Tags
autobiography, Confucius, Desiderata, gender, Hebrew Bible, modernity, New Testament, Plato, Śāntideva, Vedas
My wedding approaches rapidly, and with my love of philosophy it’s important for me to have profound and meaningful readings at the ceremony. We have each picked a modern reading that meant a lot to us – she from Walt Whitman, and I from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, beautiful advice from when I was a child. But I also wanted to find meaningful premodern readings, and that turned out to be a lot harder.
The problem I quickly realized is that romantic marriage is a recent invention, a construct of our own time. It was obvious to me from the beginning that I’d get little help from Indian Buddhism, where sex and marriage are emphasized as fetters that bind us in suffering. I knew that to choose marriage was to side against Śāntideva. Sure, Śāntideva praises the monk Jyotis for breaking his monastic vows and marrying a woman who fell in love with him – but Jyotis, like a good bodhisattva, did this entirely out of compassion. “I’m marrying you out of sympathy” is not exactly the note on which I want to start married life.
Classical Buddhism is an ascetic tradition through and through, as uncomfortable as such asceticism might make us today. But then much the same can be said about classical Christianity, at least as expressed in Paul’s New Testament writings. “Better to marry than to burn”: marriage is a third-best option, not as good as converting to celibacy as Paul did, let alone lifelong celibacy. It is good only because it prevents the worse option, of being led around by sexual lust. For this reason I tend to chafe a bit when I hear the standard wedding reading of 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind,” and so on. Paul is not even talking about familial love, let alone romantic love; that’s the last thing on his mind. He’s talking about agape, compassion, close to Buddhist karuṇā. The King James Bible makes the point well when it renders the passage with “charity” rather than “love.”
But what about the non-ascetic traditions? Clearly some premoderns gave an unqualified endorsement to married life, even if the classical Buddhists and Christians did not. Indeed they did – but marriage so viewed was a very different thing. I touched on the point in my previous post about weddings, but it’s worth coming back to. Traditionally, marriage was not about the couple, it was about the community and its continuity, arranged by parents for the sake of producing and raising new children. And it was often the wife’s job to raise the children and the husband’s to provide materially – or sometimes the job of the extended family, if both were working. This is the married relationship that Confucius praises; but it is not our marriage. We fell in love without our families’ involvement, and we do not intend to have children. All of my family members are hundreds of miles away; hers do not live with us. To top it off, for the moment, she is our breadwinner while I am unemployed and taking care of the household. When classical Jewish or Confucian texts endorse marriage, it is for reasons far removed from ours. While I’ve said that weddings always imply a certain amount of traditionalism, to most traditional audiences our marriage looks a lot more like libertinism.
So the best premodern texts for a modern marriage are likely those which are not about marriage. The last time I got married, we read Pausanias’s speech from Plato’s Symposium, arguing that the best kind of love is pursued for the cultivation of virtue. A great and noble sentiment, and here we are talking about a love closer to modern romantic love – sexually charged eros, not compassionate agape. A good reading, but worth remembering that the eros that’s at issue here is the love Plato knew, between an older man and a younger boy. The dialogue never even entertains the idea that a married couple would feel eros for each other.
So likewise the Song of Songs, that Hebrew text that has made so many wonder “why is this in the Bible?” Not being constrained in our interpretations by tradition, we don’t need to take the strained reading of the text as an allegory for God’s love for the church. We can read it literally for what it is, the erotic passion of two heterosexual lovers, in a text that is nevertheless ancient and passed down by tradition. The text never says these lovers are married; in their time, they probably wouldn’t have been. But their love is much more like ours than is Paul’s agape, Śāntideva’s karuṇā, or the community- and family-oriented Confucian marriage. And so we are having a selection from this text sung at our wedding.
The other premodern reading we’ll have at the wedding is the short closing lines of the Rig Veda (X.191.4): “May your aim be one and single / May your hands be joined in one / The mind at rest in unison / At peace with all, so may you be.” It is also not about marriage in its original context, but about unity among Agni worshippers; and the translation is quite loose. In these respects I suppose it’s really no better than the Corinthians. But my father has regularly sent it as a wedding blessing to most of the couples we know who have married in my lifetime. So it’s become part of our own family tradition, in a way, as well as being an appropriate wish expressed in beautiful English. And all of that matters.
This will be my last post for a couple weeks – because of the wedding, of course! The next week and a half will be frenetic with wedding planning, and after that we are having a week’s honeymoon in New Orleans. (We had intended to go further afield, but immigration issues intervened; we expect to take a longer honeymoon this winter.) Blogging will take a back seat during this period. If I am seized by the urge to write about something topical, it’s possible that there may be a post in the interim; but I expect the blog’s writing to resume on the first of August.
Naturally, comments will remain open during this period; I’m happy that some lively discussions have got going here recently and I would be delighted if they continue. Before I pause, I would like to say a word of thanks to all my commenters and regular readers. You have made writing this blog a tremendously rewarding experience for me, and I look forward to resuming it in August.
Very best wishes.
Thanks, Michael!
Congratulations, Amod! And this post was hilarious. It’s great to be reminded that the institutions we take for granted have not always had the forms or meanings they do today…
Thanks, Erin! Yes, I agree we typically don’t think enough about institutions’ roots. I think this is something that comes out in the gay marriage debate: it’s impossible to make a reasonable case against gay marriage when one assumes that marriage is primarily about the expression of romantic love. I think that the most reasonable case against gay marriage is that it hastens the societal perception of marriage as being about romantic love in this way, and further erodes the remnants of the older communitarian views. I think the more productive political debate would be about marriage as such, rather than gay marriage specifically – but I guess that’s too theoretical for politics these days.
Congratulations! Best wishes!
Here is a wedding poem for you from Apollinaire’s Bestiary:
The Cat
What I wish in my house
Is a reasonable woman,
A cat passing among the books,
And friends in every season,
Whom I can’t live without.
Good wishes. Thank you. I must pass on the cat because of my allergies, but I agree they are beautiful creatures.
Very best wishes to you both, Amod.
Thanks, Skholiast!
A note: I saw a comment in my spam filter that I brushed over too quickly and deleted; as it was being erased I got a glimpse of its content that suggested it may have been a real comment related to this post. If so, I am deeply sorry for deleting it; unfortunately it is unrecoverable. If the author of that comment reads this, I hope you will post it again.
Congratulations, Amod!
Just remember to do more than your lion’s share of household chores and ensure that the kitchen sink is cleaned thoroughly before you go to bed and you will enjoy permanent marital bliss contrary to Buddhist teachings of impermanence! LOL
Dear Amod,
very best wishes to you two. May you live together happily and/or friendly for all days to come.
May I raise an objection? I might be influenced by my geographic background (since I grew up and live in Europe), but I do not think that marriage is just about romantic love. If the point were just love, then there would be no point in getting married, not to speak of getting re-married. If the only important thing are one’s feelings, then why bother at all with white dresses, etc.? Alternatively, one could arrange a great party, perhaps also in order to show to one’s beloved one that one is proud of her/him. Or, one could subscribe for a social insurance. Marriage seems to me to imply a commitment which intrinsically goes beyond romantic love: the commitment to *remain* married. One promises that one will do all one can do to love the other, independently of what one’s feelings may become. Romantic love, to put it short, is somehow unreliable. One might at a certain point meet someone who is even more attractive that one’s spouse. But, since one married her/him, one feels committed to stay with him/her and love her/him nonetheless. In short, romantic love may nowadays play the role of families’ plots in selecting the ideal partner. But it is by no means the only player once a marriage has been celebrated.
(I admit that the situation may be quite different in the US, where divorce is more easy to get –in Italy, for instance, it takes at least 4 years+some months to bureaucratically arrange for the new marriage. But what is the purpose/meaning of getting married, say, every second year?)
Thanks, Elisa. This is a good point, and I agree with what you say. I think you point to an important distinction that I failed to raise above: between the reasons for entering into marriage itself, and the reasons for selecting a marriage partner. Our cultures today tend to view the latter as primarily about romantic love – rightly, in my view. But many lovers choose not to get married, and that fact does not diminish their love.
Still, I think the distinction between modern and premodern remains; there is something qualitatively different between freely entered marriage to a chosen romantic partner on one hand, and marriage chosen by the family as responsibility to the community on the other.