Men, women and three stories

I return to my occasional subject of men, women and marriage, earthly mirror of Christ and the church, that great mystery. I do it with diffidence.  I cannot say I understand the mystery from either side. The heavenly mystery of the church as Christ's bride is difficult to understand. It could be I do not quite understand the earthly and commonplace side of it either. Women can be confusing to men: I expect that to pass muster as a self-evident proposition.

When I do not understand something, storytelling may be more helpful to me than logical exposition. Here are some stories that seem cogent.

The knight Fairhands (Beaumains) and Lady Linet

From Malory's Arthur, the story of a knight assigned to serve and protect a woman who thinks he does nothing right. She nags and belittles and says King Arthur should have assigned her a better knight. He succeeds in his quest anyway, and weds her more appreciative sister, the noblewoman on whose behalf the nagging sister sought help in the first place.

The moral I take from this story is that if a man and woman are to get along they need to be on the same quest. Linet and Fairhands had different visions of what they were doing and how to go about it. The earthly consequences of that type of mismatch are clear enough. I leave the heavenly corollary for the reader to explore, the church that thinks it improves upon the Bridegroom's leadership.

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's

Don't tell sex-negative moralists that this is in the Bible. It will disturb them because it is frankly erotic, intimate and, between the lines of some Mideastern allusion by metaphor, graphically sensual. Man and woman are in each other's arms, delighted about it, and with no tendency to hide or withhold themselves one from the other. The book is an affirmation of that intimacy, its joy and wonder.

The marriage instructions in 1 Corinthians 7

That passage wasn't written as a story but you can read the story between the lines, the fledgling first-century Church trying to come to grips with social mores of the time versus the demands of a sound marriage. The social mores of the Roman Empire were unwholesome. Christians needed to be different to be happy.

The point becomes clearer when we get to Ephesians 5 and learn that the man who marries has signed the biggest blank check imaginable, to live for the woman's sake or, at need, to die for her. I do not suppose it needs much exegesis to see what that has to do with Christ and the Church.

The woman has responsibilities too, which modern feminism has gone out of its way to distort into oppression and compulsion and patriarchal exploitation, but read the passages for yourself and it sounds more like an exchange of gifts. She gets the man's undivided duty. That is no light matter.

As I read it, marriage is a compact of honor, an exchange of obligations, rather than a statement about transient feelings of romance, and that view is reflected in the traditional marriage rite. Stern pledges are made on both sides, richer, poorer, sicker, healthier, better, worse. Until one of you dies.  Something immutable, except by the death of a participant,  happens when Christians marry. The ancient Christian understanding is effaced to the harm of women in some modern churches. When I found myself dating in my fifties I found I was in the company of bitter women who had been abandoned by their husbands or lovers for younger women, or for boys. This is where we came in, Roman Empire 101.


Some conclusions 

It is best if you do not marry someone like Linet, who will second guess her knight all the time. In the story a better fate awaits him. A church is like Linet when it rides apart from her knight protector.

The woman in the Song of Songs, a red-hot babe to use the modern parlance, is positively portrayed, and so is the king who cannot get enough of her. Theologians in ancient times allegorized the song to refer also to spiritual intimacy with God. Modern Western sensibilities recoil at that, but it is because our culture has gone a long way toward perverting sexual intimacy.

In Corinthians, we find that marriage is not to be undertaken lightly, because the one who comes to you, you may in no wise cast out. There are a couple of ways a marriage can end legitimately while both parties are alive, narrowly tailored exceptions, but one way they might be explained is by comparing the matter to apostasy: When put to the test the commitment fails. (Roman Catholicism dances around this point with language about "defect of intention" concerning marriage, but it amounts to the same thing.) In spiritual terms, Christ does not divorce believers, though apparent but not real believers depart. Saul may be among the prophets, but it does not stick.