Chapter 2
The World Transformed

I. The Way of Noble Love

A man a woman, a woman a man,

Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan.

“As the glow of love’s inward fire increases,” the poet Gottfried wrote, “so the frenzy of the lover’s suit. But this pain is so full of love, this anguish so enheartening, that no noble heart would dispense with it, once having been so heartened.”Note 1

Figure 13. Gottfried of Strassburg (ink on velum, Germany, c. 1304)

Of all the modes of experience by which the individual might be carried away from the safety of well-trodden grounds to the danger of the unknown, the mode of feeling, the erotic, was the first to waken Gothic man from his childhood slumber in authority; and, as Gottfried’s language tells, there were those, whom he calls noble, whose lives received from this spiritual fire the same nourishment as the lover of God received from the bread and wine of the sacrament. The poet intentionally echoes, in celebration of his legend, the monkish raptures of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous series of sermons on the Song of Songs:

“I know it,” he writes, “as surely as my death, since I have learned from the agony itself: the noble lover loves love stories. Anyone yearning for such a story, then, need fare no farther than here: for I shall story him well of noble lovers who of pure love gave proof enough: he in love, she in love.…”

We read their life, we read their death,

And to us it is sweet as bread.

Their life, their death, are our bread.

So lives their life, so lives their death,

So live they still and yet are dead

And their death is the bread of the living.Note 2

Like the other legends of Arthurian romance, that of Tristan and Isolt had been distilled from a compound of themes derived from pagan Celtic myth, transformed and retold as of Christian knighthood. Hence the force of its allure to the still half-pagan ears that opened to its song in the age of the Crusades, and its appeal to romantic hearts ever since. For, as in all great pagan mythologies, in the Celtic there is throughout an essential reliance on nature; whereas, according to every churchly doctrine, nature had been so corrupted by the Fall of Adam and Eve that there was no virtue in it whatsoever. The Celtic hero, as though moved by an infalliblenatural grace, follows without fear the urges of his heart. And though these may promise only sorrow and pain, danger and disaster — to Christians, even the ultimate disaster of hell for all eternity — when followed for themselves alone, without thought or care for consequence, they can be felt to communicate to a life, if not the radiance of eternal life, at least integrity and truth.

Saint Augustine had established in the early fifth century, against the Irish heretic Pelagius, the doctrine that salvation from the general corruption of the Fall can be attained only through asupernatural grace that is rendered not by nature but by God, through Jesus crucified, and dispensed only by the clergy of his incorruptible Church, through its seven sacraments.Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. And yet within the fold of the Gothic Church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the corruption at least of the natural (if not also the supernatural) character of its incorruptible clergy was the outstanding scandal of the age.