What is Marriage?

Another assignment from Marriage and Family.  Professor Sells wrote, "Writing as a scholar, what “Identifies” marriage, and particularly, what identifies Christian Marriage?"

       Material logic shows that to identify anything, we must identify first its membership in a group, and then differentiate from other members of that group (e.g., Simmons, 1961, pp.41-53): a marriage is a relationship; but it differs from other relationships, in that it is an organic bodily union. Just as our organs each have separate functions, yet work together towards one goal (the sustenance of the body), so one male body and one female body are separate yet have one ultimate goal (the engendering and nurture of children)(Girgis, George, and Anderson, 2010, p.245-287).

        There are, of course, a number of objections to this way of looking at marriage. What about polygamy? No marriage is between one man and many women (or vice versa), although one man may have many marriages (Girgis, George, and Anderson, 2010, p.247). What about couples who cannot have children? There are baseball teams who will never win a championship or even a game; nevertheless, they are constituted essentially differently from a team of umpires (Girgis, George, and Anderson, 2010, p.267). What about mutual comfort and encouragement? The love of husband and wife is inherently good, yet it does not define a marriage (although it may characterize many marriages, and it may lead to many marriages).

        Which leads us to the capstone question. What about Christian marriage? Doesn't the traditional conjugal definition limit or trivialize Christian marriage? Shouldn't we be talking about glorifying God instead of trying to bump up numbers by popping out miniature Christians? The objection reveals an artificial distinction between the physical and the spiritual (Feser, 2006, p.19-48). Engendering and nurturing children is profoundly spiritual, and is yet another way of using our bodies to glorify God. There are hardly any spiritual acts (if any) we can do which do not involve our bodies (you use your body for silent prayer, after all). Married people worship God corporately, ideally, by having and nurturing children.

        So it could be subtly confusing to speak of Christian marriage. All married humans are designed for the ideal of marriage, but Christianity makes it clearer and easier to attain. We could also ask, "What is the purpose of the Christian life?" But to be a Christian is to claim that the purpose of life is the same for everyone (McInerney, 1997, p.35-59) and best achieved (or not at all) through Christianity (Kreeft & Tacelli, 1994, p.341-360). If marriage is related to the meaning of life, then it is related to the meaning of life for everyone everywhere. Non-Christians are married for the same reason Christians are; but they do it imperfectly, in the sense that they do not see, yet, the ultimate reason and purpose for their marriage. Again, all people feel that murder is wrong (allowing for differences in definition), but to be a Christian is to say that Christianity teaches us most clearly the ultimate implications of murder. "What is Christian murder?" can be a good question but it would seem to imply that there are also equally valid Buddhist murders and Jain murders.

        And so what? We cannot see clearly what is wrong unless we see clearly what a thing should be, its essence. All efforts to help marriages must be based on an idea of what marriage is. This is also the basis for any coherent ethics, the only way to get a "should" from an "is" (McInerney, 1997, p36-37). There has to be a clear view of the good, because there are a vast multiplicity of ways a thing can be good, but only a limited number of ways it can suffer a deprivation of the good.

References

Girgis, S., George, R. P., & Anderson, R. T. (2010). What is marriage? Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 34, 245-287.

Kreeft, P. & Tacelli, R. K. (1994). Handbook of Christian apologetics. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

McInerney, R. (1997). Ethica Thomistica, rev. ed. Washington, DC: CUA Press.

Simmons, E. D. (1961). The scientific art of logic: an introduction to the principles of formal and material logic. Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Co.

What's love got to do with it? Marital satisfiction

This is a small assignment for my Marriage and Family class.  We were assigned to respond to Wilcox and Nock (2006), a very interesting study on marital satisfaction.

Andrew Marvell famously sang, "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near." I will not analyze, as I would like, the interesting and encouraging aspects of this article, nor the several errors in logic (Wilcox & Nock, 2006), nor will I enter into a detailed consideration of what marriage should be or could be; confining myself, instead to this solitary observation. The assumption of this article and many other articles written from within the viewpoint of Wundt's empiriological psychology, is that the ultimate standard for everything is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. But that makes life meaningless, and destroys the very thing it values (cf. the destruction of Companiate marriage, mentioned by Wilcox and Nock, 2006, by the very pursuit of Companiate marriage). Pleasure is always a by-product, merely, of a good thing. Pleasure is good, but its function is to be the handmaiden to good actions, to reward good actions and make them more likely. One of the reasons this is so is that we are changeable; the object of all our dreams quickly becomes last year's Christmas present.

So the proper question is not really, "How pleasurable is marriage to its incumbents?" but "How well are the incumbents performing marriage?" I think this article illustrates a corollary to the principle of the subordination of pleasure, mentioned by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, which is this: that those who have the strongest habits of good action will also tend to be the most satisfied anyway. Christian housewives tend to be more satisfied than Sinead O'Connor (as Wilcox & Nock 2006 also discover); but even if they were miserable, their lot would be preferable to someone living a fake "happiness" in the Matrix or on the Truman Show.

The really important Dependent Variable here is how much the husbands attend to their wives' emotional needs--because it is the only good action investigated. There are other variables which would be equally useful to measure, but the point is that good action is more important than the subjective result of good action. In fact, continually asking people how "happy" they are in the marriages would seem to lead to the invidious comparisons which lead to unhappiness--and then to "unhappiness."

For further thought or discussion, here is an interesting article from the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9572187/Couples-who-share-the-housework-are-more-likely-to-divorce-study-finds.html

Reference

Wilcox, W. B. & Nock, S. L. (2006). What's love got to do with it? Equality, equity, commitment, and women's marital quality. Social Forces, 84 (3), p.1321-1345.