The Foundations of Romantic Love and Chivalry

By Alex Shashkevich Romance of the Rose

People celebrating Valentine’s Day can thank Plato for the notion that their partner is their soulmate and other half, says Stanford scholar Robert Pogue Harrison.

Harrison, the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature in the School of Humanities and Sciences, co-teaches What is Love?, a popular Stanford humanities class where students trace the classical roots of contemporary, romantic love and read the Aristophanic myth in Plato’s Symposium that has since inspired people on the romantic search for the person to make them feel whole.

[Editor's Note: Set in the allegorical Garden of Delight (representing courtly society), the dreamer meets the god of love, and consequently falls in love with a rosebud that he sees while gazing into the fountain of Narcissus; The Romance of the Rose.]

Here, Harrison discusses the origins of romance. Harrison, a scholar of romance studies, has researched and written about death, literature, religion and mythology, among other topics. One of his books, The Body of Beatrice, explores medieval Italian lyric poetry with a focus on Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova, a 13th century work of the medieval courtly love genre that emphasizes chivalry and nobility.

What are some of the major origins of romantic love?

Romantic love, as we understand it today, has several historical origins. One of the oldest is the speech that comic playwright Aristophanes gives in philosopher Plato’s Symposium, a dialogue about Eros, a Greek god of love and desire, which dates to the 4th century B.C.

In his speech, which takes the form of a myth, Aristophanes suggests that humans were originally sphere-like creatures complete in themselves. They came in three genders – male, female and androgynous – but the gods divided them in half. Ever since, human individuals feel incomplete and long to restore that lost unity. Love is that yearning, as well as the sense of well-being that comes from finding that other lost half of oneself. I think much of our current ideas of romantic love are Aristophanic.

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The Foundations of Romantic Love and Chivalry

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