Love Began With Shakespeare
Piety and Avian Epistemology
There is an amusing line from Philip Larkin's cheeky Annus Murabilis, that “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles' first LP.”
Yet, something more amusing rules the modern mind: the idea that marrying for love started with Shakespeare, or the romanticists, or the feminists, or somewhere not too far behind. The idea is that for most of human history, marriage was transactional, or for bare survival, and that it was only recently that the human heart started beating for love, and butterflies started to flutter in the belly. Prior to that, the human heart was stone cold, as were marriages, and butterflies were only mythical maggots. This is not only untrue, but simply impossible. We don’t know this, however, because we live in a metaphysically impoverished age.
As an aside, there is something thrilling about disillusionment. That is, the ability to unveil and disenchant enchanted things; to remove the magic from the appearance or substance of things. Sir Roger Scruton describes the appeal as, “We watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to earth.” Which is the particular ailment of the mind which looks upon the norms and traditions of the past with the adolescence of the present and casts judgement of that immature sort which pubescent teenagers inflict on their parents.
The thought that “Across cultures, marriage hasn’t always been about love, or even about women’s agency,” is one of those disenchanting tropes that has now been overplayed and rehearsed to a point of insipidity. Why is this? Because we have become avian in our conceptions, amnesic in our observations, and stumped in our judgements. In simpler words, we have become like birds who are distracted by every particular motion, unable to stay and contemplate enduring things (beings), losing all metaphysical vision. We swim in the tasteless soup of historical particulars, failing to see the durable elements of existence, such as love.
When people say things like “In many early societies, it functioned as a transaction that unified warring families and strengthened kingdoms. And in that exchange, the woman (often young and voiceless), was the bridge,” it is because they are locked into the psychology of the day and cannot see beyond its bars. For if they could, they would realise two things: first, that erotic love and desire are so elementary to human life that if all marriages everywhere were transactions —until the present day— the human race would have exploded. For the erotic passions, which have as their aim to congregate the male and female, are like a volatile canister which, if not properly handled, will light the house aflame. How then could this have been so suppressed that it wasn’t until Shakespeare that people knew to marry for love?
This first problem relies on a sample problem, of course: it is always a sample of the elites of society. Who else had the lands and kingdoms to over which to barter their children? What did the poor farmer have that he would give his daughter to secure? The princess was always the prize. It would seem as if nobility and royalty came with responsibilities. Who cares for the cobbler’s daughter, save the young man who truly loved her? Or the other richer gentleman who had nothing to lose? How many of these richer gentlemen existed by the way? Thus, from this sample set, the bulletin has gone flying across the seas that marriage was a cold contract until God sent Shakespeare to preach the gospel of love. If the erotic desire was so suppressed until “the veil of modernity fell over our rituals,” how do you suppose that a race which congregates by that desire, as fuel to machine, survived the years without devolution and implosion? Should we take our sample set from The Bible for starters, considering its age, the theme of the erotic is everywhere —between man and wife: Abraham caressed his wife in semi-public view, Isaac loved Rebekah in an instant, Jacob worked fourteen years for the woman he loved. This is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, by whom God calls Himself; these men yearned for their women with total abandon. How then do we suppose that everyone was a cold-blooded spouse until recently when “love, equality, and autonomy” stood around Shakespeare like Peter, James, and John?
The second thing we would realise if we were not as distracted as birds in our metaphysical vision is that it is not that we now marry for love, but that we marry now only for love, or might I say in the name of love —setting aside the question whether it is love at all.
It is not that we now marry for love. Which, as I will show, is not a win. But that we now marry in the name of love, a love that has gone mad, in the same respect as virtues going mad, as when Chesterton says that “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” In the same vein, “marrying for love” is not something to be praised, particularly when that love has gone berserk by being isolated from other virtues and wandering alone.
As when the writer says that “From Mesopotamian dowries to Confucian filial piety, marriage was how a woman was transferred from one owner (her parents) to another (her husband). Her name would change, and her purpose would become: serve, bear, endure, and be f***g quiet.” (Emphasis mine.)
What, one ought to ask, is wrong with Confucian filial piety? Or just filial piety? What part of marrying for love intrinsically opposes piety —that is, one’s duty to their efficient causes; duty to parents, tribe, and nation? Is there anything inherent to love which is opposed to the aforementioned duties?
No, comes the response. For without piety, love has no true form and expression, as piety is the spine and lumber of society; “honour thy father and mother, so that your days be long.” For it is piety which says, in the words of Cordelia, Lear’s daughter, “According to my bond; no more nor less.” Without piety, there is no morality. Without morality, all you have is immorality. With immorality, you have degradation and degeneration. With degeneration, we are reduced to brutes. What then is a marriage of love that is removed from filial piety except uber-brutism? If we might stretch it at all, to consider that the unitive and procreative purposes of marriage are joined at the head (not the hip), isn’t marriage in and of itself a type of piety; a duty to the human race? As it stands, at the root of anti-natalism common to modern marriages itself is a stringent impiety. It is a refusal to ‘pay forward’ a good deed done for you, whereas civilisations survive only when each generation ‘pays it forward.’
Which is why this furore about marrying for love leads us back to denigrating the content and objects in fairy tales and folklores. To avoid realising our folly, we must become wise in our own eyes, and discount the wisdom of tradition and our priors. Once disenchantment begins, all wombs of magic and wisdom must be ripped open in a barbarous attempt and treated with a cynicism that is not befitting of rational souls. To retain our uber-brutism, we must refuse everything which has its aim our ennoblement.
However, it is not fairy tales that are the targets, but ideals, of which fairy tales and lore are merely vehicles of these ideals. When the avian cynicism kicks in, we want to watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to earth. But since we can’t get to the ideals and noble forms more directly, we thrust at their harbingers.
In defence of fairy-tales, folklores, and the princesses who were “adorned and waiting, had no right to be the agent of her own fate, but the mere prize of someone else’s conquest,” I say that, in Chesterton’s words, “They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic…Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.” It is not history that judges metaphysics; metaphysics judges history.
Fairy tales, folklores, and myths are the metaphysical capsules digestible for the common intellect. As the philosopher says, “whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders.” History comes after metaphysics —and by extension, wonder, myth, fairytales and folklores—ontologically and logically, even though not chronologically (in our perception).
All this to say, that the charge against ancient societies, that they bartered children in marriage, absent of love, fails in the metaphysical court, but wins those with avian epistemology. And the other instance of repudiating filial piety and folklore merely reveals our current folly. Perhaps we ought to learn what those princesses knew: that marriage is not only about the individuals within it; the family and tribe also are invested in its outcome, as the success or failure thereof produces a ripple effect that rings through the ages. Perhaps we should realise that what we refer to as “marrying for love” is virtue gone berserk and stark individualism driving hard against customary conscience. And to do anything against conscience is neither right nor safe.
My argument is summarised thus: marrying for love has always been, and will always be, necessary, but not sufficient. Here I stand.
Your meme, about marriage, because, why not?
