Abstract

One of the most widely accepted explanations for the peculiarity of the modern European is his addiction to the ideal of romantic love. Its invention is supposed to have so radically transformed ethics, imagination and daily life, that we can hardly imagine the mental world of the ancients or the Orient where such an ideal of love is unknown. In the classic source for this view, The Allegory of Love , C. S. Lewis traces the modern ideal back to medieval tales of courtly love. But he sees the devotion to romantic love as a distinguishing mark of the modern individualistic consciousness, which began, he says, with a new interest in ‘the inner workings of the human heart’