ABSTRACT
The spiritual orientation was straight, a direct line between created human and the creator God; the corporeal orientation was inverted, a turning of the created back into itself. This chapter explores some of the theoretical approaches before analysing the essential framework of the corporeal orientation as found in the work of Augustine of Hippo. It describes how these ideas function in the twelfth-century account of human cognition offered by Hugh of St Victor. The chapter examines how Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner, in the fourteenth century, exemplifies the idea of a corporeal love as described by Augustine and Hugh. The emotions are a ‘domain of effort’ in which individuals struggle to shape their own emotional experience according to some of the wider goals. The chapter explores how the Fall of humanity in John Milton’s seventeenth-century Paradise Lost follows the framework of the corporeal orientation outlined earlier by Augustine, Hugh and Chaucer.
