The Radicality of Marriage

receiving every ordinary moment as a renewed, ever-fresh gift

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of Obergefell. We thought it would be appropriate to publish this wondrous essay by John Milbank about the radicality of marriage.

@revolvingstyle

Marriage is the most truly subversive act that both founds democracy and yet renders it absolute in terms of its commitment to the common good.

Many of the most famous works of literature celebrate exactly this: Romeo and Juliet, The Marriage of Figaro, I Promessi Sposi. The aristocratic order, concerned only with lineages of power and the droit de seigneur, is thwarted by the consensual love of equals. In league with an equally revolutionary celibate clergy, the couples exercise their Christian right to become one flesh, if necessary against the wishes of parents and especially of that of fathers.

Since the will of the bride is equally involved with that of the bridegroom, marriage is also the supremely feminist institution: a free turning to male protection, which outside the realms of liberal abstract fantasy, is the surest salve against prevailing male violence. It may well be that marriage is also a social contract amongst males to limit each other’s power, and especially the power of the most powerful amongst them, as well as to ensure legitimate succession. Yet this is still to the overwhelming benefit of women and wholly to the benefit of children who are otherwise the playthings of appropriation, however much we may legitimately wish that property be more equalised.

Marriage is likewise the most shocking sexual license imaginable. On the whole, as we are today rediscovering, sex has to be banned: it is usually inappropriate as between different ages, between degrees of blood relations or affines, and between colleagues. We can never be quite sure that it is consensual, given that the whole point of desire is that it invades our faculty of rational choice with a dervish derision.

And a sense of responsibility might dictate that we should disperse and distribute our sexual attentions in a manner that would do justice to the equality in diversity of human attractiveness. But no! The gospel commands that we instead give free and permanent reign to our most unavoidable obsession: the others are to be irresponsibly forsaken, since the indissolubility of marriage is no matter of law and rigour, but of antinomian anarchy, with its counter-stringency, along with all the other ‘but I say unto you’s’. On another occasion Christ writes on the ground erasable and temporary words in embarrassment, while decreeing the absoluteness and eternity of erotic love as affinity: ‘whom God has joined together’ - where marriage is a fact, it clearly cannot be undone.

For that is simply the implication of sex itself: total self-abandonment, total fusion, that is antithetical to periodic limits. It is the redemptive recovery of the state of infancy in which the baby has not as yet distinguished its own body from its surroundings. That state of immanent ‘participation’ in which younger and less tarnished human peoples still to some degree dwell, even as adults. But in marriage everyone can recover this condition more completely, although also now more interpersonally and differentially, and so at a higher dialectical level.

A man and a woman become one flesh. Once more one experiences the exterior as also oneself; yet now as another strange, opposite and mysterious self. His or her problems are now also fully one’s own; even though one can never quite understand them. But in the course of not doing so, one realises that one does not quite understand one’s own problems either: now that they have been handed over to the equal care of the sexual other one realises that her or his bafflement before them is one’s own bafflement also.

Inviolable interiority is to this degree devalued; yet with the gain of access to another interiority which starts to render all exteriority in general compensatingly more familiar. Of course, this wonderful exchange is as much corporeal as it is psychic and emotional. It is completed in a blinding mutual ecstasy; yet the aftermath of that ecstasy is a new dawn of shared mutuality and an opening out upon further space and future time. Always orgasm knows in surprise that a further surprise awaits it – and only one of these surprises is that of offspring, though it is supremely that, for certain.

Marriage then, is the founding social contract made between equals. But it is irrevocable: constitution-forming and not contract-making, either politically or economically. There are never going to be fresh elections. For this supremely political (and therefore anti-liberal) act does not concern a free individual choice that might be rescinded later, but the free mutual choice of two individuals that is already a choice to found a future city, as so often in the Bible. The laws of this city are the laws of this specific love and they are unalterable, though endlessly variable, because an ethos has been established.

It is the common good that must now prevail, although this common good includes the repetition with difference of the sexual act: the discovery of the plenitude within each human singularity, as opposed to the essential identity despite superficial contrast that governs promiscuity. The latter risks succumbing to nominalist delusion, which in this case is the denial that the human universal is contained in each single human person. A desire not to miss out on a new sample or example always risks a search for the extra to the human that simply is not there. It foregoes the discovery of the ultimate within the human itself, which either marriage or celibacy in different modes embrace. The point about being only allowed one woman or one man is that thereby alone you have married woman as such and man as such. Any substitute will be disappointingly singular.

And yet this withdrawal of marriage into the sheerly singular, into the veiled chamber of a folie à deux, the outlaw glades of reckless arcadia, is also the taking of a secret pathway back to the castle, back into the kingdom, now reenvisaged with a new glow of ideality and initiation. Vows, though utterly private, must eventually be made public. The runaways have to return and their always weeping parents have to learn to embrace a new mode of joy. It turns out that the absolute commitment to each other is also a public commitment to the laws of the city to the degree that they are founded upon the laws of nature and so are truly laws at all.

Thus the erotically indulgent irresponsibility of marriage gives a new erotic ground to society. The married people, in order to be recognised as such, must indeed sign-up to existing laws and conventions. As married people who have to undertake public roles and educate their children they must now become drily respectable citizens. And yet the erotic motivation refreshes and re-infuses all these public practices with more of the interpersonal: We now know that our fellow citizens are also spouses and parents. Indeed, forgetting this is the source of much injustice. And that is why the selfish nuclear family, as opposed to an extended and community-rooted one, offers but a parody of the nuptial.

To enter upon marriage is therefore to enter upon endless private joy, as for Friedrich Schlegel (Lucinde) and D.H. Lawrence (The Rainbow). But it is also to enter upon real, non-liberal public responsibility: It is to seek to be as wedded to one’s city as to one’s spouse and with an equal sense of intangible ethos as here conveying the common good in an ineffably specific idiom. This is exactly why Søren Kierkegaard knew that marriage was his solemn duty and that he was prevaricatingly evading it. His authorship is nothing but a Scandi-Noir, blow-by-psychic-blow account of this prevarication, which bears some kinship to the Greek Patristic sense that we should hasten the eschaton through the embrace of celibacy. For is not marrying a perpetuation of original sin and tragedy? Do we not, in marrying, impose not just our problems but our own mode of incurable melancholia upon the other? A mode which carries all the unfortunate genetic and cultural currents of our specific familial history, compounded by our wider social and national legacy.

How can we ever really justify the risk of corrupting the other that is here involved? Or the risk of contaminating ourselves in turn, by so placing all our sperm in one basket or our eggs at the disposal of a single harvester? Should we not rather be like the Swiss author Amiel in the Nineteenth Century and never commit ourselves at all, much less so drastically as in marriage?

But the gospel answer here is that in fact only a total commitment, as with marriage, is fully justifiable. If we find ourselves by losing ourselves, of which the clearest paradigm is surely the sexual act, then this means that the inner uncommitted itself is actually a void and is no real characterised self at all. It is rather the completely invested subject, the subject that has ‘gone over’ to her preferences and elections that fully assumes a personality.

And this entails indeed very serious dangers. We may well get embroiled in the pathologies and crimes of the other. We may lose our rights to not be complicit in such things, since the loyalty of marriage, like the priestly confessional, takes precedence over impersonal rules that are only absolute for the liberal, or for his dark twin, the dictator. It is a loyalty beyond death which may need to execute its own justice, as in Geoffrey Household’s classic thriller, Rogue Male.

Again, it is Kierkegaard who best, if obliquely, understood all this, just because in his own life he entirely and voluntarily missed it. Marriage is absolute exposure: to the miseries of the other, to his ultimate death, to shared complicity in his warped inheritance and ambivalent public behaviour. But it is also, through such abandonment, the receiving of every ordinary moment as a renewed and ever-fresh gift. And the risk of mutual contamination is overborne by the unreserved bearing of each other’s burdens that can alone finally ease them; by a process of continuous exchanged forgiveness that alone heals through sustained mutual substitution -- as the Anglican lay theologian and ‘inkling’, Charles Williams taught.

If renouncing marriage for celibacy is an exception, equivalent to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice the entire civic future, then marriage is itself the counter-exception; the irresponsible decision to continue the human race despite the catastrophe that is finite life. It is the selfish preference for immediate joy that only you can experience -- but then it is also the ecstatic and utterly unselfish conveying of such joy to the other and beyond to all other others, current in space and to come in time.

Upon this exception to the law, the law is nonetheless founded. But not founded upon a Schmittian willful decision or upon the inviolability of a closed identity, whether individual or collective. Instead, upon a cleavage with the self at the very outset; a breaking of the law of the whole, whether that be the self or the state, in favour of a primordial relationality.

The desire today to abolish marriage (which is of course only heterosexual marriage) is therefore a desire to halt the progress of human beings towards a fuller humanity. It is a campaign against joy, against sex, against sexual difference and against community. The Satanic revolt of those who refuse the invitation of the Lamb to his wedding feast. An authoritarian desire to subject ever-more isolated individuals to discipline and control, with sex mainly banned saved for a privileged few who are granted an erotic value which increasingly has to do with market prestige and nothing to do with beauty. Michel Houellebecq has all this right.

Let us therefore recall that the original most celebrated rebels against a purely patriarchal order were typically lovers wishing to seal their own self-made nuptials sacramentally. Now that they are despised and marginalised, it is not the fathers and mothers whom they ineluctably became in turn (with increasing parental kindness), who once more prevail. Instead, it is the scientific priests who wish to redesign human beings for their own curiosity and convenience and to remove human reproduction from the sphere of interpersonal love in order to render human beings also human commodities and machinic components.

So if you wish to resist and to sustain freedom and democracy, walk out in search of love; and when you have found him or her, bind yourself to him or her forever in a secret bower, emerging in your own good time to bring forth once more a mutual human flourishing that is always to do with a wider recognised linkage of affinity and with fresh creative generation.