of listening to the call of reason and giving sex its proper value.12 Where we should feel natural desire, we are carried away by unrestrained lust. If Reason really is speaking for Jean, then she is calling us not to act like the hero of courtly love romance but like the man Augustine was striving to be: one who, as Reason says, loves all humans generally rather than becoming obsessed with just one particular human. The Lover’s failure to do so is meant not to be inevitable but instructive.
