The Will to Change questions about love asked by men of all ages in our cul­ ture. I write in response to questions about love asked me by the men I know most intimately who are still working to find their way back to the open-hearted, emotionally expressive selves they once were before they were told to silence their longings and close their hearts. The Will to Change is the offering I bring to the feast of male reclamation and recovery of self, of their emotional right to love and be loved. Women have believed that we could save the men in our lives by giving them love, that this love would serve as the cure for all the wounds i�flicted by toxic assaults on their emotional systems, by the emotional heart attacks they undergo every day. Women can share in this healing process. We can guide, instruct, observe, share information and skills, but we cannot do for boys and men what they must do for themselves. Our love helps, but it alone does not save boys or men. Ultimately boys and men save themselves when they learn the art of loving. 16 2 Understanding Patriarchy P atriarchy is the single most life-threatening social dis­ ease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word "patriarchy'' in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy-what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly. The word "patriarchy'' just is not a part of their normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women's liber­ ation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences. I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it. Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death. I often use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capi­ talist patriarchy'' to describe the interlocking political sys­ tems that are the foundation of our nation's politics. Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about 17 180 Belonging folks who have accepted unearned white privilege must be willing to forego those rewards and stand down, expressing their solidarity with those to are the most immediate victims of racist assault and domina­ tion. In 77,e Hidden H/4i1111d, first published in 1968, Wendell Berry was prescient in his insightful critique of whiteness, showing himself to be among the first well known cultural critic to see and publicly name the link between white racist domination and destruction of the earth. He does not sugarcoat his critique boldl.

1. The Will to Change
questions about love asked by men of all ages in our cul-
ture. I write in response to questions about love asked me
by the men I know most intimately who are still working to
find their way back to the open-hearted, emotionally
expressive selves they once were before they were told to
silence their longings and close their hearts.
The Will to Change is the offering I bring to the feast of
male reclamation and recovery of self, of their emotional
right to love and be loved. Women have believed that we
could save the men in our lives by giving them love, that this
love would serve as the cure for all the wounds i�flicted by
toxic assaults on their emotional systems, by the emotional
heart attacks they undergo every day. Women can share in
this healing process. We can guide, instruct, observe, share
information and skills, but we cannot do for boys and men

2. what they must do for themselves. Our love helps, but it
alone does not save boys or men. Ultimately boys and men
save themselves when they learn the art of loving.
16
2
Understanding Patriarchy
P
atriarchy is the single most life-threatening social dis-
ease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.
Yet most men do not use the word "patriarchy'' in everyday
life. Most men never think about patriarchy-what it
means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our
nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it
correctly. The word "patriarchy'' just is not a part of their
normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard
and know the word usually associate it with women's liber-
ation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant
to their own experiences. I have been standing at podiums
talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a

3. word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me
what I mean by it.
Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of
men as all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a
major facet of the political system that shapes and informs
male identity and sense of self from birth until death. I
often use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capi-
talist patriarchy'' to describe the interlocking political sys-
tems that are the foundation of our nation's politics. Of
these systems the one that we all learn the most about
17

4. 180 Belonging
folks who have accepted unearned white privilege must be
willing to
forego those rewards and stand down, expressing their solidarity
with
those to are the most immediate victims of racist assault and
domina-
tion.
In 77,e Hidden H/4i1111d, first published in 1968, Wendell
Berry was
prescient in his insightful critique of whiteness, showing
himself to be
among the first well known cultural critic to see and publicly
name

5. the link between white racist domination and destruction of the
earth.
He does not sugarcoat his critique boldly proclaiming:" ... the
white
race in America has marketed and destroyed more of the
fertility of
the earth in less time than any other race that has ever lived. In
my
part of the country, at least, this is largely to be accounted for
by the
racial division of the experience of the landscape. The white
man,
preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation
and
ownership of the land, necessar ily has lived on the country as a
de-
structive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned
the hard
labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the
land, to
a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor,
he de-
stroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth."
Berry

6. acknowledged that agrarian subjugated black folk were able to
work
the land and "develop resources of character and religion and
art that
have some resemblance to the old world." Displaced African
people
found working the land to be one of the few locations where ties
to
their landscape of origin could be reclaimed.
In seeking freedom in the city via mass migration from the
agrar-
ian South, most black people began to embrace dominator ways
of
thinking about the earth. Berry contends: "The move from
country to
city, moreover deprives them of their competence in doing for
them-
selves. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the country, most
blacks
were skilled in the arts-of-make-do and subsistence ... They
knew
how to grow and harvest and prepare food. They knew how to
gather
wild fruits, nuts, and herbs.They knew how to hunt and fish ...

7. In the
cities, all of this know-how was suddenly of no value ... In the
country,
Returning to the Wound 181
despite the limits placed upon them by segregation and poverty,
they
possessed a certain freedom in their ability to do things, but
once they
were in the city freedom was inescapably associated with the
ability
to buy things." Of course, not all black folk migrated to cities.
And it
the memory of a sustained oppositional living sub-culture, like
the
one Berry describes that offers a glimmer of hope in the present
day.
Hence the importance of both naming black folks collective
estrange-
ment from our agrarian past and taking steps to uncover the true
na-
ture of culture of belonging as well as the naming of the trauma
that
took place when country life lost meaning and visibility.

8. This estrangement from our agrarian past, this rupture can only
be
healed by full acknowledgement of that legacy and the
functional use
of that legacy in the present. Remembering Nick Watkins and
Aunt
Georgie (and folks like them) is one way to intervene on our
nation's
collective forgetting. One of the silent spaces in Berry's
narrative is
caused by his lack of familiarity with the more developed and
articu-
lated land stewardship of Kentucky black people. He learns
some of
that sub-culture of blackness from his conversations with
southern
black writer Ernest Gaines. In Berry's short story "Freedom," a
fic-
tionalized account of Nick's funeral, he shares accurate
secondhand
knowledge of the unique way many southern black folks
approach
death.
Certainly, Berry in 77,e Hidde11 rH11md shows both a keen

9. aware-
ness and a profound respect for the humanizing culture black
folks
created in the midst of adversity. Rightly, in the afterword
added in
1988, twenty years after the initial publication, he still
acknowledges
"the freedom and prosperity of the people" cannot be seen as
separate
from the issue of the health of the land" and that "the psychic
wounds
of racism had resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, the
country
itself."W hile Berry can state that he believed then and now
"that the
root of our racial problem in American is not racism" but "our
inor-
dinate desire to be super ior." Of course were Ber ry a student
of my
work, I would encourage him to think more about the ideology
of

10. Courtly Love
The courtly love ethos developed in southern France in the area
called Languedoc around the year 1100. It coincided therefore
with what has been called the Renaissance of the twelfth
century and with the development of high Gothic architecture
and the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary.
It is sometimes thought, wrongly, that the courtly love ethos
was influenced by or was even a direct reflection of the
development of the cult of the Virgin Mary. That was not the
case. The two were parallel, independent developments in ways
of thinking about and representing the image and the status of
women. If anything, it was the poetry of the courtly love
tradition that influenced ways of representing the Virgin Mary
rather than the reverse.
If one can quantify or measure such events, it would have to be
said that the rise of the courtly love ethos was and remains the
far more important event in the history of human consciousness.

11. Why?
A generally shared view of human psychology and culture is
that while ways of thinking about and representing human
feelings change, the feelings themselves do not. The assumption
is that feelings like love in all its forms, from the love of
friendship to the love of home and region to passionate sexual
love, are universal and constant. What happened in Languedoc
in the twelfth century, though, gives us some reason to believe
that that may not be the case. As the scholar and author C.S.
Lewis wrote, revolutions in sentiment and feeling are very rare,
but one may have taken place with the rise of the courtly love
ethos.
What is courtly love, what was its social background, and what
preceded it?
We know the courtly love tradition chiefly through the
testimony of poets. Collectively their work is known as
Provençal poetry and the poets as troubadours and trouvères.
Troubadours were active in the south of France, trouvères were
active somewhat later in the north of France. The world of this
poetry has two fundamental features, both of which are new.
First, in this poetry the speaker of the poem addresses another
man’s wife. The speaker’s rival is not the woman’s husband but
rather another man, or men. Second, paying court to the woman
requires of the man a “politeness,” or courtesy (French:
courtoisie) that was new. It is this new element of courtesy that
defines the courtly love tradition andf to which it owes its
name, courtly love. Courtly love requires that one be polite:
only the courteous can truly love, but then only love, or the
ability to love, makes one courteous. In modern times we tend
to think of courtesy, or politeness, in mainly exterior social
terms. Courtesy has to do with forms and conventions of
conduct. This was certainly true in the Middle Ages as well,
except that their courtesy presupposed an interior courtesy, the
right kind of interior disposition. But before we go into this
further, let us look at what preceded it and at the social context.

12. First of all, there is little or no evidence that the idea of
courtship or anything like it existed either in ancient times or
before the twelfth century. As far as the language of love and
sexual relationships was concerned, it was a bare affective
landscape. Certainly our idea of personal happiness as
something centered in relationship to another person did not
exist. Prior to Provençal poetry the only love stories told about
women were stories that involved the women’s shame or
disgrace (Helen, Phaedra, Medea, and Dido are the most
famous. As we have seen with Plato, to the extent the ancient
Greeks honored sexual love, it was sexual love between two
men. But what both Plato and Aristotle chiefly honored was not
sexual love at all but rather the love of friendship, and for them
the model of friendship was love between two men, which is
may be philia and not eros. Plato does place his highest praise
of love in the mouth of a woman, the priestess Diotima, but
Diotima praises love of the soul, or the intellect, and not
specifically the affective love of another person.
In the excerpt that we discussed from the Roman poet Ovid’s
Art of Love we do hear and see a different kind of sentiment.
Ovid depicts the foolishness to which love drives people, or
rather to which it drives young men: the poem is addressed to
men. Ovid, though, is not holding love up to ridicule. If he
mocks the ways of love and lovers he is doing so that lovers can
also laugh at themselves. For Ovid the art of love is a game, but
a game to be enjoyed and not taken too seriously. As we will
see, that is the difference between Ovid and courtly love: in the
latter love is still a game, but a game to be taken very seriously.
As far as marriage was concerned, though, little changed
between antiquity and the twelfth century. The spread of
Christianity may have served to soften some sentiments and
practices, but it did not fundamentally change the texture of
marriage and love relationships. On the contrary, relationships
between men remained the most important social relationships.
In the Middle Ages these were the bonds between vassal and
lord and the bonds between knights who fought together in

13. battle.
So how did the revolution in feeling that is courtly love come
about? There is still no answer to that and none may ever
emerge. However, we can imagine how it may have come about
by recalling the nature of medieval society.
The most important form of wealth in the Middle Ages was
land. This did not change until the rise of towns and cities in
the later Middle Ages (the fourteenth century) and the
accelerated development of the commercial, as distinct from
agrarian, economy. The owners of land, large and small, were
called lords. (Not every lord, though, was necessarily a
landowner; he might be serving a wealthier, landholding lord.)
To protect and defend their holdings lords required men sworn
to serve them by an oath of loyalty. These men were the lord’s
vassals. These vassals were also often knights, men possessed
of a horse and armor and trained to fight in battle but not
possessed of other wealth.
So we can imagine a provincial estate and court in the French
countryside populated by a lord and landless knights and by a
few ladies. Medieval society being what it was, the male
members of the court outnumber the women. There was, and
would have been, nothing new about this social formation until
the element of courtesy [courtoisie] was introduced as a social
and affective ideal. But the element of courtesy could only be
introduced though a subtle change in the status of the women at
court, which is not to say of women in general. With the ideal
of courtesy, the vassal/lord relationship became the vassal/lady
relationship and was infused with a romantic element, though
with one all-important qualification: the romantic relation was
never between lord and lady as husband and wife but rather
between the lady and vassal, or vassals. In marriage the lady
remained little more than the property of her husband, but
outside of marriage courtly love gave the lady the status of a
superior. The most famous instance of courtly love, the story of
Guinevere and Lancelot, is a good example. If Queen Guinevere
is King Arthur’s spouse and property, she is also Lancelot’s

14. queen and superior, the one to whom he sacrifices everything.
Why did the romantic element not inform marriage itself?
First, Marriage had nothing to do with love; it was a social
arrangement. This does not mean that married couple could not
or did not develop bonds of affection and loyalty, but the point
is precisely that. Those things developed from the relationship,
they were not its basis.
The idealization of love in a society where marriage was a
utilitarian practice for the generation of offspring and the
preservation or increase of property could only emerge as an
idealization of adultery.
Second, medieval attitudes toward sex and marriage were not
our own but were also not simple. For example, it was long
thought that medieval culture had an allergic view of sex as
something evil or sinful. Things were more complex. The
theological view of sex was not that desire or pleasure as such
were evil but that they could lead to the loss of reason and self-
control and that that was an evil. For the medieval mind there is
innocent sexuality but not innocent passionate sexuality. That is
because the medieval mind only knew passion as an animal
appetite. Medieval society did not have the later romantic sense
of passion as something purifying and transformative.
Third, the courtly love ethos did not so much question this point
of view as set up a rival point of view. In saying that true love
is only possible outside of marriage, the courtly love ethos
inaugurates a religion of love, a new cult of eros that hadno
precedent in antiquity. This erotic religion became the rival and
parody of real religion. It is a rival religion because from the
beginning Provençal poetry turned the pursuit of love into an
elaborate ritual with a language and rules of conduct that
duplicated the language of religious practice: honor, humility,
sacrifice, loyalty, and service. In other words, the courtly love
ethos appropriates the language and ritual of religion for its
own ends. The more religiously the lady is addressed and
honored, the more irreligious a figure she is.
But if this sounds like masquerade or mere hypocrisy, it was

15. not. Genuinely new in the courtly love ethos was the sentiment
that because love was a noble sentiment, it only enslaved the
noblest hearts.
The rule and ethos of courtly love can be summed up by
reference to a text by Andreas Capellanus written in the late
twelfth century (1170—80) and called On the Art of Loving
Honestly [De arte honeste amandi]. He uses the word honest in
the old sense of honorable, or right. In that text Andreas, as he
was known, lays down the following guidelines and rules.
1. Love is not purely sensual but it is also not “Platonic.”
Although love is sensual in nature, love does not consist in
sexual union nor in the pleasure of sexual union but rather in
the yearning for sexual union.
2. The lover must be dedicated to one constant object. Love is
the source and origin of other kinds of goodness.
3. The lady who choses love does so with a sense of probity, or
integrity.
4. Courtesy demands that a lover serve all ladies but not all
women. A common woman does not merit the same care and
respect as a lady.
5. Love is both a state of mind and an art.
6. The most important ingredient of love as an art is rhetoric, or
the use of language. Rhetoric is more important than conduct,
appearance, or personal attractiveness.
7. Love is kept secret.
8. Love is not a part of the marriage relation.
9. If a man and woman who are lovers enter into marriage, the
terms of their earlier relationship cease.
10. Conjugal affection is not love because tied to duty and
necessity.
11. . The love a lady bestows must be freely given and given
only to noble men.
12. In the rule of courtly love, a lady cannot refuse the attention
and favor of a suitor. A suitor who is refused is unjustly
refused, for the purpose of courtly love is to call forth

16. excellence from its followers.
13. Expressing contempt for religion does not recommend a
suitor and is a ground for refusing him. That the cult of courtly
love was a kind of rival religion does not mean that it replaced
the religion of the Church.
14. Marriage not being a contract freely chosen, any view of
love as something noble and ennobling must be a theory of
adultery.
15. At the end of his text Andreas writes to Walter, its
dedicatee, that he has composed it so as to inform “how to
provoke the minds of women to love” and then adds that Walter
should refrain from employing the information. This advice
appears contradictory and is. But in this respect it is indicative
of much of medieval culture, and of cultures in general.
1