ABSTRACT
The paederastia of the Greeks and the love celebrated in Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium were in part educational relationships, in which romance blended with care and an almost parental tone; and this especial caring is far more strongly developed in Christianity. Nature to Jesus is kindly, with God as love, creating the lily and caring for the birds, and all its horrors somehow by-passed. Christian theology is the science of an unprecedented happening, alien to common sense. If the medieval synthesis attained an inclusive harmony unknown before or since, this was through no denial of paradox, but rather through the firm acceptance of dramatic paradox at its heart, with resultant harmony out-flowering. Chivalry suggests ‘courtesy’ and touches ‘courtly love’. A break between the Church and classical drama was inevitable. Revulsion from the horrors and indecencies associated with the stage in fourth-century Rome merely forced a natural divergence. Christianity claimed to include and place the dramatic substances.
