Unfortunately this morning dawn of Romantic Love, as depicted in the pages of Ovid, was soon hidden beneath the dark clouds of mediæval barbarism, not to emerge again till a thousand years later.
MEDIÆVAL LOVE
CELIBACY VERSUS MARRIAGE
Were I asked to name the four most refining influences in modern civilisation I would answer: Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage. Were I asked to name the essence of the early mediæval spirit I would say: Deadly Enmity toward Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage.
This pathologic attitude of the mediæval mind was at first a natural reaction against the incredible depravity and licentiousness that prevailed under the Roman Empire. But the reaction went to such preposterous extremes that the resulting state of affairs was even more degrading and deplorable than the original evil. It was like inoculating a man with leprosy to cure him of smallpox. It was bad enough to treat marriage as a farce, as did the later Romans, among whom there were women who had their eighth and tenth husband, while one case is related of a woman “who was married to her twenty-third husband, she herself being his twenty-first wife”; while the public looked upon this case as a “match” in a double sense, the survivor being publicly crowned and feted as champion. But a thousand times worse was the mediæval notion that marriage is a crime. And this preposterous notion—that a relation on which all civilisation is based, which is sanctioned even by many animals and ignored by only the very lowest of the savages—this criminal notion was foisted on the world by the fanatical priesthood in whose hands unfortunately Christianity was placed for centuries, to be distorted, vitiated, and utilised for political, criminal, and selfish purposes.
“The services rendered,” says Mr. Lecky, “by the ascetics in imprinting on the minds of men a profound and enduring conviction of the importance of chastity, though extremely great, were seriously counterbalanced by their noxious influence upon marriage. Two or three beautiful descriptions of this institution have been culled out of the immense mass of patristic writings; but in general it would be difficult to conceive anything more coarse and more repulsive than the manner in which they regarded it.... The tender love which it elicits, the holy and beautiful domestic qualities that follow in its train, were almost absolutely omitted from consideration. The object of the ascetic was to attract men to a life of virginity, and, as a necessary consequence, marriage was treated as an inferior state.”
“The days of Chivalry were not yet,” we read in Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, “and we cannot but notice even in the greatest of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and, consequently, of the marriage relationship.”
What an inexhaustible source of mediæval immorality this contemptuous treatment of marriage by the most influential class of society proved, has been so often depicted in glaring colours that these pages need not be tainted with illustrations.
WOMAN’S LOWEST DEGRADATION
Woman was represented by the Fathers “as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman; she should live in continual penance on account of the curses she has brought upon the world. Women were even forbidden by a provincial council in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained” (Lecky).