Description
On your screens are images of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (below) and Madame de Warens (above). She took him in when he was poor and not yet famous.
Without going into details of their relationship (although it is very interesting, I have never encountered this before), I want to draw your attention to her attitude to Christian morality, given the fact that she considered herself a good Catholic and even received a pension from the church. You know, I’m tired of being surprised by this kind of thing, especially since in our time you can find many worse examples. But at that moment, when I read “The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau”, where the quote in the picture was actually taken from, it outraged me to the core. And yesterday, when I drank two glasses of cognac at my mother’s birthday, returning home, I remembered this and called out into the void: “People, are you all really like that?” And then I was horrified and thought, am I really like that! And then I reassured myself: “Well, no, I’m certainly not like that.” And now I’m thinking about what kind of person I am... Our poet Yegor Letov probably answered this question most succinctly and best: “Since the time of Christ, there have been no innocents.”
To be honest, I am confused in all of this: what is good, what is bad, what is allowed, what is unacceptable, what is appropriate, what does not make sense. But I cannot tolerate petty swindlers who refer to God when arranging their earthly life, so I had to shoot the face of Madame de Warens.
Below I quote the original excerpt and apologize to Rousseau for attributing to him what he did not say, in fact, he loved Madame de Warens very much, despite the contradictions in her worldview.
"Had there been no Christian morality established, I am persuaded she would have lived as if regulated by its principles, so perfectly did they seem to accord with her disposition. She did everything that was required; and she would have done the same had there been no such requisition: but all this morality was subordinate to the principles of M. Tavel, or rather she pretended to see nothing in religion that contradicted them; thus she would have favored twenty lovers in a day, without any idea of a crime, her conscience being no more moved in that particular than her passions. I know that a number of devotees are not more scrupulous, but the difference is, they are seduced by constitution, she was blinded by her sophisms. In the midst of conversations the most affecting, I might say the most edifying, she would touch on this subject, without any change of air or manner, and without being sensible of any contradiction in her opinions; so much was she persuaded that our restrictions on that head are merely political, and that any person of sense might interpret, apply, or make exceptions to them, without any danger of offending the Almighty.
Though I was far enough from being of the same opinion in this particular, I confess I dared not combat hers; indeed, as I was situated, it would have been putting myself in rather awkward circumstances, since I could only have sought to establish my opinion for others, myself being an exception."
The font used is MEK Mono v1.0