ABSTRACT
The twelfth century marks a watershed in the ethics of passion and sexuality in the West. Hellenic, Roman and Christian traditions developed philosophies of love which consigned sexual desire to the lowest level of philosophical and social ideals. For Hellenic and Roman thought on love and friendship, love as a social ideal had its fulfilment in the development of character, virtue and self-control, or, in Platonic philosophy, in addition to its positive social functions, in a cognitive process fuelled by desire and fulfilled in vision of the archetypal forms. The idealism of love presupposed the restraint, the control, in some cases the renunciation of sexuality.2
