The great English essayist and possibly best prose writer of
the twentieth century, G. K. Chesterton once remarked to a man who claimed that
Christianity had been tried and found wanting that, on the contrary, “it had
been found difficult and left untried.” He
might have been speaking of any number of aspects of Christianity, whether
belief in the Incarnation and crucifixion, a
stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles or idea that
the humble and poor are blessed rather than the rich and proud. To some significant extent, I rather suspect
that he was speaking in large part about Christian beliefs on human
sexuality.
In no age have Christian sexual teachings been popular. It is sometimes claimed today that Jesus gave
commands that kept with the spirit of his time, but do not fit with ours. This is nonsense. Jesus’ concept of human sexuality was no more
popular in his age then than today. He
rejected divorce in an age that demanded it with the same vehemence with which
modern society does. He and apostles always
assumed that marriage was between a man
and a women, even Paul writing to a pagan Roman society that was no more
sympathetic to Christian sexual teaching than pagan modern society (Rom
1:26-27).
The strange thing about modern distaste for Church teaching
on monogamy is that in demanding monogamy without divorce, the Church, as C.S.
Lewis, remarked in Mere Christianity,
does not demand people do something utterly foreign to them. The Church did not force Romeo to promise
Juliet eternal constancy and love, he did that one his own. Songs, poems, love stories, both modern and
ancient, are full of promises of eternal love and fidelity. Songs promise that “I will love you forever;”
they never promise, “I will love you until next Tuesday.” For all the commonness of modern divorce and
promiscuity, man cannot easily escape at least the ideal of fidelity. The Church does not impose this ideal, it
simply demands that man keep it.
At the lowest level, keeping this promise of fidelity is a
matter of integrity. When a man does
what his conscience tells him that he ought do, promise his love forever, he
makes an oath that it is a simple matter of honesty and integrity to keep. Robert Bolt’s Thomas More, in A Man for All Seasons, on being asked
why he would not take an oath to save his life, replied that he would not take
an oath that he could not keep. He explained
that “when a man takes an oath, he takes his own self into his hands, like
water, and if he opens his fingers, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”
Keeping to one woman (or man), though, is not simply a
matter of honesty or integrity, but adventure.
As Chesterton remarked, there is simply no fun in taking an oath that I
cannot be kept to. There is no adventure
in keeping an promise only when it is easy to do so, or following a road only
until the trail darkens. What adventure
would it have been in Lord of the Rings
had Fordo turned back at the first sound of a black rider’s footsteps or if
Hector fled when the first Greek ships approached Troy? What if St. Francis gave up at his first
hunger pangs? What if Christ turned
back to Galilee at the first shrieking devil?
This comes to the final point. Frodo did not turn back at the first sounds
of a black rider’s steps. He saw his
quest through fire and foes, through darkness and thunder, through fear and
doubt and back home. And he did not come
back the same. His enemy, Saruman, on
his return said to him in awe, “you have grown... you are wise and cruel, you
have robbed my revenge of its sweetness and I must go hence, indebted to your
mercy...” No one comes through trials
the same. Fulton Sheen liked to remark
on the spiritual law running though the universe that “no one shall be crowned
unless first he has struggled.” The
adventure leaves no man (or woman) who sees it through the same, if only he
have the courage to undertake it.
