The Love Grotto: Life Lessons About Sex, Love, Religion, and Society in Gottfried Von Strassburg’s Tale of Tristan

By John N.H. Perkins

This book introduces the reader to a feminist psychological understanding of the age-old tale of the tragic lovers Tristan and Isolde. John Perkins offers us a series of life lessons designed to heighten our appreciation of our own sensibilities as he retells and examines Gottfried von Strassburg’s twelfth century work Tristan.
The central dilemma is the tension between our duty to follow the ingrained patriarchal values of our society on the one hand and an in-depth realization of our holistic human nature on the other—following an authentic life over a prescribed one; the struggle between obligation and love—behaving correctly under surveillance (the watchful dictates of law or custom) or living by the spontaneous inclinations of the illumined heart.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781480898219

John N.H. Perkins

John N. H. Perkins is a psychoanalyst in the tradition of C. G. Jung. Educated at the University of Notre Dame, in the U. Chicago Great Books curriculum at Shimer College, and The Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, Perkins studied with the late Joseph Campbell at Sarah Lawrence College, and was the analysand and protégé of the late analyst and writer Dr. Robert A. Johnson.

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Copyright © 2021 John N.H. Perkins.

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Scripture quotations marked JB are from The Jerusalem Bible, copyright © 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9820-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9819-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9821-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020920862

Archway Publishing rev. date: 02/10/2021

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Summary of Thomas of Britain’s Concluding Chapters

Conclusion

Endnotes

For

the late

Paul Clement Matthews, II

With great affection

        I am content to follow to its source

        Every event in action or in thought;

        Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

        When such as I cast out remorse

        So great a sweetness flows into the breast

        We must laugh and we must sing,

        We are blest by everything,

        Everything we look upon is blest.¹

—William Butler Yeats, from A Dialogue of Self and Soul

… I dreamt once that I was there … [in heaven, and] … that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.²

… I cannot express it, but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were utterly contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton [her intended husband, Edgar] is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.³

– Cathy Earnshaw to the housekeeper, Nelly Dean,

in Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights

Introduction

The late German medieval scholar, Arthur Thomas Hatto (1910–2010), reminds us in his introduction to his English translation of Tristan⁴ that Gottfried von Strassburg is telling us an old tale that came down to him through his literary predecessors, especially Thomas of Britain. Yet ultimately, Gottfried’s tale emerged from the murky hinterlands of ancient Celtic myth, issuing from Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and, perhaps, Ireland. Gottfried’s story is not one of simple entertainment. Rather, this German poet can be understood to offer a series of life lessons designed to heighten our appreciation of those universal themes that characterize our fundamental human existence.

The central dilemma of this tale is the tension between our duty to follow the ingrained patriarchal values of our society on the one hand and an in-depth realization of our holistic human nature on the other. Gottfried stresses following an authentic life over a prescribed one. In short, it is the dilemma between obligation and love—behaving correctly under surveillance (the watchful dictates of law or custom) or living by the spontaneous inclinations of the illumined heart.

Gottfried tells his listeners that he intends to busy himself with bringing pleasure and satisfaction to a select circle of noble hearts, as opposed to upper-class society in general. In his day, the well-to-do youth of the nobility were bent upon simply having a good time. But in Gottfried’s view, certain individuals were in fact capable of welcoming love in the totality of its profound antitheses—the bittersweet opposites—joyful sorrow, life and death, Heaven and Earth, all united in one single experience of love. Gottfried was so ardently devoted to this transcendent experience of love that he was willing to stand by it even if the Church condemned his soul to hell.

Unlike certain contemporary authors, who are set upon worshiping human instincts, Gottfried believed that true lovers must practice sympathetic self-sacrifice to its highest degree. If necessary, the suffering required of true amour must be accepted with sensitivity, patience, and courage. Gottfried’s ideal of love expounds a unity of the sensual with the spiritual; of the earthly with the heavenly; of the feminine with the masculine psychological disposition, all joined into one indissoluble entity. This elucidation is filled with both theological and psychological significance. Tristan and Isolde must suffer their way through the unification of the opposites just mentioned. This is the cross they must bear if they are to remain faithful to the integrity of their mutual love.

It is obvious that Gottfried is addressing neither instinctive gratification alone, nor sheer emotional infatuation, nor ethereal detachment. Rather, he is envisioning a more evolved notion of love—a higher sense of the erotic experience of humankind—as it can develop, not in the average experience of ordinary people whose awareness is programmed by collective cultural habit, but in the lives of those very few unusual folk who possess edele herzen (noble hearts). The common herd—on average—craves pleasure and sensual titillation whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. It is unable and will, in fact, tenaciously avoid the need to tolerate the unified antitheses of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, life and death.

Gottfried proposes that love entails responsibility, compassion, empathy, and a certain amount of discipline, forsaking happiness alone as a goal. Consequently, authentic honor is not the result of birthright or public station in the social hierarchy, nor of power or egotistical conceit, nor the result of heroic deeds on the worldly stage. True honor is the rare mark of individual human integrity realized.

Gottfried assesses the typical love familiar to nobles in courtly society as relatively shallow and self-seeking, even dissolute and immoral. As Gottfried’s tale develops, the love affair of Tristan and Isolde is likened to the most holy sacrament of the altar in Catholic Christianity. This is far more than an embellishment of figurative language, as in love ballads in which the lover exclaims, It is heaven to be with you like this. On the contrary, Gottfried really means it! He is deadly serious about this transcendental approximation of love and Heaven, even though he has no intention of establishing a new religion.

At the end of his Prologue to Tristan, Gottfried writes the following, which reminds us of the liturgical language of the Christian Eucharist:

Here is bread for all hearts that are noble. Now their death continues. We hear about their life, we hear about their death, so that to us this is bread that is ever sweet.

Their life and their death are bread. Their life goes on, accordingly their death also continues. So they are still alive although they are dead, and their death is our living bread.⁵

Gottfried seems to be saying boldly that in the same way as communicants receive the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion, just so, as we read the tale of Tristan and Isolde, we may take their tragic story into ourselves so that, together, they may resurrect from death to life within us and become our eternal sustenance.

Accordingly, Gottfried is intent upon raising sensuous love to the noble level of high mystical and spiritual fulfillment. The exaltation of Tristan and Isolde’s liaison to the level of sacrament occurs precisely when the lovers are banished from King Mark’s court because of a persistent suspicion of their adultery. The two lovers enter the wilderness and find shelter in what seems to be a vast gemstone cave hidden deep within a forested mountain.

The lofty sacramental significance of their union in the grotto of love continues until, but only until, they lose their nerve and attempt to deceive King Mark and his men by hiding the physically erotic character of their liaison. The lovers do this after they suspect that they will soon be spied upon. They arrange to sleep, not entwined in each other’s arms as is their habit, but on either side of a sword that Tristan places between them on the Crystalline Bed, which stands in the usual place of an altar.

This tactic is done merely for show to give the impression of a sexless character regarding their love affair. But this motive results in self-betrayal! These two have abandoned their dedication to stand faithfully and openly for their sacramental integration of the spiritual and the sensual—of the earthly and the heavenly. As a Freudian psychologist would put it, they have succumbed to the Super-ego at the expense of the Id. They have followed the moralistic ethos of their society instead of the paradoxical integrity of their love—a love that unites all the opposites and binds them together unto death.

Much of received opinion in the Middle Ages departed from Saint Augustine’s explicit teaching confirming the actual physical and sexual nature of our first parents. Augustine firmly believed that physicality, sex, and guilt-free pleasures of many kinds were real and valid paradisiacal experiences actually intended by the Creator. Augustine’s notion of the fall of humanity neither condemned the body nor the instinctive drives, but rather censured the distortion and miss-use of these impulses through what we today might term self-centered egotism—displacing God by me, myself, and I—by a grandiose ambition that rebelled against the Creator.⁶

However, in Augustine’s time, and increasingly in the later Middle Ages, it became popular to believe that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had not lived in physical bodies like ours but within incorporeal envelopes that were created not of animal flesh but rather of an ethereal, angelic substance. Consequently, salvation required that men and women must discard their physicality and reassume their original, angelic, sexless dispositions. Accordingly, for religious folk, life in the flesh became increasingly perilous! Union with God could not occur while one was alive in the flesh but only after death when the soul was finally released from its imprisonment within the body so as to enjoy a purely spiritual existence.

What had been a holistic Faith subtly devolved into beliefs and practices that were plainly dualistic, opposing spirit and flesh. As a result, sex was itself assumed to be sinful, synonymous with the first disobedience. Monks and nuns who vowed to abstain from sex all their lives were considered to live on a higher plane than married persons. The church even taught that the sin of fornication was conceivable within marriage, that is, if any sexual pleasure was enjoyed.

Just as sexual pleasure associated with romantic love both within and without marriage was condemned as wrong, women as the vessel of sexuality were believed to be inferior to men. Received Christian opinion had it that the Bible depicted the advent of sin in the world as the result of the seduction of Eve by the devil-serpent, whereas the first man, Adam, was merely the victim of Eve’s wily, alluring nature. As a result, the original fault was Eve’s, not Adam’s. Death was caused by a woman and not by a man. The patriarchal Church taught that Eve’s culpability in the loss of Eden was inherited by all women throughout the ages down to the present. It was emphasized that sexual love did not exist in Eden but was initiated by the Fall. Even the conception of children became necessary only later due to the loss of this eternal bliss of God’s first creation and thereby the beginning of death. So, in the prevailing view, even the world itself, including all of humanity, was considered to be degenerate, representing a falling away from the original ethereal or spiritual intentions of God.

In contrast, medieval courtly or chivalric love literature depicted noble women on a higher plane than men. Such women, by their mere presence and demeanor, possessed the ability to inspire young knightly gentlemen to great deeds of heroism. A fair damsel exuded an erotic allure that did not degrade her lover but rather moved him to nobler feats of service to humanity. However, such ladies were not portrayed as three-dimensional human beings. In such a one-way situation, there obviously could not be a truly reciprocal relationship between two noble partners.

In Gottfried’s tale of Tristan, on the contrary, Isolde is portrayed as a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being who is every bit as assertive and active as the male. Her sexuality is just as hot-blooded as Tristan’s. Unlike the typical ethos of the Middle Ages, Isolde is presented as a woman who possesses the power of choice according to the inclinations of her own heart. She is not subject to patriarchal control in a marriage contract arranged by the fathers of the bride and groom.

In this period, the Church emphasized the Biblical tradition that Mary conceived Christ without the agency of any sexual relationship. According to the Bible as supported by church tradition, Jesus himself abstained from sex throughout his lifetime. The Incarnation of God was viewed as an ethereal, sexless phenomenon, occurring far outside of human existence. There were other, far more profound ways to understand Jesus’s virginal conception, but, generally speaking, an anti-sex and anti-body view of the matter prevailed as opposed to the central theme of a transcendent, Almighty Creator assuming complete earthly personhood in the space-time of history.

In the medieval world, erotic love was thought to be in tension with the welfare of society in general. However, many medieval writers outside the strict limits of theology scarcely dealt with the stressful imbalance between love—especially sexual love—and the demands of an orderly Christian society. Gottfried von Strassburg is nearly the single exception, since in Tristan, he met the conflict most painfully head on: He presented a thoroughly humane, earthy, and sexual love, which was at the same time genuinely spiritual—virtually a sacrament of God in irresolvable tension with all the worldly mores of society. This was the tragic image that Gottfried von Strassburg offered to the European imagination for the first time in its history.

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Chapter 1

G ottfried von Strassburg begins his tale of Tristan with the story of Tristan’s parents, Rivalin and Blancheflor. In doing so, he establishes his major themes and the existential dualities of love and death, earth and heaven, honor and betrayal, duty and impulse that will be embodied later by Tristan and Isolde.

Rivalin, though of tender years, was a proud yet charming and courageous young nobleman in a region of Brittany known as Parmenie. If he had any faults, they were that he craved self-indulgent luxury and rich entertainments. His habit, so typical of youthful immaturity, was to do exactly as he pleased. But in the end, it did not bode well that his youthful conceit also inclined him never to overlook a hurt. As an arrogant youth zealous to guard his honor at any cost, he was relentless in repaying injury for injury—as they say, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—without the slightest variation. Consequently, he could never make allowances for other men’s shortcomings.

When Rivalin had attained the pinnacle of expertise in the arts of chivalry and courtly decorum, this impetuous young knight attacked the territories of a nearby nobleman named Morgan. Rivalin was vigorous and unyielding in his efforts. His vassals overran most of Morgan’s territories and ravaged his lands. Rivalin imposed his will so thoroughly that, in the end, Morgan had no alternative but to yield and pledge faithful obeisance to Rivalin.

When these conflicts had passed, Rivalin decided to visit the land of Cornwall. Cornwall lay northward across the great channel that separated that island—known as the Land of the Angles—from mainland Brittany. Cornwall’s King Mark was widely known to support the most sophisticated and lavish styles of courtly life. He and his barons were recognized as the paragons of culture and civilized gentility. Their practice of holding stylish and tasteful entertainments was legendary. In the end, Rivalin’s desire to partake in the superior civilization across the channel would lead to his downfall.

Before departing, Rivalin provisioned a ship with a cargo of luxurious goods. These included the finest weapons and the most powerful steeds, excellent vintages of wine, and many rich types of apparel. Rivalin was accompanied by members of his noble court of polished gentlemen and comely ladies. When their vessel had been made ready, they sailed off to call upon Cornwall and its king, the celebrated Mark.

Rivalin arrived at Tintagel, where King Mark’s court was presently convened, and the visitors were received with honor and distinction. The King placed his personal resources and his many attendants and household staff at Rivalin’s disposal.

It was King Mark’s usual practice in early May to hold a lavish, month-long festival in the loveliest part of the rich Cornish countryside. The spring flowers were blooming wantonly. The breezes were mild and refreshing. All the knights and their ladies from the surrounding districts were invited. As they assembled, some were heard to remark that the brightly blooming flowers of the field were reflected in the noble guests’ very eyes.

There was music, dancing, the bohort (sport jousting) tournaments, and all the varieties of sumptuous entertainment imaginable. The rainy season had passed, and the blue skies smiled down on the assembled group of several hundred noble folk. They pitched their colorful pavilions of azure, vermillion, lime, and brightest gold in several adjacent green fields teeming with every blossom imaginable.

On one of the occasions when they held a bohort, where blunt lances without armor was the rule, young Rivalin appeared among the magnificent company. It was not long before everyone noticed the skill and elegant gestures by which Rivalin steered his handsome charger, and with what grace and expertise he handled the weapons and armor of his well-equipped knighthood. Indeed, the ladies in particular noticed his handsome, sensuous body, his erect carriage on his mount, and his dazzling head with its rich, flowing dark hair streaming behind him as he cantered across the meadow. How fortunate will be any woman who can enjoy that man! they murmured amongst themselves.

Chief among the ladies of the court at this bohort was King Mark’s young sister, the celestial Blancheflor, whom some described as a veritable miracle on earth! This noblest of damsels was more beautiful than any sunny spring day. If heaven could have given birth to the quintessence of all womanhood, Blancheflor was that and more. Her magnificence, beauty, and noble bearing were peerless.

As it turned out, the judges declared Rivalin to be the winner of the bohort. Accordingly, as behooves