Would you like to make an institution Christian? Then make it a marriage.
Marriage leaps for virtue like a man leaping for a moving train. It takes two people, with their sin, vice, and striving for perfection and binds them together, saying, “You have, up to this point, sinned, and the world has gone on unperturbed; lied, and no one has been reduced to tears; amassed a thousand occasions of wrath, pride, and petty selfishness—and no one suffered for it. Now you will marry. Now all your hardness of heart will knock up against the heart of another; now that tone, the one you do not even realize you take, will ring in the ears of another. Now the demonic horns you grow in secret will poke and prod the one with whom you share bed and bathroom. You are married; you stand revealed, naked, utterly seen through after a few weeks’ honeymoon; your vices now intimately related to a flesh that feels them and a soul that suffers them. Every callous that crusts over your conscience has become so much roughness rubbing against the other—who will protest the fact!”
Marriage makes virtue possible by making it necessary. One can indulge the illusion that virtue is “good behavior” when one is a child; make a kind merit-badge of it when one is a young man; fantasize about virtue as “growth in self-mastery” deep into one’s twenties; but the married man is not virtuous because he would like to be but because he has freely chosen a situation in which the lack of virtue means—hell! Instant hell.
Be a selfish jerk at a Waffle House—no demon will rise from the ground to remind you of the ultimate end of your actions. Pejure yourself in a court of law—you’ll get away with it. But be a selfish jerk around the family table, and you’ll already feel the infernal heat; the shift of temperature; the sudden isolation of your being from itself, as your wife and children look on you with horror.
Marriage is a deliberate entering into a state of existence whose continued life depends on continued love. As such, it is a sort of suicide pact: let us, you and I, enter into such and such a contract by which the happiness of each becomes utterly dependent on a gift that neither can assure will, in fact, keep coming—that is, love. Let us increase the likelihood of mutual destruction by an infinite degree. Let us make sin, which once meant nothing, mean hurt, and mean it right away. It is all well and good to preach the virtuous life, but preach the married life, and the necessity of the virtuous life will become as clear as a slap in the face.
For the moralists are wrong about what motivates. I’ll risk my immortal soul for a passing pleasure any given Tuesday—but I won’t risk my wife. Souls are notoriously tough to see, but marriage incarnates one’s soul, makes of it a wife, and so renders visible what invisible tortures we put our created nature through. The sinner is wise to avoid marriage, so long as he would like to persist in his sin, for, in becoming “one flesh” with another, he gains in girth; in recognizing the other as bone of my bone, he increases the number of bones he can break; expands in total sensitivity to reality; begins to react not in his own person but in the reaction of his wife—who does the same to him. In marriage, both hold up their face against the reason for virtue—the neighbor—and refuse to look away. The marriage vow says, in effect, “virtue or death.”
Let atheism flourish; let liberalism run rampant; let capitalism put sin up for sale; still, none of these evils will suck the necessity of virtue out of marriage. All the devil can do is convince men and women that what they learn inside of marriage does not apply outside of it. As the nuptial blessing puts it, marriage is the one blessing “not forfeited by original sin”—the most that the author of sin can hope for is to insert marriage into an ideological structure which would contracept its fruitfulness; a structure in which husbands stop being husbands when they go to work and in which what is true concerning the household is false concerning the city and the business.
For even in the pagan regimes, where false gods, slavery, blood sacrifices, and ritualized oppression were the order of the day, no one was so foolish as to advocate anything but the basic wisdom of the Bible when it came to marriage as such. Marriage is indeed the one blessing “not washed away by the flood,” for even in such a flood of idol-worship as ancient Egypt, the advice for a man living vowed to a woman cannot stray far from God’s design without swift retribution, as in the Instructions of Ani: “Thou shouldst not supervise thy wife in her own house, when thou knowest that she is efficient. Do not say to her: ‘Where is it? Fetch it for us!’ when she has put it in the most useful place.... How happy it is when thy hand is with her!” Or in the Instructions of the Vizier Ptah-Hotep: “If thou art a man of standing, thou shouldst found thy household and love thy wife at home as is fitting. Fill her belly; clothe her back. Ointment is the prescription for her body. Make her heart glad as long as thou livest.” The pagans, like the liberals, are not so guilty of making marriage itself wicked as of hiding its precepts away; calling it a “private space” relative to a public space in which other rules apply.
All marriage, Catholic or not, is the instantiation of Catholic social teaching in all its fire and spirit. For just as marriage makes virtue an obvious necessity, it makes those strange dictates of the Gospel (otherwise only fitfully applied) the things to do—or die.
The Church teaches that the life of perfection is characterized by a state in which Christians “hold all things in common.” Private property is a sacred good, but it is subordinated to this ideal. Liberals have a very hard time subordinating private property to common property: “it’s mine, I can do what I want with it,” is a kind of calling-card with them. And so, within liberal states, the Church’s teaching is difficult to understand. The Catholic might be tempted to give up on making the commons comprehensible—if it wasn’t for marriage. For marriage is obviously a state in which we will hold all goods in common—or divorce. Marriage is obviously a condition in which we will radically subordinate our private property until it becomes the servant of our common property—or risk adultery, resentment and suspicion.
The “radical” doctrine of “the universal destination of all earthly goods” is a humdrum description of a man and a woman scooping from the same bowl, brushing at the same sink. It may be a strange teaching in the boardroom, but it is the modus operandi of the playroom and the sine qua non of the kitchen cupboard. “Holding all things in common” is a good description of both the marital act (which is either a good held in common or a rape) and the marital fruit—the child, who is either held in common or born into a living hell of neglect. Only in loony libertarian treatises and divorce courts is marriage held to be anything but a Catholic experience of property.
Likewise, Jesus instructs us to forgive, to love our enemies, and to pray for our persecutors, and this sounds difficult, awfully difficult: until we are married to our enemy, and in the pleasure of marriage conceive four or five very small, very insistent persecutors. Here, we will either forgive or, again—hell! the silent weight of unresolved bitterness hanging like a millstone around the common neck! the back turned in the bed! the crying toddler!
Loving our enemy seems like an impossible task—until we recall that it is a basic mode of life between siblings. Forgiving seven times seventy times each day seems impossible—until the marriage vow makes constant forgiveness the very condition of the possibility of our continued happiness. The family is the “school of charity” inasmuch as it is that unique institution in which, when one of its members hits another in the face with a lit sparkler, even so, forgiveness, and not war, naturally results. For a marriage makes peace predominant, makes mercy more important than justice, makes undeserved grace paradoxically necessary, even as it remains freely given—for who could imagine a family in which strict justice was kept? Who can conceive of a family in which parents actually got to the truth about who started what and with what intentions? in which husband and wife met to legislate about what was fair, who owes who what, and what restitution is required for which action? What horror! Rather, the only happiness possible to the family is Christian happiness, whatever name they call it, and the only way a marriage continues in being is by the primacy of peace, of the common good, regularly appealed to over and against all attempts at commutative justice, as in, “Look, I don’t know how this started, and I don’t care, I just want to be friends again.” Marriage obviously needs regular outpourings of underserved mercy on sinful individuals for the sake of a peace that transcends them all. That is to say marriage obviously needs grace, not for its augmentation, but for the sake of its quotidian functioning.
Perhaps this is why the Catholic Church has never recognized a marriage that is not holy, why St. John Paul II called on us “to rediscover the transcendent dimension that is intrinsic to the full truth of marriage and the family, overcoming every dichotomy that tends to separate the profane aspects from the religious as if there were two marriages: one profane and another sacred.” For marriages are not “of God” through an extrinsic addition of “religion” to something natural we call “marriage”; rather, as the Pope put it: “in their being ‘one flesh’ the man and the woman, in their mutual assistance and fruitfulness, participate in something sacred and religious.” Something is always already godly in the thing.
The Church teaches that we are to give away our superfluities, and all of liberal society groans, protests, and hides its cash in the stock market. But in the family, disobeying this doctrine means death, and the father who does not give to his poor is a murderer whom even the laws of liberal societies would shudder not to confront—a fact which reveals their continued Christianity, not their consistency.
The Church teaches that all power is for the sake of the weak, and she is called communist; but show me a father who does not act so “communistically” for his wife and children, and I will show you a divorcé. The Church teaches the goodness of hierarchy and obedience, and she is called authoritarian: but show me the mother who is not such an “authoritarian” to her children and I will show you—some messed up children, to start. All the Catholic norms of subsidiarity, solidarity, and liberation are the natural grounds for a happy marriage, a fact which should no longer surprise us, for marriage is the Church awaiting herself in history, and Church doctrine can only propose that which is already confirmed in the life of the domestic Church: that love is the one thing necessary, and oh! how very necessary it is. In the practicing Catholic family, Eden long lost meets Eden long preserved. Perhaps this is why the faithful are consulted in matters of doctrine.
If the goal of Christian politics is to restore, by grace, the conditions of Eden to the valley of tears—and any other goal falls rather flat—then it would be odd if the Singular Remnant of the Edenic Condition were only accidentally related to Christian politics. It would be odd, to say the least, if the effort to establish a social order characterized by love of God and love of neighbor were to skip over an assured line of continuity between us, now, and man in the state of perfect relation with God and neighbor. Rather, in building a Christian social order, man never starts from scratch. He starts from marriage. “The Kingdom of God is among you”—for a marriage is objectively a kingdom of God.
The Catholic Church is the effort, on Earth, to model all relationships on family relationships; it is the reformation of humanity into one family, unified by a common love, boasting God as their Father, Mary as their Mother, and Christ as their brother.
The Church is the one who bids you to remember when you were a happy child; when you last glowed with the assurance of love that characterizes the family, even if, amidst the effort of all hell to break the family, that memory glows as small and brief as a spark in the night. Rather than consigning this spark to a buried past, the Church promises the resurrection of precisely that joy—now as the reality of all of social life. When you accept what she proposes, you are re-born; you become a child of God at the hands of one you call Father in and through the establishment of new and really familial relationships—your godparents and god-siblings—who are responsible for enacting in their flesh (and in their prayers, gifts, and willingness to sacrifice for your sake) that new relationship of love which characterizes every Christian relationship in potentia. In her teaching and by the grace of her sacraments, the Church enables what is natural within the family to become what is natural between all men: the unity of love, forgiveness, mercy, communion, healing, and all the rest.
What is the mission of Christian politics? To make all men brothers, all women sisters; to make fathers and mothers of all those with more power than others; to make children of all those with less; to make cousins of all allies and strangers; to take the seed of charity so obviously present between mother and daughter, husband and wife, and make of it the very model and norm of the social order as a whole—so that, when I approach the one who rules over me, be he bureaucrat or king, the governing norm and expectation is that he will treat me as a father treats his son. “When ye see these things coming to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh.”