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Excersus LXIII: Lust Be Honest
It is a delicious but maddening irony that the very people who clamor so loudly for the sanctity of marriage now, namely the Christian far right, are the very ones who historically did all they could to destroy what they regarded as the pagan institution of marriage. For a millenium and a half, the Catholic Church resisted developing a full and independent marriage rite of its own, hoping against hope that people would give up on the idea of finding happiness in each other and instead turn to the Lord, meaning the priests, for their purpose in life. Tertullian said that "marriage consists essentially in fornication" and Cyprian thought it irrelevant now that the world was decently populated. The ploy didn't work, and the Church was eventually forced in the sixteenth century to adopt marriage as a sacrament, borrowing heavily from the best pagan traditions, and under intense pressure from the rise of the Reformation. Now, a brief four hundred years later, all that we hear is how deeply concerned the Church is with the sanctity of marriage, the very thing it fought with all its might to deny and destroy. |
