Practical Romance

The Catholic Thing ^ | 30 April 2009 | Brad Miner

[Publius804]

Practical Romance

By Brad Miner

G. K. Chesterton speaks of the human need for “practical romance” — a mixture of something strange with something secure. And the key thing is to be held to account for the risks and rewards of the romantic adventure. Chesterton writes: “If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing. . . . For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable.” And marriage, he says, is the ultimate example of a real and irrevocable result.

Too many modern relationships are rather more informal; commitments are desultory. Why? The reasons are manifold. As Leon Kass has written, the so-called sexual revolution has led to an “erosion of shame and awe” with regard to sexuality, with all the familiar consequences: so many abortions, so many unwed parents, so many fatherless children, so many divorces, so much infidelity, so much voyeurism. Restraint is anathema, and with Edmund Burke we may lament that, not only is chivalry dead. Romance is moribund as well:

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.