Posted on 02/08/2017 3:07:16 AM PST by BlessedBeGod
Father John Hunwicke has just asked some Big Questions on his entertaining and scholarly blog, and I thought I would try and answer one of them. The first question is this:
BIG QUESTION: Is this the first human age in which people have felt sexual temptation, and have sometimes fallen victim to it?
If not, why does this age demand novel ways of circumventing the objective sinfulness of adultery?
One must assume that human nature has not changed very much over the centuries. If one wants proof, one only has to read the literature of yesteryear. The way that Chaucer, for example, writes about love and passion strikes me as an indication that nothing has changed. Shakespeare too: aren’t Romeo and Juliet just an archetypal couple in love, which is one reason that modern dress productions of the play work so well?
Well, yes and no. My contention would be that feelings have not changed, but what has changed is the way we deal with them. Romeo and Juliet conceive a passion for each other, and decide to get married at Friar Laurence’s cell. The first bit is something we all understand, the second is not something that we would ever dream of doing. For Romeo and Juliet, love means marriage, because love involves the complete union of man and woman. Romeo and Juliet are passionately in love, but they commit no sin. Indeed they are horrified by the prospect of sin, otherwise Juliet would have married the County Paris in a bigamous union, but that is one thing she cannot do, despite the Nurse’s urging, and the tragic outcome of the play turns on this one fact.
Certain people, who claim to be historians, but who never produce any real evidence for their views, take the line that in Medieval and Early Modern England, the vast majority of people never got married in the sacramental sense. Instead of this, they lived in common law unions. I have never seen a convincing study that proves that this is so. But one thing is clear, and that is, in the families we know about, people did take care to regularise their situations in the eyes of the Church, and correspondingly, many were deeply involved in efforts to declare certain unions null and void.
We all know about Henry VIII’s matrimonial adventures; while that King did commit adultery with ladies like Bessie Blount and Mary Bullen, he was also very keen to be in a regular union with Anne Bullen, and was eager to have the ‘marriage’ with Anne annulled, and her executed, just to make doubly sure that no one could ever impugn the validity his marriage to Jane Seymour. But Henry was not the only one: his grandfather Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was also the subject of much discussion. And his forebear John of Gaunt took the trouble of marrying his mistress Katherine Swynford, showing that he clearly cared about not living in a state of sin.
One key concern in all these matters was the question of the status of the children of these unions. Illegitimate children could not inherit the throne, or any title of nobility. One could argue people were keen to regularise their unions in the eyes of the Church (the only authority that counted in those days) in order to have legitimate heirs.
However, one thing that no one ever tried to do was justify or sanitise adultery. Louis XIV of France was one for the ladies, but it is notable that he spent the last three decades of his life as an exemplary married man, and one of his chief mistresses, Louise de la Valliere, subsequently entered a convent and lived a life of exemplary piety. Even Louis XV, who lived most of his adult life in a state of mortal sin, did repent at the end, and did, before he met Madame de Pompadour, have recourse to the confessional between bouts of passion with his mistress Madame de Mailly (who also ended up in a convent where she became very devout).
There was certainly lots of sin about at Versailles, but lots of repentance too, and no one, but no one at all, even the King, would have dreamed of approaching the sacrament of Holy Communion while in a state of sin. This idea, that one can somehow justify going to communion when you are living with someone who is not your lawful spouse, is an utterly modern idea.
So, to get back to Father Hunwicke’s question, where did this modern idea come from? One suspects that the sexual revolution of the 1960’s has something to do with it, and that period saw a real change in the way people viewed their sexual sins. Or put this way: what was seen as sin suddenly did not seem sinful any more, thanks to what Saint John Paul II eloquently called the loss of the sense of sin. Back in the eighteenth century there were people who had no sense of sin, who were called libertines, but they were always in a small minority. Now libertinism has become the majority position, and those who try to justify adultery and see it as something that can exist alongside the grace of God are effectively trying to conform the Church to the world.
This project – the reconciliation of the Church to the ways of the world – has, to put it mildly, not got a good track record. Moreover, it is something that the Saviour of Mankind clearly rejected. If He had thought well of the project He would never have set aside Moses’ provision about divorce, and He would never have died on the Cross, because people like Herod, Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas would have seen Him as someone they could work with. But He wasn’t. And neither should we be.
To go back to Fr Hunwicke’s question. Human nature has not changed. We seek novel ways of circumventing the sin of adultery because we have embraced a creed at variance with the teaching of Jesus. What was once seen as a sin we now regard as a right, the right to sexual satisfaction. We need to go back to the Gospel, and to the vocation we have received from the one and only Master.
And the patriarchs of the Old Testament were polygamists. The Spartans were practicing homosexuals etcetera... Human nature? Or coarse disregard of nature as intended? Societal mores seem to dictate was is detestable as well as what is allowable inside and outside of “normal behaviors” which could lead one to ask; what is normal? Or, what is allowable?
I can’t answer these questions but as everyone else, I too have my own personal preferences.
I find it funny how certain people are condemned for it, Kennedy, and others... Newt seem to get a pass. Both cheated multiple times on their spouses... Newt changed spouses like some change socks.
God made Adam and Eve to be as one. They are our example. Whatever mankind did after that was outside of God’s design for the sanctity of marriage.
I’m told Newt got better.
I'm not advocating adultery, by any means. It is an evil nasty sin second only to finances in wrecking holy matrimony.
But it is far closer to normal behavior than sticking one's Johnson into some other dude's poop chute . . . and far less likely to give one an incurable STD.
Your post was beyond creepy and seemingly condoned perverted behavior. I been going to this site since 2008, and never seen anything like it.
I am not sure what you said in your email, because I deleted it. Don’t email, unless you want to waste your time.
My response is this:
Historical observation of a depraved world.
Those outside of the worldly, fleshy system does not agree with perversion or sins of the flesh, looks inward, sticks their collective heads in the sand. The truth is.. debased thought and deed has been around for millenia. I don’t agree with it, I do not practice it, nor do I believe it is healthy to pretend it died off with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The devil has been very busy indeed. With the falling away in a faithless world and not exercising the authority granted to us in the new covenant, I fear attitudes will only degrade further.
I believe there is something in there about “the hardness of your hearts”.
Sociologists love to compare humans and chimpanzees, up to a point.
In chimpanzee troops, a single dominant male will have a “harem” of females in his territory. But just outside his territory are other males hovering about, hoping to persuade members of his harem to cheat on the dominant male.
Sociologists point to this and say, “Look, cheating is normal and natural, so people should be able to do it as well.”
But they invariably stop at that point.
Because if the dominant male catches one of his harem cheating with another male, if he can, he will *kill* both of them.
So if cheating is normal and natural, so is violent jealous rage culminating in killing.
Pissing people off.
As my wife just said, “They aren’t the Ten Suggestions”!
Thank you for your response. I agree that social norms dictate what is acceptable behavior to a secular society. I am sure that it will continue to degrade. If you told me 18 months ago, we would be arguing about bathrooms, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are, what is the next perverted battle coming our way.
I’ve been thinking about this type of thing a lot lately. Our whole society seems to be based in accepting and normalizing adultery. Our TV shows, books, movies, commercials, democrat politics, my college handing out free condoms at the library.... etc. all seem given into that. Although there is no surprise here, as the Bible says people will do just this - that they will try to make right-wrong, and wrong right. That their sin will turn them to homosexuality and depravity (Romans 1).
I imagine there are other Christians out there that feel just as alienated as I do. I even see this adultery acceptance at a personal level. The main reason I am still single is that I will not give in to that lifestyle. Women always see me as a waste of time when they find out I don’t believe in any physical activity until after marriage.... but hey, John 15:8 “if the world hates you, understand that it hated Me first”.
This, along with no-fault marriage, is a much bigger deal than homosexuality.
The Christian church accepted the normalization of adultery and no-fault divorce sometime between the 1920s and 1960s, I’d say. In this matter, the devil slipped quietly into the church sanctuary, not drawing attention to himself, and slowly convinced Christians and the church to normalize adultery and no-fault divorce. By the 1970s, these things were legitimized, and the devil was hardly noticed.
Come the 1990s and 2000s, the devil was now openly and loudly banging on the church doors and demanding to be let in, over the topic of homosexuality. He demanded openly and loudly that the church either expunge homosexuality from our list of sins, or explicitly declare that any Biblical guidance on homosexuality be, by deliberate policy, ignored.
The devil won both of these. (Well, perhaps the victory in the latter matter was decisive only in the mainline Protestant churches.) The first was a much bigger prize in sheer magnitude of effected people. The second is significant in that this was perhaps the first time that Christians accepted an open and explicit call from the devil who worked out in the open.
Christians are sinners and always have been and always will be. The devil has come and gone into and out of the Christian church since the days of Acts. But it wasn’t until the homosexual battle in the late 1990s that the devil acted so openly. In my estimation.
It took several decades for the devil to win society over to the no-fault divorce view. It took perhaps a decade, maybe two, to win the homosexuality view. It took maybe two years to win the gay marriage view. The transgender view took about 5 minutes. A big part of the pederasty battle was won (by the devil) in the post-1060s era, with the wide acceptance and normalization of teen-with-teen sex. Both the Clinton and Obama regimes have had senior executive appointees who espoused acceptance of adult-teen sex. This will be a tougher nut to crack for acceptance by all of society, but it should happen in perhaps ten years. Then on to adult-child sex. The groundwork is being laid by psychiatry and psychology and philosophers and Progressives. I give it about 20 years.
You analysis is true to a.point, but leaves out the glaring fact that the churches abandoned the truth of the Gospel long before openly accepting homosexuality. These “churches” abandoned all biblical instruction regarding human sexuality and the family before anyone alive was born..
Even divorce came long after allowing “family planning.” The premeditated choice to rebel against God’s providence lies at the root, sustained by man’s pride. Explicit homosexual behavior is no surprise when implicit homosexual (sterile) behavior is accepted in the marriage bed. Marriage was intended by God to build families, not simply for the temporal pleasure of two selfish people.
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