Love is the Lesson

     Here in a residually Catholic corner of the Maritimes, divorce -- and a blithe carelessness about getting married in the first place -- has ravaged the population.  It took me a while to notice, but it's become clear to me that if you meet someone over 40, your better bet is to assume that the woman with him is not his first wife, or not his wife at all.

     And that set me to wondering.  I'm not enough of an anthropologist to make any confident assertions about it, but it seems to me that the norm for human cultures is either polygamy or monogamy with lots of divorce.  In Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis?, set in the time of Nero, a certain noblewoman is considered a veritable phoenix for being univira, that is, a woman who has had only one husband.  Naturally, she is a Christian.  And when you read the early apologists, like Justin Martyr and Tertullian, you see that the Christians keep the moral ideals that the Romans had long held up for themselves but had also long betrayed.  They honor the home and hearth.  They do not divorce.  They remain faithful to their spouses.  They love their children -- Romans had a reputation for that -- and therefore they did not expose them, as Romans did anyway, if they happened to be baby girls or if they came in inconvenient numbers.

     All cultures are based on marriage, and thus on the love between man and woman, expressed in a variety of ways.  But we know that such love is prone to wild disorders: we do not love where we think we love, and we do love where we think we do not.  Thus most poetry about love, in all cultures that I know anything about, is deeply ambivalent: Odi et amo, says Catullus; I love and I hate.  Christians had the example and the words of Jesus Christ to help them set their loves in some kind of order: "So let us love, dear love, like as we ought; / Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught" (Spenser, Amoretti 68).  What happens when the examples and the words are not just sinned against, but ignored, until they finally fade from cultural consciousness?

     Why should we expect the blessings to continue, once we have cut ourselves off from their source?  In an earlier post I suggested that Christ had given mankind a new idea, a charity that the world had never imagined before.  Why should he not also have given us the possibility of healing our loves sufficiently for man and woman to live together as they had never or but rarely lived before?