Symposium: Relativism and Revision

This article is in response to “The Social Costs of Abandoning the Meaning of Marriage” by Ryan T. Anderson and is part of the symposium, “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.”

“Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,’ seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive, and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

Reading Ryan Anderson’s symposium article about the revision of marriage brought Pope emeritus Benedict XVI’s words to mind. In revising marriage, we have drained all definite meaning out of a word that used to be freighted with sacred presence.

If popular culture strips marriage of its social, spiritual, and biological purpose, then marriage is frivolous. Just like yesterday’s fashions, when desires change, marriage can be redefined to accommodate new desires…polyamory?!

Desire does not legitimize, and it does not bring value. Reducing marriage to desire both trivializes marriage and endangers children. Children become objects of desire too, discarded in the womb if inconvenient. Chesterton once said, “The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage.” This prophecy concerning the effects of ‘no fault’ divorce laws seems to have come true. When marriage is not anchored in the definite nature of our being, relativism washes marriage out to sea.

Most tragically, when we diminish the meaning of marriage, we also diminish the meaning of love. Teaching that marriage is whatever we desire it to be reduces love to self satisfaction. Such a “love” can never be true. Such a “love” can never be sustained.  Words like “duty” and “steadfastness”  become unmentionable. The substance of marital love must provoke transformation, willing the good of the other. If marriage will endure, this can never be merely a self-interested exchange as our culture would have us believe.

Because the revisionist marriage movement lacks roots in truth or the nature of human beings, it must co-opt good words such as “love” and “marriage” and exist parasitically on the residual memory of a time when marriage was more than an abstraction based on  desire, but a robust social institution that gave order and direction to life. Though the stand for marriage may seem dismal, redundant, or even hopeless at times, we must not abandon the fight.

More than two thousand years ago the ancient Roman poet, Horace, astutely observed: “natura expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.” (You may throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back.) The social cost and misery of persons living in an atomized society that treats marriage as a frivolity pleads desperately for our attention.