At the end of A Problem in Greek Ethics, John Addington Symonds maps out a timeline that describes how different ideas of love were favored across time in the Mediterranean (and western Europe). What he called “Greek love” (or, in Ancient Greek, paiderastia) flourished in the Greek world. Republican and early Imperial Rome shared the notion of the “boy-lover” but filtered out the specific customs of paiderastia, while the Christians of the Late Roman Empire sought to suppress the “sensuality” of its contemporaries (Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics XX). Finally, the Christians of medieval Europe brought chivalry, or courtly love, into prominence:

“The mythology of Mary gave religious sanction to the chivalrous enthusiasm; and a cult of woman sprang into being which, although it was romantic and visionary, we owe the spiritual basis of our domestic and civil life. The modus vivendi of the modern world was found” (Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics XX).

That passage consists of the final words of the essay. When I first read A Problem in Greek Ethics, I found this ending to be peculiar. It’s a sudden ending, one that at first seems to merely rush some vague notion of futurity into an essay that is otherwise firmly fixed in Ancient Greece. However, having considered this ending further, I believe that it suggests profound revelations about how Symonds explored the matter of love.

By placing Greek love at the beginning of the “timeline” and medieval chivalry at the end, Symonds implictly places the two in dialogue (though he does not necessarily argue for a causal relationship). Both involve a form of love that follows very specific social customs: in short, they are systems of love, which are bound to the societal mores of their time and place.

On one hand, as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the patriarchal structure (and homosocial structure, reinforcing said patriarchal structures) of Classical Greek city-states heavily shaped Greek paiderastia: the erastes (“lover”) must be an adult male citizen, while the eromenos (“beloved”) must be an adolescent male who temporarily assumes a lower social position (i.e. positions of women, enslaved persons) (Sedgwick, Between Men 4).

On the other hand, the worship of Mary in medieval Christianity heavily shaped medieval European chivalry, or courtly love: the loving knight exalts the loving lady as the Christian exalts Mary, and this love cannot coexist with marriage, as the lady “might be a maiden or a married woman” (Symonds, “Ideals of Love” 75).

Thus, Symonds has established a comparative link between Greek love and medieval chivalry: they are systems of love that are shaped and enforced by societal norms. I found this to be an interesting comparison by itself when I first noticed it, but I believe that Symonds goes further than mere comparison.

By placing Greek love and medieval chivalry together, Symonds posits a particular question about the nature of “love”: how does love—as a broadly-defined, yet profound attachment to someone else—manifest outside of the societal norms of marriage (as a legal and/or social binding between people) and sexuality (as including but not limited to sexual acts, attraction, and/or reproduction)?

Symonds’s answer is that passion, as a form of “raw” emotional affection for another that is not bound to those particular societal norms, does not require the permission of said norms to manifest itself.

Ultimately, Symonds posits that passion can exist separately from and/or in direct conflict with societal norms of marriage and sexuality and that, as a result, forms of love end up being excluded from social structures built around love. In “The Dantesque and the Platonic Ideals of Love,” Symonds discusses how passion collides with societal norms of marriage and sexuality in the respective historical contexts of Greek love and medieval chivalry:

“In theory, then, chivalrous love of both types, the Greek and the mediaeval, existed independently of the marriage tie and free from sensual affections. It was, in each case, the source of exhilarating passion; a durable ecstasy which removed the lover to a higher region, rendering him capable of haughty thoughts and valiant deeds” (Symonds, “Ideals of Love” 77).

For Symonds, the role of chivalry in exemplifying passion highlights certain limitations in systems of love. On one hand, love is not inherent to marriage, and passion is not inherent to sex. On the other hand, forms of passion such as Greek love and medieval chivalry are excluded from socially stable institutions of marriage.

Throughout “The Dantesque and the Platonic Ideals of Love,” Symonds utilizes this complication in order to discuss how chivalry affects the interpretation of Dante and his love for Beatrice. He argues that Dante’s extraordinary, almost unreal love for Beatrice can be better understood as the elevated passion that marked chivalry (and can be compared to Greek love).

“By comparing [Greek love and chivalrous love], we may come to understand more of that peculiar enthusiasm which they possessed in common, which made love in either case a ladder for scaling the higher fortresses of intellectual truth, and which it is now well-nigh impossible for us to realise as actual” (ibid. 60).

In the face of disbelief of Dante’s love for Beatrice and doubt of Beatrice’s very existence, Symonds argues that models of chivalry and Greek love can supplement the notions of passion necessary to understand Dante. By adding passion back into reading, he is able to reconcile Dante’s intellectual, truth-seeking mind and his seemingly unreal love for Beatrice. Symonds posits that for Dante, his powerful mind derives from his passion for Beatrice, not the other way around.

Searching through Symonds’s “lost library,” we can find another potential key to his research on systems of love: Richard Hovey‘s Launcelot and Guenevere, a Poem in Dramas (New York, 1891). Hovey’s work, a retelling of parts of the Arthurian legend, engages heavily with the dissonance between marriage and passion which Symonds discusses in both A Problem in Greek Ethics and “Ideals of Love.” Deeply embedded within the historical context of chivalrous love, Hovey’s Guinevere (“Guenevere,” in Hovey) brings the separation of marriage and passion into palpable view:

Life and custom close us in
Between such granite walls of circumstance
That, when we choose, it is not as we would
But between courses where each likes us not
I shall not love. But sometime I must wed.
It is the law for women that they marry;
Else they endure a scorned inactive fate…
As for Arthur, he is a very princely gentleman,
One whom at least I never shall despise
(Hovey 128).

Guinevere elucidates how, in the matter of love, institutions of marriage can very much fail the desires of individuals. She speaks in the context of her looming marriage to King Arthur, but the institutions of marriage and religion of Symonds’s time and place most certainly failed queer individuals, as well. Thus, Guinevere’s lament may have proven helpful to Symonds in conceptualizing a system of love in dialogue with, yet distinct from those of the Greeks and the medieval Europeans—a system with room for homosexuality in the institutions of society.

Further, I believe that there is a certain character from the Arthurian legend who can help to elaborate how chivalry in medieval literature defines systems of love. This character, who features in Hovey’s Launcelot and Guenevere, but not to the same extent as in the Prose Lancelot, is Galehaut (“Galahault,” in Hovey; “Galehot,” in Mieszkowski), the half-giant knight and chivalrous partner of Lancelot. Gretchen Mieszkowski argues throughout “The Prose Lancelot‘s Galehot, Malory’s Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature” for a queer reading of Galehaut’s love for Lancelot through the context of chivalrous love—a methodology similar to Symonds’s reading of Dante.

Symonds likely knew who Galehaut was, as the latter is mentioned in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno as a simile for the story of Lancelot that inspired Francesca and Paolo’s affair (Dante, Inferno V:137). Further, I.C. Wright’s translation of the Inferno, which points out this simile in a footnote (Wright, Dante 23), was one of the books in Symonds’s personal library. Although it is uncertain if Symonds encountered Galehaut’s love for Lancelot (based on what we know of the Arthurian works in his personal library), Galehaut’s story nevertheless serves as a meaningful companion to a discussion of how chivalry manifests in Symonds’ study of love.

Mieszkowski notes how Galehaut’s instant, absolute devotion for Lancelot, his willingness to abandon everything for him, and his longing for him, despite him never being able to match Guinevere as Lancelot’s lover, all exemplify the values of chivalry relevant during the medieval time during which the Prose Lancelot was written:

“Galehot expresses his love of Lancelot by renouncing on his account the most important conquest of his own professional life… Like a traditional courtly lover, Galehot falls in love at first sight of Lancelot, and Galehot the conquerer is overcome by Galehot the lover… Galehot’s love story is a tragedy… the only love in the story that matches Galehot’s for Lancelot is Lancelot’s for Guinevere…” (Mieszkowski 28, 34).

In this way, Mieszkowski’s description of Lancelot and Galehaut’s chivalrous partnership resembles Symonds’s description of the social positions of courtly lovers in “Ideals of Love”:

“The lady whom the knight adored and served, who received his service and rewarded his devotion, could never be his wife” (Symonds, “Ideals of Love” 75).

Galehaut’s love for Lancelot manifests as courtly love through his undying devotion to someone out of his league. Thus, Mieszkowski elucidates how the institution of marriage fails Galehaut’s own passion. Guinevere asks Galehaut to marry the Lady of Malohaut, and he obliges, but this marriage fails to satisfy or supplant his love for Lancelot:

“It is at Guinevere’s request that he consents to become the lover of her confidante, the Lady of Malohaut… when [Galehaut and the Lady of Malohaut] are portrayed as a couple, they are always a kind of faint, passionless echo of Lancelot and Guinevere. Lancelot is Galehot’s one real love” (ibid. 40-41).

As Hovey depicts Guinevere, marriage does not presuppose passion for Galehaut in the Prose Lancelot. Further, although Galehaut’s marriage fails to satisfy his love for Lancelot, it cannot prevent it, either. Thus, the tragedy of Galehaut’s marriage exemplifies the dissonance between marriage and passion.

Ultimately, medieval chivalry afforded Symonds (in tandem with his research on Greek love) an avenue to reconstruct a system of love—to explore what he called l’amour de l’impossible (“love of the impossible”). Although chivalry could not function as that system, it helped define the meaning of passion, and it demonstrated how societal institutions can fail love.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Dante. Translated by I.C. Wright, London, 1855.

Hovey, Richard. Launcelot and Guenevere, a Poem in Dramas. New York, 1891.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. “The Prose “Lancelot’s” Galehot, Malory’s Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature,” Arthuriana. Scriptorium Press, 1995.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Symonds, John Addington. A Problem in Greek Ethics. London, 1897-1901.

Symonds, John Addington. “The Dantesque and the Platonic Ideals of Love.” In the Key of Blue and Other Prose Essays. London, 1893.