Finally [on page 18?] we come to the fourth mark of courtly love – its love religion of the god Amor… This erotic religion arises as a rival or a parody of the real religion and emphasizes the antagonism of the two ideals.

Lewis posits that prior to the 11th Century, the love god was presented flippantly, most notably by Ovid, and people who worshipped him ridiculed. The comparison to religion was “humorous blasphemy”.

As against any theory which would derive medieval Frauendienst from Christianity and the worship of the Blessed Virgin, we must insist that the love religion often begins as a parody of the real religion. This does not mean that it may not soon become something more serious than a parody, nor even that it may not, as in Dante, find a modus vivendi with Christianity and produce a noble fusion of sexual and religious experience. But it does mean that we must be prepared for a certain ambiguity in all those poems where the attitude of the lover to his lady or to Love looks at first sight most like the attitude of the worshiper to the Blessed Virgin or to God. The distance between the ‘lord of terrible aspect’ in [Dante's] the Vita Nuova and the god of lovers in the Council of Remiremont [a French poem Lewis described where nuns debate being in love with clergy or knights with the knightophile losers, labeled heretics, called to repentance or punished] is a measure of the tradition’s width and complexity. Dante is as serious as a man can be; the French poet is not serious at all.

There are other authors in between these two extremes.

Where it is not a parody of the Church it may be, in a sense, her rival – a temporary escape, a truancy from the ardours of a religion that was believed, into the delights of a religion that was merely imagined. To describe it as the revenge of Paganism on her conqueror would be to exaggerate; but to think of it as a direct colouring of human passions by religious emotion would be a far graver error. It is as if some lover’s metaphor when he said ‘Here is my heaven’ in a moment of passionate abandonment were taken up and expanded into a system. Even while he speaks he knows that ‘here’ is not heaven; and yet it is a delightful audacity to develop the idea a little further. If you go on to add to that lover’s ‘heaven’ its natural accessories, a god and saints and a list of commandments, and if you picture the lover praying, sinning, repenting, and finally admitted to bliss, you will find yourself in the precarious dream-world of medieval love poetry. An extension of religion, an escape from religion, a rival religion. Frauendienst may be any of these, or any combination of them. It may even be the open enemy of religion – as when Aucassin roundly declares that he would rather follow all the sweet ladies and goodly knights to hell than go without them to heaven. The ideal lady of the old love poems is not what the earliest scholars took her to be. The more religiously she is addressed, the more irreligious the poem usually is.

I’m no the Queen o’ Heavn, Thomas;
I never carried my head sae hee,
For I am but a lady gay
Come out to hunt in my follee.

For our purpose it is enough to point out that life and letters are inextricably intermixed. If the feeling came first a literary convention would soon arise to express it: if the convention came first it would soon teach those who practiced it a new feeling… We can be quite sure that the poetry which initiated all over Europe so great a change of hearts was not a ‘mere’ convention: we can be quite as sure that it was not a transcript of fact. It was poetry.

Before the close of the twelfth century we find the Provençal conception of love spreading out in two directions from the land of its birth. One stream flows down into Italy and, through the poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo, goes to swell the great sea of the Divine Comedy; and there, at least, the quarrel between Christianity and the love religion was made up. Another stream found its way northward to mingle with the Ovidian tradition which already existed there, and so to produce the French poetry of the twelfth century. To that poetry we must now turn.

Thus ends Chapter One, p.23. Now that he’s laid out the basics, maybe I can skip through a little faster. I’m glad he addressed Veneration of Mary – it does not derive from courtly love and is not it’s inspiration, but most likely CL is a parody of it. He explains very well that it is love removed from the Church, not in the sense of source, but distance, and thus distorted and at odds with her and Christ.