Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity by Anthony Esolen

Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity by Anthony Esolen

Author:Anthony Esolen [Esolen, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saint Benedict Press
Published: 2014-06-01T00:00:00+00:00


Seventh Argument

We Must Not Seal Ourselves in

a Regime of Divorce

THE banquet is over, and the guests and the families have lighted the way home in a big parade. Some of them are bearing torches. Others are singing merry songs about what’s going to happen tonight. Then the bride stops in front of the threshold to his house. He’s gone before her, and stands as if waiting for her, with the door open. He gestures in a call of welcome. Her name is Flavia, and his name is Quintus, but for this moment they use the ceremonial names that their own parents used, and their parents before them, back into the immemorial past.

Ubi tu Caius, she says, ibi ego Caia. Wherever you shall go, Caius, there I Caia shall go also.

And he lifts her up over the threshold, and their wedded lives begin.

Let’s look at that moment in the ancient Roman ceremony, and see what it reveals about matrimony.

Why do the bride and groom not use their own names? Why do they use the masculine and feminine forms of the same name?

The ceremony suggests to Caius and Caia, whatever their names may be, that they are doing the thing that founds the city itself. They are citizens, with the commonest of names; they see themselves as united with all the other Roman men and women who have done the same. The marriage isn’t a private affair. It can’t be, not when the family is the seedbed of the city. Piety to one’s country flows from the piety one owes to father and mother and children. There are no gods of the city if there are no household gods first.

And why the same name? When the Pharisees asked Jesus under what circumstances a man might lawfully divorce his wife, He surprised them by disallowing the question. “Moses permitted a letter of divorce,” He said, “because of the hardness of your hearts; but from the beginning it was not so.” Jesus then cites the words of Genesis, before the Fall, to express the essence of matrimony, one that harmonizes exactly with the pagan Roman custom above. “Male and female He created them,” He says, “and for this reason a man shall leave his mother and father and cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.”

One flesh—a new thing in the world. I will not ask the reader to defer to sacred Scripture. I’m noting that the pagans themselves understood marriage in much the same way. Flavia and Quintus may enjoy one another’s company. We call that friendship. But matrimony is qualitatively different. When they marry, in the very act that consummates the marriage, they become Caius and Caia; male and female to one another; a union of complementaries; one flesh.

This isn’t mysticism. It is a plain biological fact. Quintus can eat on his own. Flavia can breathe on her own. Their bodies can do on their own all things that bodies can do, with one most important exception. They cannot reproduce on their own.



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