Shan’t I have anything from you to take with me?
MARIA: This scent ball, to gladden your heart.
PAMPHILUS: Add a kiss at least.
MARIA: I want to deliver to you a virginity whole and unimpaired.
PAMPHILUS: Does a kiss rob you of your virginity?
MARIA: Then do you want me to bestow my kisses on others too?
PAMPHILUS: Of course not. I want your kisses kept for me.
MARIA: I’ll keep them for you. Though there’s another reason why I wouldn’t dare give away kisses just now.
PAMPHILUS: What’s that?
MARIA: You say your soul has passed almost entirely into my body and that there’s only the slightest particle left in yours. Consequently, I’m afraid this particle in you would skip over to me in a kiss and you’d then become quite lifeless. So shake hands, a symbol of our mutual love; and farewell. Persevere in your efforts. Meanwhile I’ll pray Christ to bless and prosper us both in what we do.
This final exchange reveals Maria’s understanding of her own womanhood: “I want to deliver to you a virginity whole and unimpaired.” She deliberately holds back, it seems, precisely because she knows what she most desires and what it really means to give herself to her beloved, body and soul. For her, virginity is not an empty heroic or Mars-like pose; neither is it an image of divine purity. It is important because it both represents and makes possible the serious, wholehearted, exclusive, unconditional, unsullied, lifelong attachment she most desires; we may even say, because it enables her to achieve her highest aspiration.
And what of Pamphilus’s request for a kiss and Maria’s refusal? Here, for sure, a modern reader, even one who has played along up until this point, will leave the train – or so we thought. In an effort to forestall any such knee-jerk rejection, we asked the class, quite simply, “What is a kiss?” To our astonishment and delight, the first four answers were as follows: “A kiss is the most erotic thing imaginable.” “A kiss is a sharing of the breath, which is the spirit.” “A kiss is a promise.” “A kiss is a small consummation.” From there it was easy for them to see why they might hesitate to treat one’s kisses cheaply – though whether they would themselves bestow their kisses differently we are unable to say.§
The colloquy ends with Maria encouraging Pamphilus to persevere while she herself will seek divine blessing for their endeavors.
* * *
Let us quickly recapitulate ten important elements of the courtship exchange: (1) He must demonstrate concern for her esteem; he must make himself humanly admirable, not merely handsomely attractive. (2) He must woo concretely, “embodiedly,” and personally; love cannot remain a lofty, spiritual quest, indifferent to ordinary life. (3) He must see that he woos freely, not from passionate desire alone but also by deliberate choice, thus displaying in advance the free will by which he will later voluntarily bind himself in marriage. (4) He acknowledges the rule of what is lawful and right, reasonable and honorable. (5) He expresses the wish for exclusiveness, permanence, fidelity – for marriage, not an affair. (6) Both he and (especially) she need to be deliberate: to evaluate character, to look for what could support and enhance their desire for lasting union. (7) Both he and she must be mindful of the transience of bodily beauty. (8) Both, but especially he, need to show concern for children and evince devotion to their well-being. (9) Both need to be aware of the costs and risks of married life – in terms of decreased liberty, diminished wealth, and the pains of loss, grief, and disappointment – and show themselves ready to bear them. (10) Finally, he must stand up before, and stand up to, the older generation, seeking parental consent, establishing links to the larger familial world and to the past, acknowledging that marriage is not just a private matter between the lovers. The manners and mores of courtship teach the lovers that eros, for all his glory, is not the highest authority.
Stepping back from the colloquy, let us review courtship, looking for general themes and possible generalizations. Unlike earlier mores that regulated relations between the sexes by paternal authority, religious edict, and arranged marriage, courtship took erotic love of man for woman as its starting point, but sought to discipline it and direct it toward monogamous marriage. Erasmus’s colloquy was one of the earliest efforts to establish such marital mores based on love, opposing not only arranged marriage but also the two nonmarital ideals, the romantic ideal of love poetry and the celibate ideal of the church. Part of the discipline of erotic love comes from explicit and self-conscious confrontation with certain deep truths that, as we have seen, are embedded in the mores of courtship, truths regarding the promises and perils of sexual desire and erotic love, regarding human neediness and human freedom, regarding finitude and the longing for eternity, regarding marriage as a vehicle to life’s higher possibilities. Courtship enables both man and woman to make clear the meaning of their own sexual nature, while elevating that nature by clothing it in sanctifying ceremony and ritual.
By holding back the satisfaction of sexual desire, courtship uses the energy of romantic attraction to foster salutary illusions that encourage admiration and devotion; functioning as ideals, they in turn inspire conduct worthy of admiration and devotion. At the same time, courtship provides opportunities for learning about one another’s character, manners, and tastes. It enables man and woman to discover whether they can be friends, not merely lovers, and whether they have enough in common and enough mutual regard to sustain a union even when the erotic ardor of youth subsides. By locating wooer and wooed in their familial settings, courtship teaches the couple the intergenerational meaning of erotic activity and prepares their parents to accept their own new station, no longer in the vanguard of life. The process of courting provides the opportunity to enact the kind of attentiveness, dependability, care, exclusiveness, and fidelity that the couple will subsequently promise each other when they finally wed. For all these reasons, one does not exaggerate much in saying that going through the forms of courtship provides early practice in being married – a very different kind of practice, for a very different view of marriage, than the practice now thought to be provided by premarital cohabitation. Therefore, when they work well, the mores of courtship provide ample opportunity to discover how good a match and a marriage this is likely to be. In addition, as the natural elements of love between man and woman become a path to marriage, these elements are shaped by courtship into marriage’s more-than-natural foundation. Courtship, a wisely instituted practice, is meant to substitute for any lack of personal wisdom.
But this summary ignores the important sexual asymmetry of courtship, well represented in this colloquy. The roles are sexually distinct: the man woos, the woman is wooed, and each quite self-consciously takes up the appropriate part. Initiative apparently belongs to the man, and, at least superficially, he takes the more active role. Pamphilus is in love, not just in lust, and while this makes him vulnerable to poetical exaggeration and prone to fantastical excess, his love indicates his capacity to look beyond himself, to be moved by more than selfish calculation, to risk ridicule, rejection, and failure. A lover – unlike a significant other – is fit for the adventure of marriage; he is not a fellow who plays it safe. In contrast to the calculating contractual partner, having given himself to the tempests of eros, he is much more likely to be able to promise “in sickness and in health,” “for better and for worse.” In the lover, sexual desire is sublimated and attached to an idealized beloved; eros is focused upon a particular woman, whom the lover wants to possess and enjoy exclusively. Because she resists, his eros is enhanced by being linked to his pride. He desires a victory gained through her willing submission, granted only when he has won her esteem. As Allan Bloom remarks (in commenting on Rousseau’s treatment of the same subject in Emile):
Even
