 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Love Reign Over Me – The Romance of the Rose. Looking for a romantic gift for that special someone? I highly recommend that you do not get them a copy of the 12th century treatise On Love by Andreas Kapilanos. Your intended sweetheart is going to have misgivings about your liaison once he or she reads the first page. Here Andreas explains what love is, namely a certain innate suffering caused by seeing, and thinking too much about, the shapeliness of someone of the opposite sex. And of course he has a point. We all know from the lyrics of pop songs, if not from personal experience, that to love is to suffer. There's the fear of possible rejection, and the agony of actual rejection. There are the pangs of longing when the beloved is absent, replaced by anxiety and befuddlement when the beloved is present. Just ask Pat Benatar, who proclaimed that love is a battlefield. Or Billie Holiday, whose hard-won expertise on this matter led her to proclaim that, you don't know what love is until you've learned the meaning of the blues. The Jay Giles band went further still, singing, I've had the blues, the reds and the pinks, one thing for sure, love stinks. Somewhat more poetic, but little more encouraging, is the definition of love found in The Romance of the Rose. It reads, Love is a mental illness afflicting two persons of the opposite sex. It comes upon people through a burning desire, born of disordered perception, to embrace and to kiss and to seek carnal gratification. But, like a first date, this passage should be approached carefully. For starters, it's really just a reworking of the earlier definition given by Andreas Kapelanis. This is typical of The Romance of the Rose, a poem built largely of other literary materials. Being a well-read expert in the amatory arts, the author Jean de Meun strips his sources of their Latin and re-clothes them in French, having his way with them in the process. In this case, he goes further than Andreas by saying that love is actually a kind of illness. To further complicate matters, it isn't exactly Jean who is responsible for ravishing the literary model in this way. At this point in the poem, we are not hearing the author's own voice, but that of Reason, one of the many personifications and emblematic characters who populate The Romance of the Rose. When Reason compares love to an illness, it is part of her overall effort to show that we should not allow the irrational passions of love to rule over us. We should never give in to such an excess of emotion that we would experience suffering as a result of our affection. Clearly, Reason doesn't know the meaning of the blues. Jean de Meun himself doesn't necessarily see things in such black-and-white terms though. He allows the voice of Reason to have its say, but not to have the last word. Other characters will weigh in with their own ideas about love and the erotic before the poem is out. Like the Kama Sutra, Jean adopts a wide range of positions when it comes to sexuality. For all its exuberance and prodigious length, Jean's contribution is a doubly modest one. He expressly draws on earlier sources, above all The Art of Love by the Latin poet Ovid, The Ancient Philosopher Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and The Complaint of Nature by Alain of Lille. So dependent is he on these and other texts that he feels free to blame them for any untruths to be found in his own poem. Furthermore, Jean's exuberant and inventive reuse of these Latin works is itself offered as the completion of a poem started by another man. As Jean tells us himself in a characteristically perplexing and ironic passage midway through the poem, the romance was begun by a certain Guillaume de Yoriss. Jean even takes the trouble to tell us how much time elapsed between the work of the two authors, about 40 years, and to identify for us the last line that was written by Guillaume. That line comes about 4,000 lines into a work which in its completed form contains almost 22,000 lines. Thus, more than four-fifths of the work is by Jean. We know nothing about Guillaume de Yoriss apart from what is divulged by the poem itself, which isn't much. Jean is writing at about 1270, so if Guillaume wrote 40 years earlier, then we can date him to around 1230. He is a classic exponent of the courtly love poetic tradition which we saw inspiring the big-yin mystics Hadidic and Mächtild of Magdeburg. So we find in him the idea of devoting oneself entirely to romantic love and a depiction of the agony experience when the beloved is unattainable. Guillaume goes so far as to say that, "...no pain can equal that suffered by lovers." What drew Jean to this particular text is a matter of speculation. My guess is that it was not only the standard themes of courtly love that attracted him, but also Guillaume's self-aware literary artifice and his display of good literary taste. He presents his poem as the recounting of a dream in which he finds himself in a garden, populated by personifications of the psychological and practical considerations that arise in a love affair. Pleasure, courtesy, fair welcome, and the God of Love himself are all described as are the forces that thwart seduction like jealousy, evil tongue, chastity, fear, and shame. Guillaume dreams of himself pledging loyalty to the God of Love in the terms of a vassal speaking to a Lord. In the greatest obsession with a rosebud you'll find outside of Citizen Kane, he adopts the role of a besotted lover who longs to possess a beautiful rose growing within the garden. To do so, the lover must call on the forces of love to help with his seduction and lay siege to the defenses arrayed to protect the flower's innocence, including a symbolic fortress built around the rose. For a reader who grew up in the 1980s, the thought is irresistible, Pat Benatar was right, love really is a battlefield. For a medieval reader, meanwhile, the dream setting would recall Cicero's famous Dream of Scipio, which was commented upon by Macrobius. Just to make sure we don't miss the point, Guillaume refers to Macrobius at the very outset of his own poem. For Jean, the most self-conscious of writers, it might also have been intriguing that Guillaume often comments on his own efforts as a writer as when he frequently apologizes that words are inadequate to describe what he saw in the dream. Intriguing or not, Guillaume's 4,000 lines wouldn't earn a place in our history of philosophy, but Jean de Meun is like the emotional life of the Jay Giles band, a horse of a different color. He trained at the University of Paris and made more traditional contributions to our subject. One imagines him winking at the reader when he says in his poem what a great service it would be if someone would translate Boethius's Consolation from Latin into the vernacular. Jean himself would go on to produce a French version of it, and also to translate the exchange of letters between Peter Abelard and Heloise. As for his continuation of the Romance of the Rose, it's one of the most important works of medieval literature in any language, and it has much to say about philosophy. Jean peppers his poem with parodic allusions to scholastic practice and vocabulary, as when his characters accuse one another of sophistry or challenge one another to produce definitions and proofs in support of their claims about love. He also refers to many philosophers by name, from Plato and Aristotle to Avicenna and Abelard. Then there is more substantive philosophical material which Jean makes accessible to his French audience by including it in his poem, a direct translation of a passage from Plato's Timaeus, and an extensive summary of Boethius's ideas about the necessity of the future. He also takes a stand on issues that had divided philosophers in the medieval period. The intellectual tumult of the 12th century still seems to be very much alive for Jean. One of his main sources is Alain of Lille. He is fascinated by the story of Abelard and Heloise, and as we'll see shortly by the whole topic of castration, and he weighs in on the 12th century debate as to whether Plato had already grasped the Trinity, his answer being no. A more contemporary note is struck by a vicious attack on the mendicant movement and its vow of self-imposed poverty. Jean hides behind, but not far behind, another symbolic character to make this attack, namely false seeming. This character is introduced to argue that a successful seduction often involves a bit of economy with the truth. False seeming advises rubbing onion juice into the eyes to make for a convincing display of love-struck weeping. But then comes one of the many digressions that, paradoxically, seem to be Jean's main purpose in writing his continuation of the romance. This digression is an attack on the voluntary poverty of the mendicant friars. Speaking on behalf of the mendicants, false seeming boasts of the cunning hypocrisy that makes it possible to amass wealth while acquiring a reputation for abstemious piety. We pretend to be poor, says false seeming, but we have everything while having nothing. Though Jean's poem is thus not short on allusions to scholastic culture, it is a good deal more entertaining than anything produced by the schoolmen. By turns ironic, self-righteous, provocative, violent, funny, crude, elegant, and obscene, the romance of the Rose is quite frankly a hell of a lot of fun. Medievalists agree because it allows them to play their favorite game of spot the illusion. Nearly every one of the secondary works I've consulted triumphantly pointed out previously unnoticed parallels to classical or medieval texts used by Jean. Of course, detecting such resonances would also have been part of the fun for a well-read medieval audience. But if the fun is in the allusions, then the action is with the poem's central theme. Guillaume already announces that the poem contains the whole art of love, and Jean continues with at least the pretense that we are being offered instruction and fair warning in Affairs of the Heart. The narrative depicts the challenges that face lovers and the means by which these challenges can be overcome. A series of benevolent symbolic personifications, including one simply named Friend, appear to give the central character advice on how to win his rose. But this is no mere instruction manual, no courtly love for dummies. Jean seems to be trying to say something about love, about its correct place in human life, or perhaps the place it is inevitably going to occupy whether correctly or not. But what is his message? Here, interpretations differ. One traditional idea is that there is a sharp contrast between Jean and Guillaume. Where Guillaume was indeed a courtly author, Jean is, for all his learning, earthier and more naturalistic. He celebrates the simple pleasures of sexuality, finding both joy and comedy in this innate human drive. On this telling, Jean could be allied with the so-called Latin of Aroists and seen as not only vernacular, but even secular in his endorsement of the purely natural. Indeed, some of the speeches in the Romance suggest that Jean sees sexual activity in light of a tacit theory of natural law. He emphasizes that, to speak with yet another bit of popular music, birds do it, bees do it, and so we humans too may as well fall in love. Other readings situate Jean in a more distinctively Christian and theological frame of reference. On this interpretation, his satire is intended to warn us against excessive interest in purely physical delight, which is a consequence of our fallen nature. It's no wonder that such disagreements should emerge, because both points of view, and more besides, are present in the poem. A range of characters are allowed to express various ideas about love and at great length. The speeches are written with such conviction that they may seem to speak for Jean himself, yet the speeches don't agree with one another. This feature of the Romance has been leading readers into their own disagreements for a long time. Several later medieval readers, including Christine de Pizan, got involved in a debate over the poem, the so-called Carelles de la Rose. Christine complained of the misogyny that is indeed a striking feature of Jean's work, as in a horrific passage where a jealous husband speaks of beating his wife into submission. Another famous Jean, namely Jean Gasson, agreed with Christine that the poem was bad news, liable to lead its readers into lechery. To these complaints, a defender of Jean de Meun, named Pierre Cole, responded that the poet simply, made each character speak according to his nature. It is wrongheaded to say that the author believes women to be as evil as the jealous man, in accordance with his character, declares. Of all the speeches in the Romance, the most decisive for our assessment of Jean's true attitude toward sexuality is the one given by reason. This is actually the second appearance of reason in the poem. Guillaume had already included a scene in which reason advises against pursuing the love affair. In short order, she was rebuffed by the character of the lover. Jean reprises the scene and gives it a far more detailed treatment. Where Guillaume, devoted 75 verses to Reason's point of view, Jean gives her more than 3,000. As you might expect, Reason's main objection to passionate love is that it is irrational. This does not mean that there is no proper role for sex in the good life, for sexual activity is required if the human species is to live on, a point emphasized later in a further speech by genius, a character and theme borrowed from Alain of Lille. The lover is no more impressed by this second, long-winded appearance from reason than he was by the first. When she names Socrates as a paradigm of rationality, he responds, I would not give three chickpeas for Socrates. And on the whole, he observes, whenever love spied me sitting, listening to the sermon, he took a spade and threw out of my head by one ear whatever reason had put in the other. This looks like it could be grist to the mill of the theological reading. In our fallen state, we are incapable of listening to the call of reason and giving sex its proper value. Where we should feel natural desire, we are carried away by unrestrained lust. But, the fact that the lover rejects the advice of reason needn't mean that we, as readers, are supposed to follow suit. If reason really is speaking for Jeanne, then she is calling us not to act like the hero of courtly love romance, but like the man Augustin was striving to be. One who, as reason says, loves all humans generally, rather than becoming obsessed with just one particular human. The lover's failure to do so is meant not to be inevitable, but instructive. It's hard to know Jeanne's true intention though, because it is unclear whether reason is an instrument or target of his satire. A case in point is one of the most memorable passages of the whole romance. In the course of her argument, reason has alluded to the classical legend according to which Saturn was castrated and his testicles thrown into the sea, resulting in the birth of Venus. The lover reacts by castigating reason for her use of the word testicles, where she might have employed a suitable euphemism. Reason responds that, as Plato taught, language is for communication. Towards this end, she has herself made appropriate words for the things created by God so that there can be no objection to her using frank language. The lover remains unmoved, albeit without indicating how many chickpeas he would or wouldn't give for Plato. What are we to make of this? Any plausible answer needs to look ahead to the very end of the romance, a section that is climactic in every sense of the word. The lover finally manages to achieve his objective and his deflowering of the rose is veiled in only the thinnest of allegorical veils. The lover compares his labors to those of Hercules as he struggles to force his staff through a narrow passage to reach into a reliquary and so on. You get the idea. It's been well remarked of this passage that it shows how euphemism may in fact be at least as obscene and much more pornographic than plain speech. We have to assume that Jean was well aware of this when he composed the rather unromantic conclusion of his romance. So we may be rather skeptical of the lover's confidence in the power of evasive language. His objection to reason's speech might better have been directed to its matter rather than its form. Once you've decided to speak of gods castrating one another, your choice of words is almost beside the point. And indeed, the lover could have called on a formidable range of allies if he sought to press this objection. Augustine and Macrobius and before them Plato had expressed disquiet with such myths. The reason would be prepared for this complaint too. Where the lover advises her to use a euphemistic gloss to cloak her meaning if she absolutely must bring testicles into the discussion, reason replies that we should use an interpretive gloss to uncover the deeper meaning of the myth. Like the Platonist authors of the 12th century who have been associated with a school of Chartres, reason speaks of the surface of a myth as a covering or integumentum that conceals deeper philosophical meaning. So there are indeed good reasons to think in this scene and others that the character of the lover does not speak for Jean. He is not held up for adulation, but as an example of the addled state into which love can lead us. His fixation on improper language would go hand in hand with his own improper obsession with private pleasure. Where he should love all humankind and appreciate nature as God's creation, the lover thinks only of his rose. In other words, his problem is that he is not a philosopher. This is borne out at least to some extent by what happens when nature herself appears as a character. In passages based closely on Alain of Lille's complaint of nature, Jean has his personification of nature extol the well-ordered design of the cosmos and especially the heavens. She digresses to several philosophical themes, including an explanation of the darker patches on the moon as being made of more transparent material than the rest. Amidst all this cosmic harmony, it is only humans who violate the correct order with their sexual immoderation. But reading the Romance of the Rose is like attending a disputation at the medieval university. There's always an on the other hand. In this case, nature herself is made to imagine and describe some rather unnatural scenes, as when she talks about what would happen if animals could learn to reason and talk. Besides, earlier in the poem, more disreputable characters have been allowed to state that it is only natural for humans to engage in sex outside the bounds of marriage. Women are, we are told, naturally attracted to all men and not only one husband. Jean's poem contains lofty philosophical praise of nature, but also shows that a natural sexual ethics could be not so much high-minded as below the belt. Again, one might take him to be critiquing those who are content with the merely physical or natural, satire in the aid of a theological message, but to my mind the interpretations that seek to enlist Jean on the side of naturalism or supernaturalism miss the rather obvious point that he is staging a dialogue between these points of view, and at least as much for our enjoyment as for our edification. Why should we expect the intellectual tensions to be resolved, rather than displayed and explored? The Romance of the Rose is not a philosophical work disguised as a poem about love. Rather, it is a poem that is in love with philosophy but hesitates to get into a committed relationship. Along with other vernacular poems that it anticipates, like Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Romance shows how philosophy was working its way into the literature of this period. But what about the other arts, such as painting, music, or the architectural marvels being produced by the builders of cathedrals? Were such endeavours influenced by medieval philosophical ideas? For that matter, did medieval philosophers even develop ideas that would belong to the branch of philosophy we now call aesthetics? We'll find out next time, in an artful conversation that doesn't dodge these difficult questions, featuring Andreas Speer. He'll be in the frame next time, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.