And so it goes...

[fpb]

I thought to insulate people who were not up to it from the shock of my opinions on a couple of matters; and the very fact that I announced it led directly to it breaking down. It was a reaction to it that caused the response that became my last post. Apparently I cannot manage to avoid controversy even if I try. Well, so be it. As it is now, I doubt whether I will ever use the Credenti group again.

Comments

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

...

If you define contradictory evidence out of existence, then there's not much to talk about.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you insist on using the term "marriage" for something that has nothing to do with what I have been talking about for several posts, you will find you are talking to yourself. I started this debate and this is my blog. These are the parameters.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

There's a serious question which I think ought to have been asked, especially as I'm not personally inclined to assume that your "happily divorced" acquaintances were lying. Would you say that it is likely that they entered into marriage with the advance understanding that it was an arrangement which could be freely dissolved if desired?

In a Catholic context, under Canon Law the revelation that a marriage had clearly been contracted with such an understanding -- that it was conditional on future outcomes -- would adequate basis for a legal finding that no valid marriage had been contracted because full consent had been withheld. My understanding is that, prior the widespread acceptance of no-fault divorce, the requirements for marriage in civil law were generally similar.

Something to think about if that is the case: as people have become widely accustomed to the idea of no-fault divorce, it is very likely that a great number of heterosexual couples have been entering arrangements, under the form of marriage, which, if closely examined, would not have been previously recognized as actual marriage.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Well, the two closest to me are my parents -- both had had an earlier marriage, in the 1950s. How easy was divorce then, in California? I have a dim memory my mother at least had to push the right buttons to get out, no no-fault yet. Both were hasty marriages, but I can't say what the conscious mindset or consideration of alternatives was, and I can't ask any more. My mother remained on good terms with her ex; my father... not bad terms, they just didn't have much in common, apart from their daughter. Civil and friendly, certainly.

If marriage with the possibility of divorce means that it's not really marriage, then much of the world's population has considered itself married without being so by your definition. Every Jew and Muslim, for example, at least for the men. Classical Chinese men. Roman men and women. Men and women in many tribes, where the woman can divorce by putting the man's things outside her home. In both the common and anthropological parlance, and to themselves, these people are and were married.

I can see how that's not the case to a Catholic perspective, and I won't tell a Catholic blogger that he's doing it wrong on his own journal -- but to an outsider it sounds very odd to say that most of the world which considers itself husband or wife is not really married. And I doubt they'd appreciate it, any more than Catholics appreciate definitions of "Christian" which exclude them.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's not about Catholicism, it's about natural law. Ask yourself which is the archetype and which the ectype; which has the power of positive reality and which reduces itself to a series of ever-feebler, ever more compromised, ever more ritualistic and meaningless echoes.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Natural law -- as seen by a Catholic.
I don't know what you mean by "positive reality".
As for what's natural, marriage with divorce seems more common and more 'primitive' than marriage without. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Jews had divorce, the Muslims had divorce, the Christians didn't. If divorce has been around for 5000+ years, worry about "ever-feebler" seems misplaced.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And the Egyptian, Greeks, Romans and Jews were of course primitive Naturvoelker without thousands of years of civilization and refinements of every sort behind them. Please. The day you can lecture me about the influence of monetary concepts on the earliest layer of Roman law, or on the problems of Greek marriage law and whether such a thing even existed, you can enter this kind of field; till then, leave it to those who have made a study of it. Natural law is a different conception from any specific ancient law, and the ancients themselves knew it. The Romans made a clear distinction between ius nationum or international law, ius Romanum/Graecum/Aegyptiacum/etc., and ius naturale, which informed and underlay all others. And they also knew that special interest, degeneration and folly could and did detach any kind of local law from ius naturale; and indeed it would be difficult to explain differences in usage between nation without it.

Actually, I think this really finishes your part in this debate

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I don't know what you mean by positive reality.
Well, I dare say.

An unserious note

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Please do not think that I am speaking seriously, but:
According to science and the theory of evolution, the human race (homo sapiens) has been around for something like 170,000 years.
According to creationists, the whole world has been around for less than 10,000 years.
You seem to think that the existence of something for 5,000 years proves that it is fundamental to the human race.
This does not really hold well if you believe that the human race is 170,000 (that is, 34 times 5,000) years old.
You don't happen to be a Young Earth creationist, by any chance?

Re: An unserious note

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Extrapolating from existing hunter-gatherer tribes, divorce would be a lot older than 5000 years. But written records cut out before then, so there's no hard evidence either way.

Re: An unserious note

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Which is why people generally define ius naturale differently. The same argument would justify male paedophilia, which is popular across many civilized and primitive groups. Not to mention cannibalism (the Aztecs), incest (the Zoroastrian Persians) and brother-murder (the Ottoman Turks).

P.S.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Exactly the same argument applies to the Naturvoelker of the world. It took just as much time for the Inuit or the Khoisan to develop to their present (or recent) state of culture, as it did the Italians or the Chinese. You cannot deduce natural law from the law of any nation currently in the world, even if we assume that it existed with the original human tribe, and that the original human tribe was hunting-gathering.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

The reason I brought up sacramental marriage is that (as Fabio noted) I think it closely reflects the archetype. What I wanted to draw attention to in doing so was that (whatever the classical world did), marriage in the West from the Christian era on was until very recently much closer to that archetype than it is now.

But my point is this: since the advent of no-fault divorce, many marriages have been contracted which secular law would have, not all that long ago, deemed invalid. The decline has been recent and very dramatic.

As a matter of fact, the Church does recognize a broader category of "natural" marriage outside the Church, which would apply to at least some of the classical examples. I suppose there is still a problem in that we have now departed much further from the ideal than even the classical world -- the classical world, for example, at least understood reproduction as an ordinary integral part of marriage.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I think that even our friend would have some trouble with Cato's "loan" of his wife Porcia.

Re: And now that I have calmed down (unlike you)...

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

(I think you meant Marcia.) Wasn't that also an aberration from the point of view of Cato's contemporaries?