Symposium: The Real Don John

This article is in response to “What Can Pornography Teach Us About Love?” by Michael Bradley and is part of the symposium, “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.”

I must confess I have never seen the movie Don Jon, and even if I had I would have nothing original to say on the matter. Between Michael Bradley’s excellent work, and that of my friend John Goerke, the virtues and vices of the film have been thoroughly and adequately dissected.

One thing I find amusingly ironic about the film is the choice of the main character’s nickname. He is given the name “Don Jon” for his skillful ability to lure countless women to his bed, but what is striking is that some few hundred years ago there was a very real person, a member of the Austrian Royal family, and his name was also Don John. Most who remember him today only do so because he was immortalized in G.K. Chesterton’s poem Lepanto, which of course, was the great naval battle between The Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, and in that battle Don John saved Europe from invasion and freed 12,000 Christian slaves.

However, Chesterton’s most profound tribute to Don John is not based on anything the great man did do, but on something he didn’t. Chesterton once read a passing remark on how Don John had intended to marry Mary Queen of Scots, and Chesterton proceeded to write an essay appropriately titled “If Don John of Austria had Married Mary Queen of Scots.”

Chesterton mused on the fact that love is often the one thing that will make good men commit terrible acts. Nearly every page of history from Troy to Actium testifies to that fact. In contrast to this, Chesterton said of John and Mary that “they were made for each other; they were in fact the heroic lovers… for whom we have looked elsewhere in history in vain.”

But what made them so great? Chesterton continued to say of Don John, “he was not incapable of enjoying fear as an element in a mystery like that of love. It is exactly because love has lost that slight touch of fear, that it has become in our time so flat and flippant and vulgar; when it has not become laboriously biological, not to say bestial.”

As Michael Bradley aptly noted, the film’s Don Jon only found love when he embraced the other person for who she was – baggage and all. A grave responsibility and a frightening prospect. But acknowledging a healthy amount of fear, and appreciating its mystery, is what distinguishes Jon and John.