Let loftiest love alone within thee move,
And purity and virtue will be thine.
Guirot Riquier expressed a similar sentiment:
For chaste and pure my love has always been,
From my "sweet bliss" I've never asked a boon;
If I may humbly serve her night and noon,
My life be her inalienable lien.
Walter von der Vogelweide says: "Love is a treasure heaped up of all
virtues."
As time went on the barrier erected between true spiritual love and
insidious sensuality became more and more clearly defined; the former
pervaded the erotic emotion of the whole period. Parallel with chaste
love, sensuality continued to exist as something contemptible, unworthy
of a noble mind; and it must be admitted that according to the
contemporary "Fabliaux," later German comedies and Italian and French
novels, the sexual manifestations of the period, were of incredible
coarseness. As against these, spiritual love was not merely an artistic
and theoretic concept, but the profound emotion of the cultured minds,
and remained a powerful and creative force even in later centuries.
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