On Love

On Love:

Our last discussion on Chaucer took an emphatic, and unexpected, turn in the comments. For that reason I'd like to refer to this piece from the Nation on the subject of love.

It mentions feminism, but I'm not at all interested in what the author has to say about that subject. I am interested in the debate with C. S. Lewis.

Lewis considered Ovid to have written the Ars Amatoria as an "amusement," an "ironically didactic" poem that "presupposes an audience to whom love is one of the minor peccadilloes of life, and the joke consists in treating it seriously." Nehring describes Ovid's work as a "first-century self-help book" as well as "the first dating book ever written," though she recognizes that the "rambunctious" Ovid was "forever making fun." She points not to Lewis but unnamed "modern-day editors" who consider the work a "'tongue-in-cheek' parody." She asserts that "Ovid takes his subject seriously," and whether or not he did, it seems worth noting what Lewis sees as the distinction between Ovid's perspective and the troubadours'. According to Lewis, the "conduct which Ovid recommends is felt to be shameful and absurd," but

the very same conduct which Ovid ironically recommended could be recommended seriously by the courtly tradition. To leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady, or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth century or even of the seventeenth century[.]

That love as we know it had been invented by these poets was important, Lewis argued, because that meant it was no product of human nature. What goes one way can go the other; and Lewis warned that love might not survive. There is reason to think we might be living at the end of its life even now.

"Real changes in human sentiment are very rare--there are perhaps three or four on record--but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them," Lewis ventures. Earlier he reminds us that "it seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end."

Sixty years later, in The End of the Novel of Love (1997), the critic Vivian Gornick argued that what Lewis prophesied had finally come to pass. When Gornick was a girl, she recalls, the whole world believed in love. This was the Bronx, New York City, sometime around World War II. The mothers had various advice for their daughters about the nature of love and its embodiments of greater or lesser disappointment, but whatever their admonishments, "love" itself was the creed, a simple operating principle in an unpredictable world. "It's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man"; "Don't do like I did. Marry a man you love"; "You're smart, make something of yourself, but always remember, love is the most important thing in a woman's life."

When Gornick was a girl, love wasn't just meaningful--it was the quality that gave life meaning.

The author of the book being reviewed takes a substantial beating from her critic, and it seems she deserves much of it. Her ignorance of C. S. Lewis' argument, when she undertook to dress him down, is the sort of thing that merits an academic beating. (I read another such review recently, Francis Lee Utley's "Chaucer and Patristic Expressions," which reviews D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer. Utley remarks, "[O]ne is tempted to dismiss it simply as a strange hodgepodge of patristics and puzzle-solving, insulting to the community of scholars and, indeed, to the twentieth century itself." Well, and doubtless it was partly that; the question is whether the twentieth century merited the insult.)

Yet our critic is sympathetic to the author's basic view that modern relationships are not love at all, being bland and "safety-checked," and lacking the heroic quality. The critic ends by asking to be 'signed up' for such a cult of love as once ruled the West, and now survives only in certain echoes.

We should embrace love, she tells us, as ecstatic, risky, transgressive, unequal and perhaps violent. It is, she has said, a faith, a demon and a divine madness, but the suffering it induces may be the crucible in which we refine our souls.

That vision is just the one I endorse. Tom asked if I might be mad to do so. Well, indeed I might be. A man who follows love may well go mad -- it is one of the most regularly repeated features of the tales. That may be part of the point.

The critic is right to say that the vision wasn't Ovid's, but that it very much was the troubadour's. Lewis was right, I fear, to say that it was a vision that might die. Yet it need not die; it lies in our power to save it, if we dare.