In the next section Lewis presents a third contributor to the advent of Courtly Love, the Medieval view that desire is sinful, even in marriage. There are some interesting quotes from different Medieval people, including St. Gregory (not sure which one) who categorize desire and pleasure as being an evil consequence of the fall, with some distinctions between the two.

Lewis says that Gregory says “to Augustine” that “the act is innocent but the desire is morally evil.” The “example is of a righteous-rebuke delivered in anger… the emotion which is the efficient cause of our saying it is morally bad.”

He continues to say that during the later Middle Ages, Hugo of St. Victor says that the selflessness of producing children offset the guilt of desire. But Hugo “goes out of his way to combat the rigorous view that a marriage caused by beauty is not marriage: Jacob, as he reminds us, married Rachel for her beauty. On the other hand, he is clear that if we had remained in the state of innocence we should have generated sine carnis incentivo. He differs from Gregory by considering not only the desire but the pleasure. The latter he thinks evil, but not morally evil: it is, he says, not a sin but the punishment of a sin.”

Peter Lombard…located evil in the desire and said that it was not a moral evil, but a punishment for the Fall… (Lombard) quotes with approval from a supposedly Pythagorean source a sentence which is all important for the historian of courtly love, ‘passionate love of a man’s own wife is adultery.

Albertus Magnus takes a much more genial view… pleasure would have been greater if we had remained in Paradise. The real trouble about fallen man is not the strength of his pleasures but the weakness of his reason: unfallen man could have enjoyed any degree of pleasure without losing sight, for a moment, of the First Good.”

Thomas Aquinas says “sexual life would have existed without the Fall by the argument that God would not have given Adam a woman as a ‘help’ except for this purpose; for any other, a man would obviously have been so much more satisfactory.” He is aware that affection increases pleasure. He says that the evil “is neither the desire nor the pleasure, but the submergence of the rational faculty which accompanies them: and this submergence, again, is not a sin, though it is an evil, a result of the Fall.

…This is almost the opposite of the view, implicit in so much romantic love poetry, that it is precisely passion which purifies. About ‘passion’(which works a chemical change upon appetite and affection and turns them into a thing different from either) in this sense Thomas Aquinas has naturally nothing to say…. He had not heard of it. It was only coming into existence in his time, and finding its first expression in the poetry of courtly love.

…The general impression left on the medieval mind by its official teachers was that all love was more or less wicked. And this imression, combining with the nature of feudal marriage as I have already described it, produced in the poets a certain willfulness, a readiness to emphasize rather than to conceal the antagonism between their amatory and their religious ideals.

Marriage was for pleasureless, but righteous, procreation, therefore lovers were relegated to sinful delight. Courtly Love said, and I’ll quote Barbara Mandrell, “if loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.” And according to Lewis, “This cleavage between Church and court… which will become more apparent as we proceed, is the most striking feature of medieval sentiment.”

I do not know if Lewis is drawing from more western statements about passion in marriage or the lack thereof, but I think they are consistent with some of what I’ve read from the first Millennium. I can think of some Bible verses that are more positive about married love like Song of Solomon, and some verses in Proverbs and St. Paul’s statements about marriage. I believe more modern Orthodox teachers do not preach against pleasure so much as against passions, which have consistently been characterized through the centuries as obsessive, selfish, based on a false idea of needs and expectations, and cause one to loose sight of God, their salvation. And not just the rationalistic way that Thomas Aquinas speaks of.

I think a non-dialectical approach would be to say that the Fall disordered our desires, and that they will be corrected in Christ through our obedient will and His grace. If we see fulfilling disordered desires as necessary and deserved, we will move away from Christ, our salvation.