I am the one who posted this originally, I am responding to what Mithrandylan said in reply.
Thank you for what you said, I had no idea this was the history behind the painting. It is good to know. I found this painting posted on a traditional Catholic website, speaking of traditional customs surrounding courtship. The point of that article and my post was to emphasize that the proper order of things is for the father to be the one who introduces a suitor to his daughter, in order to properly help her choose a good husband. I did not realize the significance of the fact that this was occurring in a train.
I hear what you're saying about the problem with trains. But are there not legitimate and even praiseworthy reasons for using them, such as visiting family or going on a pilgrimage? St. Thérèse of Lisieux was accompanied by her father and sister Céline to Rome on a pilgrimage, which involved trains. The dangers involved in inappropriate dealings with strangers are mitigated as long as one has an appropriate chaperone, right? I do understand that ideally one ought to find a spouse that one has already known due to living in the same village as you have described. I may not be understanding you correctly, but it seems you are against (in principle) people generally meeting strangers in order to marry.
However as has been said, one never truly knows who they marry until they get married. Some people are really good at putting on a front of piety and goodness, when in reality they are terrible in private, and there is no more intimate relationship than what one has with a spouse, where faults are revealed as in no other human relationship. And since courtships are supposed to be short, there is not necessarily enough time in general, or enough time for suffering to happen, to really see what people are like under pressure.
Ultimately as it applies in our days, we ought to teach people how to discern well the characters of others, including discerning the soul of a man by his appearance, according to the teachings of the saints, as for example given here: https://www.cathinfo.com/the-library/discern-a-man's-soul-by-his-appearance/msg1020020/#msg1020020
What I thought the painting was portraying is a woman under the guidance of her father in choosing a spouse, which is all I was promoting. A father can be very helpful and more objective, since he is more apt to view the man as a potential predator than the blushing, naive girl.
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For the record, I understood that your point was nothing other than the importance of a woman's male guardian screening suitors.
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We are SO divorced from the natural mode of social and economic organization that Solomon's painting passes as something exemplary when in fact what it depicts is part of the very problem we're dealing with.
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Whether or not mass transit can be used morally is totally beside the point (of course it can). The point is that travel facilitated the destruction of local communities because it emancipated men and women from their immediate environments. And then it (travel) became regarded as "necessary" because it was the only way to maintain the social and economic ties that it played a pivotal role destroying. Travel is only "necessary" because your friends, family, and economy no longer belong to your immediate environment. And that is a profound perversion of the natural mode of social organization.
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Everyone has heard that the family is the building block of society. But that isn't just some Reaganite platitude, it's literally-- even metaphysically-- true. Every society is nothing other than a family that got really big. Every people is nothing other than a family with very extended roots. All bound to the same place, all committed to different roles aimed at supporting the local common good. If you don't have that, you don't have a society in any way that any of your ancestors would recognize.
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It is through basic society that the institution of marriage is promoted and maintained-- effortlessly. In a proper society there is always a pool of suitors, and its members are boys and men with whom young ladies have already been interacting with since they were small. Suitors who are employed by the young lady's father already, or at least by his friends. Suitors who are known to the young lady's family-- not just now, but dating back indefinitely. The suitors own upbringings, family histories, etc. are all already known. Everyone has a shared history, a shared set of moral, social, and economic expectations. We've never experienced what it's like to live in a society like that. I don't think we understand how foundational that kind of society is to human flourishing-- nor do we appreciate that those are actually the
normal human conditions under which virtually all our ancestors lived.
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This of course does not mean that all marriages in the pre-modern age were flawless, nor does it mean that a young lady's father doesn't play a critical role in helping her discriminate suitors. Discretion is still required. But the point is that from top to bottom society was organized in a way that naturally and effortlessly lent itself to the pairing off of men and women for marriage.
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The point? The difference between courtship today and courtship of yesterday is
not that fathers used to be involved and now they aren't. The differences are SO much more radical than that, and although fathers DO need to be involved, involving them is nowhere CLOSE to a restoration of the systems required to support proper family formation, development, and growth.
Topic: Church fathers on finding a husband? (Read 8317 times)