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The indissolubility of marriage is not natural. I could not agree more with Dan Savage<\/a> when, in the great American tradition of offering unsolicited advice, he told\u00a0heterosexuals that this till-death-do-us-apart stuff is an\u00a0impossible expectation. Indissolubility, by his view,\u00a0cannot be a norm.\u00a0Perpetuity can only be a preference. If we could \u201cacknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted,\u201d instead of mindlessly pumping a deflated, Disney-born mystique of forever-and-ever,\u00a0we\u2019d be closer to and honest and natural marriage contract.<\/p>\n \u201cInseparability,\u201d which makes Savage grimace so, does not belong to marriage considered as a civil institution \u2014 state-permitted divorce and remarriage assure us of the fact. \u201cInseparability\u201d does not even belong to marriage as a natural<\/em> institution. Aquinas argues that\u00a0\u201c\u2018offspring\u2019 and \u2018fidelity\u2019\u00a0pertain to\u00a0matrimony\u00a0as directed to an\u00a0office\u00a0of\u00a0human\u00a0nature\u201d (Summa Theologica<\/em>,\u00a0II-II, q. 49, a. 3<\/a>) but not<\/em> indissolubility, and this seems to hold \u2014 if a man divorces his wife, remarries, and begins a new family, nothing in the order of nature<\/em> could argue that he is still husband to his first wife.<\/p>\n The bizarre promise of \u201cforever\u201d made by two beings who have no assurance of \u201cforever\u201d could only have been instituted by an equally bizarre faith. It was neither nature, nor the State, nor even the Old Law of the Jewish people that so radically defined marriage. Typically, it was Jesus. He argued that soluble\u00a0marriage\u00a0was a human tradition, \u201ctraditional marriage\u201d at its finest, and that under His New Law the following divine ordinance applied: \u201cWhat God has joined let no man tear asunder\u201d (Mark 10:9<\/a>).<\/p>\n Augustine follows this up, arguing for the inherently sacramental, God-given character of indissolubility: \u201cIn the sacrament<\/em> it is provided that the marriage bond should not be broken, and that a husband and wife, if separated, should not be joined to another even for the sake of offspring.\u201d And Aquinas again:<\/p>\n It is easy to miss the revolution slipped into the thomistic shuffle. The condition of inseparability in marriage comes from the divinely instituted\u00a0nature of the thing, and it is this condition which, in a certain sense, is most essential to marriage. One can be married without children, one can even be married and unfaithful, but one cannot be married and separable.\u00a0<\/i>Thus \u201cinseparability, which pertains to sacrament<\/em>, is placed in the definition of marriage, while offspring and faith are not. Therefore among the other goods sacrament is the most essential to matrimony<\/em>\u201d\u00a0(49, a. 3<\/a>).<\/p>\n Maybe it\u2019s his Catholic upbringing shining through the sex-column cliches, but Savage is absolutely correct \u2014 indissolubility is far from natural. It is supernatural. The sacrament of Holy Matrimony is a radical shift in the tradition of marriage that cannot be defended on purely human terms. If we think we can treat marriage as a purely civil and social institution and retain what is essentially sacramental, attempting to magic up from the order of nature what is born in the order of grace, we\u2019ll end up disappointed with just how difficult \u201cforever\u201d really is.<\/p>\n Now there is something wonderful here, and it confuses the issue. When Christ said \u201cwhat God has joined let no man tear asunder,\u201d he said it in the context of restoring an original institution, arguing against a culture of divorce and remarriage that \u201cin the beginning it was not so.\u201d Thus, in a certain sense, we can say that indissolubility belongs to marriage by nature, insofar as it was, prior to the Fall of Man, the \u201cnatural\u201d state of marriage. It is true what Pope Paul VI says, that \u201calthough the sacramental element may be absent from a marriage as is the case among unbelievers, still in such a marriage, inasmuch as it is a true marriage there must remain and indeed there does remain that perpetual bond which by divine right is so bound up with matrimony from its first institution that it is not subject to any civil power\u201d (Casti Connubi<\/em>, 34<\/a>). But it seems to me that the fact that indissolubility belongs to unbelieving, non-sacramental marriages, far from arguing that indissolubility is of nature or of law, argues that unbelievers, in some way, partake in the order of grace. \u201cFrom God comes the very institution of marriage, the ends for which it was instituted, the laws that govern it, the blessings that flow from it\u201d (Casti Connubi<\/em>, 9<\/a>), and if our marriage is indissoluble, and we retain the character of \u2018husband\u2019 and \u2018wife\u2019 even if we divorce and remarry, even if we claim by law and nature to have shuffled them off, it is because we have entered an institution that neither civil laws nor nature can dissolve, whether we meant to enter into marriage as a \u201cdivine institution\u201d or not.<\/p>\n This is getting complicated, but I\u2019m down to keep working through it. Motivate me by donating your loose change to the greatest urban-revitalization-y charitable project ever, The Harmonium Project<\/a>. If I see a donation, I\u2019ll wake up hella early tomorrow morning and blog you a\u00a0blog.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/1ywpi925eu8i25ne6noy0131.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Thomas-Aquinas-resized.jpg\")
\u201cInseparability, which is denoted by \u201csacrament,\u201d regards the very sacrament considered in itself, since from the very fact that by the marriage compact man and wife give to one another power the one over the other in perpetuity, it follows that they cannot be put asunder. Hence there is no matrimony without inseparability, whereas there is matrimony without \u201cfaith\u201d and \u201coffspring,\u201d because the existence of a thing does not depend on its use; and in this sense \u201csacrament\u201d is more essential to matrimony than \u201cfaith\u201d and \u201coffspring\u201d\u00a0(q. 49, a. 3<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jongerlo.org\/images\/kerk_bruid_LR%20(01).jpg\")
The married Catholic is unique because he has the capacity to know that what he does is not of man, but of God, and that in his marriage what is natural is perfected by what is divine. I say he has the capacity<\/em>, because American Catholics tend to have a lame notion of Holy Matrimony as a kind of \u201cCatholic version\u201d of marriage, as if we replace judges for priests, drink more at the reception and voila<\/i>, the sacrament! But our own tradition, which no one reads, makes it clear that the sacrament, while it does \u201cadd on\u201d to what we might call \u201cnatural marriage,\u201d is an addition that transforms and perfects what it is added to. The difference the\u00a0sacrament makes is simple, but it only becomes clear to the Christian: Man and woman become more than themselves \u2014 they become signs of Christ\u2019s marriage to his Church. To marry is to have one\u2019s earthly fidelity and fecundity shot through by divine mysteries like rising sun through stained-glass, revealing to oneself\u00a0and to the world the colors, contours, and splendor of Christ\u2019s love for mankind. It is for this reason that the sacrament adds the terrifying condition of inseparability to marriage \u2014 Christ does not love us conditionally, or for a time, but forever. So with what foolishness we consider Holy Matrimony \u201cbasically the same\u201d as marriage considered as a civil or natural institution! Holy Matrimony is different, and it\u2019s high time we investigated the difference such a sacrament makes<\/a>.<\/p>\n