ABSTRACT
There are many theories about the origin and even the appropriate name that should be given to that poetic and chivalrous Medieval movement which was built around "honest love" and "refined love" and, which, in the nineteenth century, received the name courtly love. The Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson states baldly that "romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche". The chivalrous steps of romantic love, so often themselves naïve and juvenile, combined the mystic and the eternal and the contingent. The lines between divine union and union with one's lady are often completely blurred so that Venus's love takes on the meaning of life. Alexander Denomy argued that it was a naturalistic heresy, fittingly in a little book entitled The Heresy of Courtly Love, and its philosophical roots can be found in the Arab fusion of neo-Platonic and Aristotelian ideas such as are found in Avicenna's Treatise on Love.
