or pretends to think, that the garden of Deduit really is a celestial paradise on earth, and inevitably, he also imagines that the birdsong he hears is the harmony of angelic choirs:

                   A service meet,
As I have told you, all these birds performed,
For such a song they sang as angels sing,
And sang it, truly, to my great delight.
No mortal man e’er heard a fairer tune,
So soft and sweetly pealed their melody
That, if a man comparison should seek,
It seemed no hymn of birds, but mermaids’ song,
Who for their voices clear, serene, and pure
Are Sirens called.

Ah, the Sirens.  In pre-modern literature, the relationship between the literary themes of music and love practically guarantees that the myth of the Sirens–attaching to which there is an ancient and well-known allegorical tradition–will be invoked sooner or later, in one context or another.

The Sirens, as you recall, are those femmes fatales whose entrancing vocalizations lure sailors to their deaths.  When, in the Odyssey, Odysseus’ ship passes by their island, there is already a mountain of human skeletons piled up on the shore.  Odysseus alone recognizes the danger, and to prevent his sailors from leaping into the sea and swimming into the Sirens’ fatal embrace, he stops up their ears with wax.

The history of the Sirens as moral allegorical symbols begins with the philosophical commentaries on Homer that were first written in the fifth century B.C., and abounded until the close of classical antiquity.  For the Pythagoreans, Odysseus is the wise man who, by avoiding the fleshly temptations represented by the Sirens, was able to escape from the wheel of reincarnation and fly back to the soul’s celestial homeland.  For the Stoics and Middle Platonists, he is the helmsman of the soul, the immanent Logos. The sea through which his ship is tossed is the sea of the passions and temptations of this world; and Ithaca is the safe harbor of the heavenly patria.  The wax with which Odysseus stopped up the ears of his crewmen is, of course, philosophy.

While repeating these allegorical commonplaces, the Neoplatonists twinned the Sirens in the same way as Plato had conferred upon Venus and Eros both a celestial and an earthly aspect.  Their conceit of the two sets of Sirens was inspired by a passage from Plato’s myth of Er in Book X of the Republic, in which Er describes the eight concentric whorls of the cosmos—the eight spheres, that is–rotating on the spindle of Necessity:

Above, on each of its circles is perched a Siren, accompanying its revolution, uttering a single sound, one note; from all eight is produced the accord of a single harmony. (Republic 687 b)

Plato here identifies the Sirens with the Intelligences that intone the harmony of the spheres.  Neoplatonic commentators such as the fifth century Proclus thus differentiated between the celestial Sirens of Plato, whose heavenly music they interpreted as the wisdom of philosophy, and the vulgar Sirens of Homer, whose song symbolized the false pleasures of the world and the flesh.

The Passio of Love in Andreas…

Its Stages, and those of the Universal Pattern of Sin…

 The Roman de la Rose…

Idleness and Lust…

     Andreas’ admonition against the pursuit of carnal love is thus something that runs through the whole work, and is not confined to the last book, “The Rejection of Love”, which is usually mistakenly dismissed as a sort of pious palinode.  In the first chapter of the first book, for example, Andreas gives his friend Walter anything but a positive prospectus.  He warns him that lovers are in a constant state of agitation and fear:  knowing their love is illicit, they fear it may at any time be revealed; they fear they may not be able to succeed in their suit (perhaps they’re ugly); or they worry that having gained their lady’s favour, they will lose it.  The lover is in a state, in other words, exactly like that of the foolish worldling described by Boethius’ Lady Philosophy, whose earthly ambition and avarice have made him a slave to the fickle goddess Fortuna.

Andreas then formulates a definition of love that places it in a wider and instantly recognizable theological context.  Love, he says, is “a certain inborn suffering (passio) that derives from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex.”  The passio of love, he continues, originates from the “suggestion of sight”, grows with “excessive meditation” or “pleasurable thought”, and becomes entrenched through the “consent of the reason”.

In the Middle Ages, as we have just seen, this is how the development of any sin was typically described, as every act of sin was thought to follow the pattern established by the Original Sin of Adam in the garden of Eden.  For Andreas, as for Chaucer’s Parson, the crucial stage in the formation of this passion is that of excessive contemplation or pleasurable thought, as he emphasizes when he continues:  “This suffering does not arise from any action; only from the reflection of the mind upon what it sees does this suffering (passio) come.”

Then Andreas alludes to a famous biblical text, Matt. 5:28, from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount:  “For when a man sees some woman shaped according to his taste, he begins to lust after her in his heart; then the more he thinks about her, the more he burns, until he proceeds to a fuller meditation.”  He begins, continues Andreas, to “differentiate her limbs,…to pry into the secrets of her body, and he desires to put each part of it to its fullest use”.  Now the lover, having committed adultery in his heart (as the biblical text and former President Carter have put it), is ready to commit the sin “in deed”:  “Then after he has come to this complete meditation, the lover cannot hold the reins, but he proceeds at once to action.”

 

Bearing this background in mind, we are now in a position to understand the passio that afflicts the poet-narrator when he falls in love with his rose bud in the Roman de la Rose. 

Begun ca. 1237 by Guillaume de Lorris, and continued ca. 1277 by Jean de Meun, the Roman is by genre an allegorical dream vision; thus, in the very first lines the speaker anatomizes the various types of dreams as they had been conventionally enumerated since late antiquity, while being careful to invoke the authority of Macrobius’ celebrated discussion of the subject at the beginning of his commentary on the Dream of Scipio: 

Many a man holds dreams to be but lies,
All fabulous; but there have been some dreams
No whit deceptive, as was later found.
Well might one cite Macrobius, who wrote
The story of the Dream of Scipio,
And was assured that dreams are ofttimes true…
Now, as for me, I have full confidence
That visions are significant to man
Of good and evil… 

The speaker thus makes it clear that the dream he is about to narrate has a moral signification, and that—as is hardly unusual for medieval literature—his poem is going to be didactic.

He calls his dream “The Romance of the Rose”, and says that “it enfolds/Within its compass all the Art of Love”.  It will be another “manual of instruction”, that is, on the proper conduct of the lover, after the manner of Ovid’s Art of Love and Andreas Capellanus’ De Amore.

Like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the action of the Roman begins in spring, when the dream is said to have occurred, specifically

In that month [May] amorous, that time of joy,
When all things living seem to take delight,
When one sees leafless neither bush nor hedge,
But each new raiment dons, when forest trees
Achieve fresh verdure, though they dry have been
While winter yet endured, when prideful Earth,
Forgetting all her winter poverty
Now that again she bathes herself in dew,
Exults to have a new-spun, gorgeous dress…
The birds, long silent while the cold remained…
Are glad in May because of skies serene,
And they perforce express their joyful hearts
By utterance of fitting minstrelsy.
Then nightingales contend to fill the air
With sound of melody, and then the lark
And popinjay with songs amuse themselves.

Here, again, the bird-song and universal rebirth of nature in the spring induce thoughts, not of the music of the spheres, nor the resurrection of the spirit in imitation of the vernal death and rebirth of Christ on the Cross, nor of holy pilgrimages, as in Chaucer, but of more earthly pastimes:

The young folk then their whole attention give
To suit the season fair and sweet with love…

In this season of love, the speaker dreams that he has been awakened by the morning chorus of the birds and wanders across town to hear more of their music (and thus “welcome the new year”).  On his journey, he comes to a river, and on its bank a walled garden.  Painted on the walls, he sees the images of a number of personified abstractions, each clearly identified in an inscription, including:  Hate, Hypocrisy, and the deadly sins Covetousness, Avarice, and Envy, the conventional iconography of each of which he describes in detail.  Notwithstanding the rather ominous implications of these allegorical emblems, hearing the marvelous sounds of the birds singing their “courteous, pleasing songs of love” within, and “most powerfully stirred by all their tunes”, the dreamer proceeds eagerly to the garden gate and knocks.

The gate is opened by the porteress of the garden, a beautiful, yellow-haired, tender-fleshed maiden named Oiseuse, who carries a wreath of roses, a comb, and a mirror.  As the dreamer comments with envious approval, “When she was combed, adorned, and well arrayed,/Her daily task was done.”

 

The name Oiseuse means accidia in Latin (idleness or sloth en anglais), and indeed the “character” who is the gate-keeper of the garden is no character at all, but another allegorical abstraction.  She is the personification of one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and the comb and mirror she carries are her traditional iconographical attributes in ecclesiastical sculpture, stained glass, manuscript illuminations, theological manuals on the Seven Sins, and literary descriptions of which there are literally thousands of examples.

Not surprisingly, the mirror of self-love and pride in her own physical beauty, and the roses that fade of a season, are attributes that Idleness shares with another of the Seven Sins, Luxuria, or Lust; and indeed (as mentioned in a previous essay), the former is understood to be one of the necessary conditions of the latter:  “Remove idleness”, as Ovid famously wrote in his Remedies for Love, “and you destroy the arrows of Cupid”.

This became a favourite quotation in medieval and Renaissance texts, and the idea that idleness leads to lust was another Christian commonplace.  In the popular thirteenth-century satire Architrenius,for example, idleness is called “the nurse of Venus”.  The fourteenth-century English preacher Robert Holcot says idleness is the “first cause” of lechery.  And with Ovid’s text in mind, Guido Faba writes in his treatise on the virtues and vices:

He who wishes to remove lust should strive to remove idleness.  Which is why you are exhorted by all means to heed duty and labour diligently, lest the seductress Venus shower you with her deadly arrows, since while the enjoyment of lust is brief, the penalty is eternal.

 

Oiseuse confirms the dreamer’s impression of her, when she introduces herself formally:

All my companions call me Idleness,
A woman rich and powerful am I.
Especially I’m blessed in one respect:
I have no care except to tress and comb
My hair, amuse myself, and take mine ease.

There can be no mistaking, then, the identify of the lady who stands at the gate to the garden; and any rational dreamer at this point, having seen the images of the Sins and other misfortunes depicted on the wall of the garden, and now having met one of them in the “flesh”, would have done everything in his power to rouse himself from sleep.

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.