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.
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but who sends them out to work?
The man sometimes, no doubt, but stay-at-home moms seem to have a different view on the ‘I’d like to stay at home but…’ line—just an observation.
-You are indeed correct. I don’t disagree with that paragraph; too many days had gone by and memory confused itself.
-It was not an endorsement or wish, but an observation based on data that a majority (2/3rds) of divorces are initiated by women.
They may have very good grounds--abandonment, but there are other reasons less traditional, which is my suspicion. When one considers the court bias, and State incentives, the conservative-feminist congruence on an archetype (the abandoning father) has this assured end.
The State's interest should be reconciliation, but as long as “conservatives” are playing with the contract in league with feminists & institutional family law, focused on the 'abandoning father', they don’t/haven’t been serving a segment of fathers/men and their children who are paying a heavy price, as they encourage the cads and grifters.
This is read by older eyes, as blaming women, but:
because men are not better than women
...while probably true, the parity on the issue, and lets hope it doesn’t go past parity if it hasn't already in some age segments, is alarming for the reverse implication.
The point is not to blame men or exculpate women. The point is rather not to let the stronger and predominant sex off the hook for first of all creating this situation in general and then, in this current generation, acting like spoiled brats and whining about how tough it is when marriages collapse. Many men today expect their wives to work as well as keep house and watch the kids. Even if a woman only works 15-25 hours a week, she is in a difficult position. I watch some of these couples in public places, the mealy-mouthed husband and the shrewish woman he never rules. It is the story in Herodotus of the men who returned home to find that the slaves had risen up and taken their women and property. At first there was a standoff, and then, when one of the returning husbands brandished a whip, the slaves remembered who they were. Women are not slaves, bur junior partners in a marriage who owe their husbands obedience. If men started acting like men and instead, of whining about their rights, actually exercised their rights and fulfilled their duties, none of this nonsense would be happening. A man who does not make it clear to his fiancee that he means to be master in his own home is either a coward or a liar. In either case he is looking forward to a long period of misery. One of the many things very wrong with the men's movement--beginning with the obvious fact that they do not act like any men I have ever heard of--is that they begin with false assumptions, namely, that marriage is a contract between free and equal individuals. It is too bad that men recognize this mistake much too late, but it is far worse that when they think they have learned their lesson they turn into whiners. Read Waugh's Handful of Dust or Ford Maddox Ford's WWI novels and learn how to accept adversity like a Christian gentleman.
Many men today
Okay, but in these cases, they learned it from their Ma's and Pa's. When the good Progressives were attempting to shut down productive teenage labor in New England, they propagated a similar archetype (and certain interests were eager to bring those textile jobs elsewhere, or shutdown the farmer). True, he probably existed, the man living off the income of his kids, but is that a reason to make schooling mandatory and import adult low skill labor?
I can't say expecting wives to work and not watch/outsource the kids is an improvement which is closer to the situation but it is a predictable outcome, and seems to be the trend if Lamar Alexanders millions are any indication.
I can respect women in the previous role of trying to do it all, at the minimum. The present generation at least acknowledges it cannot be done, and in the interest of peace, I observe. Who wouldn't like that college education cost (tax subsidies included) as, instead, a dowry?
A man who does not make it clear to his fiancee that he means to be master in his own home is either a coward or a liar.
No disagreement. Exactly why I council against "marriage" when this arises. As already posted, if the answer is then don't get married, then out with it.
I don't enjoy getting off-topic this way for the sake of the quality of learned opinion which I benefit from and doesn't include me in the petty b., but I'll note, Dr. Fleming, you were quite able to use the language to allude to personal experience & observation, and its implied impact, which doesn't compromise anything, and Mr. Moses, to the extent he might have an interest, could benefit from, stylistically speaking.
By design I introduced a personal note to show that one might speak personally without being maudlin or confessional. This conversation, alas, has reached the usual impasse beyond which it is pointless to go. I
perhaps a return tobthe subject would be I order
"women are junior partners who owe their husbands obedience". Well, if that view of marriage became widesspread in our culture (I know it was at one time) I would predict a much lower marriage rate! I have already determined that should my husband predecease me, I will never remarry, as I would like to run my own life for a change.
"Deirdre" sounds like a man's movement type trying to parody the modern women they like to blame for everything. If this really is a married woman, I would remind her that the conversation here is not about what she thinks or I think but about about the natural foundations of marriage and the teachings of Christianity. From either perspective, biological-anthropological-historical or religious, men are in nature and by divine law supposed to be the dominant partner. If women do not like the Christian view of marriage, they may then revert to the natural view, which gives the cavemen the power and authority to beat them. The Christian view is very close to Aristotle, who says that while a man rules his children in a monarchical fashion, his authority over his wife is constitutional or aristocratic and not despotic. It is rule, however. Equality is a pure fantasy conjured out of the fevered brain of the French Revolution. It has never worked, will never work, can never work. And, if women wish to run things, I wonder why is it that most women hate to work under other women.
No, I'm not actually a man's movement type. I do accept the idea that someone must be in charge and it seems that it must be the man. I just observed that should my husband die, I will be free to run my own life and why on earth would I want to "reup" so to speak? Is there anything wrong with that observation? Not that my husband is bossy, he is a very reasonable person and consults me about everything. I guess I'm just too independent for my own good!
I cannot presume to judge anyone I do not know, but let us suppose we were dealing with a fictional case and a married woman expressed this opinion. Unless we knew her husband to be a bully and a tyrant, we would have to conclude that she was in fact too eager for power. The desire to rise above one's place in the scheme of things is in itself unwholesome. It is the sin of Eve and Adam, after all. We Americans all share a tendency--now pretty widespread around the world--that we have to have things our way, even if our way is the wrong way. I have a good friend who cherishes certain foolish habits, for example, pulling out the soft part of a French loaf to eat it without the crust. In a restaurant it is mildly annoying and attracts attention. When I point this out--or other pieces of foolishness--as a bad habit, he inevitably responds, "It's what I do." Even when we are right, we should try to pay less attention to "What I do." I do not at all exculpate myself. I am deeply annoyed when someone serves me salad before a meal--a complete barbarism that is bad for the meal and bad for the digestion. In a restaurant I simply hold onto my salad but in someone's house I now munch away cheerfully on the outside. The next obstacle is to eliminate the inner sourness.
By the way, there was a debate in the early Church on whether or not second or third marriages were a good idea. St. Basil (I believe) opined that a first marriage was praiseworthy and a second marriage acceptable.
Yeah, that's my problem, all right. I like to be in charge and be the boss and have always been an independent type of person and being obedient to God or to my husband or whoever else has lawful authority over me has always been a problem for me. My husband really is a lovely person but he likes to be in charge as well. It would not surprise anyone that we are both the oldest children in our families. It also would not surprise anyone probably that he says that if I were to predecease him, he would be looking for a wife pretty soon, after a decent interval. I, however do not feel that way. Hopefully if he were to predecease me I wouldn't get too uppity and would give my whole attention to serving God and my neighbor and not become an eccentric old lady with my cats or something. I guess to see what my attitude is really, look at Chaucer's Wife of Bath, who says what all women secretly want is a husband that lets them do as they please. As this goes back 600 years to a time when European culture was indisputably Christian, one could not blame the Wife's attitude on modern feminism or any other bete noire of traditionally minded men!
Deirdre is refreshingly candid. These problems, as you say, have always been with us, though feminism has aggravated them. If we men are all heirs to the Old Adam, our wives are heirs of the Old Eve. With any luck you and your husband will outlive the petty power struggles that trouble the surfaces of most marriages. Many couples I know are happier in their 60's than they were in their 30's, and this is not because they are too tired to fight. There comes a ripeness of affection, a depth of attachment that we perhaps are not even fully aware of. I often have wondered, by the way, if the Wife of Bath is not a man's way of depicting certain traits he partly resented but was human enough to appreciate.
Well, I have heard that Chaucer was supposedly a henpecked husband so that might be it! I don't want to give away the store, but we wives have a way of getting the husband to see things our way! The best exemplar of that is the mother in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." The frumpy daughter wants to go to college and then work at her aunt's travel agency. The dad, an old country Greek guy, wants her to be the same frumpy girl working in the family restaurant she has always been, but he complains that she hasn't met any eligible men.
The mother says, "The man, the man is the head! But the woman is the neck, and she turns the head!" Not only does she convince the husband to allow the girl to go to school, she makes him think it's his idea in the first place! Now that is a smart woman!!!
Dierde of Sorrow Writes: “The man, the man is the head! But the woman is the neck, and she turns the head!” Not only does she convince the husband to allow the girl to go to school, she makes him think it’s his idea in the first place! Now that is a smart woman!!!"
As are you a wise woman. It is always so with those acquainted with the sorrowful and joyful mysteries of life. Who was it that taught Socrates the mystery of love testified to in the Symposium ? The mid-wife, Diotima, I believe. Who is Star of the Sea, Tower of Ivory and Gate of Heaven in our own tradition? A blessed woman, of course. And as a lawyer once said to me after attempting the cross examination of a fiesty and cunning woman, " Far be it from me to ever again attempt the last word with a woman!" And then collapsing into a heap of unwarranted despair," No more questions."
Dr. Fleming is correct that it would be good for husbands to “brandish the whip” (reassert their dominance) once again. The difficulty lies in not getting carted off to jail for “domestic violence” afterwards. Any wife can now make use of the State and its feminist laws to tyrannize over her husband. (See the writings of sometime Chronicles contributor Stephen Baskerville for the ugly details.) This means it is no longer sufficient for individual men to brandish their individual whips. There will simply have to be an organized “men’s (political) movement” of some kind if we are to reverse the damage wrought by feminism.
This is not necessarily to endorse any particular movement or organization now existing. It is regrettable—but also, I think, understandable—that most men’s advocates today express themselves in the vernacular of “rights and equality.” But our most urgent task is to secure the natural male-headed family—a better philosophy curriculum can wait. (Baskerville gets it right once again when he says “Men’s Rights are Men’s Duties.”)
Thank you, Dr. Wilson, for that clarification of Mrs. Calhoun's role in the Eaton affair.
Dr. Fleming, I'm sorry to drift off topic, but could you tell me where you stand on reading the Iliad/Odyssey vis a vis verse vs. prose? What do you think of the Samuel Butler translation?
This discussion is obviously petering out, and your question is welcome. Aaron Wolf and I are planning to reestablish the section on humane education, with an autodidact column designed to answer just such questions. On the narrower question of Butler, I have not looked at his translations seriously for 40 years, but enjoyed them very much in my teens. He had a lively narrative style, as his best fiction shows. On the respective merits or prose and verse translations, I am of two minds. Ideally, a translation should be fairly accurate and rendered in an appropriate English verse, whether rhymed couplets or--as I much prefer--blank verse. This has never been done. Chapman's Iliad is in something like a ballad meter though his Odyssey is the so-called pentamer. Both are inaccurate, but with splendid passages of Elizabethan verse. They are hard for most people today. Pope is easier and rather perfect versification but Bentley's judgment still stands: "Very pretty, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." In the 20th century, it seems to me, all sense of versification was lost. Fitzgerald is readable and engaging but much too wordy and poetic to be Homeric, while Richmond Lattimore is unreadable and rhythmically clumsy. I think a reviewer once said of Lattimore's "loose six beat thing" (as I once heard another translator describe his even clumsier effort) that it made him think of a fly buzzing wearily trying to get out of a bottle. By the way, I also liked TE Lawrence's novelistic Odyssey. For the Aeneid we are luckier. Dryden's Vergil is very fine versifying and he has a feeling for the Romans and imbues it with his rather English sense of a national destiny.
Mr Devlin, as usual, is completely wrong. Men who beat their women--or have to--are generally contemptible, and any men's movement is a contradiction in terms. When I brought this subject up to my younger daughter, she expressed astonishment that any male could be so unmanly as to join a "men's movement." My reference to the Spartan's whip was simply a metaphor for males learning to act like men, which is precisely what a movement seems designed to prevent. What was it Max Beerbohm once said? One cannot turn a sheep into a man simply by forcing it to stand on two legs, but one can turn any group of men into a flock of sheep.
"Aaron Wolf and I are planning to reestablish the section on humane education, with an autodidact column designed to answer just such questions"
Excellent!
"a contradiction in terms" - might that not also be applied to
the other gender's movement?
Thanks again for this essay.
*68 was directed to Dr. T. Fleming.
I was careful to add the words "reassert their dominance" in parentheses after quoting Dr. Fleming's own expression "brandishing the whip" in order to remove all possible suspicion that I intended it literally. But "brandishing the whip" is apparently an expression that is fine for Dr. Fleming to use, but objectionable when employed by others. Just like "feral women."
FRD once again choses perversely to misunderstand. The image from ancient history was quite clearly not intended to be taken as a commendation of domestic bullying, much less marital violence, and the topic of discussion was how classical liberalism and libertarianism is a poor lens through which to view or mechanism to remedy social ills, like the failure of marriage. And yes, there is no democracy on this weblog. Since this conversation has petered out and is now on the second page, I shall close it down tomorrow. If anyone would like a parallel discussion--e.g. property, immigration, crime, etc.--to illustrate further the irrelevance of liberalism, I should be happy to offer a few observations.
Dr. Fleming, could you please post your observations on property and crime? I would like to read them.
Since I am currently enduring an undergraduate course in political philosophy--largely focused on Locke and Marx--I would appreciate some of Dr. Fleming's observations on property.