2 - Love and language in Jean de Meun
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2010
Summary
Love and language are both contaminated by the Fall from Paradise or from the Golden Age: commentators and poets who are preoccupied with love almost necessarily become preoccupied with language as well. Both originate in Paradise as defining human faculties; both now exhibit a gap between will and performance, and between the natural and the artificial. In Paradise, according to Honorius Augustodunensis' Elucidarium, an infant would have been able to walk and to speak absolute [clearly] from birth; and in the Golden Age love was natural and innocent. Now we must learn to walk and learn to use language; and for the medieval poets schooled by Ovid, the language we use is not only analogous to but directly implicated in the domain of sexual difference and heterosexual desire. As Bloch argues, language – that is, language in the fallen world – engenders narrative, desire, and especially narratives of desire. And Augustine says that the “word uttered inside ourselves,” as it manifests itself in spoken words and deeds, is a word of love:
This word is conceived in love of either the creature or the creator, that is of changeable nature or unchangeable truth; which means either in covetousness [cupiditas] or in charity [caritas] … Now this word is born when on thinking over it we like it either for sinning or for doing good. So love, like something in the middle, joins together our word and the mind it is begotten from, and binds itself in with them as a third element in a non-bodily embrace, without any confusion.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007