Below are a series of excerpts showing that the tradition of courtly & romantic love requires a man to sacrifice his values and honor in order to prove his love for a woman. This factor has been central to the history of romantic love, and remains so today. As stated by Joseph Campbell, the tragic tension between love and honor has remained unresolved in the West to the present.
Joseph Campbell Quotes:
“In the Tristan romance King Mark is of course in the role of the jealous spouse; and his royal estate, with its elegant princely court, stands for the values of the day: world-history, society, knightly honor, deeds, career and fame, chivalry and friendship—in absolute opposition to the grotto of the timeless goddess Minne (romantic love).” [Creative Mythology – 1968]
“This we now must recognize as posing a profound problem—the problem, I should say; that from the period of the early Tristan poets, when it first seriously emerged in our literature in terms of the tragic tension between minne and ere, love and honor, that has remained unresolved in the West to the present.” [Creative Mythology – 1968]
“For it was in the legend of the Holy Grail that the healing work was symbolized through which the world torn between honor and love, as represented in the Tristan legend, was to be cured of its irresolution. [Myths To Live By – 1972]
“In Gottfried’s poem, tragedy follows the inability of the characters to reconcile love (minne), on one hand, and honor (ere), on the other. Gottfried himself and his century were torn between the two. The Love Grotto in the dangerous forest represents the dimension of the depth experience and King Mark’s court, the world in which that experience has to be borne.” [Flight Of the Wild Gander – 1969]
“When the heart is completely taken by this image of love, nothing else counts; and in the courtly tradition, nothing else counted. Amour. And what is the principal threat? Honor. So you find in these traditions of the Middle Ages this conflict between honor and love. The ultimate sacrifice for a noble heart is the sacrifice of honor for love. So that’s the theme that we’re up against here.” [Transformations of Myth Through Time – 1988]
“The second work by Chrétien—you can see he was writing for Marie—was Erec. It’s a wonderful story of a young knight who has had great fame and then falls in love. Now this is a modern as well as an ancient theme. His career is wrecked by his devotion to his love. This is the theme, honor or love. His honor is wrecked. He is no longer winning the battles, and when he realizes this, he becomes rejective of her. This is the normal thing for today, you know: you marry at twenty-two and divorce at twenty eight to recover. So he pushes her aside and then goes forth to win back his fame. She trots along behind him—she’s right there all the time—and then finally her loyalty to him, in her rejection, solves the whole problem.” [Transformations of Myth Through Time – 1988]
Books and Studies:
“The legend of Tristan and Isolde, posing the basic human conflict between an overpowering passion and the demands of morality and honor, offered a rich fund of material for medieval writers. They told the story in various forms for various reasons. Some condemned the love, others exalted it. For one, Tristan is a great hero, destroyed by a passion he cannot control; for another he is an artist inspired by a love that is mostly pain; for another, a knight caught between his love and loyalty to an unworthy king…
The conflict arises because Tristan’s love for Isolt is not just an ennobling inspiration, it is also a physical passion that demands fulfilment and destroys prudence. Love, which should guide the knight in the right direction, instead gets in his way. This presents a crucial paradox: without honor in the world a man cannot be a perfect lover, but without love a man is not a complete knight.
Why does this paradox exist? Because love between man and woman cannot be a purely spiritual phenomenon; there is always the danger of the physical impulse asserting itself and taking control. Then love, for all its ennobling powers, becomes an anti-social force. The only way out of the dilemma is death, so instead of a moral comedy, we have a romantic tragedy.”