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Those who start with the pagan philosophy of sex must face life as a descent. Associated with a growing old, there is a loss of physical energy, and the horrible perspective of death. The Christian philosophy of love, on the contrary, implies an ascension. The body may grow older, but the spirit grows younger, and love often becomes more intense. With time there is an unfolding of the mystery of love. The difference between sex and love is like the difference between an education without a philosophy of life and one with such an integrating factor. A system without a philosophy measures progress in terms of substitution. Spencer is substituted for Kant, Marx for Spencer, Freud for Marx. There is no continuity in mental development any more than the automobile grew out of the horse and buggy. But in a Christian education, there is a deepening of a mystery. One starts with a simple truth that God exists. Instead of abandoning that idea when one begins to study science, one deepens his knowledge of God with a study of the Trinity and then begins to see the tremendous ramifications of Divine Power in the universe, of Divine Providence in history, and of Divine Mercy in the human heart.
So it is with love. The Christian marriage is the deepening of a mystery in two ways: first in the raising of a family, and secondly in the ascension of love.
There comes a moment in the noblest of human love when one "gets used" to the best. Jewelers lose the thrill of seeing precious stones. There must always be a mystery in life. Once it disappears, life becomes banal. One wonders if the reason for the popularity of murder mysteries today is because they fill up the void created by the loss of the mysteries of faith. The extreme interest in murder mysteries is a sign that people are more interested in how a person is killed than in the eternal lot of the one who is killed. So long as there is nothing undisclosed and unrevealed in life, there is no longer a joy in living. The zest of life partly comes from the fact that there is a door that is yet unopened, a veil that has not yet been lifted, a note that has not yet been struck.
No one is ever thirsty at the border of a well. There is little desire for the possessed, and no hope for that which is already ours. Marriage often ends the romance, as if the chase were ended and one had bagged the game. When persons are taken for granted, then is lost all the sensitiveness and delicacy which is the essential condition of friendship and joy. This is particularly true in some marriages where there is possession without desire, a capture without the thrill of the chase.
The Christian way of preserving mystery, and therefore attractiveness, is through the unfolding of love into the next generation, which is what we mean by making it triune. Modern life is geared to the idea that beauty in a woman and strength in a man are permanent possessions. All the mechanics of modern advertising are directed to this lie. If a man eats certain kinds of crunchy, cracky food, he is told that he can take ten strokes off his golf, and that if he swallows a few pills, he will no longer have a fine head of skin. The woman, in her turn, is told that beauty can be a permanent possession, and that her rough laundry hands, her unattractive smile, can all be remedied by a tube of this or that; or she is led to believe that after a few days of diet she will no longer be a victim of circumference, and will not look as if she had turned forty, but as if she had returned twenty.
Despite all this propaganda for the fixity of strength and beauty, it often happens that, a year or two after marriage, the husband no longer seems to be that strong brave Apollo who made end runs on the football team on Saturday afternoons, or who came home from the war with three stars on his breast. One day the wife asks him to help wash the dishes and he retorts: "That's a woman's job, not mine." In her turn, she no longer seems to him as beautiful as the first day of the honeymoon. Her baby talk that once seemed so cute, now begins to get on his nerves. Then it is that some couples feel there is no longer any love, because there is no thrill.
God did not intend that strength in a man and beauty in a woman should endure, but that they should reappear in their children. Here is where God's Providence reveals itself. Just at a time when it might seem that beauty is fading in one, and strength in the other, God sends children to protect and revive both. When the first boy is born, the husband reappears in all his strength and promise and, in the language of Virgil, "from high heaven descends a worthier race of men." When the first girl is born, the wife revives in all her beauty and charm, and even the baby talk becomes cute all over again. He even likes to think that she is the sole source of the daughter's loveliness. Each child that is born begins to be a bead in the great rosary of love, binding the parents together in the rosy chains of a sweet slavery of love.
The transports of a newborn life come to youth and maid with all the sweet and true illusion of an eternal bliss. The moment for which their mutual love had been yearning has at last arrived; the seed they planted is born. The secret of their love has been whispered and understood, in the full consciousness that they who were given heaven's fires passed on the torch aflame to other generations. Their love was made flesh and dwelt amongst them, and that joy no one shall take from them. Eyes that at first could see no vision but the other, now center on a common image which is neither his nor hers, but their joint "creation" under God.
In this kind of life, like the bush Moses saw, the fires of love burn but there is nothing consumed. Love becomes life's champion and answers the challenge of death. Thus is married love saved from disillusionment. Phoenix-like it is always rising from the ashes, as husband and wife draw up reinforcements of their love in the eternal campaign for life. No self-loathing, satiety and fear seize their souls, for they never pluck the fruit of love at its core nor break the lute to snare the music. Love becomes an ascension from the sense-plane through an incarnation and rises back again to God, as they train their children for their native heaven and its Trinity, whence came their sparks of fire and love. From the time the children learn to bless themselves and say the name of Jesus, through that hour when they learn in little catechisms greater truths than the worldly-wise could give, to that day when they themselves start love again on its pilgrimage, the parents have a consciousness of their trusteeship under God.
The children thus become new bonds of love between husband and wife as a new quality appears in marriage, namely, the penetration of a mystery. There is never any love when one hits bottom. Love demands something unrevealed; it flourishes, therefore, only in mystery. No one ever wants to hear a singer hit her highest note, nor an orator "tear a passion to tatters," for once mystery and the infinite are denied, life's urge is stilled and its passion glutted.
In a true marriage, there is an ever-enchanting romance. There are at least four distinct mysteries progressively revealed. First, there is the mystery of the other partner, which is body-mystery. When that mystery is solved and the first child is born, there begins a new mystery. The husband sees something in the wife he never before knew existed, namely, the beautiful mystery of motherhood. She sees a new mystery in him she never before knew existed, namely, the mystery of fatherhood. As other children come to revive their strength and beauty, the husband never seems older to the wife than the day they were married, and the wife never seems older than the day they first met and carved their initials in an oak tree. As the children reach the age of reason, a third mystery unfolds, that of father-craft and mother-craft; the disciplining and training of young minds and hearts in the ways of God. As the children grow into maturity the mystery continues to deepen, new areas of exploration open up, and the father and mother now see themselves as sculptors in the great quarry of humanity, carving living stones and fitting them together in the Temple of God, Whose Architect is Love.
The fourth mystery is their contribution to the well-being of the nation. Here, too, is the root of democracy, for it is in the family that a person is valued, not for what he is worth, nor for what he can do, but primarily for what he is. His status, his position, is guaranteed by the very fact of being alive. The children who are dumb or blind, sons who were maimed in war, are all loved because of themselves and their intrinsic worth as gifts of God, and not because of what they know, or what they earn, or because of the class to which they belong. This reverence for personality in the family is the social principle upon which the wider life of the community depends, for the State exists for the person, not the person for the State.
In the love of friends, in the love of husband and wife, there must be a recognition of a Love beyond both, in which, as in a sea, they bathe for refreshment. As everything the human mind knows is intelligible only because it is in some way related to being, as the eye sees what is colored, so one heart loves another heart in that immense dimension outside of both, which is the Love of God.
When that marital love is fruitful, the children represent in the order of flesh that third which is so essential for happiness. They rescue duality from boredom; they prevent life from ever touching bottom; they turn new pages in the book of life; they explore depths beyond body and education and democracy, thereby bringing astonishment and wonder and mystery into love. As friend and friend, husband and wife call on the Third outside themselves to save each from isolation, and to make them a family in the mystery of Giver, Receiver, and Gift.
When there is duality, there is need; where there is Trinity, there is pity. Need is avid to be filled out of the neighbor's basket. Pity is born of a plenitude restless to empty itself. Strip love of its triune quality, and all internal relationships dissolve; and what is left is only the external. For example, the epidemic contacts in man and woman, capital and labor in competition, or the Eastern and Western World at war, hot or cold. A society in which the unifying bond is dismissed, progressively becomes an agglomeration of atoms. Finally, the disorganized cry out for a totalitarian force to "organize" the chaos. Thus is atheistic socialism born. As education, when it loses its philosophy of life, breaks up into departments without any integration or unity except the accidental one of proximity and time, and as a body, when it loses its soul, breaks up into its chemical components, so a family, when it loses the nullifying bond of love, breaks up in the divorce court without the third element outside both, the human is first suppressed, and then compressed, by hostile forces until he is locked inside his mind, solitary, alone, and afraid, a prisoner of his very self. In relation to nothing, what can satisfy him? Rejecting Love outside of his ego, he cannot understand sacrifice except as amputation and self-destruction. How can such a consciously self-deficient and helpless being give, without diminishing his own emptiness? He is ready for self-immolation understood as a suicide, but not the sacrifice of self for others. Nothing exists but his own ego, the other egos outside himself limit his personality and cross his wishes, and therefore are detestable. Not until the wider and deeper Love appears, which is the fulfillment of personality, will the ego ever cease to revolt against sacrifice, whether it be giving way to the partner for the sake of peace, or raising a family to see strength and beauty prolonged even "unto the third and fourth generation."
The only really progressive thing in all the universe is love. And yet that which God made to bloom and blossom and flower through time and into eternity is that which is most often nipped in the bud. Perhaps that is the reason why artists always picture love as a little cupid who never grows up. Armed with only a bow and arrow in an atomic universe, the poor little angel has hardly a chance. St. Paul speaks of faith and hope disappearing in heaven, but love remaining forever. Yet that one thing that mortals want to be eternal is that which they most quickly choke before it has begun to walk. If a man came from Mars and had never heard of the greatest event in history, which was the birth of the Divine Love in the person of Christ, he probably could guess the rest of the story and predict His Crucifixion. All he would need to do would be to look at the way even the best of human loves are divorced, denied, mutilated, bartered, and stunted.
But if love be what the heart wants above all things else, why does it not grow in love? It is because most hearts want love like a serpent, not like a bird. They want love on the same plane as the flesh, and not a love which wings its way from earth to mountain peak and then is lost in the sky. They want a love that, like Cupid, does not grow; not a love which dies in order to ascend, like the Risen Christ, Who accepts defeat and conquers it by Love. They want the impossible: repetition without satiety, which no human body can give. The refusal to surrender the horizontal for the vertical, because it demands sacrifice, condemns the heart to mediocrity and staleness. Love is no bargain. It appears so attractive, like a precious violin advertised at a low price, but one discovers that after one has it without much effort it is useless unless one disciplines himself to its use. The cross is a far better picture of what love really is than Cupid. The latter's darts are shot in the dark in a moment when the heart least suspects it; but the cross is something one sees on the roadway of life a long time ahead, and the invitation to carry it to a resurrection of love is frightening, indeed. That is why the Sacred Heart has so few lovers. They want that cross streamlined, without Him, Who said: "If any man has a mind to come my way, let him renounce self, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." (Luke 9:23)
The ascension of love in marriage proceeds through three stages, each of which has its transfiguration. These three loves are Eros, or sex love; personal love; and Christian love.
Sex love is here understood as carnal love outside of marriage, or in marriage with a denial of its social function. There is no direct connection between sex love and personal love. Sex love of another is for the sake of pleasure which the other person gives the ego. The partner is regarded as one of the opposite sex, instead of as a person. The infatuation associated with it is nothing but the boundless desire of self-centeredness to express itself at all costs. Because it cares only for its own rapture and its own fulfillment, such love most quickly turns to hate when no longer satisfied. With promiscuity and divorce so very general, with each one looking for his own pleasure without regard for God's directions about love, it is only natural that our century should be the one to unveil the mystery of sex. Those who believe that there are other loves beyond the carnal are not so anxious to unveil sex as they are to have the higher loves revealed. If, on entering a home with three floors, one deludes himself into believing that there is nothing above the basement where the Id lives, then, to have fun, one must explore every nook and corner of that subliminal floor. But to one who knows that there are two other floors above, each one more beautiful than the other, the joy of life will be in having these higher mysteries revealed. Literature throughout the centuries depicted love but never concentrated very much on sex until this century, and that is because our times refuse to believe that there is anything beyond. Modern man substitutes prodding for discovery, analysis for ascension, the scalpel for the microscope, and the couch for the prie-dieu.
Over and above sex love, there is personal love. Personal love includes sex in marriage, but in its essence it is based on the objective value of another person. The other person may be loved for artistic or moral excellence, or because of a common, sympathetic interest. Personal love exists wherever there is reciprocity, duality, and understanding. This kind of love can exist with carnal love in marriage, or quite apart from carnal love, for there is no direct connection between the flesh and love. It is possible to be in love without there being physical attraction, as it is possible to have physical attraction without being in love. Personal love is in the will, not in the body. In personal love, there is no substitution of persons possible; this person is loved, and not another. But in carnal or erotic love, since there is not of necessity a love for another person, but only a love of self, it is possible to find a substitute for the one who gives pleasure. Sex love substitutes one occasion of pleasure for the other, but love knows no substitution. No one can take the place of a mother, or a devoted husband, or a loving wife. Since personal love is directed to a person which it affirms for eternity, it has a wider range than carnal love, for it exists wherever there is a twoness and a sympathy. Sometimes it may become blind, when it overlooks the real needs and requirements of others. Such is the case with parents who spoil their children by interpreting faults as virtues, license as liberty, and anarchy as progressiveness.
Beyond each of these two is Christian love, which loves everyone either as a potential or actual child of God, redeemed by Christ; it is a love which loves without even a hope of return. It loves the other, not because of attractiveness, or talents, or sympathy, but because of God. To the Christian, a person is one for whom I must sacrifice myself, not one who must exist for my sake. Sex love demands carnal reciprocity; personal love finds it difficult to survive without it, but Christian love requires no reciprocity. Its inspiration is Christ, Who loved us while we were sinners, and therefore unlovable. Nowhere else but in Christian love is the tortuous contradiction between infinite desire and finite being resolved, for here all human limitations become the channels to the spiritual and the eternal. The urge toward the fulfillment of self can never adequately be satisfied by another self on the same level; to attempt this is to become the victim of cynicism and boredom. Christian love alone supplies that deficiency of human love, by loving every other person for God's sake. The very fact that one suffers more in the absence of the one loved than he rejoices in the other's presence reveals that it is something unpossessed that we crave; namely, God's love, which alone can fill the emptiness of the human heart.
As personal love includes sex, so does Christian love include it in a truly Christian marriage. Even though the marriage is an unhappy one, there can still be Christian love, for the other partner is then loved for Christ's sake and for the purpose of prolonging Christ's redemption. From a natural point of view, some people are quite unlovable. It is only when one begins to see God's love in them that they become first bearable and then lovable. As, in the physical order, it is the sick child in the family who receives the most attention and care, so, in the moral order, it is the unworthy member who becomes the object of the greatest Christian solicitation and prayer. The children who write begging for prayers for their drunken father, or for their unfaithful mother, are already trained in Christian love long before they know the meaning of sex.
No life is happy without mystery, and the greatest of all mysteries is love. Great are the joys in marriage as there is the lifting of progressive veils until one is brought into the blazing lights of the Presence of God. Whether the marriage is happy or unhappy, whether life is sweet or bitter, makes no difference to the heart which aspires to a more and more purified love. It may even be that the waters of life become more purified by running over the jagged mountain streams of suffering.
Love never grows old except to those who put its essence into that which grows old: the body. Like a precious liquid, love shares the lot of the container. If love is put in a vessel of clay, it is quickly absorbed and dried; if, like knowledge, it is placed in the mind, it grows through the years, becoming stronger, even as the body grows weaker. The more it is united with the spirit, the more immortal it becomes. Just as some theologians know about God in an abstract way, so there are some who know love only from afar. As other theologians know God through abandonment to His Will, so there are those who know love because they sought it in God's way, and not their own. Once the spirit of Divine Love enters marriage, as it does at the altar, there is no magic faith introduced that the partner is absolutely perfect. But there is introduced the idea that this partner has been given by God until death and, therefore, is worthy of love for Christ's sake, always.
The sanctity of married life is not something which takes place alongside of marriage, but by and through marriage. The vocation to marriage is a vocation to happiness which comes through holiness and sanctity. Unity of two in one flesh is not something that God tolerates, but something that He wills. Because He wills it, He sanctifies the couple through its use. Instead of diminishing in any way the union of their spirits with one another, it contributes to their ascension in love. The union of two in one flesh is the symbol of the union of their souls, and both in turn are a symbol of the union of Christ and His Church.
Looking back on a happy married life, the spouses can see the footprints of the ascension of their love. In the first moments there is the joy of possession, which is the natural reaction of the desire of a body-soul in the face of a body-soul. Next there comes the more personal joy of giving oneself to the other, where one loves to give just to please. Finally, there comes the stage where one self is not given for the sake of the other self, but where both together are given to God and to His Holy Designs. It is now unity that is offered, and to something outside both; first to the children and through them to God, Who is the bond of their unity. "I have other sheep too, which do not belong to this fold; I must bring them in too; they will listen to my voice; so there will be one fold, and one shepherd." (John 10:16) The love which sustained them at every step of the road is the Love that created them and witnessed their union. This vision becomes clearer as life goes on; the flesh has fewer overtones, and the spirit begins to play in a major chord. When the autumn of life comes they suddenly realize that they love one another more now than ever, because they love the Love which authored their love. The Lover, the Beloved, and Love now merge into a beautiful Trinity toward which they aspire.
This elevation of love from one stage to another is inseparable from the crushing of selfishness, which is the enemy of love. A young couple enter marriage with distinct personalities, and each one dreams of his and her happiness, as if they were in separate vessels. This preoccupation with personal futures soon merges into a common future and common destiny, and there is no doubt that the unity of the flesh had much to do with the unity of their minds and wills and aspirations. External time with its daily routines, and internal time with its growth in common ideals, fuse into a higher unity. That is why, in moments of physical separation, there is less a sense of being apart. The children who are born to them become successive incarnations of their one-flesh, one-heart bonds. As the economic stress of life, sickness, and habitude lay their heavy hands upon them, it becomes necessary to resign themselves to the other's incompleteness and imperfection. This means "putting up" with the shortcomings which long living together brings out.
At this point, unless there is an ascension through deeper faith, the marriage may fail. But if the other partner, despite all failings, is seen as a trust and a responsibility before God, then He is brought more and more into the picture to heal the wounds. Deceptions in a Christian marriage, instead of causing depression, summon forth a sacrifice in union with the Cross. What God has begun to work in the partners, namely, union with the pleasures of the flesh, He will perfect in the end through the joys of the spirit. Recalling that Christ still loves His Church, though it is made up of so many imperfect members, they resolve to love one another despite imperfections, that the symbol may not fail the reality. As life goes on, they become not two compatible beings who have learned to live together through self-suppression and patience, but one new and richer being, fused in the fires of God's love and tempered of the best of both. One by one, the veils of life's mysteries have been lifted. The flesh, they found, was too precocious to reveal its own mystery; then came the mystery of the other's inner life, disclosed in the raising of young minds and hearts in the ways of God; then came the fuller mystery of how they showed forth the love of Christ and His Spouse, the Church. And now the greatest mystery of all awaits them still, a mystery infinite in its unbodied essence, a mystery about which eternity cannot begin to sound its heavenly voluptuousness, and that is the mystery that made them one: the Lover, the Beloved, and Love; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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