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We must get marriage right – for happiness now, and beyond
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February 1, 2021In our time of loneliness, made worse by the frailty of families, the withering of community life, and the mutual suspicion of the sexes, many turn to same-sex relations as something, anything to make their lives bearable. For the society that praises it, it is as if someone dying of thirst should drink grain alcohol; the relief is temporary, and the underlying condition deteriorates.
We must get marriage right, for happiness in this world and for a clearer vision of the world to come. “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,” says God to the first human couple, male and female. The words echo his blessing of the beasts, for man too is a creature. He dwells in time, sharing in the creative power of God by procreation, and in the eternity of God by the succession of generations.
God adds to His blessing of the man and woman the command to have dominion, to share his governance of the world. Adam shows this dominion by naming the beasts that God brings to him, seeing their nature and revealing it in the appropriate word. He names not individuals but kinds, for that is how God has created them. Yet from all these kinds is found no “helper fit for him.”
A helper for what task? Adam is sufficient to name the beasts. If he needed help to build cities, the fit helper would be another man, as Enkidu is for Gilgamesh in the Sumerian imperial epic. Muscle calls for muscle; brother calls for brother. But in Genesis, Cain the first murderer is the first city-builder, and the builders of Babel, who thought to reach heaven by technological and political might, earn from God a lesson in human futility.
What is the task? Not emotional fulfillment. There is no sense in the text that Adam feels bad. Rather, he is, in the Hebrew, separate. The word echoes what God does in creation: He “separated the light from the darkness.” But now God unites across a separation. The harmony of creation is expressed not by reducing to sameness, but by uniting what is separate: in the case of man and woman, a more profound and mysterious union by far than any friendship of man and man can be. That is why Adam cries out, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman,” Hebrew ’ishah, “because she was taken out of Man,” ’ish. “Therefore,” says the author, “a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife,” ’ishah, “and they become one flesh.”
God, who is one, creates what is not God, but by that separation he brings about union within and among all kinds of living things. Most glorious is the union of man and woman, coming together to bring into being other souls made in the divine image, more numerous than the grains of sand on the seashore.
More numerous and more glorious. These same sons of Adam and daughters of Eve are called to partake in the wedding feast of the Lamb, the final triumph of union across separation, for the infinite difference between God and the creature is bridged by Him alone who could accomplish it, God made man. How can we understand that eternal wedding feast that gathers all of time and the generations, if we reduce marriage to an emotional salve, sterile, never daring to step across the divide? Why, even married Catholic men and women treat their marriages as such. Do not do so. You tread upon holy ground.
DR. ANTHONY ESOLEN is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of Liberal Arts in Warner, NH. He is the author and translator of more than 20 books, including Defending Boyhood: How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World; Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World; Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture; Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child; and Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity (St. Benedict Press).
