The defence of the family and the reconquest of its values
In last Friday’s webinar, Attacks against the family: a historical overview, Professor Roberto de Mattei elucidated exactly what is at stake in the battle between opposing conceptions of the family — that conceived by the philosophical realism of St Thomas Aquinas and those conceived by the succession of subjective philosophies which have arisen since the sixteenth century.
“Luther denied that matrimony is a sacrament, and, consistent with this position, denied its indissolubility. He affirmed that matrimony could be dissolved ipso facto by infidelity on the part of one of the spouses… Divorce spread widely in the following centuries in Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican countries, but civil divorce was officially introduced in public institutions only after the French Revolution.”
Even more than the Protestant Revolt, it was the spirit of 1789 which would become the mother and model of all subsequent attacks on the family. Nowhere is this more evident that in the “philosophy” of one of the French Revolution’s most influential children, the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814).
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