This essay tells one strand of a story in which philosophies of happiness and arts of love mixed and mingled—in both philosophical and literary traditions. The very idea of a philosophical art of love leads us back to Ovid, whose Ars amatoria (Art of Love, composed c. 2 CE) plays upon a vigorous tradition of instruction about love (“erotodidaxis”) already existing across the discourses of elegy, philosophy, drama and erotic treatise. As scholars have long noted, in Ovid’s hands—and with his signature irony—erotic instruction engages in political and ethical questions as much as amatory matters. In contrast to the genre of the love elegy, Ovid’s Ars amatoria does not create an opposition between love and civil life, but rather “sets up love as a serious ethical concern” (Green 2006, 7).1 Ovid portrays sexual pleasure as the root of human civilization and the height of fulfillment—the highest reward for self-knowledge.2 The Latin and vernacular literature of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages inherited Ovid’s version of the erotodidactic tradition, and this essay explores some medieval transformations of the “art of love” as they relate to discourses of happiness. Ovid’s Ars amatoria itself was widely read, commented upon and variously adapted and translated into Western European vernaculars (Minnis 2001, 35–81). I am most interested here in the absorption of Ovidian erotodidaxis into philosophical discourse.
A striking example of such absorption occurs in the twelfth century, when Andreas Capellanus wrote a widely circulated Latin treatise, De amore, clearly modeled to some extent on Ovid’s text, with the narrator adopting the pose of the praeceptor amoris. The De amore—a treatise partly in the form of a scholastic quaestio dedicated to another man on the subject of heterosexual love and possibly written at the request of Marie de Champagne in the 1180s—had wide enough (and controversial enough) circulation to be included in a list of condemned texts by the bishop of Paris in 1277; Andreas’s work is one piece of evidence among many that the genre of the “art of love” had already been assimilated to the forms of scholastic philosophy. I will explore some avenues by which the idea of the “art of love” spread beyond explicitly Ovidian iterations, and came to stand for a didacticism that encompassed all manner of ethical and political concerns, centrally an Aristotelian orientation emphasizing the interconnections of erotic love, friendship, virtue and happiness.
In this joining of love and philosophy, the medieval “art of love” is aligned with love literature more broadly. I have argued elsewhere that—within a Christian culture that devalued earthly goods—erotic poetry provided a fitting space to address questions of earthly ethics and even earthly happiness as a highest good (Rosenfeld 2011, 38–44). At least since the twelfth century, vernacular lyric and romance had constituted a site for thinking through ethical problems such as conflicting loyalties, conflicting emotions, and conflicting moral commitments of various kinds—to one’s lord, one’s fellow knights, a lady, God. In this poetry, “clerkly” religious concerns with spiritual culpability and love of God were transformed and given voice in the context of pursuits of human justice, love and happiness. The genres of love poetry and philosophy are not so distant from each other as one might think at this time, and late medieval culture witnessed a flourishing exchange between poetic and philosophical discourses, especially in the field of ethics and especially in poetry about love. Medieval academic commentators considered poetry to be an ethical genre and a poet like Ovid to be an ethical author (“Ovidius ethicus”), typically referring to poetry’s interest in human behavior and moral choices to justify this classification.3 Late medieval moral philosophy and poetry were further captivated by the question of what makes for a human life of flourishing, and whether such happiness can be spoken of as a true “end” of human existence. The fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer appears to have been quite interested in the relationship between the joys of lovers and the “Felicite, which that thise clerkes wise / Comenden so” (Felicity, which these wise clerks so commend) (Chaucer 1987, Troilus, III.1691–92), as well as the equivalencies that wise clerks draw between happiness and pleasure, for “Somme clerkes holden that felicitee / Stant in delyte” (Some clerks believe that felicity is comprised by pleasure) (Chaucer 1987, Canterbury Tales, IV.2021–22).
The vigor of these discussions across both poetry and philosophy is at least partly owing to the greater availability of Aristotle’s ethical writings in the mid-thirteenth century—including the entirety of the Nicomachean Ethics (Dod 1982; Wieland 1982). In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Aristotle’s ethical ideas were already circulating, but only the first three books of the Nicomachean Ethics were available in Latin. His ideas about the virtue of the “mean” and the cultivation of habitus were uncontroversial and widely influential; he had also been understood as an authority on happiness, but only practical, political happiness—not that happiness which is the highest goal of human life. But with the translation from Greek into Latin of the full Nicomachean Ethics in the 1240s and its immediate take-up in universities, the philosopher’s definition of happiness in the tenth book had to be reckoned with.4 This previously unavailable final book describes a life of perfect contemplative happiness that is theoretically attainable in the mundane world. Early Christian theologians had certainly treated happiness as a spiritual goal, but this happiness was typically only accessible in the afterlife or through experiences bestowed by God’s intervention. These theologians were forced to confront an authoritative theory of happiness that was earthly and involved the contemplation of truth, but did not define that truth as God, or the contemplation of truth as an act of love. Aristotelian happiness could no longer be explained as purely active or practical and his contemplative ideal was simply not equivalent to loving reflection upon God.
Thus, with the sudden availability in Latin of Aristotle’s ethical writings, vernacular love poetry no longer afforded the only space for the consideration of earthly happiness, and central ethical concepts of pleasure, love and happiness were subjected to reconsideration and redefinition in both discourses. For those interested in the intellectual history of happiness in the West, the thirteenth century offers the excitement and turbulence of a tradition in transition, a Greco-Christian synthesis troubled by the new availability of Aristotelian texts that were less easily subsumed into a religion that had always made human happiness a lesser, secondary goal of life (if it was even a goal at all). For a Christian audience, Aristotle’s claim in the final book of the Ethics that perfect happiness—contemplative happiness—may be had in this life was controversial to say the least, and philosophers and poets both responded with vigorous debate about the central ethical concepts of pleasure, love and happiness itself (Wieland, “Happiness,” 1982; Rosenfeld 2011). In the translations and commentaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one finds a visible absorption of ideas about the ethical goals of human life that strikingly contradict Christian religious norms. One can witness the confrontation of Christian certainty that true happiness only occurs in the afterlife with the authoritative ideas of Aristotle—referred to in this period as “the Philosopher”—who insists that earthly life should be oriented toward the achievement of perfect happiness.
A wrestling with this account of happiness is evident in the first complete Latin commentary on the Ethics, written by Albert the Great around the year 1250. In his commentary on Book 10, Albert introduced the problem of Aristotelian contemplation’s relationship to love, for it appeared that, for Aristotle, contemplation was an end in itself. Albert argued that, even in Aristotle, contemplation must be oriented toward a justifying end, and that enjoyment of any object—here, in Aristotle, the noblest object of all—must be completed by love. For Albert, the contemplation of happiness and the contemplation of God are one and the same. His student Thomas Aquinas took a slightly different tack in his commentary, resolving that Aristotle must be speaking about “imperfect” rather than perfect happiness, for perfect happiness is only available in the afterlife, is bestowed by the grace of God and cannot be comprehended by human reason (Aquinas 1964, L.I, l. 9, 113). While this attribution of imperfection to Aristotelian happiness may seem to be a willful misreading of Aristotle, it had the enabling effect of rendering human imperfection and incompleteness, not to mention unfulfilled desire, valid topics for philosophical speculation and ethical consideration. Thus, as much as one might need to affix caveats to the kind of happiness that was being recommended as the goal of earthly life, one could—as a medieval theologian—fully investigate these goals.
Late medieval erotic poetry took note of the concerns about happiness that it shared with medieval philosophy—the material that those people known as “clerks” are always writing about. Poets and clerks shared concerns about love and friendship, virtuous and/or pleasurable activity, “enjoyment” (variously defined) as the highest good, and something referred to in Middle English as felicite or blisfulness or welfulness, in French as beneurté or felicite, and beatitudo or felicitas in Latin—that is to say, happiness, a noun that did not enter English until the late fifteenth century. Poetry spoke in the shared vocabulary of lovers and clerks, and questions of how one should define and experience love, delight, pain and desire pervaded literature and philosophy alike.5 The solutions proposed to conflicts between Christianity and Aristotelian thought were not without their controversies, and the intellectual history of this period has often centered on the 219 theses—associated with “radical Aristotelianism” among other heresies—condemned by Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris, in 1277.6 Thus at the end of the Middle Ages, with the help of Aristotle, human happiness, achieved on earth, became a legitimate if contested terrain of Christian ethical inquiry, and love poetry—as a central strand of vernacular literature—was a significant place for ethical thought along with moral philosophy proper.
It is in this context that one of the most influential vernacular poems of the Middle Ages, The Romance of the Rose, was written—a poem that, in its opening, claims to be where “l’art d’Amors est tote enclose” (the whole art of love is enclosed). The poem, first composed by Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1230), was extended by nearly 18,000 lines by Jean de Meun (c. 1270), and Jean’s poem has long been understood as engaging in the Aristotelian controversies of late thirteenth-century Paris.7 As continuator, Jean transforms the love narrative into a medium for the consideration of various intellectual and social debates, and changes the name of the poem to the “Mirror for Lovers” (Guillaume and Jean 1965–70, l. 10621: “Le Miroër aus Amoreus”).8 The basic plot of the Rose involves a narrator who recounts a dream he once had in which he came under the sway of the God of Love (Cupid), fell in love with a beautiful rose and spoke to various interlocutors—a Friend, an Old Woman, a priest named Genius—seeking advice about winning his love object. In renaming his poem the Mirror for Lovers, Jean foregrounds the didactic structure of the poem, highlighting not only its role as a narrative of progress and education for the Lover of the poem, but also the “lovers” who make up the audience of the poem. If the “art of love” is encompassed by the poem, that art also contains excursions into a variety of philosophical topics that are deemed necessary to the practice of love, and should also be understood as a “mirror” for self-reflection and contemplation. Thus the Rose embodies the judgment that many, if not all, of the arts of philosophy are intertwined with the art of love.
It is not only poets who were aware of the ethical confluences between poetry and philosophy, between happiness and love. A fourteenth-century reader of the Rose glossed his manuscript with references to the Nicomachean Ethics among other texts (Huot 1993, 50), and it is clear that the poem’s investment in philosophical questions—not just ethics but optics, theories of language, rhetoric, politics, economics and natural philosophy—was influential in creating a “philosophical poetic” that lasted well into the fifteenth century. Philosophers also took note, and Albert the Great suggests that poetry can be a concise and comprehensive vehicle for moral philosophy, especially as it relates to happiness. At the beginning of his commentary on the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics, he tells us that in the opening lines of Book III, meter 12 (Felix qui potuit boni) of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, we find “drawn together and grasped” (trahitur et tangitur) all of Book X of the Ethics (Albertus 1968–72, L.X, lectio I, section 842, p. 708). In that case, we can choose to read Aristotle, or we can read Boethius’s poem about the Orpheus myth, which begins, “Happy was he who could look upon / The clear fount of the good; / Happy who could loose the bonds / Of heavy earth” (Boethius 1973, III.m.12).9 The poem tells the story of Orpheus’s double loss of Eurydice—after attempting to retrieve her from the underworld, he saw her, lost her and died (vidit, perdidit, occidit). Boethius’s use of this narrative is usually understood as an ascetic admonishment not to love earthly objects, but to turn one’s gaze heavenward. But the meter also acknowledges the pull of love—“who can give a rule to lovers?” (quis legem det amantibus?), asks the poem’s speaker, Philosophia. Both impulses—the need to transcend desire for earthly happiness and the pull of earthly desires—are acknowledged even in Albert’s commentary. Aristotle does not say, after all, that achieving happiness is simple or easy. Those heavy chains may not merely be condemned, but acknowledged for their strength.
If up to now I have been exploring some influential links between medieval arts of love and arts of happiness, I would like to turn to the relevance of these arts for the second half of my title, “translating Aristotle.” It is my hope that this discursive context can help us to understand the striking emergence of a French adaptation of the Nicomachean Ethics produced at the end of the thirteenth century, in the years directly following the composition of Jean de Meun’s Rose. It was then that a compiler-author decided to adapt and translate Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, along with a commentary by Thomas Aquinas and many other learned texts, and to call it Li ars d’amour—The Art of Love.10 The Picardian French treatise addresses the topics of erotic and marital desire, friendship, the soul, happiness and governance, offering definitions and advice to a “friend” who is the text’s dedicatee. The author explains, “As images of absent friends are delightful, even more so are the letters and true teachings of these friends; and this book is called the art of love, for in it the nature of love and friendship is defined.”11 This text gives us evidence of widespread engagement with philosophical concerns usually imagined to be restricted to the Latin tradition at the turn of the fourteenth century—evidence of access to Aristotelian learning for a noble audience who would be unlikely to encounter Latin scholastic texts and commentaries.
Li ars d’amour is a treatise in three parts, Part 1 on Love and Friendship (four books), Part 2 on the Soul (seven books) and Part 3 on Happiness (two books). The treatise has thus far received the most attention from art historians, given the extended illustration programs in the two earliest manuscripts.12 Yet as Guy Guldentops and Carlos Steel (2003) observe, it deserves fame among historians of philosophy and philologists—especially, I would add, the growing number of literary and cultural scholars who are interested in vernacular philosophy as a significant terrain of late medieval literature. Guldentops and Steel note that if all of the quotations and summaries in the text were put together, although neither Aristotle nor Aquinas are mentioned by name, one would have an almost complete vernacular reconstruction of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics together with Aquinas’s commentary, as well as quotations from the Summa Theologiae and Summa contra gentiles—an “astonishing achievement” (2003, 72). The treatise was composed well before Nicole Oresme’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics for Charles V in 1370 (though after Brunetto Latini’s Tresor from the 1240s, which includes a summary of the Ethics),13 and appears to be evidence of greater continuity between scholastic teaching and vernacular writing than is typically assumed. Li ars d’amour is one rich place where we see a philosophical text fully engaged with the courtly preoccupations of a noble, nonclerical audience, taking in genres of mirror for princes, philosophical summa and, obviously, the “art of love” that originates with Ovid and is subject to simultaneous scholastic and vernacular revision from the twelfth century forward.
Even with the previous examples of Andreas and Jean de Meun, however, there is no obvious answer as to what it might mean to speak about Aristotle’s Ethics as an “art of love.” There is a double act of translation happening in Li ars d’amour, in that the author summarizes and translates authoritative Latin texts into the vernacular, and also translates the content of the ethical teaching of the universities into a context comprehensible and attractive to a lay, noble audience.14 To this end the author of the treatise included a glossary of technical terms such as appetive (desiring), amours amiable (virtuous love), amités (friendship—alliance or company), concupiscence (amorous desire concerning bodily pleasure) and philosophie (defined as “amours de savoir, de viertut ou de verité”).15 Thus if lyric poetry and romance do one kind of work in “translating” ideas about happiness for a lay, vernacular audience, Li ars d’amour creates an adaptation of philosophical texts aimed at that same audience, engaging in literal translation as well as a kind of cultural translation.
The opening of Li ars d’amour explains that the author made the treatise in order to instruct his audience on the perfect unity of friendship, a knowledge that the author selflessly wishes to instill in his friend and dedicatee even if he should replace him with another person. Thus he has written this treatise, which “teaches the roots and the foundation on which the diverse manners of love are founded; and next, what the different kinds of love and friendship are and how they may come about and be preserved […] and in short what the nature of all those friendships is.”16 He admits that he also made the work for another reason, “if God granted me so much understanding that I might teach you something you do not yet know, I would rejoice wonderfully.”17 The author wishes that the recipient should think about him all the time, and so the treatise is “as it were my image representing me to you.”18 The text not only is an art of love, defining and advising on manners of love and friendship, but also depicts itself as an act of love, the gift of the author’s self-portrait to the recipient. In describing successful teaching as something to rejoice over, the author describes education as the pinnacle of friendship and route to happiness.
The author then declares that he will not only provide his own views on love, but also explain the teachings of authoritative “ancient” writers who have varying and sometimes contradictory opinions on the matter. But as Guldentops and Steel note, the original thinking of the author is only occasionally detectable, and the text is largely a compilation—not only of Aristotle and Aquinas, but also of Seneca, Cicero, Boethius, Jerome and others. The first section of the treatise spends some time defining and distinguishing among friendship, love and benevolence. Short sections treat a range of topics, including “the good that is in love,” “the difference between love and friendship” and “the difference between love and benevolence.” The treatise oscillates between the descriptive and the prescriptive. Defining friendship, the author observes that “One may say that friendship is the desire to have the company and enjoyment of one whom one loves via reciprocally perceived goodwill. And this friendship may be for benefit or for delight or for high honor/virtue.”19 Friendship, it is emphasized, is open, not secret, and consists in understanding—the word used is perchevance (perception)—and in this the text follows Aristotle, who notes in very similar language that goodwill (bene velle) for another may not be hidden (non latentes) if it is to be considered friendship (Aristotle 1972–74, 8.2.27). While acknowledging that friendship may have a variety of motivations, the author ultimately concludes that of the three kinds of friendship—for profit, delight or honor—friendship for the sake of honor is the truest and most perfect. As Aristotle puts it, “perfect friendship […] is friendship between men who are good and resemble one another according to virtue” (Aristotle 1972–74, 8.4.6).20
At times, Li ars d’amour uses ancient sources as bases for meditations on love that would not be out of place in courtly erotic poetry. Elaborating on the necessity of mutuality in friendship, one chapter demonstrates “that the name friend comes from friendship and does not come from love.”21 On this the author quotes Seneca, “a friend always loves; but one who loves is by no means always a friend.”22 Then, reveling in wordplay, the treatise goes on to observe that for this reason—because of the possibility of unrequited love—love is spoken of as bitter:
Love (amours) is so called from the word “bitter” (amer), and bitterness (amers) and love (amors) are so similar that when you find one you always find the other, and when bitterness exists love is there, and when love is there bitterness is there, and a friend is so called from the word friendship, and love can exist without friendship, thus it can also be bitter.23
The association of love and bitterness has a long history in French poetry, most strongly associated with the Tristan romance, which in the version by Thomas of Britain plays extensively on the homophones for the sea, love and bitterness (la mer, l’amer and l’amer). One finds such wordplay in the Romance of the Rose, in which the lover, having been given a kiss from the rose, claims that “Se j’oi joie, nus nou demant, / car une odor m’entra ou cors / qui en geta la dolor hors / et adouci les maus d’amer / qui me souloient estre amer” [No one need ask if I was joyful, for into my heart there entered an odor that drove out my sorrow and sweetened the woes of love that had so long been so bitter] (ll. 3462–66) (my emphasis).
In this case Li ars d’amour appears to engage in the wordplay of courtly poetry in order to endorse an ideal of male friendship that is not bitter. Such idealizing of love between men is maintained throughout much of the treatise, solidifying hierarchies of non-heterosexual, masculine friendship. It is explained in one section that women cannot truly participate in friendship, as they are by nature phlegmatic and thus too changeable and mutable to pursue virtuous delight together with another. In this disability they have good company with infants, the aged and criminals.24 Yet at times the author seems to endorse an idea of natural, heterosexual love (Camille 1997, 69–70). In a chapter on the delights of love,25 “which are founded on the five senses,” the author explains the reasons for the pleasure of the sexual act. Such acts of love must be delightful, he explains, so that men and women will not feel “horreur et desdaing” at the possibility, and will compensate for the fact that we cannot live forever, seeking a version of immortality that is a form of imitating God. And yet the treatise is scarcely an untrammeled celebration of human sexuality, and the author is careful to note, following Aquinas, that sex between an unmarried man and unmarried woman constitutes “simple fornication” and is a sin.26
Thus Li ars d’amour is capacious enough to elevate masculine friendship and still create space for the consideration of heterosexual desire. In its treatment of marriage, the text engages in a complicated nesting of discourses that resonates with courtly vernacular treatments of love and ethics. In the fifth book of the second part of the treatise, the author treats the topic of justice at length, modeling his discussion most clearly on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 5 and Politics Book 1. The text first considers the definition of justice in both its varieties, as the lawful and the fair, then moves to the question of unjust actions and finally addresses the question—related to justice and equality—of love and hierarchy within marriage. The treatise insists that it is inappropriate that a wife should be the servant of her husband. For although it might be fitting that a husband govern his wife in light of his superior reason, he should not create conditions of such great inequality that he uses her like a servant—rather she should be his companion.27 Yet husbands and wives alike are warned not to love each other too much or for the wrong reasons:
Husband and wife should love each other for the heart and the goodness of each, not for shape, face, or beauty. The too-great love of beauty is the forgetting of reason and the neighbor of unbecoming madness and a suspicious heart. It confuses counsel, breaks high and generous will, draws one away from great thoughts to insignificant ones; it makes people querulous, wrathful, foolhardy, cruelly imperious, servile flatterers, good for nothing.28
The advice is presented as appropriate for both husbands and wives, but the bad consequences of excessive love—confusing counsel, distraction from “grandes pensées”—are clearly relevant to men. Here the author begins his transition into a misogynist discourse that follows Jerome’s infamous antifeminist treatise Against Jovinian. Love in its fundamental form furthers good, virtuous character, but love that is misguided or too strong leads to corruption. Furthermore, these particular objects of passion—wives—can be ribald, greedy and generally trying. The author assures his readers that he does not at all mean that one should not marry, simply that one should pursue a good marriage. From this discussion the treatise makes its way back to justice, and to the question of natural justice and the positive justice of human-given laws.
Although the treatise follows a series of Latin authorities throughout the discussion outlined above, the parallels with the Romance of the Rose are striking. I acknowledge that it is scarcely a medieval invention to include marriage as an essential component of politics; for Aristotle, marriage is foundational to considerations of justice because the household is the smallest unit of the state (Politics Book 1). But the movement between discussions of law and politics via the vehicle of discussions of women, desire and equality finds a notable parallel in the Rose. In the Lover’s discourse with the Friend, the speech of the Friend moves from advice to attract women, to the observation that women desire wealth, to a lament for current mores—a nostalgia that allows for the introduction of the topos of the “golden age” when “all were accustomed to being equal, no one wanted any possessions of his own” (Trestuit pareill estre soloient, / ne riens propre avoir ne voloient, ll. 8417–18). The Friend recites the common dictum that love and lordship do not keep company, and notes that it is much the same case within marriage, where the husband should not beat his wife. He then begins a long discourse in which he ventriloquizes a “jealous husband,” relates the story of Lucrece, then excoriates wives and all women. In his own voice he diagnoses the fault of the husband as a failure of equality—the jealous husband makes himself his wife’s lord instead of her companion. He then turns back to the topos of the Golden Age in which all were equally rich and no one was lord over anyone else; this state of affairs was disturbed first by sin, then lordship and private property.
The mode is digressive, but the Rose prefigures the structure of Li ars d’amour—or at the very least demonstrates an analogous structure of thought about a series of political questions: justice, marriage, equality, desire and the relationship between natural and positive law. In both the poem and the treatise one can see a learned lay culture synthesizing various discourses on love and marriage as a means of coming to grips with Aristotelian understandings of justice—and vice versa. If in Aristotle marital and family life must be discussed because an understanding of the state is built upon an understanding of the households that make up the state, in these medieval texts love and marriage do not appear to be subordinate concerns. Li ars d’amour addresses the various aspects of the good life in their own right, without the careful Aristotelian subordination to the “end” that these aspects are oriented toward.
This structure of non-subordination holds even though the final section of the treatise, on happiness, turns toward the most privileged form of love—the love of God. This love completes the variety of affections encompassed by the treatise: friendship, marriage, sexual desire, charitable goodwill, concern for the common good and justice. In the final part of Li ars d’amour the author explains that happiness is what all people desire and hold as the sovereign good of human life. Happiness is the sovereign good, and the sovereign good is happiness.29 He goes on to explain the variety of opinions as to what constitutes happiness, as some say it resides in the delight of the body, some in riches and some in worldly honors. The treatise gradually establishes that spiritual pleasure is greater than bodily pleasure, and that speculative happiness is greater than practical happiness, but also explains that there is an important secondary happiness that consists in works of prudence. In this transition from the moral to the political the treatise imitates the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, which turns at its close to questions of lawmaking and political science, serving, as Thomas Aquinas notes in his commentary, as a connection to Aristotle’s work in the Politics. The last section of Li ars d’amour includes arguments that one should love the common good, an explanation of the necessity of laws and descriptions of what makes a good ruler—admonishments that a prince should be knowledgeable and wise and also patient.
In the end Li ars d’amour offers, it says, another way toward happiness than that which had been shown previously, and it shows that happiness is in love. For the treatise as a whole has made plain that the true lover should be, above all, virtuous and happy. And it has shown that happiness is in a certain manner inspired by love. The text praises speculative happiness, which it says is in contemplation of the truth of God and of celestial things and is entirely pleasurable:
Thus it appears that happiness consists in love. Though we cannot fully know or comprehend God, we may love him fully and in this way it seems that we are closer to God, which creates happiness.30
Everything is ultimately ordered to that highest good, the love of God, which the treatise pointedly renames charity (karités) but then still proceeds to call amour. This love that inspires happiness consists in desiring God, and in the impossible attempt to understand him. The treatise ends with a short lyric on desiring, contemplating and delighting and thereby being satisfied in one’s hunger and slaking one’s thirst.
This turn surely articulates an orthodox perspective, and yet it remains significant that the treatise arrives at the truism of love of God as the highest human happiness via the language of Aristotelian ethics modulated by a courtly vernacular. This author felt the praise of the love of God was best arrived at via an “art of love” that by no means sold itself as a devotional treatise. Li ars d’amour invests its success in the idea that romance-inspired meditations on the bitterness of love are an appropriate form for the investigation of an Aristotelian ethics of friendship. And although this ethics ultimately gives way to the love of God, the treatise spends the greatest bulk of its time exploring the importance of male friendship, princely rule and the pursuit of virtue for earthly ends.
Behind Li ars d’amour, I suggest, lies the first Art of Love. In the Ars Amatoria and other writings influential in the late medieval period (including the Metamorphoses) Ovid established love—heterosexual love, homosexual love, parental love, friendship, religious devotion—as a vehicle for consideration of philosophical questions of consent, personal identity, freedom of the will, governance, and the relationship between sexual ethics and the state. And though it is not unique to Ovid nor the late medieval period that the literature of eros would be a place for philosophy (the Symposium comes to mind), we might consider that Ovid provided a far-reaching model for accessing these larger questions via meditations on love and via the persona of the praeceptor amoris, depicting love itself not simply as a convenient medium for thought but the central experience of human life. If the later Middle Ages is rightly thought about as the period that gave birth to “amorous subjectivity” (Fradenburg 1997, 212), the enduring Western definition of the self as one who loves, then perhaps we are also still working out the ramifications of an art of happiness that completes itself via its expression as an art of love.
I would like to thank my colleagues Wendy Love Anderson and Julie Singer for their helpful responses to a draft of this essay.
1Green refers here most immediately to Labate (1984).
2See, for example, Ars Amatoria Book II.467–78 on solitary, nomadic human beings “softened” by “voluptuous pleasure” and Book II.501–2 on Apollonian self-knowledge leading to wise, successful love.
3Foundational scholarship on these commentaries, and medieval literary theory more broadly, can be found in Allen (1982) and Minnis (2012).
4The translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Robert Grosseteste, revised by William of Moerbeke, was the most widely circulated version in the Latin West. A contemporary translation from Arabic, of Averroës’s Middle Commentary on the Ethics, by Hermannus Alemannus, also survives in several copies.
5On the shared language of theology and vernacular love poetry, see Courtenay (1990).
6The full text of the condemnation is found in the Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis 1889–97, vol. 1, pp. 543–61, translated by Fortin and O’Neill, (1963). See also Hissette (1977), especially pp. 263–73 on the ethical articles.
7See Paré (1941, 1947), Minnis (2001), Heller Roazen (2003) Rosenfeld (2011).
8Translations of the Rose are from Dahlberg (1971).
9Felix qui potuit boni / Fontem visere lucidum, / Felix qui potuit gravis / Terrae solvere vincula.
10The treatise survives in three known manuscripts: Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, Mss. 9543 and 9548 (the latter a copy of 9543) and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. Fr. 611. It was edited by Jules Petit in the nineteenth century, attributed to Jean le Bel and titled Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté. For a survey of current knowledge about the treatise, see Guldentops and Steel (2003). The author has been variously identified over the years, most recently as Guy d’Avesnes (Bishop of Utrecht, 1301–17, brother of the Count of Hainault and student of Henry Bate); see van der Meulen (2000).
11Li ars d’amour, I.I.2, Tome premier, 8: Car se les ymages des amis absens sunt délitables, moult plus doivent estre les letres, et vraies ensègnes sunt des amis: et est apielés cis livres li ars d’amours, car par ce ke dit i est, on set la nature d’amour et d’amisté.
13Guldentops and Steel (2003, 85) find Li ars to be independent of (not influenced by) Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou tresor.
14Guldentops and Steel observe that the treatise plays to noble sensibilities by endorsing fame and honor as compatible with moral excellence, and that Guy d’Avesnes “composed an adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics that was understandable for, and palatable to, his aristocratic friends and family” (2003, 84).
15The glossary is contained in Tome deuxième, pp. xlv–lvi.
16Li ars d’amour I.I.1, Tome Premier, 7: il ensegne queles sunt les racines et li fondement sor quoi les diverses manières d’amours sunt fondées; et après, queles les amours et les amistés sunt, comment eles doivent estre faites et gardées et comment depechies […] et briément toute la nature de toutes les amistés.
17Li ars d’amour I.I.1, Tome Premier, 7: se Diex m’avoit tant de sens presté ke je vous puisse aprendre chose que vois ne seüssiés, je m’en esjoïroie mervilleusement.
18Li ars d’amour I.I.2, Tome Premier, 8: ki est ensi comme men ymage, moi représentant à vous.
19Li ars d’amour I.I.10, Tome Premier, 23: Dont poons dire k’amistés est désirs d’avoir compaignie et usanche de ce c’on ayme par entrechangable bienvoellance piercheue. Et ceste amistés si puet estre u pour proufit u pour délit u por bien honeste.
20perfecta […] est bonorum amicitia, et secundum virtutem similium.
21Li ars d’amour I.I.12, Tome Premier, 25: Cis capitles moustre ke cis nons amis vient d’amisté et nient d’amours.
22Li ars d’amour I.I.12, Tome Premier, 25: ki amis est toujours aime; mais ki aime il n’est mie tousjours amis; Seneca, Epistles, 35.
23Li ars d’amour I.I.12, Tome Premier, 25: Et pour ce ke amours est dite d’amer, et amers et amors sont si ensanle ke quant li uns est, li autres est, si que quant amers est amours est, et quant amours est amers est, et amis si est dis d’amisté, et amour puest estre sans amisté, dont le pora ausi estre amers […]
24Li ars d’amour, I.II.12–13, Tome Premier, 48–50.
25Li ars d’amour, I.III.3, Tome Premier, 136.
26Li ars d’amour, II.III.15, Tome Premier, 365–6; see Guldentops and Steel (2003, 76).
27Li ars d’amour II.V.12, Tome Deuxième, p. 93: si son de compaigne.
28Li ars d’amour II.V.12, Tome Deuxième, p. 95: Li corages et li bontés dou baron et de le feme, li uns del autre fait à amer ne mie la fourme, la figure u li biautés. Li amours trop grande de la fourme est oubliance de raison et prochaine à foursenerie desavenans et à corage souspecheneuse, les consaus tourble, les grandes et les gentis volentés brise, de grandes pensées as petites remue. Ele fait aussi les gens tencheurs, ireus, outrageus durs comandemens, servichablement blandissans, nient utiles à tous. See Jerome, Adversus Jovinianus, Book I, chapter 49.
29Li ars d’amour III.I.1, Tome Deuxième, 249: sovrains biens et boneürtés et ce k’est boneürtés est sovrains biens.
30Li ars d’amour III.II.11, Tome Deuxième, 384: Dont il sanle ke boneürtés soit en amer. Dieu aussi tout comprendre ne poons ne connoistre; mais tot le poons amer et par ce sanlons nous à Dieu plus prochain, laquele chose fait boneürté.
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