Marriage and Mysterion

Extract

‘Europeans say’, I remarked to Cosmas Daudu, ‘that a man with several wives cannot bring up his children properly.’ ‘That is not so’, he retorted, ‘my father had eight wives. In the evening, he would gather us round the fire, and begin to ask us what we would do, if things happened in this way or that. If we just tried to agree with him, he would not be pleased with us. He wanted us to think everything out carefully.’ I did not offer any more of the empirical and ill-informed wisdom of Europe. Some time later, I heard Gosmas himself defending monogamy, ‘For in the beginning God made one man and one woman in the garden there.’

Now, on reflection I think Cosmas had the better of the two arguments, and the main object of this article is to claim that many of the difficulties with which Catholic moral theology finds itself occupied just now can be solved only (by ‘solved’ I don’t mean neatly weighed and measured, but rather made meaningful in a wider context) by adopting Cosmas Daudu’s approach, which seems to me not a precedent-seeking fundamentalism, but rather an awareness of the essentially symbolic nature of Christian ethics, and their orientation to the unity of mankind in the love of God. Or, to put it a little differently, Oscar Wilde’s witticism about the Bible beginning beautifully with a man and woman in a garden but ending with the Book of Revelations is really quite sound exegesis, since the end of the Book of Revelations does take up the theme of marriage, presented by Genesis as at the root of the bliss and woe of Everyman and Everywoman, and show it as the transcendent sign of reintegrated mankind at the wind-up of history.