because, by getting the sex thing out of the way, it is now possible to be friends with men as it never was before.” After that class, I felt like tossing in the towel and never going back.
But my wife, cooler and wiser, knew not to despair. “Not to worry. They are just blowing smoke. We’ll do what we always do: put good readings in front of them and discuss them as if they really mattered. You’ll see. They are better than they know.” And so for the next ten weeks we read and talked about, for example, the Garden of Eden story, the coupling of Ares and Aphrodite, Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium, C.S.Lewis on Eros, and the courtships of Darcy and Elizabeth (Pride and Prejudice), Emile and Sophie (Rousseau’s Emile), and Orlando and Rosalind (As You Like It).
Surprisingly, perhaps the most helpful reading turned out to be Erasmus’s “Courtship: A Colloquy” (written in 1523), a compressed dramatic enactment in which Erasmus depicts not so much what was happening in his day as what he thought should happen.3 It provides a useful mirror in which we can see the deficiencies of our present situation and, at the same time, look for basic principles of courtship that might still be necessary and desirable today. By reviewing and commenting here on major portions of the colloquy, we seek to show by example how pondering old texts can contribute to the search for positive manners and mores, especially in an age where none are available.
On first or even second reading, “Courtship: A Colloquy” will no doubt strike most modern readers as quaint or irrelevant, at best. We hope to demonstrate why it can and should be taken seriously, not because it offers a pattern readily importable to modern times – it doesn’t – but because it addresses, whether we recognize them or not, what are still the most important issues: (1) How to transform brutish sexual appetite into human loving? (2) How to make a manly man interested in marriage and (when they arrive) attached to his children? (3) How to help a woman negotiate between her erotic desires and her concern for progeny? (4) How to enable men to find and win, how to enable women to select and hold the right one for lasting marriage? (5) How to locate the relations of men and women in the larger contexts of human life – familial, political, religious? More up-to-date mores and manners that do not come to terms with these issues will not get the job done. The colloquy should command our attention also because it illustrates what may be the central truth about sexual manners and mores: it is women who control and teach mores.
* * *
Pamphilus and Maria meet in the evening in the vicinity of Maria’s family home, probably neither by prior arrangement nor entirely by chance. Pamphilus (whose name means “all-loving” or “loving all”) appears at first to be a foolish, moonstruck lover, quite beside himself in love. Although it later will emerge that he is willing to marry, Pamphilus is eager to win Maria (named after the Virgin) here and now, and he presses his suit – in speech and manner – after the conventions of love poetry. Maria, by contrast, appears from the start to be utterly sensible and self-possessed; witty, sharp, and charming, she almost immediately assumes control. She will direct the conversation from the conventions of love poetry to the conventions of marriage. The beginning establishes both the tone and the starting points of the courtship. (Readers are encouraged to read the dialogue aloud, and dramatically.)
PAMPHILUS: Hello – you cruel, hardhearted, unrelenting creature!
MARIA: Hello yourself, Pamphilus, as often and as much as you like, and by whatever name you please. But sometimes I think you’ve forgotten my name. It’s Maria.
PAMPHILUS: Quite appropriate for you to be named after Mars.
MARIA: Why so? What have I to do with Mars?
PAMPHILUS: You slay men for sport, as the god does. Except that you’re more pitiless than Mars: you kill even a lover.
MARIA: Mind what you’re saying. Where’s this heap of men I’ve slain? Where’s the blood of the slaughtered?
PAMPHILUS: You’ve only to look at me to see one lifeless corpse.
MARIA: What do I hear? You speak and walk about when you’re dead? I hope I never meet more fearsome ghosts!
PAMPHILUS: You’re joking, but all the same you’re the death of poor me, and you kill more cruelly than if you pierced with a spear. Now, alas, I’m just skin and bones from long torture.
MARIA: Well, well! Tell me, how many pregnant women have miscarried at the sight of you?
PAMPHILUS: But my pallor shows I’ve less blood than any ghost.
MARIA: Yet this pallor is streaked with lavender. You’re as pale as a ripening cherry or a purple grape.
PAMPHILUS: Shame on you for making fun of a miserable wretch!
MARIA: But if you don’t believe me, bring a mirror.
PAMPHILUS: I want no other mirror, nor do I think any could be brighter, than the one in which I’m looking at myself now.
MARIA: What mirror are you talking about?
PAMPHILUS: Your eyes.
Pamphilus opens by greeting Maria not by name but as “you cruel, hardhearted, unrelenting creature”: he finds her cruel because she is hard-hearted, and hard-hearted because she is unrelenting. From the man’s point of view, the woman’s crime in love is her steadfast refusal to yield sexually to a wooer’s importunings. Indeed, after Maria greets him by name and playfully reminds him of her own, Pamphilus sees in her name not mainly the Virgin but rather the pagan deity Mars: Maria appears to him not merely unrelenting but positively warlike, martially aggressive in defense of her virginity.
Maria’s lighthearted defense and skillful repartee soon make Pamphilus blush (“You’re as pale as a ripening cherry”) and then be embarrassed by this involuntary self-revelation (“Shame on you for making fun of a miserable wretch!”); blushing and embarrassment are good signs, indicating that a man seeks not only a woman’s acquiescence but also her esteem and approval. Yet even in this respect Pamphilus remains self-absorbed. In looking at Maria’s eyes, he literally and figuratively sees only himself. Trafficking in his own wretched, lovelorn state, he seems as much in love with love as he does with Maria.
Despite her steady resistance, Maria is obviously attracted to Pamphilus – just listen to the way she eggs him on – but, serious in her playfulness, she never forgets who she is or what she wants, not only here and now but especially hereafter. Exploiting his ardor and her self-restraint, she employs her considerable wit to bring Pamphilus round to seeing things from her point of view.
MARIA: . . . But how do you prove you’re lifeless? Do ghosts eat?
PAMPHILUS: Yes, but they eat insipid stuff, as I do.
MARIA: What do they eat, then?
PAMPHILUS: Mallows, leeks, and lupines.
MARIA: But you don’t abstain from capons and partridges.
PAMPHILUS: True, but they taste no better to my palate than if I were eating mallows, or beets without pepper, wine, and vinegar.
MARIA: Poor you! Yet all the time you’re putting on weight. And do dead men talk, too?
PAMPHILUS: Like me, in a very thin, squeaky voice.
MARIA:
