In chapters 20 and 21, we discussed the question of the relationship between faith and reason as it pertains to ethical principles or foundations, especially virtue and law. In this chapter and the subsequent one, we will turn to the relationship between theistic faith and philosophical reason as it pertains to two specific aspects of human life—namely, marriage and the use of the human sexual faculties (chapter 22) and warfare and the use of violence (chapter 23). Our procedure in both chapters will be similar, in that we will be asking whether biblical faith and rational philosophy coincide with respect to these matters and, if so, how.
A. A Review of the Biblical Teaching
The Book of Genesis begins with a statement about the first principles and foundations of everything that is. In the very first chapter of that statement, after reading about the creation of the world and all its elements, we read about the creation of the human male and female and the unique blessing God gives to them:
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply; and fill the earth and subdue it.” (Gen 1:27-28)
Subsequent commentary on this biblical text often understands the divine image within man to refer to human rationality, but the text itself is striking in linking instead the distinction between male and female directly to the divine image. No other human property—not even rationality, it seems—is linked quite so clearly to the divine image in this way; sexual differentiation and the faculties of procreation are articulated openly in the passage, whereas even our rational faculties are not. It is not, however, immediately evident in this story whether the man is “in the image of God” all by himself and the woman is “in the image of God” all by herself, or whether the two together are “in the image of God” and individually they are only incompletely “in the image of God”.
In the subsequent chapter of Genesis, the reader encounters the story of the creation of the woman from the rib of the man. In this story, the man is created first and is placed in the garden by himself. God says, however, that “It is not good that the man should be alone” and decides to make “a helper fit” for the man (Gen 2:18). Failing to find a suitable partner among the animals he has been creating, God makes the woman and presents her to the man, who exclaims, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” Lest the moral of the story be unclear, it is stated openly at its conclusion: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:23, 24). We are also told, “The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed” (2:25).
Whereas the verses about the divine image seemed to call attention to the difference between the human male and female, these latter verses about the creation of the woman from the rib of the man seem to emphasize the unity of the two. The dignity and power of sexual differentiation is indicated in the first passage by the linking of sexual differentiation to the divine image and to fecundity; the dignity of sexual intercourse and of sexual unity is indicated in the second passage by the absence of shame in the face of nakedness.
In the New Testament, the key comment on the meaning of these parts of the Book of Genesis occurs when Jesus is being questioned about the provision of the Mosaic law permitting divorce under certain conditions (Deut 24:1-4). Divorce, however, would seem to be in tension with the unity of the sexes suggested in the Genesis story about the man clinging to the wife and the two becoming one. In replying to the questioners, Jesus subordinates the Mosaic teaching to that of Genesis, stating that the former was only a begrudging concession and not something in accord with God’s original intention:
“Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” (Mt 19:4-6; cf. Mk 10:5-8)
For Christian theists, then, the Genesis passages connecting marriage, sexual intercourse, and procreation or fecundity are the original and proper pattern for these things as willed by God. These passages establish the unity of marriage as well as its procreative element. Indeed, the suggestion is that these arrangements are “in the divine image” itself.
A third feature of marriage that developed within Christianity is the notion of marriage as a sacrament. The root of this development is in such New Testament passages as Paul’s statement in Ephesians 5:32 that the Genesis 2 teaching on the unity of the married couple is “a great mystery” referring to the love between Christ and the Church. This idea that the marriage union is somehow emblematic of the union between Christ and the Church eventually led Christians to understand marriage as a sacrament along the lines of the other sacraments of the Christian life such as the Eucharist. This sacramental notion of marriage was later rejected within Protestantism, but it endures within the Catholic Church.
Given the stubbornness and waywardness of the sexual longings people experience, Christians have frequently failed to live up to the pattern of righteousness that they assert is indicated in Genesis and the New Testament. Marital failings—sins against marriage—are obviously common and various, even among Catholics. There is no need to attempt a complete catalogue of all of them here, but presumably some are of greater gravity than others; since the prohibition of adultery is listed among the Ten Commandments, perhaps it is the greatest of all such sins. Nevertheless, all departures from the proper pattern are just that, so there is no reason not to call all of them “sins” against marriage, howsoever slight or great they may be.
Different Christian groups at different moments in history have attempted one or another pastoral approach for dealing with these sins. Obviously, Christians want to restrain and restrict departures from the Genesis pattern. On the other hand, Christians also believe that God is merciful, so there is a great desire on the part of Christians for sinners to confess their wrongdoings and return to good standing in the Church.
To sum up, then, the Christian teaching about what is best and proper and right for people is fairly clear from Genesis: sexual intercourse, marriage, and procreation all go together as part of God’s benevolent, creative will for man. Where Christians are less uniform is in deciding how to limit and control departures from what is best and how to restore correspondence with what is best through repentance.
While we confine our remarks in this chapter to standard Christian theism, it is not surprising that there are many similarities between Christian and Jewish views of marriage, since both are rooted in the Book of Genesis. Indeed, a similar (not identical) teaching is found in Islam, so we would not be going far afield if we spoke of “the theistic view of marriage” or the outlook on marriage of religious theism generally. The groups differ with respect to particulars about departing and returning to the proper pattern, but they are largely (though not completely) in agreement about what the correct pattern is. Most of all, they are in agreement in thinking that there is something “sacred” and “holy” about this pattern.
B. The Teaching of Reason on Family
In this chapter, then, the question that arises is whether the view of marriage within Christian theism is reasonable. May faith and reason be integrated on this matter, and, if so, how closely? The main problem faced in addressing this question is that there seems to be no commonly agreed upon view of what reason teaches us about marriage. To be sure, we have noted that not all Christians are in complete alignment with respect to all the details about marriage, sex, and procreation, but in comparison with the philosophers, the Christians seem absolutely unified.
One famous argument between philosophers about marriage occurred between John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like many philosophers, they both appealed to nature as the guide to be trusted in deciding the question. Locke claimed that human beings are by nature like the carnivorous animals, among which, he claimed, it is characteristic for the male to remain attached to a single female and to assist her in raising the young. It is important to note, Locke suggests, that before the firstborn child is able to live without the support of the parents, the mother is often pregnant with a second child. This situation keeps the pair attached at least until the woman no longer bears children, Locke says.
Rousseau argued back against Locke that, indeed, one should take one’s bearings about marriage from nature, but that marriage was contrary to nature. In nature, he argues, there was no reason to suppose that the male and the female human beings would stay together for the nine months between the beginning of the first pregnancy and the birth of the first child. So there was no reason for the “marriage” ever to get started. Indeed, Rousseau suggests that human beings are by nature sexually promiscuous and that marriage is an artificial convention invented by civil society. Sexual desire is naturally undiscriminating; it does not prefer one member of the opposite sex to the others. The artifice that is marriage, he says, is based on romantic love, but such love is also unnatural. Finally, whereas Locke based his claims on the carnivorous nature of the human diet, Rousseau claims that human beings were originally vegetarians and, thus, as sexually promiscuous as many of the vegetable-eating animals purportedly are.
For all their differences, Locke and Rousseau are quite similar in that they both take their bearings from nonhuman animals. Although these modern philosophers both died in the eighteenth century, similar views are prevalent in discussions of human sexuality and marriage even in our time. Our conversations on the “birds and the bees” often seem to turn on such nondistinctively human biological notions as the transfer of genetic material and reproductive success rates.
Even without judging modern views by reference to the Bible, there are a great many objections based on reason alone that one could raise. First, there are basic empirical questions to be asked: If we look to the animals for guidance in finding the natural as Locke and Rousseau urge us to, just what lessons should we draw from animal behavior? It turns out that some animals live promiscuously; others mate for a season; others mate for life. Which of these divergent models should we emulate? Locke and Rousseau tried to solve this objection by claiming different sexual mores for carnivores and herbivores. But there is variation in the behaviors of carnivores and herbivores. Besides, it seems that perhaps people are naturally omnivorous!
Secondly, and more importantly, though, one would wonder about the cogency of any arguments that substitute the subhuman or at least the nonhuman for the human. Indeed, it seems rather easy to point out that human beings, even if they have their origin in the animal species, also are thinking, reasoning beings. Whatever our nonrational urges and inclinations, it seems unphilosophical to think that these should be preferred over the dictates of reason. The passions are unthinking and even, in some cases, deceptive. It seems necessary to admit the possibility that a rational or philosophical understanding of marriage, sex, and procreation might therefore be at odds with nonrational urgings and longings.
Finally, it was pointed out in discussing “by nature” and “the natural” in the previous chapter that such words have more than one meaning. In particular, we distinguished what happens most of the time from what is in accord with the highest goal of a human being. Locke and Rousseau, not to mention others, seem to understand “nature” in the former, less noble sense of the word. They seem to ask about what is common rather than what is the best or highest. But it seems quite reasonable to ask whether the higher understanding ought not to be preferred.
It seems possible, then, to cast doubt on the reasonableness of the argument that human sexual mores should be patterned on nonhuman animals. Is it possible that there are better reasonable arguments to be made about marriage, human sexual faculties, and procreation? Perhaps philosophers might turn to utility as a guide. At least for thinkers with a practical cast of mind, it would seem to be reasonable to think about marriage in terms of “what works”—that is, in terms of “what is useful”. Indeed, there are plenty of books and articles that would seem to confirm that something like the pattern of marriage envisioned by the Book of Genesis is, generally speaking, the most useful form of marriage for society. Human beings, both parents and children, seem to prosper most in those situations where marriage, sexual intercourse, and procreation go together along the lines suggested by the Bible or theism generally. Such evidence is not all in support of biblical marriage, though. One can think of situations where, say, spousal anger, harshness, and abuse can be harmful to spouses and children alike. Often children of divorced parents face difficult obstacles, but sometimes it seems that the children of undivorced but unhappy parents face equally great obstacles.
For the purposes of this book, we will not be rehearsing all the claims and counterclaims that are advanced regarding the utility of Christian marriage. We think that a complete sifting of the evidence would show that, for the most part, Christian marriage is highly useful to society, but also that the evidence is not uniformly in support of such a conclusion. If this hypothesis should turn out to be correct, theists might then be tempted to base their advocacy of biblical marriage along the lines of utility, especially when talking with non-theists. Nevertheless, an argument based on utility or consequences is probably not the best way for either Christians or philosophers to argue about the matter. To be sure, all things being equal, it is easy to prefer utility to disutility. The rub is that there are a great many practices that might be useful but that would hardly seem right. It might be useful to society if all people over the age of, say, seventy-five were euthanized. It might be useful if the top 10 percent of a population in terms of strength were enslaved to the bottom 51 percent who were the weakest. It might be useful if we killed rich but senile Aunt Matilda and used her money to build an orphanage, and so forth. Thus, advocates of biblical marriage ought to be cautious about relying too heavily on utility.
Another problem with appeals to utility to justify biblical marriage is that they will usually involve justifying what is high and noble in terms of what is low and relatively vulgar. That is, advocates of Christian marriage think of this state as a very high, sublime condition—even as a sacrament. To say that marriage is at any rate “at least useful” will seemingly diminish marriage. It is rather like saying that Brunelleschi’s dome on the cathedral at Florence is good because it keeps out the rain. The claim is true, of course, but Brunelleschi presumably had something more noble in mind. Similarly, it is true that a marriage in which the partners are faithful to each other and take care of their children is useful to human life; but in the Christian view, God presumably had something even higher in mind.
In addition to thinking about marriage in terms of nonhuman animals or in terms of what is useful, then, it seems that we should consider whether philosophy has a high or noble argument to make about marriage. And indeed, in treating the notion of natural law, we argued that the superior philosophical notion of nature was a teleological notion, wherein what is “by nature” refers to what a thing is when it has reached its full perfection. According to this view, reason should ask itself what the best arrangement of marriage, sex, and procreation is that would enable human beings to achieve complete virtue. Aristotle himself seems to hint at this notion when he says that the highest form of friendship is when friends meet together and consider how they might make each other better and then suggests that perhaps sometimes the friendship between man and wife might approach such friendship. Perhaps Jane Austen takes us farther along this road in making the best marriages in her novels the sort of marriages whereby the partners to the marriage are to make each other into better persons.
Such an argument, taking its bearings from the highest or most noble, sounds like a more promising philosophical argument, at least from the point of view of Christians. Even here, though, it would seem that Christians ought to be cautious. Such a view, if taken to its extreme, might seem to imply that the best way for people to live is in complete abstinence from marriage, sexual desire, and procreation, for the concerns of marriage can impede one’s progress in philosophical study and hence the practice of the highest virtues. Plato seems to imply as much in some of his dialogues, and, indeed, a great many philosophers have lived lives of celibacy. If celibacy is the most reasonable position, though, then marriage is perhaps not the sort of good that the biblical text seems to envision. Marriage would almost seem to be, at best, a sort of concession, rather like the provision for divorce granted by Moses. The Christian tradition has always resisted such a conclusion, but it often has said that while both celibacy and marriage are great goods, celibacy is better.
C. Conclusion
We began this chapter by asking whether the biblical notion of marriage, sexual intercourse, and procreation can be integrated with philosophical reason and, if so, how that integration might proceed. After a brief review of the basic pattern of biblical marriage, we attempted a brief review of philosophical argumentation regarding “reasonable” marriage. Much more could be said about both the biblical and philosophical positions, but this much should enable us to return to our question about the integration of faith and reason with respect to matrimony and to sketch out a possible answer.
Let us return, once again, to our Venn diagram:
Remembering that region 1 in the diagram represents those revealed doctrines that are accessible only by faith, it would seem that at least some and perhaps much of the Christian faith’s position on marriage would have to be placed in this region. The linking of marriage and procreation to the divine image would seem to be a teaching for which reason all by itself would have a hard time providing an argument. For one thing, it seems that one would have to have some real knowledge of what the divine image is, and it is hard to see how one could know the image of the divine without having real, positive knowledge of the divine itself. But such knowledge of God seems to be accessible principally through revelation, and hence it would be known through sacred theology rather than philosophical theology. Indeed, even if the purely rational arguments about God examined earlier in this book were all accepted, they would seem, at most, to show that God is the creator of human nature and that human nature, in the highest or teleological sense of the term, is not inconsistent with the view of the human sexual powers described by the Bible.
If we consider the notion of marriage as sacramental, as is the case in Catholicism, it would seem even more imperative to place at least part of the Christian dogma of marriage in region 1 of the diagram. The Christian view is that the sacraments have their power or effectiveness in the person of Christ; but if this is so, and if the Incarnation of Christ is a revealed dogma rather than something known merely through reason, then a teaching on marriage based on Christ has to fall into region 1.
The crucial question, though, is what should be said about region 2, the region in which faith and reason may overlap. We began our analysis of the philosophical position on marriage by noting that there really is not much agreement among philosophers about the reasonable position regarding marriage, sex, and procreation. Nevertheless, it is by now clear that some philosophers surely do hold positions that are inconsistent with the biblical view. The position of Rousseau, for example, is clearly incompatible with biblical faith. According to Thomas Aquinas, then, a theistic thinker ought in principle to be able to show that Rousseau’s claims about marriage are not the conclusions of deductively proven arguments. Rousseau, however, does not seem to be making a deductive argument in claiming that human beings are by nature promiscuous; he seems to be making a claim that is based on an inductive argument.
We also noted in our analysis that some advocates of reason consider marriage in terms of its utility. We suggested, but did not prove, that biblical marriage, on the whole, is useful to human societies. If we should go through the effort to review all the evidence, we would then be able to say that a rational analysis shows that there is some reasonable support for biblical marriage. In other words, we would be saying that there is an inductive argument to be made for the utility of Christian marriage. We would be saying that, even though the highest aspects of Christian marriage transcend the merely useful (since marriage is about the divine image and is a sacrament), it is still the case that reason can discern that theistic marriage is at least useful. We could say, then, that the proposition “Marriage is a sacrament” belongs to region ι of our diagram, but that the proposition “Marriage is usually useful” belongs to region 2. If we wanted to place the claim “Marriage is usually useful” in region 2 of the diagram, we would also be making the claim that “Rousseau’s teaching on marriage is probably not true.”
Something similar could presumably also be said about the more elevated notion of marriage as a school of virtue, along the lines of the view attributed to Jane Austen above. To the extent that there is evidence that Christian marriage develops natural virtue, we can say that faith and reason reinforce each other in this instance. In such a situation, we could say that both biblical revelation and natural reason conclude that “Marriage sometimes promotes human virtue.” Still, there is a considerable distance from the proposition “Marriage sometimes promotes virtue” to the proposition that “Marriage is a Christian sacrament.”