tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post116060221372555600..comments2024-03-26T01:10:13.720+00:00Comments on Teach Me Tonight: Plato in Dialogue with the Romance GenreE. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-1160734973604486042006-10-13T11:22:00.000+01:002006-10-13T11:22:00.000+01:00Stephanie Coontz has the first chapter of her Marr...Stephanie Coontz has the first chapter of her <I>Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage</I> available online <A HREF="http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/books/marriage/chapter1.htm" REL="nofollow">here</A>. In it she emphasises how unusual it is, in historical terms, for romantic love to be the basis of marriage and notes that:<BR/><BR/><I>Some Greek and Roman philosophers even said that a man who loved his wife with “excessive” ardor was “an adulterer.” Many centuries later Catholic and Protestant theologians argued that husbands and wives who loved each other too much were committing the sin of idolatry.</I><BR/><BR/>I managed to find some modern examples of this theological argument:<BR/><BR/><I>All idols kill love and therefore undermine or destroy marriage. When we treat marriage as an idol, we put impossible demands on our spouses to fill the place of God for us. When the state, work, money, power, happiness, children or sex are idols, anyone who gets in the way of those goals is crushed.</I><BR/><BR/>Earlier <A HREF="http://www.ransomfellowship.org/R_Marriage.html" REL="nofollow">in the same article</A> romance novels were mentioned, and not approvingly, in the context of a woman who wrote in to an advice column:<BR/><BR/><I>With the exception of a wedding ceremony, all of the elements which anthropologists recognize as universal to marriage and family are already present in this relationship: They are living together, raising a daughter together, working together for the family’s well-being, and (presumably) having a sexual relationship. On top of that, the man’s feelings and actions prove that he loves the woman and her daughter very much. The only thing missing is a feeling of romantic love on the part of the woman. (She wonders herself whether her doubts comes from too many romance novels!)</I><BR/><BR/>or how about this:<BR/><BR/><I>Do we make idols of our love? In an article about being complete as an individual, Fern Horst mentioned that love focused on one particular individual over God is a form of idolatry. [...] She makes a point that's worth thinking about: "Any time we look to anyone or anything other than God to give us meaning, to meet our needs, we are creating an idol."</I> (from <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/brianhart.geo/idealize.html" REL="nofollow">this site</A>)<BR/><BR/>So the theological warnings concerning excessive love for a spouse being a form of idolatry are still around, they're maybe just not as prevalent as they used to be.Laura Vivancohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00906661869372622821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-1160703628754272202006-10-13T02:40:00.000+01:002006-10-13T02:40:00.000+01:00Fascinating! Among Puritan writers in the 17th ce...Fascinating! Among Puritan writers in the 17th century, and indeed among American protestants well into the 19th century, as Karen Lystra has shown (see her book "Searching the Heart," a study of 19th c. American love letters), the fear of loving one's husband or wife more than God was very, very real. Some writers went so far as to blame their own idolatrous affection for the deaths of spouses, as though the losses were a brusque reminder from God never to love creation more than the Creator. Hence Emily Dickinson's mordant poem 1719:<BR/><BR/>God is indeed a jealous God-<BR/>He cannot bear to see<BR/>That we had rather not with Him<BR/>But with each other play.<BR/><BR/>I must admit that in many years of listening to Christian talk radio (alhtough I'm not a Christian, I'm fascinated by "The Bible Answer Man") I have NEVER heard a caller worried about this particular sin or punishment. Nor have any of my evangelical students mentioned it, although they speak up about other theological topics rather often. It may be that the theology and lived culture of Protestants, at least in America, has left this concern far behind.E. M. Selingerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-1160688965506916622006-10-12T22:36:00.000+01:002006-10-12T22:36:00.000+01:00On the other hand, I think you're on to something,...<I>On the other hand, I think you're on to something, jfj, when you mention how crucial some idea of virtue often turns out to be in romance fiction, especially virtue in the heroine.</I><BR/><BR/>That's what I was getting at when I said that 'the lovers are usually [...] possessed of particular virtues [...] They are personifications of aspects of "the Good"'. It ties in with the idea expressed by medieval courtly lovers that, apart from the fact that the beloved was almost divine (and the love poems of the period did sometimes verge on the blasphemous), loving her encouraged the lover to become better himself. The role of Dante's Beatrice, for example, is to lead him towards source of goodness, 'the Good', in Dante's case the Christian God.<BR/><BR/>In some romances I think what may happen is that the heroine is made the personification of the 'feminine' virtues, while the hero personifies the 'masculine' virtues. Only together can they most nearly resemble 'the Good'. So in that sense many romances combine the idea that the lovers are incomplete without each other (they need their other half) with the idea that what each seeks in the beloved is 'the Good'. Each is attracted to the other because the beloved is the embodiment of those aspects of 'the Good' which the lover lacks. And as they become 'one body' through marriage, they come even closer to resembling 'the Good' in which all the virtues, both 'masculine' and 'feminine' are present in their purest form.<BR/><BR/>I'm not saying that all romances are like this, just that some, at a particular end of Frye's scale, may be. Also what I've said above about the 'masculine' and 'feminine' virtues doesn't necessarily imply that romances of this sort must, by definition, be about heterosexual couples. Plato certainly thought love was most likely between an older and a younger man.<BR/><BR/>Re inspirationals, about which you asked 'Is there a tension in any of those romances between loving the Creator and loving a created being, like a spouse?', I think there are sometimes conflicts when one of the pair is Christian and the other is not. That sometimes forms the main 'barrier' (as defined by Pamela Regis) which must be overcome. But there isn't tension between loving God and loving a Christian spouse. A while back I asked Brenda Coulter a question related to this <A HREF="http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/2006/08/do-all-romance-readers-love-hero.html" REL="nofollow">and she replied that</A>:<BR/><BR/><I>To understand the "love triangle" (man, woman, God) in a Christian romance, we must understand it in real life. The woman does not love two "men." God is not on the same plane as the loved one, He is above it. He is the top of the triangle. In Christian marriage, each partner puts God not merely above his or her spouse, but above his or her own self. Christian romance novels reflect that truth.</I>Laura Vivancohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00906661869372622821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-1160680417756533362006-10-12T20:13:00.000+01:002006-10-12T20:13:00.000+01:00I'd certainly rather spend my time with--heck, I'd...I'd certainly rather spend my time with--heck, I'd rather BE--the person reading romance than the one reading Nietzsche.<BR/><BR/>Laura, you're a genius to take the ad up on its challenge and look into The Republic, only to find love there. It's notable that the ad did not choose The Symposium (or "The Drinking Party," as it might as well be called), but rather a text whose title, at least, suggests the sort of weighty matters that folks in the nation's capital take seriously. (Or are supposed to, although perhaps Mr. Foley, he of the latest scandal with a Congressional page, might have learned more from The Symposium!)<BR/><BR/>Three more thoughts come to mind:<BR/><BR/>1) The Platonic idea that most romance novels cite directly would have to be the notion of love as the search for a "soul-mate" or other half of ourselves that Aristophanes recounts with comic detail in the Symposium. (We're split like filets of fish, you'll recall, and now roam around looking for our missing pieces.) On the other hand, I think you're on to something, jfj, when you mention how crucial some idea of virtue often turns out to be in romance fiction, especially virtue in the heroine. Is this Plato as filtered through Jane Austen, perhaps?<BR/><BR/>2) The other place to find that old time Platonic religion of eros--eros with proper object being the Ideal, rather than a mere human being--is...well, no, let me phrase this as a question: do we could find it in Christian inspirational romance? Is there a tension in any of those romances between loving the Creator and loving a created being, like a spouse? (Such tensions go back a long, long way in the history of love.)<BR/><BR/>3) Finally, for another relationship between Romance and the Republic, there's always dear Jack Donne ("Captain...Jack Donne," one wants him to say):<BR/><BR/>"She's all states, and all princes, I. / Nothing else is. / Princes do but play us; compared to this / All honour's mimic, all wealth, alchemy."<BR/><BR/>("The Sun Rising")<BR/><BR/>More on the age thing soon--off to pluck some grey hairs first--E. M. Selingerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30203557.post-1160629787768972872006-10-12T06:09:00.000+01:002006-10-12T06:09:00.000+01:00What struck me about the ad was that it was obviou...What struck me about the ad was that it was obviously the same guy who was reading both the lurid romance novel and Plato. So obviously you can be both of average intelligence when you read romances and above average when you take on the Soc.<BR/><BR/>I appreciated one of the Bitches honesty when she admitted there's a reason people make fun of romance novels. But then one could also make fun of those who read Nietzsche.<BR/><BR/>But if it's true that "love is always directed towards what is good, indeed that goodness itself is the only object of love," then it explains why heroines in romances are such paragons of virtue.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com