https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin
Perhaps the connection is this. The practice of sexual restraint is by its very nature far-sighted and realistic: that is, people understand that the child-making act does indeed make children, and they understand, even if they cannot express it in philosophically rigorous terms, that a child by HIS very nature requires a mother and father committed to one another for life. We are not puppies in a bitch's litter. I'm not just talking about the long period during which the human child is vulnerable. Dogs have no history; we do. We are the time-transcending creatures. Dogs remember; we commemorate. Dogs can, in the short term, anticipate; we plan. We plant trees whose fruit not we but our children will enjoy. We see beyond the local and momentary act, to its principles and to the logical and anthropologically inevitable conclusions they will lead to. THAT KIND OF CREATURE should not be born into what is transient, undependable, without a long past to which we owe debts of gratitude and duty, and without a future that will embrace the past and the present and be fructified by them. A child is the KIND OF CREATURE who has rights to great-grandparents even if they have passed away, in a coherent family line and not a scatter-shot pattern of sexual liaisons held together with spit, and who has rights to an ORDERED extended family, a web of current relationships that reach into the future.
We were sold a bill of goods. Does anybody even bother to claim that it has made people happy? I don't see that. But it has also drastically foreshortened our vision, and now it is not only our experience of time that suffers. So does our experience of the wonder of reality. We are bored, not enthralled, by the truth. And so does our apprehension of the divine. These powers, it seems, are all interinvolved. Why should it show up in the arts, too? Well, consider -- you cannot compose as Bach did unless you are in the habit of seeing far, and seeing the reality of many things at once, and seeing into and through and beyond the merely material, to touch upon the divine. In this way, the structure of a Bach oratorio is like the structure of Chartres cathedral, and like the structure of a Shakespearean play, and like the structure of the interconnected and inter-allusive paintings on the walls and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and like the structure of Thomas's Summa Theologica; and absolutely nothing being done now in the arts, even in our most recent creation, the film, can compare.
