Of Love & Strife Part II
Christian polemics
Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa, vulnerasti cor meum in uno oculorum tuorum, et in uno crine colli tui.
No tradition has done more to shape how we think about love and marriage than Christianity. Its first task was to inherit and transform two legacies: the covenantal ’ahavah of Israel and the loaded concept of eros from the Classical World. Where the Stoics neutralized passion as perturbatio animi, an error of judgment to be disciplined by reason, the biblical tradition cast love as command—’ahavah, the demanded fidelity of Israel to its jealous God. Christianity seized both legacies and recast them: in Paul and John, agápē transcends both the Stoic’s pathology and the Hebrew’s exclusive covenant to become a universal principle—God’s self-giving love revealed in Christ.
The Weight of Love
In Israel’s scriptures, love is ’ahavah (אַהֲבָה): a word of covenant and fidelity. It is given shape in God’s jealous choice and in the command that binds Man to Him.
Deuteronomy speaks with absolute clarity:
וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ
בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ
וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ
וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ׃
Ve’ahavta êt Adonai Elohekha b’khol levavkha uv’khol nafshekha uv’khol me’odekha.
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might (Deut. 6:5).
Love here is imperative, a commanded orientation of the whole being. It binds Israel through divine election: “The LORD set his love upon you and chose you… because he loved your fathers and kept the oath he swore” (Deut. 7:7–8). To love is to remain faithful to the God who has claimed His people.
Thus Man stands as covenantal subject, defined by the bonds of loyalty and the command to devote himself wholly. Love secures kinship, neighborliness, and obedience under the jealous gaze of God. It is the axis of election and fidelity, the condition of belonging itself. In the fragile world of early Israel—scattered highland villages, small tribal confederations pressed between Egyptian garrisons, Philistine city-states, and Assyrian power—this commanded love was the nomos of solidarity. Kinship was the only bulwark against dissolution; to love God was to remain within the covenant that held clan to clan and tribe to tribe. To turn aside was not only impiety but betrayal of the community’s cohesion, the undoing of its fragile order, and the prophets dramatize this peril with erotic metaphor: Israel as the adulterous bride, Hosea’s harlot wife, Ezekiel’s lascivious allegories. Desire becomes the language of fidelity and its breach, binding the people into obedience. Love here is a principle of group survival, the pole of absolute loyalty against rivals both divine and political.
Paul writes into Rome—a world where law and citizenship claimed universality, and where philosophy disciplined desire into tranquillitas. Cicero and Seneca, heirs of the Stoics, had recoded eros as perturbatio animi, a pathology of judgment to be mastered. Affection, even within family, survived only as a “preferred indifferent”—acceptable, but never constitutive of happiness. Rome’s universalism was civic and rational, an empire of law and Logos.1
The covenantal ’ahavah of Israel, once jealous and exclusive, is transfigured into agápē. Where Stoics disciplined passion into tranquility, Paul proclaims a different love altogether: as the Spirit’s own life.
ὅτι ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ ἐκκέχυται ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν
the love of God has been poured into our hearts (Rom. 5:5).
Where Rome claimed unity through contract and law, Paul asserts a rival universality: a love that is patient, kind, bearing all things, the “more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31-13:13). In this redefinition, Man is recast as vessel of divine love, in whom agápē itself dwells and acts. His measure is participation in this love, poured into the heart, binding it into the new universality of Christ.
The Johannine stroke is still bolder:
ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν (1 Jn. 4:8).
Love is the very substance of God. With this, the term vaults from covenantal loyalty to metaphysical principle, echoing in some ways its classical cosmological nature. The divine is no longer jealous over one people, but disclosed as the ground of being itself.
The Church as Bride (Eph. 5:25–33) reuses the erotic covenantal imagery of Hosea and Ezekiel, but empties it of possession. The Bridegroom “gave himself up” for her: love is descent, and value created in the beloved, instead of jealous possession, demanded as fidelity. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Agápē is self-sacrifice universalized.
In this, the NT sets itself against both legacies it inherited. It breaks from the jealous exclusivity of Israel’s election, just as it breaks from the acquisitive striving of Plato’s eros. In their place it names agápē—universal descent, an unmerited gift, an overflowing, unbound love bestowed on Man.
The power claim is total. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28). In declaring itself custodian of this one love, the Church asserts a universality greater than blood, law, or philosophy. No longer Jew or Greek, nor philosopher striving for calm—Paul sees Man as a vessel, brimming with divine charity.
Yet Scripture itself preserved a dangerous remainder.2 Alongside commandments of covenant and the universality of agápē stood the Song of Songs—its opening cry: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love [dodêkha] is better than wine” (Song 1:2). The Hebrew here is dodim—the language of caress and belovedness, bodily and intimate, the register of lovers rather than tribes. Canonized in holy writ, it spoke with a frankness that refused easy assimilation into command or covenant. When carried into Greek, its imagery could not help but echo the field of erotic discourse—ardent, passionate, consuming, restless—pressing against the boundaries the tradition had tried to enforce. The text could not be ignored. Origen, in the third century, supplied the decisive hermeneutic: allegory. The Bride is the soul, the Bridegroom the Logos. What seems carnal is unveiled as mystical, the fire of dodim and the vocabulary of eros seized and reoriented towards God.
Desire, in Origen’s hands, was redeemed, its fire redirected, its restlessness transfigured into holy longing. The Song’s bodily register, dodim rendered through the Greek semantic field of eros, became material for theology so long as its object was Christ. Even the text of transmission bears the mark of this struggle. In the Latin version of Rufinus, words like amor and cupido are quietly softened into caritas. Rufinus himself admits the choice, preferring a “more respectable word”.3 The very vocabulary of love shows its scars: passion spiritualized, disciplined, made to serve as allegory rather than temptation.
Beneath this strategy lay Origen’s radical anthropology, a Platonism pressed to its limit. The body was provisional, destined to dissolve; sexual difference a temporary wound of the fall, not the soul’s true identity.4 Virginity stood as a “waxen seal” of original purity, a life already lived beyond the flesh. The rumor of his self-castration, whether history or legend, captures the logic: the body cut open so that desire itself might be wholly reoriented.
Thus eros appears as the soul’s own fire, lifted into an ascensional discipline. Origen takes the language of desire and binds it into the regimen of contemplation, so that passion becomes a force trained toward the divine. In this training he can speak with startling candor: eros and agápē are one motion, a sanctified amor whose truth lies in the soul’s longing for God.
From this redirected eros sprang the long tradition of nuptial mysticism, seizing bodily passion in its spiritualized form, an inheritance Augustine and the scholastics would later struggle to discipline by translating its ecstasy into the ordered hierarchies of ordo amoris and caritas.
When Scripture was reborn in Latin, translation itself became the vector of polemic—every choice of words across tongues an act of contest, where rival power claims meet and quarrels buried in language resurface.
Jerome, steeped in Virgil and the Roman elegists, knew that words carried entire worlds. In Letter 22 to Eustochium, he recalls how, even in the desert, Cicero’s cadences and Plautus’ jokes still rang in his mind, until a vision condemned him as a “Ciceronian, not a Christian.” For him, Rome’s letters echoed with rhythms he could not exorcise except through tears and fasting.
The problem was decisive: the New Testament’s agápē needed a Latin form. Amor was the obvious candidate, but it bore the weight of conquest, seduction, eroticism, and elegiac play. To sanctify it in Scripture would risk binding Christian love to the desires of the poets, and Jerome refused to let the pagan lexicon define the Christian soul.
He turned instead to another word, already in circulation but not overdetermined by verse. In his rendering of Paul’s hymn, the new idiom appears:
Caritas patiens est, benigna est… (1 Cor. 13:4)
Deus caritas est… (1 Jn 4:16)
Caritas, from carus (“precious, dear”), denoted esteem and devoted value. Unlike amor, it was pliable, unburdened by poetry. Jerome raised it into a technical term, the name of divine love infused by grace, and caritas thus resculpted Man as a soul dignified by grace, its power to love ordered into a cleaving to God and neighbor through divine infusion, rather than dispersed in Roman conquest or seduction.
Though Jerome acknowledged that amor, dilectio, and caritas could appear interchangeably in Scripture, his decision to render Paul’s hymn and John’s declaration with caritas rather than amor shows the polemical edge of his project: to distance Christian love from Rome’s erotic lexicon and fix caritas as the privileged name of divine charity.
The Vulgate thus set a boundary within the Latin tongue itself. Caritas became the Church’s word, the Latin analogue of agápē, carrying Paul’s universal love while sealing it off from Roman amor. Through it, Man was reimagined: no longer trapped in the cycle of desire sung by the elegists, but reconstituted as vessel of theological virtue. In a society where aristocratic marriage was fragile contract and erotic poetry the badge of culture, Jerome’s choice furnished the ascetic elite with a new word, and with it, a new identity. Translation was theology, but also social discipline: the creation of a counter-lexicon to sustain a counter-order.
Jerome had cut open the lexical space, but the incision remained raw, the new word still exposed, its meaning fragile and unstable: a language without structure wavers. The next move belonged to Augustine, who set out to give this new word a body—to bind the flux of human longing into the ordered weight of the soul.
He gave it form by setting it within a new polarity: caritas and cupiditas.
Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror
My love is my weight; by it I am carried wherever I am carried (Confessions XIII.9).
Augustine’s use of amor is striking: where Jerome had set it aside, Augustine makes it the soul’s very gravity, one force divided only by its end. Caritas is the upward weight toward God, cupiditas the downward drag into self and world—the same energy, ordered or perverted.
In De Doctrina Christiana he translates this into the language of use and enjoyment; only God is to be enjoyed (frui); all else is to be used (uti) to reach blessedness. To “enjoy” a creature is to cling to it as ultimate, to turn good things into idols. Man is not first and foremost rational but loving; the ordo amoris is the order of life itself: “definitio breuis et vera uirtutis ordo est amoris” (De civitate Dei XV.22).
The polemical edge is triple. Against the Stoics, he rejects apatheia, the dream of erasing passion: caritas is not calm but ardor, “a burning love of God” (ardor caritatis), affect transfigured under order. Against Neoplatonic ascent—the ego straining upward through eros—he opposes a Love that descends, grace perfecting the soul from above. Against the Manichaeans, who despised the body and saw sex as the transmission of evil, he insists on creation’s goodness. In De bono coniugali he defines the three goods of marriage; proles (offspring), fides (fidelity), sacramentum (indissoluble bond). If bodies were evil, there could be no bonum prolis, no sacramental coniugium.
By calling desire cupiditas only when mis-ordered, he refuses the Manichaean collapse of all amor into evil. There, sex would have been a motion of the members commanded by the will. But after the Fall, concupiscence, the flesh’s involuntary stirring, marks the wounded will. It is a wound grace alone can heal. Against Pelagius and Julian, he insists that discipline is not enough; true caritas must be infused from above.5
In De Civitate Dei Augustine finally names its order: the ordo amoris. Two cities, Augustine writes, are founded by two loves: “terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, caelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui (XIV.28). The earthly city rises from self-love to the contempt of God; the heavenly city from the love of God to the contempt of self. Love now vaults beyond private inclination, beyond scriptural term or lexical maneuver, to become the very principle that orders the soul and all of history; caritas ceases to be a fragile word, hardening into structure, the gravitational field in which human life and human polities take shape. To love rightly is to be drawn upward into God, to love wrongly is to build Babel, the city of pride. In his hands, the vocabulary of love breathes life into a new order, binding Man and empire alike to the axis of divine desire.
Contract, Possession, Sacrament
Marriage in the early Church was civil war—Scripture against custom, law against desire, the body itself dragged into the fight. Roman civilian and Germanic folk norms pulled the other way: the former tolerated divorce and recognized concubinatus; the latter often treated union as sexual possession dissoluble at a man’s will—frames the Church would contest for centuries. Against Greco-Roman and Germanic notions, the Church pressed: sacramentum (indissoluble bond), consensus (present-tense consent suffices), monogamy/exogamy, and sex ranked to proles and remedy for fornicatio.6
In the Roman frame, repudium was light-touch—before witnesses, often unilateral, routine among the propertied and elites. The result was obvious: elite natality collapsed, concubinage flourished, marriage was a dissoluble convenience. Against this civic laxity, Ambrose (340–397 AD) struck: repudium as a social disease, a class consuming heirs instead of producing them. Where ius civile unraveled unions by will, he invoked a higher ordinance—divine law—so contractus yielded to sacramentum: “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6). Christian emperors vacillated. Constantine (c. 272–337 AD) criminalized bigamy and barred uxor et concubina, while Theodosius II (c. 401–450 AD) allowed divorce by mutual consent with swift remarriage. Augustine (354–430 AD) pressed the opposite grammar. Sacramentum meant unbreakable, even while conceding the civil forum still dissolved what the Church could not. Justinian’s (c. 482–565 AD) Novels circle this fault line, oscillating between the rigor of moralists and the ease of custom, never quite daring to embrace indissolubility outright.7
The Fathers had bent love. Paul’s agápē, Origen’s transfigured eros, Jerome’s caritas. But marriage still hung between concession and ideal. Jurists stabilized coniugium as a distinct state: licit sex, inheritance, and kinship rights within a Christian ordo, explicitly distinguishing it from non-marital intercourse and from poetic amor. Ends split: canonists spoke the salvific idiom, souls, signs, sacrament, while lay practice, especially among elites, treated marriage as instrument: dowry, landholding, office, peace between houses.
Jerome supplied one extreme view of marriage. In Adversus Jovinianum (c. 393) he sharpened Paul’s concession into dogma: marriage replenishes the earth, virginity fills Paradise. Virginity was apex; marriage a remedium concupiscentiae. His metaphors were merciless: marriage silver, virginity gold; even Eden knew no intercourse. Concupiscence loosed only at the Fall.
Augustine, on the other hand, gave the volatile field its first durable structure. In De bono coniugali he defined the bona matrimonii: proles (offspring), fides (mutual fidelity), sacramentum (indissoluble bond). From the twelfth century, canonists consolidated this into sacramentum, seizing jurisdiction over marriage and re-sacralizing what Roman law had treated as civil pact.
Concubinatus, tolerated by Roman law, became a perpetual irritant, something the Fathers denounced but never eliminated.8 Early Christians moved ambivalently: Hippolytus (c. 170–236 AD) urged dismissal and marriage; Calixtus I (c. 217 to 222 AD) allowed quasi-marital cohabitation when civil law blocked a wedding; bishops long treated a bachelor’s una concubina loco uxoris as a lesser wrong. Moralists, Augustine included, interpreted it as fornicatio continua, while pastors like Caesarius (c. 468–542 AD) admitted it was too common to excise by mass excommunication.9
The contest did not stop with pagan custom or imperial edict. Secular forums—royal, comital, urban—refused to disappear when the Church claimed marriage as sacrament. Property, dowry, succession remained under civic control, so from the start Europe lived with a divided jurisdiction: one tribunal guarding validity and indissolubility coram Deo, another reshaping unions coram rege. A marriage might be declared eternal in heaven even as it was unstitched on parchment.
Faced with this dissonance, canonists developed a double grammar, and on one side stood consensus facit nuptias, the contract, the spoken word of consent, which allowed courts to recognize or unmake individual unions, while on the other side stood sacramentum, the indissoluble sign of Christ’s fidelity, which anchored the Church’s claim to govern marriage as a sacred sphere. Law became a two-handed instrument; one hand agile in adjudicating cases, the other heavy in asserting jurisdictional supremacy.10
Alexander III (pontificate 1159–1181) closed the gate on divorce by declaring that verba de praesenti created a binding and irretractable union, whether or not consummation followed. In practice, ratum sed non consummatum marriages could be dissolved by papal dispensation. Lateran IV (1215) narrowed the degrees of kinship that barred a match and required banns to tame secrecy. Trent, with Tametsi (1563), went further still: where promulgated, clandestine vows, once valid though illicit, became null unless made before priest and witnesses.11
Even here, the system betrayed its own tension. The same texts that exalted virginity (virginitas aurum) nonetheless tolerated marriage as remedium concupiscentiae. The same insistence on consent as sacramental hinge often functioned as legal fiction, since infants might be pledged when dynastic calculus required. Consanguinity, first expanded to absurd breadth, then curtailed, provided a lever for discipline and a revenue stream in dispensations. And feudal incidents, such as wardship, merchet, the economics of land and dowry, all ensured that “free consent” was never truly free.
What emerges is a regime of high claims and pragmatic adjustments: a doctrinal edifice of love transfigured into caritas, marriage sealed as sacrament, yet always hedged by procedures, dispensations, and fiscal interests. The semantic field of indissolubility gave the Church its jurisdiction, but the grammar of contract allowed endless casuistry, and between them, the civil war over marriage was stabilized, but never fully resolved.
Social Realities
Outside schools and courts, marriage met a rougher terrain. As Brundage and McCarthy show, villages counted marriage by cohabitation and witness, aristocrats by dowry and alliance, and towns by public order.1213 Urban statutes on brothels, adultery, and marriage formalities codified the tension. Families maneuvered overlapping jurisdictions—church policing validity, secular courts property—so a union could be valid before God yet voidable before the king. The field was perpetual negotiation: theology declaring mystery, law demanding procedure, households insisting on survival.
Among peasants, what bound a couple was spoken word and shared bed, while handfastings persisted, forcing courts to treat them as valid yet illicit—adjudicated on villagers’ testimony rather than priestly record. The consent maxim ironically underwrote this folk practice: villagers already assumed sex and settlement made the marriage real, and the doctrine of consensus gave private vows juridical bite. Courts managed the tension pragmatically, upholding validity to prevent bigamy while punishing defective form with fines or penance. In Anglo-Ireland clandestine marriages endured despite repeated condemnation.
Evidentiary quarrels multiplied around recollections, staged witnesses, and rival pre-contracts, and now case illustrates both jurisdictional reach and evidentiary limits than the Florentine cause of Giovanni and Lusanna (1453–55): an archiepiscopal court accepted ring, words, and repute; Rome reversed; jurisdiction secured, proof snarled.14
Women exploited the mixed forum. They invoked metus et vis and error personae to annul coerced or mistaken unions; pleaded fides against concubinage; demanded the debitum coniugale to curb desertion; sought separatio a mensa et thoro for saevitia; and recovered dowries on repudium. They also staged de praesenti vows to resist arrangements or void unwanted betrothals.15 At the edges of Christendom the gap widened: Icelandic law long allowed divorce for causes as slight as a public slap.16
For nobles, marriage was charter before sacrament, an instrument of dynasty sealed by dowries and inheritances. Royal chancelleries and city statutes notarialized betrothal, dower, and dowry, giving marriage civil weight through contracts and archives as much as through liturgy, while consent, the theological cornerstone, often only functioned as legal fiction, and infants were pledged when estates hung in the balance, while dispensations greased consanguinity hurdles.17
Concubinatus offered a recognized alternative: stable cohabitation outside sacrament. Roman law had long tolerated it; medieval lordships and towns often recognized it socially. In Gaelic polities, acknowledged paternity could outweigh canonical legitimacy, giving “concubines” near-wife standing and their children near-equal rights. Civilian jurists such as Bartolus and Odofredus treated concubinage as a tolerated quasi-marriage: no sacrament, yet a legible union with attenuated effects in matters like succession and dowry return.
The sharpest fracture ran through the clergy. Though councils outlawed priestly marriage, episcopal visitations across Europe repeatedly found clerics living with women publice. Early ferocities gave way to fines, suspensions, and orders to dismiss; governance managed the breach rather than eradicated it. Parishioners often regarded such households as ordinary; bishops called them illicit; canon law erased the children. Proclaimed as the badge of spiritual authority, celibacy nonetheless proved porous, producing a shadow order of clerical families.18
Marriage in the medieval West lived in two registers, policed by dual forums. In the scholastic and canonical idiom, it was sacramentum—an indissoluble, salvific sign. But in the secular forum and in lay practice, it was alliance, contract, and convenience, a transaction of property and lineage.
Canonists legitimated children by subsequent marriage (legitimatio per subsequens matrimonium); English common law refused. The same child could be heir in foro ecclesiae and bastard in civic court. Mothers leveraged legitimatio to secure status—salvific language turned legal strategy.
The Church’s definitions operated less as universal order than as symbolic capital. Bishops wielded indissolubility to block unions; nobles traded dispensations for alliances; peasants relied on handfasting custom; priests kept households. Shadow forms—repudium, concubinatus diuturnus—persisted alongside charters and contracts.
Romantic, passionate love, and marriage, rarely coincided in practice. Among nobles, unions were dynastic instruments; among peasants, economic necessity and communal order weighed heavier than affection. The canonist maxim that “consent makes marriage” gave couples a tool, but mostly as strategy against coercion or to secure legitimacy, instead of romance.19 When medieval culture spoke of love as passion, it was usually outside marriage, as we shall see with troubadours and mystics, while popular tales set desire at odds with sacrament.
Marriage remained contract and sacrament, and was never simply imposed, remaining a contested terrain, a battleground where affection, property, lineage, and salvation were bound together yet constantly pulled apart. Idealized love found its stage elsewhere.
The Scholastic Fortress of Love
By the thirteenth century the vocabulary of love had been honed by polemic. Aquinas entered a different age, where universities and disputations demanded system. Armed with the rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle, Philosophus, and to calm the Augustinian terror of desire, Aquinas synthesized a new cosmological frame, where every being moves toward its good through desire, a natural movement, ordered and elevated by grace; the task was no longer to fight the legacy of pagan eros but to absorb it into architecture.
In the Summa Theologiae:
Ipsa autem aptitudo sive proportio appetitus ad bonum est amor, qui nihil aliud est quam complacentia boni
And this very aptitude or proportion of the appetite to good is love, which is complacency in good (ST I–II, q.25, a.2).
From this complacency flow desire (desiderium) and joy (gaudium). Love is the most basic inclination of any appetite, natural or rational: stones fall, fire rises, the will seeks the good. By making amor the morally indifferent inclination of any appetite, Thomas de-polemizes Augustine’s binary at the level of psychology: natural affections (family, civic, aesthetic) are not ipso facto cupiditas, but matter for order under reason and grace, the first motion of being toward its fulfillment.
He then distinguishes: “Addit enim dilectio supra amorem, electionem praecedentem, ut ipsum nomen sonat.” (ST I–II, q.26, a.3)—dilectio implies choice; it belongs to the will. Moral appraisal shifts from passion to electio: vice lies in mis-choice, not in movement as such. At the summit stands caritas: “amicitia hominis ad Deum”—“friendship of man for God” (ST II–II, q.23, a.1), an infused friendship orienting all loves to their end, securing Augustine’s claim that true love of God exceeds created powers. Thomas parses Paul by distinguishing amor concupiscentiae and amor amicitiae: caritas is the latter—loving God (and neighbor in God) for God’s sake—while acknowledging that every love arises from amor sui ordered to beatitudo in God. Gratia non tollat naturam, sed perficiat (ST I, q. 1, a. 8): grace perfects, no destroys, nature; caritas perfects, not erases, natural loves; jurists mirror this humanly with affectio maritalis, a tempered friendship inside coniugium.
Marriage sits within a broader theological and natural framework. Augustine identified its principal goods; Aquinas further integrates these into natural law by emphasizing the primary end of marriage as the procreation and education of offspring. Fidelity disciplines concupiscence into mutual obligation, while the sacrament elevates the conjugal bond beyond mere contract. As Aquinas explains, marriage is a sign of the union of Christ and the Church (ST Suppl., q. 49, a. 2). Concupiscence itself is a tendency (fomes) rather than sin unless consented to, making marriage both a remedium and bonum naturae.
Aquinas presupposes the juristic turn: the efficient cause of marriage is consensus; consummation perfects the bond; coitus without consensus is mere concubinage. (Post–Alexander III the courts center consent for validity and treat consummation as what renders a ratified marriage absolutely indissoluble.) Civil lawyers’ affectio maritalis—continuing marital intention—sits alongside consent as a forensic signal for sorting marriage from concubinage when facts are messy. This maps onto Thomas’s triad: consensus as an act of dilectio (rational choice), sustained by fides as habit, and—when grace elevates—perfused by caritas; cupiditas is domesticated.
What Roman law treated as dissoluble pact, and what Jerome tolerated as concession, becomes in Aquinas both natural institution and supernatural mystery. Man is a rational creature whose desires can be traced, ordered, directed—ordo amoris is the universal order. Sin is misplacement of love; grace, its rectification. What Augustine wielded as two-city polemic becomes metaphysics: the same ordo amoris is now the deep grammar of nature and grace, stabilizing practice rather than fighting a war of terms.
Outside the schools, Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore strikes a discordant note, insisting that amor cannot thrive within marriage; spouses may feel affection or “immoderate affection” for one another, but true courtly amor is generally considered impossible between husband and wife; amor is extramarital, secret, tied to ideals of longing and ennoblement. Dante, as we shall see, schooled by Thomas, distinguishes amor naturale (instinctive pull toward God) and amor razionale (fallible choice), recognizing that even conjugal or filial love corrupts when it usurps caritas.
With Aquinas, the medieval semantic project reaches its most durable form. Less fiery than Jerome, less dramatic than Augustine, but more total: Thomas systematizes Augustine (grace-given caritas), clarifies him (will-based dilectio), and cools the heat (value-neutral amor), translating a polemical field into a scholastic architecture. By the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries the legal grammar is fixed—coniugium formed by consensus, elevated as sacramentum, policed against cupiditas, ideally suffused by amicitia—while poets and mystics answer with rival lexicons. The same words drift across regimes of truth, law, lyric, contemplation, carrying different imperatives in each.
Love & Marriage in the East
While the Latin West moved toward a rigid legal and sacramental definition, struggling against the remnants of the Classical World and the customs of Germanic tribes, the Greek East developed a more flexible pastoral grammar, a difference encapsulated in the terms oikonomia and mystērion. The vocabulary signals a different anthropology—Man as God’s co-worker, nature as curable, law as medicine rather than sentence. The East, bound to empire in symphōnia rather than rivalry, never faced the same polemic as the West—and so could let discipline bend toward healing.
Oikonomia—household stewardship—is the key term. In tension with akribeia (strictness), it names the pastoral freedom to bend the letter for the sake of healing. Indissolubility is the norm under akribeia, but when a marriage has already collapsed, bishops invoke oikonomia: not to deny the mystērion of the first bond, but to refuse the fiction of its survival. Hence the graduated rites: the first marriage crowned in joy, the second permitted as a concession, the third grudgingly endured, the fourth forbidden.20
The East holds opposites in suspension. Parish priests may marry; bishops must be celibate. The logic is typological: the priest as witness embedded in household and village, the bishop as eschatological sign, freed from the ties of kin. A married man chosen as bishop would often part from his wife, she taking vows as a nun.
Byzantine governance likewise fused nomos and canon into the Nomokanon: empire and church legislating marriage together, and Justinian’s code catalogued legitimate separations; later synods (notably Quinisext) confirmed the married parish clergy but demanded episcopal continence. Unlike in the Latin West, jurisdiction never hardened into a church monopoly. The empire itself imagined law and liturgy as the two hands of divine rule.21
The mystics pressed this language still further, with figures such as Gregory of Nyssa reading marriage as a school of detachment and ascent; Maximus seeing agápē as the creature’s natural movement toward God, with eros naming its purified dynamism, and in this register of synergeia, divine initiative and human longing interweave. Eros is a created power ordered to deification, while agápē is its form once healed. Mystērion gathers both—transfigurative ritual.22
Thus the East refuses both contempt for the temporal and its absolutization. Marriage and celibacy are two economies of the same end: the Kingdom glimpsed either by renouncing ties (akribeia of virginity) or by sanctifying them (oikonomia of wedlock). These categories are fluid instruments of therapeia, not rigid laws of stone.
The Sovereignty of Desire
While theologians built a fortress of caritas and canonists codified marriage as sacramentum, their official order of love could not contain the energies it sought to tame. From outside the schools and courts, two powerful counter-languages arose, each proposing a rival sovereignty for desire. From the castles of Occitania and Champagne, poets of fin’amor forged a secular liturgy of passion, recasting feudal vassalage as erotic devotion. Simultaneously, from the cloisters and béguinages of the Rhineland and Flanders, mystics reclaimed eros as the very voice of God in the soul. Both movements, in their own ways, performed a radical inversion: they made love sovereign.
The same contests played out not only in treatises but in ritual. Carolingian dotal charters cast marriage as a sacred contract of caritas, while nuptial liturgies balanced sex and chastity with the noctes Tobiae—wedding nights of abstinence by which desire was ritually lifted into a higher register.23
Poets almost never spoke sacramentum, yet they poached its ethos: the lover’s oath bore the weight of sacred bond even as it defied the Church’s claim that only marriage could seal such ties. Mystics translated sacrament into symbol—“mystical marriage” rather than juridical contract.
Beguines, invoking vita apostolica and caritas, justified chaste communal life without vows or enclosure; a lay perfection in monastic idiom, yet beyond clerical control.
By the twelfth century the societas christiana stood on a double hierarchy, feudal and ecclesiastical:
God → Christ → Church → marriage → family → community
Emperor/King → law → marriage → property → polity
Desire was to be domesticated under sacrament; Augustine’s ordo amoris subordinated eros and amor to caritas, and canon law bound it into the indissoluble knot of marriage. The knight’s oath was for his lord, the wife’s fidelity for her husband, the heart for God, Love a force to be mastered.
Yet women quietly reversed the flow. The title sponsa Christi outweighed paternal or marital command, letting virgins and wives claim enclosure, travel, or almsgiving as obedience not to men but to the heavenly Bridegroom.
It is against this backdrop that Bernart de Ventadorn sings, in Pel doutz chan que.l rossinhols fai:
Pel doutz chan que.l rossinhols fai,
La noih can me sui adormitz,
Revelh de joi totz esbaitz,
D'amor pensius e cossirans!
C'aisso es mos melher mesters,
Que tostems ai joi volunters,
Et ab joi comensa mos chans.
Par le doux chant que fait le rossignol
La nuit, lorsque je me suis endormi,
Je me réveille tout ébahi de joie,
Songeur et soucieux d’amour ;
Car c’est là ma suprême vocation.
À tout moment, j’accueille volontiers la joie,
Et par la joie commence ma chanson.
The nightingale’s sweet plaintive air
When I have fall’n asleep at night
Wakes me, with joy bewildered quite,
Thinking of love and pondering.
And better I could not employ
Myself, for ever I’ve loved joy,
And I begin with joy to sing.
Here jois sheds its older skins. The Stoic pertubatio animi, the covenantal caritas are left behind, and it is reborn as mester: best task, a vocation. Desire, once pathology or concession, is elevated into a telos in its own right.
Fin’amor achieves this by plundering older tongues: the elemental eros of Hesiod and Sappho, the Roman amor of oath and conquest, the Christian idiom of sacramentum and Augustine’s polarity of caritas and cupiditas. Yet the troubadour bends these inheritances into something unprecedented. Jois becomes melher mester: infatuation exalted as a calling, passion reimagined as destiny.
Domna, vostre sui e serai,
Del vostre servizi garnitz.
Vostr' om sui juratz e plevitz ,
E vostre m'era des abans.
E vos etz lo meus jois primers,
E si seretz vos lo derrers,
Tan com la vida m'er durans.
Dame, vôtre je suis et serai,
Entièrement à votre service.
Je suis votre homme par ma parole et ma foi,
Et je fus vôtre depuis toujours.
Vous êtes ma première joie,
Vous serez aussi la dernière,
Aussi longtemps que durera ma vie.
Lady, my arms for you I bear,
And e’er for you shall they be borne.
I am your vassal pledged and sworn
And evermore henceforth will be.
For first of all my joys are you,
And you shall be my last joy too,
As long as life remains to me.
The troubadour seizes the Church’s own language of sacrament and homage. His oath of vassalage to the Lady—vostr’ om sui juratz e plevitz—mimics the sacramentum fidelitatis binding knight to lord or soul to God, but bends its gravity toward illicit passion. In swearing himself her man, sworn and pledged, he commits a double treason—against altar and throne alike—redeploying allegiance from king, God, and lawful spouse into the exclusive bond of desire. The Church’s jealous economy of fidelity is inverted, its hierarchy undone from within. What had been the skeleton of the societas christiana becomes the scaffolding of another polity: a hidden civitas amoris.
Stanza VI intensifies the defection:
No sai coras mais vos veirai!
Mas vau m'en iratz e maritz.
Per vos me sui del rei partitz,
E prec vos que no.m sia dans,
Qu'e.us serai en cort prezenters
Entre domnas e chavalers,
Francs e doutz et umilians.
Je ne sais quand je vous reverrai
Mais je m’en vais quoiqu’irrité et meurtri.
Pour vous, je suis parti du roi,
Et je vous prie qu’il ne m’en advienne aucun dommage
Puisque pour vous je me rendrai à la cour,
Entre dames et chevaliers,
Sincère et doux et humble.
I know not when again or where
We’ll meet; I leave you sorrowing;
For your sake I have left the King,
But pray to you this may not mean
A loss to me, for you shall find
Me humble, generous, and kind
At court with knights and dames, I ween.
The Church had labored to make marriage the axis of obedience, binding desire to sacrament and aligning household with altar. The Crown, for its part, demanded loyalty through the oath of fealty. Bernart’s voice breaks from both lines at once. Per vos me sui del rei partitz—“for you I have left the King.” The service he claims is concentrated on the Lady. What begins as erotic devotion acquires a political edge: homage itself is seized and redirected. The very formula of vassalage is transposed, from King and God, into key of passion. In that act the old hierarchies are subverted, their sacred gravity bent into a new allegiance. From this inversion arises a third order of love, a civitas amoris, exclusive and fervent, neither Augustine’s civitas Dei nor the civitas terrena, but a polity of passion that utters its vows in the shadow of the Church yet claims a sovereignty under the guise of sacrament.
The logic of Bernart’s fin’amor takes narrative flesh in Chrétien de Troyes. What Bernart sang as an oath—vostr’ om juratz e plevitz—Chrétien stages as story: what does it mean to obey Love against all other claims? The Charrette answers by dramatizing the moment when knightly honor collapses before the command of passion.
Li chevaliers… voit un nain…
— Nains, fait il, por Deu ! car me di
Se as veu passer par ci
Passer ma dame la Reine ?
…Se tu vels monter
Sur la charete…
Savoir porras jusqu’à demain
Que la Reine est devenue.
…Mal le fìst ; mar ì douta honte.
Mès raison, qui d’amor se part,
Li dit que de monter se gart…
Mès amors est el cuer enclose,
Qui li comande et semont
Que tost sor la charete mont.
Lancelot, seeking Guinevere, is told by the dwarf: only if he mounts the cart of shame will he learn her fate. Reason warns him to hold back; shame will follow. Yet Amors est el cuer enclose—Love enclosed in his heart—and he mounts. Amors, descended from Vergilian conquest and elegiac wit, the troubadours had already resemanticized as vocation, a sovereign claim of the heart that sets itself against the hierarchies of caritas and cupiditas; Chrétien makes that vocation the drama of the cart.
The cart was the mark of infamy, criminals paraded for derision. To ride it was to renounce honor, to stain knighthood. In Chrétien’s telling this disgrace becomes proof: what feudal and ecclesiastical order condemned as cupiditas is transfigured into the very seal of devotion.
The contrast is sharpened by Gawain’s refusal:
Car trop vil eschange feroie
Sé charete à cheval chanjoie.
I would make too vile an exchange, trading horse for cart.
Gawain embodies the old order, where honor and reputation are supreme. Lancelot enacts the new: honor redefined as fidelity to the Lady’s command.
When townsfolk mock and jeer—“li vieillart, et li enfant… par les rues à moult grant hui”—Chrétien turns their scorn into narrative exaltation. Shame, universally perceived, becomes the mark of greatness.
The parody is theological. The cart functions as grotesque anti-sacrament. Where the Church demanded the indissoluble coniugium as proof of caritas, Lancelot proves his fidelity by ritual disgrace: Love commands precisely where reason and canon forbid; the sacred vow is inverted into scandal.
Here the troubadour’s hidden civitas amoris emerges as world. Love, adulterous and consuming, becomes the axis of a new order, Guinevere is no longer wife-as-sacrament but Lady-as-sovereign, rival to the Church’s Christ-Bridegroom, and the cart is the stage of this rival anthropology: Reason counsels law, Love commands shame, the knight obeys Love.
Chrétien leaves irony intact—the shame never disappears—but even irony serves the polemic. It destabilizes Augustine’s ordo amoris, exposing amor as folly and salvation at once. What Bernart declared—per vos me sui del rei partitz—Chrétien dramatizes: for you I leave king, law, and honor itself.
If the troubadours stylized passion as feudal homage, Tristan et Iseut24 exposes its abyss. What Bernart could veil as vassalage, as chosen fidelity, the legend strips bare as seizure: love is drunk, endured, imposed, subjected.
On shipboard, a servant finds the fatal vessel:
Non, ce n’était pas du vin: c’était la passion, c’était l’âpre joie et l’angoisse sans fin, et la mort.
The hanap becomes a parody of the chalice: what should communicate grace now enslaves. Eucharist dissolves into pharmakon, sacrament into spell. Caritas yields to delirium, and Plato’s daimōn reappears in its archaic guise: possession, seizure, affliction. Behind it flickers Sappho’s glukúpikron, eros as bittersweet violence, the force that bends body against will.
When they name their bond, they reach again for the language of homage. Tristan:
Ne suis-je pas votre homme lige, votre vassal, pour vous révérer, vous servir et vous aimer comme ma reine et ma dame?
Iseut replies:
Tu es mon seigneur et mon maître! Tu sais que ta force me domine et que je suis ta serve!
The feudal grammar of contract is mirrored and reversed—homme lige, seigneur, serve—as shared captivity. Bernart’s voluntary vow has curdled into necessity: love no longer chosen but borne.
The scandal lies in its very condition. Isolde is already bound to Mark by sacrament, the indissoluble sign of Christ and Church. Canonists would brand her new bond cupiditas; and yet, the romance crowns it as nobility, fidelity proven through transgression.
The potion dramatizes this inversion. A blasphemous Eucharist, it substitutes “l’âpre joie et l’angoisse sans fin” for the blood of Christ. The feudal sacramentum fidelitatis—binding knight to king, soul to God—reappears in Tristan’s avowal, but its weight falls at Isolde’s feet. The Church’s jealous chain is cracked: homage migrates to the Lady, who becomes sovereign.
Troubadour song arose in courts like Aquitaine and Provence, where feudal power was fractured and women patrons held unusual sway. They did not invent desire—infatuation is a biological human universal—but they did invent Love as a cultural form: an ideal of passionate devotion pursued for its own sake.
By redirecting the language of homage to the Lady, poets staged a soft rebellion against both king and Church: fidelity no longer measured by public oaths, or sacrament, but by secret devotion. This gave knights a new arena of honor when war was scarce, elevated female sovereignty within the court, and set vernacular culture against Latin clerical monopoly. In this gesture fin’amor reaches beyond metaphor. The civitas amoris takes shape as a rival order, sustained by passion elevated to principle, whispered in the shadow of throne and altar.
The troubadours had inverted the feudal idiom, Chrétien staged dishonor as fidelity, Tristan exposed eros as pharmakon, a binding stronger than covenant. Dante receives all this, but he inherits it through Aquinas. By the thirteenth century, the scholastic fortress had stabilized the lexicon: Augustine’s polarity of caritas and cupiditas had been inscribed as a taxonomy of appetites, with amor as neutral inclination, dilectio as rational choice, and caritas as infused friendship with God. Desire no longer threatened to collapse language; it had been ordered into a system. This cooling of the polemic gave Dante room to re-baptize the troubadour idiom into theology.
The Vita nuova begins with a vision: Beatrice, nine years old, appears, and Dante’s body trembles.
Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi
Behold, a God stronger than I, who comes to rule me.
Love here is sovereignty (signoreggiare), lordship of the soul. The Augustinian grammar of dominion and the troubadour idiom of vassalage converge, yet the end is transfigured:
Apparuit jam beatitudo vestra
Now your beatitude has appeared.
Beatrice is Lady, but also beatitudo, salvation. What Bernart called jois as vocation, Dante remakes as blessedness.
D’allora innanzi dico ch’Amore signoreggiò l’anima mia
From that moment on, Love lorded over my soul.
The lover’s oath survives, its edge tempered into ascent. The feudal pledge now signals fidelity raised toward the divine. Amor, once figured as seizure and compulsion, appears as caritas, ordered desire. The Lady mediates this passage, the figure through whom love becomes transparent to God.
The process culminates in the Paradiso. Beatrice lifts her gaze to the eterne rote, and Dante, gazing on her, is transformed:
Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fé Glauco nel gustar dell’erba
che ’l fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi.
As Glaucus, tasting the grass, became a consort among the gods, so I was changed within by gazing on her.
Her beauty functions as sacrament of metamorphosis; Dante coins trasumanar, to pass beyond the human, for what the troubadours had only half-perceived.
With him, the parody of sacrament becomes its fulfillment. The lover’s vow of vassalage is no longer a theft from the Church but a channel through which the very movement of desire is raised into theology. The civitas amoris ceases to be a rival city of passion and appears instead as an annex of the civitas Dei: Love itself revealed as the form of beatitude.
Lordship of Love
From oath to cart to potion to trasumanar, the lyric and romance traditions forged a counter-idiom: jois exalted as vocation, homage bent to the Lady, shame transfigured into proof, passion suffered as pharmakon, and at last Dante’s ascent where amor becomes caritas. The feudal lexicon and the biblical one now sat on the same bench; sovereignty, fidelity, blessedness entered a shared semantic field.
This fused tongue, born in the courts, would find its most radical expression in the cloister. The mystics seized it, turning the outward drama of vassalage into an interior war of the soul.
Sponsa Christi recasts vassalage as interior fealty; the Song’s kisses, wounds, and liquefactions become pedagogy of ascent; caritas is no longer cold command but ardor, eros disciplined as longing for God. Beguines and Cistercians take the troubadour’s pledge and transpose it into interior governance. Obedience, service, union are reinterpreted, without abandoning the intensity that troubadours and Tristan had made thinkable.
The revolt shifts stage. What the courts had dramatized in oaths and adulteries, the cloisters now transposed in visions. Fin’amor exalted illicit devotion to the Lady, mysticism redirected Love toward God himself. Against Augustine’s suspicion of desire as concupiscence, they seized erotic idiom and declared it the soul’s truest speech.
The mystics inherited this fused tongue but turned it inward, deploying a systematic theology of sensation rooted in the Song of Songs. They sacramentalized sweetness, wounds, and hunger, enthroning Love as sovereign within the soul.25
Bernard de Clairvaux dared to preach this of the soul and God. Origen had already drawn the Song upward into allegory, and Bernard takes his place in that tradition of spiritual exegesis: the Song is for monks already advanced, ready for eros to become pedagogy, with transformation for purpose, through the reordering of desire itself.26
He lingers on the opening line:
Osculetur me osculo oris sui
Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth (Cant. 1:2).
Redundant, sensual, almost scandalous. Why not simply ore suo (with his mouth)? Bernard calls it blanda Scripturae facies, the alluring face of Scripture. Its very strangeness, novitas locutionis in veteri libro, is proof of the Spirit’s hand. The kiss becomes theology: Father who kisses, Son who is kissed, Spirit who is the kiss.
Likewise the wound:
Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa (Cant. 4:9).
becomes the soul’s sweetness, the voluptas vulneris.
Here Bernard accomplishes what the poets only half glimpsed. Where they sang of jois as vocation or of passion as binding vow, he consecrates the same grammar within the Church. The troubadours and romancers had raised amor into sovereignty beside crown and altar; Bernard inscribes it into the liturgy itself. In his sermons, desire is drawn upward and ordered—ordinavit in me caritatem—redirected from self-love and worldly love into the love of God and neighbor. Desire is disciplined until it speaks as caritas, the Spirit’s own idiom. What Tristan tasted as potion is now transfigured as the soul’s own passage into God.
Here the genealogy widens. Women visionaries report kisses, wounds, and mystical communions in visionary register, often accompanied by a charge to counsel or mediate. They claim Christ as both giver and gift—bread, touch, and drink. Their charisma is justified by eros itself: the Spirit’s kiss authorizing their speech.
In Bernard, the same kiss and the same wound that once destabilized law become God’s chosen language. In the women who followed, that idiom becomes experiential proof that the Spirit still governs by eros.
Hadewijch radicalizes the medieval lexicon of love by enthroning Minne (Love) as sovereign mistress of the soul. She draws from two genealogies at once: the troubadour and trobairitz tradition of fin’amor, with its vows of homage to a Lady, and the Cistercian mystical tradition of Bernard, William of Saint-Thierry, Richard of St. Victor, and Beatrice of Nazareth. The fusion is decisive: feudal language of fidelity is transposed inward, while monastic affectivity supplies the theological ground.
Her formula is constitutional in tone:
Hine es nieman onderdaen dan der Minnen allene, diene met Minnen beuaen heuet.
[The soul] is subject to none but Love alone, once Love has taken hold of it.
The words onderdaen (“subject”) and beuaen (“taken hold”) transpose feudal obedience into an inner jurisdiction. Minne, from Old High German minna (“loving remembrance”), goes back to the Indo-European root men- “to think, to remember,” and stands alongside Latin memini and mens as cognates that reveal its link to memory and minds.27 It is love insofar as it inhabits and occupies the mind, a power of interior capture. Reason, will, and virtues no longer restrain desire; they become Love’s envoys (boden), executing its judgments.
This sovereignty rests on an ontology of mutual passage between God and the soul:
Siele es een wech vanden dore vaerne gods in sine vriheit van sinen diepsten; Ende god es een wech vanden dore vaerne der zielen in hare vriheit, Dat es in sinen gront die niet gheraect en can werden, sine gherakene met hare diepheit; Ende god en si hare gheheel, hine waer hare niet ghenoech.
The soul is a way of God’s passage into His freedom from His deepest, and God is a way of the soul’s passage into her freedom, that is in His ground, which cannot be touched unless she touches it with her depth; and were God not all hers, He would not be enough for her.
Here Hadewijch pushes further than her Cistercian predecessors. Bernard had consecrated eros into caritas, Richard of St. Victor called love caritas ligat, the binding chain; Hadewijch radicalizes this inheritance by enthroning Minne as sovereign mistress, insisting on a reciprocity where God and soul meet as equals in union.
Within this order, cognition itself is eroticized. Hadewijch writes:
Dat sien heuet .ij. oghen, Dat es Minne ende redene. De redene en can gode niet ghesien sonder in dat hi niet en es; Minne en rust niet dan in dat hi es… Want redene leert Minne, Ende Minne verlicht redene
This sight has two eyes, love and reason. Reason cannot see God except in what He is not, love does not rest except in what He is… for reason teaches love and love enlightens reason.
The scholastic hierarchy in which reason disciplines passion is overturned into reciprocity: reason opens paths, love grants light.
Even the wound of eros is consecrated as method.
Soe dat dine gheenichde oghen dijnre begherten bliue ane hanghende in dat anschijn dijns liefs Metten dore gaenden naghelen der berrender gherijnnessen die niet en cesseren.
so that the united eyes of your desire keep clinging to the face of your Beloved with the penetrating nails that touch you with burning which do not leave off.
The nails mark a continuous, sanctified affliction. What earlier theologians feared as pathology becomes the very procedure by which the soul is kept open as Love’s court, with Minne as judge and the virtues as officers.
In Hadewijch, feudal homage, nuptial allegory, and scholastic dialectic are gathered into a single political theology: Love legislates, circulates, instructs, and wounds. To declare oneself “subject to Love alone” is to relocate obedience from clerical office to divine sovereignty without renouncing obedience itself. By fusing troubadour amor with Cistercian caritas, and by absorbing the voices of trobairitz into vernacular mysticism, Hadewijch creates a counter-jurisdiction: women’s circles and lay teachers cloak themselves in orthodoxy while, in practice, submitting to Minne’s rule rather than to that of schools.
If Hadewijch enthroned Minne as sovereign, Mechthild of Magdeburg made her body its theatre. In Das fließende Licht der Gottheit she dares to voice divine intimacy in the grammar of incision:
Du hast mich gegraben in Deine Seite, in Hände und in Füße. Eya! vergönne mir, Viellieber! daß ich Dich salben dürfe. — Ja, wo wolltest Du die Salbe nehmen, Herz-Liebe? — Herr! ich wollte meiner Seele Herz in Stücken reißen und wollte Dich darinnen betten.
You have dug me into Your side, into Your hands and into Your feet. Ah, dearest, grant me that I may anoint You. — ‘Yes, and where would you take the ointment, Heart-Love?’ — ‘Lord! I would tear my soul’s heart into pieces, and I would lay You therein as in a bed.’
Here kiss and wound collapse: the soul’s own rending becomes the bridal chamber of God. Flesh long policed as disorder becomes the credential of intimacy.
Mechthild goes further still. In her great allegory, the noble soul prepares for her Bridegroom by adorning herself with the “chemise of gentle humility,” the “white dress of sincere chastity,” the “mantle of good reputation.” Yet Christ instructs her to strip them off: “You are so completely en-natured in me that nothing must come between us.” Fear, shame, even the external virtues must be set aside for “noble longing” and “unceasing desire.” Theology becomes undressing: a disrobing of mediation until only desire remains.28
When the senses, cast as paternal stewards, warn that without them she will be blinded or drowned in the divine fire, she replies: “A fish in water cannot drown.” Created for God, she insists on direct encounter without clerical guardianship, without even the Virgin’s milk to sustain her. The immediacy itself is proof of vocation: “Leave me be … I will drink the unmingled wine.”
When she names Love as tormentor, she insists on the sweetness of affliction:
Frau Minne, Ihr habt mich also sehr bezwungen, daß meinen Leib ankam ein wunderliches Siechtum.
Frau Königin, darwider gab ich Euch manche herrliche Erkenntnis.
Frau Minne, Ihr habt verzehrt mein Fleisch und mein Blut.
Frau Königin, so läuterte ich Euch und zog Euch in Gott.
Frau Minne, Ihr seid eine Räuberin, Ihr sollt es mir entgelten!
Frau Königin, so nehmet nur mich selber.
Lady Love, you have so greatly overcome me that a wondrous sickness came upon my body.
Lady Queen, in return I gave you many splendid insights.
Lady Love, you have consumed my flesh and my blood.
Lady Queen, thus I purified you and drew you into God.
Lady Love, you are a robber; you shall make it up to me!
Lady Queen, then take only myself.
In this register, Mechthild legislates with love. Her vernacular visions function as theology in their own right—a Summa written in blood and desire. Her personal voice claims divine authority: what she utters is the Logos speaking through her. The “wound of charity” that Bernard allegorized, and Hadewijch constitutionalized, she embodies: carved into her own heart, where the Beloved takes up residence.
The word Minne resists translation—at once love, desire, personified Lady, sovereign mistress. It carries the erotic charge of amor while laying claim to the dignity of caritas. Its semantic instability is its power. Suspicion of desire is met by reversal: Scripture itself sanctions eros, the senses become liturgy, and Love takes the throne of the soul.
The mystics, like the troubadours, refused the Church’s attempt to domesticate Love. Yet their rebellion ran on a different vector. Where the troubadour exalted his Lady against sacrament, the mystic exalted her God against institution. Both ennobled passion, both made suffering the proof of fidelity, both raised desire into the highest register of devotion. In the mystical idiom eroticism saturates theology—what canonists had marked as concupiscent disorder becomes the very pedagogy of union.
Augustine had disciplined love into ordo amoris; the mystics broke it open into ecstasy. Their claim was stark: the path to God runs through passion, not around it. For the mystics, wounds, sweetness, hunger, and fire ceased to be temptations for suppression and became instead sacraments of experience—the very register through which the Incarnate Word disclosed himself.
Because women cloaked their speech in orthodox idioms—caritas, sponsa Christi, vita apostolica—their spaces could endure, though always precariously, as periodic crackdowns on beguines and beghards attest. Mastery of the idiom was a shield, never a guarantee.
Semantic Failures
Despite centuries of effort, the Church’s attempt to stabilize the language of love never fully succeeded. Certain pressure points resisted domestication and remained zones of semantic instability.
The first fault line is the traffic between agápē and eros. The tradition never fixed the balance between gift and appetite, self-donation and ascent. The lexicon itself abetted the slippage: amor, dilectio, caritas glide across pages until distinctions collapse in practice.
A second seam runs through the body. Clerical continence and purity fears produced a rhetoric of “impassible” sacraments, yet popular anxiety persisted about polluted rites and the priest’s hidden wife. Angelic corporeality flickered uneasily between metaphor and matter, revealing a tension the official vocabulary could not absorb.
Marriage exposed similar fault lines in law. Indissolubility stood in theory, while lay repudium, regional separations, de facto dissolutions carried on in practice. The canonists’ axiom—consent makes, sex perfects—never erased the folk conviction that cohabitation and consummation made the marriage real. Clandestine contracts remained both sinful and binding until Trent, producing judgments that punished form while upholding substance. Jurisdiction itself fractured meaning: an heir might be legitimate in foro ecclesiae and a bastard at common law. Even “nature,” summoned to police acts and ends, proved a fog rather than a rule, spawning contradictory verdicts on what counted as licit sex.
The result was structural overdetermination. Marriage was sacrament and contract, grace and remedy, private vow and civic file. The scholastic taxonomy and the Tridentine reforms disciplined the terms but never erased their tensions. At the heart of Christian love, semantics remained porous, overlaid with rival grammars that refused to settle into a single order.
The long medieval labor to discipline desire produced a fragile equilibrium. Yet by the sixteenth century, this synthesis began to crack. Popular practice had already pressed the seams: clandestine contracts, civil divorces, concubinage, and peasant handfastings forced courts to recognize unions that bypassed priest and altar.
Luther’s break was decisive. He shattered the caritas synthesis itself. For him, eros could never be baptized: human love is acquisitive, seeking its own; divine love creates its object by loving it. “God’s love does not find, but creates, what is pleasing to it.” Augustine had arranged love in order, Aquinas had stabilized it in hierarchy; Luther drove them apart into antithesis.
This was more than a theological move. It destroyed the medieval compromise between nature and grace, eros and agápē. Marriage ceased to be a sacrament, and love ceased to be a ladder of ascent. What scholasticism had harmonized into ordo became, for Luther, a chasm that only grace could cross.
Thus the medieval grammar of love reached both culmination and negation: the cathedral of ordo amoris built across a millennium toppled under the hammer of reform. Out of its ruins would rise new orders of love—humanist, Protestant, Enlightenment—each recasting desire in its own key.29
Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (1971).
Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (1953).
Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R.P. Lawson (1957).
Peter Brown, The Body and Society Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988).
idem.
James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987).
Philip L. Reynolds, John Witte Jr, To Have and to Hold Marrying and its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400-1600 (2007).
Brundage, 1987.
Conor McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England - Law, Literature and Practice (2004).
Reynolds, 2007.
Brundage, 1987.
idem.
McCarthy, 2004.
In this notorious Florentine lawsuit, Lusanna di Benedetto claimed a valid clandestine marriage to Giovanni della Casa based on vows, a ring, and witnesses—a claim initially upheld by the local archbishop. Giovanni successfully appealed to Rome by denying the ceremony took place, attacking Lusanna's character, and highlighting the union's lack of formal documentation (such as a notary or a recorded dowry). The case is a classic example of how proof of consent, the cornerstone of canon law, could be “snarled” by conflicting testimony and procedural maneuvering in ecclesiastical courts.
Brundage, 1987.
“Medieval Iceland seems to have ignored the Christian insistence on the indissolubility of marriage, allowing for divorce on a number of grounds: a slap, a family feud, incompatibility, nonconsummation, a compromising wound, a fatal illness, cross-dressing, and a mocking verse are all shown to be reasons for divorce in Icelandic sagas. Concubinage survived into the thirteenth century, as did the sexual double standard which treated adultery as a predominantly female crime. Iceland is of interest for the study of medieval European marriage because perhaps, as Roberta Frank argues, ‘the situation in Iceland may be taken as representative of what happened in other rural districts of medieval Europe where both the Church and the world of classical letters were remote”, McCarthy, 2004
Brundage, 1987.
idem.
“Several conclusions emerge from the comparison of secular and spiritual marriage contracts, conclusions about the subject of marriage and the people’s attitude toward the law that regulated it. Most striking is an apparent contradiction in the assumptions that lay behind the two types of contracts examined above. The secular agreements seem to have assumed that the family, in particular the fathers, of the man and woman who were to be wed had the right to arrange the match. Very occasionally, there was hesitation. Future agreement of one of the parties to the marriage itself might be made a condition for performance of the con-tract to transfer lands and chattels. But that did not happen often. For the most part, the operative assumption appears to have been that the family controlled marriage.
The spiritual agreements, by contrast, have little to say about family or fathers. The man and woman involved – their words, their consent, and their intention – were what counted in the ecclesiastical courts. As Michael Sheehan once wrote, the church was “pushing men and women towards the more individualistic view of marriage.” Lay society, it would seem from the secular contracts, was pushing back.” Reynolds, 2007.
John Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective (1975).
Spyros Troianos, “Byzantine Canon Law to 1100,” and '“Byzantine Canon Law from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries”, In The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500 (2012).
Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (1996).
Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (1998).
My analysis relies on Joseph Bédier's classic 1900 prose reconstruction, Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut. As the original medieval poems (primarily from authors like Béroul and Thomas) survive only in fragmented and incomplete forms, Bédier, a respected medievalist, synthesized these sources into a single, coherent narrative. His version is widely considered the authoritative and most accessible text for modern readers, praised for preserving the spirit of the medieval legend.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987).
Paul Decock, “Bernard of Clairvaux’s Reading of the Song of Songs 2:4–5: Wounded by Love – Putting Order in Love” (Journal for Semitics 24, no. 2, 2015).
Inna Savynska, “Genealogy of Hadewijch’s Concept of Minne: Secular and Religious Aspects” (2024).
Amber L. Griffioen, “‘Undressing’ Philosophical Theology – Lessons from Mechthild of Magdeburg”, Logia, 18 April 2019, https://logiatheology.org/undressing-philosophical-theology-lessons-from-mechthild-of-magdeburg/.
Pointed out to me by a reader of Part I, but I completely overlooked the role of medicinal thought with relation to the passions as physiological afflictions. I intend on amending this in the future, perhaps for a book version. That way you get a “director’s cut” if you happen to be one of the ten poor souls who owns a physical copy.
Very good piece