Week 2 blog

"Marriage is not the supreme realization of love, but rather a legal, social, and economic form whose purposes are different from love's.  The stability of the family depends upon marriage. To attack it is to attack the very bases of society. And love, for the same reason, is an antisocial act, though not deliberately so" (Octavio Paz, The Dialectic of Solitude, pg. 199). 

In his work, The Dialectic of Solitude, Octavio Paz explores man’s innate nature to desire to be separated from those around him. Paz explains that beginning at birth when a man is thrust from the womb of his mother his journey is one of solitude. As part of this theory Paz assesses marital relationships. He argues that “marriage is not the supreme realization of love”. Instead, Paz believes that marriage is merely a construct of our society, a means of reproducing.

            This section of the Paz’s text reminded my of The Family: A Proclamation to The World, as well as a few principles that I have learned recently in my Book of Mormon class. In my class, as we studied Alma chapter 30, we discussed ways that the persecutors of The Church can manipulate the truth in an attempt to deceive the saints. Corihor (an anti-Christ in the Book of Mormon) states, “ye say that this people is a guilty and a fallen people, because of the transgression of a parent. Behold I say that a child is not guilty because of its parents” (Alma 30:1).  He mixes the truth with a false teaching. We believe that we are a fallen people, but not because of “the transgression of a parent.

            Similarly, Paz, in his essay combines a truth with a falsehood. First he states that, “Marriage is not the supreme realization of love, but rather a legal, social, and economic form whose purposes are different from love's”, but then explains: “The stability of the family depends upon marriage. To attack it is to attack the very bases of society”. The Family: A Proclamation to the World informs us that marriage is indeed the supreme realization of love, but also that society depends on stable marriages and families.

 I do not mean to condemn Octavio Paz nor to equate him with Corihor. Instead I make the comparison between the statements of these two figures to describe the ways in which the truth can be made obscure by misunderstanding. Often, we are faced with statements which contain both true and false. Therefore, it is our responsibility to learn to discern between the two.