This love was a profound devotion that could regulate selfish desire and render it innocent; proof of such devotion could be found in heroic acts of self-sacrifice or self-denial. However, such heroic acts included heroic adherence to gender norms and gendered ideals of self-presentation and self-discipline. This was a high price to pay for the legitimacy lovers sought to win. Nonetheless, it was a price that generations of lovers and would-be lovers did pay.
Relying on a wealth of recent research into the social and cultural history of the lay aristocracy in the period, Reddy is able to show that courtly love smoothly integrated existing aristocratic values, and permitted aristocrats to legitimate at least some sexual practices long familiar to them. Courtly love, romantic love, was born as a movement of covert resistance.
These facets of the twelfth-century making of romantic love in Europe are much more evident when one sets European developments in a comparative framework. As Reddy shows, in twelfth-century Bengal and Orissa, and in eleventh-century Heian Japan, there was no doctrine of desire, no notion of sexual “appetite,” as the Christian theologians called it. As a result, there was no need to elaborate a heroic vision of a love capable of regulating appetite and cleansing it. Whether one looks at the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva, the bhakti temple worship practiced at Puri, the multiple love affairs of Heian aristocrats, or the timeless classics of love literature, such as The Tale of Genji, penned by Heian women, one finds no reference to sexual desire as a bodily appetite or drive. In some Orissan temples, sexual love, shringara rasa, which culminated in divine sexual play, was regarded as the most sacred facet of the relationship between humans and the gods. In that strain of Buddhism most popular in Heian Japan, all wishes and longings were regarded as frustrating, as the very cause of suffering. Like Amida Buddha, Heian lovers sought to offer each other compassion and a taste of that elegance that shone in the court of the semi-divine emperor.
These points of contrast permit one to identify the peculiar features of Western practices more accurately, and to show that the form of heroic mutual devotion characteristic of Western romantic love was made, at a specific point in time, by individuals seeking a refuge from the blanket condemnations by the Church of a kind of “desire” which, itself, did not admit the possibility of love. If romantic love lives on in a similar form today, it may be in part because various doctrines of desire continue to deny its possibility.