Malady of Love

Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose came to me as a blurry, philosophical babble on religious heresies, follies and crimes designed, I suspect, to drive me out of my illogical mind.

New York Times hailed the book as a bestseller. I might have been dazzled by its brilliance too were I not distracted by the fact that I found it all quite meaningless.

Umberto concluded by burning the once prominent abbey and glorious labyrinthine library in Italy where it all happened. And now I believe I shall do the same with the 600 pages or so I just wasted about two weeks digesting in my mind. Well, maybe, save five of them…

About mid part of the book, I was given pause from mindless reading, so surprised was I to have run across a commentary on a subject that has continually plagued each and every one of us through time – the malady of love.

It was Adso -- a character I’ve reluctantly grown fond of whose occasional witticisms have saved me from completely dozing off or smashing the book across the room before I reached its final page—who discovered Speculum amoris by Maximus of Bolgna while leafing through the books in the said library in search of a truth.

Like every one of us at some point in our lives – this young novice monk suffered too from the malady of love, particularly when his vows prevented him from pursuing the girl he slept with one night and constantly thought of the days after.

What is love and how do you conquer it? Allow me to quote from the book and share to you Adso’s discovery:

“So I was moved by the pages of Ibn-Hazm, who defines love as a rebel illness whose treatment lies within itself, for the sick person does not want to be healed and he who is ill with it is reluctant to get well. I realized why that morning I had been so stirred by everything I saw: it seems that love enters through the eyes, as Basil of Ancira also says, and – unmistakable symptom—he who is seized by such an illness displays an excessive gaiety, while he wishes at the same time to keep to himself and seeks solitude, while other phenomena affecting him are a violent restlessness and an awe that makes him speechless…

“I was frightened to read that the sincere lover, when denied the sight of the beloved object, must fall into a wasting state that often reaches the point of confining him to bed, and sometimes the malady overpowers the brain and the subject loses his mind and raves. But I read with apprehension that if the illness worsens, death can ensue, and I asked myself whether the joy I derived from thinking of the girl was worth this supreme sacrifice of the body, apart from all due consideration of the soul’s health.

"I learned further, from some words of Saint Hildegard, that the melancholy humor I had felt during the day, which I attributed to a sweet feeling of pain at the girl’s absence, was perilously close to the feeling experienced by one who strays from the harmonious and perfect state man experiences in paradise…

"… the great Avicenna defined love as an assiduous thought of a melancholy nature, born as a result of one’s thinking again and again of the features, gestures, or behavior of a person of the opposite sex: it does not originate as an illness but is transformed into illness when, remaining unsatisfied, it becomes obsessive thought, and so there is an incessant flutter of the eyelids, irregular respiration; now the victim laughs, now weeps, and the pulse throbs. Avicenna advised an infallible method already proposed by Galen for discovering whether someone is in love: grasp the wrist of the sufferer and utter many names of members of the opposite sex, until you discover which name makes the pulse accelerate.”

“Alas, as remedy, Avicenna suggested uniting the two lovers in matrimony, which would cure the illness… Luckily, Avicenna did consider the case of lovers who cannot be joined, and advised as radical treatment hot baths… But then, I read again in Avicenna, that there were also other remedies: for example, enlisting the help of old and expert women who would spend their time denigrating the beloved – and it seems that old women are more expert than men in this task… The last solution suggested by the Saracen was truly immodest, for it required the unhappy lover to couple with many slave girls, a remedy quite unsuitable for a monk.

“I did find a passage in Arnold Villanova, an author I had heard William mention with great esteem, who had it that lovesickness was born from an excess of humors and pneuma, when the human organism finds itself in an excess of dampness and heat, because the blood (which produces the generative seed), increasing through excess, produces excess of seed, a “complexio venerea,” and an intense desire for union in man and woman. There is an estimative virtue situated in the dorsal part of the meridian ventricle of the encephalus (What is that? I wondered) whose purpose is to perceive the insensitive intentions perceived by the senses, and when desire for the object perceived by the senses becomes too strong, the estimative faculty is upset, and it feeds only on the phantom of the beloved person; then there is an inflammation of the whole soul and body, as sadness alternates with joy, because heat (which in moments of despair descends into the deepest parts of the body and chills the skin) in moments of joy rises to the surface, inflaming the face.

"The treatment suggested by Arnold consisted in trying to lose the assurance and the hope of reaching the beloved object, so that the thought would go away.”