Eighty-two years ago this month, Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke at the marriage of Hervé de la Goublaye de Ménorval and a fellow palaeontologist, Éliane Basse. Let’s revisit that sermon to see why Archbishop Charles Scicluna is right to speak up against the principle of gay marriage – but also why Catholic politicians would be mistaken to follow him.
In English, it’s difficult to capture the special quality of Teilhard’s French. It has a surface tranquillity and an underlying passion. He speaks, as perhaps only the French can, with the ardour of reason and the cool objectivity of non-possessive love. The fire and ice of his prose are trying to capture something essential about his vision of marriage: a rational harnessing of the energies of love that would be, in human history, the second discovery of fire.
As both a scientist and a priest, he was interested in human origins. He understood marriage in both biblical and evolutionary terms. In particular, he saw marriage as an integral part of the future of humanity, as an increasingly organised single nervous system with God as its mysterious centre.
If you think this is all a bit too intense and poetic for a column, that’s my very point. If it has no place in a column, what place does it have in politics and legislation?
Teilhard had his intellectual idiosyncrasies but his vision of marriage is quintessentially Christian. The Christian vision is very distinctive and even peculiar when compared with other visions of marriage in history, let alone the tepid bureaucratic formalities of civil marriage.
Let’s let Teilhard speak for himself. Addressing the 36-year-old bride, he told her never to regret the long hours she had spent in the laboratory, the painstaking editing of notes and the difficult journeys across the vast expanses of the world. (She had no regrets and went on to become a distinguished scientist.)
Weren’t these adventures of body and spirit necessary, Teilhard asked the bride, to find in the groom a perfect companion, a fellow industrious explorer? Having linked marriage to her life’s adventures, Teilhard proceeded to link up that ephemeral event of June 11, 1935 to nothing less than the Alpha and the Omega.
“It required, Mademoiselle, millions of years for life, under creative direction, to form the heart and intelligence that your mother has transmitted to you. It again required all the labour and all the risks of your early youth to achieve in yourself a being capable of self-giving.”
He went on: “And now, I say, the same law that wished that you prepare yourselves, separately, for union, expects that you each achieve the other, one for the other, in union. What will be the never-ending story of your mutual conquest? Only God knows...”
But, he assured them solemnly (“in the name of all human experience”): “You will not be happy… unless your lives intertwine and propel themselves, adventurously bending towards the future, in the passion of one larger than you both.”
Let’s take a deep breath and lock up the absinthe.
Teilhard gives, in 20th-century language, a rendition of Christ’s teaching on marriage (and excoriation of divorce) in the Gospel, where the indissoluble marriage of male and female is embedded in the order of creation.
If you’re going to speak about the institution of marriage, be historical. Do not peddle myths
It took Christ’s listeners aback and it’s been taking entire peoples aback ever since. It’s not a description of how marriage has been in human history. It’s a critique of what human beings have made of marriage across the ages.
Divorce has been the norm, not the exception. Polygyny has been common and polyandry (one wife with several husbands) not unknown. Marriage has routinely been subordinated to family interests and property considerations.
Church history has been one long story of sustained criticism of marital arrangements in social practice: the excessive power of the pater familias here, the sexual hypocrisy there, the stifling strictures of family honour and pride everywhere.
If this vision of marital love seems natural to you – natural enough that you think you can do away with the frippery of its supernatural belief and ‘heterosexism’ – that’s only a testament to the success with which this peculiar vision has spread.
But it’s not something hunter gatherers had. Moses (according to Jesus) thought the Jews couldn’t handle it. It’s not compatible with belief in reincarnation. Or with a stoic or Buddhist belief in limiting desire. Although the Quran urges husband and wife to be like “garments to each other”, Islam includes a prenuptial agreement (in case of divorce) in its marriage contracts and permits polygyny.
You can see why Mgr Scicluna is right to speak up for the Gospel’s vision of marriage. If not him, who? It’s unreasonable for anyone to expect him to compromise.
But in speaking up for it, he is doing so not only against the State but also against any other vision of marriage that falls short of it. And all of them do (even if on gay marriage itself other traditional visions of marriage are in agreement with that of the Gospel).
Putting the matter this way, however, shows why politicians – even fully paid-up Catholic politicians – cannot follow Mgr Scicluna’s line as legislators.
The State cannot offer a form of marriage whose meaning depends on Christian belief and spiritual practice. There would be no point in offering civil marriage if it’s identical to that of the Catholic Church.
It’s got to be a form of marriage that sets and defends the ground rules of legal rights and duties. But, otherwise, it has to be empty of emotional, symbolic content. How else can it accommodate Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans and cynics?
That is, in fact, what we’ve had all along for the past 40 years. Anyone who’s attended a civil marriage ceremony will have noticed how dry and perfunctory the actual marriage ceremony, officiated by the State official, is.
The power, sentiment and choreography in these ceremonies is something that the bride and groom bring. This being Malta, a lot of it is inspired by Christianity – but that is truly, in this case, frippery.
If this is true, doesn’t that mean that civil marriage is no different – except in name – from civil unions? Yes, exactly.
Oh, by the way, our anti-divorce campaigners said the same thing back in 2011. If divorce were permitted, they argued, then civil marriage would be no different from ‘engagement’.
They were right then (apart from not noticing that that is what civil marriage already was in practice). Why are they forgetting it now when arguing that gay marriage would demote the true meaning of marriage?
None of this is a licence for unprincipled relativism. There is a principle that should guide Catholic politicians. It’s not Christian sexual ethics, though. It’s the threefold value of truth.
First, there is truth as history. If you’re going to speak about the institution of marriage, be historical. Do not peddle myths.
Second, there is truth as promise. If you promised gay marriage less than a month ago, you can’t say you’re not bound by that promise because you didn’t win the election. At least, not if you intend to defend truth-telling in politics, against the predations of opportunism and superficiality.
Finally, there is truth as evidence. There is no evidence whatsoever that calling gay civil unions ‘marriage’ has any significant impact on the dominant current cultural understanding of marriage.
In traditional Christianity, Satan was the Prince of Lies, not the Duchess of Sex. Good news for our Catholic politicians. They can get on with the job of finding a place for truth in politics and evidence in policies.
ranierfsadni@europe.com