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Ideals of Love
Selection copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All
rights reserved. This edition may not be reproduced or
redistributed to third parties without permission of the
editor.
[Excerpt from "The Dantesque and Platonic Ideals of
Love", from In the Key of Blue and Other Prose
Essays, 1893; originally published in
The Contemporary Review, September
1890. Symonds argues that Greek (homosexual) love almost exactly
mirrors Chivalrous (heterosexual) love.]
In order to understand the Platonic and the Florentine
enthusiasm, the love of the Symposium
and the love of the Vita Nuova, we must
begin by studying the conditions under which they were severally
elaborated.
Platonic love, in the true sense of that phrase, was the
affection of a man for a man; and it grew out of antecedent
customs which had obtained from very distant times in Hellas.
Homer excludes this emotion from his picture of society in the
heroic age. The tale of Patroclus and Achilles in the
Iliad does not suggest the
interpretation put on it by later generations; and the legend of
Ganymede is related without a hint of personal desire. . . .
However this may be, masculine love, as the Greeks called
it, appeared at an early age in Hellas. We find it localised in
several places, and consecrated by divers legends of the gods.
Yet none of the later Greeks could give a distinct account of its
origin or importation. There are critical grounds for supposing
that the Dorians developed this custom in this native mountains
(the home of Achilles and the region where it still survives),
and that they carried it upon their migration to Peloponnesus.
At any rate, in Crete and Sparta, it speedily became a social
institution, regulated by definite laws and sanctioned by the
State. In each country a youth who had no suitor lost in public
estimation. The elder, in this unions of friends, received the
name of "inspirer" or "lover," the younger
that of "hearer" or "admired." When the youth
grew up and went to battle with his comrade, he assumed the title
of bystander in the ranks. I have not space to dwell upon the
minute laws and customs by which Dorian love was governed.
Suffice it to say that in all of them we discern the intention
of promoting a martial spirit in the population, securing a manly
education for the young, and binding the male members of the
nature together by bonds of mutual affection. In earlier times
at least care was taken to secure the virtues of loyalty, self-
respect, and permanence in these relations. In short, masculine
love constituted the chivalry of primitive Hellas, the
stimulating the exalting enthusiasm of her sons. It did not
exclude marriage, nor had it the effect of lowering the position
of women in society, since it is notorious that in those Dorian
States where the love of comrades became an institution, women
received more public honour and enjoyed fuller liberty and power
over property than elsewhere.
The military and chivalrous nature of Greek love is proved
by the myths and more or less historical legends which idealised
its virtues. Herakles, the Dorian demigod, typified by his
affection for young men and by his unselfish devotion to humanity
what the Spartan and Cretan warriors demanded from this emotion.
The friendships of Theseus and Peirithous, or Orestes and
Pylades, of Damon and Pythias, comrades in arms and faithful to
each other to the death, embalmed the memory of lives ennobled
by masculine affection. Nearly every city had some tale to tell
of emancipation from tyranny, of prudent legislation, or of
heroic achievements in war, inspired by the erotic enthusiasm.
When Athens laboured under a grievous curse and pestilence, two
lovers, Cratinus and Aristodemus, devoted their lives to the
salvation of the city. Two lovers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
shook off the bondage of the Peisistratidae. Philolaus and
Diocles gave laws to Thebes. Another Diocles won everlasting
glory in a fight at Megara. Chariton and Melanippus resisted the
tyranny of Phalaris at Agrigentum. Cleomachus, inspired by
passion, restored freedom to the town of Chalkis. All these men
were lovers of the Greek type. Tyrants, says an interlocutor in
one of Plato's dialogues, tremble before lovers. Glorying in
their emotion, the Greeks pronounced it to be the crowning virtue
of free men, the source of gentle and heroic actions, the
heirloom of Hellenic civilisation, in which barbarians and slaves
had and could have no part or lot. The chivalry of which I am
speaking powerfully influenced Greek history. All the Spartan
kings and generals grew up under the institution of Dorian
comradeship. Epameinondas and Alexander were notable lovers; and
the names of their comrades are recorded. When Greek liberty
expired upon the Plain of Chaeronea, the Sacred Band of Thebans,
all of whom were lovers, fell dead to a man; and Philip wept as
he beheld their corpses, crying aloud: "Perish the man who
thinks that these men either did or suffered what is
shameful." It powerfully influenced Greek art. Pindar and
Sophocles were lovers; Pindar died in the arms of Theoxenos,
whose praise he sang in the Skolion of which we have a
characteristic fragment. Pheidias carved the name of his beloved
Pantarkes on the chryselephantine statue of Olympian Zeus.
AEschylus wrote one of his most popular tragedies upon the
affection of Achilles for Patroclus. Solon, Demosthenes,
AEschines, among statesmen and orators, made no secret of a
feeling which they regarded as the highest joy in life and the
source of exalted enthusiasm.
Greek love, as I have shown, was in its origin and essence
masculine, military, chivalrous. However repugnant to modern
taste may be the bare fact that this passion existed and
flourished in the highest-gifted of all races, yet it was clearly
neither an effeminate depravity nor a sensual vice. Still such
an emotion, being abnormal, could not prevail and dominate the
customs of a whole nation without grave drawbacks. Very close to
the chivalry of Hellas lurked a formidable social evil, just as
adultery was intertwined with the chivalry of mediaeval Europe.
Adultery was not occasionally, but so to speak continually, mixed
up with the feudal love de par amour.
One ingenious writer, Vernon Lee, even maintains that adultery
was the very ground on which that love flourished. In like
manner, another immorality was, not occasionally, but continually
mixed up with Greek love, was the soil on which it flourished.
Therefore in those States especially, like Athens, where the love
in question had not been moralised by prescribed laws, did it
tend to degenerate. And it was just here, at Athens, that it
received the metaphysical idealisation which justifies us in
comparing it to the Italian form of mediaeval chivalry. Socrates,
says Maximum Tyrius, pitying the state of young men, and wishing
to raise their affections from the mire into which they were
declining, opened a way for the salvation of their souls through
the very love they then abused. Whether Socrates was really
actuated by these motives, cannot be affirmed with certainty. At
any rate, he handled masculine love with robust originality, and
prepared the path for Plato's philosophical conception of passion
as an inspiration leading men to the divine idea.
I have observed that in Dorian chivalry the lover was called
"inspirer," and the beloved "hearer." It was
the man's duty to instruct the lad in manners, feats of arms,
trials of strength and music. This relation of the elder to the
younger is still assumed to exist by Plato. But he modifies it
in a way peculiar to himself, upon the consideration of which I
must now enter, since we have reached the very point of contact
between Plato's and Dante's enthusiasm.
Socrates, as interpreted in the Platonic dialogues entitled
Phaedrus and
Symposium, sought to direct and elevate
a moral force, an enthusiasm, an exaltation of the emotions,
which already existed as the highest form of feeling in the Greek
race. In the earlier of those dialogues he describes the love of
man for youth as a madness, or divine frenzy, not different in
quality from that which inspires prophets and poets. The soul he
compares to a charioteer guiding a pair of winged horses,the one
of noble, the other of ignoble breed. Under this metaphor is
veiled the psychological distinctions of reason, generous
impulse, and carnal appetite. Composed of these triple elements,
the soul has shared in former lives the company of gods, and has
gazed on beauty, wisdom, and goodness, the three most eminent
manifestations of the divine, in their pure essence. But, sooner
or later, during the course of her celestial wanderings, the soul
is dragged to earth by the baseness of the carnal steed. she
enters a form of flesh, and loses the pinions which enabled her
to soar. Yet even in her mundane life (that obscure and confused
state of existence which Plato elsewhere compares to a dark cave
visited only by shadows of reality) she may be reminded of the
heavenly place from which she fell, and of the glorious visions
of divinity she there enjoyed. No mortal senses, indeed, could
bear the sight of truth or goodness or beauty in their undimmed
splendour. Yet earthly things in which truth, goodness, and
beauty are incarnate, touch the soul to adoration, stimulate the
growth of her wings, and set her on the upward path whereby she
will revert to God. The lover has this opportunity when he
beholds the person who awakes his passion; for the human body is
of all earthly things that in which real beauty shines most
clearly. When Plato proceeds to say that "philosophy in
combination with affection for young men" is the surest
method for attaining to the higher spiritual life, he takes for
granted that reason, recognising the divine essence of beauty,
encouraging the generous impulses of the heart, curbing the
carnal appetite, converts the mania of love into an instrument
of edification. Passionate friends, bound together in the chains
of close yet temperate comradeship, seeking always to advance in
wisdom, self-restraint, and intellectual illumination, prepare
themselves for the celestial journey. "When the end comes,
they are light and ready to fly away, having conquered in one of
the three heavenly or truly Olympian victories. Nor can human
discipline or divine inspiration confer any greater blessing on
man than this." Moreover, even should they decline toward
sensuality and taste those pleasures on which the vulgar set
great store, they, too, will pass from live, "unwinged
indeed, but eager to soar, and thus obtain no mean reward of love
and madness."
The doctrine of the Symposium is
not different, except that here Socrates, professing to report
the teaching of a wise woman Diotima, assumes a loftier tone, and
attempts a sublimer flight. Love, he says, is the child of
Poverty and Contrivance, deriving something from both his father
and his mother. He lacks all things, and has the wit to gain all
things. Love too, when touched by beauty, desires to procreate;
and if the mortal lover be one whose body alone is creative, he
betakes himself to woman and begets children; but if the soul be
the chief creative principle in the lover's nature, then he turns
to young men of "fair and noble and well-nurtured
spirit," and in them begets the immortal progeny of high
thoughts and generous emotions. The same divine frenzy of love,
which forms the subject of the
Phaedrus, is here again treated as the
motive force which starts the soul upon her journey towards the
region of essential truth. Attracted by what is beautiful, the
lover first dedicates himself to one youth in whom beauty is
apparent; next he is led to perceive that beauty in all fair
forms is a single quality; he then passes to the conviction that
intellectual is superior to physical beauty; and so by degrees
he attains the vision of a single science, which is the science
of beauty everywhere, or the worship of the divine under one of
its three main attributes.
The lesson which both of these Socratic dialogues seem
intended to inculcate, may be summed up thus. Love, like poetry
and prophecy, is a divine gift, which divers men from the common
current of their earthly lives; and in the right use of this gift
lies the secret of all human excellence. The passion which
grovels in the filth of sensual grossness may be transformed into
a glorious enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of rising to
the contemplation of eternal verities and reuniting the soul of
man to God. How strange will it be, when once those heights of
intellectual intuition have been scaled, to look down again on
earth and view the human being in whom the spirit first
recognised the essence of beauty.
There is a deeply rooted mysticism, an impenetrable Sufism,
in the Socratic doctrine of Eros. And it must be born in mind
that the love of women is rigidly and expressly excluded from the
scheme. The soul which has attained to the highest possible form
of perfection in this life, is defined by Plato to be "the
soul of one who has followed philosophy with flawless self-
devotion, or who has combined his passion for young men with the
pursuit of truth." These are the essential conditions of
Platonic love; and they are so strange that Lucian, Epicurus,
Cicero, and Gibbon may be pardoned for sneering at "the thin
device of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers of
Athens," just as in modern times the purity of chivalrous
love has been almost universally suspected.
It is not needful to describe the conditions of mediaeval
chivalry with great particularity of detail. They are better
known than the conditions of Greek chivalry; and the enthusiastic
love which sprang from them, though little understood, is
regarded by common consent as legitimate and beneficial to
society.
Chivalry must not be confounded with the feudalism out of
which it emerged. It was an ideal, binding men together by common
spiritual enthusiasms. We find the ground material of the
chivalrous virtues in the Teutonic character. As described by
Tacitus, the German races were distinguished for chastity,
obedience to self-imposed laws, truth, loyalty, regard for honour
more than gain, and a reference for women amounting to idolatry.
These qualities furnished a proper soil for the chivalrous
emotions; and the chivalrous investiture, whereby the young
knight was consecrated to a noble life, can also be derived from
Teutonic customs. "They decorate their youthful warriors
with the shield and spear," says Tacitus, insisting on the
sacred obligation which this ceremony imposed. chivalry would,
however, scarcely have assumed the form it did in the twelfth
century but for the slowly refining influences of Christianity.
In the epics of the Niblung Cycle, and in the song of Roland,
thee are but faint traces of its subtler spirit. The
unselfishness of the true knight, his humility and obedience, his
devotion to the service of the weak and helpless, his inspiration
by ideals, his readiness to forgive and to show mercy þ in fact,
what we may call his charity in armour þ sprang from
Christianity. It is only in the later romances of King Arthur
that these essential elements of the chivalrous spirit make
themselves manifest.
"As for death," says a knight of the Round Table,
"be he welcome when he cometh; but my oath and my honour,
the adventure that hath fallen to me, and the love of my lady,
I will lose them not."
This sentence, in a few words, expresses the attitude of a
chivalrous gentleman. When King Arthur established his knights
in a solemn chapter at the Court of Camelot, he "charged
them never to do outrage nor murder, and alway to flee treason;
also by no means to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that
asked mercy, upon pain of forfeiture of their worship and
lordship of King Arthur for evermore; and always to do ladies,
damosels, and gentlewoman succour upon pain of death. Also that
no man take no battles in a wrong quarrel for no law, nor for
worldly goods." The knights, both old and young, swore to
these articles; and every year they took the oath again at the
high feast of Pentecost.
As the Christian religion in general exercised a decisive
influence in the formation of chivalry, so we may perhaps connect
the peculiar mode of amorous enthusiasm which characterised this
ideal with the worship of the maiden mother of Christ. Woman had
been exalted to the throne of heaven; and it was not unnatural
that woman should become an object of almost religious adoration
upon earth. The names of God and of his lady were united on the
lips of a true knight; for the motto of chivalry in its best
period was Dien et ma Dame. Love came
to be regarded as the source of all nobility, virtue, heroism,
and self-sacrifice. "A knight may never be of prowess,"
says Sir Tristram, "but if he be a lover." This
language precisely corresponds with the language of the Greeks
regarding that other love of theirs, which nerved them for deeds
of prowess, for the overthrow of tyrants, and the liberation of
their fatherland.
Chivalrous love was wholly extra-nuptial and anti-
matrimonial. The lady whom the knight adored and served, who
received his service and rewarded his devotion, could never be
his wife. She might be a maiden or a married woman; in practice
she was almost invariably the latter. But the love which united
the two in bonds more firm than any other, was incompatible with
marriage. The feudal courts of love in fact proclaimed that
"between two married persons, Love cannot exert his
powers." This is a peculiarity well worthy of notice. Not
only does it at once and for ever set an end to those foolish
questions which have sometimes been asked about the reasons why
Dante did not marry Beatrice; it also constitutes one of the
strongest points of similarity between the chivalrous love of the
ancient Greeks and that of the mediaeval races. Plato, in the
Symposium, it will be remembered,
asserts that the exalted love on which he is discoursing has
nothing whatever to do with the "vulgar and trivial"
way of matrimony. It must be excited by a person with whom
connubial relations are absolutely impossible. It is a state of
the soul, not an appetite; and though the weakness of mortality
may lead lovers into sensuality, such shortcomings form a
distinct deviation from the ideal. Least of all can it have
anything to do with those connections profitable to the State and
useful to society, which involve the procreation and rearing of
children, domestic cares, and the commonplace of daily duties.
In theory, at any rate, both Greek and mediaeval types of
chivalrous emotion were pure and spiritual enthusiasms, purging
the lover's soul of all base thoughts, lifting him above the
bondage of the flesh, and filling him with a continual rapture.
Plato called love a "mania," an inspired frenzy.
Among the chivalrous lovers of Provence, this high rapture
received the name of "Joy." It will here be remembered
by students of the Morte Darthur that
the castle to which both Lancelot and Tristram carried off their
ladies was Joyous Gard. The fruits of joy were bravery, courtesy,
high spirit, sustained powers of endurance, delight in perilous
adventure. The soul of the knight, penetrated with the fine
elixir of enthusiastic love, is ready to confront all dangers,
to undertake the most difficult tasks, to bear obloquy and want,
the scorn of men, misunderstanding, even coldness and disdain on
the part of his lady, with serene sweetness and an exalted
patience. Plato's description of the lover in the
Phaedrus exactly squares with this
romantic ideal of the knight's enthusiasm. The permanent emotion,
whether terms "mania" or "joy," is precisely
the same in quality; and whether the object which stirred it was
a young man as in Greece, or a married woman as in mediaeval
Europe, signified nothing.
Chivalrous love, under both its forms, did not exclude
marriage, except between the lovers themselves. Lancelot and
Tristram took wives, while remaining loyal to Guinevere and
Iseult, their ladies. Dante had children by Gemma, and Petrarch
by a concubine. Still it was the sainted Beatrice, the
unattainable Laura, who received the homage of these poets and
inspired their art.
In theory, then, chivalrous love of both types, the Greek
and the mediaeval, existed independently of the marriage tie and
free from sensual affections. It was, in each case, the source
of exhilarating passion; a durable ecstasy which removed the
lover to a higher region, rendering him capable of haughty
thoughts and valiant deeds. Both loves were originally martial,
and connected with the military customs of the peoples among whom
they flourished. Both, in practice and in course of time, fell
below their own ideal standards, without, however, losing the
high spirit, loyalty, and sense of honour, which went far to
compensate for what was defective in their psychological basis.
At the same time, social evils of the gravest kind were
inseparable from both forms of enthusiastic feeling, because each
had striven to transcend the sphere of natural duties and of
normal instincts.
At this point, when feudal chivalry was tending toward the
travesty which is depicted for us in Little Jehan de
Saintré, the same thing happened at Florence
to its imaginative essence as had previously happened to the
imaginative essence of Greek chivalry at Athens. We have seen
that Greek love was originally a Dorian and soldierly passion;
it had grown up in the camp: and when it lost its primal quality
in the Attic circles, Socrates attempted to utilise the force he
recognised in this still romantic feeling for the stimulation of
a nobler intellectual life. The moral energy was there. It throbs
through previous ages of Greek legend, literature, and history.
But a philosophical application of this motive, which is the
peculiar discovery of the Platonic Socrates, had not been
attempted. That was reserved for the Athenians, and, in
particular, for the school of the Academy. Precisely in like
manner, chivalry, the fine but scarcely wholesome flower of
feudalism, the super-subtle hybrid between savage Teutonic
virtues and hyper-sensitive Christian emotions, which grew up in
the mediaeval castle, had been now transplanted to the classic
soil of Italy. Italy was neither feudal nor Teutonic; and her
Christianity, for the highest of her sons, was deeply penetrated
with political and intellectual ideas. The generous Tuscan
spirits who adopted chivalry, partly as a motive for their art,
and partly as a visionary guide in conduct — Guido
Guinicelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoja, Lapo, Dante —
enamoured of its beauty, but unable to prolong its life upon the
former line of feudal institutions, lent it the new touch of
mystical philosophy. The simple substance of the chivalrous
enthusiasm, which had take gracious form in the legends of
Lancelot and Tristram, of Sir Beaumains and Sir Galahad, was
refined upon and spun into a web of allegory. The subtleties and
psychological distinctions of the troubadours received
metaphysical interpretations. A nation of scholars and of
doctors, who were also artists — Dante calls the poets of
his school dottori — men who were
not knights or squires or mighty of their hands, reformed,
rehandled, and recast the tradition of the love they had received
from militant subconscious predecessors. We come thus to the
remarkable fact that the last manifestation of mediaeval love at
Florence represents an almost exact parallel to the last
manifestation of Greek love at Athens. In both instances, an
enthusiasm which had its root in human passion, after passing
through a martial phase of evolution and becoming a social factor
of importance in the raising of the race to higher spiritual
power, assumes the aspect of philosophy, and connects itself with
the effort of the intellect to reach the Beatific Vision. Dante,
conducted by Beatrice into the circle of the Celestial Rose,
proclaims the same creed as Plato when he asserts that the love
of a single person, leading the soul upon the way to truth,
becomes the means whereby man may ascend to the contemplation of
the divine under one of its eternal aspects.
What is really remarkable in the parallel I have attempted
to establish is, that the metaphysical transformation of Greek
"mania" and mediaeval "joy," which was
effected severally at Athens and in Tuscany, took place in each
case by a natural and independent process of development. We have
no reason to suppose that feudal chivalry owed anything to
Platonic influences, even in this its latest manifestation. It
is certain, for instance, that Dante never read the
Phaedrus and the
Symposium in the originals; and nothing
shows that he was even remotely acquainted with their true
substance in scholastic compendiums. The same exalted
psychological condition followed similar lines of development,
and reached the same result þ a result which in each case is
almost unintelligible to us who study it. We find the greatest
difficult in believing that Socrates was sincere, and that Dante
was sincere. We turn, like Gibbon, in our perplexity about Greek
love to the hypothesis of "a thin device of friendship and
virtue," masking gross immorality. We turn, like the elder
Rossetti and his school, in our perplexity about Dante's
idealisation of beatrice, to the hypothesis of a political or a
theological allegory. But sound criticism rejects both of these
hypotheses. Frankly admitting that Greek love was tainted with
a vice obnoxious to modern notions, and that mediaeval love was
involved with adultery, the true critic will declare that,
strange and incomprehensible as this must always seem, there were
two brief moments, once at Athens and once at Florence, when
amorous enthusiasms of an abnormal type presented themselves to
natures of the noblest stamp as indispensable conditions of the
progress of the soul upon the pathway toward perfection.
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