In terms of the debate over marriage, nearly all of human history can be divided neatly into two halves. During the first, which stretches back into the dim mists of time, the human race struggled to understand the meaning of marriage — what it was for and how to undertake it. They struggled, sometimes poorly, in coming to grips with an idea they knew was central to their existence, but which was sometimes disconnected from their perceived needs and desires.
Yet they endured in that quest. Over the previous 500 years or so we encounter the second half of that story. After a genuine definition of marriage was attained, many decided it was either too hard, too limiting, or didn’t sanction the sort of activities towards which they felt driven.
The attainment of the truth about marriage was not easy to come by. To give one example, various theories of “primitive promiscuity” have enlivened academic debates now for over 100 years. A bit further in time we are met with some of the fundamental challenges to a developed understanding of marriage both in biblical and classical sources: polygamy, fornication, divorce, adultery, contraception, homosexual activity, inadequate theories of consent. All of these have characterized humanity from the start, and all did their part in slowing the correct discernment of what marriage actually is.
That did not stop the peoples of the pre-modern world from making an effort. Through the progressive revelation of the Old Testament we see unequivocal condemnations of a series of threats to the marital union, as well as a progressive development away from polygamy to monogamy. It went further than that bare evolution, though. That polygamous history was replaced with an elevated and exalted idea of unique spousal love, one that gradually became manifested in God’s covenant relationship with his people, and is explored in such stunning texts as Hosea and the Song of Songs.
We see similar progress in the societies of the ancient world. Ritualized prostitution began to be marginalized, while homosexual and pederastic activity was relegated to recreation in Greek society, and altogether to the margins of the Roman Republic. Aristotle recognized fruitful monogamous unions as the source of all society and civilization.
It is with Rome (and its precursor culture, the Etruscans) that we see the fullest flowering of a mature idea of matrimony. A theoretically chaste monogamy — seen as the pillar of the state — and the irreducible centrality of the family were the cornerstones of the success and stability of the mighty Roman Republic.
All purely human societies lacked permanence, and the centrifugal force of sin was strong. Contraception, abortion, and infanticide were rampant practices. Divorce was universally accepted, even among God’s chosen people, with its penalty nearly always falling heaviest on women. While respected in Greece, Judea, and especially in Rome, women and children were still treated as chattels in most areas of the world, preventing a thorough realization of the ideal of marriage.
The best of the ancients had realized something. Marriage is the foundation of the state, the school of civilization, and the privileged heart of individual human lives. Yet divorce was considered a necessary evil, and violence against children and the unborn was a tragic and regrettable part of a society not yet cognizant of human dignity in its purest form.
Homosexuality was viewed, by the Roman Republic and the better philosophers, as contrary to nature and as a grievous offense before God in the Hebrew tradition. The light was there, but opaque. As Chesterton said of the ancient Mediterranean region “the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.”
Into that very world — wherein the treasure of ancient civilization, Jewish, Greek, and Roman, had flowed — Christ became incarnate, in a family, into the lives of a married couple, who were themselves heirs of the great wisdom of God’s revelation of marital dignity. It was God himself who had come to restore marriage to its original design and intention. “In the beginning it was not so!” Christ thundered to the crowd, among whom the shuffling of feet and grumbling of voices may well have been audible.
No divorce was to be permitted for, as His great Apostle said, marriage was a great mystery, which bore witness to the unbreakable union between Christ and His beloved spouse, the Church. Not only adultery but lust was condemned. Unbreakable marital monogamy was held up. “Male and Female He created them” declaimed Christ against those who would invent new genders or valorize proclivities outside that natural and sacred complementarity.
Christ had repristinated marriage according to its design: an unbreakable covenant of complementary beings, ordained for love and by its nature meant to be fruitful. But the “hard teaching” was in the air and many, from that day to this, no longer walked with Him because of it.
For a thousand years and more, Christ’s spouse — animated by the Spirit and supernatural charity — worked to put His teachings into practice. It took what was good in Greek philosophy and Roman Law and purified it, condemning practices like contraception, abortion, and infanticide unreservedly and uncompromisingly. Divorce was outlawed and the legal mandate for a free consent from women put an end to the practice of forced marriage.
At times the societies which it inhabited listened, sometimes they did not, but everyone touched by the Church in this pre-modern age knew that any declension from the teaching of Christ made marriage less than it ought to be. Every act of adultery or contraception, homosexuality or prostitution diminished humanity, and was contrary to the natures that we possessed in common, and offenses against the God who gave them.
New philosophies were beginning to stir however. Around the year 1300, two new streams of thought arose to challenge the dominant Platonism and Aristotelianism, both hallowed by reason and tradition. These were nominalism and voluntarism.
Nominalism said that “common” natures were a mere “vocal utterance.” There was no such thing as “humanity,” only a collection of similar individuals.
Voluntarism stressed the omnipotence of God rather than His reason. Adultery was wrong because God said so, not because it really was. God could declare adultery to be moral. This went against the older traditions, which asserted that things like murder and adultery were against God’s own nature, He could not make them moral because He would be commanding contrary to his own nature.
These new trends would be the animating philosophies of the modern world. When divorced from God and tradition, as Nietzsche would do in the nineteenth century, such corrosive philosophies would undergird all the dehumanizing movements to come.
The crack in the door was opened. People began to explore ways in which they could make “marriage” fit their own definitions, rather than attempting to conform to what it really was. Separated from the tradition of the Catholic Church, divorce came to be tolerated as the separation of free individuals, rather than the unbreakable anchor of social life, and image of the Church. But other than that, social habit died hard. For a long time the classical understanding of marriage held its ground, though gravely undermined by its separation from reason, tradition, nature, and authority.
The floodgates opened in the nineteenth century, an age of religious and social experimentation. The loosened moorings could be sensed in the experimental polygamies and polyamorous practices of various American sects of the 1840s. The real threat, however, appeared later.
Science made many positive breakthroughs, but a false faith in its ability to solve all problems led to some terrible realities, such as eugenics — popularized under the cover of the increasing availability of contraceptives. In a world desensitized to the value of human life, yet at the same time open to facile understandings of “rights,” legal abortion soon followed.
The dissolution of the remaining social pressures against fornication allowed whole generations to be born outside of stable families. Marriage became malleable in the hands of the nominalist, post-modern West. Reimagined as a free association of sovereign individuals, and liberated from its intrinsic relation to offspring and other social imperatives, marriage had indeed become a “vocal utterance.”
It is not to be wondered that “marriage,” divorced from its social obligations, its orientation towards the future, and from its direction towards the other instead of the self, has now come to be demanded for same-sex couples. This is as regrettable as it was predictable.
Without a common and solid basis rooted in the idea of common human nature, in philosophical realism, in the profession of unchanging truth, or even in the simple principle of non-contradiction, nearly anything is possible, particularly when enforced by the coercive power of the modern state. A remedy will only be found in the careful preservations of the sources of that civilization that discerned the reality and ideal of marriage in the first place.
Careful cultivation of truth, goodness, beauty, and reason in our families, as well as treasuring and valuing of those monuments of the past that have been bequeathed to us will lay a sure foundation for the resurrection of such perennial principles in the future.
Donald S. Prudlo is Associate Professor of Ancient and Medieval History at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. He is also Assistant Professor of Theology and Church History at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College. His specialty is Saints and Sainthood in the Christian Tradition, and he is the author of The Martyred Inquisitor: The Life and Cult of Peter of Verona (+1252) (Ashgate, 2008) and has recently edited The Origin, Development, and Refinement of Medieval Religious Mendicancies (Brill, 2011).
