Two Rival Versions of Sexual Virtue: Simon Blackburn and John Paul II on Lust and Chastity (original) (raw)
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The Classical Review, 2014
the use in argumentation about 'the fulcrum of human responsibility' of inde and tunc. In Prudentius' felix qui … potuit (line 330), where we detect both the above-mentioned authors, we have a kind of 'scratch-card poetics' (183: perhaps as felicitous as any description of this feature). Ostensibly pastoral passages are put under the microscope, in the contention that Prudentian pastoral settings are deliberately awed, like the world itself. 'Landscape is revelatory' (40). Allusions to the Bible's component books are treated with similar detail: multiple allusion may not only point to the unity of the Bible which Marcion had sought to divide but also provide a kind of 'security', parallel, perhaps, to the safety in numbers (of references) so common in contemporary exegetes and homilists. But here too there is the 'disorientation' which helps to create the 'responsible reader' (for example in the words animum castrata recisum, l. 957). D. boldly faces the apparent breakdown of typology in Prudentius' text: why is reference made to the walls of Jericho (which famously fell) in the context of building the Church? Why, when explaining that King David's children included one bad apple, do we nd the 'blatantly eroticized and blankly explicit' description of the copulation and parturition of snakes, where the 'bride' kills the father and is in turn killed by the 'puppy-snakes' (catuli)? And so to genre, in ch. 4, though its centrality has been anticipated many times already. 'Irrequietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in genere', as D. says, having asked, briey, 'Is genre essential?' After a ne discussion of the contribution of satire and didactic to the poem, and an analysis of the seges scelerum passage (ll. 258-97: cf. Juvenal 1.87 vitiorum copia?) with its allusions to Lucretius, Vergil, Manilius, Ovid and Catullus, D. concludes 'we could zigzag forever, while still remaining within the text' (244). The yearning for certainty is frustrated, just as the yearning for the bucolic idyll is; 'the world of this text is a world post peccatum', and the responsible reader is called to acknowledge this. Two nal points. 'The effect of sin on the world', mentioned above, is indeed a major theme, but to illustrate its effect on the world in various places D. puts great weight on one line of Prudentius: exemplum dat vita hominum, quo cetera peccent (l. 250: the Loeb translation 'for the life of man sets an example for all else to sin' seems very acceptable). One wonders exactly how the storms and oods and other dysfunctions of the mundana … machina follow the example of human bellicosity, sexual libido (D. concentrates on this), and monetary greed, the vices that Prudentius singles out. Secondly, on a different plane, the index is unexpectedly thin: there could, and should, be many more entries, and many more page-references for some of the existing ones. Many themes of this stimulating book are difcult to nd and return to. Not that this should deter anyone, and I would be irresponsible not to end by clearly signalling my fascination with this subtle and sensitive study.
In recent years, social scientists have given much attention to the sociocultural dimension in the construction of sexual identities. This essay looks at two aspects of male sexuality, sodomy and masturbation, which seem to have rendered the development of male sexuality problematic, a source of anxiety about virility, performance, and depletion of sexual potency. Here I will examine how, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Catholic church in its pastoral approach to confession and in its moral theology reinterpreted these two "sins against nature" in a new context, which is thought to have imposed emotional strains on men's sexual transactions. In this essay I will examine how, following the Council of Trent in 1545–63, views on marriage and domestic life were not only detrimental to women but also affected men's sexual self-image. I will demonstrate how the moralists' discourse on male sexuality can be used as an analytical tool to shed light on the connections between men's sexuality and the social construction of the ideal type of the rational autonomous self. I will argue that post-Tridentine moral theology, which to date has been most frequently overlooked in scholarly works in the field of the history of sexual variance and its relation to religion, constitutes an important missing link between the Thomistic natural law approach to nonprocreative sexual acts and the nineteenth-century medical model stressing the innate dispositions of the sexual subject. The moralists' views on male masturbation and sodomy will serve as categories of analysis that will show how the regulation of "deviant" male sexuality not only reached far beyond religious concerns about procreative sex but also developed as an integral part of men's understanding of their capacity to master social institutions rationally and subjugate the natural world to the power of dispassionate objective reason, falsely presented as universal or gender-neutral. 1 This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in the
Biblica et Patristica Thoruniensia, 13-3 (2020): 341-355
The question I want to put forth is whether the pleasure that ensues upon lust, regardless it being moderate or excessive, is so strong that it has the power to overwhelm the mind, bringing it into a state that prevents it from approaching reality serenely, and depriving it of clarity and the mental sharpness required to make right decisions and to attain a more accurate understanding of reality. I analyze the question stating as a conclusion that according to John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great, the regulation of sexual desire, which is proper to chastity, anthropologically predisposes the intellect to greater clarity in order to know the truth, whereas lust is unsuitable to attain this knowledge.
The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality
Contemporary Sociology, 1987
A "lucid and provocative" (Paul. Robinson) examination of the sexual attitudes of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Puritan England and their impact on modern ideas. Drawing upon the insights of psychoanalysis and a wide array of historical and literary sources, Leites shows that the Puritans called for a lifelong integration of sensuality, purity, and constancy within marriage. $17.