living as an embodied spirit in a concupiscible world

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

How Far Is Too Far?

How far is too far? -- Not how close is too close.  I ran across an Ethika Politika piece the other day that piqued my interest because the writer articulated some of the feelz I have in an accessible and non-emotional account. 

It deals with couples (and individuals) who eschew all/almost all physical affection until marriage.  These are the side-hug, no-hand-holding, first-kiss-on-the-altar type folk.  While the idea of purity appeals to me, something about this manner of courtship has started to bother me more and more since I first heard about (and considered) it in high school.  
The writer, Audra Nakas, addressed the choice to court in this manner as a refusal to exercise the virtual of temperance.  Our goal, as Catholics and really as human persons, is the proper integration of sexuality with the whole person, i.e. chastity.  Avoiding all things that might possibly maybe somehow remotely be related to the other sex does not promote this integration.

This line of thought makes so much sense to me.  The tendency to overreact to problematic cultural trends is a not uncommon human tendency.  In a way, the model of courtship that Nakas addresses is analogous to the rise of fideism during the historical moment when a hyperrationalism was taking over Western thought.  The rationalists separated God from reason and rejected God.  Fideism accepted that split by placing God outside of reason, thus doing violence to the notion of human reason.  Radical courtship does a similar thing for human sexuality:  seeing the sexual license of the culture, it concedes that sexual integration is not possible and offers a "Christian" solution, one that in fact abandons the quest for true chastity.

Caveat: Nakas writes about two specific groups in her article and I don't know enough about either group to know how well she assesses them.  I will just add as a caveat that there may be specific times when specific people need to avoid specific temptations in a very serious way.  There is not one fit-all formula for sexual integration; it is the constant striving of an individual by the grace of God, with the help of the Sacraments -- like all virtue.

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