A reader, Mark Pilon, highlights two excellent quotes from G. K. Chesterton regarding vows, marriage, anarchy, and the nature of true liberty and authentic freedom:
"The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender.
In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead. Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite another matter, it is amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy. The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage In both cases the point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper, and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for "incompatibility of temper" I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible."
Even better is the great passage from Orthodoxy:
"I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious instance, it would not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing. You could not even make a fairy tale from the experiences of a man who, when he was swallowed by a whale, might find himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or when he was turned into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo. For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable. Christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing. And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on myself. ...
"All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. 'You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there.'"
Thanks, Mark!
But, of course, the conventional "wisdom" remains conventionally, conveniently stunted:
"I was motivated by love for someone, by a good thing, a healthy and a good desire in my heart," he said on TV yesterday. "And at the same time, I just need to make decisions. And I shouldn't be making them in public, but that's exactly what happened."
In my first year of art school, fresh out of high school, I was exposed to this noxiously narcissistic way of thinking in the form of a preening, arrogant, empty shell of a teacher, George, who regularly complained to our class about the horrors of marriage. He was never clear about what it was, exactly, that bothered him about his wife—probably because the issue wasn't really his wife. No, the crux of the marital malaise, as George kept informing us in various ways, was that, in his words, "I'm not made to be with just one person. That's too limiting! It's too boring to be with the same person my entire life. I need more if I'm going to be happy."
The correlation between George's thinly veiled self-worship (he was also, by the way, a loud-mouthed Christian-basher—surprise!) and his need for more, more, and yet more in the women/sex department was obvious even to this naive, wide-eyed rube from the wilds of Montana. George was too great for just one woman; his needs too expansive for the limitations of marriage; his gifts (whatever they were) too much for the bounds of a silly vow. No, George needed more than one woman—he was hell-bent on a life of serial monogamy, come heartache or herpes, apparently never considering that his approach to the fairer sex rendered him equally disposable and meaningless to whatever "lady" might join him, for a few days or weeks, on his never-ending tour of cheap and loveless love.
The claim, made by several pundits, that Fr. Cutie's dalliances created an opportunity for "public discussion" about celibacy is as sterile and empty as celibacy can be fecund and fruitful. Such discussion is simply an opportunity to dismiss not just celibacy, but the whole of the Church's vast insights into the nature of man and the mystery of love. Funny, isn't it, how calls for "discussion" and "conversation" about issues related to sex and marriage always end up as calls for more marriage-free sex and more freedom from marriage?
The fact is, all sin is a rebellious dismissal of the joy and happiness offered by God; all sin is a preference for the confining, life-killing "limitlessness" of our desires over the infinite, life-giving "limits" granted by our Maker, the Lover of Souls, the Lover of Mankind, the Source of all Love. Believe me, I understand Fr. Cutie and George; I know of the many temptations to follow the "healthy and good desire in my heart", which is merely a clever way of selling my disordered passions to my wavering will. It's a battle. I've also witnessed, up close and first hand, the ugly results of many broken vows. Utopia never awaits those who achieve the "ultimate hope" of "the dissolution of all special ties." Quite the opposite.
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