The other kind of notion, that of fulfilled melancholic love (insofar as one can speak at all of fulfillment), was evolved by Christianity. In this case, one should not speak of a notion of love, as in the Hegelian concept, so much as the actual reality of love, because Christian-Romantic love permeates the culture of the modern era as a matter of practice. Christian-Romantic love is a coming to terms with a changed world; after antiquity, the possibility of Greek love ceased, and a world split into the sensual and the spiritual modified love as well. It did not split love in two, since love continued to be markedly unitary and independent; it “merely” altered its place. That “relocation,” however, did not leave love untouched. Christian love, which is directed not at lovers entering into an alliance with earthly powers but rather at a betrothal with heaven through the object of love, lies closer to reality, paradoxically, than does love as sketched out by Hegel. For Hegel does not describe love but calls it to account for something — a utopia, a certain view of society. Christian love, entering into an alliance with heaven, does not call it to account for anything but acquiesces in the way things are; it is fully aware that the era of Greek love has passed, and that in the changed world love too has been modified.
The reality of heaven was no metaphor: for the Middle Ages, the duplication of the world into heavenly and earthly domains, spirituality and sensuality turned against each other, was a manifest reality. This was the biggest legacy of the Middle Ages to modern culture. Heaven was no longer heaven, but the possibility of being able to step beyond the given reality toward another world that, if not real and manifest, was at least as existent as the other; heaven was a spiritualization of everyday life. In the modern world, that legacy was necessarily connected with the concept of alienation: with the spiritual and sensual doubling of the world, the possibility of a harmonious relationship between individual and society ceased. Love evaded that: only the place it occupied in the world changed; it did not become divided against itself. Such things as spiritual love and sensual love do not exist; love is not divisible into “empty and abstract” love and sheer sensuality. Sheer sensuality and physicality do not lack “spirituality,” and vice versa; yet “physicality” or “sensuality” does not necessarily mean love, just as platonic love cannot be considered love in every case. Love continues to be unitary — it does not differ from the love of antiquity in that respect. The decisive difference appears in the fact that whereas then the world seemed unitary (for want of a better word), and for that reason love linked up organically and seamlessly with the system of human contacts, in the modern age, because of the “alienation” of the world, love became detached from other connections and separated from all other human relationships by a chasm. Greek love, with its simultaneous striving for the beautiful and the good, truly beautified and improved the whole of existence, and thus appeared as a special contact, the relationship between two people. Modern love has no say in the course of the world as it is given; by its existence, it does not contribute to the formation of that world. It condemns the lover to solitude; love cannot be objectified — it can exist only as a desire. This is a unidirectional movement, in contrast to the longing that was characteristic of the Greeks; it lacks the reciprocity of Greek love, and this difference determines other relationships in the modern age (affection, friendship, marriage). Modern love is not a bilateral relationship but an absolutely private affair — and every attempt to judge love as a reciprocal affair truly misunderstands the place and specific characteristics of love.
Christian culture did not recognize private affairs: everything was a part of the worldly empire, and even the most personal-seeming gesture evoked God, whether dissentingly or affirmatively. Christianity sought to confirm the sensual and spiritual division of the world within love as well, and modern love became melancholic, or rather became one of the typical manifestations of melancholia, precisely because it resisted that division. The roots of a distinction between heavenly and earthly love had appeared with Plato, who made a distinction between two Aphrodites. One of these was heavenly (Aphrodite Urania) and had no parents, whereas the other, the younger (Aphrodite Pandemos), had parents (Zeus and Dione), and was the one usually called the goddess of love. There was no doubt, however, that both goddesses of love were celestial beings, that is, spiritual and physical love were far from being strangers to each other, as Plato’s Christian disciples later insisted. At the time of Hellenism and early Christianity, the two goddesses became estranged, and physical love had less and less to do with spiritual love, which was essentially directed at God. Love is in part divine, in part a harmful daimon and passion, Plotinus proclaimed; according to St. Augustine, Jerusalem called upon the love of God, and Babylon upon that of earthly life, the former being the source of all good things, the latter of all evil. “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. . Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another,” John wrote in his first epistle (1 John 4:7, 11), though with him that love, like the love in Paul’s “Hymn to Love” (1 Corinthians 13), was a special capability: agape was manifested through the intervention of God; love on the part of humans, on the other hand, was for helping them stay in communion with God. Physical, erotic love was a sign of turning away from God: it was during the period of early Christianity that theologians developed the view that the original, collective sin was passed down from descendant to descendant by physical contact. Love was fulfilled in virginity, as promulgated by the Gospels — virginity was supposed to express love toward God. The doctrines of Jesus’s virgin birth and Mary’s Immaculate Conception were connected at the deepest level with the assessment of love in the Middle Ages and the modern era.1 Perpetual virginity (semper virgo) freed one from the earthly world, from creatureliness, and from sin, and therefore Christian-Catholic ideology had to judge physical love in a diametrically opposed way, denying any sublimity to it, because of its sinfulness. (St. Thomas Aquinas’s principal argument against physical love was that it deprived people of their minds.) A couplet noted in the Middle Ages faithfully reflects this point of view: