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Re: Roma/Amor

"The beginnings of married love are honourable, but its excesses make it
perverse. After all, it makes no difference how a disease is actually caught.
For this reason, Sextius has written in his Opinions: "The man who makes love
too ardently to his wife is an adulterer." And indeed it is a disgraceful thing
to feel any love for another man's wife, but also to feel too much for your own.
The wise man ought to love his wife reasonably, not passionately. He controls
the onset of erotic excitement an is not rushed headlong into sex : there is
nothing more disgusting than making love to your wife as if she were your
mistress." (Seneca, De Matrimonio, 84-85)

De Benoist's citation of Seneca to show that the Romans could distinguish
between Juno and Venus is very misleading, and one wonders how this could escape
the attention of anyone who has the slightest notion of the Stoic view on
sexuality. If Seneca writes that it is a "disgraceful thing...to feel too much
love for [your own wife]" and that "the wise man ought to love his wife
reasonably, not passionately", this does not mean he approves a man's feeling
passionate love for a woman other than his wife. Stoics condemned all passionate
love, and if Seneca spoke about married couples in this instance, it is simply
because his treatise is dedicated to marriage. If one wants to show that Seneca
and the Roman Stoics could made a distinction between Juno and Venus, then let
one, if one can, indicate a single instance where a Stoic author sanctioned
passionate love, that is, the Venus of that equation. One would search high and
low for such a sanction in Stoicism, in vain. The fact is that, like the early
Christian point of view, Stoicism condemned all forms of passionate love, and
permitted sex only for procreation purposes, as a compromise for not being able
to banish it entirely. Indeed, it is not a coincidence if the Church Fathers
found Stoicism the most congenial of pagan philosophies to Christianity and even
adopted some of its terminology: this applied both in the sphere of ethics as
well as that of theology.

Sure, the pre-Christian conception of marriage might have rested more on a basis
of political and familial alliances (a practice, however, which tacitly survived
and was practised in Christian Europe, down to modern times, despite the
official individualistic Christian conception of marriage), and, granted,
Demosthenes' quotation indicates a richer and polyvalent view of sexuality in
the ancient world, but that, however, is still a long way from saying that the
pagan world despised or condemned passionate love between a married couple. This
is wishful thinking at its wildest.

--- In evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "evola_as_he_is" <evola_as_he_is@...>
wrote:
>
> Evola's standpoint on sexuality and on marriage and on the connected question
of the relationship between marriage and sexuality, as expressed in 'Metaphysics
of Sex' and in 'Men among the ruins', is well-known. "In The Metaphysics of Sex
(1958), Guido Stucco summarises, Evola took issue with three views of human
sexuality. The first is naturalism. According to naturalism the erotic life is
conceived as an extension of animal instincts, or merely as a means to
perpetuate the species. (...). The second view Evola called "bourgeois love": it
is characterized by respectability and sanctified by marriage. The most
important features of this type of sexuality are mutual commitment, love,
feelings. The third view of sex is hedonism. Following this view, people seek
pleasure as an end in itself. This type of sexuality is hopelessly closed to
transcendent possibilities intrinsic to sexual intercourse, and thus not worthy
of being pursued. Evola then went on to explain how sexual intercourse can
become a path leading to spiritual achievements."
>
> Now, let's wish that we are not the only one to have noted in 'Men Among the
Ruins' a statement that appears to be slightly in contradiction with the correct
view that "The most important features of this type of sexuality [the bourgeois
one] are mutual commitment, love, feelings." This contradiction is found in the
chapter called 'The Problem of Births', which, in all other respects, remains,
from a supra-Christian standpoint, one of the very best writings on the topic.
Let's quote it :
>
> "The Catholic religion has embraced the biblical principle concerning the
multiplication of the human species. This is one of the cases in which the
Church has bestowed an ethical value on things that have only a practical,
relative value that is quite outdated today. The Jewish precept was justified
only considering the patriarchal conditions of the ancient Jewish tribes,
composed of farmers and herdsmen, in which (as still happens today in those few
rural areas where analogous situations are found) a plentiful offspring was
regarded as desirable and providential because of the need for able bodies. All
this has nothing to do with religion or ethics. From a specific point of
view-that of asceticism-it is possible to condemn the pleasures of sex in
general, as was the case of the original ascetic Christian tradition. But in
ordinary life, and in general, wherever there are no ascetic vocations it is
extremely unreasonable to legitimize and sanctify sexual union and marriage only
when they are aimed at procreation, declaring them to be sinful in every other
instance. For practical purposes, what does this mean, other than that the
religious perspective here approves and even encourages the most primitive and
animalistic expression of an instinct? Conception essentially implies a state of
complete abandonment of man to the sexual passion, just as one of the most
natural means to avoid conception implies a certain renunciation, predominance
of will, and self-control vis-a-vis the most primitive impulse of instinct and
desire. In every other instance besides sex, the Church praises and formally
approves the latter disposition - that is, the predominance of the intellect and
will over the impulses of the senses. But when it comes to sexual union, because
it obtusely maintains the outdated precept of the Jewish law, either out of
hypocrisy or from a theological hatred of sex per se, Catholic morality has
endorsed the opposite attitude: the attitude of those who passively play into
the hands of Schopenhauer's "genius of the species," through couplings that are
really more ferarum [after the manner of beasts].
>
> Let me repeat: I could understand the precept of celibacy and chastity and the
total condemnation of the pleasures of sex and the use of women from the point
of view of an ascetic morality with supernatural objectives. However, it is
incomprehensible to endorse the use of women and sexuality only in terms of
procreation, as this amounts to degrading every relation between the sexes to an
animal level. Even a libertine, who elevates pleasure to an art (not to mention
a certain "Dionysism" that in antiquity enjoyed a religious sanction), is
undoubtedly superior to those who follow the Catholic view to the letter."
>
> The "slight" contradiction we have just mentionned is found in the next
paragraph.:
>
> "However, it seems that the Church has recently been willing to make some
concessions. While the concern of Vatican II to keep up with the times has had
several deprecable consequences, we can still recognize as a positive thing the
council's explicit acknowledgment that not only procreation, but "love" as well,
may be the legitimate foundation of marriage."
>
> The quotation marks between "love" is the only reason why we have called that
statement of his in 'Men among the Ruin' a "slight" contradiction. In reality,
in antiquity and until the late twelfth century in Europe, love, with or without
quotation marks, was seen either as a 'merry sensuality' or as a 'tragic
madness' and, as a result, was not considered as a "legitimate foundation of
marriage", far from it. Here, once again, we thus find that the same views were
hold both by the Church and by the pre-Christian power, yet for different and,
to some extent, even antithetic reasons, whose study it is not our intention to
undertake in this message ; let's just note that, as a rule, any moral precept,
when cut off from the higher plane on which it finds its justification, is bound
to backfire sooner or later, after it is assumed or forced upon a whole people.
>
> Various authors, from their own perspective, have shown how love-based and,
more generally, feeling-based marital union originates directly in the Church
utilitarian views on marriage, as a seemingly paradoxical aftershock of its
"theological hatred of sex per se" and to its successful attempt to restructure
marriage according to it. Alain de Benoist, a rather well-known French scholar
who is considered as the leader of what may be left of the 'Nouvelle Droite',
and who, incidentally, has written a worthy study on the work of J. Evola, is
one of them.
>
> "It is only relatively lately that Christianity has begun to exert a massive
influence on the European family. Just think that it took it almost a millennium
to establish its theology of marriage and to turn it into a sacrament! When it
had to reflect on marriage and on family, the Church was first faced with a
relative dogmatic vacuum. In the Gospels, Jesus did not stand for procreation,
nor did he tell us what the 'ideal family' should be. He merely condemned
repudiation, emphasised clearly the pre-eminence of the community of faith on
blood ties and suggested that virginity and celibacy are better than marital
union. After him, saint Paul reinforced the Christian contempt for the flesh::
to him, marriage was only a stopgap. Sexual abstinence was particularly praised
in the early Church, either in the form of virginity and celibacy, or as
conjugal continence. One only needs to read Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian of
Carthage, Ambrose of Milan or Gregory of Nyssa, to realise that, in patristic
times, marriage was essentially conceived of as a remedy for fornication.
Originally, the Christian ideal does thus seem to have been that of the final
renouncement of any sexual activity. However, the assumption of this ideal would
have obviously meant the end of Christendom. Besides, the Church soon had to
react against various currents which were rejected as heretic or as encratic,
and which laid it on thick, going so far as to condemn any sexual relation
within marriage and to preach castration. To answer the objections of heretics
as well as the faithful's questioning, the Church eventually had to decide on
its policy. The Christian doctrine of marriage was gradually established, from
the IXth to the XIIth century. They are known in broad outlines. Virginity was
still regarded as a higher state than marital union, but, theoretically at
least, it was only forced upon priests and monastic communities. At the same
time marriage was made "virtuous" by the encounter of the three goods enumerated
by Saint Augustine: procreation of children, marital fidelity and sacramentality
of the union.
>
> This Christian marriage had great trouble imposing itself, since it was in
stark contrast on several essential points with the pagan pattern of married and
family life. Whereas Roman law, Celtic law and Germanic law accepted in certain
cases separation, repudiation or divorce, in particular if the wife was sterile,
Christian marriage was essentially meant to be indissoluble: The logic of the
couple prevailed on that of the line. This feature was still accentuated by the
emphasis laid by the Church on the freedom of the personal consent of the
couple. In the context of those times, this attitude amounted, by instituting a
new form of autonomy of the subject, to considering the interests of families
and clans, that is to say, the transmission of heritage, of secondary
importance. By institutionalising an autonomous conjugality to the detriment of
broader forms of adherence and of solidarity (community, lineage, and extended
family), Christian marriage initiated a long process of individualisation, whose
final result was love-based modern marriage (today, the main cause of divorce).
On the other hand, throughout the Middle Ages, the Church was obsessed by the
fight against 'incest': Until 1215, all 7th cousins were not allowed to
intermarry! However, since unmemorable times, the Indo-European system of
relationship rested on an endogamic system of diagonal alliances between
cousins. The proscription of marriage between relatives, even remote ones, not
only eliminated a considerable number of possible wives, but ran counter to a
traditional logic, characteristic of aristocratic marriage, according to which
the requirement for the maintenance and the reorganisation of inheritances or of
private kingdoms went hand in hand with the need for a lasting alliance between
lines. Lastly, the Church prescribed that any sexual activity should occur only
within marriage, this activity being at the same time subject to limitations of
all kinds. Thus, the practice of cohabitation, which was common in Antiquity,
was prohibited and considered as adultery, bigamy or polygamy. Marital union
became the only legitimate place for erotic involvement, which amounts to not
being able to distinguish between Venus and Juno anymore. There's a world of
difference between these views and Demosthenes', who said: the following : "This
is what it means to be married: to have sons one can introduce to the family and
the neighbours, and to have daughters of one's own to give to husbands. For we
have courtesans for pleasure, concubines to attend to our daily bodily needs,
and wives to bear children legitimately and to be faithful wards of our homes."
(Against Neaera, 122). On all these points, the Christian doctrine was in stark
contrast with the pagan conception of marriage and family. This is what George
Duby [a French scholar whose knowledge of the Middle Ages is still unparalleled
in French academe] called the conflict between the "morals of the warriors" and
the "morals of the
priests"."http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:1NRgNX8FHwYJ:www.alaindebenoist.c\
om/pdf/entretien_sur_le_paganisme.pdf+endogamie+indo-europeens&cd=24&hl=fr&ct=cl\
nk&gl=fr

>
>
> Each sentence of this in-depth analysis could expand into a few books. In the
meantime, the reader is invited to ponder over one of the most disturbing aspect
of Christian marriage, as pointed out by A. de Benoist : " Marital union became
the only legitimate place for erotic involvement, which amounts to not being
able to distinguish between Venus and Juno anymore.", a distinction of which the
ancient Roman was well aware, and that was even consubstantial to him, in most
cases : "The beginnings of married love are honourable, but its excesses make it
perverse. After all, it makes no difference how a disease is actually caught.
For this reason, Sextius has written in his Opinions: "The man who makes love
too ardently to his wife is an adulterer." And indeed it is a disgraceful thing
to feel any love for another man's wife, but also to feel too much for your own.
The wise man ought to love his wife reasonably, not passionately. He controls
the onset of erotic excitement an is not rushed headlong into sex : there is
nothing more disgusting than making love to your wife as if she were your
mistress." (Seneca, De Matrimonio, 84-85)
>





Sun Sep 6, 2009 6:31 pm

nataraja86
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Evola's standpoint on sexuality and on marriage and on the connected question of the relationship between marriage and sexuality, as expressed in 'Metaphysics...
evola_as_he_is Offline Send Email Aug 13, 2009
7:12 pm

"The beginnings of married love are honourable, but its excesses make it perverse. After all, it makes no difference how a disease is actually caught. For this...
nataraja86 Offline Send Email Sep 7, 2009
11:27 am

Who's "saying that the pagan world despised or condemned passionate love between a married couple"? Certainly, that quotation, in this context, is misleading,...
evola_as_he_is Offline Send Email Sep 7, 2009
6:45 pm

... [[Current research on Zoroastrianism is against the proposition that original Mazdean dualism was not what they here mean by "cosmic," which seems to be a...
grimnir_bolverksson
grimnir_bolv... Offline Send Email
Sep 12, 2009
11:50 am

Also, if the Romans could distinguish between Juno and Venus, they did, however, like to see them reconciled or coinciding. Since evola_as_he_is has mentioned...
nataraja86 Offline Send Email Sep 7, 2009
6:59 pm

George Duby, we wrote, is a "French scholar whose knowledge of the Middle Ages is still unparalleled in French academe." Should we have stressed : "Middle...
evola_as_he_is Offline Send Email Sep 7, 2009
7:14 pm

All the scholars involved in the redaction of the 'History of Private Life' series are excellent in their respective areas of specialisation (Paul Veyne is...
nataraja86 Offline Send Email Sep 7, 2009
11:10 pm

All we are saying is that, in ancient Rome as well as in ancient Greece and, for that matter, in all traditional civilisations, while love and tenderness could...
evola_as_he_is Offline Send Email Sep 8, 2009
12:25 am

We agree, then....
nataraja86 Offline Send Email Sep 8, 2009
9:48 am

(......) Che il matrimonio fosse un sacramento già assai prima del cristianesimo (come per esempio la rituale confarreatio romana), è cosa forse già nota ai...
vandermok
charltonroad36 Offline Send Email
Sep 8, 2009
11:09 am

The whole text can be found at http://www.juliusevola.it/documenti/template.asp?cod=636 This is an English translation of the quote : "That the wedding was a...
evola_as_he_is Offline Send Email Sep 8, 2009
2:59 pm

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