In my last couple of posts, I’ve discussed Dante’s conflation of spiritual and sexual1 language in his Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia. I came to explore, as a background to these texts, the Platonic tradition of eros as a way of reconciling elements of the psyche, and in particular the Augustinian form of this tradition in which it reached Dante. I opined that Dante’s Vita Nuova is the story of the synthesis of Augustinian amor with a new subjective spirit embodied in, among other cultural trends of the time, the fin’amor of the troubadours. In this post, I’d like to explore the background of this synthesis.
Though Dante himself never expressed it this way, I believe his new conception of love arose out of necessity from a cultural impasse—the failure of the epoch’s two most influential attempts to adequately conceptualize love. The problem was not just an abstraction, because it was bound up with the question of how one ought to understand one’s own desire, and therefore how one ought to live life.
The desire of most contemplative people in medieval Europe was, of course, guided by Christianity, often in a particularly Augustinian form. As I wrote in my previous post, the Augustinian tradition allowed some subjectivity but ultimately subordinated it to external authority. The goal of the Platonico-Augustinian tradition was to reconcile the two—to actually overcome (at least momentarily) the division between subject and object altogether in the ecstatic vision of being, the good, the One, God. But human spontaneity always presented a problem in the Augustinian tradition. Curiosity about and pleasure in the world for their own sake were seen as vices, and the tradition tended toward ascetiscm.
This Platonico-Augustinian tradition was subversive in the most personal way, because it questioned daily experience. For its adherents, nothing in consciousness was to be taken at face value; everything was food for a kind of proto-psychoanalysis—the moments of inner life were all seen as manifestations of a largely unconscious yearning to be joined in unity with God through understanding. This is spelled out perhaps most explicitly in St. Bonaventure’s Mind’s Road to God, in which the world and mind are pervaded with symbols or traces—vestigia, literally “footprints”—of God, unrecognized as such by us in our daily lives. The psyche in this view has a new depth—really, one must say, an infinite one, because everything in it stands for something else, and the whole structure is grounded in infinite life.
On the other hand, there’s also a certain insubstantiality to the life of the psyche in this tradition, because the moments of its life are seen as symbolic only; they count only as signposts of the infinite, not as experiences that are important in themselves. To be in the world is to be a wayfarer, a mendicant in the wilderness.
Alongside this introspective tradition there arose in the Middle Ages an increasing restlessness, a subjectivity that seemed more and more to chafe against the teachings of the church. This new subjective spirit took a number of forms, including a curiosity-driven philosophy that prompted the seeking of Aristotelian texts unknown in western Europe since the fall of Rome, and with it a challenge to the authority heretofore given in Christendom to faith over philosophy. Another was the flowering of the culture of fin’amor, the “courtly love” of the troubadours and romance-writers.
Fin’amor was in some ways the very opposite of the amor of the contemplatives. The noted frequency in troubadour poetry of words such as spring, youth and joy suggests its ideal: a boundlessness of life to be found in actual experience. The object of desire is not something to be discerned through an analysis of consciousness, but is manifest directly to the senses. In a poem describing the return of spring, one of the earliest troubadours, Guilhem de Peitieu, wrote:
Since we see meadows newly blossoming, and orchards growing green once more, streams and springs turning clear, breezes and winds, each man ought to delight in the joy that gives him pleasure.2
Both the Augustinian and the “courtly” traditions of love were enormously influential in the Middle Ages. But they were also mutually incompatible; neither could really tolerate the other. As Dantologist Tristan Kay notes in his 2016 Dante’s Lyric Redemption, the De Amore of Andreas Cappellanus—a treatise on the love of the love-poets—was banned by church authorities in 1277; and there is a striking tendency among troubadour poets to reach a point in their lives when they renounce their love poetry and retire to monasteries, at least according to their medieval biographers.3 In the Fiore—a work of poetry written in the tradition of fin’amor, possibly by a very young Dante—Amore appears as a supreme deity vying with the Christian one for the absolute commitment of the lover:
“Be sure to worship me, for I am your god; and set aside every other belief: do not believe Luke or Matthew, Mark or John.”4
The people of the Middle Ages knew no middle ground between these extremes because they (the troubadours included) assumed that desire experienced purely subjectively would not lead humans to an intelligible purpose; for them, subjectively experienced desire was by its nature satisfiable only by finite things or sensual experiences. This assumption was closely related to medieval teachings on the necessity of religious faith: if humans can through their own experience perceive the ultimate object of their desire to be the absolute good, God, it becomes difficult to say why faith is necessary. This problem—put in terms of the possibility that there might be no need of any knowledge other than philosophy, the natural knowledge humans get from following their curiosity, since even the existence and nature of God can be investigated rationally—is explicitly raised by Thomas Aquinas (as an argument to be refuted) in the article that opens his Summa Theologiae:
Everything that is, is treated of in philosophical science—even God Himself; so that there is a part of philosophy called theology, or the divine science, as Aristotle has proved (Metaph. vi). Therefore, besides philosophical science, there is no need of any further knowledge.
This medieval distrust of subjectively experienced desire—or at least the conviction that it must be for the finite—resulted in a kind of crisis of love, the existence of two competing theories of desire, each of which tended to split the psyche.
As we saw, the Augustinian amor of the monasteries and convents required the suppression of human spontaneity. The spontaneous self, the natural self, becomes in this tradition a disruptive other to the conscious mind in that mind’s attempt to orient itself to an externally given notion of the ultimate end of its desire; subjective and objective desire, passion and reason, are at odds with one another.
For its part, fin’amor also resulted in a cleaving of the self, but in a way almost precisely opposed to that of Augustinian amor. Subjectively experienced desire that presupposed its object to be finite—the favour of the lady—left the lover vulnerable to the greatest suffering, because the lady could always withdraw her favour, or die. It also meant a loss of self-control and a kind of dispersion of the self, because attraction to a finite good—a lady or any other thing of this world—risked directing the lover away from any ground or centre he may have found in an intelligible purpose.
Until Dante’s Vita Nuova, medieval thinking about desire produced two stark alternatives: a desire experienced subjectively that was seen as essentially irrational; and an ultimately rational desire that depended on external authority to realize itself. I think by Dante’s time there was increasing unrest with each of these approaches, a sense that neither could heal the fractured self or deliver the fulness of life each seemed to promise. And indeed we see powerful images of fragmentation and death in at least two of their most perceptive representatives.
The thirteen-century Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi seems to express something like this in “Two Different Modes of Contemplating the Cross,” a dialogue in poetry between two friars, one who seems blithely content in the religious life, the other in a dark night of the soul. The voice which seems most genuinely the author’s—it has both the first and last word—is the latter; the words of his companion suggest, at least to me, the false consolers of Job. Here is the poem in full:
I flee the consuming cross and its fires;
Their heat drives me back and I flee from Love.
Nowhere can I find refuge—
The flames continue to blaze in my heart and my mind.
Why, brother, do you take flight
From that joy which I insistently seek?
How unworthy of you to run away,
To flee its delights!
I am in flight, Brother, because I have been wounded,
And wounded close to the heart;
You know nothing of such pain.
I pray you, say no more.
The cross is in flower, Brother,
And all my thoughts
Are bent on its beauty;
It inflicts no wounds on me but joy.
I, instead, find it full of arrows
That speed from the side,
Piercing my armor and my heart.
The archer aims them straight at me.
Once I was blind, now I see,
And this change I owe to contemplating the cross.
The cross is my guide, which I follow in joy;
Without it I live in torment.
That light has blinded me
With its searing intensity;
I go about sightless
Though my eyes are open.
Now I can speak, though once I was mute,
And the change is due to the cross;
I have tasted of its sweetness
And now I can preach it to many.
And I who once could talk am now made mute;
My heart has plunged into such an abyss
I can find almost no one to whom I can speak
Of the horror of this void.
I once was dead but now I live;
The change came about as I contemplated the cross.
When it leaves me I die,
When I feel its presence I have life.
I am not dead, but close to death—
God will that it come quickly!
Oh, the agony of enduring its assaults
And never, never wrenching free!
The cross is my joy, Brother,
Do not call it torment;
Perhaps you have not become one with it,
Not embraced it as your spouse.
The cross warms you but sets me on fire;
For you it is joy, for me searing pain. How can I stay
In this blazing furnace? Not to have experienced it
Is not to know the heat of the flame.
I do not comprehend you, Brother.
Why do you flee Love?
If you try to explain,
You may help me to understand.
Brother, you have barely sipped,
But I have drunk of this new wine,
And no iron bands could contain this pressure,
Which threatens to split me stave from stave.
It’s striking how many of the same images—of violent attack from the outside, torment, disintegration and death—recur in the poetry of Dante’s friend, Guido Cavalcanti, though this poetry follows in the opposed tradition of fin’amor. I quote two of Cavalcanti’s lyrics here:
XIII
You who through my eyes penetrated my heart
And wakened my sleeping mind,
Look upon my tormented life
Which Love destroys by dint of sighs.
He comes slashing with such great force
That the frail spirits depart:
Only [my] countenance remains in control
And something of a voice that speaks woe.
This power of love that has undone me
Issued swiftly from your noble eyes:
It cast a dart into my side.
The blow came so straight at the first draw
That [my] soul, trembling, was startled
At seeing my heart struck dead on my left side.
XXXII
Since from death I must draw life
And from affliction joy,
How is it that from such distress
Love’s spirit exhorts me to love?
How is it that my heart exhorts me to love,
Alas, when it is full of grief
And so beset on all sides with sighs
That it almost cannot invoke even mercy,
And is stripped of strength
By the anxiety that already has nearly overcome me?
Singing, pleasure, ease, and laughter
Are for me sorrows and sighs:
Let everyone look and see
That Death has risen into my face!
Love, which is born of mutual pleasure,
Stays within the heart,
Forming a new person of desire,
But it makes [heart’s] strength decay to weakness,
So that he dare not love
Who feels how [Love] rewards service.
Why then does [Love] discourse with me about loving?
I believe only because he sees
That I ask mercy
Of Death, who makes me target of every woe.
I can complain of great affliction
More than anyone ever did:
For Death draws from within my heart a heart
That continually speaks of cruel loving,
Which in my loud groans
Assails me right where I draw all strength.
Cursed be that moment when Love
Was born in such a way
That my harsh life
Was to him, with such pleasure, gratifying.
For each poet the torment of love is seen as originating from a different cause: to Jacopone, from adherence to a doctrine that seems to require a harsh indifference to his nature; to Cavalcanti, from submitting to a blind but omnipotent force that robs him of his autonomy as a rational agent. Yet both are in some way talking about the same thing: a love in which great hope was initially placed, but which now seems to bring the greatest suffering. The love of both is unrequited.
Because of the inner contradictions in both these ideologies of love, this sense of being at an impasse in the understanding of love subtly haunted the culture of the late Middle Ages. Thus the question asked by poet Guido Orlandi to Guido Cavalcanti, in response to which Cavalcanti wrote his “Donna me prega,” is also a central dilemma of the epoch: “É vita questo amore o vero é morte?” (“Is this love life or is it really death?”).
In my next post, I’d like to begin explaining why I think Dante’s Vita Nuova is an account of his solution of this problem—and the gateway to a new age.
1 Possibly “sexual” isn’t quite the right word here, since we’re talking about an emotional experience, not just a physical activity. Perhaps “romantic” would be better, though this term is problematic partly because it’s unclear to what extent romance is universal to human experience and not just a cultural invention of the medieval and modern West. The ancient Greeks, for example, had no word for “romantic” as distinct from “erotic”; a love song was an erotic song, erotikon melos.
2 Cited in “Fin’amor and the development of the courtly canso,” Linda Paterson, p. 28 of The Troubadours: An Introduction, edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, Cambridge University Press 1999.
3 Kay, Dante’s Lyric Redemption, pages 23-24 .
4 Il Fiore 5. (translation by Santa Casciani and Christopher Kleinhenz, in The Fiore and the Detto d’amore: A Late 13th-Century Italian Translation of the Roman de la Rose, Attributable to Dante (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), pp. 44-45.
Opening the Vita Nuova 
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