Soul, Self, and Society by Rubin Edward L.;

Soul, Self, and Society by Rubin Edward L.;

Author:Rubin, Edward L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2014-03-09T16:00:00+00:00


The Domestication of Love

After all this discussion of sex as a morally relevant aspect of intimate relations between adults, it seems necessary to say something about love. As Chapter 2 discussed, a man’s love for a woman emerged as a theme, and perhaps even as a concept, in the Western World only in the High Middle Ages, when it was assimilated to the prevailing morality of higher purposes. Viewed as a perpetual quest, a yearning after the desired but unattainable love object, this notion of love could be readily applied to courtship but only with difficulty to marriage. The morality of self-fulfillment provides a different approach to the relationship between love and marriage. By regarding love as a source of self-fulfillment rather than a higher purpose, it can integrate love directly into the marital relationship. In other words, it domesticates this previously destabilizing motivation. Now Erec and Enide, the prematurely contented couple of Chrétien de Troyes’s romance, can live happily ever after once they marry. Erec’s love for his wife as both “his sweetheart and his mistress”—as a source of companionship and sexual satisfaction combined—is no longer seen as a dereliction of his duty but as a fulfilling intimate relationship.

This view of love confers a certain status on women, but it does not necessarily require that they be regarded as men’s equals. Rather, gender equality is an independent theme in the morality of self-fulfillment. It does not initially arise from a reinterpretation of heterosexual marriage or from any consideration of women’s relationship to men, but rather from their status as selves and the basic principle of the new morality that each self is entitled to strive for fulfillment by choosing its own life path. Marriage is then transformed, as a consequence of this reconception of life’s meaning and the secondary principle of equality, into a relationship between two equal selves, regardless of their respective genders.

This produces a transformation of marriage as a social institution. In the morality of honor, it was the man’s honor that was at stake in marriage and sexual matters; in the morality of higher purposes, it was the man’s purposes. The woman’s role, in both these systems, was to serve the man as a possession, housekeeper, and progeny producer. Men were entitled to love their wives but cautioned against allowing such tender feelings to interfere with their ability to exercise control over them and the family in general.98 While this was sometimes regarded as means of ensuring that people were not distracted from the more important love of God and thus the higher purpose of saving their eternal souls, it was also understood as a means of insulating the family from the intense and stormy emotions that love engenders, thus preserving it for the more pragmatic higher purpose of social stability.

The morality of self-fulfillment demands that women as well as men should be able to maximize the pursuit of their interests and the use of their abilities. As discussed earlier, it also means that women as well as men should be sexually fulfilled.



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