Christian Marriage

If they cannot contain, let them marry:

for it is better to marry than to burn.

--I Corinthians 7:9

This month U.S. churches were crowded--for weddings. But some June brides might drop their bouquets with shock to hear that the early Christian Fathers regarded marriage as the lesser of two evils.

According to Professor Roland H. Bainton of Yale University Divinity School, Christianity has taken three principal views of marriage--the sacramental, the romantic and the companionable. In the current issue of the quarterly Religion in Life, Dr. Bainton, a Congregationalist, sets all three attitudes in their historical perspective, which indicates that the modern,' "romantic" view is the least Christian of all.

"God Hath Joined . . ." Dr. Bainton finds the sacramental conception of marriage best grounded in the New Testament. Jesus sanctified marriage by His first miracle at Cana. And Christ said: ". . . What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Saint Paul, however, urged Christians who were unmarried to stay single. Marriage, he believed, was only for those in whom the temptation to sin was too strong.

When the early Church came into contact with the licentiousness of Greco-Roman civilization, it became the staunch advocate of matrimony. The Church even tried to keep Christian marriages from going on the rocks by offering its members advice more detailed than anything Dorothy Dix ever attempted. Saint Chrysostom (347-407) wrote that no wife should say to her husband: " 'Unmanly coward and lazy sluggard, look at that man . . . His wife wears jewels and goes out with a pair of milk-white mules. She is attended by a troop of slaves, but you have cowered down and live to no purpose.' But if a wife does so speak, her husband shall say to her: 'My dear, when I could have taken many to wife, both with better fortunes and of noble family, I did not so choose but was enamoured of you . . .' Then immediately from these beginnings the husband shall open the way to a discourse on true wisdom with some circumlocutions on the vanity of riches."

Cult of Adultery. Romance, even within the bonds of wedlock, was looked at askance by the early Christians. Writes Historian Bainton: "Women were strongly exhorted not to make themselves attractive." Virginity was highly prized by the more pious counselors. Saint Jerome expatiated on the difficulties and disadvantages of matrimony. But the great Saint Augustine, with a more moderate view of marriage ethics, set the basis of Roman Catholic teaching today.

According to Professor Bainton: "Marriage, said Augustine, is good. Sex as such is not evil. But the purpose of sex is propagation, and anything in excess of that intent is evil. It is an evil, however, from which no married couple is ever free . . . That which outside of marriage is a mortal sin, within marriage is but a venial sin, provided no artificial device is used to prevent offspring."*

Dr. Bainton attributes the rise of romantic love to reaction against the Church's austerity. The "cult of adultery," with its emphasis on courtship, began during the Renaissance to romanticize the institution of marriage itself. According to Dr. Bainton, the modern idea of falling in love before marriage often has "the unhappy and unnecessary corollary that if romantic attachment wanes marriage should be terminated."

Puritan Love. The Protestant Reformation was responsible for the development of a third Christian attitude toward marriage--companionability. Martin Luther maintained that, in the eyes of God, a monk may be no more holy than a married man. Luther's own marriage, says Bainton, was chiefly to exemplify this teaching. "I am not madly in love," Luther once said, "but I esteem my wife."

The Quakers established women as the spiritual equals of men. The Puritan conception of companionship and "tender respectiveness" set a new standard for Christian marriage. Wrote William Penn to his wife, as he was about to depart for Pennsylvania: "My dear wife, remember thou wast the love of my youth, and much the joy of my life; the most beloved, as well as the most worthy of all my earthly comforts . . . God knows, and thou knowest it, I can say it was a match of Providence's making."

*Augustine reproached himself for having had only one child by the concubine with whom he had a common-law marriage for 16 years before he was Converted to Christianity.

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