Pseudogamy 102

     As the poet Edmund Spenser brings his Epithalamion or wedding-song to its grand conclusion, he dismisses all those whom he has called in joy to witness his wedding and to celebrate it afterwards.  They aren't just family and friends.  He dismisses the young ladies who have attended upon the bride, the boys who have been running and cheering up and down the street, the men who have lit bonfires, and the daughters of merchants who never will have seen anything so wondrous and inspiring such reverence as does his modest, chaste, and properly-proud bride.  He dismisses the nymphs of the nearby Irish rivers, and the woodland gods.  He dismisses the creatures of the forests, and even the sun itself -- for when man and woman marry, man and woman the crown of creation, we Christians must see in that marriage the summation of all that God had created before.  The cattle and the birds and all the creeping things that creep upon the earth and the beasts that swim the seas await their king and queen when man is made, male and female; and their own fruitfulness and multiplication is to be summed up in the fruitful increase of man.  The very verbs of God's command and blessing rhyme in the Hebrew, as if, for us, to rule were but the natural consequence of our being fruitful, and multiplying, and filling the world.

     Spenser does not only dismiss, though.  If the celebration is public, what happens after the celebration is downright cosmic.  That is, he invokes the moon and the goddess of the moon, the virgin Cynthia, and great Juno, goddess of childbirth, and the heavenly host, all in the Renaissance way of invoking, allegorically, the blessings of heaven.  In the bed where he and his bride make love, we are made to understand that something may happen for which all the cosmos, all that grand wild extravagant order of stars and planets and night and day, is but the preparation or the stage, and in comparison with which all the cosmos that is not human is but dust.  They may beget a child.  Indeed they pray that it be so, "that they may raise a large posterity," to increase the number of the saints in bliss.  Nymphs and fauns may witness the spousal.  Saints and angels witness the holy consummation.

     Does it even require stating that almost none of what Spenser feels and understands is felt and understood now by bride and groom?  Our marriages, we think, are our own affairs.  Indeed, they are usually preceded by "affairs," ours together or ours with others, and somewhere along the line are granted the ho-hum endorsement of a big party and a "honeymoon".  I say "ho-hum," because where there is not much to celebrate, we can only distract ourselves from the lack by throwing big parties, getting drunk, spending a lot of money, or, what is more likely, causing a lot of people to spend a lot of money whether they like it or not, and then pretending excitement as the bride in white is whisked off by the groom to spend the night in their apartment before heading off for the fifth time to their favorite honeymoon hideaway.  And they will almost certainly not be invoking a goddess of childbirth to shed her benign influence upon them.  Children will kick down your little sandcastle world for sure.

     To say that our marriages are not viewed in such an expansive way as to embrace all of physical space and time, and also the time beyond time, where Christ and his hallows dwell, is not nearly enough.  I return to the notion of cosmos: order.  Man and woman unite in marriage to bring into being a new generation; and even when they cannot do so, because of age or some physical defect, they may well wish to do so, or they stand for others as exemplars of the act that naturally brings forth children.  All of which is to say that marriage that is open to children is part of the order created by God.  Then marriage that is not open to children violates that order, and introduces into our understanding of marriage a destructive chaos.  It is deeply ironic: the messiness and surprise and being-themselves of children not engineered as products at the end of an assembly line are as wild and alive and orderly as Eden.  But a marriage whence children have been ruled out recasts itself, most tidily, as the result of personal wilfulness, of desire for some very good things (sexual intercourse, companionship, and so on) but on one's own terms, rather than on the obvious terms whereon nature and nature's God confer them.  And wilfulness is essentially chaotic.  The tidy wilfulness of the professional couple who like nice cars and hot tubs better than they like new human beings is easier for us to overlook than is the frenzied wilfulness of the people who live in the trailer park and whose children need to invent new words to describe their relation to the people they are living with, but it is not clear to me that it is therefore morally superior because it is tidy, or in the long run less destructive.

     I know people who love one another and who decided, when they married, that they would never have children.  I'm not doubting their love.  But there is a great element of pseudogamy to such a relationship: a refusal to take upon oneself the full responsibility, and the full joy, of marriage.  It is related to acedia, I think; a turning aside from the risks of faith and hope and love, and their replacement with the terrible distraction of fun.  High time for Christians to remember that joy is to fun as Heaven is to a tourist trap.

Comments

[Beth from TN]

I feel like a broken record when I comment on your work, Tony. Wow --again. :) I am intrigued by your comment in the last paragraph on acedia. I have a book by Kathleen Norris on acedia which I plan to read this summer, because I want to know how much of the depression I experience might be seen as related to it. I don't think I'd ever thought of seeking after fun as a sign of it, but intuitively it makes sense in the context you've given. I'll be giving it more thought; I'd love to hear you expound on it if you were to have the time and inclination.

I absolutely love Spenser's _Epithalamion_. Just your explication sent chills down my spine; I'll have to look it up and re-read it now!

A technical -- and most ignorant of me -- question: how would one pronounce your (to me, at least) new word, "pseudogamy"? I can't figure out the logical stress . . .

[Kamilla]

I guess I'll be broken record #2 - Tony, this is simply gorgeous!

It makes my heart ache, selfishly for what I am missing - but mostly for, in the words of a wise friend, "how messed up things are". The people around me are so distracted by their ugly amusements, they no longer hunger for the good, the true and the beautiful. They live in small, grey worlds with a few trinkets - it brings to mind Plato's cave. They are satisfied with stale bottled water when they could be drinking deeply from living streams.

Kamilla

[Steve Nicoloso]

Surely, sud-AH-gu-me, right?

Not to be outdone by your female admirers, yes, these essays are always sharp. And with so few faults to find, I often don't acknowledge your service to the faithful enough. That said, be sure to wear your cilice a couple extra hours today, to defeat that pride that will surely attempt to rear its damnable head!

[Bill R]

I've been listening on my ipod to one of the great SF classics, "Earth Abides," by George Stewart, which I enjoyed so much as a teenager. Unlike modern SF, Stewart's book is actually worth remembering sixty years after it was written. An unknown plague has wiped out much of the human race, leaving only a few immune stragglers to rebuild civilization. Steward, though himself a skeptic, knew his Bible and filled his book with references to Genesis and Job. In reflecting on what the near-destruction of the human race would mean, Stewart builds on the story of Noah, telling of a new world built on the carcass of the old. So, when Ish, his Noah, meets a surviving woman, he hesitates to love her, though he is desperate for human contact, understanding that this means love, not just sex, and consequently children and a new future for the human race. The community of survivors (called not too subtly the "Tribe") they pick up along the journey all strive to have as many children as they can, to be fruitful and multiply. It's a theme that few skeptics would embrace these days.

This passage caught my attention in view of Tony's remark: Ish notes that the children loved to fish in the now-teeming San Francisco Bay, but for food and enjoyment, not amusement. Ish noted that amusement was no longer a part of their lives which, while happy, were filled every hour with the need to ensure basic food and shelter.

[ben]

I would like to express my gratitude. What a beautiful remider you have given me of how much I love my wife.

On Sunday we will celebrate 11 years together as we watch one of our boys receive his first communion.

[Deputyheadmistress]

This is beautiful. This year my family is experiencing two weddings (the second of our seven children wed her best friend last November, and our firstborn will likewise wed a wonderful Christian man this October). My husband and I will see our first grandchild when the November wedding of last year will bring forth a child for us all to see in September. We are blessed, and not least because I can send the link to this essay to these two daughters and they will be as moved by it as I am.

[Clifford Simon]

If you read The Weekly Standard, there is a great feature this week about --- well, I hesitate to say pseudogamy because that's *our* blog's word. But yes, there's a great article there about the nature of true marriage. It's about locating marriage as an element of the "kinship system." http://www.theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/533narty.asp?pg=1

[Michel]

why is this subject not treated in the posts at this site?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_to_Inquire_into_Child_Abuse

[Daniel Janeiro]

Dr. E,

I'm very glad to see you returning to the tilting yards. Your lectures on the cosmic nature of Spenser's Epithalamion when I took Spenser with you some nine years ago(!) always stuck with me. How much wisdom was in those Elizabethan conceits...we have lost that typological sense of our own lives...that our struggles are echoes of the Great Struggle, our victories are foretastes of the Final Victory, and our loves, images of that Divine Love.

I've been reading the poet Coventry Patmore recently, that too-little-studied Victorian. In his collection The Unknown Eros, there is this gem:

To the Body

Creation's and Creator's crowning good;
Wall of infinitude;
Foundation of the sky,
In Heaven forecast
And long'd for from eternity,
Though laid the last;
Reverberating dome,
Of music cunningly built home
Against the void and indolent disgrace
Of unresponsive space;
Little, sequester'd pleasure-house
For God and for His Spouse;
Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair,
Since, from the graced decorum of the hair,
Ev'n to the tingling, sweet
Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,
And from the inmost heart
Outwards unto the thin
Silk curtains of the skin,
Every least part
Astonish'd hears
And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres;
Form'd for a dignity prophets but darkly name,
Lest shameless men cry ‘Shame!'
So rich with wealth conceal'd
That Heaven and Hell fight chiefly for this field;
Clinging to everything that pleases thee
With indefectible fidelity;
Alas, so true
To all thy friendships that no grace
Thee from thy sin can wholly disembrace;
Which thus 'bides with thee as the Jebusite,
That, maugre all God's promises could do,
The chosen People never conquer'd quite;
Who therefore lived with them,
And that by formal truce and as of right,
In metropolitan Jerusalem.
For which false fealty
Thou needs must, for a season, lie
In the grave's arms, foul and unshriven,
Albeit, in Heaven,
Thy crimson-throbbing Glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go,
And does with envy see
Enoch, Elijah, and the Lady, she
Who left the roses in her body's lieu.
O, if the pleasures I have known in thee
But my poor faith's poor first-fruits be,
What quintessential, keen, ethereal bliss
Then shall be his
Who has thy birth-time's consecrating dew
For death's sweet chrism retain'd,
Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofaned!

We need poets to speak of the body this way.

Dan J

[Nick]

Micel,

You might want to read Leon Poodles articles. He's a contributor.