Who's "saying that the pagan world despised or condemned passionate love between
a married couple"?
Certainly, that quotation, in this context, is misleading, since Seneca is known
to be a "procreationist". Hence our quoting also Demosthenes, whose views on
sexuality and marriage are far more in line with original Roman thought and
attitudes in this field. Incidentally, not all Greek Stoics accepted sexuality
only because of the need for reproduction. For instance, Epitectus, as well seen
by J. Boswell, spoke of homosexual and heterosexual attractions in terms of
complete equality and urged his followers not to be judgmental toward those
given to sexual indulgence (Encheiridion, 33), thus acknowledging implicitly
that procreation is not the end of sexuality. Not all : K.L. Gaca goes so far as
to state : "It does not follow ... that procreationism is philosophically Stoic
simply because two Roman Stoics [Musonius and Seneca] happen to advocate it"
("The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek
Philosophy and Early Christianity", Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of
California Press). "(...) the early Stoics, the reviewer of the book continues,
stress communalism, rejecting marriage in favor of cultivating friendships. What
about later Stoics? Gaca concedes that there is a social mainstreaming of
Stoicism, as represented, for example, by Musonius,
a staunch proponent of marriage. The social mainstreaming of later Stoicism is
an example of the process by which a revolutionary set of ideas gets tamed,
loses touches with its origins and thereby gains middle-of-the-road popularity,
laments Gaca. But
isn't this Stoicism's middle-of-the-road popularity why later Stoics loom large
in the study of early Christian morality and in Foucault's models of sexual
ethics and subjectivity?" This leads us to fill, with you, a void - almost a
black hole - in de Benoist's study on the Christian conception of marriage :
procreationism in the Graeco-Roman world was pre-existent to the birth of
Christianity and to the spreading of its message.
"It is often supposed that the profound impact of Stoicism on early Christian
morality in some way affected Christian attitudes towards (...) sexuality, but
(...) what is supposed to have been the major contribution of Stoicism to
Christian morality - the idea that the sole 'natural' (and hence natural) use of
sexuality was procreation - was in fact a common belief of many philosophies of
the day. It was espoused by persons vehemently opposed to Stoicism, like
Plutarch, and it probably entered Christian schools of thought through the
influence of the Alexandrian Platonists." To Gaca, on the contrary, it
originated in "The Reproductive Technology of the Pythagoreans." We have not had
the opportunity to read that chapter of her book yet, all we can say is that its
title sounds promising, especially in view of Evola's own assessment of
Pythagorism, which he described as a lunar-mathematical tradition. "Writing with
an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings,
the reviewer of the book says, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the
Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic
Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating
their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early
Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from
Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against
fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and
philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among
all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices,
only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without
going to extremes of sexual renunciation."
Other scholars trace procreationism back to dualism, a concept according to
which there are two conflicting forces, represented respectively by the
principle of good and that of evil, warring for the control of man's mind.
"Saint Augustine had been a member of a dualist sect, the Manicheans, for many
years before his conversion to Christianity, and many Christian moralists were
consciously or unconsciously affected by the powerful dualist intellectual
currents of the later empire. Dualists deprecated all forms of sexuality as
weapons of the evil forces against the good, arguing that all pleasures distract
the soul from spiritual ends and that sexual pleasures, as more powerful than
most, are more dangerous than most. Most Manicheans opposed all forms of
sexuality equally." ('Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay
People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the
Fourteenth Century', J. Boswell)
"The Zoroastrian doctrine of dualism greatly influenced Jewish, and in later
times, Christian thinking. Echoes of both Ethical and Cosmic dualism can be
found in the Bible. The Jews first encountered Persia and Zoroastrian philosophy
at the end of their captivity in Babylon, when the Persians overran the area and
their king Cyrus freed the Jews to return to their homeland. During that period
(6th century BCE), and afterward, Jewish contact continued with Persia. In that
early period, there may still have been Zoroastrian priests and scholars who
knew the old Avestan language and could study and teach directly from the
Gathas. These thinkers may have professed the Ethical view rather than the
Cosmic, and thus Jews may have exchanged ideas on Ethical dualism with their
Persian neighbors. At that same time, Jewish sages and scribes were re-editing
their own scriptural texts into the five books known as the Torah. Deuteronomy,
the fifth book, was re-written during the Exile. In this book, at Chapter 31:15,
there is a clear and familiar statement of Ethical dualism, adapted into the
Jewish context:
"See, today I set before you life and prosperity, death and disaster. If you
obey the commandments of YHVH your God that I enjoin on you today, if you love
YHVH your God and follow His ways, if you keep His commandments, His laws, His
customs, you will live and increase, and YHVH your God will bless you in the
land which you are entering to make your own. But if your heart strays, if you
refuse to listen, if you let yourself be drawn into worshipping other gods and
serving them, I tell you today, you will most certainly perish....I set before
you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your
descendants may live...." (Deut. 31:15-19, Jerusalem Bible translation)
Centuries later, Jews were again inspired by Zoroastrian tradition, this time
the Cosmic-dualistic. The mythologized timelines of Zoroastrianism contributed
to the formation of Jewish apocalyptic thought, which is also concerned with
sacred history and the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Such apocalyptic
motifs can be found in the book of the prophet Daniel, which is a very late
addition to the Old Testament, full of Persian influence (Daniel, after all,
served at the court of the Persian king).
Even more direct Zoroastrian influence can be found in the writings of the
Jewish Essene sects. Some of these texts are popularly known as part of the
"Dead Sea Scrolls" collection. The Essene "Manual of Discipline" contains
classic Cosmic dualism: the view of the righteous Essenes as the Sons of Light,
battling against the evil Sons of Darkness:
"He (God) created man to have dominion over the world and made for him two
spirits...they are the spirits of truth and of error. In the abode of light are
the origins of truth, and from the source of darkness are the origins of error.
In the hand of the prince of lights is dominion over the sons of righteousness;
in the ways of light they walk. And by the angel of darkness is the straying of
all the sons of righteousness, and all their sin and their iniquities and
guilt....And all the spirits of his lot try to make the sons of light stumble;
but the God of Israel and his angel of truth have helped all the sons of light.
For he created the spirits of light and of darkness, and upon them he founded
every work and every service. One of the spirits God loves for all the ages of
eternity, and with all its deeds he is pleased forever; as for the other, he
abhors its company, and all its ways he hates forever." (Essene Manual of
Discipline, from The Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Millar Burrows)
Early Christianity built on these Zoroastrianized Jewish foundations. The
well-known Christian figure of Satan, who tempts and torments human beings and
even Christ himself, and to whom much of the world is given, is very much like
the Ahriman of the cosmic dualists. And the vividly described Hell of the New
Testament looks much like the mythic Zoroastrian underworld where wrongdoers are
punished. Christianity and Zoroastrianism, developing parallel to each other as
well as in close geographic proximity, exchanged many ideas about the spiritual
world, especially in regard to dualism, Heaven, and Hell.
The famous Prologue to the Gospel of John contains a form of cosmic dualism,
united with Hellenized Jewish ideas to give philosophical support to the
presence of the Christian God- incarnation. In this text, Jesus is the creative
Word, and the Light, of God:
"All that came to be had life in him. And that life was the light of men, a
light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower..."
(John 1:3-5, Jerusalem Bible)
Ethical dualism also appears in the Gospel of John: "...Though the light has
come into the world, men have shown they prefer darkness to the light because
their deeds were evil. And indeed, everybody who does wrong hates the light and
avoids it, for fear his actions should be exposed; but the man who lives by the
truth comes out into the light, so that it may plainly be seen that what he does
is done in God." (John 3:19-21, Jerusalem Bible)
These same dualistic metaphors of light and darkness, exposure and concealment,
truth and falsehood, can be found in the Gathas of Zarathushtra, composed
perhaps 1500 years earlier than John's Gospel.
There are other ways in which the dualism of Zoroastrianism has entered Western
thought. Religions and ideologies such as Manichaeanism and Gnosticism, which
arose in Persia and the Middle East in the early centuries of our era, extended
the boundaries of cosmic dualism. In Manichaean and Gnostic thought, the entire
physical world is the production of an evil entity, and is completely corrupt,
except for the "particles of light" or soul-essence trapped in the prison of
matter. The work of humanity is not to redeem the world, but to escape it by
rejecting matter as much as possible. This form of dualism, which can lead to an
otherworldly contempt for the physical world and the human body, influenced
major Christian thinkers, especially Saint Augustine, and can still be
recognized in some areas of Christianity today."
(http://www.sullivan-county.com/z/dualism.htm)
Whatever Jews borrow, they distort it, cannot but distort it, not necessarily
consciously : distortion may simply result from a misunderstanding and,
therefore, from a misinterpretation of the non Jewish doctrine from which they
borrow specific elements, a misinterpretation due, in turn, to a constitutive
inadequacy between the container and the content. "But it is important to
remember that this Manichaean dualism of soul against world, of mind against
body, is not the true Zoroastrian dualism. Zoroastrians, whether they are cosmic
or ethical dualists, believe in the continuity of the physical and spiritual,
not their separation. What is done in the physical world affects the spiritual
world, and vice versa. Zoroastrianism has never called the entire physical world
evil; rather, it rejoices in the goodness of the world which was created by an
all-good God." (ibid.)
To come back to de Benoist's blunder, no matter how huge it is, it does not
invalidate in any way the soundness of his analysis of the qualitative
differences between the Christian view on marriage and the pre-Christian
Aryan-based one.
You argue that the practice of political and familial alliances - beware : based
on bloodlines - "tacitly survived and was practised in Christian Europe, down to
modern times, despite the official individualistic Christian conception of
marriage." Fair enough, but that's precisely what de Benoist states implicitly
at the beginning of the text : "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!" Indo-European-based mores in Europe resisted as long as
they could the leveling Judeo-Christian subtle steamroller
In the same vein, it took the notorious Christian precept according to which
"There is no Greek or Jews, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian,
slave or free" (Col.3:11) centuries and centuries to be reflected in a secular
form in the various democratic constitutions of Europe.
--- In evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "nataraja86" <cavalcarelatigre@...>
wrote:
>
> "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)
> >
>