It is impossible to understand any aspect of the Christian religion unless it is brought into immediate relation with the ultimate goal and purpose of the Faith, which is to say the final end to which human life is ordered. The supreme and all-important goal of our religion is God, for we have been created in order that we may realize an eternal union with our Creator. The aim of the Christian religion is the eternal union of man with God in body, soul, and spirit. The Prayer Book relates Christian marriage directly to this end, for the preamble to the marriage service states that “matrimony is an honorable estate, instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church.” In other words, Holy Matrimony is the highest earthly analogy of that creative union of God and man, Christ and Church, which is the end and fulfillment of human life.
It is for this reason that Christian marriage has the dignity of a sacrament, that the Song of Songs is admitted to the books of Holy Scripture, and that our Lord constantly employed the symbolism of marriage to explain the meaning of his presence in the world. “Love your wives,” wrote St. Paul to the Ephesians, “as Christ also loved the Church, and delivered himself up for it, that he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of the water of life. … So also ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. … For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak in Christ and the Church.” Thus to understand marriage we must study the union of man with God; and to understand union with God we must study the ideals of Christian marriage.
Eternal life is the state wherein God and man are united in mutual life, so that man participates in the love that is between God and Father and God and Son, God the Lover and God the Beloved, sharing in its unutterable joy. “Every soul,” wrote Coventry Patmore, “was created to be, if it chose, a participator of this felicity, of ‘the glory which the Son had with the Father before the beginning of the world.’ … He who has not attained, through denial of himself, to some sensible knowledge of this felicity, in reality knows nothing; for all knowledge, worthy of the name, is nuptial knowledge.” Our love for God, by means of which we deny ourselves and receive eternal life, is of course the reflection of God’s love for us. “This,” said St. John, “is love; not that we loved God, but that God first loved us.” For God takes the first step in our redemption by giving his very self, in Christ, to each and every member of the human race, for, in our Lord, God is uniting himself to the world. We accept this gift of union with God when we become members of his Church.
This is a truth that cannot receive too much emphasis, not only because no aspect of the Christian Faith is intelligible apart from it, but also because it receives an absolute minimum of attention in modern Church teaching. We talk interminably of how we ought to love God and our neighbors, but say all too little of the infinite love that God has for us. We too easily conceal its immensity and infinity by speaking of it simply as grace, which the average layman understands simply as a handout of power from a distant deity, a dose of spiritual gasoline received at the altar on Sunday, sufficient to last until next week. We do not make it sufficiently clear that God’s love for us is precisely the gift of himself, that by grace we sinful men, through no merit of our own, are given nothing less than eternal union with the divine essence, the very Godhead. The Christian life, Christian morality, Christian sanctity, must be understood as the uproar of thanksgiving and gratitude for this overwhelming gift—not as the price at which we earn our pie in the sky.
For by the power that the gift involves we can begin to love God in return, as a mirror turned toward the sun has the image of the sun within it and reflects the light back to its source. Our lord used this very symbol of sunlight to describe the Father’s love, who, as he said, “maketh his sun to shine upon the evil and the good,” for the divine love is like sunlight in that it pours itself out impartially in an act of pure generosity. It gives itself wholly and seeks no gain, for nothing can be added to the glory of God. Thus love, in the Christian sense of the word, means to give oneself wholly and unreservedly to another.
But in common speech the world love can mean different things. Greek has two words for our one, and generally uses the term agape for the purely generous, self-giving love of God. With the other word, eros, it denotes a self-seeking love, loving something because it supplies that which you lack and for which you hunger. Because he lacks nothing, God’s love is always agape, but since human beings are imperfect and finite, not to say sinful, their love, apart from divine grace, is always eros. Man’s natural love for God, his thirst for divinity, which he has in spite of the fall, is thus also eros, and non-Christian religions, to the extent that they are purely natural religions, are religions of eros-love. But the true sanctity of supernatural religion is where man loves God with God’s own agape-love, exclaiming, to adapt the words of Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I love him!” For the Christian’s love of God is a sharing in Christ’s love for the Father, the self-abandoning and self-emptying love of the cross, which is only possible for the Christian because he is one with Christ.
The distinction between agape and eros explains, too, the difference between Christian marriage and purely natural marriage, for the natural love of man and woman is eros-love. But because a Christian, by virtue of union with God, is capable of agape-love, marriage between Christians is a relationship in which the natural love of man and woman is transformed into the supernatural, the self-seeking type of love into the self-giving.
Now this transformation of natural into supernatural love is not just the addition of some extra cream to the cup of marital bliss. On the contrary, it is something without which the relations between man and woman, husband and wife, are problematic, troubled, and fundamentally unworkable. In complete variance with secular opinion, the Christian doctrine of marriage assumes that, because of the fall, the natural relations of man and woman, whether monogamous, polygamous, or wholly promiscuous, are in a thorough mess. This is no arbitrary theological disgruntlement with the joy of life; it is a strictly realistic and scientific observation. Ever since history was written, the relations of man and woman have been problematic through and through. Look at this modern world that ceases not day and night to praise the joys of natural love, and that goes on seeking them so greedily just because it doesn’t find them. The true commentary on the modern praise of natural love is the concomitant popularity of easy divorce and that staggered polygamy, which subscribes to the frustrating and perpetually disappointing creed that the grass on the other side of the fence is always greener. If this is not enough evidence, one need only turn to the literature of all ages for immense and reiterated witness to the fact that natural love is at root unhappy and frustrated love. The world’s classic love stories—Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice, to mention a few from the Western world alone—are essentially stories of frustrated love, for they reflect the experience of the race.
The Christian sacrament of holy matrimony is not given to the world to deny or to trim the joys of natural love to a minimum. The fact that must be drummed into the secular mind is that Christian marriage is the only alternative to frustration, the only realistic cure for the diseased condition of natural marriage, the only form of essentially happy love. It is not that Holy Matrimony entirely abolishes the problems of marriage, but rather raises them to a level where they become fruitful and redeeming instead of frustrating and damning, where, like the pains of the cross, they have an undertone of essential and absolute joy.
At root the Christian doctrine of marriage is quite simple. Its essence is that Holy Matrimony is constituted by two baptized persons entering into the marriage contract and living together as man and wife. Because they are baptized they are one with Christ and partakers of the divine nature and the divine love. Thus the love that they have for one another must be a degree of agape, God’s own love, for which reason their union is analogous to the union of God and the world in Christ. Such is the basic principle upon which the whole structure of the doctrine depends. It has two primary consequences.
The first is that Holy Matrimony is a state in which the man gives himself wholly to the woman, and the woman to the man, for in the Christian agape sense love can mean nothing less than this. Christian marriage is therefore monogamous and permanent. It is monogamous because the love of one partner for the other is whole and undivided. Only God, being infinite, can give himself wholly to many objects. It is permanent, “til death do us part,” because to give oneself wholly in love means that you give not only what you are now, but also what you will be; you give your whole life, both as it expands in space and in time. Furthermore, you give yourself unreservedly. You burn your bridges behind you; you commit yourself irrevocably and leave no way of escape. If this is rash and foolish, it is none other than the foolishness of that love that showed itself on the cross. For unless you are prepared to do this you do not really love, and if you have the divorce-court in the back of your mind as a way of escape your marriage is not likely to work for the simple reason that your love is incomplete. It is not Godlike love. For the marriage vow to live as one flesh “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health,” to stay by your partner come what may, is precisely a reflection of the love wherein God unites his very self with us to all eternity even though we elect to be damned.
The second consequence may sound more simple than it is: namely, the object of one’s love in the state of Holy Matrimony is another person. The real reason for the failure of natural love is that its object is not really another person; it is oneself—projected upon another. Eros is self-love; it is the love of the sensation, the emotion within oneself that another person arouses. In essence natural love is to be in love with the state of being in love. The other person is merely the occasion for this state. “Eros,” writes Denis de Rougemont, “treated a fellow-creature as but an illusory excuse and occasion for taking fire.” Agape, on the other hand, is outgoing and extraverted; its object is that other unique human person, and is more often a reflection of the creative love of God who gives himself entirely to each one of a multitude of unique beings who are quite other than himself.
The keynote of Christian marriage is therefore wholeness, which is after all the same word as holiness. It is the product of a love in which the lover gives himself wholly to all of the beloved, not a mind, not a soul, not just a woman in the abstract, but that totality of aspects and qualities that adds up to a unique human being. The result of total love is total union, the becoming of one flesh, analogous to the realization of eternal life, the goal of religion, wherein we are one life with God.
So much for the theoretical considerations that lie at the root of the Christian doctrine of marriage. We turn now to their practical application, as I wish to show that this is the only workable and practical philosophy of marriage, and not just a highly specialized and select vocation for super-mystics. We must therefore consider the application of agape-love to the three great aspects of marriage as of man—the three departments that make up the totality of human life: the realm of body, the realm of mind, the realm of spirit. For marriage, like religion, is a bodily, mental, and spiritual union of lover and beloved. Just as a religion without sacraments is like a marriage without physical love, so a marriage without communion of mind and spirit is like a purely ceremonial religion—mere “spikery.”
We shall begin, then, with marriage as bodily union. In the popular view this seems to be the all-absorbing phase of marriage, for it regards marriage and sex as some people regard bread and butter … mostly butter. Important as the sexual aspect of marriage may be, in reality it occupies a very small fraction of one’s married time, and cannot without complete detriment to itself be isolated from or set above the other aspects of marriage. So many marriages fail for the very reason that sexuality is regarded as an end in itself, in ignorance of the fact that, apart from Christian love, sex—like everything else in a fallen world—is a failure.
The Church does not teach, and churchmen should not give the impression, that sex is evil or even a necessary evil. Read your Old Testament. On the contrary, evil is purely spiritual in origin, and sex, like all other material processes and things created by God, is positively good. In common with eating, sleeping, moving and thinking, it is a faculty that becomes evil only when misused. The Church does teach that sex becomes a source of evil when separated from agape-love, and love in that sense implies a marriage. This is, again, no arbitrary restriction based on the assumption that what is very pleasant is wrong. It is a simple statement of fact, of the fact that without total self-giving love the sexual relation is a failure—even on the purely biological plane.
Contrary to the general belief of mankind, the successful sexual relationship does not come naturally to human beings. So far from being a thing to which any mature person can take “as a duck to water,” sexuality is a high art that must be acquired through devotion and discipline like any other art, such as painting or music. Strange to say, many church people find this quite an unfamiliar and sometimes repugnant idea. They are accustomed to thinking of sex as pertaining to the realm of indecency and toiletry, and have no notion at all that it can be supernaturalized. Needless to say, such thinking is wholly vicious and heretical—for if sex is not supernaturalized it becomes at once an occasion of evil, and it makes no difference whether you praise it to the skies, or degrade it to the mud. Both are forms of the same error. Christian marriage alone provides the conditions under which the art of sexuality can be practiced to perfection. However, it is unlike other arts in that almost everyone desires to practice it, and desires it fervently. Failure in the attempt to practice it thus involves serious and wide-spread frustrations, and it is in these that the real evil of misused sex has its origin. This evil consists in the obsessions, fantasies and perverse desires to which sexual failure will so often give rise.
Four conditions, all of which are involved in the Christian concept of marriage, are necessary for the perfection of the art:
1. No art whatever can be called perfect without this first condition, which is that it be done for the glory of God. A Christian is one who tries to do every single daily action for the glory of God, turning his whole life into an act of worship. Sexuality must not be excluded from this worship, for as much as anything else it is done in the eyes of God and will become evil unless dedicated to him. Wherever the danger of evil and temptation lurks, its physical occasion must be offered to God. There is no other escape from sin. But where sex is concerned this is too often the very last thought that will occur, even to the otherwise devout.
2. Self-giving love implies that in the sexual act one must put the pleasure of the other partner before your own. Unhappily our American Prayer Book has omitted the phrase that accompanies the giving of the ring in the English Prayer Book, “with my body I thee worship.” The natural idea of sexual pleasure is the reverse—“with thy body I me worship”—and when this is the motive the act will not be sexual communion at all, but simply self-gratification. Generally speaking, this will mean lack of complete satisfaction for the female partner in particular (her reactions being slower than the male) because the man bent purely on self-gratification will approach the act with thoughtless haste and clumsiness. To overcome this he must have a degree of genuine altruism found only in agape-love. Similar haste and selfishness on the part of the woman, though more rare, will have the same effect.
3. The sexual life of the married couple must have creative issue. (I say “the Sexual life,” because this cannot be said of each sexual act—quite apart from the question of artificial contraception.) It must have creative result just as the union of man and God, if it is to be realized at all, must have creative result: by their fruits ye shall know them, and every tree that beareth not fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. Save in certain abnormal circumstances, childless marriage denigrates into a selfish “twosome,” which, for lack of creative outlet, comes to grief by its own futility. It lacks analogy with God the Creator. Since, too, the sexual act is always liable to produce children, it cannot be entered into with the necessary relaxation and self-abandonment if there is any anxiety as to its results. Only the security of permanent marriage can fully get rid of anxiety and its attendant frustration of pleasure.
4. As in all other arts, the art of prayer or the art of the piano, it is essential that there be constant and regular practice—with the same partner. It may take from five to seven years to reach a real degree of perfection, to attain the full adjustment between two unique and highly complex human organisms—an adjustment that can never be attained if relations are promiscuous. Like temperance, sexual self-control must not be confused with abstinence. A controlled pianist is not one who plays the piano very seldom; he is one who plays it very often and very well. He will, of course, get tired and stale if he plays too much, but the trouble with so many married couples is not that they have too much intercourse, but too much undisciplined and selfish intercourse. The notion that sexual self-control is merely a matter of longish periods of abstinence proceeds from the same fallacy as sexual promiscuity—that ideal relations are normal and natural. They are not; they are supernormal and supernatural. They necessarily involve the total devotion and self-denying love of the other partner, which is the essence of Christian marriage. For such love and such discipline-in-the-act are only possible for one who has realized some measure of union with the sole source of unselfish love—almighty God.
The absence of any of these four conditions brings in frustration, making the act somewhat disappointing, somewhat below expectations. People can react to such frustration in one of two ways: they can go on practicing and loving until perfection is reached, or they can retire into the realm of fantasy, and simply dream about an easy and readymade perfection. The latter course opens the door to every kind of sexual evil, because these fantasies soon grow to the point where pleasures are imagined that reality can never provide. Attempts may be made to fulfill such dreams in all kinds of promiscuous and perverse relations, but because of the absence of our four conditions these relations will always involve more and more frustration, giving birth to more and more impossible dreams. That way lies sexual obsession that is a hell on earth, destroying character and spiritual life.
Our teaching about sexuality in Christian marriage needs to stress above all that the Church’s view, so far from being designed to curtail the joys of physical union is the only really workable approach to the subject. A fully enjoyable sex life may occasionally have been lived but as a rule simply is not found apart from the principles of Christian marriage, because the Church’s view is based on the actual facts of nature and the human spirit. Perhaps this is a bold statement, but the evidence is that wherever these principles are not followed, an atmosphere of obsession prevails upon the subject of sex, which is a clear sign of frustration. As St. Thomas insisted over and over again, the principles of the spiritual life do not destroy nature: they perfect it—and it is for lack of this perfection in the realm of sexuality, and consequent lack of real enjoyment, that our modern world, obsessed with the impossible dreams of the frustrated, wallows greedily but unhappily in the sins of the flesh.
But the real problems of marriage do not lie so much in physical union as in mental and spiritual union. It is a truism that one must marry even more for companionship than for physical attraction, but sometimes I think a truism may be defined as a principle that all know and few observe. So few young people seem to realize that the real work of marriage is to learn to live in the same house, in the same room, with another person day after day, year after year, on terms of such great intimacy. Because of this, the adjustment of sexuality is far less difficult than the adjustment, the union, of tastes, interests, minds and characters. As the psychiatrist C. G. Jung once observed, marriage is a task for adults only, and unfortunately there are so few of them.
To approach this problem on the merely natural level is surely quite absurd, and it is small wonder that in countries where the Christian religion does not flourish a union on the mental and spiritual plane is seldom even attempted. When the old wife gets boring, put her away in a quiet corner of the harem and get a new one. For heaven’s sake don’t mix the women up with your social life; make it a tabu to take them out to dinner, and when company comes lock the door to their quarters. And when all else fails, use the big stick. Lacking a supernatural religion all this is very understandable. But our modern problem is this: that 2,000 years of Christianity have abolished this kind of marriage management in the Western world, yet because that world has largely forsaken Christian belief we now have millions of married pagans trying to live in Christian monogamy. No wonder they call it monotony.
I submit that without extraordinary luck or extraordinary grace, it is practically impossible to live on terms of such prolonged intimacy with another person on any other basis than agape-love. No amount of mere compromise will effect the necessary adjustment, for compromise assumes that marriage is a 50–50 relationship where I have my rights and you have yours, so let’s make a bargain. But there is nothing of the 50–50 compromise about Christian marriage. “The wife,” says St. Paul, “hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.” In Christian marriage you give yourselves 100 percent on both sides, for like all the sacraments of the Church Holy Matrimony is a sacrificial action. Nowhere is sacrifice more necessary in marriage than in the achievement of the union of souls, for outside of a monastery there is surely no more rigorous school for the denial of one’s personal pride. How often must you admit, when it comes to a difference of opinion, that you are quite wrong; how often must you eat your most cherished prejudices; or how often must you submit patiently to a black atmosphere when, for conscience’s sake, you have had to insist on a point of view? And yet anyone who has consistently done this over the years knows that it leads to a happiness that those who will not sacrifice never can experience.
On the whole, it would seem that in our civilization it is harder for men than for women to let go of themselves and give themselves to the extent required in agape-love. We all know, for example, that it is much easier to interest women in religion than men, because a woman is much better adapted psychologically to yielding herself. But Anglo Saxon-American man is afflicted with a certain psychological and spiritual rigidity that makes it most difficult for him to give himself entirely whether in religion or in marriage. In marriage this difficulty is encountered more particularly on the mental and spiritual level. The trouble lies in a certain false masculine pride that causes men to avoid like the plague certain things considered “undignified” and still more things considered “sissy.” All too often this is taken to such lengths that men wholly stifle the feminine element in their own nature, and thus destroy all common ground and sympathy with women. In short, the cult of the “strong, silent man” all too easily becomes the neurosis of psychological isolation and the sin of spiritual pride.
First, this attitude is destructive to marital union in the realm of work. American men in particular are guilty of becoming so absorbed in business, of making business so much the end-all and the be-all of their lives, that their wives are excluded almost entirely from their husbands’ principle interest in life. In a civilization of commuters this is a major gulf between man and wife, and it is not helped a bit when, on coming home to dinner, the man is disposed to be strong and silent about what he has been doing all day.
Second, it is destructive of marital union in the sphere of recreation, which might otherwise compensate for inevitable lack of union in work. But what happens? Ousted from a share in her husband’s major interest, the wife, in self-defense, goes in for that monstrosity called “Womens’ Club Culure,” where she is segregated off from the males with her female cronies. American culture is thus a predominantly female culture, whence it is not surprising that men consider the whole cultural and aesthetic side of life “sissy.” They avoid it, and once again lose common ground with their women-folk. This recreational segregation of the sexes does not only arise in the realm of the highbrow arts, but also in that of the lowbrow games. It is with his male friends, rather than with his and their wives, that the average man takes his recreation, his golf, his poker, his fishing.
Third, it is most of all destructive of marital union in the realm of worship. The average American husband and wife simply do not go to Church together nor have any spiritual life in common in the home. They must face the facts. Either God exists, or he doesn’t. If he does, he is the most important reality in life, and a marriage that is not united in God leaves the marriage unconsummated in the major realm of human existence. But, here again, to the ordinary male religion is “sissy.” From one standpoint he is right, for since the Reformation both Protestant and Catholic piety have gone on the “mushy” side. But from another standpoint he is quite wrong, since Anglo Saxon-American man could well do with a great deal less toughness and a great deal more suppleness; it would make him much more of a real man, and less of a neuter oaf. It is up to the Church, however, to teach the strength of suppleness and the power of yielding. “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” Under the burden of snow, the branches of the willow bend and do not break, whereas the rigid limbs of the pine crack and fall.
This so-called marriage wherein husband and wife neither work together, play together, nor worship together, and very soon cease to sleep together, is an all too common feature of American society. Jiggs and Maggie1 are very true to life, and I do not doubt that Maggie enjoys herself at the Club, and that Jiggs has a wonderful time with the gang. But such happiness as they have is precisely an escape from marriage, and in real life the insatiable appetite of eros will look for satisfaction from all kinds of impossible and harmful sources. And the perpetual frustration of this appetite tells its tale in the steely eyes and tight lips of our hardened clubwomen, and in the early deaths or nervous collapse of men who seek their escape in the squirrel-cage of modern business—which goes faster, to save time, to make money, to go faster, to save more time, to make more money, until something or someone busts. No one can pretend that on this basis, either marriage or the escape from marriage works—or that it makes anyone happy. But people go on doing it, on the supposition that a couple of kids who are more or less congenial at the age of twenty will somehow get along naturally if thrown together in marriage. This, however, is not marriage; it is juxtaposition. Marriage is an action, a work, in which one partner gives his body, mind, and spirit to the other.
In the Christian view, therefore, a marriage simply is not Holy Matrimony unless it is a physical union, a mental union, and a spiritual union, for anything less than this is not a wedding of two entire persons. I believe that before the clergy bless a marriage they should consider whether the couple are actually whole persons, or whether the grace of Matrimony has any chance of making them so. To let a woman of the Church, for example, be married to a man who once received Holy Baptism but has never done anything about it since, is just as disastrous as letting her marry someone with a serious physical deformity such as an undeveloped head. We shall be a thousand times more respected by the world if we have the courage of our convictions and boldly declare that a person with no spiritual life, no interest in agape-love, is simply not all there. He is no fit recipient for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. If the state can refuse a license on the relatively trivial grounds of a positive Wasserman reaction, the church can surely do the same on the grounds of much more serious spiritual diseases.
Doesn’t it all boil down to this: do we believe in the Christian religion we talk so much about, or don’t we? Do we believe that God exists, that human nature is fallen, that God has given himself to each one of us in Christ, that because of the fall natural marriage is a necessary failure, and that because of Christ, and only because of him, marriage, and all that goes with it can be made healthy, whole and holy? Do we believe it? If we honestly don’t we shall help the human race far more by becoming devout Hedonists and making the best of a bad job, of an incurably evil human existence. But if we really do believe that Christ, that this God of love is Reality itself, more actual than these hands, these bones, more concrete than these very walls, more solid than this earth—then we are utterly bound to admit and state plainly that those who live their lives without relation to this Reality are more diseased, more crippled, than the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, more remote from reason than the insane. But God, through us his Church, can heal them, and it for the work of healing that his sacraments are given to the world for all willing to try them and accept their conditions. We need, then, to teach Holy Matrimony not merely as an ideal, a duty, a godly, righteous and sober way of life, but rather as a dispensation of the divine mercy for the healing and transfiguration of what must otherwise be inevitable frustration and bitterness—the passion of human love.
1. [Jiggs and Maggie are characters in a cartoon series distributed by King Features Syndicate entitled Bringing Up Father, which ran from 1913 to 2000—Eds.].
Reprinted from Canterbury Club Tract, No. 1, 1946, Episcopal Church at the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO. Copyright 1946 by Alan W. Watts. Copyright not renewed.