What is the point of marriage? This sort of essential question has directed numerous seminars with Regina Mater’s high school theology students through the years. Another question that stands out this year, in addition to our recent conversation on marriage, concerned the Eucharist. At the end of his “mystagogical catechesis,” St. Cyril of Jerusalem compares Holy Communion to handling “gold dust.” Some unfairly use Cyril as a defense of communion in the hand, but the practice Cyril describes is not the modern instruction (and as far as I know, used nowhere in the world today). In Cyril’s time the communicants used their hands as a paten, placing their right hand over left, and lifted the host to their mouth (not grasping the host with fingers). Nonetheless, the concern over mishandling consecrated particles is indeed present. Cyril writes, “if someone gave gold dust to you, would you not hold onto it with every care, guarding it, lest it be lost from you, and you suffer the loss? Should you not be more careful then, watching closely so as not to let a crumb of what is more precious than gold and precious stones fall from you?” The line that seemed to grab everyone’s attention concluded the instruction on communion: “Hold these traditions spotless and keep yourselves from offense.” By this point they had been convinced by St. Cyril’s preaching, which demonstrates the Biblical and spiritual meanings of the mass. (What he describes maps most clearly to the Maronite liturgy, which traces itself to Jerusalem, but is certainly recognizable to Roman Catholics.) Cyril peels back the veil, so to speak, on the cosmic realities standing behind the Eucharistic prayer, the Our Father, the actions of the priest, deacon, and choir in the liturgy. He attunes us to the immaterial. For example:
After this you hear the cantor with sacred melodies encouraging you to the communion of the holy mysteries, singing, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Stop making your decision on the basis of your bodily throat, but on the basis of your unquestioning faith. For when we are invited to taste, we taste not of bread and wine but of the sacramental representation of the body and blood of Christ.
That ascent of the mind, climbing from the sensible to the intelligible, is the type of act embodied in the great Christian authors, especially ancient and medieval. (It contrasts the “picture thinking” of Manicheans and Modernists, for whom the material aspect dominates, as well as the hyper-rationalistic approach that divorces concepts from realities.)
In our high school theology class, merely appearing pious has little incentive, because every statement in discussion is held up to be evaluated. Pat answers are not enough. I have yet to meet a student who has been infused with the spiritual wisdom of a 85 year-old monastic whose utterances are self-evident, although it could happen. I am, however, often cheered by the insights they express. I think (or hope) it likewise gives them reassurance that theology is a science, and not a jumble of personal thoughts and feelings. Theology harmonizes with reason–and harmonizes man’s view of everything else. For this reason the pre-moderns called theology the “Queen of the Sciences,” without which every science suffers (see Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University for a lengthy defense of teaching theology alongside the secular sciences). The science the class arrived at, after observing the causes behind the effects in the liturgy, was that the Eucharist demands a proper response from us. We ought to revere the sacrament not just through pious gestures but also our moral conduct. “It seems like we don’t really do what Cyril is telling us,” one student claimed. Many nodded in agreement. The whole mood of the room changed; it reminded me of the adage that we think in order to understand. When understanding comes, the tension of thinking relaxes. I was impressed that this group of teenagers felt the confidence to stand with an unpopular article of faith like the Real Presence. Had we created a “safe space” with our dialogue where their true thoughts could be revealed? Or, on the contrary, had we created a dangerous space? As they go into the world, belief in the Real Presence, or Catholic faith in general, will not make them comfortable or safe. God is not “a tame lion,” now or at any time; even more, it seems the Church is increasingly being called to heroic virtue, the virtue that can withstand persecutions, big or small. To cite an example not too far off, what helped shape Flannery O’Connor into a great writer is the loneliness she had to embrace belonging to an “odious” religion in the South. It’s sometimes difficult to accept that this is the cost of discipleship we are presenting to our children as we educate them in the faith. Catholicism in the South is not so much an issue now, but Catholicism on Twitter? Brace yourself.
Now that we’ve tied a bow on that topic, we may proceed on to a similarly mild debate: marriage! The title from Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac’s nobel-winning Viper’s Tangle, a study of marriage gone wrong, may be an apt symbol for the current state of affairs. How do we begin to untangle the marriage mess? Thankfully, our students have the first instruction on marriage through parents living out their Christian commitment. The second instruction, which has the power to heal where the first might fail, comes from the ancient wisdom of the Church reflected in the whole of Catholic culture (teachings, art, liturgy, saints, and so on). Here again we can reassure students that marriage fits within a great cosmic scheme beyond “the Bible says so,” an understandable but incomplete defense. The marriage debate strikes at the heart of human nature, and therefore nature must come into the discussion. The Church declares that nature and the Bible are not in competition; they are the two books in which man discovers the truth. The Bible gives us the wisdom to read the book of nature rightly–which prevents us from taking the fallen state of man, where self-interest dominates, as the moral norm. What a gift that Jesus teaches us about divorce in the Biblical text: “In the beginning it was not so.”
With this enlightened Biblical reasoning, what can nature tell us about marriage? If we understand nature as a tool of ideology, then it cannot tell us anything, because marriage will be anything the speaker wants it to be: a consumer arrangement, a legal convenience, a cultural weapon. The teachings of Aquinas in the “Supplement” to the Summa Theologiae, compiled after his death, lead the reader through a set of intellectual exercises climbing to higher immaterial viewpoints (as evident earlier in Cyril) that argue for marriage as a natural act. In the first consideration, nature is the operation of things in accordance with their being. Fire rises, for example. No deliberation intervenes. The second case also involves concordance with being, but now it applies to rational beings and takes the quality of virtue. To be rational means possessing reason and free will; as such, virtue has a basis in nature because virtue is the perfection of powers bestowed in our nature.
Marriage, then, falls under the natural exercise of virtue. It marshals the use of reason and free will toward a defined goal for human happiness. Still, the content of this happiness engenders confusion. The Summa claims without direct explanation that the principal end of marriage is the good of the offspring–not simply offspring, but their good. Perhaps the inference is that the course of man as a social animal is to perpetuate society; as such, children are indispensable to the human project. And because these little social animals are also rational, their good surrounds both material and spiritual provision. The Summa quotes the philosopher of nature, Aristotle, in this regard: “we derive three things from our parents, namely ‘existence,’ ‘nourishment’ and ‘education.’” This hierarchy of goods–being born, being loved, housed, and fed, and finally, being taught–most fittingly fits in the dynamic of husband and wife, whose diverse gifts construct a stable household. The biological fact at the base of human reproduction, that it requires the joining of woman and man, sets in motion the higher acts demanded by human nature for wellbeing and education. Here the argument takes up an interesting claim: a child cannot be nurtured and taught without certain knowledge of his parents. The security of the child rests in the father’s continual acknowledgement of the mother, and vice-versa. This tie defines and sustains their task to raise a child. The long horizon of “mutual service” deployed in the household opposes the idea that the natural state of man is promiscuity, polygamy, or polyamory; all of those arrangements frustrate the direction toward virtue written in nature, even one harmed by sin, that comes to the fore in household life.
The issue of children needing certain and definite parents has further implications: first, that men and women have duties corresponding to the natural rights of children; two, that the failure to uphold these duties causes deep social wounds; three, that the State cannot be a substitute for the duties of the household. The dominant competing visions for marriage run contrary to all these natural claims. On the consumerist side, the meaning of marriage seems to consist in home purchases, pet ownership, and splashy weddings. At the same time that marriage is wrapped up in consumer excess, there is a palpable increase in the ideological pressure against the authority of parents. The extreme end of family destruction appears in the Marxist plan to remove children from their mothers at birth in order to be raised in group homes; the State would thus guarantee all material and educational provision for children while liberating adults for work and so-called “free love.” It’s concerning to see where Marx’s ideas overlap with current trends.
Teenagers may be the last group inclined to defend parental authority, yet the students immediately grasped the difference in the State raising children versus parents who love them. Encountering these ideas within the context of faith, rather than the secular university or popular culture, where they take on a cloak of light, is an invaluable moral formation. The arguments from nature call forth the law written in the heart, and swiftly carry us to the borderline of faith. To understand marriage as a sacrament is not a radical shift; with the understanding of nature, it becomes clearer to see how grace heals and elevates the marital state. If marriage is a real symbol of Christ and the Church, then openness to life, Catholic education, and lifelong fidelity are the organic fruits of the sacrament. The time and space to shelter these discussions for the next generation continues to be the gift of Regina Mater.