sex and marriage

Chapter 8 Romantic Love (1)
With the triumph of Christianity and barbarism, relations between men and women fell into a state of disgrace that had never been seen in ancient centuries.in ancient society.The relationship between men and women, while depraved, is not cruel.In the European Middle Ages, religion and barbarism combined to degrade sex life.In marriage the wife has no rights; outside of marriage she is useless in restraining the natural animality of the savage male, for all men are sinful.Medieval immorality was not only widespread.And disgusting.The bishops lived openly with their daughters, committing crimes blatantly.Archbishops promoted their favorite males to live in nearby dioceses.It is widely believed that pastors are paragons of celibacy, but that is not the case.Pope Gregory VII tried his best to persuade the priests to abandon their mistresses, but in the time of Abelard, he actually thought that he could marry Heroys.Although he knew it was a disgraceful thing to do.It was not until the end of the thirteenth century that priestly celibacy was strictly enforced.Of course, those priests still had illicit relationships with women, but they could not preach that such relationships were noble or good, because even they themselves knew that such relationships were immoral and unholy.Of course, the church cannot beautify the concept of love, because the church holds an abstinent concept of sex.Only those mortals can make the idea of ​​love beautiful.

Priests once broke their vows.We should not be surprised that, starting out in what they consider to be a life of crime, they soon sink below the moral level of the common man.Pope John XXIII was accused of incest, adultery, and other crimes; an elected abbot of St. Augustine, who was not yet in office, was found after his trial at Canterbury in 23, in one village alone. There were 1171 illegitimate children; an abbot of San Pilao, Spain, was attested in 17 to have at least 1130 wives; Bishop Henry III of Liege was deposed for having 70 illegitimate children.Perhaps we cannot place too much emphasis on these individual instances, but we cannot deny the evidence given by the writers of councils and churches.In their description, there are many more serious crimes than this simple illegal cohabitation of men and women.It is understood that even if the priests do marry a wife, they will still consider this relationship illegal, so they will never have the same heart.among them.Bigamy or extreme non-specific love phenomenon is very common.Medieval authors recorded numerous accounts of nuns who were no different from whores, since mass killings of infants took place in their houses.As for the incest of priests, it was so common that the church was compelled to enact the most severe laws, forbidding priests to live with their mothers or sisters.One of the great works of Christianity is to eradicate from the world impure love, but this kind of impure love often occurs in monasteries.Before the Christian Reformation, the method of penance was generally applied for sexual immorality, but opposition was high and widespread.

Throughout the Middle Ages there was a most curious division between the Greco-Roman tradition of the church and the Teutonic tradition of the aristocracy.Each tradition contributes to civilization, but the content of the contribution is quite different.What the church contributed was knowledge, philosophy, canon law, and the unity of Christendom—all derived from the traditions of ancient Mediterranean culture; romantic thoughts.Among these, romantic love is the contribution with which we are particularly concerned.

Before the Middle Ages, it would be incorrect to say that people did not know what romantic love was, and it was only in the Middle Ages that romantic love became a generally accepted form of love.The essence of romantic love is to regard the object of love as a very rare and very precious thing.Therefore, one has to make great efforts to win the love of the object of love.Or use poetry; or use lyrics; or use martial arts; or use other ways you can think of that can best please the other party.If a woman is considered to be of high value, then there will be a mentality that it is difficult to get her, so I think that if a man can get a woman effortlessly.Then his affection for her would not take the form of a romantic love.In the Middle Ages, the object of romantic love was not those women with whom he could have legal or illegitimate sexual relations, but those who had a high dignity and had insurmountable moral or customs with their romantic lovers on obstacles.The job of the church is to make people accept that sex is unholy by nature.The work of the church was so thorough that it was impossible for a man to feel poetically for any woman unless she was beyond reach.

Therefore, for love to have a romantic component, it must be platonic.It is very difficult for modern people to guess the psychology of those poetic lovers in the Middle Ages.Although they are full of passionate emotion, they have no desire for intimacy.This situation, so incomprehensible to the modern man, leads him to regard medieval love as nothing more than a literary habit.Doubtless it is true that sometimes this is nothing but literary custom, and that literary expression is dictated by custom.However, Dante's love for Beatrice expressed in "New Life" is definitely not just customary.On the contrary, I think that emotion is more intense than most modern people realize.The figures of the great religions of the Middle Ages believed that life on earth was ugly.In their view.Human instinct is a product of corruption and original sin.They hate the body and its lust, and think that only in meditation can pure pleasure be obtained, but the object of their meditation is beyond all sexual components.In the sphere of love, this idea can only produce love of the kind we see in Dante.A man who respects and loves a woman thinks that she cannot be associated with the idea of ​​sexual intercourse.For in his view, in any case, all sexual intercourse is impure.Therefore, his love takes the form of poetry and fantasy, and is full of symbolism.This has a great influence on literature.Throughout the history of the development of love poetry, it originated from the palace of Frederick II until the heyday of the Renaissance.This situation is not uncommon.

As far as I know, there is an excellent record of love at the end of the Middle Ages in the book "The Decline of the Middle Ages" written by Haringer in 1924:
An important turning point in poetry in the history of civilization occurred in the 12th century, when the lyric poetry of Provence made people's insatiable desires the center of the poetic conception of love.Predecessors have also sung the pain of love, but the so-called pain is only the desire for pleasure, or the poor failure of love.What Peramas and Thesby, Shephalas and Procles lament is the tragic end of love, and the heartrending disappearance of the happiness that had been enjoyed.Also, desire is the theme of those noble poems.So the idea given by these poems is: love is negative.On the one hand, the ideal of the new poetry cannot abandon its connection with sexual love, and on the other hand, it can include all moral ideals.Since then, love has become the field of perfect morality and culture, and the aristocratic lover has become a pure person because of love, and the spiritual component has become more dominant.By the end of the 13th century.Dante and his friends even believed that love can give people a sense of piety and holiness.This is an extreme performance.Since then, Italian poetry has gradually recovered the more normal expression of love emotions.Petrarch's poetry is between the spiritualized thought of love and the charm of the more natural love of the ancient style.The unnatural institution of aristocratic love was soon abandoned, and the peculiarities of aristocratic love would never be restored.Although the Platonism of the Renaissance still contained aristocratic ideas, and formed a new form of love poetry with a very spiritual tendency.

In France and Burgundy, however, the situation was not the same as in Italy, since the love thoughts of the French aristocracy were dominated by "romantic roses."The so-called "rose-like romance" is the warrior-style love, because it believes that love should be satisfying.In fact, it was a rebellion against the doctrine of the Church, and at the same time a pagan assertion that love should have its rightful place in life.

(End of this chapter)