Three Weddings and a Funeral
For several decades "conservatives" have debated ways of strengthening marriage in the United States. The standard line has been to call for the repeal of no-fault divorce laws or to put sharper legal teeth into the marriage contract arranged by the state. As with every other major issue confronting us today, a lack of understanding about reality—in this case, the institution of marriage—makes it impossible to consider the most useful political options. In the interest of clarity and simplicity, I am going to be extremely brief, boiling down three chapters in a book I cannot seem to finish.
There may be a nearly infinite variety in marriage types that have developed in human history, but in essence they boil down to either the predominant type—a monogamous union of one man with one woman (which does not preclude a husband's dalliances)—and polygeny, that is one husband with several wives. Polyandry is a freakish custom that is the sign of a dying social order. It is a symptom of disease (like lesions on the mouth and face) and not an institution. One other distinction should be noted and that is between societies in which property is passed through the father's line (patrilineal) and those in which sons inherit from their mother's male relatives—her brothers, especially—(known as matrilineal).
There may also be, for all I know, an infinite variety in the way in which marriage is regarded, but in our own traditions, there are three major approaches: The ancient pagan and Jewish view, the Christian view, and the post-Christian modern view. To keep this quite simple, I am going to summarize very briefly. Anyone who wants details or facts simply has to ask for them, at the risk of being bored by the answers.
PAGAN MARRIAGE
For Greeks and Romans and Jews in historical times, marriage was in essence an arrangement between two sets of kinfolks for the preservation of one or another or both bloodlines and for the transmission of property from one generation to the next. Consent of the bride and groom may be important in some cultures at some times, but it is not the essence of marriage, which is, after all, a merging of two collectivities. The couple is just a link in a chain, and their feelings and opinions, while of some importance to the success of the marriage, are not the first consideration, though young men have usually had considerable say in the selection of brides, even when it is not a legal "right."
Pagan marriages were neither religious (though at Rome, where there were rites connected to every phase of life, including scrubbing the kitchen floor, there were religious customs associated with marriage, some of which we have inherited) nor affairs of state. In Athens, for example, the only role of the polis (the commonwealth whose center was the city and its acropolis or high city) was to provide a legal arena in which disgruntled relatives could sue for property from heirs whom they accused of not being legitimate, either because the marriage was not properly conducted or because of other impediments (e.g., after Pericles' law both parents were supposed to be citizens). Custom regulated everything, including the custom which said that when a family failed to produce a male heir, the daughter—if there was one—had to be given to the next possible male relative on the father's side, to preserve both the family line and its property. This rule shows very clearly their conception of marriage, as a means of passing property to the family's next generation. The Athenians were, however, a practical people, and a married Athenian woman in such a situation could simply buy her freedom by paying off the uncle or cousin in question with some of the estate.
Although there were no known legal impediments to divorce in classical Athens, the best analysis suggests it was virtually non-existent. This was not for any spiritual reason but because of the dangers a divorce presented to family unity and to legal actions that might damage either party. A wife's chastity was closely guarded, though a husband was free to do what he liked--so long as he did not waste family resources on flute girls or come to the attention of a wife who knew how to make his life miserable. Remember the premise of Aristophanes' Lysistrata: that wives could force their husbands to make peace by withholding sexual favors. What would be the joke if the average husband were a bisexual philanderer?
The details of Roman marriage rules vary, but the overall pattern is the same: a merger of bloodlines for the transmission of the family's identity and property. By the later republic, divorce in the upper classes became not uncommon, but the question almost always turned on the disposition of the wife's dowery and other property arrangements. In early times, a wife passed from her father's control to her husband's though later she remained to some extent her father's daughter. The evidence of wills, poems, philosophers and inscriptions indicates that a Roman man expected to love his wife and be loved in return. This understanding, was, if anything strengthened in the age of Augustus (not himself a perfect husband) and in the reigns of successors like Vespasian and the Antonines.
In classical Athens and republican Rome, a husband who caught his wife and her lover could kill them—at Rome he had to kill both, but this was to prevent entrapment and blackmail. At Rome, f the woman were in her father's control and the adultery took place in his house, he might exercise the same power. Augustus severely restricted this right but it gradually crept back into Roman law in the later empire as the mitigating circumstance known as iustus dolor.
To save time, I will not cite the Germanic parallels of Visigoths, Franks, Lombards, and Anglo-Saxons, except to say that they more or less restored the early Greco-Roman understanding of marriage. Property arrangements are the aspect of marriage most discussed in Germanic legal codes, as well as penalties for violation of status, e.g. a free woman marrying an unfree man. The Germans, even when Christianized, permitted women little or no say, and some girls were wedded at the age of five.
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
Little needs to be said about Christian marriage, which ought to be familiar to our readers from earlier discussions. Marriage was not only a monogamous union of two consenting persons but produced a merging of persons described repeatedly by the metaphor of "one flesh." Divorce was either not permitted or permitted only on grounds of incest or adultery or desertion, and there was a serious question, even in these cases, about remarriage. By the Christian Age, there were exceptions, especially in the case of royalty and nobility, but the Christian ideal was gradually enforced even against such notorious sinners as King Robert of France, who was accused of putting away his wife in order to solemnize an incestuous union with a well-connected mistress. Robert's second marriage was approved by his bishops but not by the Pope. It was an age of reform.
The pagan understanding of marriage did not disappear, far from it. The old concerns for the survival of the family and the transmission of property were always at or near the center of marital arrangements. One was not supposed to coerce a daughter into marriage—though that was done. Marriage by abduction came to be condemned, but it was tolerated and even encouraged by Merovingian kings. The abductor in some codes has to pay a fine as well as paying for the purchase of her mundium, that is, the control over his daughter a father surrenders at marriage. The problem was not such Christian but the fact that an abducted girl was married against her parents' wishes.
Consent came to be increasingly important, at least in principle, thought forced marriages persist. But even in the absence of total coercion, she could be humiliated, put on bread and water, locked in her room, or sent to a convent. I am stating the extreme, since we know that in reality decent parents are generally interested in their children's happiness and while they might deride romantic love as the basis of marriage, they will not necessarily override their children's wishes--though this seems to become more common during the Renaissance, hence the lowering of the age of marriage for girls.
Christian marriage was not originally a church ceremony. It was merely a pre-Christian marriage arrangement with a Christian understanding. As time went on, the couple was supposed to be married at the church door or later to have banns declared—to prevent clandestine marriages, for example—but these customs varied. In Tuscany, most weddings took place at home, though in the presence of witnesses, until the Council of Trent laid down universal rules.
One serious point of conflict between the Christian and pre-Christian points of view lay in the notion of consent and the way in which a clandestine marriage was treated. There was debate, naturally, within the Church, but generally speaking the Church tended to uphold runaway marriages, even while permitting fines to be imposed on the husband. This was partly because consent plus consummation constituted a marriage but also because cynical young men sometimes tricked girls into running away only to say, after the fun is over, "I'm sorry, my father refuses his permission."
The Church, generally speaking, was the ultimate arbiter in disputes over marriage and divorce, and this remained the case in England down to—I think I have the date right—1847. Martin Luther, however, took the position that this weakened paternal authority and the family, which is why Lutherans and most other Protestants transferred the power of regulating marriage from church to state. As bad an idea as this seems with the benefit of hindsight, one has to remember his intention was to strengthen the family and also that the "state" was a small-scale duchy or city-state, and not Leviathan.
POSTCHRISTIAN LIBERALISM
This is the marriage we have now. They have taken the idea of consent of persons and turned it into an abstract theory of human rights. Except in the case of minors, the respective parents may grumble all they like but cannot prevent a marriage. Marriage is a contract between individuals issued by the state, with an opt-out clause on virtually any grounds. Family, property, the welfare of the children—none of this matters, if one or another spoiled brat decides he or she has had enough. It is like the old Jewish system in which a man could repudiate his wife and take another simply because he did not like his wife's cooking or because he found another woman more attractive.
Conservatives think the divorce revolution has taken place since the 1960's. They are extremely naive. At the end of the 19th century, Lord Bryce was lamenting the proliferation of American divorce since 1867 (the triumphant secularist North forced its own divorce revolution on the South through Reconstruction) and the absurdity of the grounds. Some women did not like their husbands' jobs; others—and this is frequent—complained that they were tired of hearing Scriptures quoted on the obedience of women. Divorce was granted on such cases on the grounds of mental cruelty. No-fault divorce is only an extension of the common American practice of the 1870's.
But, in fact, it was the American Revolution that cut the USA off from England's very strict divorce laws and introduced an increasingly casual approach to wedding and divorce, both in New England and on the frontier. The famous contre-temps in Jackson's first administration over Peggy Eaton was really about the President's beloved Rachel who had not initially taken the trouble to divorce her first husband. Calhoun's wife, who led the opposition to Mrs. Eaton, came from the state with the toughest divorce law. It was overturned by the Reconstruction government, reinstated by the redeemers, and only modified after WWII, though it was still the strictest law left in the US.
So, liberal rational individualism has replaced both pagan and Christian marriage with a contract of mutual convenience without any regard for either children, who are manifestly harmed by divorce, or the wider society which is stuck with the burden of taking care of abandoned wives and kids and more seriously with the consequences to the children: high rates of alcoholism and drug use, depression and suicide, births out of wedlock, and criminality.
I'll postpone conclusions until we have been able to discuss these three models at greater length, but I do wish to point out that liberalsim/libertarianism cannot offer any solution to a problem it has caused, and what is true of marriage is true of every other good human institution now in decay. Liberalism is a trap both for conservatives trying to find solutions and for the entire society. It is the flip-side of the Marxist coin. Human beings, whether pre-Christian or Christian, do not live as free rational individualists, but as members of families, kindreds, and communities. As Hume said so well, "Man born into a family is compelled to sustain society."
In accepting one aspect of Christian marriage--consent--and then kicking out God and His laws--liberals/libertarians revolutionized and destroyed marriage, as they have destroyed social life in general. The inevitable response came from Marxists who want to nationalize and socialize family responsibilities. In looking for ways to liberate family and marriage from the socialist state, however, the last thing we need to be doing is to invoke liberal ideas. Liberalism dug the grave of Christian marriage, but it is high time conservatives arrange a funeral for liberalism in all its forms.
Entries(RSS)
Wow. What an interesting and educational piece. Thanks, Dr. Fleming, for writing it.
Interesting indeed. If one may ask, Dr. Fleming, what are your sources for the information about the three models ? I am a family-law lawyer, and have a professional interest of sorts in this sort of background information.
At the risk of trying to move the discussion along too quickly, are there any possible correctives available to remedy the situation, short of a general dismantling of the dominant culture ? And are any of these corrective measures realistic, assuming the continued existence of the current dominant culture ?
I await answers and further discussion with great anticipation.
The basic analysis is my own. Alas, I have been working for over 20 years on this project, even before taking the philosophical critique out to make a book which has gone through many incarnations, first as Citizens of the World, then as Thicker than Water, and now as The City of Man. I have grown to hate it and would gladly move on to projects that interest me more, but after 25 years I should finish it. The trouble is I keep getting bogged down in what the O'Reilly likes to call minutiae. Lately, early Medieval Europe that is the trap. Fortunately, I did spend time years ago going over, for example, the Laws of the Lombard kings, and all I have to do know is flip through volumes to find the passages I marked. The sad truth is that it is usually the feminists today who have done the best work, despite the absurdity of their point of view and conclusions.
The sources for my understanding of ancient marriage come from a long-term study of the sources, both literary and documentary, and a more than casual look at modern scholarship. For Christian marriage, my sources are the texts of Scriptures, the Fathers, Church councils and a good deal --though by no means exhaustive--secondary reading of modern scholarship on early Medieval Europe. For the liberal tradition, I am relying first on the research I did for The Morality of Everyday Life and subsequent reading in English and American history, some of it done quite recently. I am happy to provide bibliography for any part, though it will take a few days to transfer the footnotes into a bibliography that is very much a work in progress.
I'd rather postpone discussion of solutions until we have properly discussed the problem. I would say tentatively that legislative attempts to put teeth into the marriage contract by means of pre-nuptial covenants seem a novel way of reempowering families. The one trouble I see is that they are still bogged down in the individualist and contractual understanding of marriage. But that, too, is a problem that admits of solution.
Minor point. Mrs. Calhoun, the wife of the Vice-President, did not LEAD the ostracism of Peggy Eaton, despite that having been repeated several thousand times. It was already established when she reached Washington,among all respectable ladies including Jackson's niece and hostess Emily Donelson. Further aggravated by the fact that Peggy openly consorted with Eaton, who had no distinction other than being a protege of Jackson, while still married, and Mr. Eaton committed suicide on his Navy ship in the Mediterranean when he heard about it. Basically, the ladies and their husbands rested their case on good republican grounds---the President had no right to interfere in matters of society.
Bibliographies of any of the areas would be of interest to me, should you find yourself with time or opportunity to assemble them; the modern period for the obvious reason, and the other two simply to fill in gaps in my own knowledge. I appreciate your offer to provide such, very greatly.
As far as the immediate problem is concerned, would it be fair to say that part of it involves the de facto destruction of the bourgeois family structures of the last century by State action ? It seems to me that central-government actions, such as the enactment of income and estate taxes, that were directed against the families of the last century who had large independent fortunes (as opposed to the stock- and corporate-based fortunes nominally controlled by today's corporate "Lords") also tended to prevent the accumulation of family wealth by those of lesser means.
Also, it would appear that Social Security/entitlement taxes also played a part in reducing the power of the independent bourgeois families, by first extracting from those families the resources that would otherwise go towards building independent bases of wealth, and then by reducing reliance by elder members of those families (and families in general) on younger members.
For whatever it is worth, I have often wondered why Social Security laws were enacted as they were, as opposed to a system of Elder-Support laws that would have legally and officially obligated children to support their parents. I suspect that the political elites of the time had, as at least a secondary goal, the prevention of new accumulation of wealth by a potential new elite class that might otherwise supplant them. Stop the circulation of that new elite, and the members of the old one get to keep their positions, both economic and social.
Also, it might be useful to consider that, under the child-support acts that were passed in the wake of the central government's Child Support Enforcement Act (1984), most states' support laws apply to income earned from the first dollar---with the only exemption to that being money taken out for Social Security taxes. The State (actual translation: that cadre occupying the senior positions in the State apparatus), having taken the heights of political and economic command, will do anything to make sure that no efforts can be made to displace it, no matter how small.
Another case study of a primordial urge recognized from the beginning as involving a duty towards something or some person beyond the self,then perfected with a charitable and sometimes broken heart; morphing into an abstract right and ending(any day now)on a whim.
Thank you for posting this little sketch of the ancient and durable institution. I can't help but think of all the little Ivy League graduates who like to put quotation marks around any reference to "permanent things" -- as if all of this is subjective. Thomas Hardy, who knew the limits of restoration and subjectivism, noticed this peculiar persitence of marriage in the last stanza of his -- The Breaking Of Nations.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Go whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
Thanks to Clyde Wilson for the correction, though I did say opposition rather than ostracism, which implies a formal social action rather than holding or expressing an opinion. As I recall, Mrs. Calhoun did refuse--quite properly--to return a visit paid by Mrs. Eaton, after she heard some of what was said about her. In any "high" society, such a snub from the socially prominent wife of the VP would have to be regarded as a signal. Mrs. Eaton came to a predictable end. She married her granddaughter's Italian dancing teacher who took her money and then eloped with the granddaughter.
All of the pieces of legislation cited by Mark Schaeber were important milestones on the way to destroying the family, but there were significant moves against the family long before, in the liberal divorce laws of mid 19th century and the child protection statutes passed at the end of that century. I would go back even to Locke who wanted to permit divorce to a couple whose children were adults, not knowing or not caring that such a move retroactively delegitimates the children in their own mind. The reason we need the broader context is to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that there is no alternative to the liberal state except for Calvinist theonomy of the Rushdoony type. If you want a symbol for much of what is wrong in our country, take Gary North, part Christian Reconstructionist, part liberal defender of capitalism. Talk about the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea!
#5
Mark,
I think the reason is because our culture mistakes pleasure for happiness and means for ends. The end or purpose of marraige is the rearing and education of children -- it is not a civil contract entered into between consenting adults for the purpose of satisfying eachs others deepest desires. Once the civil contract, consenting adult,mutually satisfying, etc. is embraced the rest is as you describe. But there is a hell of alot more to the decay than what the state could ever do by itself.
All I can add is that down here in the gutter of mass society where I wallow, the one issue that sets off all present hatred toward Christians is the idea that homosexuality and gay marriage are unnatural and sinful and to be discouraged. Not only does it set off Christ-hatred, but it brings out of the woodwork those who are not, or don't claim to be, Christians, but who nonetheless presume to be experts on what Christ was "really" about (it always amounts to "love" -- which means to them at least, good feelings). I readily acknowledge the low level of Biblical and doctrinal literacy among evangelicals, but they do not deserve the crap being thrown at them. At times I actually am fearful for Christians.
"Human beings, whether pre-Christian or Christian, do not live as free rational individualists, but as members of families, kindreds, and communities"
This misleadingly simple statement of fact is all that is needed to discredit liberalism and its offspring. The entire house of cards is built on an assumption the falsity of which should be plain to anyone with working eyeballs and ears.
>but they do not deserve the crap being thrown at them.
What I have in mind is the crud the pop media and most other media outside of AM talk radio and FOXNews throw at Christians who (however embarrassingly -- as in the present "Miss Beverly Hills" outrage) happen to voice ideas that don't jive with the hipsters.
@ # 8: Robert:
My focus in saying what I said earlier wasn't so much to claim a disproportionate role for State action in the decay, but to throw out for consideration what I thought was part of the problem; to wit, that part of what makes the family a strong institution was the authority that derived from independent command of resources of its own, and, conversely, that weakened command of resources produced weakened family authority and therefore weakened families. Dr. Fleming made the case for this situation obtaining in Classical times, I was simply trying to point out one reason why this situation did not obtain in much of today's America.
I would also suggest that technological factors also play a part, specifically television (NOT radio) and the increased presence of the visual media in daily life. Neil Postman once pointed out that television, being a specifically visual medium, makes many of what used to be considered "adult-level" subjects (sex, death, money and the like) far more accessible to the young than they were in previous times. Postman noted that visual media tend to bypass the gate-keeper functions of parents by not requiring literacy to access those subjects. In this sense, modern mediatized societies have much more in common with medieval cultures than they do with more literate societies of the 18th and 19th centuries.
At the same time, television also serves to insulate modern children and youths from the context and unpleasant consequences of what they see. For example: a child sees a dead man or animal on a TV screen. He may not see what killed the man or animal, or experience any of the other sensations associated with the death (the smell of the corpse, or the sound the creature may have made prior to expiring). He generally does not witness the event causing the death, as a medieval child might have. Not experiencing those sensations, he is not baffled by them or asks questions about them; he is simply left to not consider the situation at all, or to disregard it outright. We refer to this as being "desensitized".
In real life, the parent can give an explanation, with authority, of what has happened. The parent puts the event into a context that the child can access and understand. In answering the question, the parent not only resolves the difficulty in the child's mind, but reinforces his authority by doing so.
It is the (ongoing) loss of authority of parents and families that is an essential part of the problem, I think, and it was that that I was trying to raise as an issue. I apologize if I did not do so clearly, or if I veered off-track from the areas Dr. Fleming or others wanted to address.
Bob "that sets off all present hatred toward Christians is the idea that homosexuality and gay marriage are unnatural and sinful and to be discouraged."
Well, that is because you don't want to get between a wild animal and what it wants. The influence of civility is to distinguish a man, who is capable of developing habits that assist him in moving toward or away from pleasures and/or instincts based on the objects goodness or danger, as opposed to a bitch dog in heat who is simply driven to the objects of desire either by instinct or passion. Men can and should experience the profound friendship available only for and with other men, but this does not necessitate an erotic experience. Davids' love for Jonathen exceded that of women but it did not necessitate a same sex marriage. Some of this craziness is beyond discussion. St. Paul warned against talking too much about certain subjects. Sure, they may hate Christians but I suspect they hate themselves too, when really they should not. But as the actor Jack Nicholson responded when asked about his views of the subject:
"That has nothing to do with me!" I do believe however, that the crazy family up in Kansas desecrating funerals across america in the name of Christ and "His words found in the Bible" should be required to consider their actions from a kind of monastic cell --- a jail cell.
Dr. Fleming @ # 7:
"I would go back even to Locke who wanted to permit divorce to a couple whose children were adults, not knowing or not caring that such a move retroactively delegitimates the children in their own mind."
I hate to admit it, but I am not as well-read in Locke as I perhaps should be. Would you please tell us where in Locke's writings he advocated for that ?
Polyandry is a freakish custom that is the sign of a dying social order
A fair number of my contemporaries view this as the present situation. A woman can get married, have kids, get divorced on thin grounds, secure an alimony, remarry, keeping the first alimony, have kids, get divorced, secure an alimony, and still take State bennies (WIC etc.) Three husbands--with the State being the kindest one.
I've witnessed versions of that scenario twice, on different points of the socio-economic scale.
Thus, men are rejecting post-Christian marriage in droves, and I'd be curious about opinion on this front.
--and I don't blame them. Social conservatives often are reduced to shaming the man into 'doing the right thing', simply feeding the beast, as men would gladly take something closer to Christian or Pagan marriage; it's women who don't.
I wonder if rather than solutions, the right frame is making marriage a better deal for men. Christians can and should offer this; church leaders should demand it, but it's a lot easier to be against State sanctioned "gay" marriage.
Some of Locke's view on divorce are in his First Treatise on Civil Government, while elsewhere he argues for equal rights for women in divorce and that marriage is merely contractual. Some of the argument goes back to Grotius. There is a reason why libertarians like Liggio as well as feminists like Locke. He is a mediocre thinker but as subversive as he felt it safe to be. If you need exact references, I can find them somewhere in one of my chapters. He also opposed primogenitur or any unequal distribution of property to heirs.
#14. I believe it is a cop-out to blame women for the current breakdown of marriage and society, something which certain people like to dwell on. Almost everything that is wrong with women can be blamed on the massive enervation, shallowness, and cowardice of American men. Scratch a woman gone wrong and you will see a bad or absent father.
Amen brother Clyde. It was men who gave women the vote and men who passed, interpreted, and interpreted the laws that have dispossessed us.
With all due respect, you are looking backward for blame when that really isn't the subject. To argue that the courts and to the extent of separation of powers, the State, are not in the favor of female privilege is borderline nonsense. Fair, we inherited this and thus in the interest of peace and prosperity it is internalized, and, yes, a small minority of powerful males which we sometimes, even on this website, call the elite, united with various feminist agitators, to preserve their rule are indeed to blame. Men are indeed competitive that way.
It is indicative of the problem in communication, Dr. Fleming, that somehow saying that XY chromosomes passed this law or that law, answers the question--I have seen this type of reasoning before--where was it?
I am 35 and yourselves, on the other side of that age--and while no prophet, I attempt the generation divide on a tough subject where any word written, due to our human nature, seems to be a challenge of the virtue of wives and daughters, the stuff that was once dueling issues and still should be, and Screwtape has us dead to rites for a circular firing squad, ever chivalrous that we are.
(And, Dr. Fleming, I appreciate your past explanations for dubious feelings towards 'men's rights' which I share, so that is not the direction I am going.)
To conclude for the moment, post a game of Candyland with wife and the boys--thank goodness I am not a Baptist, but, should I indulge, if there indeed is a generation of bad or absent fathers, then what?
Not marry them? I thought this was my point! Which is it? Post-Christian marriage or no marriage?
At least we might get someplace this way.
The discussion about marriage and family relations that I am most familiar with in Locke, is in the Second Treatise of Civil Government, in the chapter on Paternal power. It starts about paragraph 55 and continued on through paragraph 76. In paragraph 65 Locke argues the weakness of the bond between the father and children, and uses an example of a foster father of an exposed infant, and later an example claiming that American Indians had an extremely loose family structure. In paragraphs 72 and 73, Locke uses the power of inheritance as a means for the father to affect the actions his children.
Excellent piece.
The Latin maritare means not only "to marry" but also "to impregnate" - highlighting the importance of procreation in pagan marriage. As Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges has pointed out, ancient paganism was predicated in some respects upon procreation because of the importance of ancestral religious duties, remembering one's forbearers and having children to continue this totemic collective memory.
In this sense, it's been my understanding that failure to produce a child was acceptable and normal grounds for divorce not only among the Romans but also among most other ancient pagans. Is this correct or do you think it's an overgeneralization?
To mr Bowen I apologize if in endorsing Prof Wilson's main point I seemed to be denigrating his entirely valid complaint. But I also have to say that the decline in manliness in this country astounds me. Between the governments' dictations and their engineering of servillity they have made it difficult for males to act like men without becoming outlaws. Yes women have turned feral, but feral women are as much victims as the men on whom they prey. Let us shine the light on the real villains: the coalition of enemies--classical liberals and Marxists who have destroyed all vetiges of a natural social order. And let us set aside these sensitivities among men of good will who mostly understand each other.
Dr. Fleming,
Your words:
"One serious point of conflict between the Christian and pre-Christian points of view lay in the notion of consent and the way in which a clandestine marriage was treated. There was debate, naturally, within the Church, but generally speaking the Church tended to uphold runaway marriages, even while permitting fines to be imposed on the husband. This was partly because consent plus consummation constituted a marriage but also because cynical young men sometimes tricked girls into running away only to say, after the fun is over, 'I’m sorry, my father refuses his permission.'"
My tenth-grade English class is currently reading William Gilmore Simms' The Golden Christmas. All of the points which you make in the paragraph given above are incorporated in the dialogues between Ned and his father, between Ned and his friend, and among the other characters in the story.
Your article is timely for my class. My students will have a better appreciation for that which they have encountered and hopefully learned in The Golden Christmas. This will also expand the discussion beyond the text so that these sixteen-year-olds can have at least "heard" the issues before they encounter the post-modern abyss in the form of post-modern "marriages."
Dr. Wilson @ 17
As best that I can, I try to know my sheep: the kids for whom I have responsibility in school.
While all kids are negatively impacted by the absence of fathers - divorced, estranged, unknown or absent in authority but present in body - with boys usually manifesting an emasculation which is always disturbing, girls, as they reach puberty, become very vulnerable.
Being the headmaster of a private school which is embedded in a community which claims "Christian" values, I have a unique opportunity to act, although the fruits of my actions, if they ever survive to ripeness, have not been seen by me.
I have invited on numerous occasions a counselor, a mother and a daughter into my office and have outlined as best that I could what was facing her having grown up without the presence of a father.
I told one young lady that being a caring adult is down looking a road and seeing a puppy about to cross in traffic, a puppy oblivious to the dangerous which she faces. So it is that far too many young girls walked into what is called "adulthood," which is actually a postponed adulthood that has been labeled by some "emerging adulthood."
We shouldn't let Christian clergy off the hook. No major Protestant denomination disallows divorce. And although Catholic doctrine has remained firm against divorce, in America the hierarchy allows so many annulments it's hard to tell the difference. Most bishops run "annulment mills." In 33 years of attending Mass, I've heard maybe 3 sermons against divorce. Even good, orthodox Catholics I know have had several divorces -- excuse me, annulments.
Our clergy need to preach against divorce *every* Sunday until it is reduced to minuscule levels. If the pews empty, so be it. They will fill up again with those hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
I look forward to Dr. Fleming's book.
The bottom line is that marriage is not first and foremost for the good of the couple, even if in an ideal (Christian) marriage their happiness should play a role in the particular match. Marriage is first and foremost for the good of society: to ensure that there will be another generation to cultivate and develop the spiritual and material estate left behind by the parents.
If Matrimony, as a Sacrament, drives the souls of those who partake to Heaven, it does so indirectly and only insofar as it accomplishes its essence: to produce new souls who may one day join the Kingdom. Contra Monsieur Sartre, essence precedes existence, and any reliable catechism will bear this out: the first end of marriage is procreation. It is not the word "marriage" that makes the institution good and holy but what marriage is that makes the word sacred. Not a small part of the problem is that the modern imagination, poisoned as it is on existentialist and nominalist nonsense, is willing to enter into discussions without considering the essential implications.
In like manner, we do not ordain a man a priest to save him from sin--though he may well and indeed should be saved from sin throughout the faithful accomplishment of his vocation--we ordain him so that he may lead others to salvation. If it were not for the good of Christendom--which means Christian society--*first* and foremost, the Church would not consider Matrimony a sacrament.
It follows that "the marriage we have today" is not a marriage but a cohabitation arrangement: its chief end is erotic pleasure. But do Christians have only two choices? We can clean this messy filth hole out meticulously and painfully or we can demand that it change its name to reflect what it is--"civil pact of erotic solidarity"--and make provisions for homosexual, incestuous, polygamous (including polygyny AND polyandry) and bestial arrangements--as there is logically no reason for denying the same benefits to any one corner of the orgy--and retreat into our Churches to rebuild our own imperium in imperio destined to replace the rotting society once demography swings in our favour. Neither option is particularly attractive from an absolute standpoint, but at this point we at least have nominal control over how our children are educated and it is still easier to control onesself than to control hundreds of millions.
Mr. Moses @ 26
Your words:
"The bottom line is that marriage is not first and foremost for the good of the couple, even if in an ideal (Christian) marriage their happiness should play a role in the particular match."
The first obligation of marriage is to glorify our Lord. While we cannot add to His glory, we can and are expected to reflect His glory, as gold most purely refined reflects the smith and as the moon reflects the sun. Man does not exist as man as male alone or female alone, for Scripture tells us that man He created male and female He created them. When a man and woman become on flesh in marriage, they thereby become truly man and thereby reflect the uniqueness of the Godhead, the Trinity.
The second obligation of marriage is to honor our parents. We bring into marriage the customs, traditions, habits and wealth, whatever it might be, of two families, and therein is born hope that all of these will flourish in a new idiom, the heart of this new idiom being the marriage bed and the children who spring from it.
The third obligation is to the Church. The Church is the Bride of Christ and therefore the Body of Christ. In marriage we honor that miracle as the man is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church. I understand this to be much more than merely allegorical.
The fourth obligation of marriage is to the local community, that commonwealth of others, hopefully many kith among them, with which we are the most intimate outside of family and the Church. The family become the model for hospitality and charity.
There is then little wonder that Satan and the "flesh" of man is assaulting marriage.
#43."I fear Mr. Bailey still is making several errors, first in thinking this discussion has anything to do with the “science” of economics, and second that one can begin with false ideas and, without divine help, end up anywhere except worse off than before."
I am fully aware that the discussion was not about economics per se but I was alarmed by the implications that Austrian work on the economic theory was for the most part unsatisfactory and I find this hard to agree with. As for why this is so, the second point is about the false ideas etc. and in principle again I have no trouble with such a statement, specially if you regard economics as flawed to begin with as seems to be the case. But something is missing from this argument since the Austrian macroeconomic theory is still second to none. Perhaps not all of their original ideas were false then.
So, now that the government "regulates" marriage, what benefit does the state get? Divorce lawyers greedily squabble over property, with a giant 30% spiff lining their own pockets, and that's just for starters. Consider that any children (that is to say; future taxpayers) will be denied any right to divided property only to be paid off in government-printed fiat paper currency. Spouses can convince themselves that as divorcees they are "free," a constant delusion in this day and age.
As an aside, George Barna has extensively studied the issue and finds that divorce among chuchgoers is the same as American society as a whole.
I am beginning to realize that Mr B has contracted an incurable case of the Austrian disease. Let us look briefly at his unexamined assumptions before moving on to more relevant topics. First, in repeatedly inserting economics into a discussion of ethics, he is assuming that economics is the foundation for ethical and political theory when historically and logically the reverse is true. 2nd he asses that if one sticks to the point and does not talk about economics, it is out of contempt for the subject. 3rd he seems to regard econic theory as a Science like physics, whose universally applicable principles can be tested and verified or which like logic and geometry can be demonstrated--to use the old technical term--when in fact econics, like any other social science can only speak in approximations and has produced theories in conflict with eac other. 4th he accepts as given that so-called Austrian economics is self-evidently superior to all others bit offers no proof of this assertion nor any evidence to indicate that he is competent to make such a judgment. Given all these uncertainties, I can only assume that for JB Austrianism is a religion whose teachings are not subject to rational critique. In this
broad discussion of the failings of liberalism and the narrower discussion of liberalism's baneful effects on
marriage, such religious dogmatism is hardly useful.
"We shouldn’t let Christian clergy off the hook. No major Protestant denomination disallows divorce."
"Our clergy need to preach against divorce *every* Sunday until it is reduced to minuscule levels. If the pews empty, so be it. They will fill up again with those hungering and thirsting for righteousness."
Amen, Mr. Seiler. I am a lifelong Baptist who has recently been flirting lightly with the idea of becoming Catholic, for that reason, amongst a couple of others. Yes, it is true as you say that the Catholic clergy is quite guilty of trying to sidestep the issue by "annulling" marriages, but at least that church was not FOUNDED upon the desire for the freedom to divorce.
Cardinal Gibbon writes in Faith of Our Fathers (1875):
"The facility with which marriage is annulled is most injurious to the morals of individuals, of the family and of society. It leads to ill-assorted and hasty marriages, because persons are less circumspect in making a compact which may be afterwords dissolved almost at will. It stimulates a discontented and unprincipled husband or wife to lawlessness, quarrels and even adultery, well knowing that the very crime will afford a pretext and legal grounds for a separation. It engenders between husband and wife fierce litigations about the custody of their offspring. It deprives the children of the protecting arm of a father, or of the gentle care of a mother, and too frequently consigns them to the cold charity of the world; for the married couple who are wanting in conjugal love for one another are too often destitute also of parental affection. In a word, it brings into the household a blight and desolation which neither wealth nor luxury can repair."
@26: Dr. Peters and I come at this from different ecclesiological angles, and so while I would put the obligation to the Church together with obligations to God, I basically agree, though I would also meld obligation to parents in with obligation to secular society, since the obligation to ones parents precedes broader social obligations not in an absolute sense (there are parents who make unreasonable demands, even if these are fewer than some people would like to believe) but by the fact of being naturally closer to one's parents within larger society.
Ultimately, of course, all truly good human institutions are conceived with the end of fulfilling the grand design imago Dei of mankind. Matrimony, however, should not be considered an absolute step in this State of Grace, since we have it from on high that it is in fact better not to marry, marriage will only last until the death of one of the partners and in Heaven, matrimony will not figure in at all. Its end within God's design is the production and rearing of souls, and its physical resemblance to the Trinitarian concept is indeed part of the plan and a reminder of our creation, but it does not leave an indelible character on one's soul. The souls produced through the union, on the other hand, are indeed eternal.
But I think this is largely a rhetorical point.
In the last two paragraphs of your article Dr. Fleming it might be
pointed out that liberal rational individualism is the practice
in 20th and into 21 century of flexible and compromising attitudes that churches allowed in. It also fit with political attitudes of
liberal and conservative. It brings us all to today, where some
find the word sin unpleasant to use in certain company. Why would
that be? Dalliances by husband or wife is adultery. And cohabiting
as a preferred life-style is fornication.
Your article as well as the commentary has been informative and thank
you for the opportunity to respond.
Before this July every reader should memorize the following quote and reflect upon it. It needs repeating and will be the issue for every political talking head coast to coast come this summer. It goes something like "Social issues are subjective, private and unimportant, while economic issues are public and very important. Ann Coulter has already started this attempt to confuse the stupid and to take advantage of the defenseless. Others will soon be joining in the chorus.Remember the folowing and think about it early and often.
"First, in repeatedly inserting economics into a discussion of ethics, one is assuming that economics is the foundation for ethical and political theory when historically and logically the reverse is true. 2nd he asserts that if one sticks to the point and does not talk about economics, it is out of contempt for the subject. 3rd he seems to regard economic theory as a Science like physics, whose universally applicable principles can be tested and verified or which like logic and geometry can be demonstrated ..."
This type of fallacy and political conversation is coming to a radio, television and a fall election near you. Please don't allow this virus to make you ill.
@ Drs. Wilson and Fleming (#s 17, 18)
"Scratch a woman gone wrong and you will see a bad or absent father."
A second to Dr. Fleming's Amen on Dr. Wilson, and an Amen to Dr. Fleming on who created the problem. Men were in charge of society's institutions when they permitted the feminists to run wild.
You mean manly men like Powell,Blackmun.Marshall.Brenan. Ted Kennedy and on and on.
As noted and presupposed, the social cons arrive as 'white knights' (grey knights) to endorse the answer to a question not asked.
It well understood that a scoundrel elite in politics and laws, have historically looked to create certain sets of conditions to aid their goals, macro and quite micro in the case of Ted Kennedy.
The conclusion of this essay, endorsed by the 'knights', begs the question-- (though only sort of conceded that current family law favors female privilege, or economic terms, subsidizes divorce)--should the people reject, which they are, post-Christian marriage?
Mr. Moses, being the youngest, offers the best insights here. I'd make some Anne Ricer/Interview with the Vampire references, but they'd be misconstrued by the elders.
@M. Bowen: thank you for the kind words. Regarding your question:
...should the people reject, which they are, post-Christian marriage?
Here in France, that is more or less exactly what is done by traditional Catholics. The separation between Church and State is so stringent (albeit very hypocritically so) that marriage in a Church is not considered a legally binding arrangement; a couple is obligated to appear before the mayor's office for a civil ceremony before the goddess of reason (I am speaking somewhat in jest on that last bit). Our priests make it clear to us that this is a formality and the marriage, so far as a Christian is concerned, is NOT binding or valid (c.f., the man may not, without subjecting himself to mortal sin, move in with his fiancée) until the ecclesiastical ceremony.
Again, the separation between Church and State is very hypocritical (however, the confusion has worked to the advantage of the Traditional movement, in Paris in particular): in the civil sphere, France still recognises "marriage" per se as one man and one woman and there is a separate sort of arrangement arrangement, providing some of the benefits (c.f., inheritance, visitation, expedition of bureaucratic formalities, etc.) of a "marriage" but valid for *any* two people wishing to co-habitate: a queer couple, two sisters, etc. This is known as PACS: Pacte civil de solidarité. There is a push for full-blown same-sex marriage but it may be unlikely to come about, since many heterosexual couples do not any longer bother to marry at all and the civil divorce rate in Paris is over 65 percent ; among the young (apart from the very pious), marriage is widely considered a liability. Moreover, the French state is sensitive to the need to keep the natality rate up to prevent demographic swamping and to overtake Germany as the largest (and most powerful) nation in the E.U.
We all, male and female, have our eternal proportion of the evilly
inclined. Where there is a lack of legitimate authority, evil-doers, male and female, flourish. Our present condition is a product of the failure of legitimate authority---i.e., failed fatherhood.
There are several important lines of discussion here. One has to do with what constitutes a legitimate marriage or a Christian marriage. Christian marriage in origin is simply a Roman marriage with a Christian understanding. When I said this yesterday to one of my colleagues, he said, yes but a marriage between baptized Christians. I did not disagree, because that has become the Church's teaching but in the early Church it was not necessarily so. A man or woman who converted was not free to repudiate a pagan spouse. The Christian had to be faithful in all senses.
So to understand Christian marriage historically, we have to understand Roman marriage of the imperial period, when marriage required the consent of both parties. This is the background for the Church's emphasis on marriage as a relationship between two people capable of marriage who consent. This does not at all eliminate the need for other parties to consent--a Roman daughter usually needed permission from her father or guardian. Among the Germans, both fathers might have to consent. There is nothing unChristian in these restrictions, though they do not define marriage.
Consent can, unfortunately, be a two-edged sword, if it is divorced from a Christian context. Thus a woman wakes up one morning and says "I no longer consent." This was, apparently, a problem for centuries in the Eastern Church, where the Roman legal tradition held on. What of coercion or fear? The Roman jurisconsults took this up. In principle, coercion or abduction should nullify a marriage, but it is tricky. In a famous sentence of the Digest, Celsus takes up the case of a man coerced into marrying someone he would not have married, if he had made his own choice. This is, nonetheless, a valid marriage because he preferred marrying the girl to the alternatives, e.g. alienating the father or being disinherited. This strict approach to coercion and other impediments, such as "I didn't know she was poor" or "I thought she was chaste" carries over into the Christian tradition, and it is a good thing, because no one has certain knowledge of another person, and if we once open the door to these sorts of exceptions, where do we end? "I thought she was a good cook."
Abduction with or without rape or consensual sex presented a special problem, because this was one of those quaint Germanic customs it took a long time to get rid of. In principle, a Germanic husband was supposed to buy the girl's mundium (right and duty to protect) from her father. In the case of abduction, he might get away Scot free. It is a complicated story, but abduction was ruled not to be the basis of a marriage unless the abductor payed a hefty fine to the father--as well as purchasing her mundium, though there could be, in the early days, a form of free marriage that was more like concubinage.
Why am I bringing all this up? For this reason. Catholics, when they talk about marriage, usually confine their examination to Vatican II, the encyclicals of the late 19th and early 20th century, or at the most go back to Trent. This worked well for a time, but today we are facing a situation more like 6th and 7th century Gaul. If we begin with the understanding that marriage is natural and divinely ordained but was corrupted in ancient cultures until Jesus restored it to its pristine state, we might set aside some of the niceties of canon law and get down to the messy business of reconstructing Christian marriage in a postChristian world. This will be a much tougher business than the ancient missionaries faced.
I wonder if our present day marriage problem, if I may express it that way, stems from a "one size fits all" assumption that undergirds so much pontificating on all sides of the question.
The Romans of old had more than just a single type of marriage. There was, for example; manus, confarreatio, coemptio,usus and sine manu. Not to mention contuberium and concubinatus.
Christianity, as it so often does, introduces a subtle levelling mentality that erases many fine old pagan distinctions and gradations. Initially this rationalizing tendency provides great impetus to the newer sytem, as rationalizations of one sort or another often do. However, sooner or later the underlying messiness of human affairs reasserts itself. With a vengeance.
Christians now find themselves defending uniformity against plurality while at the same time trying to avoid the pitfalls of a sterile Cartesian Rationalism. Best of luck.
Dr. Fleming, thank you for your discourse especially on the issue of consent and willful misrepresentation, as I had been thinking about those in recent weeks but unsure how to articulate it. Ours is indeed a difficult task, but we also have to keep in mind that Catholics of good will today, and I am not excluding traditionalists attached to Mgr Lefebvre, are in many respects not working off a living tradition (except for the priesthood and the Eucharist) but attempting to reconstruct historical fragments into a sort of workable system, and given the magnitude of cultural and traditional losses over the past century, we can expect to encounter more frustration before every step deeper.
I attended a Legitimist conference last night on the political doctrine of the Count of Chambord and one attendant asked the lecturer how far down "Legitimist" religious and political traditions had survived within families. In responding, the lecturer took note of the fact that the Legitimism of today (c.f., of those present at the conference) was an historical obsession (not the word he used but I am too tired to think) rather than an inherited tradition. That could probably be extended to apply more generally to anything traditionally conservative these days.
Many thanks for the on-the-street, if slightly detached, reports, Mr. Moses. My memory has a way of remembering things likes your present role--being a phone/e-mail sales guy, working out of the house heightens these senses, so I don't mind the dyslexia I inherited so much, save when trying to write an email or post and struggling to proofread/nail a point.
At 35, I have a wealth of field reports on contemporaries and family--divorce is so recent to my family but sadly epidemic--and a note to the elders, my parents are still married--just speaking of my generation. The emotional response isn't automatically helpful, but there is an observation of a useful survival instinct I might channel to help my boys.
I'll look forward, as the years roll ever on, to your observations regarding friends, siblings or mere contemporaries--I do fear you hedged a bit in your response by not addressing the close and personal, but nevertheless, respect that you have, ex-pat'ed, and have perhaps cut some ties. To that, all I can say is that Facebook put me in touch with people I can council towards, albeit on a variety of fronts, that has netted a variety of questions, because of my unique position in their imaginations (how many years have gone by with some of these folks--20?); I can learn plenty of the present scene, and try to do best by my children.
@43: Thank you again; you are too kind. Indeed I have hedged and in fact this was deliberately done to protect the people in my life - both the intact and the complicated; the Internet lends itself too easily to speculation and gossip. Modern society does not, admittedly, care too much whether one couple gets divorced or has a child out of wedlock and still less could it care about the only partially re-established worldviews of certain traditionalist Roman Catholics. For that matter, however, it could also be said that modern society does not, as a rule, give a damn about propriety, period. I am not passing judgment on fellow Christians who wish to share personal stories, but for my part I do not always find them useful or necessary for general discussions. Each scandalous story has its own complex dimensions, and I prefer to save the specifics for the people closest to me who stand to learn the most from them.
N.;
I do 'get' that--it's not my interest either, though I shared a bit I suppose, but I think there is a chap popular here who said boiled down 'you can't separate history from the historian', and so it follows, the writing itself needs to acknowledge this at some level or be relegated to the 'social sciences.' And whatever your plans for life at this moment, communicating to those who need it, or rather could use it via loose conversation, is part of the human experience.
I rather disagree with Dr. Fleming's opening paragraph as far as framing. "Conservatives" did agree as far as politics being the art of the possible to strengthen the marriage contract as far as disincentive towards a phantom idea that men might seek to divorce. (It seems at a min. to observe, divorce is sought by women, not men anytime kids are involved.) 'They' were quite successful, then, at dissuading men from seeking divorce, I suppose.
I was hoping to encourage the notion that conservatives, in America, such as they are, are of no help, and rather, as you noted, the sort of anti-statist/refusenik approach in France you observe is of tremendous import as it wasn't previous to this exchange, part of my imagination.
The trouble with many of these conversations is the lack of precision and the failure to attend to details or pay attention to words. When someone "disagrees", he should make correct statement of the position with which he disagrees and then rebut it. For example, I did not say that conservatives disagreed on how to remedy the marriage problem. I said there was a debate. Naturally debate implies disagreement but that can be of a variety of kinds. If Mr. Bowen thinks that there is not a debate, then he simply has not noticed it and should say so. The most common emphasis is on revising state laws to make them more like the divorce laws of the 1950's, a second is to gain legal recognition of pre-marital covenants, and a third--which we have advocated here at Chronicles--has emphasized the personal responsibility of Christians to refuse to accept, within their communities, the postChristian understanding of marriage. All three approaches can be combined of course, but they are quite distinct and with the limited time one has, this or that self-described conservative will have to choose his preference.
I completely agree with NM that it is inappropriate to discuss one's personal life or the lives of others with the strangers one meets on the internet. Facebook may have its uses for business or for keeping up with classmates,but it is very dangerous to confuse the reality of everyday experiences with virtual experiences, and still more dangerous to give personal advice to people whose lives one does not share.
Finally, I do not understand this sentence: "It seems at a min. to observe, divorce is sought by women, not men anytime kids are involved." If this is a an earnest wish, it leaves a lot to be desired. A husband should not abandon a childless wife. Children aggravate his evil, but what he does is simply wrong. If this is a statement of fact, it is entirely erroneous. I cannot begin to describe the number of cases I know of men recklessly and ruthlessly abandoning wives and children. In one case, the couple had several children of their own and then adopted three or four, whereupon the husband woke up one day and decided this was too much for him and moved in with another woman. I know the laws have gone feminist, but it is a very serious mistake for men to blame women. First, because it was men who made these laws, and second, because men are not better than women in their sexual mores today. From my limited perspective, I have seen more young women than young men who are willing to return to sanity. This may be because females are more dominated by biology than males and the arrival of children wises some of them up. When this does not happen, it it sometimes the fault of excessive attachment to a career, but who sends them out to work? I have met many a working mother who complains she would rather stay at home, but she and her husband simply cannot make it on one income. Really? For several years, when we had one or two children, my wife and I were eligible for food stamps and other assistance which we did not dream of taking. We had no TV and only a radio and an old record player for electronic entertainment. We had one old car but were buying a nice enough house and with gardening, chickens, and a little barter--we made beer and cider-we got along just fine.
The reason I offered this little sketch was to show 1) that liberalism, which helped to create our problems, can be no part of the solution, and that 2) we needed to look beyond our current mess and even beyond 19th and 20th century arguments to get back to the fundamentals, which, if we once grasp them, can act as trail of breadcrumbs to lead us out of the wilderness and back to our home. Americans began destroying marriage not in the 1970's or even the 1870's but in the 1780's.
"we made beer and cider-we got along just fine."
This was no doubt a key element to your future success. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the brewing of spirits and the grace of God, without which (perhaps a chimney from which smoke ocaasionaly rises too)a really humane life is impossible.
Dr. Fleming: "a nice enough house and with gardening" in fellowship
it is with much appreciation to read your goodwill and words in
communion with them. Thank you and the best to you and yours.
Number 42 illustrates Pope's dictum about a little learning. The history of Roman marriage forms is not an easy subject to sum up in a few sentences, but he has managed to create more confusion than I would have thought possible. It is enough to say that the more ancient and binding forms of marriage in manum were becoming a rarity by the time of the Empire. One of them, Confarreatio was confined to patricians, its forms were weakened apparently, and it would be only of antiquarian interest to Christians. Coemptio, a sort of ritual sale, also conferred manus but in a different manner. Marriages without manus became normative in time. Contubernium was a sort of marriage but with a slave woman whose children thus inherited her status. But why go on? In trying to deceive people into thinking he knew something about Roman marriage, I.M. was making the usual dishonest neopagan argument that Christianity ruined it all, but he won't even take the trouble to look up the most elementary facts, much less to read Susan Treggiari's excellent book. On the other hand, Christian marriages could in fact take many forms so long as the basic requirements--no incest and free consent were observed. In Medieval Europe, many patterns emerged, for example, requiring a father's consent for a daughter, prescribing different inheritance structure and different punishments for offenses against married women. I have said it before and I will say it again: All these ideolohogues--socialists and liberals, neopagans and pseudo-Christian Zionists--share certainly qualities: ignorance of the facts, a willingness to lie in what they believe to be a good cause, and minds impervious to rationality. I distinguish them strictly from the honest men who happen to embrace Marxism, liberalism, or one or another Christian faith.
On liberalism, the ideology whose dishonest and ignorant adherents--Mr. Woods especially--triggered this discussion, everyone should look at a recent essay by Ralph Raico. I used to know Ralph fairly well. He is a man of serious historical learning, rare courage in his scholarship, and a clear head. He is a liberal and he knows what that means and is unwilling to fudge reality with pseudo-Christian pieties. It is on the Mises.org website: http://mises.org/daily/4113. It is a good introduction to liberalism from one of the more important living exponents. While I disagree with Raico on fundamental questions, I always learn a great deal from reading him or talking with him. He is the Nathaniel of Misesians.