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The Christian meaning of marriage - some thoughts...
There has been much discussion recently of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humane Vitae (1968) which famously included a proscription of artificial birth control, forty-one years ago this year (2009).
Accounts state that there was a general consensus among Christians – Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant – against artificial birth control, until 1930, when the Anglican Church broke with the others, and proclaimed the permissibility of its use. This may be true; but in fullest reality, I fancy the Anglican Church had had a different understanding of marriage (marriage, perhaps, rather than merely sexual intercourse) from its beginning. The question of the permissibility of artificial birth control, surely, hinges on the Christian understanding of marriage.
The marriage services in the two prayer books of Edward VI (1549, 1552), of Elizabeth I (1559) and the Book of Common Prayer (1662) all contain rubrics permitting the omission of a prayer for the procreation of children within the marriage, “where the woman is past chylde burth” (1549).
So, from the beginning, the Church of England understood marriage as being appropriate for men and women who had no prospect of reproducing, despite the fact that “Matrymonie was ordained …” firstly for “the procreacion of children”, and only secondly “for a remedie against synne, and to auoide fornication …” (1552).
There is no suggestion, in any of the marriage service prayers, rubrics, or explanatory statements (such as that excerpted from, above), that the union “where the woman is past chylde burth” was intended to be celibate, or merely a union of companionship.
If this conclusion is correct, then, from the beginning, Anglicanism had an understanding of marriage that involved sexual intercourse, but of a non-procreational kind, or rather, an understanding of the place of sexual intercourse within authentic Christian marriage which did not of necessity have its sole justification and objective in procreation.
Now, I have no idea whether or not Roman Catholicism has an understanding of marriage in which procreation is impossible, or not (or whether it marries couples where the woman is “past child birth”), and whether, if it does, it understands that those marriages remain celibate (however, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, revised edition, 1999, states, paragraph 1654, “Spouses to whom God has not granted children can nevertheless have a conjugal life full of meaning, in both human and Christian terms. Their marriage can radiate a fruitfulness of charity, of hospitality and of sacrifice.”).
It seems, then, that in Anglicanism at least, and possibly in Roman Catholicism also, there is an understanding of marriage where sexual intercourse is validly present for some other purpose than procreation. What might that purpose be?
An answer, surely, must make reference to the place of sexual union in the business of forming, strengthening, and celebrating the bond between the two persons, and as an opportunity for expressing, and (by the free giving of pleasure to the other) actualising love.
Indeed, it has been suggested that – being the material, physical, beings that we are – human love is incapable of prolonged existence if deprived of some physical expression (though need that be sexual, as such?). But must such a thing be diminished by the use of means to prevent conception? May such a thing not be “a conjugal life full of meaning, in both human and Christian terms” where conception is prevented? Sexual intercourse where procreation is prevented has been described, in Roman Catholic accounts, as “sterile”, and that this sterility prevents the presence, within the act of conjugal love, of the Holy Spirit. *
Also, there is the suggestion, in this account which I refer to, that we are left with just two alternatives: the intention to procreate, or the self-abandonment to lust. This, I fancy, is a somewhat limited view – certainly, when set besides the understanding of the nature of conjugal love between spouses suggested in the previous paragraph.
Yes, it is true that a person can use their partner simply as an object of desire, a means of gratifying their own physical urges, rather than giving love – this, indeed, is the sin of lust. But must desire of one’s spouse be perverted in a sinful way?
To desire one’s spouse in a loving way – I would argue – is not lust (to desire someone else’s spouse, in any way, obviously is); indeed, a marriage where either spouse lacks all desire for the other is surely a marriage in danger of imminent dissolution.
But I am aware that seeming possibly to disagree with the thought and teaching of the Roman Catholic Church – whom I much admire – is not a very wise thing.
* Christopher West, Theology of the body for beginners. A basic introduction to Pope John Paul II’s sexual revolution, West Chester, Pennsylvania, Ascension Press, 2004, p. 96, ff.