from that boundless love of God which had superseded the Greek precept of "nothing in excess," teaching instead that no limit should be set on what was absolutely good. The principle of love unrestrained was thus inaugurated, and did not always turn to God. Ardent natures who felt love's power, might hold it as the supreme arbiter and law of life, and the giver of strength and virtue. These thoughts will shape the tale of Lancelot and myriad poems besides. They also may be found incarnate in the living instance: the heart of Heloise held a passion for her human master which she recognized as her highest law. It was such a passion as she would hardly have conceived but for the existence of like categories of devotion to the Christian God. Not in her nature alone, but through many Christian generations whereof she was the fruit, there had gone on a continual enhancement of capacities of feeling, for which she was a greater woman when she grew to womanhood and felt its passion. Through such heightening of her powers of loving, and through the suggestiveness of the Christian love of God, she could conceive and feel a like absolute devotion to a man.[1]
There were, moreover, partially humanized stages in which the love of God was affiliated with loves of mortal hue. Many a mediaeval woman felt a passionate love for the spiritual Bridegroom. Its expression, its suggestions, its training, might transmit power and passion to the love of very mortal men: while from the worship of the Blessed Virgin expressions of passionate devotion might pass over into poems telling man's love of woman. And what reaches of passion might not the Song of Songs suggest, although that imagined bridal of the Soul was never deemed a song of human love?[2]
- ↑ Post, Chapter XXV.
- ↑ The makers of love poems borrowed expressions from poems to the Virgin. Cf. Wilmanns, Leben und Dichtung Walter's Von der Vogelweide, p. 179. Touches of mortal passion sometimes appear in the adoration of men for the Blessed Virgin. See Caesar of Heisterbach, vii. 32 and 50, and viii. 58. Of course, many suggestions were drawn also from the antique literature. See post, Chapter XXXII. iv. The subject of courtly and romantic love will come up properly for treatment in Chapter XXIII.
