The Future of Marriage
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Original positing: September 14, 2007
I was a spiritually-minded young fellow during my high school days, if I do say so myself. As evidence I point to the fact that I was planning to become a minister of the gospel. Still, I should admit that I was subject to carnal temptations, of which there are various sorts. I liked to eat, and I was not always as aware as I should have been that there are certain foods I should not eat, or eat only sparingly. Along my route to school was a bakery, and I would often stop by to pick up yesterday's leftover donuts and creme- or jam-filled pastries. Because they were incredibly cheap, I frequently managed to snatch up many more than I could possibly consume myself in a single day. Being in possession of all those goodies made me a popular fellow at lunchtime, when I shared my largesse with some of my buddies.
Back in those days we believed that the ancient Romans had this eating business all figured out. A Roman eating establishment would include a "vomitorium," which was essentially a facility for throwing up while preserving a degree of dignity. We thought the Romans would eat until they were fit to burst, throw up, and then start again -- real bulimics. I have since discovered that what we had in our head is not quite accurate, but it's an abiding image of my youth -- and also a component in a what I freely acknowledge to be an unworthy philosophy of life.
Another of my carnal preoccupations in those days was sex. I did not then make the connection, but it dawned on me during my more mature years that what we as high school kids thought was ideal in the way of eating, namely, going about it like the ancient Romans, was roughly comparable to how some people choose to live their sex lives. You indulge yourself sexually "to the max," as though "pigging out" on donuts and pastries, then somehow get it out of your system -- and start all over! It would be handy if God equipped human beings with a "reset" button for sexual purposes. The general idea was that you should have as much sex -- and sexual pleasure -- as you can. Just as my friends could not pass up a free donut or two at lunchtime, so many people today are on the lookout for free sex (whatever that might be). They graze in pastures far from home.
Now, for most of us in my public high school (St. John's, located in the north end of Winnipeg), such sexual dreams remained just that -- dreams. We did not accomplish much. But we did indulge in some unhealthy, nervous joking amongst ourselves. And as we discussed things, carefully hiding our own ignorance about various matters related to sexuality, we were influenced by Playboy magazine, that renowned fountain of unhealthy and distorted thinking about the way men can -- and should -- relate to women.
Back in those days I was enough of a budding philosopher to be caught by the idea that Playboy was not just a collection of the kinds of pictures you shouldn't be looking at but also a source of worldly "wisdom," indeed, the kind of wisdom that some dared to call philosophy. Of course the wisdom dished out by Playboy was in essence death-dealing. Its alleged wisdom has been much discussed and criticized over the years, even though the Playboy phenomenon (there was more to Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire than just magazines) has largely faded from the cultural scene by now.
Playboy was especially an assault on the institution of marriage. In her book The Hearts of Men, to which she gives the telling subtitle American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich neatly sums up this twisted philosophy in a single sentence: "You can buy sex on a fee-for-service basis, so don't get caught up in a long-term contract." [NOTE ehrenreich] In other words, your sexual life should be a buffet -- like one of those all-you-can-eat restaurants managed and staffed by Chinese people. And what our society calls marriage is just an economically inefficient way that men have long used to get the sexual favors they crave from women. Don't fall for it!
Sex is pure pleasure -- it's "recreation." Such is the idea or image or myth that sex-education teachers in Christian institutions work hard to dislodge. It's an uphill battle, for we often start out confused by these things ourselves. While we are quite guarded in what we say to the students under our tutelage, we sometimes wonder to ourselves: If it could indeed be done, if we really could detach sex from marriage, from commitment, from long-term responsibility, if we could make it purely trivial and momentary, why not?
This is not a question that admits of a sound-bite answer. When we address these issues as Christian teachers, we are often too inclined to look to the Bible and the Christian tradition for maxims and rules -- generally of the "don't do such-and-such" variety. What is needed in addition to such rules is a broader rationale for going about a sexual relationship in a way that does not resemble grazing -- whether that of cows out in the meadow or overweight diners at the China King Buffet. Christian teachers and leaders need to present an argument to the effect that genuine and worthy sexual satisfaction is not to be had via the route recommended by Hugh Hefner and the Playboy empire of yesteryear. I have touched on these matters in a separate essay (by separate I mean that it is not part of the Future of Marriage series); some of what I say in that essay will be briefly rearticulated here.
It falls within the philosopher's job description to shed some light on the question what time is and what constitutive role it plays in our experience. Now, I must admit that I have not discovered all that much light emanating from the thinking and writings of the philosophers I have studied, but there is some. For example, a study of the aesthetics of music makes it clear that we do not exist in the temporal hair's-breadth present of which some philosophers are fond. William James therefore suggested that "... the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time." [NOTE james]
A careful analysis of our experience reveals that when we attend to what we call "the present," we are actually inhabiting a greater stretch of time. For example, our apprehension of a piece of music extends into the past in what we remember and retain of what we have been hearing, and also into the future insofar as we anticipate what is yet to come (assuming that we have prior knowledge of the music or are able to divine where it is going even if we have not heard the piece before). And so our experience of music is a union of the present with what we retain (the past) and what we anticipate (the future). If we apprehended just one razor-thin moment at a time, music would make no sense to us, musically speaking. We would not have the experience of it that we do in fact have.
Some such analysis is also needed if we are to properly understand sexual experience and sexual consummation. Moreover, it should be stressed that the role of love as enhancing sexual pleasure and intensity cannot be understood apart from an extended time-consciousness. There are people, I suppose, who grant this general point to the extent of declaring (or pretending) that they love -- or are in love with -- the sex partner of the moment, whoever that may be, but they are fooling themselves. Love is not a feeling that can be generated on demand in order to attempt to ennoble what is in essence a tawdry sexual interchange. Love needs to grow gradually through a series of opportunities for mutuality and joint experience. There is all manner of give and take in a genuine love relationship. Through the gentle give and take of everyday life as lived by a man and a woman in love with one another, we are able to add depth and fullness to an eventual sexual encounter and consummation. Hard-core pornography presupposes just the opposite and therefore comes across to us as strained, artificial, unreal: it generally presents us with a woman and a man who seem to have no robust identity, and then it loses no time in getting to the sexual action. The viewer is left to wonder: who are these two people, and what is their relationship?
To make points of this sort is to affirm that a Christian understanding of sexual experience insists that sex flourishes when firmly embedded in a long-term relationship. Kierkegaard's exploration of the difference between "the aesthetic" and "the ethical," especially in Either/Or, brings out this point effectively. [NOTE kierkegaard]
Christians, I would maintain, are people who are conscious of living in time because the liturgies they use to structure their communal worship activities reinforce their sense of living in God's time rather than just their own. One reason why so many of the most wonderful Christian places of worship have greatly elevated ceilings is that a high ceiling invites a worshiper to expand his sense of who he is and in what flow of events he lives out his life on earth. Worship calls us to an awareness that we are so much more than the puny selves we often present to each other in drab, day-to-day existence. Worship in such a cathedral setting begins even before the service is formally inaugurated, which is why many Christians like to step into such a sacred setting on occasions apart from Sunday worship.
Christians, then, are encouraged to think of their own sojourn on earth as embedded in a larger stream of time in which God brings this world into being and leads it to its ultimate destiny. Therefore it is second nature for mature and reflective Christians to think of their own lives and relationships in long-term ways as well, a development which greatly enriches romantic and sexual love. The two great romantic relationships of my life have been played out within the framework that Christians cherish as marriage. But the long-term emphasis is not limited to romance and sex: friendship also comes into the picture here. I have close friends whose relationship with me dates back to when I was twelve years old. (Some of them were recipients of my high-school donuts!) And I take great pleasure in having lived in the same lovely town for twenty-five years.
The line of thought I am developing here is not the dominant one when Christian intellectuals offer a critique of the Playboy philosophy and other such shallow approaches to sexuality. A powerful tradition with roots in Aristotle and Aquinas tells us that the terms "natural" and "unnatural" must play a key role in our understanding of sex and marriage and in our critique of the sexual immorality that is rampant in our day. Now, there is much to be said in favor of this tradition as a framework for a Christian understanding of what happens in marriage. Even so, I do not make the contrast between "the natural" and "the unnatural" the key element in the way of thinking I am trying to develop in this series of essays written to explain what marriage is in essence, how it is changing, and where it is likely to end up. The relentless teleology in such an understanding of sexuality cuts off what I consider to be legitimate sexual possibilities for Christians.
Now, someone pondering the previous sentence might suppose that I am about to make a point in defense of homosexuality, which clearly blocks such immanent teleology. And it is true that homosexuality is accorded little respect by proponents of the Aristotle-and-Aquinas tradition. It hardly needs to be pointed out that whatever homosexuals may do sexually, it cannot lead to the intended end or "telos," which is conception, the key to the furtherance of our race. The sexual deeds in which homosexuals engage are therefore to be branded "unnatural acts," according to teleologically-minded thinkers. Of course it should be remembered that a great many sexual acts performed by heterosexuals could also be condemned on the basis of a strictly teleological analysis.
The title of this essay brings together the terms "birth control" and "sterilization." Both these notions, which play quite a role in shaping people's sex lives nowadays, stand implicitly condemned by the Aristotle-and-Aquinas tradition's insistence on teleology. To be sure, there is still a bit of wiggle room, so that some measures aimed at "family planning" can yet be permitted in a Christian conjugal setting, but the result is a constant preoccupation and guilt that haunts a Christian marriage because of the birth control issue. David Lodge, a Roman Catholic novelist, has addressed this matter in a telling way in his fiction. [NOTE lodge]
In my argument against the Playboy tradition, I would wish to downplay the strictly teleological orientation and speak instead of pointless sex. Now, I am aware that for a young teenage male with raging hormones, it might be difficult to conceive of any sort of sexual gratification as pointless, but that difficult phase of life does pass. I can speak from experience here: I'm no longer a teenage boy with raging hormones and too many donuts in my lunchbox. I have learned a measure of restraint, of moderation; I have learned how to take the long-term view of things, also in my love life. Just as I try to avoid eating just for the sake of eating, I do not seek sexual gratification just for its own sake but connect it to larger purposes and commitments.
Perhaps I have been too hard on the Aristotle-and-Aquinas tradition in the paragraphs above. It occurs to me that what Lauren Winner says about "hospitality" in relation to sexuality may help us capture what is best about that tradition, which is so keen to have a larger purpose held before us as we live out our sex lives. Winner maintains: "Without a quality of hospitality, sex can become too inward focused, too two-people-gazing-so-intensely-at-each-other; the openness to procreation is part of what helps sex not become, in Kierkegaard�s phrase, an ingrown toenail." [NOTE winner-1] In my own life's experience, I have discovered that there is -- and should be -- something familial about sex, even though many Playboy-inebriated sexual creatures never seem to realize this as they live out their lives of loneliness.
My first marriage, which I entered when I was quite young, was definitely aimed at founding a family. Mary and I had four children. My second marriage, which I entered after Mary had died, by which time three of our children had grown up (one died in infancy), was not aimed at bringing any more children into the world. When I married Janet, my second wife, I was not looking to her to be a mother to my children in any substantial sense -- or even a stepmother. And because she was beyond childbearing age, I did not expect an additional son or daughter from her womb. But I did look for her to fulfill the grandmother role in my life -- not to be my grandmother, of course, but to stand next to me as a grandfather. In that sense our second marriage was intended to be "hospitable" -- open to family and procreation. Within a year of our wedding day we got the good news that my daughter-in-law was expecting a child, and now Janet functions as grandmother to my grandson Steven. That grandmotherly role she plays in my extended family life cannot be disconnected from our love for one another as husband and wife, a love which has a sexual dimension and anchor. We do not love each other just as friends.
Winner's fine book Real Sex makes similar points and is highly recommended to anyone who finds merit in these essays on the future of marriage. Winner senses keenly that sex is never a strictly private business. She understands that there is something covenantal about it, and that the covenant embraces a wider family community, church community -- indeed, human society as such. [NOTE winner-2] What happens sexually between a man and a woman when they engage in intercourse is neither momentary nor isolated, even though the setting for their lovemaking is presumably a private place.
My uneasiness about the use of the terms "natural" and "unnatural" in explicating a Christian understanding of sexuality has also to do with the way the term gets used among sociobiologists, who claim to have discovered the root of all human behavior in our alleged animal ancestry. A striking example of this mentality is the work of the British zoologist Robin Baker, whose book Sperm Wars advances the thesis that sex is natural, all right -- but not in the way that Aristotle and Aquinas had in mind. Rather, our sexual behavior -- indeed, all human behavior -- is governed by deep imperatives of which the conscious mind knows nothing. And these imperatives are biological in origin -- not social. We are told: "Whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not, and whether we care or not, we are all programmed to try to win our generation's game of reproduction, to pursue reproductive success." [NOTE baker-1]
To understand sexual behavior is to realize that sexual creatures try to make sure that their genes are as widely represented in the future population of their species as possible. This general rule is the key to understanding all sexual behavior on the part of animals: Baker and his ilk then feel free to presuppose it as unquestionable truth when they comment on what human beings do, sexually speaking. The human male is determined to keep a "continuous sperm presence" in his female partner at all times in order to maximize the possibility of conception. [NOTE baker-2]
I mention Baker and his curious argument (I must confess to finding it somewhat amusing) because the theme of this essay is birth control and sterilization, of which Baker has little to say since it seems to fly in the face of his thesis. He admits: "Using a condom to remove all chance of conception thus negates a man's fundamental reason for pursuing casual sex." So what gives? Baker takes refuge here -- and elsewhere in the book -- in a distinction between what men claim to want on a conscious level and what they really want on a subconscious level: "Subconsciously, his body realizes the futility of casual sex with no chance of conception ...." It might just be, speculates Baker, that the man's body "... is actually fooled by this relatively recent invention [TP: the condom] into doing something that is against its reproductive interests." [NOTE baker-3]
Baker's understanding of sexuality certainly does not render it unnatural in the sense of pointless (like overeating, indulging yourself until you feel so sick that you need to vomit). Instead, reproductive sex is the most deeply natural thing people can do, for it gives and guarantees them a place in the future through offspring carrying their genes. Baker tells us:
Nothing -- short of castration, brain surgery, or hormone implants -- can remove a person's subconscious urge to have as many grandchildren as he or she can. So nothing will remove a man's subconscious urge to have as many children with as many women as his genes and circumstances will allow. [NOTE baker-4]
While birth control may be a mere fly in the ointment for Baker and those who think as he does, it remains a very significant issue -- indeed, an important part of our lives in the twenty-first century. There is definitely something artificial about it; it does represent an interruption of natural processes and rhythms -- no getting around it. On this score one must either say no or say yes: either you acknowledge that birth control is legitimate at least some of the time when a man and a woman make love, or you do not. I well recall that when I announced to my father, during my third year of undergraduate studies, that I was planning to get married, he asked: "What about your intention to study for a Ph.D. in philosophy?" I replied that Mary and I planned to use birth control. He responded, somewhat hesitantly, I thought, by remarking that "our churches" used to be opposed to birth control. He did not seem to be challenging me on this point. And I said simply: "I'm aware of that."
In having said yes to birth control in my own life, I am influenced in part by our culture's free interference with nature in the domain we call animal husbandry. Animals have been domesticated over thousands of years: sheep and dogs are hardly wild creatures any more. Our programs of selective breeding also apply to plants, vegetables and fruits: such programs make possible the levels of prosperity we now enjoy in relation to food supplies. We give nature many a nudge when it comes to managing our physical environment and supplying the necessities of life through processes that still remain -- even after a nudge or two from us -- grounded in nature and her rhythms. Bearing all of this in mind, I am not an opponent of artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization -- at least, not in principle. To affirm that fertilization treatments sometimes produce unwanted effects is not yet to reject them altogether, and so I would steer a cautious course on these matters.
One of the traditional contrasts with the term "natural" is the term "mechanical," which does not have the very same meaning as "unnatural." It is perhaps in the domain of the "mechanical" that we see certain limits looming before us. Here we face, for example, the Viagra issue: can sexual pleasure and satisfaction and intensity be produced from outside ourselves via the infusion of some medication, some stimulant? And when we allow this to happen, have we fallen into "mechanical" -- and therefore meaningless -- sex? Or if we go further down this path and argue that the brain is after all the ultimate sex organ, and then begin to experiment by surgically stimulating certain centers within the brain, thereby producing sexual sensations while bypassing those body parts and organs that normally play a role in sexual fulfillment, have we forsaken the natural altogether in order to embrace the mechanical? Are we then in "brain-in-a-vat" territory? [NOTE brain] These are questions that demand consideration. Is the human, relational dimension essential to a worthy sexual experience?
If we are genuinely hospitable and familial in our sexual relationships, as may well be the case in a second marriage where there is no hope or expectation of producing new offspring, may we still use birth control devices? After all, some of those devices are mechanical in a classic way: they simply block the sperm from getting where nature intends them to go and do their job. [NOTE sperm] There are a great many people who know almost nothing about Aristotle, Aquinas and the classical notion of teleology who would say: "Of course we may use birth control! What's the big deal here anyway?"
It is worth pondering the fact that the mere distribution of birth control devices (or even information) used to be a crime: the work of Marie Stopes (1880-1958) in England is worth reviewing in this regard, and also the trials and tribulations of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). [NOTE sanger] But the Christian churches -- with the prominent exception of the Roman Catholics -- have by and large made their peace with birth control. Still, some do worry that there is an area of overlap between birth control and abortion (not an easy issue to resolve).
What about sterilization? It also has the flavor of the mechanical about it. Whether performed on a male or a female, is it not in essence a procedure by means of which we cut off of the stream of life within us while opening up the possibility of sexual "grazing"? And the question can be intensified if we consider the likelihood of birth defects in this age of genetic screening. [NOTE stopes] May a person whose offspring are likely to be significantly deformed enter marriage after first having been sterilized? Or would a sterilized person have to be classified as "unmarriageable"? This is a question to which I will return in the next essay in this series.
The great hesitation many Christians feel when they contemplate such issues has something to do with the way eunuchs are spoken of in the Bible. As a male "barren one," the eunuch has no hope of being remembered by his own seed. In the prophecies of Isaiah, the anguish of the eunuch is taken away through a beautiful promise:
And let not the eunuch say, "Behold, I am a dry tree." For thus says the LORD: "To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off. [Isaiah 56:3-5]
Are eunuchs among us today (I use the term loosely here to refer to married people who find that they cannot have children because of some physical abnormality) therefore to be pitied because they must remain childless? "There's always adoption!" you point out. True, but we have a history of being suspicious of adoption; indeed, I can remember the days when it was a disputed theological point whether an adopted child in a Christian family was eligible for infant baptism.
Perhaps we need to be instructed by Scripture here. Paul reminds us that we who are Gentiles have been adopted into the family of God and "ingrafted" into a tree and family that is not ours by birth or by nature. He writes: "For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree." [Romans 11:24] I grant that this verse occurs in a somewhat obscure -- yet very important -- section of Scripture, but it gives me hope all the same. The lovemaking of the eunuch or -- in today's terms -- the barren woman who cannot conceive or the barren man who cannot cause his wife to do so -- is not without meaning for the worldwide family of God. Such is my conviction -- and firm expectation. [END]
NOTES
NOTE baker-1
Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 4.
NOTE baker-2
On "sperm presence," see pp. 9 and 11.
NOTE baker-3
Page 230 of Sperm Wars; on the subconscious or unconscious, see also pp. 134, 196, 199.
NOTE baker-4]
Page 318.
NOTE brain
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: "The skeptical hypothesis that one is a brain in a vat with systematically delusory experience is modelled on the Cartesian Evil Genius hypothesis, according to which one is a victim of thoroughgoing error induced by a God-like deceiver. The skeptic argues that one does not know that the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis is false, since if the hypothesis were true, one's experience would be just as it actually is." Online plato.stanford.edu/entries/brain-vat/
Our experiences as a brain-in-a-vat could also include what we take to be sexual sensations. Who needs sex organs?
NOTE ehrenreich
See The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1983), p. 46.
NOTE james
See Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (New York: Dover Publications, 1950; first published in 1890), p. 609. In developing his view of time, William James appealed to the work of James Mill, whom he saluted for recognizing that if consciousness were made up of discrete elements (or "bead-like sensations"), we would be stuck with a philosophical problem, for in that case, declared Mill, "... we never could have any knowledge except that of the present instant. The moment each of our sensations ceased, it would be gone for ever ... we should be wholly incapable of acquiring experience." See pp. 605-606 of Principles, where James quotes from Vol. I of Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, p. 319 of the J.S. Mill edition.
NOTE kierkegaard
It takes patience to read Kierkegaard. Either/Or has been abridged: I recommend the unabridged version. The section entitled "Diary of the Seducer" (pp. 297-440 of Volume I in the Lowrie translation, revised in 1959 and published by Princeton University Press) is especially worthwhile.
NOTE lodge
See especially his novel The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965).
NOTE sanger
Sanger met with fierce opposition. An internet source explains: "Sanger began to address women�s lack of information about birth control by writing a sex education column called 'What Every Girl Should Know' for The Call, a socialist newspaper. But in 1914, a warrant was issued for Sanger�s arrest. She stood accused of violating the Comstock law, which made it a crime to circulate 'obscenity' through the mail. Passed in 1873 in response to pressure from a crusader named Anthony Comstock, the law defined information about contraception or abortion as obscenity." See www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/opinion/nyregionopinions/15CIfeldt.html?ex=1188100800&en=2455512157505d20&ei=5070
NOTE sperm
Some words in the Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life (1983) come to mind here. Well grounded in philosophy, the comics have one of the characters insist: "Every sperm is sacred; every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate."
NOTE stopes
One reason why Stopes is not all that well remembered is that she advocated eugenics and was not keen to see people with genetic defects becoming natural parents. The Nazis made any such discussion thoroughly disreputable.
NOTE winner-1
See her interview with April Folkertsma, available online at www.theotherjournal.net/print.php?id=127
See also her book Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005), p. 66.
NOTE winner-2
See Real Sex, especially pp. 49-58.
© Theodore Plantinga 2007
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