A while back I ordered a new copy of St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life because my old one was falling apart, and as I was reading it, it felt like something was missing. So, I checked it against the old copy, and it was the section where he talks about chaste sexual love among married couples. It had been edited out in that edition, which was based on a late 19th or early 20th century British edition. So, I think there was an excessive prudery about that topic in that era, even when they are talking about it in the context of virtue!
What a bizarre and ostensible betrayal of some publishing principle to which I am not privy but of which I feel intuitively. Preface the chapter if they must with some kind of warning, but let the man speak. Otherwise I the reader am being infantilized. Arcane as some of his perceptions might be, I find the connection between the impulses concerning food and fornication timelessly sound. Thanks for composing the post.
A while back I ordered a new copy of St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life because my old one was falling apart, and as I was reading it, it felt like something was missing. So, I checked it against the old copy, and it was the section where he talks about chaste sexual love among married couples. It had been edited out in that edition, which was based on a late 19th or early 20th century British edition. So, I think there was an excessive prudery about that topic in that era, even when they are talking about it in the context of virtue!
What a bizarre and ostensible betrayal of some publishing principle to which I am not privy but of which I feel intuitively. Preface the chapter if they must with some kind of warning, but let the man speak. Otherwise I the reader am being infantilized. Arcane as some of his perceptions might be, I find the connection between the impulses concerning food and fornication timelessly sound. Thanks for composing the post.