Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Augustina's World.


I noticed this very moving comment over at Dalrock's yesterday on the subject of whether or not romantic love must precede commitment. 
I will wade in here, late, but hopefully I have something to add to the discussion. This is a subject that I know about from personal experience, as well as observing other women in similar circumstances to mine. So let me tell you a bit of my story. I am specifically responding to Deti and others who think that romantic love must proceed before a woman will remain devoted to her weakened husband.

I have never had romantic feelings for my husband. There was no falling in love period before we decided to get married. He asked me to marry him in a letter. We spoke over the phone a few times (he lived in a distant state), and I agreed to it. We were both socially conservative and I wanted a large family where I stayed at home and homeschooled the kids. This is also what he wanted, so I went for it. I never liked the dating scene and didn’t want to deal with it any more.

I agreed to marry him before I even met him. There were no tingles, no attraction, no romance. I went live near him and we spent a few weeks together before we got married. He was on the short side and slightly built. As far as sexual attraction goes, I would say it was neutral for me. He did not repulse me, but he didn’t make me tingle either.

Our wedding night wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t that great. As I said, neutral. I could work up a desire for him but it wasn’t there naturally. Immediately, our young marriage hit rocky shoals, because that’s just life. I immediately got pregnant and had difficult pregnancies which did nothing to help our sex life. He lost his job. We moved several times, across the country and in three different states. We ended up living with my parents. This did nothing to raise his sexual attractiveness to me. Hypergamy? What hypergamy?

Flash forward fifteen years or so. I had finally had it. I wanted to be the good Christian wife, and be submissive to my husband. But there was nothing to submit to. He didn’t lead. He drifted. It was like being on a ship, but with no captain to guide it. And the waters are full of icebergs, rocky shoals, submerged reefs, and vast stretches of the doldrums. It was terrifying to have my now large family on a ship with no one to navigate these waters.

He was passive, hesitant, didn’t lead as a father should, couldn’t discipline the children, and still couldn’t support his family. I was forced to make every decision, to consider our options with no input from him. I would wait for his input, request his input, but never got it. 

I can attest that a passive man who doesn’t lead will invite the fury of his woman. I was angry, furious, confused and resentful. He was, in addition to his passivity, also cold and difficult to reach. When I had tragic losses all I asked for was for him to hold me. He couldn’t do it. He could not comfort me. He also had a host of strange behavior, that I tried at first to pass off as eccentric. In short, he failed me in every way imaginable.

Finally, when I could take it no more, I considered divorce. I just wanted to be free of the emotional turmoil and unrelenting disappointment and resentment I felt towards him. But I did not consider divorce for long. I asked myself, what would it be like, to be free of him? And then I got a vision. There was my husband, sad, small and alone, in a dingy flat above a Laundromat, eating a bowl of ramen noodles. I knew that’s what divorce would do to him. And I couldn’t do it. I could not deprive this man of his family.

For all his faults, and they were legion, I knew all he wanted was a loving home for him and his children. I could not take that away from him. To do so would be bad, evil, disgusting, horrible and nasty. Marriage is fundamentally about trust. You make yourself vulnerable to the other person. You trust that they will stick by you, even if you are imperfect. I could not violate that trust, even if he didn’t live up to expectations. To violate that trust is evil. It is akin to murder.

So I dismissed the idea of divorce. Instead, I accepted my situation. I was forced, unwillingly, to be the leader of my family. I could not understand why. I did not want it, I was dragged to it, kicking and screaming (often quite literally). He didn’t ask me to be the leader, he just didn’t lead. So I looked for a career and went back to school and started working.

Once I accepted my situation, my attitude improved. I was less angry, less depressed, and more at peace. Not entirely, and this took a long time, but I felt noticeably better. It was only a few months after this that the full understanding of my situation came about. My husband’s brother was diagnosed with probably Huntington’s Disease. My husband was eventually diagnosed as well. 

This explained so much. Huntington’s is a neurodegenerative disease that affects all aspects of a person’s life: motor, cognitive and psychiatric. I would say all of our problems stemmed from the early symptoms of the disease. One of the hallmarks is loss of executive function. A man cannot lead a family without executive function. Poor executive function means no ability to make decisions, to initiate activities, to plan even in the short term. 

So what kept me loyal to him? A previous romantic attraction, that I could hold to? No. That was true of my SIL with her husband, but not for me. Hypergamy? My husband was not ever powerful, and never made much money. We were poor and dependent of family support through much of our marriage. I often felt embarrassed by his behavior. 

I don’t get much out of my marriage. For all intents and purposes I am like a single mother, and I often wish I had romance in my life. I have never had romantic love, and doubt that I will ever experience it in my life. 

Perhaps I am devoted to a higher cause: my family. I have devotion to him, and fondness for him. I recognize now what a struggle it was for him and that he is not at fault for his ‘failings.’ But it is not based on ‘tingles’, attraction, previous romantic feelings or any other such thing. I took vows to love and honor him, in good times and bad and in sickness and in health. So be it.

Now Dalrock, you don’t know me, so feel free to edit my overly long post. I am not in the habit of baring my personal life on the internet, but as it pertains to your post, I thought I had something to add. In short: romantic love or sexual attraction are not necessary prerequisites to devotion to a weakened and ailing husband.
It the God of Biomechanics had a prophet, it would be Roissy, but his chronicler would be Michel Houellebecq. The power in  Houellebecq's novels lay in their ability to describe individual atomisation whilst in a crowd. Loneliness is the ever present undercurrent, and though his characters may form relationships, there is a realisation that once they are old, ugly or otherwise "inconvenient," the relationships will fail.  His characters only "love" contingent on the other having "something"; be that looks, money or fame. Once that "something is gone", so goes the "love". Lana del Ray's current song speaks about this angst. It's an ode to Roissy. All love is fleeting.

Hence the power of Game. Game is, simply,  cultivating that "something" which women will find attractive. It is the recognition for the need and the accumulation of erotic capital. But here is the kicker; time, entropy and the process of aging are in opposition to the hoard, hence, all of us will get old, ugly and undesirable. Thus the obsession with staying attractive and avoiding old age. In the sexual market place without erotic capital, the god of sexual biomechanics kicks in and we are all alone.

But contrast this with Augustina's type of "love". Here, there is minimal or no attraction, even repulsion at times, yet it still sticks with the other.  
I don’t get much out of my marriage. For all intents and purposes I am like a single mother, and I often wish I had romance in my life. I have never had romantic love, and doubt that I will ever experience it in my life. 

Perhaps I am devoted to a higher cause: my family. I have devotion to him, and fondness for him. I recognize now what a struggle it was for him and that he is not at fault for his ‘failings.’ But it is not based on ‘tingles’, attraction, previous romantic feelings or any other such thing. I took vows to love and honor him, in good times and bad and in sickness and in health. So be it.
This type of love is outside the jurisdiction of the God of Biomechanics, it's a different type of love altogether, and it is this type of love that is the basis of Christian marriage. People may stick together out of habit, social pressure, convenience and whatever other utility, but what makes them stay when there is nothing in it for them at all?

Augustina understanding of her motivations leads her to describe it as a kind of duty to her husband, but it is not a duty. When contemplating his potential plight, should she leave him, she is moved to pity. It's not duty that stopped her from leaving her husband but rather a desire not to do wrong by him, not to see him suffer. Whilst she is not attracted to her husband she still cannot do evil to him and it is this inability to be bad which is the basis of her love and provides sustenance to her marriage.

Good and Evil are moral polarities which are expressed through our actions. Augustina's marriage is sustained by her possessing a moral polarity of good, thereby stopping her from harming the marriage and her husband. Her actions are not based on rational calculation but on moral nature. She has no self interested reason to stay but she cannot be bad to the marriage. She possess Caritas.

From the wiki article.
The love that is caritas is distinguished by its origin, being divinely infused into the soul, and by its residing in the will rather than emotions, regardless of what emotions it stirs up. 
Executive summary: Possessing Caritas means being good despite of what you feel.

It's this type of love which keeps the marriage going when there is no reason for it to keep going any longer: It's the love that lasts. It is also the main reason why marriages break up today. Most people lack the moral polarity of goodness that Augustina has and thereby divorce. As the prophets would have said, we have become evil and are now suffering the consequences for it.( Note, I'm not retarded. The culpability attributable to divorce is contingent on particular circumstances.)

Aquinas understood Caritas as a type of friendship towards God and Man. Personally, and I know I'm on very shaky ground here, I think Aquinas' conception of it was limited. I would go further than he does and assert that Caritas, expressed in act, perfects all things.(Including marriages which would otherwise fail.) Caritas should not just to be thought of as a friendship towards God and Man but extending to all things, including the physical and animal world. It is the foundation from which all good things come. A man (or woman) in possession of Caritas has some of the "stuff of God" in him and thereby becomes sort of "related by substance" to Him and, as a result, assumes a limited God-like nature. Augustina God-Loves here husband whist most other women flesh-Love theirs.

Now I harp on about Caritas (no one else seems to in this corner of the blogosphere) because the lack of Cartitas is THE fundamental problem ailing the West. Caritas makes you stick at it when the everything is bleak. We divorce, because we find our partners unattractive and thus screw them over. We let the Left win because we feel like lounging poolside. We allowed ourselves to be silenced by PC because we're scared of what other people may think of us. But look at the early Christians. They were flogged, tortured and fed to the animals, but they would not renounce the faith or do evil. They were full of Caritas, we are full of shit.

We've rejected God's nature and have reverted back to our default Pagan mode--look about you--except this time, with far less discipline than in the early stages of Ancient Rome or Greece.  We all know how Rome and Greece ended up.

........................

As an aside, and pertinent to my recent posts on the role of language and conceptual development/retardation, the wiki article also notes the danger of conception failure due to the non specificity of the word "love"; 
Confusion can arise from the multiple meanings of the English word "love". The love that is caritas is distinguished by its origin, being divinely infused into the soul, and by its residing in the will rather than emotions, regardless of what emotions it stirs up.

and;

Note that the King James Version uses both the words charity and love to translate the idea of caritas / ἀγάπη: sometimes it uses one, then sometimes the other, for the same concept. Most other English translations, both before and since, do not; instead throughout they use the same more direct English word love, so that the unity of the teaching should not be in doubt. Love can have other meanings in English, but as used in the New Testament it almost always refers to the virtue of caritas.
Rigorous minds, aware of the distinction will appreciate the contextual difference in meaning but weak minds, some in places of high authority will not. The Biblical meaning of love is quite specific to Caritas. I honestly wonder why English translators of the Bible did translate the word as Caritas and avoid confusion of meaning rather than using the word "love" which opens up the Bible to "Eat, Pray, Love" types of interpretations.

Deus Caritas est is translated in English to God is Love, but since love can have so many different meanings in the English language this translation is wide open to abuse. Since Caritas is a specific type of love with no equivalent English word, the translation, no matter how stylistically awkward, should be God is Caritas.  It's just another example of how limitations in language can sytmie concept development and further the development of bad thought.


23 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:30 pm

    Kantian duty. Philosophers have been rubbishing it for 200 years, and yet she worked it out for herself and lived it, as her own imperative.

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  2. Caritas flows from the virtues and is, thus, oft missed in the modern world

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  3. This is the type of thing that either gets instilled by the parents, a radical religious conversion, or likely (and today sadly never at all).

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  4. Thanks for this - great post.

    Ian Ironwood goes on at length (as is his wont) about caritas, it's place in marriage, and it's origins in pre-Christian paganism here:
    http://theredpillroom.blogspot.ca/2012/10/and-now-brief-public-service.html

    I suspect you'll disagree with his editorializing about what Christianity did it, but it *is* someone else in the androsphere who addresses it. Cheers.

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  5. Thank you for writing this post.

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  6. @anon

    It ain't Kantian duty. It's bigger than that.

    @Aquinas Dad.

    Hmmmmm. I'm not really sure about that. Plenty of Nazi's and Communists were brave and kind to each other. Lots of the brutal SS had bucket loads of courage but were ultimately bastards in the end.

    The famous passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians deals with this matter. Virtues can exist independent of Caritas, but it is only Caritas which orientates them to their proper ends. A brave man with Caritas will never use his bravery in the pursuit of evil, whilst a brave man without it can.

    MK

    You can't instill it, that's the problem. Lots of good Christian families have sons and daughters that have gone bad. It's a gift from God given freely. Why some and not others? I don't know.

    Roe, thanks for the link. I hadn't read it before.

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  7. " I would go further than he does and assert that Caritas, expressed in act, perfects all things.(Including marriages which would otherwise fail.) Caritas should not just to be thought of as a friendship towards God and Man but extending to all things, including the physical and animal world. It is the foundation from which all good things come. A man (or woman) in possession of Caritas has some of the "stuff of God" in him and thereby becomes sort of "related by substance" to Him and, as a result, assumes a limited God-like nature. Augustina God-Loves here husband whist most other women flesh-Love theirs."
    I agree with this, SP.

    Blessed Anna Maria Taigi possessed Caritas. She devoted her life to loving and serving God. She did this by being a good wife and mother and accepting God's will above all else.

    True Caritas, can only come from God. Anna Maria was able to give so much because God conferred Caritas upon her. The more she gave the more she received. She totally surrendered herself to God.
    God transformed a simple wife and mother into a saint.
    This is a beautiful uplifting story.
    http://taigivision.com/life/life.html
    I learnt about Anna Maria Taigi from my dear mother.

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  8. Your link to the comment is broken.

    My own reaction is very different: She was irresponsible since she put so little effort into assessing a potential husband. Either that or she had enough warning signs and ignored them.

    Why was she so irresponsible? Her desire for a large family caused her to lower her standards and just take a guy who wanted the same thing. She was pursuing her own selfish desires.

    She had an especially large responsibility to choose wisely precisely because of her goal of a large family. She was going to depend on him not just to help support one or two kids but rather many kids.

    Kantian duty: Nonsense. She had a strong instinct to make babies.

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  9. @ Randall

    Thanks. Link's fixed.

    The question here is not why she wanted to get married, but why did she stay. There were plenty enough reasons for her to go, and the Government would have picked up the bills. Financial security didn't seem the issue.

    She was quite explicit in the reason why she stayed--she couldn't do her partner harm. She is either lying about this or telling the truth. If she is telling the truth then other imputations of her motives are false.

    Lots of women get married for a wide variety of reasons and then subsequently divorce. The interesting question is, why do they stay when they have every reason and opportunity to go.

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  10. @Kathy

    A bit too holy for my tastes. Hyper-religiosity has always given me the willies; I've never been comfortable with it.

    I mean, what would have it been like to be her husband? No seriously. If your wife is getting visions and is always focused on God, well then sex with her is just going to feel.......wrong. I'm not being flippant here. Part of husband-wife love is just that, it's husband and wife. I know quite a few husbands of very Churchy women and let's just say that the marriage ain't that great from their perspective.

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  11. HeinrichVonChambermeister6:24 pm

    Dear Social Pathologist,

    Happy New Year and hope you had a very Merry Christmas.

    Having followed your writings for a while I would greatly appreciate your take on the following issues.

    I am currently in the process of rediscovering my faith and in a state of conundrum with conflicting advice I've been getting from skeptical online sources and CINOs (Christian in name only).

    Thus I highly value your intellect and opinion regarding the following matters. What is your stance on infant baptism? Is it biblical? Does one who was infantry baptized as a Catholic need to go through the process again if they have turned away from it? Or does one require a baptism of the Holy Spirit and have a born again experience?

    How do you correctly pray? Is praying to saints, angels like Michael and the blessed Virgin Mary biblical and why would you have them intercede on one's behalf if the Holy Spirit & one's guardian angel is said to aid in prayer?

    Can a Catholic join fraternal orders such as Knights of Malta and Freemasonry?

    At the present moment, I am learning toward either fundamental evangelical Baptist/Calvinism (John MacArthur) or the Catholic Church. Would really appreciate your consul before committing fully. Recent statements by the Pope hasn't really helped either.

    "Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth." Ephesians 4:28

    Charity can only come from abundance of resources, why is honest work accumulating in order to give away & help the needy condemned? The only solution to poverty in this fallen world is hard work if I am not mistaken reading Genesis & Adam tending the garden.

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  12. @Heinrich

    What is your stance on infant baptism? Is it biblical?

    As a Catholic, my position is that infant baptism is valid, and you do not have to be re-baptised if you have fallen from the faith and returned to it. Once is enough.

    How do you correctly pray?

    Books have been written about this, but it would be safe to say that there is no defined way of prayer. If you're unsure what to do, pray the Our Father and start off with that. Even asking a simple question of God is like a prayer. The desire is to communicate with Him, be in His presence and to know Him is a beginning. Imperfect prayer, done with good intention is pleasing to God.

    As for praying to the Saints and Mary, you're not strictly praying to them at all, rather you're asking them to put a good word in for you with God. I personally don't do much of this. God is accessible to all who seek him. You don't need intercessory prayer. I prefer to go directly to the source.

    Veneration of the Saints and Relics is one of the reasons why I suspect the Catholic Church is the the best version of Christianity. The more I have become aware of human cognitive limitations, the more I see the sense of having things like confession, ceremonies and venerations as aids in the practice of the faith. People have a hard time with abstract concepts like God. Giving them something physically tangible helps with their worship. I am quite able to abstract and, thus, find much incense and statuary distracting. I prefer my Churches simple and austere.

    It's big faith with room for all types of aesthetic preferences.

    Can a Catholic join fraternal orders such as Knights of Malta and Freemasonry?

    It depends on the order and its aims.

    Knights of Malta is OK. Freemasonary is not. Look the details up on Google.

    Recent statements by the Pope hasn't really helped either.

    The Pope doesn't bother me. His private statements are just that, private. His comments only become important when they are meant to be specific teaching, which his off the cuff comments and exhortation were not. I wasn't a big fan of his exhortation.

    I'd like to see you become Catholic, not because I think there aren't any good things amongst the Evangelicals, rather, there are more good things in the Catholic Church. However, the Church does have its problems and one of them, I think, is its theology of work. Here, the Protestants outclass the Catholics clearly.

    With the lamentable implosion of the Protestant faiths in Europe and the Anglosphere, it's my hope that at some of the good Protestants will cross over and join my Church, bringing some of the good things of Protestantism with them. In my opinion, my Church needs their influence.

    Good luck for the New Year and best Wishes.

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  13. What's not clear to me is why she married this guy in the first place, given the lack of contact, let alone the lack of attraction. I wonder if maybe she was motivated by *fear* and was eager to get married in order to obtain security.

    When she says "It was like being on a ship, but with no captain to guide it. And the waters are full of icebergs, rocky shoals, submerged reefs, and vast stretches of the doldrums"...that is very good writing...I don't know anything about their situation, of course, but for most people, this would seem to be an overstatement of the risks and dangers they face. Which again makes me wonder about fear-motivation.

    I do give her a lot of credit for thinking about her husband's feelings, in a way that most women in a similar situation probably would not.

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  14. David, I've had a lot of frank conversations with women with regard to their motivations for marriage.

    Some have quite frankly admitted that they didn't "want to be left on the shelf", others have told me that it was to escape their overtly strict parents. Others still had misgivings about the relationship but could not pull out of the marriage because of other peoples expectations. Some thought of it as a right of passage, others were infatuated with the idea of a wedding, and others wanted children. Though none had ever mentioned it explicitly, I got the impression that for some of them, the husband was a meal ticket which meant they didn't have to work. She's not that unusual.

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  15. Jason9:40 am

    You’re absolutely right doctor: I think that the lack of caritas – and strongly connected to this, the fatalism and the determinism of so many Alt-Right writers and those who follow them (caritas is almost always a choice and even more important: action, which in turn requires courage and risk to go against outside forces on occasion) – is the Achilles Heel of the Alt-Right movement (and of the West generally), something that will destine it to failure no matter how many other things it gets right.
    On that cheerful note: Happy new year!

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  16. @SP

    Regarding your talk about marriage motivations there is one myth that I want to dispel. That somehow what we want women to do is to "women up" and "settle" because its the logical thing to do in XYZ case. I think this is a bad attitude. Not because its not technically true (often women are completely unrealistic) but because entering a marriage from the attitude of resign settling is asking that marriage to be a failure.

    Unless the attitude of the woman is changed, she begins to realize she isn't actually settling but instead this is the appropriate partner for her and celebrates it, then it won't work. Changing that attitude requires a much larger change in psychology then just "giving up". I imagine it takes effort, time, community, family, and faith.

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  17. Spanking Emmeline2:12 pm

    I posted the following on the wrong thread. Have posted it here for clarity.

    It’s unwise to impute victimhood to Augustine by linking her story to an absence of Eros. There are too many questionable elements in her story to draw this conclusion. Apart from the long time gaps, in which must exist a great number of qualifying and mitigating factors, her husband could not have been the obscure neglectful creature she describes and still enable such sacrificial devotion from her. She doesn't speak of God, so to what is her devotion?

    She writes:

    "I wanted to be the good Christian wife, and be submissive to my husband. But there was nothing to submit to."

    Where is Christ in this? She displays none of the character of the sacrificial servant who seeks to build worth in her marriage. She writes only of her response to perceptions of worth in her husband. The sacrificial relationship - the character defined by covenant marriage - is absent prior to his illness.

    Notice that she doesn’t write of being submissive, merely of wanting to be. Wifely submissiveness is not a desire but an action. A good Christian wife doesn’t submit to her husband because of anything he does or is. She submits to him because it’s what God wants from her. Christian love in all of its forms - Eros, Agape, Filia, Storge, and Caritas require sacrifice of one's own desires for the benefit of the other. They impute self-abasement, humility and gratitude. There's a strong sense of charity in the latter part of Augustine’s story, but where’s the self-abasement, humility and gratitude?

    Augustine seems to have married for her own purposes. On what basis is she entitled to God blessing through Eros? That she spent no time with her husband before agreeing to marry him suggests her desire to be married and have lots of children were more important to her than serving God. Procreation is not the same as serving God. This attachment to Mother Earth is very likely the fundamental source of every woman's rebellion; Augustine shows no sign of understanding this.

    What of her behaviour in the fifteen years she perceived her husband to be failing at leadership? Was she generous, patient, kind, feminine, encouraging and respectful, or was she increasingly expectant, demanding, insinuating, mocking and shaming? There's a rebellious certitude and forthrightness in her writing that suggests it might be the latter, irrespective of the revelations of her husband’s illness. Ex post facto duty or guilt doesn’t remove the rebelliousness.

    To be continued...

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  18. Spanking Emmeline2:13 pm

    ...continued from above.

    She also talks of divorce as if a Christian woman who's not getting what she wants from her marriage has a right to such a thing. Jesus made no concession for divorce under any circumstances in his ministry:

    "What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Mark 10:9).

    The Bible tells Christians that divorce is permissible only when there is sexual immorality (Matthew 5:32; 19:9) - note that 'permissible' does not make it a right. Yet Augustine writes of contemplating divorce because her expectations of marriage were not met. Even when she avoids divorce and remains with her husband, she remains out of pity rather than to honour her covenant with God. She adds an interesting comment about trust; that violating trust is akin to murder. I agree, but I submit that the violation took place when she started despising him in her heart because her expectations of him were not being fulfilled.

    What of her complaint about her husband’s failure to lead the family and provide for his household? A man is not appointed by God as the leader or provider in any practical sense. His headship is spiritual. His responsibility is to be the spiritual head of his wife, which is for Christ’s sake not merely hers and his family’s. His success or failure in this role is not for his wife to judge (how can she judge in her fallen state?). Indeed, how can her husband be deemed a failure when she herself is now demonstrating sacrificial love in the character of Christ when it counts despite her prior rebellion and self-righteous protestations?

    Yet still she writes:

    "I don’t get much out of my marriage. For all intents and purposes I am like a single mother, and I often wish I had romance in my life. I have never had romantic love, and doubt that I will ever experience it in my life. "

    There is no charity in this statement, only self-pity. She talks of romantic love as if it were something a Christian should strive for, when 'romance' is bathed more and more in fantasy, allegory and embellishment. God promises nothing of the sort in marriage. Covenant marriage is not about romance. It is not about a woman's desire for her husband. It is about the fundamental relationship between a man and a woman in which the character of the sacrificial servant of God is to be cultivated. It is nothing less.

    If all of this sounds cold and uninviting to a secular confessional, then so be it. To a Christian, it's where God’s blessings begin. To the faithless, sacrificial marriage looks very much like the empty life absent of Eros that Augustine has created for herself.

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  19. ElectricAngel4:42 am

    You can't instill it, that's the problem. Lots of good Christian families have sons and daughters that have gone bad. It's a gift from God given freely. Why some and not others? I don't know.

    If I might make an analogy, it's like worker bees and queen bees. Both have the identical genetic makeup, but one is fed a diet of Royal Jelly which expresses different genes in her and causes her to become a queen.

    I suspect ALL are granted some measure of caritas, with the ones like Augustina getting a "genetic" predisposition to a lot of it. Put into the right environment, it is exercised and grows; in the wrong environment, it atrophies. Most women, and most men, would not go through with what Augustina did.

    I can tell you that my own conversion on this topic was your masterpiece post on charity two years ago. With an understanding of charity as a Christian type of tikkun olam, the suffering that comes from opposition is actually kind of fun as you see yourself takng part in perfecting God's creation. I had a misconception of charity and love, and you fixed that, Doctor (from Latin docere, to teach).

    Now, to your further point on alt-rightists ignoring charity. Much of the social dominance and evo psych that is the scientific underpinning of, call it, Roissyist philosophy, is true, correct, an understanding of the world and God comparable to what the ancient Greeks had before they heard the Good News. But it is true because it is a subset of charity, which is undertaken correctly leads one to a situation of "amused mastery," the highest sort of "alpha." OTherwise, you can use partial charity to become an "aloof asshole" and go lounge poolside.

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  20. Can you tell us:
    How old is she?
    How much does she weigh?
    Is she pretty (for a 40 year old)?
    Is she employable?

    If she had to settle for a low-market-value man, I presume she must have been a low-market-value woman herself. Life sucks for a man to be short and low-status. Life sucks for a woman to be fat and unattractive.

    Let this saint get a divorce and work full time and rent a house and get some cats and enter the 40-year-old-woman dating scene.

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  21. Christinas World, I actually live in the area this painting represents. My parents parents world, it was no doubt a better place.

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  22. @Locard

    I found America to be a very beautiful country.

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  23. Please permit the scriptural definition of "Caritas" / "Agape". Btw, agape/caritas is ALL "decent" behavior and is a "gift" from YHVH as noted in the scriptures.

    Love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous, it does not boast, it does not become conceited, 5 it does not behave dishonorably, it is not selfish, it does not become angry, it does not keep a record of wrongs, 6 it does not rejoice at unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.Love never ends.

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