With care. To him she must be true,
For choosing once she ne'er may rue.
More binding than the wedding-tie
Is love; for a diversity
Of causes wedlock may divide,
By death alone be love untied.
The idea that marriage and love cannot be combined is therefore only the logical conclusion of the fundamental feeling that love and desire cannot together be projected on one woman.
If matrimonial love had not been questioned, the choice would have lain between two alternatives: the canonisation of matrimony—an expedient chosen by the Church—or a fusion of love and sexuality in our modern sense. The first was a stage which humanity had left behind, for the ideal of absolutely perfect and pure love had already been evolved, and the world was not ripe for the second. The tendency of the rarest minds was in the direction of a further idealisation of love, of freeing it from all earthly shackles and bringing it nearer and nearer to heaven. One of the early troubadours, Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaya, gave a practical illustration to this feeling by falling in love with a lady whom he had never seen. The story of his love was famous for centuries. He loved a Countess of Tripoli, a Christian princess, and his whole soul was filled with his imaginary picture of her. The Provençal Biography relates that "he worshipped her for all the good the pilgrims had narrated of her." In order to see her, he took the cross and journeyed across the sea; he fell ill on the ship and was carried ashore in a dying condition. The countess, on hearing of his great love, hastened to the inn where he lay. As she entered his room, Jaufre regained consciousness; he knew her at once and died happily in her arms. She was so touched by his love that she henceforth renounced the world.—This story is no fairy tale; it is well attested and universally accounted genuine to-day. Jaufre's love, expressed in touching poems, was no amour de tête, as it is sometimes called, but a genuine amour de cœur, a purely spiritual love which asked nothing of the beloved woman but permission to love her. There are other instances, and even in later times it is not an infrequent occurrence in the case of imaginative people (I need only mention Bürger and Klopstock).
We men of the present age look upon this eccentric woman-worship with uncomprehending eyes. Perhaps we shall feel a little less bewildered when we meet it, stripped of courtly theories and mediaeval fashions, in some of the great men who are closely connected with our own period; in Michelangelo, in Goethe, and in Beethoven.
The Church, dualistic and ascetic from its inception, waged war against sensuality as the evil of evils. "As fire and water will not mix," wrote St. Bernard, "so spiritual and carnal delights cannot be experienced together." The toleration of matrimony was never more than a compromise; we require no proof that as far as the Church was concerned, chastity was the only real value. Even Luther took up that position, and to this day Christianity and sexuality remain unreconciled. But both the Catholic and the Protestant professions of faith regarded matrimony as the lesser evil, a concession made to the enemy, in order to render existence possible. It is very interesting to observe the position taken up by the Church in connection with the new woman-worship which, although it sprang from the most genuine Christian dualism, had for its object not God, but mortal woman. The logical attitude of the Church would have been one of welcome, for the chaste worship of woman which regarded matrimony as an inferior state, was her natural ally. Two clerics, the court-chaplain Andreas, and the prolific rhymester Matfre Ermengau, actually elaborated the theory of spiritual love contrary to the spirit of the Church, but both men hastened to utter a timely recantation and recommendation of orthodoxy as the only means of salvation. After establishing all the desirable details of love according to substance and accidents, Andreas deduced that every love not dedicated to God was bound to offend Him, and advanced eighteen points against the love of woman, starting with the well-known argument that woman was naturally of a base disposition, covetous, envious, greedy, fickle, garrulous, stubborn, proud, vain, sensual, deceitful, etc. "He who serves love, cannot serve God," he declared, "and God will punish every man who, apart from matrimony, serves Venus. What good could come from acting against the will of God?" Here we are face to face with a grotesque position: the official Church favouring sexuality, that is matrimony, as against the newer and higher standard of ascetic, spiritual love. This attitude was quite logical, if not in the spirit of religion and in contradiction to the principle of asceticism, yet in the spirit of orthodoxy; for "whatever was not for her, was against her." The brave, Janus-headed abbé was spokesman for the whole clergy, which branded love not projected on God as fornicatio. In his recantation Andreas upheld the previously-despised matrimonial state at the expense of love; "love," he maintained, "destroys matrimony." Matfre did exactly the same thing; after recapitulating in his Breviari d'Amor all the splendid achievements rooted in the cult of woman, he suddenly veered round (at the 27,445th verse):