History of Love Part - 01

THE HISTORY OF WESTERN LOVE AND SEX
FROM 1300 B.C. TO THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY

Ancient Greece
(1300 A.C.-450 A.C.)

· Homeric women (1300 B.C.-1 100 B.C.) were relatively free and exercised considerable influence over men, but remained virtuous and on double standards. With the high standard of living in later Greece, women became idle and lost their importance.

Golden Age of Greece
(450 B.C.-27 B.C.)

· Wild bisexual love life of Alcibiades (450 B.C.), a student of Socrates and raised by Pericles.

· High class prostitutes and courtesans were held superior to wives and "virtuous" women.

· Greek men wanted faithful love, but tried to obtain it by gifts and trickery. When Greek men actually did fall in love, they considered themselves as sick.

· The Greeks never connected love with marriage. They found love either an amusement that quickly faded or a god-sent affliction that lasted too long.

Roman Empire
(27 B.C.-385 A.D.)

· Pagan love in Rome was guilt-free, lusty, unfaithful and deceitful.

· Unlike Greeks, the Romans preferred sex without philosophy or significance.

· Abortions and contraception were common. Babies were often discarded as garbage.

· Octavian (Augustus) Caesar sought unsuccessfully to restore family unity and sexual "morality" via government force and the Julian laws...all were failures, even with death penalties.

· Poet Ovid (2 B.C.) wrote a manual for sex and adultery, The Art of Love (Ar Amatoria), a brilliant, modern, fun, deceptive, cheerful and humorous book:

o Modern grooming tips.

o Sanctioned the use of tears by men.

o Sexual positions described that stressed mutual orgasm and satisfaction

· Most "liberated" Roman feminists failed to find emotional satisfaction.



Decline of the Roman Empire
(100 A.D.-385 A.D.)

· Roman empire (100 A.D.-300 A.D.) still appeared vibrant, but was surrendering to a new religion...Christianity. Rome then plunged into an asceticism of joyless and guilt-laden sex.

· Christians linked all Roman evils to sex and pleasure.

· Jovinian in 385 A.D. was excommunicated by the Pope for arguing that marriage was superior to celibacy.

Rise of Christianity and the Dark Ages
(385 A.D.-1000 A.D.)

· Rise of the unwashed hippies in Egypt. They developed and implemented the concepts of Christian sacrifice, self-torture and denial (e.g., St. Simon).

· People became preoccupied with sex as Christians malevolently turned sex into a guilty and sinful activity (e.g., some burning off fingers to resist temptation). Neurotically inflamed eroticism continually increased with increased Christian condemnation of sex.

· St. Augustine (born 354 A.D.) promoted Christian guilt through his books: (1) Confessions -- self-accusations of his personal dissipation during his pagan and lustful youth. He was converted to a Christian in 386 A.D. and turned his hatred against the goodness and pleasures of man. States we are born between feces and urine. (2) The City of God his major work, speculates on how babies might be born from women uncankered by lust and sex. Demonstrates hatred for human life.

· In 585 A.D., the Catholics argued that women did not have a mortal soul and debated if women were even human.

· By the 5th Century, marriage came under clerical domination.

· The dark ages for love and happiness accompanied the rise of Christianity. Collapsing under the Christian stranglehold, 6th Century Rome was repeatedly ravaged and looted. One million population was reduced to fifty thousand. The city lay in rubble and ruins. The senate ceased for lack of qualified men. The hygiene, science, and culture of Rome was abandoned

· Christianity reduced sex to an unromantic, harsh, and ugly act. Penance was cynically performed as often as required. Women became pieces of property.

· Clergy and Popes turned to prostitutes and neurotic sex (e.g., pope of 904 A.D. practiced incest and was a lecher with children).

· By the 9th Century, Christianity dominated. Women were wasteful property. The church sanctioned wife beatings and leveled only relatively light fines for killing women. Noblemen had the "natural right" to ravish any peasant woman on the road and to deflower all brides of their vassals.

· St. Jerome stated that he who too ardently loved his wife was a sinful adulterer.

· Christian marital sex was performed only in one position and never during penance nor on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, holiday seasons, and then only to conceive a child.

· For the Catholic clergy, sex without values (e.g., prostitute sex, orgy sex, rape, or sadistic sex) was not a serious offense, but sex with value (e.g., loving or valuing a woman) was a high sin with severe penalties.

Pre-Renaissance Rise of Courtly Love
(1000-1300)

· The start of courtly love and the creation of the romantic ideal began in the 11th Century. In Southern France, noblemen developed a completely new set of love concepts from which a unique man/woman relationship arose that was previously unknown to Western civilization.

· April 25, 1227, Ulrich von Lichtenstein started his incredible journey from Venice to Austria dressed as the female goddess Venus. Challenging in a jousting battle every man enroute. He did this in the service of a woman who continually scorned him. Three centuries later this journey served as the basis for the satire, Don Quixote de la Mancha.

· Courtly love or "true love" was a clandestine, bittersweet relationship of endless frustrations. Such a relationship was supposedly spiritually "uplifting", making the knight a better man or warrior. No love existed in marriage, but the pain of frustrated courtly love was considered uplifting, delicious, and exciting.

· The sex act was considered false love, but "true love" was kissing, touching, fondling, and perhaps even naked contact.

· Troubadours believed that unsatisfied passion improved one's character. They could give freely only without the compulsion of necessity (e.g., the compulsion of married people who were duty-bound).

· For the first time, love was combined with character ennoblement (except to some degree with Greeks in their homosexual and courtesan relations).

· Troubadour poets begged their ladies not to grant them sexual favors under any conditions (e.g., Dante's love for Beatrice in Vita Nuova who was a source of spiritual guidance rather than a sexual female).

· In France, William II, Duke of Aquitaine (born 1071 A.D.), was the first of the troubadours. He introduced a new life style, love lyrics, and social manners. His courtly-love concepts swept across Europe and are still with us today.

· In 1122 A.D., William's granddaughter, Eleanor, became Queen of both France and England. She set up cultured courts and established the Court of Love, which codified and promoted courtly love. In Eleanor's court, a cleric named Andre wrote a love manual, Tractatus de Amore et -de Amoris Remedio (Treatise on Love and Its Remedy). His was a serious exposition on courtly love and its rules.

· Poet Chretien, on orders from Eleanor, developed the romantic story of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.

· Eleanor's gay, happy, and civilized life lasted four years. King Henry II then swept in and ruined the court in 1174.

· Courtly love introduced the elements of emotional relationships between men and women for the first time. This was a revolutionary concept in which love was based on mutual respect and admiration. Courtly love elevated women from a servant and house-keeper to a more equal partner and an inspirer of progress.

The Church vs. the Renaissance
(1300-1500)

· Courtly love mocked religion. Churchmen fought this new, happy love (e.g., St. Thomas stated that to kiss and touch a woman with delight, even without thought of fornication, was a mortal sin).

· Priests and religious fanatics began a 300-year period of flagellation during which they paraded in hordes from town to town praying and whipping themselves and each other into bloody pulps.

· The struggle was between the darkness of religion and the enlightenment of the Renaissance. Also the papal power struggled against the resurgence of pro-man, pro-life Aristotelian ideas.

· The church moved in and a new breed of male factors not known before appeared. They were the inquisitors who were backed by a series of murderous papal pronouncements and bulls.

· By 1450, the official Catholic dogma established that witches existed and could fly by night. All physically desirable women were projected by the church as evil sorceresses. The church was losing its power and this was their means to fight the rising rationalism and happiness brought on by the emerging Renaissance.

· Inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Henry Kramer, Dominican brothers and professors of sacred theology at the University of Cologne, armed with their influential book, Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer"), and with Pope Innocent VII's infamous Bull of 1484 advocated hanging "evil" women by their thumbs, twisting ropes around their heads, pushing needles under their nails, and pouring boiling oil on their feet in the "devout" hope of forcing confessions of their "wickedness". They burned to death over 30,000 "witches" charged with having sex with the Devil, whom the Church insisted had a brutal penis covered with fish scales.

· Crosscurrents and contradictions raged between the happy and pleasurable love arising from the enlightened Renaissance spirit and the hatred of women (wicked witches) arising from the dark and malevolent spirit of the church.

· Aging Pope Alexander VI had many teenage mistresses.

· In the 16th Century, impotent Duke of Urbino and Elizabetta Gonzaga engaged in a platonic love affair that resulted in a handbook on courtly manners, The Courtier, by Castigliones.

· Queen Marguerite of France was involved in intense but platonic love affairs with twelve men simultaneously. She also wrote a collection of 72 tales titled Heptameron that were bawdy and ribald. These were tales of platonic and "perfect love" mixed with orgies, incestuousness, partner swapping, and sexually insatiable priests.

· Marriage was based on both physical and financial aspects. Love was neither the basis for marriage nor any essential part of it. Marriage was a lifelong financial transaction. Marriage usually took place at 14-16 years old, and sometimes at 2-3 years old and included a dowry plus income and property guarantees.

· Henry VIII was the first major figure to combine love and marriage. He waged a long battle with Bishop Wolsey and Pope Clement VII about his divorce and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn.

· Woman's status was changing. Writers were trying to play both sides of this change (e.g., a book by Pyvve titled, The Praise and Dispraise of Women?. Contrasting approaches appeared later in classical literature (e.g., Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet vs. The Taming of the Shrew) .

· New concepts of joining the mind and the body in love and marriage were developing.

· The middle class was being attracted to the romantic love concepts of nobility.

· Renaissance enlightenment made sex seem not so sinful and disgusting es the church projected. The middle class began to associate sex with love.

· The completely new concept that young marrieds should live alone in a dwelling of their own began developing in the 17th Century.

· While the status of woman as a human being and as a love object was rising, her legal status remained little better than in the Middle Ages. All property belonged to the husband. Wife beating was still legal.

The Puritans
(1500-1700)

· Puritans were not anti-sex. Quite to the contrary, they were value-oriented about love and sex, even romantically sentimental.

· The Reformation combined the enlightened Renaissance (marital sex was held as good and wholesome) with the malevolent Christian position that continued to burn women as witches.

· Dr. Martin Luther (1483-1546) battled against Catholic asceticism in advocating the enjoyment of every pleasure that was not sinful. Luther was lusty and vulgar in the "eat, drink and be merry" style. He claimed to have broken wind in the Devil's face. He fought Rome and claimed that celibacy was invented by the Devil and that priests could marry. He asserted marriage was not a sacrament at all, but a civil matter. In 1532, he held that Christ probably committed adultery with Mary Magdalene and other women so as to fully experience the nature of man. Luther asserted that sexual impulses were both normal and irrepressible. He broke from Rome and married. He cheerfully loved his wife and held sex in marriage as good. Luther's reformation rapidly spread across Northern Europe.

· The Bluenoses -- John Calvin (1509-1564) was the opposite of Martin Luther. Calvin was cheerless and had a viciously malevolent theology based on total human depravity and the wrath of God. An unhappy and unhealthy ascetic, he had ulcers, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches. He considered life of little value and God as a harsh tyrant. Calvin set up a brutal political theocracy in Geneva. No dancing, fancy clothes, or jewelry were allowed. Death penalty for adultery. Even legitimate love was stringently regulated. Solemn weddings with no revelry. The Calvin marriage had two functions: (l) to produce offspring, (2) to eliminate incontinence.

· Most Puritans thoroughly rejected the unhuman joylessness of Calvinism, except for a vocal minority such as John Knox in the United States. His Blue Laws of the 1650's were against Sunday amusements, smoking, drinking, gambling, fancy clothing. He also promoted public whippings, scarlet letters, execution for adulterers, and the Salem "witch" executions (executed 26 women and two dogs in 1692).

· Stern puritan traits were mainly expressions that masked moods of mischief and romance. Church trial records show that much sexual "sinning" existed. But only sex outside of marriage was attacked. Puritans greatly enjoyed sex inside marriage and condemned the "popish" concept of the virtue of virginity. Most Puritans were tenderly romantic and good lovers.

· The image of the sexless and stony heart Puritan is false. Consider the 17th Century Puritan, John Milton (Paradise Lost); he was virtuous, but experienced a healthy view of sex. He displayed idealistic and romantic views about marriage. Milton sent tracts to Parliament urging modern-day, easy divorce ("with one gentle stroke to wipe away 10,000 tears out of the life of man"). Milton's Paradise Lost projects a benevolent view of Adam and Eve in a romantic love context. Milton entirely rejected St. Augustine's malevolent views of women, sex and life.

· 16th Century Puritans tried to combine the ideals of love with the normality of sex in marriage. Woman's status improved under puritanism (e.g., a woman could separate, even divorce, if beaten). Property rights and inheritance laws improved. Marriage became a civil contract.

· 17th Century Puritans were pious and severe, but also strongly sexed and somewhat romantic.

· 18th Century Puritans developed the stifling prudishness of the Victorians.

The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)

· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.

· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.

· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.

· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.

· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.