Eamonn Clark, STL

See parts One and Two

The third great principle: the emotions are not the body.

At this point in our series, some might be thinking, “This is totally unrealistic! You are saying it’s wrong to have feelings!” No, not quite. Let’s dig into the distinctions even further.

Seeing “her” or thinking of “him” is going to cause an emotional response. This emotional response will have its physical effects – the heart, the face, the knees – and there might be an automatic sexual impulse (arousal), or even a kind of “pre-sexual” impulse or pleasure which is even more preparatory, in the body as well that comes along as a result. Insofar as it is not specifically being desired, or there is not some special reason one ought not to be having such thoughts, it is not going to be a moral problem. How to distinguish, then, between the allowance of some feelings and not others? The ego, or the psyche, has its own proper objects for pleasure in a certain way. Consider the thrills which accompany the following statements: “She wants to go out with me!” and, “Maybe he and I really could have a life together!” When mixed with the blameless perception of the good of that individual “as” masculine or feminine (what was described above as “love”), some “overflow” of the emotions into the organs is natural and normal and without blame in itself, as it is simply generally unavoidable when romancing, just like salivating and starting to feel hungry with the cheeseburger. Sometimes, just being around the cheeseburger is enough to get one going.

The emotions experienced by the hope of being paid attention to by HER, or the chance of being emotionally affirmed by HIM, let alone the actual experience of these things, is principally an experience of one’s psyche, of the other person as such, which then overflows into the body in other ways. As long as the point remains to experience the other person socially rather than to have increasingly intense physical experiences within one’s own body, leading to a sexual experience of the other person (even if not yet “physically intimate”), that is, by experiencing the person for the sake of that sexual desire which is growing, one will generally be doing alright.

Rational goods, which all of lower human powers exist to serve, are principally two: truth, corresponding to our intellect, and friendship, corresponding to our will. We will come back to this later, but it is important to note here that the pursuit of these things, in this case the special kind of friendship which romance entails, is what we are created for. All of our emotions, and even our bodies, exist so that we can pursue the truth in a community of friends. This is only perfectly fulfilled in Heaven. But for now, we have our broken world, in which we can find a slice of what is to come in good and solid human friendships, including the intense kind of friendship called marriage, which implies a preparatory and penultimate friendship of courtship or dating.

But there is risk, we should note. The distinction between the social and the sexual leads in the context of the fallen world in which we find ourselves calls to mind the risk of sin, and this takes us onward to the fourth great principle, “risks can be justified by proportionate rewards.”