“MARRIAGE”

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 57, 30 May 1927, Page 12

“MARRIAGE”

Modern Definitions What the Sages Say Marriage, both practically and mystically, is a unique human relationship; blit the truth about marriage will only be revealed to those who remember the very large part it has in common with all other human relationships. If you attempt to isolate the specific quality of marriage, you will never discover its real nature, you will not even discover that specific quality which is not a something added or subtracted from ordinary companionship, but a peculiar spiritual atmosphere, a light which irradiates and transfigures. Many commonplaces are forgotten by those who write about marriage; are forgotten by not a few of the 24 contributors to this book. One commonplace is of particular importance. Count Keyserling insists on the need of “tension” in marriage. Now, “tension” is not the quality in marriage, it is not even a quality; it is a condition of all human society, writes R. Ellis Roberts, reviewing Count Keyserling’s “Book of Marriage” in the London “Observer.” Many of the contributors to this book make no effort to define marriage. The anthropologists and some of the sociologists use the word quite loosely, and to describe states of life which no modern men would admit in any sense to be marriage. Others, for instance, write merely picturesquely, as Richard Wilhelm in “Marriage in China as elsewhere may be an organised hell”; or Richarda Huch in the long chapter on “Romantic Marriage,” in which she discusses the polygamous affairs of various early romantics. Thomas Mann does help the practical inquirer when he says:— “Is not marriage and its foundation of love a sacramental mystery? If there are Sacraments above the Sacraments of the Church, then there may also be institutions superior to society, and it is this reciprocal relationship between body and spirit in marriage that reminds one so astonishingly of the essence and relation of art; it is this that gives it its indelible sacramental character and its permanence as an original institution in the procession of the ages.”

Still, we have not yet reached the precise differentia of marriage, though Paul Dahlke, who writes on and applauds the Buddhist ideal of celibacy, oddly enough sees that there is a real likeness, a spiritual identity between voluntary celibacy and marriage in that both demand a sense of vocation. He approaches, however, the truth only to run away from it back to his own prejudice. The most disappointing of the definitions of marriage comes from an author from whom I expected much more—Mr. Havelock Ellis:

“The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear them until they are able to take care of themselves. On that basis man is at one with all the mammals and most of the birds.”

I must not misrepresent Mr. Ellis. That is only the first sentence of his article, and he takes a far wider view of the present meaning and end of marriage. But I insist that no one starting with that exceptionally erroneous definition can ever get near the real truth about marriage. That truth is difficult to express in a sentence, but this may serve: Marriage begins where all other kinds of human relationship, involving sexual intimacy, come to an end. Children can be born and brought up by parents who never think of marriage; they often have been. Nor does the sexual relationship make marriage: men have been devoted, and women, outside the marriage bonds. It is not an exaggeration to say that in true marriage the sexual relationship and childbearing, although they will always be a normal expression of marriage, are incidental: they are not the object; they are a means of expressing the truth of the new life which marriage has created. And surely this is obviously the truth about the matter. As I read this book, I found all kinds of semipermanent, temporary, casual, shiftless unions called indifferently “marriage”; but to use language in so licentious a way is to confuse thought. Most of our normal activities make us think how extraordinarily, how depressingly alike we all are; not so this experience. No man in love has ever believed that his experience and his expression of it was not unique; and he is right in so believing. Faith, especially the Christian faith, has always said he was right, in that every soul has its own uniquely distinctive quality. And now science and psychology say he is right; and marriage. .which is the greatest normal safeguard of this uniqueness, is coming into favour again. We must not, however, pretend that marriage is easy, or give the name lightly to unions which have no right to it. Marriage is neither a compromise nor a safeguard; neither a convention nor a surrender. It is a promise and a hope.