Courting Divorce

In his great wedding poem Epithalamion, Edmund Spenser summons the whole cosmos to the church to be witnesses at the long-awaited moment when he and his bride shall "knit the knot that ever shall remain."  Or he does so for sixteen and a half out of 24 stanzas; then -- at sunset, at exactly the point in the seventeenth hour when the sun sets at the latitude of the village in Ireland where the wedding takes place -- he sends them home.  Naturally, he and Elizabeth have better things to do than talk with friends!  But even at that, they aren't entirely alone: the moon peeps in through the window, and Spenser invokes (as a literary device) various gods and goddesses to look with favor upon them, that their "timely seed" may bring forth a blessed progeny, "of Heavenly saints for to increase the count."

We have gotten lately the strange idea that marriage is a private party, with friends and relatives invited, no doubt, according to the wishes of bride and groom.  It requires a lot of backtracking through muddy assumptions to recover the old truth.  In marriage, and I am not speaking merely of Christian marriage, people celebrate the renewal of the race -- the generation to come, springing from the love of the young people before us, themselves the result of the marriages of the elder parents looking on, and of the immemorial dead.  The marriage means that life continues; and that terrible chasm between two sorts of human beings who need one another very much and so seldom understand why, that chasm between man and woman, once again is bridged.  The wound is healed, or at least soothed.  It is a living and speaking image of social and cosmic harmony.

So it was in the Renaissance; it is why most of Shakespeare's comedies end in marriage -- and Shakespeare entertained no illusions that most marriages would be happy, any more than he entertained any illusion that most people were good.  But he saw that without that marital union there could be no coherent society; call it the nuptial meaning of the body politic.  Surely we do not suppose that the heavenly wedding feast Christ describes is merely metaphorical?

Every divorce, then, tends to pull apart the fabric of our social relations.  The implicit message of divorce is that, for my own purposes, and they may be very good purposes (people always have good reasons for what they do), I may go my own way.  But the paradoxical truth is that divorce (I am not talking about physical separation, which may be temporary and circumstantial) purchases its liberation at the expense of the deserted spouse, the children, the brothers and sisters and cousins, the neighbor down the street, the people round the corner with the shaky marriage, and uncounted thousands of babies in diapers or people yet unborn, whose marriages will be made all the more difficult because of the precedent.  Now that divorce is a way of life in America, we have whole neighborhoods ravaged -- a father missing here, a sister missing there, incoherence generally, and distrust.  Just as even a bad marriage is a corruption of something inherently good -- and in its symbolism affirms the relations of trust that make real human society possible, not to mention making comprehensible the hopes of all Christians -- so even an apparently "good" or justified divorce is a soft and deceptive version of something inherently bad, which in its symbolism undermines the very idea of society, not to mention the mystery of the Trinity.

I wouldn't write these posts about divorce, except that my brothers and sisters in the faith have, I fear, gotten too comfortable with the tremendous evil that divorce is, in itself.  In a few days I'll be leaving what used to be a wonderful French-Canadian community; but divorce has spread like a plague through it, with fornication and cohabitation in its wake.  Each divorce makes the next more likely, until now we view it with a shrug, with most people divorcing over matters of petty dreary enslaving selfishness.  I beg my fellow Christians to reconsider how liberating is the old prohibition against divorce (and ask pardon from Orthodox readers; I am not clear about the Eastern teachings regarding the matter).