MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY

by F. J. SHEED

CANTERBURY BOOKS

SHEED AND WARD INC. 840 BROADWAY NEW YORK 3

This book is the central portion of the same author's "Society and

Sanity."

Copyright 1953

CONTENTS:

I. THE NATURE OF SEX AND MARRIAGE

II. MARRIAGE AND THE LAW OF GOD

III. MARRIAGE EXISTENTIAL

I. THE NATURE OF SEX AND MARRIAGE

(1)

The typical modern man practically never thinks about sex. He

dreams of it, of course, by day and by night; he craves for it; he

pictures it, is stimulated or depressed by it, slavers over it. But

this frothing, steaming activity is not thinking. Slavering is not

thinking, picturing is not thinking, craving is not thinking,

dreaming is not thinking. Thinking means bringing the power of

the mind to bear: thinking about sex means striving to see sex in

its innermost reality and in the function it is meant to serve.

Our typical modern man, when he gives his mind to it at all, thinks

of sex as something we are lucky enough to have; and he sees all

its problems rolled into the one problem of how to get the most

pleasure out of it. To that he gives himself with immoderate

enthusiasm and very moderate success. Success, in fact, can never

be more than moderate, because his procedure is folly.

Sex is a power of the whole man, one power among many: and man

is not an isolated unit, but bound to his fellows in society: and his

life on earth is not the whole of life, but only a beginning. To use

the power of sex successfully we must use it in balance with the

rest of our powers, for the service of the whole personality, within

a social order, with eternity to come. And all this is too complex a

matter to be left to instinct or chance, to desire or mood or the

heat of the blood or the line of least resistance. It calls for hard

thinking.

A summons to think about sex will be met with no enthusiasm.

Men are not much given to thought about sex; as we have seen,

they expect no fun from thought and are not much inclined to it or

good at it: whereas they expect a great deal of fun from sex and

persist in thinking (in the face of the evidence) that they are good

at it. Not only that. They feel that there is something rather

repellent, almost improper, in the association of sex and thinking.

A man must be cold-blooded, they say, to use his reason on sex.

The taunt of cold-bloodedness is one that we can bear with

fortitude. To the man with fever, a normal temperature seems

cold-blooded--but vitality goes with normal temperature, not with

fever. And modern sex life is not, even by its own standards, very

vital. Too many men who have reached middle life must admit that

for them sex has not lived up to its promise--that on balance their

life has been rather more begloomed by sex than delighted by it.

They have had plenty of glowing anticipation, a handful of

glowing experiences, a mass of half-satisfactions and whole

frustrations--with the horizon drawing in, and the worried feeling

that the splendor has somehow eluded them. It is not from any

brilliantly successful sexual life of his own that the typical man of

today can deride the idea of using the mind on sex.

Upon sex, as indeed upon all our other powers, we must use

reason. Instinct is excellent for the lower animals, but we are not

lower animals, we are rational; and the price we pay for our

rationality is that reason is our only safe guide, to ignore it is

always disaster. There is something pathetic about the

philosophers who decry reason and raise the standard of instinct,

as about little boys who play at being Red Indians. The little boys

would not survive ten minutes in a Red Indian world, the

philosophers would perish rather more quickly than the rest of us--

for this philosophy has a great attraction for pallid men--in a world

of instinct. The instincts that guide the non-rational creature to

the fulfillment of his life--to choosing the food that will nourish or

constructing the habitation that will shelter or providing for the

preservation of his own life and the continuance of his species--do

not guide man. All of these things we have to learn. What we call

our instincts are natural desires strongly felt--like the instinct of

hunger to eat, or of cold to be warmed, or of maternal love to

protect, or of gluttony to surfeit, or of sloth to idle, or of pride to

rule, or of covetousness to snatch, or of envy to vie, or of anger to

kill, or of sex to possess. In themselves they are a mixture of

necessary and dangerous: reason must sort them out, evaluate and

control them--diminish some, strengthen others. The growth of a

world in which men can live as men has been the growth of

reason's domination over the instincts--all the instincts, even the

instinct of sex. There is no special privilege exempting sex alone

from the control of reason. That it is more exciting than the others

does not make it less in need of control but more. Any one of

them, uncontrolled, can make human life unlivable--sex perhaps

more so than the others. Over none of them will reason secure

perfect control in the majority of us--certainly not over sex. But

there is a world of difference between the man who aims at control

though he only partially achieves it, and the man who does not.

Even partial control, which is all that most of us will achieve, is

worth striving for.

Thinking about sex will follow the same lines as thinking about

any other thing--what does the law of God tell us, what does the

nature of the thing itself tell us? Where the law of God is explicit

and clearly known, we have enough for right action without further

inquiry. But we should study the nature of the thing even then, as

a way of understanding God's law better and of entering into the

mind of God who gave the law. In this matter of sex, we shall begin

with the nature of man and then go on to the law of God.

(2)

If we consider sex in itself and ask what Nature had in mind in

giving sex to human beings, there can be only one answer: Sex is

meant for the production of children, as lungs for breathing or the

digestive organs for nourishment. The physical and psychological

mechanism is so complex in the man and in the woman, so

delicately ordered for the generating of new life, that it would be

monstrous to deny (nor, one imagines, has anyone ever denied)

that that is what sex is meant for, that is why we have sexual

powers. The fact that man can use sex for other, sterile purposes

of his own choosing does not alter the certainty that child-bearing

is sex's own purpose. I know that to the modern reader there seems

something quaint and old-world in asking what a thing is for; the

modern question is always what can I do with it. Yet it remains a

first principle of the intelligent use of anything to ask what the

thing is for--indeed that is almost a first principle of the intelligent

misuse of anything. If you are going to pervert a thing, it is wise to

know what you are perverting. And to ask what Nature has in mind

can hardly be an unnatural opening for any discussion.

But to say that Nature had children in mind when she gave human

beings sex does not mean that when two people decide to marry

their motive is to have children. If a man draws a girl's attention to

the falling birthrate and asks her to marry him in order to improve

it, she would be well advised to refuse him: his wooing is a good

deal too sociological. People marry, usually anyhow, because they

want each other they may want children too, or they may merely

see their advent as probable but regrettable: either way, their

purpose in marrying is not to have children but to have each other:

and Nature does not mind a bit. She is all for people having their

own purposes, provided they do not frustrate hers.

Because custom dulls wonder, dulls advertence even, we hardly

realize how extraordinary it is that sex should be for child-bearing.

It is extraordinary in two ways. For in the first place it gives a

grandeur to sex--a remote and even unwanted grandeur you may

feel it, but a grandeur that is incomparable. Against this view of

sex stand two very different types. There is the Puritan with his

conviction that any activity with such intense pleasure in it must

be sinful; and there is the hedonist gathering rosebuds while he

may, very fond of rosebuds, indeed, but unable to take them too

seriously--there are so many of them and so gatherable: sexual

experiences, he will say, are merely thrills in the body, therefore of

small consequence. For all their perversions, the pagans who have

centered their rituals upon sex's mystery are nobler than either.

The hedonist is denying the plain fact that, even as a bodily

experience, the sexual act is like no other, it engages the body

more profoundly, at once troubles and concentrates the whole

personality in its depth: the excitement of rosebuds is paler.

Hedonist and Puritan alike ignore the fundamental relation of sex

to the generation of new life, the first fact about sex--that by it

man cooperates with God in the production of other men, living

beings, immortal beings. Creation is the work of omnipotence. But

procreation is pro-creation, a kind of deputy creation. So that sex

in its essential nature is man's greatest glory in the physical order.

Sex as men have it, of course, sex existential as we may call it, is

not always, or perhaps even commonly, glorious. Which brings us

to the second way in which it is; extraordinary that sex should be

for child-bearing. It is extraordinary because the bearing and

rearing of children requires a maximum of order, stability,

tranquillity: and sex is the most turbulent of man's powers.

What clouds almost all present discussion of sex is that its

demonic energy is not adverted to: the sex reformers write of it as

though it were a sort of amiable pet, to be played with and put

back in its little basket till we choose to play again. But sex is not

like that: in its beauty and grandeur and ferocity it can be more

like a tiger, and even in the mildest it is no domestic pet. Man does

not play with sex: it is nearer the truth to say that sex plays with

him, and it can be a destructive game. For sex begins powerful and

can become uncontrollable. Short of that extreme, it can become a

vast tyranny, harrying the individual man, poisoning every sort of

human relationship. As I say, the sex reformers seem unaware of

this, and probably many of them are so. William Morris is an

example. In News from Nowhere he chisels this little gem of

understatement for us: "For, you know, love is not a very

reasonable thing, and perversity and self-will are commoner than

some of our moralists think." They are indeed. One gets the feeling

that a lot of writing on sex is done by the undersexed--men who

honestly cannot imagine what all the fuss is about because in

themselves there is no fuss: like the headmaster who wondered

why boys could not be taught to discuss their own sexual make-up

as calmly as they would discuss the machinery of a motor car. The

early Christian writers--St. Jerome, for instance--repel us by the

frenzy of their tirades against women, but at least they knew that

there was a frenzy in sex. The frenzy is still there, and anyone who

is not aware of it should not write about sex at all.

So we return to our anomaly: the continuation of the race, which

requires above all things an ordered framework of life, is entrusted

to sex, which of itself makes for chaos. It is in marriage that these

two irreconcilables are reconciled. The critics of marriage have

simply not realized how incredibly difficult, and how totally

necessary, is the reconciliation it effects. In marriage sex loses

none of its strength, but it serves life.

But if marriage is to serve life fully--bring the child not only to

birth but to maturity--it must be permanent. The new-born child

has to be shaped into a fully developed member of the human

race; and for this he needs both parents. Humanity is not man or

woman, but both in union. A child brought up by a father only or a

mother only is only half-educated. He needs what the male can

give him and what the female can give him. And he needs these

two not as two separate influences, each pushing him its own way,

so that he moves on some compromise line that is neither, but as

one fused influence, wholly human, male and female affecting him

as conjoined not as competing influences. For that the parents

must be united--and indissolubly united. It is not enough that they

should agree to live together only while the children need them--

because then they would already be separated in spirit, and their

two influences would bear upon the child as two, not as one. So

that if Nature is to solve its problem and reconcile its

irreconcilables, to make sex serve life, it needs unbreakable

marriage.

Are we, then, to see the love of the man and woman for each other

as a trap set by Nature to lure them into prison, with every

sentence a life-sentence? Are human beings no more than pawns in

Nature's game of preserving the race?

Nothing could be further from the reality. Men, in Nature's plan,

are never pawns. They cannot serve Nature's purpose without

serving their own. In marriage the power of sex is not weakened.

Marriage provides strong banks in which sex can course at the

utmost of its power, but for the service of life and not for

destruction.

There is a common error here--that the great lover is the multiple

lover, that sex is made perfect in promiscuity. But it is in the love

of one for one that men have always seen sex supremely

manifested. Not in Henry VIII or Casanova is sex glorified, but

comic, clownish.

And it calls for no long reflection to see why. There is no vitality or

mastery in barely being able to totter from one woman to the next,

any more than in barely being able to last from one cigarette to the

next. There is no mastery in being unable to say no. About the sex-

ridden there is a prowling restlessness that is a far cry from

vitality. Casual promiscuity is evidence not of sexual potency but

only of weakness of control. There is no strength, where control is

not strong. The phrase "sexual impotence" is always taken to mean

impotence for the sexual act; but there is an impotence to say no

to the demands of sex which is entitled to the same name.

Marriage, as the union of one man and one woman, gives

opportunity for a splendor of sex impossible outside it, and this

both at the level of technique, which does not concern us here,

and at the deeper level of personality, which does. The sexual act,

merely as a union of bodies, can give exquisite physical pleasure

(though it is surprising how often it does not). But it has a double

defect.

First, it cannot continue to satisfy even at its own unambitious

level: it follows the law of diminishing returns that governs the

merely physical pleasures--the dose must be increased to give the

same effect. The body craves for the sensation, but after a time

grows used to it, is unstimulated by it and craves for more intense

sensation. But the act in its essence does not allow for much

increase of the dose: so that a man either settles down grimly to a

craving he must be for ever yielding to with less and less fruit of

satisfaction, or else exhausts his inventiveness in perversions that

will for a while bring back the first excitements. It is the universal

human experience that a point comes when the craving for the act

is over-mastering and the pleasure from the act all but nil, so that

the act can be neither refused nor much enjoyed: that being the

way of the body's cravings.

Second, a union of bodies is not the fullness of sexual union. It is

valid only as an expression of the union of two personalities. Apart

from that, it is a meaningless acrobatic. In other words, the sex act

is not the marriage union, but is a marvelous way of expressing the

marriage union. When, into the union of bodies, all the shared life

and shared love of a man and a woman are poured, then you have

the sexual union in its fullness. And in this sense it is no paradox

to say that the promiscuous, however many experiences they may

have had, remain inexperienced. The giving of the bodies at once

symbolizes, expresses, and helps to effect, the giving of the

selves. The completer the self-giving, the richer the bodily union.

The giving of one's self to another is the decisive act, the act that

transforms. While the self is ungiven, one remains isolated,

singular, single. Those who have never made the gift of self retain,

through any number of bodily unions, a sort of unclean

virginalness.

But the giving of a self and the receiving of a self, the union of

personalities--all these can only in their completeness be of one to

one; they belong in marriage, and precisely in marriage that is

indissoluble. They are not always found in marriage--we shall be

looking at this later--but they are not easily to be had outside it.

Where they are found, there is sexual union in its perfection, so

that, in falling in with the plan Nature has for the carrying on of

the race, sex is enriched. The bodily union merely as such--and

indeed the whole sexual experience of which it is the normal

culmination can bring a new value into ordinary life, a heightened

awareness, an intensification of all vital processes. The thing

called glamour is real and valuable. But in marriage as Nature

would have it all this is increased and given a new hope of

permanence. The sexual union has more to utter; and there is not

the certainty of ultimate boredom which goes with all purely

bodily pleasures. For while one soon comes to an end of what the

body has to give, there is no end to the exploration of a

personality. So that an act which must become stale when repeated

for its own sake need never become stale when it is regarded as

the expression of a profounder reality that is always growing.

Falling in with Nature's plan is, then, sheer gain for sex. It is sheer

gain for the whole personality. A man and a woman represent, each

of them, half of human nature; each needs the other for

completion. But the completion will not come from mere contact or

cohabitation. There is something here faintly like what happens

when two parts of hydrogen are brought together with one part of

oxygen: you would expect water, since those are water's

constituents: but you will not get it until you send an electric

spark through. Humanity is composed of man and woman: but

putting a man and woman together does not of itself constitute the

true human compound: something else must happen, something

electric perhaps. There must be that real giving and receiving we

have already spoken of, a free-will offering of the self by each to

the other. Obviously you can have marriage where this mutual

giving is at the barest minimum; but it is not marriage at its best,

and it does not bring the enrichment of personality that each

needs. In some marriages it comes quickly, in some slowly, in

some hardly at all. But the quality of the marriage is measured by

it. Especially is the permanence of marriage linked to it. There is

no such thing as permanent union of flesh that is only that. One

remembers W. S. Gilbert's young man, who defended his infidelity

so eloquently:

You cannot eat breakfast all day

Nor is it the act of a sinner

When breakfast is taken away

To turn your attention to dinner.

And it's not in the range of belief

That you should hold him as a glutton

Who when he is tired of the beef

Determines to tackle the mutton.

It could not be better put. Modern sex life is a series of quick-

change acts, hardly more emotionally significant than tiring of

beef and tackling mutton. To ask for life-long fidelity where there

is no union of personalities really is to ask for the moon.

II. MARRIAGE AND THE LAW OF GOD

(1)

The Bible, which has a marriage in the first chapter is shot through

with intimations of God's will upon sex and marriage. In its main

lines His teaching is to be found in the Old Testament; Christ Our

Lord developed and clarified this in His time upon earth, and has

continued to teach it through His Church in the twenty centuries

since.

Broadly it may be summarized in two statements: that the powers

of sex must never be used outside marriage; and that marriage is

monogamous and unbreakable save by death.

Consider first the restriction of the use of sex to marriage. This

involves two consequences: sex must only be used between a man

and a woman: and only within the framework of a legal union.

Concubinage was tolerated among the Chosen People for a long

enough time, but it had disappeared before the coming of Christ:

and concubinage was, in any event, a state recognized and

regulated by law: it was not casual intimacy, still less mere

promiscuity: for neither of these has Scripture a moment's

tolerance. A man and a woman must not unite their bodies merely

at their choice but only within the framework of a legal union: no

union of bodies, or any use of the sex organs, was in any

circumstances thinkable save between a man and a woman--not by

either alone, or in union with another person of the same sex, or

with an animal. Christ Our Lord simply took over these laws,

adding one profound development--for He taught that sex might be

misused even in the mind, apart from any outward act--the man

that looks after a woman to lust after her has already committed

adultery with her in his heart. The Church has had nothing to

clarify here or make in any way plainer. Nor, if what has been said

in the last chapter seems to make sense, is it hard to see the

reasonableness of this total restriction: it enables the sexual

powers to do what they are there for: and to be most fully

themselves. Only within marriage do the powers of sex serve the

new life by which the race is continued. For only from the sexual

union of a man and a woman can children be born, obviously sex's

primary purpose; only in their legal union is the ordered

framework of life possible in which the children can be reared to

maturity. And in marriage, as we have seen, sex can attain its own

maturity as an expression of the total union of two personalities.

So we come to the second great law--the law of marriage as the

union of one man with one woman till death (as with concubinage,

so with polygamy; Christ tells us that Moses allowed it because of

the hardness of men's hearts, but He Himself restored the original

law). Here the teaching of the Church holds a very delicate but

quite essential balance between fixity and freedom. Marriage is an

institution whose nature and laws do not depend upon man's

choice. Marriage is what it is: God made it what it is because thus

it is best for the human race. Man cannot alter it: he can only take

it or leave it. And in that precisely lies his freedom. He can take it

or leave it. A man or a woman cannot be forced to marry: either is

morally free to marry or not to marry (and of course either is

physically free to enter into any sort of living arrangement with

the other). We can choose whether or not to marry: but we cannot

choose what marriage is. The Church expresses all this in the

statement that marriage is a relationship resulting from a contract:

the contract is made by the man and the woman, the relationship

that results is made by God. The man and the woman agree to take

each other as husband and wife for life: God makes them so,

taking them at their word.

Thus the laws relating to marriage fall into two divisions--laws

about the contract, laws about the relationship.

Consider the contract: a man and a woman agree to marry. There

are two key words here--agree and marry. Their agreement must be

unforced, otherwise it is not an agreement at all: prove that either

of them was compelled, and the contract vanishes. Similarly it

must be an agreement to marry, that is to enter into a union for

life, to the exclusion of all others, a union that is meant by God to

produce, and normally will produce, children. If they enter into an

agreement to take each other for a term of years, or till one or

other wearies of the arrangement, or to the total exclusion of

children--then it is not a contract to marry. Prove any of these

things and the contract vanishes. There are other ways in which

what looked like a marriage contract turns out not to be one (as for

example if either is married already, or is impotent, or if the due

form is not observed), but the two we have dwelt on illustrate the

principle best. Before God brings the relationship called marriage

into existence, the man and woman must have made a contract to

marry. Where it can be shown that a given couple have not done

so, the competent authority will grant a decree of nullity. Where

they have done so, there is a marriage. God has brought the

relationship into being. If marriage were only a contract, it would,

like all other contracts, be breakable by the agreement of both

parties to it. But it is not. Once they have made their contract, the

parties are bound, not by it, but by the relationship that follows.

Let us look more closely at this relationship.

God has taken a man and a woman at their word. They are now

husband and wife, made so by God. They are not simply a man and

a woman who have agreed to live together for certain agreed

purposes. If that were all, they would have entered into an

arrangement; but marriage is not an arrangement, it is a

relationship. It is hard to make this clear, though once one has

seen it nothing could be more illuminating. A man adopts a son:

that is an arrangement. A man begets a son: that is a relationship.

In marriage the man and woman have not simply adopted each

other as husband and wife, in the way a man adopts a son. They

have become husband and wife, God has made them so. They are

united, not simply by an agreement to be so, but by some vital

reality. The relationship of husband and wife is not brought into

being in the same way as the relationship of parent and child, for

the latter arises in a union of bodies, the marriage relationship in a

union of wills: but it is all the closer and more real for that. A

husband and wife are not less vitally and really related to each

other than they are to their own children, but more.

Our Lord makes His own the phrase of Genesis which puts this fact

with dazzling clearness: "They shall be two in one flesh." In the

nineteenth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel we find Him saying to

the Pharisees: "A man, therefore, will leave his father and mother

and will cling to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And

so they are no longer two, they are one flesh: what God, then, has

joined, let not man put asunder." In the fifth chapter of his epistle

to the Ephesians, St. Paul quotes the same phrase of Genesis,

leading up to it by a figure of speech which at once reasserts the

new oneness that marriage has brought into being, and lays its

foundation deeper than the natural eye of man can pierce: for he

compares the union of a man and his wife with the union of Christ

and His Church. "Wives must obey their husbands as they would

obey the Lord, as the man is the head to which the woman's body

is united, just as Christ is the head of the Church, the Savior on

whom the safety of his body depends. Why then, women must owe

obedience at all points to their husbands, as the Church does to

Christ. You who are husbands must show love to your wives, as

Christ showed love to the Church when he gave himself up on its

behalf . . . and that is how husband ought to love wife, as if she

were his own body; in loving his wife, a man is but loving himself .

. . That is why a man will leave his father and mother and will cling

to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. Yes; those words

are a high mystery, and I am applying them to Christ and his

Church."

There is something in the modern temper, of the Western world at

least, that is so jarred by the opening phrase--"Wives must obey

their husbands"--that we do not read on to the vastly exhilarating

truth that follows and, if we do, are not exhilarated by it. The

phrase seems to sum up appallingly all that business of masculine

domination from which women feel they have fought free. But it

certainly does not mean that. The woman's duty of obedience is

balanced by the man's duty of love: she is to be obedient, not to a

sultan issuing ukases, but to one who loves her as himself. The

model is the obedience of the Church to Christ, and Christ is not

tyrannical; Christ commands, but gives love not fear as the reason

for obedience--"If you love me, keep my commandments." Further,

the Church has clarified the obedience due. In the encyclical Casti

Connubi, Pope Pius XI writes: "This subordination, however, does

not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the

woman, both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view

of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor

does it bid her obey her husband's every request if not in harmony

with right reason or with the dignity due to a wife. In short, it does

not imply that the wife should be put on a level with those who in

law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free

exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature

judgment or of their ignorance of human affairs. What it does is to

forbid the exaggerated liberty which has no care for the good of

the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family the heart

be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole

body and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head,

the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in

ruling, so she may and ought to make her own the chief place in

love."

The Family is a society, and someone must have the final word,

otherwise nothing is ever decided but all is in permanent debate.

An endless tug-of-war is a miserable business. Nor would it be for

the good of family life if the question of headship should be

settled in each family by a contest of personalities, won in some

families by the man, in some by the woman. It is not a question of

men being superior to women--the need any society has for an

authority to order it aright does not mean that those who wield the

authority are in any way at all superior as persons to those who

obey it. In secular society Queen Elizabeth, for example, was not

greater than her subject, Shakespeare; in the Church, Gregory IX

was not a holier man than his subject Francis of Assisi. The

wielding of authority is a function, a necessary function, giving no

reason to feel proud, any more than obedience to it gives reason to

feel humiliated.

That the father is the head of the Family does not mean that the

mother cannot exercise authority: both must be honored. And that

the mother is the heart of the Family does not mean that the father

need not love: he, who must love his wife as Christ loves His

Church, does not suddenly shut off all love to the children born of

his love for her. Both wield authority and both love, but the

emphasis is different. And there is a similar unity with difference

in the matter of training the child. The father's part is

indispensable; but in all the earlier years the mother has the main

contact with the child. Its attitude to life it must learn from her.

She is the custodian of the standards--standards of manners,

standards of morals--of what is right and wrong, good and evil,

permissible and forbidden, tolerable and intolerable. If she does

not teach these things, the child will not be taught. In all the

Christian centuries, the task has been simple enough. The mother

had merely to hand on to her children what had been handed on to

her. But in our own century that is changed. The world into which

the child is to go from her will deride the moral standards--not

merely disobey them as people at all times have, but deny their

validity. The mother now who would do her duty as custodian of

the standards must tell her children not only what they are but

why they are, must arm them with an understanding of the real

universe in which the moral laws will be seen for what they are,

and the world's assault upon them for what it is.

(2)

In entering into this union, each has given to the other (and to the

other exclusively) the right to sexual union. Notice that sexual

union is a thing due, a right: either is entitled to demand it of the

other, and, unless there is a very serious reason, neither can refuse

it to the other. For the man to refuse his wife or the wife her

husband without good reason would be a grave sin. But notice that

it is a right, not to any sexual union but to normal sexual union,

the union by which, in the way of nature, children are conceived.

Abnormal sexual unions are forbidden to the married as to

everyone else; abnormalities in the normal sexual union--all the

ingenious trickeries that interfere with it to prevent children being

conceived--are likewise forbidden. The sexual act must be wholly

itself.

And the right thus given is no merely legalistic right--a mere right

to the use of the other's body for a specified purpose. The will

must go with it; as far as possible--it is not always possible, the

feelings cannot be commanded--the whole personality must go

with it. The marriage act is a duty, certainly, but it cannot be done

simply as a duty: it must be done generously or it is not being

done duly. It can never be repeated too often that the sexual union

is not simply a union of bodies; it is a union of personalities,

expressing itself in the union of bodies. But precisely because the

bodily union has so splendid a function, it should itself be

splendidly performed. There is a technical competence to be

learned by each, for this is an action not of each individually but

of two in unison; each surrendered totally to the rhythm of the

other. Where it is rightly done, there is an exquisite physical

pleasure for both, for so God has made man and woman. Both are

meant to experience this pleasure--each must strive that the other

may have it. In its fullness the act not only expresses the union of

personalities, the total giving of the body uttering the total giving

of the self, but intensifies and enriches it. Where there is any want

of generosity in the act by either, the union of personalities is

impoverished.

It is interesting to observe how the Church, pictured often enough

as the enemy of sex, insists upon all this.

In his widely-read book, Pardon and Peace, the Passionist Father

Alfred Wilson lists some questions that husbands and wives might

ask themselves to test how far their sexual life together

approaches the ideal: the first two are especially for wives: "Have I

habitually failed in my duty, by giving to intercourse only a

reluctant and condescending acquiescence, and by my grudging

attitude largely destroyed the value of such acquiescence?"

"Have I been selfish in the refusal or performance of intercourse?

Consulted only my own mood and never attempted to

accommodate myself to my partner's mood or done so only with

the pose of a martyr to duty?"

For men: "In the preliminaries of intercourse have I nauseated my

wife by my complete failure to show a delicate and sensitive

consideration for her feelings and desires?"

"Do I realize that whilst the biological purpose of intercourse is

procreation, the psychological purpose is the expression and

preserving of a unique love?"

"Have I raised my mind to God during intercourse and humbly

thanked Him for this pleasure, this sacramental expression of love

. . . or have I instead considered myself 'outside the pale' and

mentally skulked away from His presence and His love?"

The Church, then, sees that the health of marriage requires a

positive attitude to sex. It must be wholeheartedly accepted as

God's plan for the continuance of the race; its pleasure must be

accepted simply and frankly and with all gratitude to God, by

whose will it is there. Which brings us to the other element in the

Church's thought upon marriage. Just as there must be a positive

attitude to sex, so there must be a positive attitude to God. A

negative attitude to either is corrosive. God must not be seen

primarily as someone we can offend, or sex primarily as something

we may misuse. But God must be seen as the fount of life and of

love, sex as a channel of life and of love.

Why single out God and sex in this way? Because it is precisely by

the lack of a full and positive acceptance of one or other that

marriages otherwise healthy most often fail. Marriage itself is the

union of two lives, a man's life and a woman's life. Now most

people conceive this relation of a man to a woman positively

enough--not as a set of prohibitions to be obeyed or pitfalls to be

avoided but as love, joy in each other, a mutual self-giving, a

certain completion of each by the other, willingness for sacrifice.

All this is right and human, essentially healthy and vitalizing. It

needs no particular discussion because, as I have said, most

people see marriage like that. But what most people do not see is

that it can stay like that only if both God and sex are rightly

understood and wholeheartedly accepted.

The trouble is that people feel instinctively that there is some sort

of incompatibility between God and sex, so that to the believer it

seems irreverent, and to the unbeliever at least incongruous, to

mention them together. Thinking that they cannot well choose

both, people tend to opt for one or the other. Those who opt for

sex, leave God wholly out of their picture of marriage; those who

choose God, while they cannot leave sex out, admit it in a

shuffling shamefaced way, as though wondering what God can

possibly think of them!

Thus one may ignore God for the sake of sex or belittle sex for the

sake of God. Either way marriage is less vital than it should be.

Consider the greater error first--the concentration upon sex to the

ignoring of God. To ignore God means quite simply that no part of

life is seen rightly or can be lived rightly. God made all things, His

will is the only reason why they exist, what He made them for is

their only purpose. Leave God out and you leave out the reason for

everything and the purpose of everything. We cannot be right

about life if we are wrong about God; but we cannot be right about

marriage if we are wrong about life. Marriage is seen out of its

context if life is seen wrong; sex is seen out of its context if

marriage is seen wrong. Out of its context sex, as a union of

bodies, or even as a union of persons, looms larger than it should;

and is expected to yield a fruit of happiness and human

satisfaction which by itself it was never meant to yield, which it is

simply not big enough to yield.

Consider now the lesser error--the belittling of sex for the sake of

God. This error is more likely to affect Catholics, if and in so far as

they lack a positive attitude to God and to sex. It is the feeling that

there is something shady about the sex appetite and its

satisfaction--that God allows it but looks the other way. But this is

to fail to see the glory of the power in itself. By the use of it man

cooperates with the creative power of God. The sexual act is not

something invented by man's lust and tolerated by God: it is

ordained by God Himself as the means for the continuance of

man's race. Nor did God plan it as a strictly mechanical means for

the production of new life, to be performed dutifully and without

elation, for it was God who attached the physical ecstasy to it, so

that it is not only a channel of life but a channel of love too.

But their sexual union will be all that it should be in the life of

husband and wife only if each grasps fully the meaning both of

the act and of its pleasure, and strives wholeheartedly for that

competence in it and joy in it which each is entitled to expect from

the other. There is of course danger here as there is in all life. The

physical pleasure can become overmastering: there can be excess

within marriage as well as outside it. The remedy for this excess--

as indeed also for that distrust of the physical side of marriage

which is the opposite error--is to relate sexual life to God, to thank

Him for so good a gift (as Chesterton says we should thank Him for

wine) by moderation in the use of it, and to offer it to Him for

sanctification as naturally as the rest of life is offered. There is, as

Wingfield Hope says in Life Together, "an irrational instinct to keep

our sex life segregated from God--if sex life sidetracks from God, it

may ruin the happiness of any marriage. We must not leave God

out of any part of our married life, or of any of our thought on

marriage."

That sex is not outside the pale of spirituality God has shown, as

we have already seen, in making the marriage union a symbol of

the union of Christ with His Church; He has shown it even more

startlingly in making marriage a sacrament. For a sacrament is a

means of grace, and grace means an energizing of God's life in the

soul of man, in its first initiation establishing, and in its increase

intensifying, the union of the soul with the Blessed Trinity. Every

marriage is a relationship whereby God makes the man and woman

one flesh; but to the marriage of the baptized, a greater glory is

added. When a baptized man and a baptized woman marry, they

receive the sacrament, whether they know it or not; the union with

each other, which reaches down to the deepest and most radical

urgency of their body, enriches their union with God Himself in

the spiritual depths of the soul. Grace is the highest effect of

Matrimony as of any sacrament. But in Matrimony the sacrament

works outward as well, to vitalize the whole relationship. To quote

Casti Connubi: "The sacrament perfects natural love . . ."; again:

"the husband and wife are assisted not only in understanding, but

in knowing intimately, in adhering firmly to, in willing effectively

and in successfully putting into practice, those things which

pertain to the married state, its aims and duties."

From all this it should be clear that it is from no undervaluing of

sex and marriage that the Church teaches that virginity is higher

and holier still--not any virginity, be it noted, not the virginity of

the impotent or the timorous or the reluctant or the uninterested

or the otherwise occupied, but the virginity which is a dedication

to God of vast energies of love, which but for this higher

dedication would have found their issue in marriage. Indeed it

would seem that the primacy of such dedicated virginity is one

great bulwark of marriage. Marriage is most honored where

virginity is honored still more. For both are expressions--at two

levels, one high, the other higher--of the same truth that sex is a

gift of God: men can profane it, but there is no profanation in it

save such as men import into it.

(3)

In truth the Church is a puzzle to anyone who does not grasp the

principles on which she is thinking in this matter. On the one hand

she seems so niggardly about sex--no intercourse outside

marriage, no contraception, no divorce--and on the other hand she

sees so much splendor in it. But there is no contradiction. Alike in

her glorification of sex and in her prohibitions there is one guiding

principle. Sex must be itself. It is sex being wholly itself and

fulfilling its own function that she glorifies. All the things she

prohibits are ways of denaturing the sexual act or cutting it off

from its evident purpose.

The act is itself when the bodily organs of husband and wife are

properly in contact throughout, and the seed is allowed to take its

natural course. It is denatured when and if these conditions are

lacking. In solitary vice, for instance, there is no contact because

the act is of one person alone. In homosexuality, there is no union

of a man with a woman. Even when there is a man and a woman

and an approximation to the sexual act, the contact may be broken

before the act is complete or artificial barriers may be introduced

so that the organs are not properly in contact at all--the result

being that the seed is prevented from going its natural way, the

object being to have the pleasure of sex without the risk of

generation. Upon all this the Church is adamant. She insists upon

the integrity of the sexual act: the act must be wholly itself, it

must be allowed to have its natural consequences. To deform or

denature it is to degrade it; and to degrade an act of that vital

significance is to damage man far beyond the measure of any

suffering it is intended to alleviate.

The Church, then, insists that the sex act be not performed, save in

its integrity. Equally she insists that it be not performed outside

marriage. By the one insistence she safeguards the act itself, by

the other she safeguards its function. Her teaching here is wholly

in accord with the line of reasoning sketched in the previous

chapter. The power of sex is aimed, obviously, at the generating of

children. It can serve other purposes, too--at the lowest level it can

give pleasure, at the highest it can at once express and intensify

the union of personalities--but these other purposes must not be

sought in a total divorce from its direct function, the continuation

of the race. The institution in which sex best serves this aim is, we

have seen, marriage--and indissoluble marriage, the permanent

union of the father and mother. Where there is no union at all

between the parents, the child is in a desperate insecurity; where

there is a union, but not permanent, a union with divorce and

remarriage seen as an ever-present possibility, the child's training

towards maturity and full membership of the human race will be

profoundly damaged. Marriage is the one condition in which the

main purpose of sex is secured. The sexual union belongs in

marriage and only there.

This is not to say that husband and wife must intend every act of

sexual union to be procreative, but only that when they do have

sexual union they shall have it in its integrity. They may know that

procreation is impossible--for instance, because there is a child

already in the womb, or because the wife has passed the age of

child-bearing. They may feel that procreation is undesirable--

because of great danger to the wife's health or a desperate

economic situation--and therefore restrict the act to times when

conception is improbable. Provided they have the union in its

integrity, not deforming or distorting or mutilating it, doing

nothing to interfere with the course of nature, then they are within

their rights. Such uses of sex still serve sex's primary purpose:

they serve the children already born, by making the marriage a

firmer, warmer, lovinger thing; if no children are, or can be, born,

they still serve sex's primary purpose, for they help to add one

more strong and happy marriage to the whole institution of

marriage, and it is upon the institution of marriage that the new-

born generations depend.

Thus it will be seen that the Church's object is not, as sometimes

supposed, that families should have as many children as possible;

her concern is that a power so supremely valuable as sex should

not be played with. Children, if one may say a thing so obvious

once more, have to be not only brought into the world, but brought

up in the world; and upon this, as upon all else, men must use

their reason. To bring into the world twice as many children as

father and mother are financially competent to support, and

physically or psychologically competent to handle, is not

necessarily to make the right use of the power of sex. A given

couple may feel the certainty that it is God's will that they take no

thought of such factors and rely upon Him to help them no matter

how many children may come. But short of such a special

vocation, husband and wife may, as we have seen, decide that

there is a deeply serious reason for not having another child--for

the moment, perhaps, or even in any foreseeable future.

The reason must be serious. Trifles are not enough. That the birth

of other children might mean buying a less expensive car or

sending the children to a less fashionable school would not justify

the decision to have no more: for that would be making the

ornaments of life more valuable than life itself, and not only could

no Christian see things so, but only the devitalized could. Indeed

for one who has grasped what a human being is--made in God's

image, immortal, redeemed by Christ--only the most serious

reason would be strong enough to support such a decision. But

where such serious reason exists husband and wife may agree to

abstain from sexual intercourse, for a time, or permanently. Or

they may agree to have it only at times when conception is most

unlikely. In all this there is no want of trust in God, but simply an

awareness that in the procreation of children human beings have a

necessary part to play, and that they must use their judgment,

prayerfully, as to how they shall play it.

The denaturing of the marriage act is one of the two modern

assaults upon the integrity of marriage: divorce is the other. The

arguments for divorce are all too obvious. A marriage is a failure,

humanly speaking irredeemable. It is causing great mental

suffering, perhaps bodily suffering too, to husband and wife. The

Church teaches that in such circumstances the suffering party

may withdraw and live apart: but may not re-marry while the other

party lives, for the marriage itself cannot be broken. It is a hard

teaching, and to the generality of men seems even repulsive. For

two people in the prime of life thus to be condemned to celibacy,

especially after marriage has fully aroused them sexually, can

mean sheer anguish. Anyone with much experience of life has met

case after case where his whole soul longed that the law might be

different. The suffering caused is so great a thing, the way of relief

seems so small a thing.

But the way of relief is not so small a thing. For it is impossible. It

was not through any defect of love that Christ said "What God has

joined together let not man put asunder"--Christ, who was so

totally love that men who know nothing else about Him know at

least that He loved all of our race as it has never been loved.

God makes the man and woman to be husband and wife: no one

but God. Neither the State, nor the man and woman themselves

with all their striving, can unmake the relationship God has

made.[1] If there is cruelty in the refusal to permit divorce and

remarriage, it is not the Church's cruelty, but God's. And God is

love.

Somehow, this law, like every law of God, must serve love. The

suffering which the law may cause must be outweighed by a

greater good for man and a greater suffering avoided. And, in this

matter, however much our hearts may be wrung by the sight of

individual anguish, the greater good, the balance of advantage, is

not hard to see.

The happiness of society as a whole, of the generality of men and

women, and still more of children, is bound up with the health of

marriage: it provides the one stable framework, the underlying

security, without which men and women, and children still more,

feel the wretchedness of their insufficiency. Where a given

marriage is unhappy, this wretchedness falls upon the individuals

concerned: and there are marriages where one feels that everyone

concerned, even the children, might be the gainers from ending

them and letting the parents start afresh with new partners. One

need not stay here to observe that the second marriage is not

necessarily much happier than the first--the innocent party may

have contributed to the first failure, and in the same innocence

will bring the same defects of character and personality to make

their modest contribution to the failure of the second. But this is

beside the point. The suffering caused to individuals by a

marriage that fails is a trifle compared to the suffering caused

throughout society by the breakdown of marriage itself.

And unhappily there is no way of breaking individual marriages

without damaging the institution of marriage. For any human

power to break a marriage because it is unhappy means that

marriage as such is breakable; and if marriage as such is

breakable, then anybody's is, everybody's is. No two people are

any longer united in a relation permanent in itself, but only in an

arrangement dependent upon whim or mood or feeling or the

thousand chances of life. The institution of marriage no longer

exists and society has taken a first step on the road to chaos.

This is not a rhetorical exaggeration. The Church knows, and

seems to be alone in knowing, that wedges have thin ends. The

world always points to the thinness of the wedge's point of entry,

and accuses the Church of making a fuss about a trifle: what harm,

says the world, can possibly come from admitting an exception

and granting relief in a case so poignant, and happily so rare? The

Church sees the thickness of the wedge that lies behind that thin

end, awaiting entry. "To do a great right, do a little wrong" is a plea

that the modern man finds irresistible. But there is no such thing

as doing a little I wrong: the smallest yielding of principle, for

however good a cause, is a hole in the dike and you will not keep

out the sea. There is a principle, for instance, that innocent life

may never be taken. Of course, says the world: but to save the life

of a mother, one may surely destroy the infant within her. The

Church is seen to be unyielding and is thought to be heartless--

even her own members might wish her to yield a little to common

humanity. The Church does not yield. She has her own principle,

that God does not allow it. But she knows also about the end and

the wedge. Once conceded that innocent life may be taken for so

very good a cause, and there is no limit to the causes which will

seem good enough to justify taking it. Millions of Jews

exterminated in lethal chambers may serve as a reminder that she

is not being fanciful.

So in our present inquiry on marriage and divorce: the thin end of

the wedge was adultery. It was argued, from a text in St. Matthew's

Gospel, that Christ allowed divorce and remarriage on that one

single ground: I do not thus interpret the text, but I can see how

one might. So divorce came in, for adultery. A great deal of wedge

has entered since that thin breach was made, and we have not seen

the whole of it yet. Roughly speaking, anyone who wants a divorce

can have it. He still has to ask for it, and may have to do a little

legal maneuvering for it. But he can get it. There is something else.

The mere possibility of divorce helps marriage to fail. The average

modern couple enter upon marriage, assuming it terminable,

though they have no intention that theirs shall terminate. But

successful marriage is not automatic. It has to be worked for, and

there are trying moments, as we shall see in the next chapter, as

indeed you can see in the life around you. There are difficulties

from within--two imperfect personalities to be somehow adjusted;

difficulties from outside--economic circumstance, the superior

seductiveness of strangers. Marriage, like all other valuable human

things, calls for strong efforts and strong resistances: and people

who know that marriage is unbreakable, will make them: people

who regard it as breakable, won't.

The principle of the end and the wedge has had a spectacular

illustration in the matter of birth control. The thin end of the

wedge was the wife who would certainly die if she had another

baby: to oppose contraception for her made one feel like a brute.

The wedge made its entry: and the widening was dazzling: till now

a high-school girl might feel socially inadequate without her

contraceptive package. For everybody, married and unmarried,

contraceptives seem to have taken the danger out of sex. One can

indulge sexual desires irresponsibly, for "nothing can happen."

With contraceptives, one feels, sex can be played with. But sex is

never to be played with, it is too strong: and something is always

happening in the depths of the psyche. The truth is that a healthy

use of sex cannot co-exist with any deformation of the sexual act,

there is too much possibility of frenzy in it; the institution of

marriage cannot co-exist with divorce, for human indolence and

waywardness will always take the line of least resistance. Any

exception upon either abandons the principle, and nothing is left

but the wreckage.

All this may seem fanciful to those who regard sex as a life all its

own, not related to the rest of life, or as a private hobby with no

effects upon the other elements of the individual's life or the life

of society--a hobby like stamp-collecting, only more exciting. Such

people tend, too, to the romantic notion that you only have to

leave sex uncontrolled to get happiness. One wonders how either

notion could survive adolescence. Maturity sees sex yielding less

happiness than it ever did, the framework of married life

everywhere corroded, the children of broken homes growing into a

national problem.

Health for the individual and for society is not simply a question

of the best distribution of material goods--pleasant work, pleasant

home, economic sufficiency, sexual desire hollowing its own

happy channels All that is three-dimensional, and man has a

strange fourth dimension--the sacred. Life must be sacred, sex

must be sacred, marriage must be sacred. For all three there is no

sure middle ground between sacredness and profanation. All three

run too deep into the heart of reality for a decent respectability to

be sufficient or even possible. What man does not reverence he

will profane. He must re-learn reverence for life and for sex and

for marriage. They can flourish only as sacrosanct.

In the last section I have talked exclusively of divorce and birth

control; and indeed our presentation of marriage to the world

concentrates so much on these that an outsider might be pardoned

for thinking Christian marriage no more than an heroic refusal to

get divorced, accompanied by a tightlipped renunciation of

contraceptives. But these two are diseases of marriage, comparable

in the moral order to cancer and consumption in the material.

Freedom from cancer and consumption does not mean that a body

is healthy; freedom from divorce and birth control does not mean

that a marriage is healthy. A body may be free from major

diseases, yet unhealthy and devitalized: so may a marriage. To

understand health, we must study health--the conditions in which

a thing is most fully itself and most abounding in vitality. This

study must always be primarily positive. The study of disease--

even the recognition that it is disease--comes after.

To summarize all this, the love of husband and wife can be the

magnificent thing it is meant to be only if both are living mentally

in the real universe, a universe which exists solely because God

wills it and in which each thing is healthily itself only by being as

God wills it. Men must see what they are and where they are before

they can see with real understanding, and not simply by blind

obedience, how they should act. And save in relation to God they

cannot see what they are and where they are, for save in relation to

God they would not be at all. Once a man has this view of reality as

a whole, he will scarcely need arguments against divorce and

contraception; until he has it, he will not be convinced by them.

This bringing in of God is not mere religiosity: it is the plain fact

of things. It may seem vastly troublesome to teach men about God

before dealing with their concrete problems, but the sooner we

realize that the concrete problems cannot be solved without God,

the better for everybody.

1. God teaches, through His Church, that there are two instances in

which marriage, validly contracted, may be broken. The first is

when the marriage has not been consummated: for good reason,

the Church can terminate it. And there is the situation envisaged

by St. Paul (I Cor. vii. 15): two unbaptized people marry and later

one of them is baptized: if the unbaptized one refuses to live with

the baptized (or makes life together impossible) the baptized one

may marry again.

III. MARRIAGE EXISTENTIAL

Marriage as the nature of man needs it, marriage as God ordains it,

harmonize admirably with each other, as we have seen, but a good

deal less admirably with marriage as men and women actually live

it. Reading the last two chapters, the average married couple might

smile cynically or even savagely: one can hear them in derisive

recitation of the Christian statement of what marriage is--a man

and woman made one by God, a sexual life meant both to express

the oneness and to bring children into being, he the head, she the

heart. Derisively recited, even soberly studied, it sounds

unrealistic, hot-house stuff, not for our weather-beaten world. Not

many marriages look much like that; many look like a parody of it.

But every marriage, whatever it may look like, is in fact that--just

as man, whatever he may look like, is God's image. Husband and

wife are one, though they may no longer will oneness but turn

their every energy to rending, not union, sexual life has those

purposes, though the two may pervert it; the husband is the head

and the wife the heart, though neither functions. We are about to

look at Marriage Existential, as we have already looked at Man

Existential. In neither instance are we turning from ideal to real:

man and marriage remain, in their essential reality, what we have

shown them to be; whatever misuses there may be are misuses of

that reality; the misuses are real, certainly, but so is the nature of

the thing misused.

There are marriages that start well enough and are wrecked by

circumstance, and marriages that seem doomed from the start. The

father may be out of work, there may be no houses to be had, so

that over-crowding and under-feeding make mock of God's design;

husband or wife may die while the marriage is still young. Or the

husband may totally lack will-power, the wife totally lack feeling,

one or the other may be an alcoholic, or unnaturally cruel, or

sexually perverted. These are tragic possibilities, but they are not

in the nature of the case--they arise, when they do arise, from

exceptional circumstances or abnormal characters. They are to be

laid more to the count of circumstances and characters than of

marriage. When they do occur, it will be cruelly difficult for one or

both to rescue what can be rescued. Even then, a grasp of the

nature of God and man and marriage and a living, tenacious trust

in all three--or even a plain human clinging to the preservation of

the family--can bring success where every sign said ruin; and this

is not simply optimistic assertion, but a truth verified over and

over again in human experience. Yet we may feel that such a

degree of understanding and trust and courage is heroic and not to

be counted upon; more often the marriage goes under.

But marriages of this exceptional sort fall outside our

consideration here. That people make a failure of their marriage in

abnormal conditions is no count against the institution of

marriage. The real problem is that so many people make so poor a

thing of it in conditions roughly normal. Our concern is with the

general average.

(1)

When Mr. Smith marries Miss Jones, it is a common joke that he

doesn't know what he is marrying: which usually means that he

doesn't know what a temper she has or what she looks like in the

early morning. But of almost every man it is true in a profounder

sense: he doesn't know what he is marrying, nor does she, because

neither knows what a human being is. Two people have taken each

other for better or worse, linked their lives in what might easily

prove an intolerable intimacy, and neither knows what the being is

to whom he has tied himself so tight. A man had better study what

a human being is, because he's marrying one--assuming that

merely being one has not been a sufficient stimulus to the study.

In a sense it is a doubling of the strange anomaly that each has

been handling himself without knowing what he is, but it is

actually far worse. There is a sort of rule-of-thumb knowledge of

oneself gained from long experience of being oneself which,

though it does not supply for total ignorance of what one is, at

least takes some of the chill off it: one has managed to live more

or less satisfactorily with oneself, and such dissatisfaction as one

feels with one's own performance does not, in most people, turn to

resentment. But neither has had any such experience of being the

other. A new situation has arisen that the old tried routines cannot

cope with: and, in this matter, as in all matters when the routines

fail, there must be understanding to cope with the breakdown.

In the close union of marriage all that we have seen in the first

section of this book, as to the necessity of knowing and the danger

of not knowing what man is, stands clearer than in individual life

at the one end or the wider union of Society at the other. Not

knowing it can produce more sorrow, knowing it more joy. The pair

who have really meditated upon man as a union of matter and

spirit, by his spirit immortal and made in God's image, a being for

whom Christ died, have made a preparation for marriage for which

there is no substitute. If any be disposed to mock at this as

doctrinaire and unrealistic, at least let one who thinks he has made

a success of marriage mock first. To have failed does not of itself

qualify a man to speak as an expert, upon marriage or anything

else.

In marriage the view of the essential magnificence of man is at

once most urgently needed and most sharply tested. It is harder

for the married to go on holding it and grimmer to go on not

holding it. No man is a hero to his valet, says the proverb: and no

valet is bound as tight to his master's unposed self as wife and

husband to each other's. Distant hills are greenest: in marriage

there is no distance at all to create the illusion of any verdure that

is not there, or deepen the greenness of any that is. Every man's

private face is different from his public face: but the face that the

married see is something more private than private--private is too

public a word for it. No one sees the husband as the wife sees him-

-not the husband, certainly; and he has his own unshared view of

her for compensation. For being thus unique, the view each has of

the other is not necessarily accurate or profound. Each will note

the elements in the other that he or she personally responds to

most--the response being either of attraction or repulsion: but

whereas one may get used to the qualities that attract and take

them for granted and cease to respond to them, the irritating more

often continue to irritate.

The average issue of all this is hard to set down; indeed it is hard

to say if there is an average, or if the word average has any

meaning, where there is so wide an arc--with something that verges

on bliss at one end, and something that skirts the upper edge of

the intolerable at the other. But those marriages surely rank high

where husband and wife love each other, would feel all lost

without each other, are amiably tolerant of each other's faults (and

aware of their own): and even in this smaller group the phrase

"essential magnificence" applied to either might cause the other to

smile. In less happy marriages--which would yet count as

successful, which neither party regrets having entered upon--the

rejection would be more violent.

Only in the rarest cases will a husband and wife discover each

other's magnificence by looking at each other: the way to learn is

the way Christian civilization learnt it, by listening to God, who

says that it is so. Learn it they must, for it is the truth about

themselves, and it is the one sure ground of reverence. It is a main

theme of this book that reverence is everywhere essential. In

marriage reverence is more important even than love: love will not

find its own self without it. Reverence does not mean remoteness

or exclude lightheartedness: two who reverence each other can

play together. But it does mean a steady awareness in each that the

other has a kinship with the eternal.

It is essential that husband and wife reverence each other: it is

essential that they reverence the marriage relation. And as the one

reverence comes from knowledge of what man is, the other comes

from knowledge of what marriage is. In one as in the other, as we

have seen, the essential magnificence is as real as any existential

degradation there may be. In normal Christian marriage, of course,

there is no question of degradation. Yet there may be a failure to

realize what marriage essentially is which prevents the marriage

reaching its full stature. It may be a failure either to see marriage

as a union of personalities, based upon self-giving, or to achieve a

bodily union worthy of the total personal relation it is meant to

express.

The bodily union may lack perfection either from coldness, where

one party goes through the motions mechanically or with positive

distaste; or from excess, with one or both concentrated wholly and

gluttonously upon the pleasure the body can get out of it and so,

with whatever protestation of love, one using the other as a means,

a convenience, a thing and not a person. So far as these evils arise

from physical or psychological defects they may not be easily

curable, or curable at all. But more often they are there because no

right view of sex and marriage exists to show any reason for

bettering them. Save in the rare instances when everything goes

right by a sort of healthy instinct with love blunting all egoisms,

understanding is essential. With understanding, most of what is

wrong in the physical relation may be made right; with

understanding there may be a beginning of the self-giving without

which no sexual competence will make a marriage happy, and with

which marriage may be a thing of excellence even when the sex

relation lacks richness. Where the understanding is by both, the

marriage will not be wrecked, from within at least. Where one

understands and the other does not, it can be tragic--such an

infinity of patience and love and wounds endured and no certain

success.

(2)

Total self-giving, then, is the key to successful marriage. The self

resists, clinging to its autonomy. Love is the key to self-giving.

Love can provide a kind of understanding deeper and more

dynamic than the intellect at its most powerful will ever know.

Love can provide a kind of reverence, too, though this perhaps

more before the loved one is possessed--in which case it was

reverence for the unknown, a valuable thing but not the real thing:

to know and still to revere, that is true reverence. Love can do even

that. Love can do every sort of impossibility. The trouble is that

love at that intensity is not so very common. Every new pair of

lovers feel that they have attained it, like C. S. Calverley's man--

I did not love as others do

None ever did, that I've heard tell of.

It has never been as easy as all that, and modern life has made it

harder; the waters have been so muddied, love has so much to

contend with in the way of psychologies that have half-fouled it

for the young before they have grown to feel it. Two or three years

of cynicism about sex is no happy preparation for love. Adolescent

playing about with sex there has always been: it is a great

misfortune, since there is no gift a husband and wife can bring to

each other so great as their sexual power in its integrity, not

spilled and frittered away in small affairs: it is a great misfortune,

but not fatal--not half so deadly as the theorizing about sex that

the youngest learn now. C. S. Calverley's pair would be harder to

find today, when everyone has been taught that love is either

chemistry or libido, either way wholly of the body and not unique

or especially to be valued. Even through that soggy mass of

adverse theory, people do fall in love. And they had better, if they

are going to marry. What if they do not?

Love there must be in marriage. But not necessarily sexual love.

Husband and wife must have at least that love with which Christ

said we must love our neighbor. Without that no human relation is

possible for them at all. But this sort of love is easier while our

neighbor remains our neighbor: it grows harder when he moves in

to live with us: even warm friendship finds too close and

continuous a proximity trying. Sexual love is different. It is rooted

in the will, but it floods the emotional life too, and finds its

satisfaction in one particular person of the opposite sex--a

satisfaction not to be had only in possessing the other, but equally

in giving oneself to be possessed. It is the one love that need not

suffer attrition from proximity--even the proximity of the marriage

bed. Where there is no sexual love, the sexual act will not easily

keep its rightness. For the act is at its healthiest and richest when

it expresses a total self-giving; without that it would be performed

at best dutifully, at worst either mechanically or too animally,

anyhow without resonances in the depths of the personality. And

two who are not in love will find it difficult to give themselves

thus totally.

This special love, then, is of the first importance. But, for all its

power, it has no certainty of permanence. It depends enormously,

in its earlier stages at least, upon the feelings: and these go up and

down with one's own physical and spiritual state, and with the

other's well- or ill-doing. That is where reverence comes in, which

is based upon reason. Married love exists because he is he and she

is she. Reverence exists because he and she are human beings,

made in God's image, immortal, redeemed by Christ.

Love is based upon the uniqueness of the person loved, reverence

upon the common substance of humanity. Love can know

disillusion, he is not as she thought him, she had seemed faultless

and is not. In the wind of disillusion, love can flicker or blow out

altogether. But reverence can know no disillusion: he and she are

in their unchanging essence precisely what they were seen to be.

That is the sense in which reverence can be more important than

love. It gives permanence to marriage. It can even protect love

against its own too great volatility.

(3)

A man and a girl may marry, loving each other, and with a clear

realization of what man is and what marriage is and what life is

and what God is. And their marriage may be a miserably mediocre

business all the same. Preparation for marriage is essential. But in

another sense you cannot be prepared for it. The newly married

have a feeling that what is happening is at once like what they

were told and not quite like. A union of personalities is easy

enough to theorize about--as swimming is--but the reality can be

known only in the experience. Marriage is a sort of sea, with a

troubled surface and frightening depths. Swimming lessons on

land cannot give you the feel of the sea: after however many

lessons, the first plunge shows it strange and vast and un-

cooperative. In marriage, the new element, of which no thinking of

one's own or advice from others can give the feel, is the closeness

of life together. And the difficulty is not so much the

continuousness of the closeness, day in and day out, night after

night for ever, as the quality of the closeness--two beings not

simply linked or bound together, but interpenetrating, a sort of

permeation--more like air in lungs. It is difficult to say it without

making it sound comic. But it is true and it is not comic. Each is

the air the other breathes, and the lungs may not, for a long time

or perhaps ever, be comfortable with this new air. The bodily

penetration is a symbol of the interpenetration of their

personalities, and like all good symbols falls far short. So close a

union of personalities has two natural results: by their faults,

especially by the thrust of self, the two can bruise each other: by

their insufficiency they can leave each other unsatisfied.

The defects first. Not much needs to be said of them: they fill the

comedies of the world to bursting: it is a poor playwright who

cannot be funny about them: he need not invent, for they are

there, and they make good comedy--to watch, of course, not to live

with. Defects in husband and wife need not be great to be

maddening; faults which even in close friendship would not matter

at all, matter horribly in marriage. The way one of them sniffs or

clears his throat or laughs, a word always mis-pronounced or a

minor grammatical error, can play the devil with the other's

nerves, worse indeed than more serious faults. A want of external

courtesy can cause more hurt than a really profound want of

consideration. A mere disharmony of mood--that one should be

gay when the other is depressed--can become a major grievance.

And there is the plain human fact of cussedness, being difficult

for no reason at all, and sudden gusts of anger and a real desire to

hurt and satisfaction in hurting, with love sharpening the

satisfaction.

There is no point in listing these things. Most marriages have them

and most survive them. A sense of humor helps, though this can

be strained to screaming point (and indeed can strain the partner

to screaming point, if his own humor be on a different wave-

length, or perhaps no wave-length). Common sense helps--only the

very immature can tell themselves that somewhere a faultless

partner is waiting for them if only they had not stumbled into

marriage with one who was imperfect. Most helpful of all, perhaps,

is a lively sense of one's own defects, which are not more

attractive for being one's own.

But there are graver faults of character--lying still within the area

of the average, and not with those abnormal evils mentioned

earlier--that show up starkly and press relentlessly on nerves and

feelings. It is by these that marriage is really tested. There can be

a foul temper, for instance, or suspiciousness or jealousy; one or

other may be lazy or spendthrift or "tricky" about money. That

these things may not wreck the marriage, there must be

unselfishness, sometimes on a heroic scale--which does not mean

putting up with anything and everything, but resolutely thrusting

one's own feelings aside and doing what is best for the

troublesome partner and for the marriage itself. But unselfishness

can get a little frayed when it is all on one side, and the faults on

the other get no less; indignation--thoroughly justified, be it noted,

but all the more corrosive for that--arrives and settles in; and the

martyr-complex makes a hell for erring partner and martyr alike,

to say nothing of the children.

But one cannot say nothing of the children. A moment can easily

arrive when one partner may ask whether the defects of the other

call for some more positive action in the children's interests.

There is the possibility of self-deception here--a selfish desire to

escape, cloaking itself as anxiety for the children's well-being. But

the problem is perfectly real. The husband is the head of the

family and the woman is the heart. In the human body both organs

are marvelously adapted for their functions, and even at that they

often function badly. In the family the husband and wife may be

extremely, even marvelously ill-adapted for their very much more

delicate functions. The wife may have no heart of her own, or too

much heart to the point of sloppiness; the husband no will of his

own, or too much to the point of tyranny. In the actual run of life,

these things work out well enough, provided that one parent is

functioning normally--all, perhaps, except the last: tyranny in the

father is hard to cope with and in the nature of the case is not

uncommon. Shakespeare gives the clue:

Man, proud man

Drest in a little brief authority . . .

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As makes the angels weep.

Authority could hardly be littler or briefer than a father's over his

family: yet it can go to his head, if he have a weakness that way.

All the power he would have gloried in exercising, had life been

kind to him--as captain of a warship, say, or ruler of an empire--

comes thundering down upon the heads of his family, and the

tricks can be very fantastic indeed. A wife may have to consider

when she should intervene, and if so how, and whether anyhow

intervention is possible. This is not a book of marriage guidance,

and I am not drawing up a set of rules by which husband or wife

may decide whether or not to separate. I only say that principles as

to the nature of man and of marriage should be in their mind when

they are making the decision. But experience does seem to suggest

two things--separation is so unsatisfactory that it must be a very

bad marriage indeed to be worse; and those who have made the

sacrifices necessary to hold an unhappy marriage together do not,

in the long run, seem to regret it.

I have glanced thus rapidly at the question of how a husband and

wife can hurt each other and weaken their marriage, by their faults

of character. Of a totally different quality is what I have called

insufficiency in the personality.

There is the fact, already referred to, that no human person can

meet all another's needs. There are needs that only God can meet.

They lie very deep because the first and profoundest fact about

man is that he was made for union with God; is hungry, therefore,

for union and tormented in its absence. There is the need to adore,

for instance, which when not directed to God finds very strange

gods indeed; the sense of guilt, when union with God is broken by

sin, and the need for cleansing; the need for re-assurance in the

loneliness and lostness of the creature out of touch with his

Creator; the need for re-vitalization, when the living contact with

the Source of all life is snapped. A man need not know what is

troubling him to be profoundly troubled: as a man may die of a

microbe he has never heard of. If they do not turn to God, a

husband and wife will look to each other for the satisfaction of

these needs--more especially they will look to the sexual act; they

are asking more than the act can give, more than the whole

personality can give. Not receiving it, they feel cheated and

resentful. Which is one reason why a Christian should not marry an

atheist: it is terribly trying to be only a creature, yet expected to

meet the needs that only the Creator can meet.

Yet it is not this insufficiency, inseparable from our finitude, that I

have in mind here; but a sort of thinness of personality, a

negativeness, an absence of qualities that ought to be there--which

in extreme cases may be utter mindlessness, flabbiness in the will,

dull passions, dull or maybe shrill emotional responses, lack of

richness or generosity or any substance. The union of two such

personalities is a union of two nullities, like the embrace of two

shadows. There is a special awfulness in the marriage of two so

mindless that they cannot converse--or even be fruitfully silent: it

may be less trying when both are so busy that they meet only at

bed and board, but the busyness only masks the vacuum. There

are personalities so thin that, without strong religious motives,

their marriage cannot last. They have no will to give themselves

and almost no selves to give, nothing to hold each other with:

fidelity would be a miracle in such marriages. But even short of

that degree of nullness, most of us have little enough to offer our

partners in marriage. The problem of marriage for the majority is

to make something out of a union, if not of two nullities, at least of

two insufficiencies.

Surprisingly often it succeeds. There is a power in marriage that

tends both to weld and give substance to the personalities. In

some mysterious way--mystical might be a better word--there is a

communication of substance from one person to the other, and

from one sex to the other: each becomes himself plus something

of the other. Even a very thin personality begins to take on body

when one has to take account of another person; new elements in

one's make-up come alive and either unite with elements already

in operation or strive with them and stimulate them by strife: so

that one is already more of a person. A selfish man who no longer

takes his selfishness as sole and unquestioned law of action but is

at least troubled by the feeling of duty undone to another is, by

that shade, more human than before.

Marriage seems to work magic. But it is not all magic. Husband and

wife must work hard at it. If one is making no effort, the other

must work twice as hard. Love helps, though it is precisely love

that is in danger of losing its elan with so much to depress it;

prayer helps tremendously. But, in the purely psychological order,

nothing helps so much as the reverence that flows from a right

vision of what man is--that this loutish man, this empty-headed

woman, is God's image, an immortal spirit, loved by Christ even to

the death of the Cross: whatever the surface looks like, this is in

the depth of every human being, this in him is what God joined

together with this in her. The realization that there is this welding

of two into one in the depths of their being, below the level that

the eye of the mind can see, is the most powerful incentive to

make that union in depth effective through every layer of

personality.

This reverence is a safeguard against one of the great dangers of

family life--the tendency of one partner to form, or re-form, the

other (or for a parent to form the children) in his own image. There

is a sort of imperialism to which the self is liable, the desire to

impose its own likeness. As we have already seen, one should not

lightly try to re-make another: but, if re-making there must be,

assuredly the only image in which any one should be re-made is

the image of God in which he was made. Children are even more

likely to suffer this sort of tyranny than adults. One knows the

widowed mother who rules her children with the rod of iron of a

dead father's will--"Your father would not have wished it." Of that

will she is the sole interpreter, and there is no appeal.

Any imposing of oneself on another is a sin against reverence.

Reverence is due to all men. It was the Roman poet Juvenal who

said that the greatest reverence was due to children. It must have

sounded like a paradox to his readers, and possibly a little daring

to himself. It is the plain truth; but hard for a parent to see for two

reasons: the first is the overwhelming tendency to think one has

made them oneself, that they are one's own handiwork; the second

is their physical weakness, which makes it tempting to enforce

one's own will upon them--the weakness, you observe, may be

purely physical, a child of three often has more personality than

both parents put together. In The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler

has a wonderful phrase about a small boy in nineteenth-century

England: "The Catechism was awful . . . it seemed to him that he

had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for him upon every

side, but that nobody had any duties towards him." Our Lord

provides the element Butler found wanting in the Church

Catechism: "If one scandalize the least of these my little ones, it

were better for him if a millstone were hanged about his neck and

he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

So far we have been looking at the difficulties that arise because

marriage is the union of two personalities, which have somehow to

be harmonized. These difficulties would be tough enough, if there

were no sexual element to complicate them. But there is a sexual

element. And it complicates them. Sex's head is not always ugly,

but it always rears it.

In the making of marriage sexual desire normally plays a part: thus

far it has rendered an essential service. But sexual desire is an

uneasy servant, not to be relied on simply to serve. It has its own

needs, its own urges, its own dreams. And in the marriage it has

helped to produce, its dreams may dissolve, its needs be unmet, so

that its urges take on a new and sometimes frantic urgency. The

physical union may be totally unsatisfying, and if so, bitterly so.

This will not necessarily destroy the marriage. Where the union of

personalities is richly satisfying, the bodily union gains so much

from it that any imperfection at the bodily level is more than

compensated.

But the perfect spiritual and psychological union is rare, and, short

of it, an unsatisfying sexual life can rend a marriage apart: there

may be no actual divorce, but the dream of a perfect sexual union

will continue to haunt the imagination, so that the meager reality

becomes a torment, and husband or wife or both will go out in

pursuit of the dream. This is something quite distinct from mere

lust or licentiousness. The "dream" comes from very deep within

the personality, and the inspiration is noble in itself and can make

for nobility. When two people fall in love, each sees the dream and

the aspiration wholly concentrated in the other. It is a woeful thing

when marriage shatters them: a woeful thing if the shattering is

the fault of either.

I have said that what I have here in mind is not at all the same

thing as lust or licentiousness. But there is lust too: and if only the

licentious indulge it, no one at all is exempt from its first stirrings,

save in the fruition of a great love. Sexual desire is incalculable. As

a mere animal appetite for union with a member of the other sex,

any member not actively repulsive, it is calculable enough, and

most adults have brought it into some sort of control. What is

incalculable is the desire, not for any member of the other sex, but

for that particular one. It suddenly flames into life on no known

law. But, once it is aflame, the laws of its burning are only too well-

known. We know that a man, beginning to desire a woman he ought

not to have (because he is married, or she is) can tell himself that

it is all quite innocent--he is interested in her for her intellectual

or artistic life, or her spiritual problems--and so go on fooling

himself right up to the moment of the explosion. At least the high-

minded thus fool themselves, the earthier sort know better what

they are at. At all times man has that conflict between reason and

will of which St. Paul speaks so poignantly, whereby he can see

one thing and do another: but in this matter he goes beyond that--

sexual desire has a curious power of preventing reason and will

from acting at all (as tart apricots, for instance, can prevent the

teeth from biting). Ira furor brevis est, said Horace. Anger is

madness while it lasts. Sexual desire is a sort of somnambulism

while it lasts--something in the back of the mind plucking at the

sleeve with a reminder of reality as it is, something in the depth of

the conscience plucking at the sleeve with a warning to stand and

go no further: but mind and will not gripping, the dream in full

possession. Sexual desire, one says again, is incalculable and (save

about the precise object of desire) uncalculating. It can fix itself

anywhere: can will incompatibles: can will what it does not want--if

will be the word for it. Desire for one woman may momentarily

eclipse love for another, and the eclipsed love can outlast the

desire, so that a moment comes when the love is in full possession

again, and the dead desire seems mere emptiness and degradation.

Everyone knows all this, and knowing it does not cure it. But a

serious effort to realize it is not waste, for all that. For in the first

place it is a reminder that all carry their treasure in earthen

vessels, even young lovers newly married, who feel exultantly that

they and their love are beyond the reach of mortal accident, even

the middle-aged long-married, who feel that these are fires that

will never flame again: it can save them all from over-testing their

supposed strength: the danger is less for the man who knows it can

happen to him. And in the second place it shows where the

precautions must be taken and what counter-action is profitable.

The temptations of this sort that come to people satisfyingly in

love are fewer and more manageable: where a husband and wife

meet each other's psychological and physical needs, the odds

against the stranger are very high. There is still a magic of the

moon but the daylight magic of the sun is greater. Only when the

daylight magic has faded, when the sensed daylight has grown

less, when the whole life together has become a routine, even if a

pleasant routine--then is the dangerous moment.

Yet, when all is said, whether the level of conjugal vitality be high

or low, the most powerful safeguard against infidelity, in the

bodily act or only in the mind, is that clear view of man and of

marriage which at every point we have seen as fundamental. The

moral law--known not only as a set of prohibitions, but as the

expression of the way of life seen as best for us by a loving

Creator--can give a strength and steadiness to mind and will, and

even limit the field of temptation. There is an extraordinary

psychological force in regarding certain things as out of the

question. In all ages, men and women have been born, one

presumes, with homosexual tendencies: but in healthier ages

homosexuality was felt to be altogether unthinkable, and the

tendencies therefore came to nothing: in our own society, which

regards homosexuality as unusual but an interesting variant of the

normal all the same, the temptation to let the tendencies have

their way can prove irresistible. So with adultery. A social attitude

that regards it as impossible does at least make it improbable. We

can no longer rely on a general consensus of opinion that any sort

of sexual deviation is out of the question. But individual men and

women can provide the same sort of psychological strengthening

for themselves, by so studying and meditating upon the nature of

man and the law of God that what these require becomes a vital

part of the world they are mentally living in.

To many all that we have been saying will seem Utopian. The sex

instinct seems so powerful that to expect the generality of men to

control it is like urging tranquillity upon a man with St. Vitus'

dance. But this is to underrate the generality of men. There is a

vast store of moral health which does not normally show very

spectacularly in moral action, perhaps, but shows unmistakably in

other ways--especially in two ways--negatively, in a total inability

to find happiness in self-indulgence, positively in an astounding

readiness for sacrifice for a cause seen as good. Exceptional men

will die as martyrs to science: the most ordinary men will die

helping the stricken in an epidemic or in war for their country.

Men will sacrifice themselves for any ideal that they value. The

integrity of marriage does not seem to them such an ideal. Why

should it? Who has ever shown them the enormous human

interests involved in it? We are not entitled to say men will make

no sacrifice for the ideal, until we have done something to show

them why it is the ideal.