RELIGION
Marriage, Anglican style
EDWARD NORMAN
It is scarcely original to suppose that the institution of marriage is simply a human convention, as morally indifferent, in itself, as some of the other inheritances from the childhood of the species which are now robbed of their original mystical associations by anthropologists and historians. Marriage is a popular convention; it has come to be regarded as the normal state for all 'adjusted' persons, agreeable in its way to the diverse tastes of sections of society who in every- thing else are scornful of one another's conventions. Only the Women's Lib move- ment, in our own day, appears to offer a public articulation of dissent: and that doesn't count since the movement is all students, failed women, cause-mongers, and Americans.
Marriage, like all human institutions, de- rives its morality from the requirements of individuals and of society, and these re- quirements need delicate adjustment when men change their attitudes and reorder their priorities. It was, of course, proper that the religious awareness of men should find expression in an institution so universal and so immediate to their lives. It was also inevi- table that in the present era, when the needs of the individual are so preached up against the public control of 'private' morals, that libertarian thinking should insist upon the introduction of refined sliding-scales to the marriage contract. For once, as it happens, that mode of thought appears to be broadly right. The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. A mistaken marriage ought not to reduce a person to irrevocable misery if its dissolution can be achieved without the creation of an even greater quantity of unhappiness: God, it must be assumed, was not so insensitive to the im- perfections of human choice as to ordain the eternity of an error committed as the upshot of some transitory enthusiasm. If marriage is popular, so also is divorce. In England and Wales there were 55,000 of them in 1968, the most recent year for which figures are available, and the increase is un- likely to diminish. Divorce, too, can have acceptable ethical qualities if it corrects mistakes and allows people more tolerable fulfilment of themselves in some other, or similar, diversion.
Unlikely as it may seem to those who find such things unlikely, the Church of England has quite a creditable record on the marriage and divorce question. It has kept a close watch on its teachings and has sometimes managed to anticipate action by public bodies. In 1966, for example, it published a report which suggested • that matrimonial offence ought no longer to form the grounds for divorce, and that the irretrievable break- down of marriage should instead be substi- tuted—the principle of the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, which has just come into operation. There were problems about this change, but it found quite wide acceptance as a humanitarian and Christian reform. Now a report has been made by a Commis- sion on 'the Christian Doctrine of Marriage' set up by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1968*. To some extent, as the Commissioners rather crossly remark, their labours were pipped by the passage of the Divorce Reform Act, as well as by a joint pastoral letter on the subject from the two archbishops and the ordering of a further inquiry by Convo- cation. Undeterred, however, by these an- ticipations, the Commissioners repaired to a nunnery in West Mailing to continue their own deliberations. The effort was worth making. Their report has a balance and wis- dom which will surprise everyone.
Its value resides in a general examination of the Church's teachings on marriage. The Commissioners present their findings with perspective and generally with taste. It is only occasionally that the theologians among them reveal their style of professionalism. Like adolescents in aspic, they allow the frozen trends of their craft to be expressed in such tortuous and unheard-of concepts as 'complementarity', 'mutuality', 'relation- ality', 'secularity', and so forth. And all the usual stuff gets an airing—about sexual intercourse being a 'sacrament' just like the Holy Communion, and the 'worship' of a husband for a wife being like that of a man for God. But the humility of self-revelation is also apparent, and the Commissioners do actually admit that the gaiety and joy of marriage have been better described by the poet and novelist than by the theologian' which must come as no surprise. Nor does Bishop Montefiore's appendix, 'Jesus on Div- orce and Remarriage.' There the inquirer can divert himself with the controversy between Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel about the degree of displeasure a husband must experience before he can throw off his spouse. Bishop Montefiore and Lady Oppenheimer combine to produce a further appendix on `Vows'—the burden of which, apparently, is to show that they can be con- strued loosely. Sometimes, they argue, a vow is impossible to keep anyway 'as when un- wittingly a man goes through a form of marriage with his own sister'—and other occurrences whose frequency is left inex- plicit.
Yet on the whole the Commissioners present a wise mixture of social and psycho- logical evidence about marriage, and their insistence on the priority of traditional Christian doctrines—merely seeking to re- direct them in novel circumstances—will please most traditionalists in the Church, as well as most of those outside it who look, in moments of positivism, to the Church as an upholder of what are taken to be sound values. Others, no doubt, will derive satis- faction from the Commissioners' belief that the marriage customs of immigrant families may impart 'enrichment' to the domestic ones. The suggestion that family allowances might be ended by the state as a gesture in support of population control is sen- • sible, but unlikely to receive much support. And the rejection by the Commissioners of the notion that civil marriage might become universal, with a voluntary second ceremony in church for believers only, was made for the extraordinary reason that Christians
*Marriage, Divorce and the Church will be published by the SPCK at £1.30 on 22 April
were thought liable to have a register office wedding only, in order, as the Commis sioners put it, 'to leave a loophole for escape'.
The recommendations of the report are less useful than its analysis. The Commis- sioners are unanimous in calling upon 'the competent authorities to discover, by appropriate means, whether there now exists within the Church of England a moral con- sensus about the propriety, in certain circum- stances, of the marriage in church of div- orced persons'. Of course the divorced should be remarried in church if their consciences indicate this to be appropriate But the Commissioners' manner of con- ceding this point is so hedged about with difficulties as to create a whole new machinery of inquisitorial authority. Local clergy, and possibly congregations too, it seems, are to conduct an 'inquiry into the character and dispositions of the two per- sons seeking a solemnisation of their marriage in church'. This inquiry is no formality: it 'would involve investigation into the circumstances of the previous div- orce, and also an assurance that they are both the kind of people who are capable of the stable and permanent relationship of marriage'. There are those who might sup- pose no body of men capable of a judgment so metaphysical; but the Commissioners provide also for the education of their in- quisitors by the establishment of 'An Institute for the Family'. It is to be a national body, given over to the compilation of evidence about 'the evolving pattern of marriage'. The evidence will be evaluated by 'a research and a service team' consisting, of course, of sociologists.
It is rather like the new divorce law. A good law in its way, but it has handed to the courts the potentially inquisitorial function of determining when a marriage has broken down 'irretrievably'. In the end most people would probably have been happier fudging up evidence of a matrimonial offence in order to procure divorce, rather than have the state shove its agencies into their private lives with the less precise task of discovering the grounds of irre- trievable breakdown. Fudging up evidence was too much for the high-minded, however, It is always a great pity that the exponents of libertarianism should contrive machinery to enforce the new freedoms which is actually worse than the old, and sometimes anom- alous, restrictions.
Finally, however, the Commissioners are to be complimented on maintaining the value of high ethical conduct inside marriage.
Sometimes it is a bit too high. The safe, western, bourgeois relationships described in these pages at times seem so overwhelmingly good that most real marriages must appear a bit shabby in comparison. The problem had also occurred, it will be remembered, when theologians recently fell upon the obvious truth that sex for the unmarried could be ethical. The trouble was that the ethical requirements they then stipulated were so demanding as to make it incon- ceivable that any couple could actually meet them, let alone enjoy the consequences. It also had the unfortunate corollary of making the conditions of sex inside marriage look positively filthy, so much lower were the ethical calculations which were in that case considered the minimum standard. But for all that, as this report establishes, churchmen are still more sensitive and more balanced in the treatment of such questions than are their lay colleagues in the morality, business.,
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