The Supremacy of Love, Pt. II
by Norm Klassen
This essay appears in two parts.
Click here to read part one of “The Supremacy of Love” by Norm Klassen.
Three Faces of Courtly Love
In the Middle Ages, courtly love provides a new idiom for the transposition of love and reason and the bond between them. It does so in two ways: firstly, it makes explicit to a broader audience what is often implicit in Perfect Society’s modes of discourse; and secondly, in retrospect, it gives love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them status as a cultural artifact that can take on a quite different meaning within a simulacrum of that community and its modes. The supremacy of love is particularly vulnerable.
Lawless love
In the Middle Ages, the literary phenomenon of courtly love plays a prominent role relative to the three modes of God-talk fostered by Perfect Society. It is allegorical in one fundamental sense: it represents the supremacy of love in relation to reason. As a cultural system, courtly love consists in humility, courtesy, and usually, adultery. Above all, it is a religion of love. It does not necessarily offer an isomorphic allegory of, say, the relationship between God and the soul, but it codes the seemingly universal, spontaneous, bodily experience of falling in love. The allegory lies here, in the paradoxical bond between rational and emotional components, and the ultimate triumph of an unspeakable love as the analogical source of everything that is important in the lovers’ world.
Courtly love begins (from the male lover’s perspective) with love at first sight, a transformative event. Falling in love happens through a process – seeing – that is strongly associated with logical deliberation and rational insight, co-opted by the God of Love to effect the conquest of the heart. The lover is smitten, now devoted to the beloved and unable to think of anything else. Chaucer articulates the established principle of love and reason being in tension: “‘Do you not well know the old clerks’ saw, / That “who shall give a lover any law?”’” (This is self-reflexively funny because the speaker is a smitten knight who is arguing his case.) Love at first sight deliberately juxtaposes head and heart. Dante famously portrays Francesca and Paulo as stimulated to love through reading a certain book, a detail Rodin is careful to capture in The Kiss. “‘Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante,’” Francesca confesses. “‘That day we read in it no farther.’” As a convention, courtly love generates set pieces like the demande d’amour or “question of love,” in which two forlorn lovers debate which of them suffers more from their unrequited or lost love; visual tropes like that of a courtier and a maid playing chess, a scene which fuses dalliance and stringent concentration; a medical lexicon that identifies lovesickness as a disease (hereos) and recommends various treatments; the seedy paradox of poetic voyeurism, including the invention of the pander who conveys information while getting far too into his role.
Cosmic love
Courtly love is also cosmic. “Quando l’amor divino mosse di prima quelle cose belle,” Dante writes at the start of his own comic creation The Divine Comedy. Divine love moved all those beautiful things, themselves impelled by desire for the love that moves the universe but is itself unmoved.1 In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, after the knight who has asserted the lawlessness of love dies in a tragic accident, Duke Theseus of Athens seeks the meaning of all things and is told only that
This world is nothing but a thoroughfare full of woe,
And we are pilgrims passing to and fro.2
The duke acknowledges the First Mover, the fair chain of love, and that
with that fair chain of love he bound
The fire, the air, the water, and the land.3
Rhyming couplets attest to this ancient belief in the bond between all things, as does modern science with its tacit belief in comprehensibility. The duke can get no farther, but pilgrimage takes on its fully revealed dimensions immediately following the tale to which he is bound, in the pilgrimage to Canterbury, symbolic of heavenly Jerusalem (which they never reach). It doesn’t matter that the religious allusions on this level are uniformly blasphemous in the mouth of a miller. He’s not responsible for talking or living in a particular way. The fellowship will stay together just the same, evincing bonds greater than those that hold fire, air, water, and land together, greater even than the collective will or happenstance reasons of the pilgrims.
Of love
Beyond all the reasons for going on pilgrimage is the love that draws the pilgrims; behind all the explanations for falling in love is the inexplicable reality of it. Love is bound up with reasons, but lies beyond reason’s ability to walk its way to its destination in love. The great premodern doctrine of supernatural finality survives in courtly love as a cultural expression of something that becomes unsayable in the early modern period. Humans were made for divine completion. God has so planted his grace in us that we cannot fully be ourselves without returning home to him. Reasoning causes us to yearn for this finality, yet we cannot attain it out of reason’s own resources. Perfect Man reveals a paradoxical relationship between nature and the supernatural in the strangeness of his own human and divine natures: humans have a destiny incommensurate with their nature; they cannot fulfil their supernatural destiny simply by following their nature. A transformation is required. This is not the overlaying of one reality on top of the other. On the one hand, nature can boast its own order, with which the supernatural is not confused; on the other, the two are joined in union, so that the natural yearns for its own transformation. We must say the same for courtly love as a cultural system. Courtly love as a teasing, self-aware, and sensuous construct participates in a love that escapes enclosure and beckons for self-transcendence. The art form does not capture the relationship between the natural and the supernatural; nothing can. “Of” love is the love that is a belonging-to and points to the love that is the beginning and end of all things.
Supernatural finality marks the history of Perfect Society in two ways related to the development of culture. Its members do not turn away from human culture. Rather, they perceive that its accomplishments need purifying and completing. They also do not seek a specific principle of grace, already fingerprinted and photographed, at work in the complexity of concrete realities in nature or in culture. The permeation and spiritualization of nature is too pervasive for that. Rather, faith is everywhere operative in the pursuit of cultural understanding worthy of their calling.
Love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them is the translation and intuitive acculturation of supernatural finality. Reason in its more prosaic form (ratio in the Middle Ages, empiricism in the modern one) represents nature and the expectation to arrive at its telos out of its own resources. Love is the grace planted within nature; that which effects the necessary transformation; it is also nature’s (and reason’s) telos.
Yet one can also recognize a transcendent source in reason itself. Blaise Pascal has written,
From all material objects taken together no one can ever extract the tiniest thought. That is impossible; it is something belonging to a different order. Out of all material objects and all spirit no one can ever draw a movement of true charity; that too is impossible; it belongs to a different order, the supernatural order.4
Pascal affirms the supernatural source of both the human capacity to reason and its ability to be drawn by “true charity.” If he seems to put them on equal footing, he nonetheless affirms that they are so in an “order” beyond that to which we can attain out of our natural resources. Dante seems to say something very similar at the end of The Divine Comedy. As has been observed, “At that decisive instant ‘the Christian soul begs love to bring it beyond intelligence’; but then, in the transfiguration of all being which is consummated in God, love and intelligence are one.”5 Henri de Lubac here first accepts the formulation of Etienne Gilson, then deepens it.6
A Sensibility
This is not the place for sketching a history of the motif of love and reason and the bond between them in the development of modern culture, although another obvious highlight after courtly love is the one to which T.S. Eliot draws attention in his lectures on “the dissociation of sensibility.” That The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has dismissed Eliot’s terminology as “simple-minded”7 only confirms that contemporary cultural poetics is confronted by something very large in this trope with which it has difficulty coming to grips. Eliot gave those lectures not long before deciding that he too needed to find his place in Perfect Society. His early poetry confronts the Western tradition by insisting on the impossibility of reconciling what any modern person knows with desires by turns seedy and profound and, at any rate, inescapable. The opening lines of “Burnt Norton” turn to courtly love to affirm the possibility, at least, of their rapprochement, and to effect the further transposition of that medieval genre in terms of modern psychology and burgeoning discoveries in phenomenology and physics.
If something about the handling of the relationship between reason and love in the metaphysical poets is dissociated in modernity, the construct persists, with implicit recourse to the narrative and coherence of Perfect Society. Formulations range from the crass (“He’s thinking with his dick”) to the wry (“Schooled by love”), to the pithy (“the heart has its reasons”). They populate high and low culture alike. Shakespeare appeals to it (“Love talks with better knowledge …”), and modern mystics still do as well. Terry Eagleton has dragged it into literary theory to make a new case for objectivity, disinterestedness, and a revaluation of liberalism’s hallowed separation of facts and values. Confronting death in her forties, the brilliant Jewish sociologist Gillian Rose calls her memoir Love’s Work. She acknowledges the strangeness of what love accomplishes. The book is wrought out of her desperation that philosophy is abandoning rationality, which she perceives it can only do out of the resources of language, reason, and love. In it, she meditates on Camelot, like others invoking that medieval world of paradoxical courtly love, and in her dying days brave friends honour her by still suggesting to her further possibilities latent in that invocation.
The ubiquity of references to love-and-reason is a problem. Can there be anything to analyze when a trope is virtually omnipresent? Is it so clichéd as to be unilluminating, or so obvious that it offers very little to gnaw on? Then there is the problem of terms. Is love and reason the same as faith and reason? Perhaps not, since Simone Weil’s apothegm resonates: “Faith is the experience that intelligence is enlightened by love.”8 And what do we do with asseverations like the one in Bloodline, that “Baking is a science, cooking is intuition”?9 Science is metonymic for rationality: does intuition mean feeling and feeling, in turn, mean love? The construct gets at something similar to the ad for an exhibition at the Balloon Museum in London: “Emotion Air – Art You Can Feel.” The accompanying graphic depicts a man in a suit holding a balloon where his head should be, with a smiley face and the letters n and ē where his eyes should be.10 Love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them is easily dismissed in the call for exactness of terminology or appeals to historical particularity. Yet the allusions keep happening. They keep doing some sort of work.
Jean-Paul Sartre once expressed skepticism about moral codes on the grounds that they are difficult to apply uniformly in individual cases. To this, C.S. Lewis replied,
Obviously it is moral codes that create questions of casuistry, just as the rules of chess create chess problems. The man without a moral code, like the animal, is free from moral problems. The man who has not learned to count is free from mathematical problems. A man asleep is free from all problems.11
The idea of reason-and-love-and-the-bond-between-them as a trope is a generalization, just as the category of ethics is. As difficult as allusions to love and reason together can be to read in a way that allows one to describe a taxonomy, the work continues to be done with the expectation – obviously met on some level – that it will reach the audience and tell it something recognizable about art. We need a taxonomy. We need a hermeneutical consciousness. We need a lot of things.
Meanwhile, the examples of this trope keep coming, and they continue to do cultural work. The following excerpt from a murder mystery by Louise Penny, one of Canada’s leading writers in the genre, offers a pithy insight:
Not for the first time the retired psychologist wondered who’d decided to name that part of the body the temple. No doubt some man who worshipped information. Thinking that the brain was the temple where knowledge was housed.
But she knew, as did her companion, as did the dogs, and Gracie, trotting beside them, that anything worth knowing was kept in the heart.12
This meditation contrasts information with a different kind of knowing and in-forming. The first is housed in the brain, the latter in the heart. The first can be worshipped, and this is quite clearly misplaced worship, because “anything worth knowing” is kept not there but in the heart. The latter does not depend on expertise, as information often does. It can be gained by people of any age or professional status, women as well as men, and by animals too.
The passage offers an oblique critique of scientific modernity and of persistent patriarchal mores. It does something else, too. It contributes to the establishing of the writer’s (or the narrator’s, if you insist) credentials as a wise observer of human conduct and of history. The tone is gently ironic. In this way, the author makes a bid for her writing to be taken that little bit more seriously in that it offers not merely clever distraction but something more. The fiction aspires to the status of art. It is not surprising to learn, as we eventually do (spoiler alert), that the plot – the solving of an intellectual puzzle, the métier of the mystery novel – turns on the interpretation of a work of art.
An interview Yo-Yo Ma gave to Terry Gross achieves a similar feat of drawing the listening audience further into culture and promoting an understanding of it that trades on the relationship between reason and emotion.13 Ma expresses admiration for the role of rationality, but also recognizes its limits. He talks about reason in relation to emotion: the tension between them is again present in a discourse intended to educate non-specialists in the significance of art. Nonetheless, Ma instructively distinguishes between appealing to head and heart to “get it right” and the deeper reality of art in the infinite and in community, that is to say, in love.
Both Gross and Ma reach for the low-hanging fruit of reason and emotion to talk about art. Ma is famous partly as an interpreter of Bach’s Cello Suites. Bach has a reputation as a very mathematical musician, a technical genius. His Cello Suites, Gross presses, serve as technical pieces, and she wants to know how Ma draws musicality out of them, “making them beautiful” (4:16”). Beauty stands at a distance from technical know-how. Gross has established a binary, one which Ma both acknowledges and deepens.
The cellist leans into the role of rationality, emphasizing the importance of finding patterns and comparing making music to writing code: “Everything we have in life is about patterns: the same or different. We are constantly oscillating between the same and different” (7:10”)…. “Now, why is this beautiful?” (7:23), he continues. … “You actually get to code infinite variety” (9:15”). Ma is sharing very quickly and intuitively here. On the one hand, the expression “get to code” privileges the role of rational discipline. The notion of coding “infinite variety,” however, embeds the intellect in something other, and the combination can produce beauty: “why is this beautiful?”
The cellist seems to be pointing beyond pattern-making itself to a conception of art in which rationality is harnessed to the infinite. A rationalist might wish to claim that the coder masters variety, and some people are apparently tempted to restrict Bach’s achievement to such mastery, but Ma does not make this claim. Rather, he sees Bach as getting beyond mere rationality: “In a world where we can measure everything, or we think we can measure everything, how wonderful it is that you could have the poetry of music, or poetry, or music that actually makes you think you are touching infinity” (9:38”). Art unmasks the deception that measuring, a form of intellectual circumscription, accounts for everything. We need something more to encounter reality properly, which for Ma involves acknowledging and gesturing to the infinite. Art uncovers the reality of the latter: it makes it seem touchable.
Art creates the sense of “touching infinity.” Yet it would be hasty to equate this act with emotion. One can sense the exhilaration, the emotion, in the words Ma uses. He includes the emotions, but he is looking beyond a simple binary of reason and emotion. That binary becomes explicit when Gross encourages autobiographical reflection in her subject. Ma talks about his “tiger parents” (14:25”). He refers to “head and heart” explicitly as the contributions of his father and mother respectively. The two parents both contribute to “trying to get things right” (15:25”) in the education of their prodigy. Both parents contribute to something conceived as a closed system.
Significantly, Ma leaves an escape from this system in which he is implicitly boxed in by his parents. He asks: “But did I know why I was doing something, or what it was about?” (15:35). He is pointing towards something other. In retrospect, he discovers an escape from any system whatsoever. He comes to recognize an elsewhere beyond the effort “to get things right” in the exposure to a community of young people similarly gifted, each in their own area. They opened up worlds to one another through their geekish talent, focus, and discipline.
This interview illustrates a twofold movement in the love-and-reason construct. On the one hand, it is meant to explain everything. On the other, it makes apparent something else that transcends it. “Touching infinity” means more than achieving a perfect balance between reason and emotion; rather, it implies self-transcendence and the infinity of other people and the worlds they open up to one another in community. This is love, running on both a vertical and a horizontal axis.
Fascinatingly, love does not vanquish reason: we still get to code infinity, and the community (of artists) draws on the geekish focus and discipline of its members. Love goes beyond reason, but it does not move against it. Yet by saying that, in his case, head and heart combined in an attempt to “get it right,” Ma points to the danger of resting on head and heart as a system. Something lies beyond, something like encounter. Ma puts his finger on a perennial danger in the practice of art and in the explanation of its ways: reason always lurks to fold the other, to fold infinity, to fold love back into itself. Even if we call the otherness community, action, or encounter, our labels and our efforts at description indicate a ravenous rationality.
Who We are Now
Two very large issues press upon the construct of love-and-reason-and-the-bond-between-them to do work that it cannot do. This work jeopardizes the supremacy of love as inculcated in culture by Perfect Society. One is the paltry claim that art is subjective, where subjectivity is reduced to relativism and stripped of infinitely resonant personhood. One must distinguish between recognition of the deep subjectivity that recalls the relationship between nature and grace and the thin idea that the subject makes its own choices in untrammelled freedom. Pushed forward as the subversion of rational norms, this latter subjectivism is read into the construct of love and reason as the simplistic triumph of “Do what you want.” Feeling, embodiment, intuition, and imagination all serve as synonyms for a very narrow commitment to voluntarism in the face of the imposition of norms, the presence of authority, or the spectre of limits. The binary of love and reason, when treated without sensitivity and without reference to its history, obscures the potential richness of subjectivity, while subjectivism restricts the relationship between love and reason to the immanent domain and reduces both terms, but especially love, to a cartoon.
The other pressing issue, closely related to the first but displaying a different aspect, is the invocation of love as the objective point of reference without reference to the habits nurtured by apophasis. This tendency marks liberalism. It is to be accepted avant la lettre that love is roughly to be equated with the transcendence of revelation and authority, the unwillingness to acknowledge binding personal and corporate moral responsibility and brokenness, and above all the stubborn belief that reason, not love, is humanity’s greatest feature and source of achievement. Paradoxically, liberals invoke love to suppress rational debate. The decision has already been taken. Love is invoked as a universal, but rationality has already settled the issue. Love belongs in a quarantined realm to which liberalism has given the name “values.” Here love reigns supreme, and the presenting of reasons is frowned upon in aesthetic terms: as being in bad form, tone deaf, vulgar, insensitive, kitsch. In this way, liberalism mimics the apophatic God-talk of Perfect Society. But love isn’t supreme, decisions have been taken, and what’s left is a candy salad simulacrum of a civilizational order that pays homage to the arts. In a further irony, those who accept a fact/value split (the terms themselves must go) tacitly undermine art’s power. The construct of reason and emotion has been co-opted by liberalism to the end of opposing them and making love supreme, but at the expense of building up facts and values.
The critical mode of God-talk through the arts challenges the hegemony of love (and of art) in the recognition of love’s persistently deeper unsayability.
Love is not a victory march,
Leonard Cohen avers. The line echoes across the song. The one that follows,
It’s a cold and it’s a broken “Hallelujah!”
is easily misunderstood as a variation, however wry, on the theme of praise, an Arnoldian reduction of geistlich. In that misunderstanding, love survives intact, conceptualized, knowable: here is a song in praise of it. The enduring power of Cohen’s warning stems from its admission that it doesn’t comprehend love and can only trace where it’s been.
Except that it is a victory march after all, from the harrowing of hell to final glory. Negation from one end to the other, though much else besides. And not Dante especially to invoke as a guide, but many, many other poets too, and another medieval one as well, Langland, for a practical love worked out in the shadow of the tower of Truth.
Norm Klassen teaches in the English Department at St Jerome’s University and in the rhetoric program at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario.
The love itself is not in motion for that would imply an infinite regress, as logically unacceptable and unpleasing to Aristotle as the structure of DNA was to Crick and Watson before they discovered its double helix form.
KnT 2847–48.
KnT 2991–92.
Pensées, qtd in de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, 28–29.
De Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, 77–78, qtg Etienne Gilson.
De Lubac is one of the great twentieth-century spokespersons for supernatural finality. In A Brief Catechism on Nature and Grace, he repeatedly punctuates his remarks with references to love, both in his own words and through the commentators he cites. For instance, he quotes Maurice Blondel as saying, “‘Divine love has found the way to communicate what is incommunicable…. And to make us his, to make us over into himself, there is a trial, a transformation in love that must be suffered and willed’” (83, emphasis de Lubac’s). Elsewhere he writes, “Let us listen to St Bernard himself in one of his sermons on the Song of Songs. First he stresses, so as to avoid all confusion and to forestall all hubris on our part: ‘Not exactly equal in abundance flow a lover and Love, a spirit and the Word, a bride and the Groom, the Creator and a creature, the thirsty one and the Fountain;’ and yet, he continues, the reciprocity in unity is total; for, in fact, ‘if the creature loves less because it is less, nevertheless, if it loves from all of itself, there where everything is nothing is lacking’” (43–44, qtg Bernard of Clairvaux).
Preminger and Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1144.
Weil, Gravity and Grace.
Bloodline, S1E9.
Lewis, “On Ethics,” 56.
Penny, A World of Curiosities, 14.
“Yo-Yo Ma Says He’s Living His Best Childhood Now.” https://www.npr.org/2024/05/29/1197967745/yo-yo-ma.