Western Notions of Love

One kind of love that might best be called romantic love has been the gift or curse to the world of Western culture. This is a phenomenon that at its simplest might be described as the practice of choosing one's mate based on personal preference, rather than societal obligations. Such a concept emerged in the Middle Ages, and the true lover as described by Andreas Capellanus in his twelfth century De Amore is continually and without interruption obsessed by the image of his beloved. Capellanus also wrote that love was an inborn suffering that proceeded from the sight of, and excessive thought on, the form of the opposite sex.

This was a different view of love than had existed previously in Western culture, although there are hints of it in earlier societies and cultures. In Judaism the closest approach to erotic love appears in the Song of Solomon:

I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine.… (6:3) Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.… (8:7)

Greek myths include scenes of passionate sexual attraction but for the most part, after the successful sexual liaison, the male god goes on to seek other candidates. The tale of Eurydice and Orpheus emphasizes, however, that love in the Greek world was far more complex than simple sexual conquest. The deeper meanings of love appear in discussion by the eighth-century B.C.E. Greek writer Hesiod, who held eros or love to be the essential creative urge that brought the universe into being. A somewhat different view is put forth in the fourth century B.C.E. by Plato, who has Socrates explain in the Symposium that the lover is attracted to his beloved because he sees reflected there the higher realm of eternal truth. Love in this case is the bridge between the mundane and the transcendental, the wellspring from whence all meaningful human values derive. In the same dialogue, Plato has Aristophanes explain that the search for a lover is driven by a search to find part of oneself. This is because people were originally androgynes who were split apart because of their rebellion against the Olympian gods. Thus finding one's love was no less than the recovery of an original unity of souls.

The object of this original form of Platonic love could be of the same or different sex, although Plato makes a clear distinction between the love of youths and the love of women, with the former being held much higher than the latter kind. In fact Greek literature from the poets to the playwrights was essentially misogynistic with much of the erotic literature male focused.

In Roman society, where women had a higher standing than in Greece, the general conclusion of the first century B.C.E. lyric poets Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius was that love (and women) inevitably brought misery to man. Lucretius, a contemporary of the poets, agreed that love made one miserable, and his solution was to eradicate love. He admitted that while a particular mistress might be faultless, a man could still free himself from the pangs of love by reflecting that in her physical nature his love object was no different from all other women. Ovid, another contemporary, built up the charms of sexual love in his Ars amoris (Art of Love) but in its sequel, Re-media Amoris, he shows how to counteract the attractions of a mistress and solve the problems of love. Both the Romans and the Greeks tended to separate love from marriage.

While Christianity emphasized love, it was love of humanity or or god (agape), not eros or sexual love. Such a love appeared in the Song of Solomon, and it is a strong theme in early Christian literature (see Bynum, 1982) and later in the surviving letters and prayers of St. Catherine of Sienna (1347?–1380), who portrayed the crucified Jesus as the supreme sign and pledge of divine love and as motive for ours. As Christianity became institutionalized, sexuality, one of the base points of love in the Greek and Roman classics, was downplayed. It certainly was not necessarily involved in marriage, which was a pragmatic affair that united scions of two families and their possessions. As Caroline Walker Bynum notes in her Holy Feast, Holy Fast, medieval female saints before the twelfth century tended to be charity-giving queens who obediently married and used their influence and wealth to perform good deeds, often ending up in the cloisters. This began to change in the twelfth century with the development of what might be called romantic love, and it is this concept that came to dominate Western notions of love.