Ausiàs March as a theorist of love

Robert Archer

La Trobe University, Melbourne

One of the features of the work of Ausiàs March that distinguishes it from the mass of other poetry written in the Crown of Aragon and in Castile in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the cumulative presence of a system of thought. That is, while one could construct from recurring commonplaces in the work of other poets of the time a general world-view (a topic on which Robert Fring-Mill has carried out some distinguished work), no one who reads March's poetry in its extant entirety can fail to be impressed by his effort to build into his work a structure of apparently interlocking ideas. That he wished to give coherence to these ideas is evident from the fact that he devotes several pieces to expounding them at length, and from the way in which he incorporates theoretical dissertations into other poems which have ostensibly non-theoretical purposes.

This impression of a system of thought behind the poetry has prompted suggestions, since Bishop Torras i Bages's early essay, that March was working from a specific philosophical basis. Theories have been advanced in favour of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas and the work of Ramon Llull, as well as modified forms of both theses, but it seems fair to say that no convincing case has been made so far in support of either. Pending further research, it seems appropriate to assume that March's ideas are not derived from any particular theologian or specific work but are broadly based on a range of scholastic commonplaces, while in certain poems at least they seem to be closely related to a Romance version of Aristotle's Ethics¹.

Within this system of thought, love is inevitably a major element, since the bulk of March's poems centres on his relationship with a woman, or with women in general, and he devotes several pieces ―XLV, LXXXVII XCII, CXVII, CXXIIb and CXXIII― to what for all intents and purposes we can call a «theory of love». It has usually been assumed since Pagès, and notably in the splendid exposition of March's ideas by Pere Bohigas, that these poems offer an homogeneous basis from which to approach the rest of his work². It is argued here, within the necessarily limited context that these poems offer, that March's ideas on love are in fact a less consistent element in his system of ideas than is generally believed. For reasons of space, I will restrict detailed discussion to XLV, LXXXVII and XCII, without wishing to suggest that CXVII, CXXIIb, and CXXIII are unimportant.

In XLV, probably the first of the poems in the order of chronology, March develops a number of concepts concerning love with the ostensible aim of explaining to those who are «ignorant of love and its deeds» what love is, and in particular the nature of its effects on himself. He begins with a lengthy refutatio (lines 1-20), declaring that those who do not believe what he says must be unworthy examples of mankind. He also includes within these stanzas a description of the physical effects of love in «fins amadors» like himself, in terms that are purely conventional³:

Foc amagat, nodrit dins en les venes, faent gran fum per via dreta i torta; ira dins pau, e turment molt alegre, llum clar e bell ab si portant tenebres.

(lines 9-12)

The poem starts off, in effect, as an apology for human love: people should not scoff at the suffering lover, for the power of love is irresistible and terrible to experience. But in the third stanza it becomes apparent that this description of the workings of love in men like himself in fact represents a norm against which March intends to gauge the complexity of the particular experience he claims for himself.

The poet's experience of love has to it a further dimension: not only that which strikes at the composite nature of man, bringing into play the interpenetration of body and soul, but also a form of love in which the flesh has no part and in which human love transcends sin (lines 21-24). This type of love, to which at this point March gives the name «voluntat bona», has only virtue as its object (line 26) and is the response of one soul to another (line 28); its effects are, by implication, quite different from those that take their hold on «fins amadors», which March has described in lines 9-12 and now summarizes in line 32 as «pau e guerra tot ensemble». This is a grand claim. The poet contends not only that he loves as one who, like others, has elevated human love to «fina amor», but also that he is an even finer being who strives for the kind of love that can only be experienced beyond the flesh:

Aquella amor que·s diu voluntat bona e solament esguarda part honesta, aquesta amor ha fet a mi amable per mon semblant e·l mijançant ministre.

(lines 25-28)4

In most of the remainder of the poem, March elaborates the theoretical basis of his claim.

In the central theoretical section (lines 33-88), he places love in the context of scholastic psychology. Love begins in man as data perceived by the faculty of the senses. These data (the attributes of the loved person) enter man firstly through the exterior senses («nostres senys», line 33), and thence into the «comú seny» (line 34), the sensus communis or interior sense which distinguishes between the exterior senses and collates them. From here, the perceived forms pass into the understanding («l'entendre», line 35) at which point the will («voler», line 36), seeking the good, desires love. March makes it clear that this is not a virtuous form of love, even though the understanding is involved. While it is true that the virtue and intelligence of the loved woman («totes virtuts e seny», line 39) are part of the lover's desire, these are not loved for their own sake but rather because they serve to augment the overall pleasure which the lover takes in his beloved.

March now defines the two extreme forms of love between which lies «fina amor». In purely carnal love, the kind of pleasure he has just described is not possible since the understanding, by definition, has no part in it. Rather, it is a short-lived form of love since its cause ―purely physical appetite― is itself only brief (lines 41-49). At the other extreme is the type of love in which the senses have no part, that is, purely spiritual love. Few have actually attained it, but those blessed few have experienced the only form of enduring love. It is evident here that March does not include himself among the number of these spiritual lovers. What he has actually claimed, in lines 25-28 quoted above, is that he feels the pull of the spiritual form of love and aspires to practise it, while he continues to be subject to «fina amor». This form of love lies between the two extremes, and is in practice a refined form of the properly human «amor homenívol», which partakes of man's composite nature. The refinement lies in its tendency to incline more towards the spirit than towards the flesh (lines 49-56).

In the next few stanzas March explains why «amor homenívol» (including «fina amor») is so much more beset with strong desires («volers [...] punyents», lines 63-64) than the simple forms (carnal, spiritual). This is because, in the struggle for domination between body and soul, the flesh always manages in the end to impose its will upon the spirit (although, as March has asserted in line 54, in «fina amor» the spirit has a more pronounced role). This is due to the fact that in human love man loves unaided by virtue (lines 65-72).

In this properly human type of love, desire, pleasure, and the passions all play their part. Desire comes first, the primary movement identified by March elsewhere as the «primer moviment» or «prim moviment»⁵. The passions (that is, the emotions) follow the onset of love, which will last only as long as pleasure endures (lines 73-76). At this point March includes some very elliptical clarification of his terms of reference: he reminds us that the form of «amor homenívol» he is discussing is that of «fina amor», and that he uses the word pleasure (delit) without wishing to imply the carnal act. Rather, the pleasure to which he refers is one in which the lover aspires to another form of love, more spiritual than carnal, which is sustained solely by the hope of achieving reciprocation. Because «fina amor» is subject to the passions (or so we may infer), once hope is lost (hope is in scholastic terms a passion), only the opposite passion, fear, can follow (lines 77-80).

This idea is developed in the following stanza in the form of a eulogy of true «fins amants»: those who give themselves up to the passions of «fina amor» live in the hope of requited love, and once this is lost only a martyr's death can follow (lines 81-88). At this point an underlying irony starts to make its presence felt in the poem: March proclaims that those who would be worthy adherents of such love need first to renounce the use of their reason:

Cell qui d'amor del tot no·s lleixa vençre, sí que raó de son consell no llunya, no mereix pas la corona de martre.

(lines 81-83)

Not only, then, is the lover in «fina amor» unaided by virtue, but he has also to be blind to reason. In the final full stanza the irony of these words of praise is brought out still further by their contrast with March's encomium of bona amor, the spiritual love that earlier in the poem he had called «voluntat bona» (line 25). This type of love is infinite, transcending death itself, and thus can hold no fears for the lover since it lies beyond the passions. Dante's love for Beatrice is cited as an example. This form of love has its origins in virtue itself ―virtuous friendship― and it is for this reason that the senses. (The fallible basis of «fina amor») cannot bring about its undoing (lines 91-92).

At this stage it becomes apparent that March has shifted ground from the exaltation of «fina amor» in the first stanzas to the recognition of its underlying moral defects. By the end of the poem, he is willing to tolerate only spiritual love as the object of his praise.

If we read XLV in this way, its tornada turns out to be less surprising than it might at first appear, since the final perspective of March's somewhat tangled disquisition on love is an exclusively moral one that is perfectly consonant with the sententia of the last four lines. The terms of reference here continue to be broadly scholastic, but it is useful to relate March's ideas to their Aristotelian roots, at least in the form accessible to him in a Catalan translation of Brunetto Latini, used by him on at least two other occasions⁶.

March's final words are as follows:

Llir entre cards, tres són les grans carreres on veritat per negun temps passeja: ira i amor ab si no la consenten, e l'altra és general ignorança.

(lines 97-100)

In the compendium of the Ethics in Brunetto, Guillem de Copons translates:

Pobrea de seny e de discreció és occasió de mal e de tots hòmens malvats [...] Mas pensen les gents que·ls [...] hòmens fellons, quant fan mal, que·u fan per ignorància, e ço és per no saber. E jassia que ells sien no-sabents o ignorants en lurs afers, però la occasió del mal no és fora de l'home [...] E la occasió d'acò és concupiscència e ira, que són occasió de totes males obres que hom fa per voluntat7.

I am not suggesting that. Brunetto is the source of March's ideas here⁸. However, the parallel is worth drawing as it allows us to see that the poet is not saying anything unusual, but rather is drawing on commonplaces of medieval Aristotelianism. It is plain from Brunetto that ignorància becomes a culpable condition when sinful acts are committed; such sinful acts are always prompted by ira and concupiscència. In March, the three terms appear as ignorança, ira, and amor. The «general ignorança» to which March alludes in the very last words of his poem is set up in deliberate contrast with the ignorance of those whom March decries in his opening line: «Los ignorants amor e sos exemples». This manifestation of ignorance fades into insignificance by the end of the poem since March makes a full retreat from his initial position: no form of human love «that involves the senses, even fina amor» with all the attendant wonders described in lines 1-16, can lead man towards truth. It is universal culpable ignorance, in close alliance with the concupiscent and irascible wills, that March finally denounces.

This, I suggest, is the moral position that underlies a great deal of March's love poetry⁹. If he rarely allows it to occupy the centre of his discourse, this seems to be precisely because he was concerned with exploring other ways than those of didacticism by which to show the falsity of the ideal of «fina amor», especially by acting out the process of perception. In this sense, XLV is an important point of reference for numerous other poems, including all the Plena de seny and Llir entre cards pieces. In it we see clearly how March decries «fina amor» even as he celebrates it.

By the time March carne to write his longest piece of theorizing on love, poem LXXXVII, the legitimacy of «fina amor» as a transcendent form of love is no longer the matter in dispute. There is no reference to «fina amor» or «fins amants». Rather, March returns to the claim made in XLV, lines 17-24, namely that he loves in both the spiritual/physical and purely spiritual forms, or at least that he feels strongly pulled towards the latter type. But what makes this poem so interesting is the way in which March strives to get beyond the moral perspective that comes to the fore in XLV and which provides the underlying context for much of what is assumed to be his early and mature work. Allowing himself 340 lines to move at will amidst the complexities of the relationship between spiritual/physical and spiritual love, he is able to posit some unconventional ideas about love of which XLV contained not a hint.

In this poem, as in XLV, March at once identifies his audience. Here he is not speaking to the ignorant and incredulous in matters of love. Quite the contrary: he addresses the «entenent amador», the hypothetical reader who is deemed to have developed, through the practice of the higher forms of human love, a subtle understanding of its nature.

March next delimits the area of his discussion of love and of his relationship to it. Following the Aristotelian division of the objects of human desire (they are called profitable, delitable, and bona in Brunetto) he distinguishes three kinds of love, and States from the first that he refuses even to discuss the lowest of the three, «lo profit amable», a form in which the lover does not seek the reciprocation and furtherance of love but rather is motivated by the desire for personal advantage¹⁰.

Most of LXXXVII, both in its purely theoretical part (lines 1-194) and in its more personalized remainder (lines 195-340), is an attempt to define the workings of the appetites of body and soul in relation to the passions of spiritual/physical love. March's view of this has an underlying basis in the then generally (but not universally) accepted concept of hylomorphism. That is, man is a composite being of which the soul is the substantial form and the body the primal matter; he is not two substantial beings (as body and as soul) as Augustine and Plato had maintained. It is important to bear this in mind if we are to avoid making assumptions of duality behind March's references to the two natures of man (as in line 22, for instance).

Spiritual/physical love, which inevitably fails to give man the contentment he seeks from it, derives from the sensitive will of the soul, not from the rational will (lines 44-45). However, since the two wills do not operate discretely in this form of love, it is in practice impossible to distinguish one from the other; they form a «mesclat voler» (line 19). The two wills ―sensitive, and intellectual/rational― are in a state of constant flux, with dominance continually shifting from one to the other (lines 51-70). For its part, the soul can only participate in this mixed form of love («amor [...] mixte», CXVII, 151) through the body, and although it derives pleasure from it, this comes only at the cost of its abasement, and the temporary forgetting of its own nature (lines 71-90). The state of flux that characterizes the «mesclat voler» points to the absence of virtue; if virtue were present, such love would be stable and not subject to the shifting movements of body and soul (lines 91-100). Given this condition, neither body nor soul is able to achieve contentment and each is goaded constantly by its own desire until such time as the object of love ceases to be desired, a development which is usually felt in the body first (lines 101-30).

Since this form of love involves passions which debilitate body and soul, it is destined to extinction. But spiritual love, even though it too begins in the senses like the «mixed» form, does not have as its end the fulfilment of sensual desires, but rather virtue and wisdom (lines 131-50). Such love, however, is rarely practised. While most men want the woman they love to be virtuous, the end of this desire for virtue is not virtue itself but the pleasure that is to be derived from virtue (lines 151-60), a point also made in XLV, lines 38-40. Few men love virtue in women for its own sake; most lovers, even those who are virtuous themselves, are given up, at best, to the mixed form, which obstructs man's passage to the truth (lines 161-80).

It is at this point that March praises the power of spiritual love for its capacity to impose itself in certain circumstances over the claims of the flesh, even where the mixed type is active (lines 181-90). The pleasure felt by the soul is not subject to the flux of the passions, so that when the body's urges subside, the soul is left free, for a time, to reach towards what it glimpses beyond its corporal prison (lines 191-200). March makes it clear at once that he is not claiming that he loves with the spirit only, but rather that he experiences some form of the love of the spirit during those spells when the desire of the flesh abates. It is this aspect of «mixed» love ―its moments of virtuous love during lulls in the movements of the body― that, he affirms, gives meaning to his life (lines 201-30).

He knows, then, what it is to love spiritually, even if only during brief remissions of the carnal urges. The question inevitably follows: why, knowing that this spiritual love is the only true good for those who would devote themselves to love, does he not channel all his love into this form? In his attempt at an answer in the next four stanzas (lines 231-70) he can only partially explain his failure, attributing it to the power of his own fickle sensuality (lines 245-47) and to the inherent fallibility of the proposed object of this spiritual love:

Assats a mi és causa descoberta que pura amor no pot en dona caure.

(lines 267-68)

Such a form of love is beyond both the immediate capacities of the poet and the innate capabilities of the beloved.

This is the first point in the poem where March takes a step down from the higher abstractions of his theory to clarify that the object of the spiritual love he has briefly described is the same as that of spiritual/physical love. His is a vita contemplativa whose spiritual journey is not into God, but rather towards a female beloved. And yet it would be easy to assume up to this point that the virtuous love he speaks of is directed at the Creator, its only true end from any theological standpoint: there are no references to Dante to invite, us to think otherwise (as there are in XLV). It is an assumption that leads us to the real cause of the poet's failure in his striving for virtuous love: the only end that could ever give fulfilment to the lover is God, and the only true love is charity.

These ideas provide the moral backdrop to the rest of the poem. Two stanzas follow (lines 271-90) in which March describes his amorous vita activa. The effects of the «mesclat voler» which he lists are the classical symptoms of amor hereos; the connection between the lover's malady and «amor homenívol» is much clearer here than in XLV. This leads to some conjecture about the problems he had described in lines 241-50: if he cannot turn those moments of spirituality into an enduring habit, it is because he is simply one of those men who are, as the severity of the symptoms attest, predisposed to love with body and soul (lines 291-300).

He finds no solutions to the problem. He can only reaffirm the superiority of spiritual love (lines 301-10) and define ―by means of the last of the seven comparisons that he uses in the second half of his poem― his own perception of the mixed form of love (lines 311-16). Like the armour made from an alloy of steel and iron so that it will stand up to the blows of combat, the enduring love of the spirit tempers the carnal appetite and gives it strength. More importantly still, as he goes on to say a few lines later, it can happen at times that the sensitive appetite temporarily dies, dissolving for a while the ties of the soul to the body, so that the soul, while still operating within the «mesclat voler», loves purely as soul for as long as the carnal appetite is dormant:

En cert cas mor nostra amor sensitiva e l'esperit junt ab ell se destempra. Amen ensemps, e l'esperit sols ame, perque tot l'hom no·s trop que en res desame.

(lines 317-20)

March contends, in effect, that human love, as practised by him and by the «tot entenent amador», contains moments of transcendence that overlap with, or are identical with, spiritual love. It is significant that immediately after these lines March apologizes for any unconventional ideas that the reader may find in his theory:

Doncs, si d'amor algun parlar m'escapa que la raó no·l lloe ne l'aprove, no sia algú que los dits meus reprove.

(lines 325-27)

This is not simply a modesty topos: the apology is entirely ironic, coming within a peroratio that is mil of hyperbolic claims to privileged knowledge:

Dels grans secrets que amor cobre ab sa capa, de tots aquells puc fer apocalipsi. Io defallint, amor farà eclipsi.

(lines 328-30)

In the final stanza, March describes this apocalypse, and discards from his scheme of things every chance of there being any other «entenent amador» but himself: he deletes from his poem the very audience that he had inscribed into its first line¹¹. Only the poet, by constantly seeking to transcend the confínes of the compositum, takes human love as far as it will go. Striving is all, and no one else in the world is even trying:

pus hom no s'afina en ben amar, ans cascú veig que·s llasse.

(lines 337-38)

The transcendence described in LXXXVII becomes more than fleetingly possible once the object of love ceases to have a carnal form. The death of the loved woman that prompts the Cants de mort (poems XCII-XCVII) forces March to look afresh at the question of spiritual love within the context of grief, which itself raises for him important theoretical issues¹². This is dealt with in the longest, and what is probably the first, of the six poems (XCII).

March affirms that the love he feels for the dead «muller aimia» is one of «amistança pura» (lines 29-30) ―the virtuous friendship he had described in XLV, 93-94― while trying to define the roles of the other two forms of love (physical and spiritual/physical) in these new circumstances. He recognizes initially that purely physical desire has not entirely disappeared, but he expects this to happen soon (lines 41-42). The mixed love formed of the wills of body and soul, and with no element of virtue to control it, is identified as the principal cause of his continuing grief; the third, spiritual, form of love is not a cause since it is united with reason, which will not admit grief (lines 43-70).

In lines 71-100 March elaborates his ideas on the mechanism of grief. Since it is impossible to distinguish between the workings of body and soul when the mixed form of love is operative, it would be inaccurate to describe this grief as belonging to either body or soul. Such grief may begin in the body, for instance, but it then extends through the compositum to affect the soul. Pain, such as grief, is felt by man within this mixed love in much the same way as he experiences his pleasures, a process described in XLV and LXXXVII.

After several stanzas of a much mere personal kind in which he describes the emotional experience of his grief, and affirms the predominant spirituality of his love for the deceased woman (lines 101-88), March turns his attention to an important problem that underlies the theory he has developed so far (lines 191-220). While his grief has its causes in a persisting mixed love, a new spiritual, love has arisen from the beloved's death. How is it possible for the two forms to coexist?

March's solution is that his grief is caused by the memory of pleasure experienced in spiritual/physical love («lo record del plaure», line 212), while his spiritual love arises from a new condition in which the flesh, since it has lost its object in the lady's body, can feel no desire (by this stage in the poem, the previous suggestion of a lingering physical desire has been discarded). This explanation of the coexistence of the two forms of love enables March to affirm that, beyond his persisting grief, he now feels a spiritual love that is enduring, rather than the fleeting form he had described in LXXXVII:

si voler tinc, pec és lo qui no creia que l'esperit de pura amor s'enflame.

(lines 227-28)

Compared to these three poems, CXXIIb, which we can assign with confidence to March's later years, contains no more than the empty rehearsal of worn propositions on the nature of love, enlisted for the purposes of a plea to an enamoured King Alfonso (significantly, the other known version of the poem has no theoretical content). In this jocular request for a favour, March distinguishes between forms of love according to his basic taxonomy and asserts (as he did in XLV, 50-51) that whoever loves spiritually is closer to the angels than to man. But by this stage of his poetic career, March seems to have abandoned the notion that amour mixte could contain its own level of spirituality. In poems CXVII and CXXIII March does not mention spiritual love except as a theoretical possibility inextricably linked to the other forms of love:

Lo qui amor per tres parts ha sentit, toca de tot: d'angel e d'hom e brut.

(CXXIII, 29-30)

By now the striving has gone, and so has the vitality of the theory: love is discussed according to a tripartite schema which leaves no room for unconventional transcendence. The virtue of the poems we have studied is precisely that in them March is seen to push out beyond the limits of the threefold classification of love, and to affirm the real possibility of transcending the human compositum, both within properly human love and within the condition of grief.