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I meant to post this on St. Valentine’s Day, but this whole new blogger business was giving me problems. Ambrosius ended up putting up a very appropriate post for the Day of Love, but now that the kinks are worked out I thought I’d offer mine as well… I could save it for next year, but by then I’ll be married myself and my husband might regard it as a personal criticism of him. This year I’m presumably safe.
I should warn you all at the outset that this does not come from an authoritative source. In fact, if anything, it comes from an anti-authoritative source; not only is the author an Anglican priest (or “priest” if you prefer), he is a hypocrite as well. In his book on marriage, from which I am about to quote, he says a number of nice things, including declaring divorce to be “a metaphysical impossibility”… but, after having six children with his wife and writing a book about it, he divorced her and remarried. Go figure. So take this or leave it as you like, but I found it thought-provoking nonetheless.
I suppose what I found thought-provoking was this: in an age in which love-making has come to be associate with that dirty word “sex,” we hardly think it necessary or even fitting to think about being good lovers. In the eyes of the Church, good love-making is that which is done within wedlock, non-contraceptively, and that, we might think, is about all there is to say on the matter. I have two friends who did an Engaged Encounter weekend before their marriage, which included a session on love-making (though of course they insisted on calling it “sex.”) The leaders of the session declared that there was really nothing special that needed to be said on that topic, but apparently the EE program required them to address it, so they turned the hour into a Q and A session. How typical, in an age in which sex is seen primarily as a recreational activity, that people would assume that this aspect of marriage would take care of itself, and that no special thought needed to be put into it.
If we can spill so much ink telling people about the wrong ways to go about making love, surely at least a few words can be said about the right way? Anyway I think so, and in that spirit I offer this little tidbit from the hypocritical heretic priest, Robert Farrar Capon, who, whatever his errors, is at the very least exploring a worthwhile line of thought.
“”St. Paul may have been prejudiced toward women (what with not letting them speak in church), and we may be able to sit loose to his obiter dicta about them; but on the subject of wives and husbands he deserves more of a hearing than he currently gets. The husband, he says, is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the Church. The marriage rite takes him at his word. It is the groom who speaks first, gives first and loves first. The bride is to obey, to receive and to respond….
The reason the headship of the husband is so violently object to is that it is misunderstood. First of all, St. Paul’s anti-feminist prejudices notwithstanding, the Bible does not say that men and women are unequal. Neither does the Church. There are no second-class citizens in the New Jerusalem. It is husbands and wives that are unequal. It is precisely in marriage (a state, you will recall, not to be continued as such in heaven) that they enter into a relationship of superior to inferior — of head to body. And the difference there is not one of worth, ability or intelligence, but of role. It is functional, not organic. It is based on the exigencies of the Dance, not on a judgment as to talent. In the ballet, in any intricate dance, once dancer leads, the other follows. Not because one is better (he may or may not be) but because that is his part. Our mistake, here as elsewhere, is to think that equality and diversity are unreconcilable. The common notion of equality is based on the image of the march. In a parade, really unequal beings are dressed alike, given guns of identical length, trained to hold them at the same angle, and ordered to keep step with a fixed beat. But it is not the parade that is true to life; it is the dance. There you have real equals assigned unequal roles in order that each may achieve his individual perfection in the whole. Nothing is less personal than a parade; nothing more so than a dance. It is the choice image of fulfillment through function, and it comes very close to the heart of the Trinity. Marriage is a hierarchical game played by co-equal persons. Keep that paradox and you move in the freedom of the Dance; alter it, and you grow weary with marching.
But that only says what the headship doesn’t mean. What it does mean is equally misunderstood. The husband is head over his wife as the head is over the body. It isn’t a description of what ought to be; it just says what is. He is the head. He will be a good one or a bad one, depending; but if he isn’t the head, there isn’t any other. He is to be the lover, she the beloved. If he doesn’t initiate, she will wither of neglect. She cannot supply what only he can give. If the locomotive doesn’t pull, the train doesn’t move.
He, then, is to love and cherish her. And he is to do it first, because he promised it first. She must do it too, of course, but in her own way, as an answering voice, a counterpoint. Unfortunately it doesn’t often work out that way. And our little bete noire, Sex, doesn’t help much. One of the commonest ways it suceeds in frustrating honest sexuality is to train men to look on women as sources of stimulation, rather than as objects of love. They come to marriage after years of being conditioned to respond to certain more or less irrelevant fetishes — the height of heels, the length of hair, the size of waistlines, the prominence of busts. When they become husbands, however, they find that what they have learned to consider Sexy is not too dependably supplied by marriage. Waistlines thicken as the years go by, and busts fall and fashions change. But husbands still wait to be aroused, and not infrequently they wait more than they do anything else. They grow impatient. They complain. If, in their disgruntlement, they resort to reading marriage books, they are liable to get the impression that the source of trouble is lack of technique; theirs, if they are diffident; their wives’, if they are arrogant. But that isn’t the trouble at all. It’s that they are being passive where they should be active. Don’t misunderstand. Perhaps most husbands do fairly well. The point is that what they are doing is responding, not leading, and their wives suffer for it. No human being can afford to settle for being only the occasion of somebody else’s pleasure. No wife can long endure being treated as if her chief sexual function were to arouse her husband. That puts the shoe on exactly the wrong foot. She is, after all, a person; if her husband never grows from passion and response into action and love — if he doesn’t stop waiting to be aroused and realize that he’s got to make something of a career of arousing — she is not going to find being a wife much of a fulfillment.
As a priest, I listen dutifully to a lot of wifely discontent. Women have their faults, and I don’t suppose there is a pastor on earth who doesn’t at times wish he had the power to convert them all back into ribs — nice, quiet, uncomplaining ribs. But all this female smoldering is evidence of a fire somewhere. I dare say that at least one of its causes is the failure of their husbands to treat them as wives — to be indeed their heads, their lovers and their first movers. An appalling number of men are relational blanks in their marriages. Maybe now and then — in bed — a husband acquires some color, some substance, in his wife’s eyes, but too often that’s the only place. All or nothing. She receives no minor sexual attention. The adjunct daily affections — the little passes executed only because he wills them, not because he is aroused — these she does not see. The cajolery and fair speech, the gallantry and unconsummated buffoonery that is man — these she never gets. She has no head. She has only one more tired member who has to be caught in a good mood and worked up.
Small wonder, then, that wives do such unwifely things. No marvel that there are so many active trousered women to make up for passive trousered men. As a matter of fact, we have become a trousered race, not the human race. There is only one sex left, and that is: Sex. And while both husbands and wives are responsible for the debacle, it is husbands who have done the most damage, and it is they who can, if they will, do the most good. If they train doesn’t move, repair the locamotive. Don’t let the cars sit around blaming themselves for not being engines. Above all, don’t let them try to act as if they were. For the cars have their own function, thy are what the train is really about. They are what the engine is for. All the space in a husband is supposed to be given over to providing traction; it is the wife’s capacity for freight that makes the trip worthwhile. The comparison is hardly flattering, but it does manage to be a bit gallant and, as a husband, I am rather pleased that I was able to get it off. One should try to practice what one preaches, with or without elegance.”
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
Oh boy, where to start? How about this:
“And while both husbands and wives are responsible for the debacle, it is husbands who have done the most damage, and it is they who can, if they will, do the most good.”
I’ve got to say that laying most of the blame at the feet of husbands is unjust (full disclosure: yeah, I’m a husband). First, what are we being blamed for? Although it was a little unclear to me, I think it is that husbands are not taking the lead in erotic love. By “erotic love” is meant more than merely initiating sex, but continually expressing to the wife, through words and actions, that she is desirable. (Is that accurate?).
Well, it’s pretty obvious why there’s a problem here and it has to do with the sexual revolution. The fact that husbands are more passive in expressing erotic love is surely an effect of the confusion of gender roles, not the principal cause of confusion. As a man, I can tell you that there is great confusion in these matters: do you hold the door open for a woman, or is it an assertion that she is powerless?; do you automatically reach for the bill at dinner?; what about the “Sex and the City” mentality that women are powerful (”sexually autonomous) and ought to be the ones initiating erotic love?
With the dissolution of traditional gender roles, you no longer know which behaviors are expected of you. That being said, this is clearly false:
“The husband is head over his wife as the head is over the body. It isn’t a description of what ought to be; it just says what is. He is the head. He will be a good one or a bad one, depending; but if he isn’t the head, there isn’t any other.”
It obviously is a description of what ought to be, because we are living in a society in which this model of headship is not constitutive of how most people understand marriage. As the undergraduates at Cornell would probably put it, Paul’s view on the husband’s headship is SO “heteronormative”. In this cultural atmosphere, it is crazy to believe that husbands will naturally conform to a certain model of marriage that is not being conveyed by tradition.
I am interested to hear what Clara and the other ladies out there found of interest in this article. By my lights, it didn’t seem to get at the root of the problem, although, perhaps, it contains some useful tips for husbands.
“or “priest” if you prefer”
Well, that’s what God prefers we call these laymen. The real hypocrisy is that he belongs to a sect created for the sole purpose of rationalizing a divorce.
Tobias Petrus,
Fair enough. I will not dispute this point.
Brad C.,
Well, first of all, I tried to make clear that I don’t give an absolute full Clara endorsement to the passage in question. For example, I don’t really think St. Paul had any unfortunate sexist tendencies (and why on Earth would women be speaking in church, anyway? At a Catholic Mass there’s no reason for it.) I said that I found the piece thought-provoking, and I do.
As I understand it, you are agreeing that our society has lost sight of proper gender roles, but protesting indignantly that the blame doesn’t lie with men. May I take it that you think the blame lies pretty squarely with women?
Well, as a matter of fact, I think women can be blamed for much of the mischief, and they have many important questions to weigh and consider. But if the sexes are supposed to be complementary, we will tend to find that neither side can properly play its part if the other does not. I find on this blog and among conservatives generally, we women have come in for a pretty fair amount of criticism already, for being too prideful, hard, independent, uppity, ambitious, educated, and in general too much like men. Some of the criticism is overdone, some is legitimate, but either way it seems fair to occasionally turn the mirror back at the men. Note that I didn’t presume to do it myself, but only to quote someone else’s perspective on the matter (a husband’s, in fact), which I humbly invite you to consider as you will.
As for the is and ought business, I will back Capon up on that one. His point is that God has himself invested husbands with both authority and specific responsibilities. He will likewise give them the graces to enable them to play their parts, if they will open themselves to those graces. Whether or not individual husbands (or wives, or Cornell undergraduates) know and believe that is irrelevant. People have lots of wacky ideas about love and sex and marriage, but such things are not decided by majority opinion.
If you’re simply protesting that it’s difficult in the present climate to live by these types of norms… fair enough. I sympathize. It’s a confusing time for all of us. But discussing how things at least ought to be is a place to start.
As for what Capon is really saying… well, I think he’s saying in large part that the erotic element in marriage (an important one, by the way) cannot be trusted to take care of itself. It requires work and thought and planning. On some level most women enjoy being treated like women; maybe if men put more time and conscious effort into doing this, they’d be happier about playing their roles as well?
I was definitely not trying to shift the blame from men to women and I apologize if my post suggested that. What I was saying–and you agree with me on this–is that we have inherited a new notion of marriage as a union between two equal (which is true) but genderless (which is not true) individuals. I placed the blame on the Sexual Revolution, which was not intended to apply only to women. In fact, if I had to point fingers, I would start with Nietzsche and Marx–the first, for denying that there is an order in nature independent of our wills and that this order can give rise to obligations; the second, for undermining marriage by interpreting it as a means of the bourgeoisie for owning the woman’s capacity for “reproduction of labor”.
The point I was trying to make, I guess, was that how both husbands and wives understand their roles as married people depends in large part on what they both believe marriage to be. If they are influenced by the liberationist movements deriving from Nietzsche and Marx (even without explicitly acknowledging it), then there is going to be the kind of confusion Capon describes. If they are influenced by St. Paul, and believe that there is a difference of roles rooted in the nature of things, then there won’t be as much confusion, although there will always be problems here and there.
So like I said, criticizing husbands’ behavior that is the result of a confused understanding of marriage doesn’t get at the problem. Like a religious communion, a marriage is constituted in part by shared belief about the nature of the institution and what it is for. If husbands and wives had a common understanding of marriage, there would be more harmony and little confusion about what was expected of them.
I think this makes Capon’s reference to St. Paul’s “anti-feminist prejudices” even more problematic. If St. Paul is expressing a deep insight about the nature of men and women, and by extension married intimacy, then it really confuses things for him to say, “oh by the way, St. Paul was probably a bit of a misogynist. But don’t worry he also says some really good things, too.”. This admission undermines his appeal to Paul’s supposedly great insight.
Brad,
Okay, I think I can understand what you’re saying. It’s perfectly true that many people are so deeply confused about marriage that advice like this might not do them much good. They wouldn’t be able to understand it because too many other things are wrong.
In matters like this, you’re always going to be oversimplifying absurdly whenever you try to identify “the real problem” in a sentence. There are lots of angles from which things can be approached. People who absolutely reject the notion of genders will probably not be convinced or helped. But people who are reading Capon’s book are probably already inclined, for the most part, to be more sympathetic than the average population to St. Paul’s words on marriage. Likewise the readers of this blog. So it might sometimes be worthwhile to get into stuff like this.
Even for those who are tempted by traditional ideas of marriage, it can be difficult to actually grasp and live them, given the generally hostile conditions of our present society. Capon’s explanations might be good for the half-convinced, or as a helpful way of fleshing out the notion of headship for the more fully convinced. I mean, if the sexual revolution is responsible for the damage, we’ll still have to figure out practical ways, on the level of our own families, to repair matters.
So much of what is quoted doesn’t seem realistic about married lovers. When a husband and wife are having and raising children, it’s like two horses pulling a plow. When one horse of a team says “I’m the boss,” he can’t forget he is being guided by his Master.
What good wife doesn’t appreciate a husband who leads his family with “It’s time to say prayers” or “We all need to volunteer to help …” or “We can afford to take all of you on a trip this next summer, if we cooperate in …” Leadership means leading the way in pleasing God.
The keys to better loving are good leadership from the husband, hard work from both spouses, thoughtful words of appreciation, and charity to forgive each others defects.
A wife knows she is loved when she is appreciated by her husband; a husband when he is appreciated by his wife.