I read in Fr. Barron's article this month in "Christ is our Hope" ("The Acts We Perform; the People We Become", p.15), his reminder to young people (and all of us), that what we do in our lives makes us who we are. This Aristotelean/Thomistic idea of virtue is applied to sexual ethics, and in particular, the horrendous, practice of "hooking up" sexually, which is an ever greater part of our youth culture, says Barron. (I haven't seen statistics on this; I assume he is correct, but don't exactly know.)
This way of thinking of what we do in life is very valid. But I want to offer a complementary perspective drawing from Plato by way of Adriaan Peperzak. The two approaches are not in conflict, but reinforce one another.
In his book Platonic Transformations, at p. 10-11, Peperzak writes:
"Plato neither condems nor represses the life of desires, angers, hopes, fears, pleasures, and pains; on the contrary, he wants to save them . . . by having them concretize and express their dvine essence. Most often, this essence is hidden, underdeveloped, and more or less perverted. Well-guided askesis is needed to purify the emotions, to let them grow in association with other elements of a human life, and to cultivate them through appropriate modes of expression. When Aristotle appeals to 'that which has logos' (to logon echon) and states that no life can be good if it is not ruled by that element, he does not proclaim a new doctrine; but Plato was more outspoken about the nondiscursive 'light' that is necessary to give virtuous behavior its ultimate orientation.
"That Socrates' erotic strategy aimed at ultimate meaning shows how close he was to religion. Karl Albert has shown that Plato, notwithstanding his enlightened departure from popular mythology, continues a relgious tradition when he interprets the phenomenal world in the light of ideas, the Good, the One, admiration, immortality, etc. Since the modern secularization has taken hold of many minds, the protest against Platonic sublimation has not stopped. Ideas, immaterial principles, spiritual determinations, and reason as law have been indicted in the name of sensibility, the body, passions, Dionysos, and life itself. Plato's 'metaphysics' is said to be the source of oppression and alienation. According to Plato -- in company with Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel -- such accusations reveal an ungodly and unmusical mindset. Logos, reason, ideas, the Good, and essences are not hostile to the sensible, sensitive, and tasteful experience of material phenomena, emotions, world, and liberty. On the contrary, the corporeal world can and must be saved from chaos and wildness; it must be ennobled and made beautiful, but this will not succeed if we are unable to bring the different dimensions of our being into harmony.
"An illustration of Plato's approach can be found in the contrast between Aristophanes and Diotima in the Symposium. According to Aristophanes' tragicomedy, the erotic destiny of human individuals lies in their being only half of what they originally were and had to be. This fact condems them to a chase for the other half. Humans are not free for love and in loving; our true existence is realized only during short moments of sexual union. The rest of our lives is nostalgia and dissatisfaction.
"Diotima, however, teaches Socrates that an aristophanic love makes human lives unhappy. Fascination by one or many bodies cannot fulfill the desire that constitutes the human essence. A certain distance from infatuation -- a distance that is interior and does not exclude any erotic involvement -- is needed to be free in love. Freedom with regard to my own spontaneous eroticism can only be the effect of another, 'higher' or more profound dimension of eros. The most sublime eros, granting freedom, is a condition for freely loving another free and erotic person. While Aristophene's conception was presented as a poetic myth, Socrates' insight was the gift of a priestess. Philosophy refers to religion, but it tries to understand why and to what extent religion is right. Similar remarks can be made about the mania of the Phaedrus: only a flight toward the dimension of the divine can save us from the fascinations that make us crawl."
In my own experiences of love and my reflections on them, I acknowledge how essential it is to struggle to escape my lower desires, which I know, if followed, will inexorably result not in freedom but in "chaos and wilderness." I appreciate Peperzak's (and originally Plato's) insight that our thinking and doing (i.e. our lives) must be guided by something higher, a divine element. Levinas' thought similarly emphasizes our need to be servants to this higher Other. And I especially appreciate Peperzak's validation of the religious (the "light" that guides reason) as the end of our reflections on life's meaning (and, of course, of life itself). This is an essential counter-remedy for so much current thinking that sees our world as bereft of God. That illness, I believe, is ultimately behind the "hook up" mentality, a form of "despair" in which the inspiration, the light, the music, of the divine has left us.
How can we help our loved ones see that this is the opposite of "the way things are"?
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