The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distinguish between two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but—as we shall see in detail in the special chapter devoted to them—they applied the celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love between men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading, a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's Symposium and everywhere. In Plutarch's Dialogue on Love, written five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint protest against the current notion that "there is no gust of friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women; but this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same dialogue:
"True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark…. The passion for women consists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty."
Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words: "It behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved."
Goethe had an aperçu of the absence of purity in Greek love when he wrote, in his Roman Elegies:
In der heroischen Zeit, da Götter und Göttinnen liebten.
Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.
PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY
The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude to the modern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closely connected with the growth of the altruistic ingredients of love—sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and especially adoration. It is one of the points where religion and love meet. Mariolatry greatly affected men's attitude toward women in general, including their notions about love. There is a curious passage in Burton worth citing here (III., 2):
"Christ himself, and the Virgin Mary, had most beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith Baradius, that ever lived, yet withal so modest, so chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from that passion of burning lust, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it as the Virgin Mary's face."
Mediaeval theologians had a special name for this faculty—Penetrative
Virginity—which McClintock and Strong's Cyclopedia of Biblical
Literature defines as
"such an extraordinary or perfect gift of chastity, to which some have pretended that it overpowered those by whom they have been surrounded, and created in them an insensibility to the pleasures of the flesh. The Virgin Mary, according to some Romanists, was possessed of this gift, which made those who beheld her, notwithstanding her beauty, to have no sentiments but such as were consistent with chastity."