Abstract

Western culture, at its best, has been a continuous effort to move from the low, the necessities of the body, toward the high, an eternity toward which all men aspire in their capacity for goodness. The purpose of politics, now understood as democracy, has been to regulate the low, the base desires that set men apart from each other. Politics, then, follows culture. But this linkage has been broken by the feminist demand for equality in romantic union, thus destroying the connection between lovers, farmily, and the culture which seeks to protect them The attack on courtly love through the leveling of male and female relatedness is a vicarious effort to undermine hierarchical love, natural and divine.