When one goes into church history, then you find people who challenge you. The medieval nuns and monks had a knightly or lady-like love of their Lord or Lady. This was seen as noble and worthy. They lived in better times: but Lewis noted that this was something else.
Every one has heard of courtly love, and every one knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics oft he Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described. With the form, which is lyrical, and the style, which is sophisticated and often 'aureate' or deliberately enigmatic, we need not concern ourselves. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady's lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady's 'man'. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not 'my lady' but 'my lord'. The whole attitude has been righdy described as 'a feudalisation oflove'.3 This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel ofthe courtly life. It is possible only to those who are, in the old sense of the word, polite. It thus becomes, from one point of view the flower, from another the seed, of all those noble usages which distinguish the gentle from the vilein: only the courteous can love, but it is love that makes them courteous. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, Chapter 1.
Mechthild was a mystic. She spent her live in a community of women, did not take vows, but lived as if she did, and she wrote down her visions and experiences in German: these included some direct criticisms of the clergy of her day and an ecstatic declaration of her love to Christ. This now makes me, as I live in the same postmodern world as all do, uncomfortable. But does this matter? Here we need charity: we do not live in a time of courtly love. She did.
Mechthild of Magdeburg
Draw the souls of your people into your love, O God, that like your servant Mechthild, we may yearn to be fully yours, for you know us better than we can know ourselves; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.
I note that there are others now looking at Church history, because in doing so they are trying to discern from the past what would help in this time, for in every aspect of human life — economic, cultural, ideological and spiritual == the post modern project has been an abject failure. So it is good to be challenged by the times of others. The very fact that people not consider Lewis — writing less than a hundred years ago — old fashioned and problematic, not writing to scholarly standards, is a silent critique of this age.
A friend asked me at the pub the other night whether I believe Lewis is right. My answer was that I think he is, at least in terms of the literature I know. If you do want to read this book, be aware that it would not be published today. Too many of his assertions go uncited or unargued (not that I mind), and too little is cited in the footnotes by way of engaging with other scholars or telling me where that quotation from a modern poem is from.
It might be that the regulation of form is a flaw of this age. It also might be that big love is flawed. It might be that the medieval ideal of courtesy, chivalry and honour allow for more faithful love and more ways of being devoted than the modern liberal zeitgeist imagines.
Three points emerged, all of which I’ll write about in due course, and all of which address the question: “what in fact should we do?” The first is this: it’s time to abolish Big Romance. One of my central contentions is that while some liberalisation has benefited some women, especially bourgeois women in the developed world, radical social liquefaction across the board is catastrophically bad for women - and especially those of us who are mothers. Interdependence is a defining feature of motherhood, from gestation onward. Family life is the archetypal template for those ways in which, as humans, we thrive when we belong to one another.
This non mystic, reformed, cynical man knows that not everyone is like him. Not all times are like these. The reason to read history is to discern patterns for this time, and excavate other ways of living, preferably means that are more sustainable. And for that, I thank God that the lectionary still has people like Mechthild listed as examples to contemplate.