Scott Moringiello recalls Simone Weil on Homer and violence:
“The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force, that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.”
For various reasons I have been considering recently Catholic sexual morality, and mulling over with muffled outrage the clerisy’s long defense of marital rape, a form of the above, as a legitimate derivative of “God’s plan for the human family,” marriage. And so many other things. I suppose it is bootless to be retroactively outraged. But oh in middle age how hard it is to find anything to believe in. Time to find my old copy of Blake, I think, and reread the Songs of Experience.
I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And “Thou shalt not,” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
2 Comments
Would you mind explaining where you find the church’s position on marital rape arises? I’ve never heard anything like that.
The traditional stance on marital rape is that it is by definition impossible, as spouses are bound by the “debitum coniugale,” the marital obligation, to have sex with their spouse on demand. This is from Paul, 1 Corinthians 7. “The woman does not have authority over her own body; her husband has it.” This is held with only minor variations until the 20th century, and the hierarchy considered itself empowered to enforce “payment of the conjugal debt” when one partner was unwilling. This is now (thank God – or perhaps, thank “the Church’s enemies”) no longer mainstream Catholic theology, because the Church hierarchy now agrees with the suffragettes and liberals it resisted a few decades ago. Needless to say there is no such thing as, nor would any sane person want, a “ius in corpus,” love not obligation, being the important thing. But for centuries the Papal States – which must be definition be the mainstream of pontifical moral teaching – would no more have thought of outlawing marital rape than they would have thought of outlawing the spectacular executions they held to kick off Carnival. Or prostitution, which so scandalized Luther. Or a lot of other things.