Courtesy
Romantic courtesy is a liturgy of service which springs from the veneration of the Lady. Its goal is simply the lady’s felicity, and her looks and gestures are signs of acceptable service. All veneration is a selfless art, requiring patience, constancy, and discipline — in short, virtue. Eros may or may not attend.
The high art of courtesy requires, above all, a gentle heart, but this “aristocracy of the gentle heart” is not passivity. Rather, it is an honoring of the fair sweetheart by carefulness with subtleties — carefulness and rapt attention. The tone is attention, rather than the languor of the bower.
The lady owes similar carefulness to her lord, and will seek his felicity. Our records of chivalry omits her devotion and may allow a one sided view to be taken for an entire relationship.
There is also a kind of courtesy, called by Maurice Valency “heroic”, which resembles in some language and externals the romantic, but is quite different. This “courtesy” is actually courtship, a mutual negotiation of the terms of erotic pleasure, and so has gratification as its object; it is hardly selfless. Disciplined devotion may be required to overcome the coquetry of the lady, but we all know how easily this devotion is killed by both success and failure.
The Mystical Ladder, for Husbands
Note: this is secret mystical knowledge, for men alone. Let the deacons now show the women out and let the doors be shut.
Stage 1, the New Convert: If I talk to her about it, I can understand why she is crying and help her understand why she doesn’t need to cry.
Stage 2, the Cloud of Unknowing: It is not possible to understand why she is crying. I just have to go hide.
Stage 3, the Apophatic Union: She does not actually understand why she is crying, she is not interested in understanding it, and therefore I do not need to understand it. One slight movement toward her, in almost any area of her life, will evaporate the tears. It was easier than I ever imagined.
Who to marry: Esolen’s rules:
Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: The Rules
So then, whom could you marry? A long time ago we came up with something we called “Esolen’s Rules.” They’re only half facetious. But they are an attempt to get at the normal:
1. Don’t marry a woman who likes cats but does not like dogs. You may marry a woman who doesn’t like either, or whose reason for not liking dogs is that one of them bit her when she was a toddler. But a woman who likes cats but does not like dogs will be a Joan Crawford or Jane Wyman. Ronald Reagan married Jane Wyman, and look how sorry he was about that.
2. Don’t marry a man who is neater than you are. You may, however, marry a man who polishes his tools and puts them away after use….
3. Don’t marry anybody, man or woman, who says, “I’m going to call you at eight,” and then leaves you waiting by the phone for an hour. Exceptions can be made for people who are kidnapped by Arabs, or who have epileptic seizures.
4. Don’t marry anybody who insists on a separate bank account, bed, bathroom, vacation, or zip code. It makes no sense to be one flesh and two wallets.
5. Don’t marry a woman who spends more on makeup than she does on food. In general, don’t marry a woman who engages in the sin of reverse gluttony.
6. Don’t marry a man who does not like dogs. Such men do not like children. Don’t marry a man who does not like children. On the other hand, I have known at least one excellent man who thought he didn’t like children, until he had some; seven, I think, at last count. Perhaps the rule may be rephrased: Don’t marry a man whom you cannot imagine rolling on the ground in a wrestling hold, with a Labrador retriever or three children, or hollering on a ferris wheel, with a Labrador retriever or three children.
7. Don’t marry a woman who exercises so frequently that you cannot tell if she is a woman or a very strange looking 13-year-old boy. I’m going out on a line here, but the real purpose of the rule is to determine whether she will mind getting fat, as happens when you are going to have a child. In other words, don’t marry a woman whom you cannot imagine having a child. Do not marry a woman who does not like children.
8. Do not marry a man who treats his mother or his sisters discourteously. As he treats his mother, so will he treat you. But by all means do not marry a man who takes his direction from his mother, or who is ruled by his mother’s ambitions. Mama’s boys are unhappy, and they make their wives unhappy too. So are the mothers of mama’s boys, come to think of it. Unhappy days are here again.
9. Do not marry a woman who sneers at innocent male pastimes, such as football. Such women do not really enjoy the company of men, and after a period soon reached, do not enjoy the company of their own husbands. They are also the most ignorant of what men are really like. You may marry a tomboy, so long as she’s a girlish tomboy and doesn’t take the sport with dreadful seriousness. You may marry a Daddy’s girl, so long as she is not spoiled when it comes to money.
10. Never marry anyone who is secretive about money. Such people are also secretive about sex.
11. Never marry a man who lets you take the initiative in everything. You want a jellyfish, maybe? You want Burt Lancaster instead.
12. Never marry a woman who never lets you take the initiative in anything. You want a porcupine, maybe? You want Maureen O’Hara instead.
13. Never marry a woman who does not laugh at your jokes or your buffoonery. That is one of the nicest ways in which men “serve” women, and women respond by taking delight in the antics. That is why God made impersonators of Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, and Homer Simpson. It may in fact be the principal justification for the existence of Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, and Homer Simpson. This rule is simply an instance of the more general rule that you should never marry a woman who does not genuinely admire you, nor should a woman marry a man whom she does not admire.
14. Never marry anyone who delights in “exposing” you in public. Teasing does not count; in fact, never marry a man who cannot be teased. You can marry a woman who cannot be teased.
15. Never marry a man who is not admired by respectable male friends. The people in the world who know a man best are the men he works and plays with. They know well if he is a cheat, a thug, a loser. You may marry a man who does not have female friends. If anything, you should be suspicious of a man whose friends are principally female. The men may be avoiding him, and there is a reason for that.
16. Never marry anyone who is not interested in looking at your fourth-grade yearbook. This means: never marry anyone who seems unaware that he or she is marrying also a family, a hometown, a past, silly friends, comedies and tragedies. Never marry anyone who does not want to meet your father and mother. If your sister doesn’t like him, dump him. If your sister doesn’t like her, dump her. That is why God created sisters. Their approval, however, is not a sufficient condition; they will occasionally like losers, but they almost never detest good marrying material.
17. Never marry a feminist of either sex. That would be as bad as marrying someone with the soul (not the occupation, but the soul) of a lawyer.
18. Never marry anyone whom you catch in a lie, even a little one. Trust us on this one. People in love are about the most gullible creatures on God’s green earth. In fact, beside the dictionary entry on “gullible” there’s a picture of a woman in love, eyes looking dreamily upward, hands holding her chin; and a picture of an indignant young man defending the honor of his beloved, who would never do such a thing, no sir!
19. Never marry a woman who does not like to feed people, or a man who does not like to help out with the removal of a junked car, regardless of how much he knows about junked cars. By all means marry a woman who enjoys seeing men eat, or a man who looks at a mudslide and says, “I can make a really fine wall out of that.”
20. Never marry anyone, man or woman, who scoffs at virtue, who reduces “good” and “evil” to arbitrary counters in the war of all against all, whose humor is flippancy, who looks down upon janitors and maids, who cannot delight in making simple things (like a batting T or a thank-you note), who thinks tradition is old and shopworn (such people are followers of every fad that comes), and who is never, ever, just relaxed, grateful for a shady seat under the maple tree in fall. That is another way of saying that you should never marry anyone who does not know who God is.
Peter Leithart: Wedding Sermon
Peter Leithart: “Wedding Sermon” is just magnificent:
….As the Spirit joins Father and Son, so He joins fathers and sons across the gap of generations. No generation can be healthy if it is dominated by one spirit. A generation dominated by the spirit of sons breaks from the past in revolution, and a generation that drinks only of the spirit of the fathers is hidebound, and tyrannical. A healthy generation partakes of the spirit of the fathers and the spirit of sons, and must learn to join these spirits into one spirit. The Holy Spirit is the One Between who unifies the past and future. As the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the Spirit joins the hearts of the fathers to sons, and of sons to the fathers….
….Our prayer for you, on this Saturday after Pentecost, is that the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the true Spirit of joviality, the One Between, will fill the gaps in you, in your marriage, and in your home, drawing you into the unity of the Son and the Father, from this day to your lives’ end. This is our prayer, because the success of your marriage depends entirely on the grace of God, the grace that is the Gift of God, the Gift that is the Spirit of God. You’ll find, if you are honest, that marriage is impossible, but our prayer is that that you will also find that with God the Spirit, the God in between, nothing is impossible.
The Real Soul-Mate
Quote Details: J. R. R. Tolkien: Nearly all marriages, even… – The Quotations Page
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter to Michael Tolkien, March 1941
British scholar & fantasy novelist (1892 – 1973)
These Days are Fleeting
I think moms need to stop apologizing for doing a full time job full time! I am not going to state that all moms must be stay at home moms but for those who are, they must stop feeling inferior for their decision. I am tired of the mentality that is becoming more and more prevalent that says women who stay at home raising their children are wasting themselves even as they serve to drag down the economy. That’s a lie. Women who are home raising their children should do so with gusto and no regrets. No one can love your children like you can. God made you to be their mother and no one else. Learn everything you can about how to be the best mom you can be by God’s grace. Hold your head high when you state that you are a mom—not “just a mom” but a mom full time. Love your job because the days are fleeting. Those precious little ones will be grown up sooner than you think. Motherhood is a high calling now just as it has always been. Those who think otherwise are deceiving themselves.
A pure heart
Men fantasize about sex, women fantasize about romance.
These are both idols that sully, equally, the image of the real husband or the real wife.
Safe Killing and Liberated Sex Objects
Thank God other people have said something. I didn’t want to be the first to react. I think that maybe Sharon doesn’t realize just how empty the word “safe” sounds to most of us when applied to “abortion.” Abortion kills the fetus and violently disrupts the natural pregnancy process. In other words, it injures the mother. Something that involves killing and injury isn’t particularly “safe.” The way I see it, always prefacing “abortion” with “safe” isn’t descriptive; it’s subversive. It’s attempt to a priori set certain boundaries to the discussion and compel us all to think a certain way about abortion that is at least amicable to the “yes” party. But the whole ethic and, dare I say it, metaphysic I subscribe to positively demands that I not use the word “safe” to describe “abortion,” any more than I think there is a “safe” way to practice bulemia.There’s also something inconsistent with how things turned out about saying that the sexual liberation of women was “threatening” to men. The language is saturated with the imagery of the oppressed women not only liberating themselves, but turning the very tables on their oppressors. However, that’s not how the reality rolls. “Intimidating” is the last word a typical man would use to describe a woman who satisfies his sexual desires without any expectation that he care about the spiritual, emotional, financial, or physical well-being of her and her offspring. Reproductive “control” (again, a term implying things about reproduction that I simply don’t believe) has not produced a generation of self-confident, free, self-governed women liberated from social demands and expectations. It created a generation of women who have to tart themselves up by 8 and start putting out by 13 in order to gain acceptance. Perhaps woman’s former role as home-maker and child-bearer was demeaning and enslaving, but the new role as spiritless sex-toy surely is not exalting. Shockingly, one cannot abolish social norms. One can only institute new ones.
“…an egalitarian destroys the very things whose equality he asserts.”
Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal
In academe, it is simply assumed by almost everybody that sex differences are at most superficial. To quote a coarse and not terribly perceptive female member of the Army: “The only thing the men can do that the women can’t do is urinate through a hole in a fence.” It takes an effort of the imagination to pretend that you know nothing about men and women, and then to pay close attention to their voices, their gestures, their habits of speech (the sorts of sentences they use, for instance), what they do with their eyes while they speak, the sorts of things they speak about and how, and on and on. I know you agree with me here. I don’t think the egalitarians agree.And this thought leads me to another conclusion, parallel to what I said about powerful interpretations of Scripture: the indifferentist cannot really appreciate the beauty of woman (or of man, for that matter). There’s nothing much to say, if everything that we associate with women is merely superficial, or, if not superficial, then merely “socially constructed” and thus not essential, or, if in some way natural, not socially or anthropologically important, and thus not reaching deep into the woman’s being. Such an egalitarian destroys the very things whose equality he asserts.
Posted by: Tony Esolen | Sep 26, 2006 12:09:22 PM
“All Flattened Things Are Equal”
Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal
All Flattened Things are Equal…how can Christians fail to see that equality and hierarchy are not necessarily contradictory, seeing that they have the examples of the obedience of the Son to the Father, and of the inner life of the Trinity itself?
Which brings me to a point I’ve made before in Touchstone: all the really interesting interpretations of Scripture prescind from the assumption that, in one fashion or another, the Bible is inerrant. Failing that assumption, every time we come upon a crux we “resolve” it by consigning one of the truths to the flames. We say that A is true, but that B is culturally conditioned — or whatever the equivalent of “horsefeathers” happens to be at the time. Thus we avoid the difficult work of theological reflection, in submission to the word of God, and instead set ourselves up as judges over the word. We make things “easier,” in the same way that a steamroller makes things easier. It is not easy, for instance, to think that the eternally begotten Son of God became incarnate; so we level the trouble by denying the co-equality of the Son with the Father, as Arius did (and Milton, alas), or we level it by denying the reality of the incarnation. It is not easy to consider that one God exists in three distinct Persons, so we level the trouble by collapsing the three Persons into modes of one Being.
The “egalitarian” steamroller does the same sort of thing. Nor have the “egalitarians” anything really interesting to say about the sexes — because their form of egalitarianism is really indifferentism, leveling distinctions by denying that they exist. (By contrast, I think that a single baseball card — closely considered, as if it were an artifact from another planet about whose creatures we have absolutely no preconceptions — reveals a veritable encyclopedia of features that distinguish the human male!). Since it is incoherent to suppose that God is Father, but has left no traces of his Fatherhood, specifically, in the universe or in the human race — that the patriarchy of the Father is a kind of embarrassing exception –, the next step is to deny that his Fatherhood has any ontological reality; Jesus was simply using a metaphor, and one metaphor may be as useful as another. Then his Sonship (rather than the abstract Offspringship or Begottenship) too loses its claim to reality; and the connection between the Logos and the man Jesus is severed — Jesus simply happened to be male. And once we have done that, it is doubtful that we have remained Christian. The egalitarian — the indifferentist — becomes unitarian, reconceiving the self-revealed God according to the vanity of his own rather dull imagination.
