Conjugal Love Research Articles

Love, Arranged Marriage, and the Indian Social Structure

This paper examines the concepts of “romantic love” and “conjugal love” and their relationship to arranged marriage in the Indian social system. The family system, though it is pervasive in all social systems, represents unique features of a particular society and its ongoing changes which control the expression of premarital love/romantic love and also determine the importance of conjugal love/marital love. In a society where the family system is a strong agency of socialization and emphasizes family unity as opposed to individual goals, in the absence of other agencies of emotional and marital support, the family exerts a great control on the mate-selection process and the institutionalization of “arranged marriage”. The purposes and consequences of arranged marriage are tentatively analyzed and a generalized picture of cultural norms and the social system is presented as a theoretical paradigm to understand the importance of arranged marriage in India.

Masculimity, femininity, and conjugal love

Masculimity, femininity, and conjugal love

Mate Selection among the Shirishana

The Shirishana are one of many tribes which arrange marriages for young people, without always securing the consent of the prospective partners. The author argues that such a pattern should not be interfered with, as it is functional and leads to family stability among the Shirishana, whereas Western patterns of mate selection would lead to social disintegration. The Shirishana pattern in no way precludes the development of genuine conjugal love.

Odpowiedzialne rodzicielstwo według papieża Pawła VI we współczesnym nauczaniu moralnym Kościoła

Aspekty odpowiedzialnego rodzicielstwa, na które zwraca uwagę papież Paweł VI w encyklice Humanae vitae, stanowią ciekawą propozycję we współczesnym przepowiadaniu Dobrej Nowiny o małżeństwie i rodzinie. Podkreślenie ścisłego związku miłości z prokreacją może być także dzisiaj światłem w dialogu z niepłodnymi małżonkami. Sama prokreacja powinna być postrzegana jako owoc miłości małżeńskiej. Stwierdzenie, że przekazywanie życia znajduje swe przedłużenie przede wszystkim w dziele wychowania, nie ogranicza się tylko do perspektyw doczesności, lecz ma odniesienie do wiecznego przeznaczenia ludzkiego. Wskazane przez papieża treści należy jednak umieć przekazać językiem zrozumiałym dla młodego człowieka, wykorzystując także całą współczesną wiedzę z zakresu antropologii personalistycznej oraz innych nauk o człowieku. Tylko wówczas nauczanie Kościoła o odpowiedzialnym rodzicielstwie będzie ważnym elementem nowej ewangelizacji.

Family Planning Counsel

THE greatest psychological blessing that can be conferred upon a child at birth is to be wanted by his parents. Conversely, an enviable asset for new parents is to be in a position to welcome wholeheartedly the new addition to the family. This is not to say that all unplanned pregnancies are unwanted or that they turn out badly, but that there is an optimum readiness for parenthood and this readiness is too often neglected in our society at present. This neglect is in part an indictment of medical and public health practice. There is a striking contradiction-rarely noted-in the way our society regards readiness for the responsibilities of parenthood. There is virtually no interference or even cautionary suggestion against parenthood for married couples who are biologically able to reproduce. Even for the unmarried, social sanctions aginst pregnancy act chiefly as punishments or threats, without supporting prevention: the prospect of punishment often fails as a deterrent. Even couples who decide that they are unable to rear a child properly have been-and are still being-denied full information and necessary implements to practice birth control. There still exists a medical-social bias that favors pregnancy as the inevitable outcome of sexual intercourse, especially for the deprived segments of our population. In this circumstance of effective, albeit unconscious bias, no attention is paid to the quality of parenthood in store for the child-to-be, or of the wishes of the parents-to-be in regard to their own future, except perhaps to deny the right of conjugal love unless they wish to procreate. By way of contrast we note the plight of an infertile couple (especially one of mature years, mixed religion or race, or low income) who wish to be parents. For an approved adoption procedure they must be thoroughly evaluated as to their qualifications as parents, and many adoptive couples will testify to the emotional stress involved in presenting oneself for this

The Sexual Doctrine of Cardinal Cajetan by Dennis Doherty, O.S.B.

BOOK REVIEWS 511 significant sense to animals as well as men is a question to be discussed, but apart from this point he recognizes the special moral character of struggle, and puts the matter well in saying: " Struggle against temptation means the awareness of a dichotomy in the world-good versus evil. The anguish of soul that such struggle involves is the token of the knowledge that morality is better than immorality" (p. 269), leading to the final sentence of the book, " The ability to struggle against temptation is the sign of the truly human being." University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana JoHN A. OEsTERLE The Sexual Doctrine of Cardinal Cajetan. By Dennis Doherty, 0. S. B. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1966. Pages 389. Band 12, Studien zur Geschichte der kath. Moraltheologie, Herausgegeben von Michael MUller. Giacomo de Vio Gaetano (1469-1534), known to history as Cardinal Cajetan, is remembered both as a scholar and as an important figure in the historical events of his own time. His scholarship is evidenced in his commentaries on the Bible and on certain works of Aristotle. The principal contribution which he made to theology is his commentary on Thomas Aquinas' Summa theologiae. Thoughout his life, from his entry into the Dominican Order when he took the name Thomas until his death, he wished to be the faithful exponent of the Angelic Doctor. So successful was he at this purpose that it is difficult to elaborate a doctrine of Cajetan apart from that of Aquinas. Cajetan's commentary was not only the first complete commentary on the Summa of Aquinas but it remains the magisterial commentary. Thus, it is printed in the Leonine edition of Aquinas' work and contemporary Thomists rightfully question whether an opinion can be ascribed to " thomistae communiter " if it is not taught by Cajetan. As a man of his own times, Cajetan held influential positions in his own Order, of which he was Master General, and in the Church, in which he often served as Papal Legate. He was involved in such pressing contemporary problems as the marriage dispute of Henry VIII and negotiations with Luther in Germany. Intellectually, he appears better characterized as a medieval than as a humanist. This judgment is that of Congar and it remains true in spite of several recent attempts (e. g., J. Mayer, R. Bauer, M.-H. Laurent) to make of him a humanist. Although he was devoted to the primacy of reason when there was no solution to be found in Revelation, this method was more that 51~ BOOK REVIEWS of Aquinas than of the humanists. By rejecting a method based upon a multiplication of authorities or upon an unnecessary multiplication of distinctions , he was only being faithful to Aquinas and attempting to revive Thomism from the poor state in which it was found in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Cajetan's general approach to theology was also true of his moral theology: he remained the commentator on Aquinas. His writings share the weaknesses and strengths of Aquinas. One such weakness is the negativity towards sexual pleasure which characterized Catholic moral teaching before Aquinas and found its way into his works, especially via his respect for Augustine. Yet the reader of today must be cautious about judging history in the light of present emphases on conjugal love and sexual fulilllment within marriage. A second weakness is the androcentric orientation of traditional and Thomistic moral teaching. Again, however, feminism is a social movement characteristic of the twentieth century. On the doctrinal plane both Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan understood human sexuality in a way which denied any validity to a dualistic approach . Doherty explains this well in developing two key principles of Thomistic moral theology. The first of these principles is that the pleasure proper to an action must be judged in terms of the goodness or evil of the operation. Since sexual actions are obviously in accord with man's nature, and thus are intended by the Creator, they cannot but be good; so also the pleasure associated with them must be good. Another principle of Aquinas which Cajetan explained and defended is that concupiscence is not the formal determinant of original...

Lope's La Dama Boba And Baroque Comedy

Bulletin Of The Comediantes Vol. XIII Fall, 1961 No. 2 Lope's La Dama Boba And Baroque Comedy Bruce W. Wardropper The Johns Hopkins University I have argued elsewhere (RR, XLIX, 3-11) that, if the drama de honor is the peculiar form of Spanish baroque tragedy, the comedia de capa y espada is the peculiar form of its comedy. Honor plays deal with the problems of married people, sacramentalIy made one flesh by divine grace; any interference with this divinely ordained state is a kind of blasphemy, followed inevitably by retribution and misfortune. The cloakand -sword plays present unmarried people whose mutual bond is anything but a divine amalgam; they have practical difficulties rather than moral problems; their failures , falling well short of blasphemy, may be seen as ridiculous, and laughted at. Honor questions must be treated as part of the social fabric instituted and jealously supervised by God; love—human love—concerns the social order only in so far as society involves practical everyday living in the secular world. Many critics have tried with more or less acuity to analyze the implications of honor for the Spanish tragedy. The comedy —the theatre not of honor but of love— has been neglected. Since Menéndez Pelayo 's unsteady pinitos the study of the Spanish theatre has had a chance to grow up. We may now hope to approach the frivolous play of the Golden Age with a greater understanding of its internal mechanism. As a first step I should like, in the short space available to me, to make some observations on Lope de Vega's La dama boia as a baroque comedy. It is not an untypical work. I shall limit myself to two important aspects —the theme of love the teacher and the imagery of mirrors—in the hope that they will illuminate somewhat the genre as a whole. Lope makes one of his characters underline the essential difference that should distinguish the behavior of an unmarried woman from that of a wife: Hable la dama en la reja, escriba, diga conceptos en el coche, en el estrado, de amor, de engaños, de celos; pero la casada sepa de su familia el gobierno, porque el más discreto hablar no es santo como el silencio.1 The heroine of a comedy, then, is an idle chatterbox who, unlike her married sister, does not aim at a sainthood based on prudent silence. Her life is a shallow stream of lovemaking in conventional social situations, of verbal brilliance, of pique, of misunderstanding , of the madness of Eros and the grotesquerie of petty jealousy. The life of the married woman runs deep; it is circumscribed by the home she rules, sanctified by a conjugal love made firm by her constant preoccupation with her husband's honor, unsullied by any mean jealousy of him or any amorous frenzy towards other men. The superficiality of the single person's daily existence is conveyed in the play by a series of mirror images. Comedy, in Cicero's famous words, is a mirror held up to life. But mirrors reduce three dimensions to two. They are incapable of probing 1. P. 128. I cite from the edition in Colección Crisol, num. 32 (Madrid, 1944). 1 BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES Published in the Spring and Fall by the Comediantes, an informal, international group of all those interested in the comedia. Editor Karl-Ludwig Selig University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minn. Associate Editor John E. Keller University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, N. C. Subscription: $1 a year even the visible world in depth. This, it turns out, is just as well. There are long periods in life when man must forget essential realities and heed only the demands of social relationships. In his foolishness he needs the protection of partial truth or even of engaño. Pues si un tonto ver pudiera su entendimiento a un espejo,¿no fuera huyendo de si? (p. 137) The reason for this is that man's capacity for understanding the world around him is not limitless. He must grope before he can grasp it. He must learn to recognize its deceitful nature and its insubstantiality. And so it...

Polyeucte and the de Imitatione Christi

In his masterly study of le Sentiment de l'Amour dans I'CEuvre de Pierre Corneille, M. Octave Nadal makes one reservation regarding Polyeucte. After rooting the spiritual adventure of the martyr in the climate of conjugal love where both blood and spirit stir, M. Nadal acknowledges nonetheless a certain ambiguity in the psychology of the hero. He goes so far as to say that in Polyeucte's speeches one could easily find “des formules” which deny the heroism and grandeur of human love at the same time that “l'action même du martyr ne tend jamais qu'à les prouver et à les consacrer.” M. R. Chauviré and M. Raymond Lebègue have made similar observations.

The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love

Many of the old clichés about Puritanism have been dispelled by the researches of such eminent modern scholars as Haller, Knappen, and Miller, so that we are now more likely to understand the Puritans than were our less well-informed predecessors. Certain areas of misconception and uncertainty still remain, however, and the function of this paper is to explore one of these areas, namely, the teachings of classical Puritanism on physical love in marriage. Although judgments have already been pronounced by scholars on this subject—judgments which are both varied and conflicting—there has, as yet, been available no study which provides detailed and conclusive documentation of the Puritan teaching on the physical relations of marriage, for even the most useful studies usually skirt the sexual aspects of marriage, or dismiss these aspects with a sentence or two, and but little documentation.

Marriage: Its Meaning and Purposes

D URING the last few years Catholic theologians have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the doctrine of Christian marriage. Books and articles have appeared in which one discerns a tendency to reconsider various phases of Catholic teaching, especially with regard to the relative importance of the ends of marriage. The tendency has been to emphasize the secondary ends, and the element of conjugal love, which to these authors seem to have been neglected or at least underemphasized in the treatment of marriage commonly found in theological manuals. They feel that the true Catholic teaching would be more clearly presented if less emphasis were placed on what has hitherto commonly been called the primary end of marriage, and more emphasis placed on the personal elements of conjugal love and conjugal community of life. In fact, some seem to go so far as to deny that procreation is the primary end, at least in the sense in which St. Thomas made it primary. Among these writers the one who has made the greatest impression on other Catholic thinkers is undoubtedly Doctor Herbert Doms, Privat-Dozent of the University of Breslau, a priest, and Doctor of Theology. His book Vom Sinn und Zweck der Ebe, first published in German in 1935, had its second French edition in 1937, and has appeared in English in 1939 under the title: The Meaning of Marriage.