The Death of Marcus Aurelius

The Death of Marcus Aurelius

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Musonius Rufus, Lectures 13.1


Lecture 13: What is the chief end of marriage?

That the primary end of marriage is community of life with a view to the procreation of children: The husband and wife, he used to say, should come together for the purpose of making a life in common and of procreating children, and furthermore of regarding all things in common between them, and nothing peculiar or private to one or the other, not even their own bodies.

Part two in an uncomfortable series on Musonius, on the bits that no self-respecting post-modernist will touch with a ten-foot pole.

As a young fellow, I was deeply confused about what it meant to be married, since I ran into so many different approaches and attitudes. My own generation was at a sort of a threshold, where we somehow thought that the stale old ways were giving ways to vibrant new ones. Beaver Cleaver was slowly on his way out, and Roseanne Conner was just around the corner.

Were those the only options I had available to me? Was that all there was, a choice between a nuclear family and a nuclear fallout?

For many people, marriage was just a social institution, something that self-respecting people were eventually expected to do. If you aspired to the upper middle class, you went to school and jumped through all the hoops. Then you got a nice job, and you made some money. Then you somehow arranged a classy wedding with someone else just like you, and you posed for pictures with big smiles. Then you had a carefully planned child or two, and you continued posing for smiling pictures with them while you were on vacation. Then you retired in comfort, and posed in more smiling pictures with your grandchildren on the holidays. Then you died, and everyone said how happy you had been for the whole time.

I know, that sounds like a rather nasty way to put it, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t make it any less true, or any less sad. How empty and tiresome!

There were other people who disparaged marriage constantly and they told me how it was a complete waste of my time. In the refined and progressive circles I eventually found myself in, divorce was a badge of pride. It almost seemed like the inability to make love work was a sign that you were going somewhere. The power to “move on” from another person, someone you had once promised to care for until you were parted by death, made it clear that your priorities were firmly centered on your own gratification. Was there a fundamental disagreement? Remove the offender, and go find someone new. Was there a serious hardship? Make it easier by throwing out the bathwater, and the babies along with it.

Does it seem nasty for me to say it? Not nearly as nasty as if I chose to do it. How selfish and vain!

I could not come to terms with either model, since neither embraced unconditional love. The one told me that my attachments were a soulless obligation, and the other told me that my commitments were a throw of the dice. Is it any wonder, a few decades later, that fewer and fewer people want to marry anymore?

I took my own terrible missteps, of course, in trying to find love. It felt bad enough to be thought of as a dull, awkward, and unattractive fellow, and it felt far worse when I latched onto the first person who paid me any attention at all. My romantic illusions had nothing to do with love either; it was hardly my place to throw stones at the yuppies and the libertines.

After I had rather dramatically abandoned my search for any deeper companionship, it somehow came to me while I wasn’t looking. There were struggles, and there were fights, and there were times when everything seemed wasted, and yet there was always something that remained constant. That “something” involved two parts, exactly the ones my own family had vainly tried to teach me, and exactly the ones Musonius praises as the joined ends of marriage.

The passage above can sound trite if you just mouth the words, and yet they are deeply moving if you attend to their meaning. Nature does nothing in vain. There are all sorts of friendships, but nothing can be as complete as the bond between a man and a woman, as each was made for the other, in all possible ways.

I give some things to some people, and that is good, but I give everything to my wife, and that is better. “Community of life”, where nothing is private, is not just a phrase.

And it is no accident of Nature that a total sharing of life is necessarily ordered to a stewardship over new life.

During that frustrating time when I was in college, and through almost all of what I call my later Wilderness Years, one of the most popular sitcoms on television was Married. . . With Children. It could be rather funny, and yet it was also quite cynical and depressing. I do wonder if a whole generation was inadvertently turned off from the very idea of family by some of the entertainment we consumed.

I recall sitting around in someone’s dorm room one night, and most everyone was busy getting drunk. My girlfriend was also busy, flirting with the new handsome, and rich, transfer student. That show came on the television, and I actually listened to the lyrics to theme song for the first time:

Love and marriage, love and marriage
They go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you, brother
You can't have one without the other

I know the show was making fun of it all, and maybe Frank Sinatra was originally making fun of it all as well, but I suddenly felt ashamed that any of us thought it was worth making fun of to begin with.

Whenever anyone “dated” anyone else in college, the first question was always if you had “done it” yet. The second question was always if you had worn a condom. Sex without love, and sex without children, without a glimmer of commitment to be found anywhere.

How much more unnatural could you possibly get?

Written in 12/1999

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