The Death of Marcus Aurelius

The Death of Marcus Aurelius

Friday, November 24, 2017

Epictetus, The Handbook 42: Right Passions



. . . Avoid impurity to the utmost of your power before marriage, but if you indulge your passion, let it be done lawfully.

But do not be offensive or censorious to those who indulge it, and do not always be bringing up your own chastity.

If some one tells you that so and so speaks ill of you, do not defend yourself against what he says, but answer, 'He did not know my other faults, or he would not have mentioned these alone.'. . .

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 33 (tr Matheson)

My own concerns about the sexual mores of our time do not come from a frustrated hatred of the flesh, or from the reactionary belief that sexuality exists only as an unfortunate but necessary means to produce a few more copies of myself on the face of this Earth.

My concern has long been that we have turned our liberation into selfishness. We separate our desires from the commitment of love, and in the process reduce others to a means for our gratification. Once it becomes all about the taking, and abandons all the giving, we treat others as objects, and not as persons.

In my younger years, I would hear both men and women talk about “getting a piece of that”, and I would cringe. The phrases may change, but the attitude isn’t all that different. We can make it all appear right and proper, of course, but when sex is just about seeking pleasure, which so easily transforms into the exercise of control and power, we abuse others just as we abuse ourselves.

We cannot help but somehow recognize that so deep a personal intimacy brings with it so deep a personal consequence. I need only look around me to see the intense damage done by lazy affections.

In my early teaching years, I knew a young lady who spoke proudly of her “no-strings-attached” affair, and all the benefits she thought it brought her. A year later she was sobbing uncontrollably, and asking why she had let herself love the fellow in question. I did my best to help her through it, though I regret that it was hardly enough.

She learned it the hard way, as so many of us do, and as I had to learn myself, that hearts are to be cherished, and not to be played with.

Epictetus also understands that it is the mark of a frustrated and miserable person to be too quick to accuse and condemn others. I should worry far more about maintaining my own chastity than I should about policing the chastity of others, because I should readily understand all the temptations and pitfalls that come our way.

It helps little if I tell you that you are broken, without offering my friendship to help you heal those wounds.

If love is about a commitment to others, I will hardly be practicing that love, either if I abuse others by sleeping with them carelessly, or if I abuse others by damning them carelessly. I need not be promiscuous or a prude. I just need to show compassion and concern.

I was once a bit enamored of a woman I saw regularly at daily Mass. She always sat quietly in the back, right where I always did, and always in the company of a lovely three or four year old boy. I asked a friend who she might be.

“You want nothing to do with her! She had a child out of wedlock!”

“Well, all right then, but I think I’d like to get to know her. When did you start throwing stones?”

“You’d be a fool if you ever thought you could love a woman like that.”

“Perhaps she might like to share her life and her son’s life with someone, or at least find a friend to make it easier?”

“Women like that are never any good, and you should know that already.”

“What, you mean the ones like Mary Magdalene?”

He had no answer for that, beyond a sigh and a roll of the eyes.

I was pathetically too shy to ever speak to her, but I always deeply admired her commitment to raising her son. The only good that ever came from it was that I found some better friends.

If the best criticism you can come up with is a rumor that someone has been intemperate, you are sadly missing the forest for the trees.

We can’t complain that we have separated love from sex, and then also separate love from all of our other judgments and actions.

Written in 6/2009

Image: Jacques de L'Ange, Allegory of Lust (mid 17th c.)




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