A good marriage is made of two coordinated kinds of love: 1) the intersubjective immediacy of “in love”, which is the passive element (it happens to you), and 2) the objective abstraction of “the relationship”, which is the active element (it is something the couple preserves, improves, sometimes nurses back to health, sometimes rescues from imminent disaster — and occasionally brings back from the dead).
“In love” is a representative manifestation of grace, and “the relationship” is a representative manifestation of faith. Marriage is a sacrament by virtue of its representative manifestation of religious phenomena. A sacrament clarifies and substantiates religion in “real life” by manifesting representatively, or if you prefer by being symbol.
In a good marriage, grace nourishes the couple’s faith, and faith serves the return of grace. In times of grace, the grace is invested in strengthening the marriage; and in times of faith, the couple adheres to practices that preserve the conditions for the return of grace.
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There are also some marriages that have only one or the other kind of love.
Marriages of passion survive as long as grace persists, but when grace goes — and it always eventually goes — the couple has “fallen out of love”, which, of course, as every good modern knows, can only mean immediate divorce.
Marriages of duty survive unconditionally — with or without grace, and more or less independently of grace. Such couples denigrate being “in love” as child’s play, as a means to an end of establishing a dutiful marriage. When grace goes, the couple lets it fall away like stages of a rocket. All that uplifting heat and fire of youthful love did its job of launching them into the cold heights of maturity where adults do what they should because that is what they should do. Such marriages last and last, and their endurance (plus their procreative productivity) is their proof of success.
There are different balances of grace and faith in different marriages. Knowledge of marriage and skill in marriage does not guarantee the survival of a marriage, any more than living prudently guarantees the long life of an individual. It just helps in avoiding pointless mistakes, whether the mistake is enduring too much or enduring too little.
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Regarding marriages of passion. All grace feels eternal, which is easily and very commonly confused with temporal permanence. A young couple cannot imagine ever not being in love 4ever: “Look how the whole world has changed! How could it change back with all we’ve seen and known?”
But grace is not factual knowledge, but vision, and vision is painfully autonomous.
Vision manifests as a particular way to have factual knowledge. Vision is the ordering background of fact — the body into which facts are meaningfully assimilated as knowledge. What we experience as seen are objects of knowledge, the facts. We know with vision (along the vision), and this is what makes facts significant or irrelevant. It is this field of significance that we wish to preserve when we white-knuckle significant facts, as if these facts are the significance itself. We grip objects, as if it they are the handle of the whole vision. It’s a voodoo move: possess the enemy’s fingernail, and possess the enemy himself. Possess the fruit, and possess the whole orchard.
It’s a natural mistake. We do not experience vision as such while we know, any more than we experience our eyes while seeing objects with them. Blurry eyes see a blurry world; they do not experience the blurriness as belonging to their eyes until they reflect on the situation. A vision in love knows the beloved…
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Subjective vision comes and goes as it will. We do not command it — it commands us. When we obey the commands of grace that is the pinnacle of freedom. And make no mistake: this subjectivity is not private, and is not confined to our craniums. No — subjective vision in experienced as coming from beyond us; it descends on us, penetrates, transfigures us and the entire world, and it becomes our own vision, and much more than our own.
What we do command (sort of) is objective knowledge. We can at least control its comings and goings to the extend of our memory capacity.
Excessively objective people fear being forsaken by what they most love, so they reduce the entire world to possessable objects, mastering or evading what might possess them and make them lose control. They objectify everything that can be objectified and reject the rest.
The one they love is another discrete individual, to be experienced from an enjoyable distance.
A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky. — Rilke
The “relationship” is a formal arrangement consisting of an official status, a set of rules, concrete circumstances, and perhaps a pattern of habits. Or, for these very reasons, relationships should be avoided altogether, or changed fundamentally to exclude some of these constraining formalities.
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My strong opinion is that humanity, and everything pertaining to humanity, is trying to be marriage, and has much to learn from marriage.
Europes’s marriage to objectivity, passionate in the 17th and 18th century, enjoyed its dalliances in the 19th century, and suffered its storms and coolings throughout the 20th century, has grown thoroughly cold and loveless and a matter of pure duty (or fear of being alone?), with no intention of future intimacy.
We crave grace, but do we know how to make room for it? Do we know how to welcome it home?