This book is only first on my list because it is an Interlibrary Loan book with a short deadline (now, anyway) that happened to be sitting around my office on the top of the stack while I was having computer issues. I found it while heading down a rabbit hole that had something to do with theological discouragement or prohibition on remarriage, thinking specifically of Finwë, and the theologians Origen and Tertullian. I am not sure how useful it will be, but it is an interesting study.
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From the Introduction:
[According to the imperial officials who were called upon to condemn Pelagius] The Pelagians seemed not to take seriously the horror of death. They were said to have claimed that Adam and Eve had been created mortal, and they would have died a natural death whether they had disobeyed God or not. To laypeople with a healthy fear of death for themselves and a poignant sense of grief for the deaths of their wives and children (a grief that many still expressed on their tombstones), this view seemed shockingly insensitive. How could it be that God, when He was free to make humanity as gloriously as He wished, had been content to make, in Adam and Eve, two shoddy creatures who already had death in their bones? It was a "disgusting beginning to the human race, [to create] persons who would be born with nothing in store for them but death." (lxiii) [The quote at the end is from the Imperial Edict of 418.]
What strikes me particularly about this particular objection to the Pelagians is how it resembles the treatment of mortality for the race of Men in The Silmarillion, particularly as compared to and perceived by the immortal Elves. Tolkien is know to have denied any specific theological underpinnings to his mythology, but this seems compelling to me.
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By the late fourth century, a new categorization of the faithful had emerged in the Latin Church. This concentrated on the body alone. Different people were held to enjoy different degrees of prominence in the Church according to whether or not (or how much) sex had touched their bodies. Virgins and celibates were top; widows were second; the married were third. (lxvi) [Jovinian and Augustine didn't approve, btw.]
I would not at all, ever, advocate seeing anything in Tolkien's works in these terms. In fact, the first thing to occur to me is that virginity is not particularly idealized. Case in point: who better to be virginal than Galadriel? And she is married. Sex seems to me a non-issue. Nevertheless, we do have the unmarried, some widows, and the married. Marriage, I think, is privileged in this construct. The two are--in the right circumstances--enriched. The celibates are limited--separating those who are presumed to marry eventually from those who will never wed--and seem limited to Frodo and Bilbo (wizards, for the moment--and perhaps forever--notwithstanding; actually, why don't the Maiar marry? Some may... In fact, yes. Need to confirm.)
The other thing that strikes me is that this is a "problem" that has been noted in the Twentieth Century Church as well--the promotion of a vocation to celibacy above the vocation of marriage within the Church. It is one of the reasons that St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body talks, and his engagement with the subject of marriage as holiness [reference needed] were so revolutionary. So hmmm--old problem. Until the moment that someone realized that both the ideal of consecrated virginity and the Sacrament of Marriage left little theological room for single, unmarried, unconsecrated celibate individuals. Frodo and Bilbo both live a version of the ideal bachelor's life--at least at some point. But does their involvement with the ring change that somehow?Ch 1: Body and City
It's hard not to think of the Ents, here, in this description of the cultural attitude toward marriage and childbearing in the Early Christian period, when St. Paul was preaching virginity:
The inhabitants of an ancient Mediterranean community, such as the little town of Seleuci or the inland city of Iconium (modern Konya), where Thecla had been so infelicitously espoused to Thamyris, knew very well that a fertile Mediterranean landscape, dotted with ancient towns and immemorial temples, would die for lack of men. They knew that they had few resources for continuity and cohesion more dependable, and for which they were more directly responsible, than their own bodies. If their little world was not to come to an end for lack of citizens, they must reproduce it, every generation, by marriage, intercourse, and the begetting and rearing of children. (7)
Of course, to the Ents, as immortals, the urgency of procreation was removed, but this made them more able to slip into complacency with regard to their reproduction. What I like is that, while the need to continue to maintain and build the population drives these citizens to marry and reproduce, and the need to reproduce is the chief goal of marriage, and a strong reason to oppose preservation of virginity ("even a philosopher could be challenged to 'bequeath a copy of himself' to posterity" (7)--again, something the Ents would not have understood), in Tolkien the emphasis is not on the desire to reproduce or the need to reproduce, which is only notable in the absence of reproduction (with Finwë being, perhaps, a notable exception). Marriage, in the above account, is purely understood in service of the State by way of the body. By contrast, in the story of the Ents, we see that marriage can only be maintained by attention to the needs of the individuals, which leads to the maintenance of the union for the good of the soul and, naturally and incidentally, the maintenance of the population/race.
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If C. S. Lewis had paid closer attention to his Plutarch, perhaps his ideas about women in The Four Loves would have been different? Or maybe not. But at least Plutarch found value in bringing a woman into the man's intellectual sphere and having her grow with him, which C. S. Lewis rejects as being, more or less, too much trouble and too disruptive to male friendship:
Plutarch warned Pollianus that women were intractable creatures. Left to themselves, they "conceive many untoward ideas low designs and emotions."
But he urged the conscientious young man not to give up. Pollianus could absorb Eurydice into his own, grave world. She must eat with him and his friends. Otherwise she would learn to "stuff herself when alone." She must share the same gods with him, rather than withdraw to the rustling powers that ruled the women's quarters. (13)
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It [a relationship with a woman] gave him the nearest that he might ever come in his life to an unmotivated friendship, based on his own talent as the moral guide of his wife. (13)
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We meet such women on the sarcophagi of Italy and Asia Minor in the second and third centuries. In them, the wife was shown standing attentively, or sitting, in front of her husband, as he raised his right hand to make a point, while in his left hand he displayed the scroll which represented the superior literary culture on which he based his claim to outright dominance, in society at large as in his marriage. (13)
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She would not be left to her own devices, free to run to seed unnoticed in the women's quarters. She had been swept, by her cultivated husband, into the charmed circle of a shared excellence. (14)
The image in Brown's account of the woman in a male intellectual circle compares strikingly to C. S. Lewis's image of a woman who, having an acquaintance with one member of a circle of friends, enters it and inevitably changes the discourse because she cannot possibly understand the discourse. Lewis was seemingly willing to leave women "to run to seed unnoticed in the women's quarters." Apparently Plutarch's Advice on Marriage was "destined to enjoy a long future in Christian sermonizing" (14), presumably the emphasis on the intellectual and moral inferiority of women that necessitated their tutoring by husbands.
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An unexpected intimacy/privilege in ancient marriage:
Later in life, a man would expect to find in his wife the one thing that he could not expect to find among his peers--honesty. Parrhésia, unflinching frankness with one's fellows and superiors, was an infinitely rare and precious commodity. It could be had only from the only two authoritative figures who stood to one side of political life--from a philosopher and from one's wife. We should not underestimate how heavily the need for intimacy of this kind weighed upon ancient men. A fourth-century pagan, Praetexatus, wrote of his wife Paulina:
To you I could entrust the fast-closed depths of my own mind...
And so as friends we have been joined in trust,
By long acquaintance, by shared initiations of the gods,
All in one bond of faith, one single heart, united in one mind. (15)
This parrhésia was "the privileged freedom of speech, of a Roman wife to her husband," invoked here in an account of Theodora "berat[ing] Emperor Justinian for his loss of nerve during the Nika Riot" in the sixth century (15). I feel like there is a kind of analogue in Arwen's final admonition to Aragorn, though her advice, in that case, is misplaced.Ch. 2: From Apostle to Apologist: Sexual Order and Sexual Renunciation in the Early Church
As Paul cites the reasons that not marrying can be harmful in his First Letter to the Corinthians, he is speaking against the backdrop of the social disorder in Corinth that is leading some to renounce the institutions that are necessary for the continuation of that society (including marriage and slavery), and with the understanding that his own chastity was from God, a "prophetic gift of continence" (56). While repeating the common Jewish teaching that "it was better to marry than to be aflame with passion" (55), he also acknowledged that others might be called to that prophetic continence:
Certainly, in Corinth, Paul accepted the possibility of groups that included mature continent women He even envisioned some young, virgin children, committed to a future of perpetual chastity. These continent persons shared a gift on which he was prepared to speak with transparent enthusiasm:
'The appointed time has grown very short....For the form of this world is passing away... The unmarried man is anxious [only] about the affairs of the Lord... And the unmarried woman or virgin girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit.'
They lived better prepared than were the married for the great travail that would preceded the coming of Jesus. By contrast, marriage was not a "gift." Rather, the fact of being married betrayed an absence of God's call to continence. The married lacked the supreme quality of the undivided heart: "the married person is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and he is divided." (56)
Marriage, like household slavery, was a "calling" devoid of glamor. It did not attract close attention as the present age slipped silently toward its end. The "shortening of the time" itself would soon sweep it away. (57)
St. Paul's rhetoric of division is echoed in a curious way when Frodo leaves Middle-earth. Against the backdrop of Sam's marriage to Rosie and their family, Frodo, himself fractured by the Ring and its loss, says that Sam needs to be "one and whole": "You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and be, and to do." By implication, either Sam is torn in two by his constant worry for Frodo at Bag End, or Sam could potentially be torn in two by his longing to follow Frodo, or both. Either way, Frodo tells Sam not to be torn in two, which seems to suggest that it is not the fact of Sam's marriage that tears him in two--he is able to be whole in his marriage, and (at least for now) that is the ideal state. But is it, then, his previous status as Ring-bearer (alluded to by Frodo in the preceding lines), or his devotion to Frodo (who is, after all, his Master) that stands to disrupt the unity of his marriage, or is it, indeed, the marriage itself that is the distraction? How comfortable is Tolkien with the idea of Sam being involved ("anxious about"?) worldly affairs? Since I do address this in an upcoming publication, at least in part, I don't want to say too much about it here. This is something that certainly needs to be teased out, particularly given a conclusion to Sam's part of the story that Tolkien envisioned, but that (thankfully) never actually made it into the final version of LOTR. What chiefly interests me here is whether Tolkien's vision, here, of wholeness is opposed to St. Paul's because it marriage is wholeness, or whether the ideal is the departure for the West, and marriage really is a distraction for Sam (if a temporary one)--Sam is not called to that other (higher?) vocation. Sam's marriage, as Frodo represents it, does seem to be a service to the community, as his family becomes a prominent one, propagating and preserving wisdom.
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The chapter goes on to state that "letters ascribed to Saint Paul were, in reality, assembled by his followers in the two generations after his death" as these followers tried to correct the scattering of "unworkable communities" across the Mediterranean as a result of Paul's preaching. These "wished to present Paul, an apostle notably fired by the ideal of an 'undistracted' life in Christ, as a man concerned to validate the structures of the married household" (57). Into this context, Brown situates the Letter to the Ephesians, with its use of "the relations of husband and wife as a reflection of the primal solidarity brought back by Christ to the universe and to the church" ("Husbands, love your wives....) (57). "In the church, as in the city, the concord of a married couple was made to bear the heavy weight of expressing the ideal harmony of the whole society" (57).
I think this is true in Sam's marriage, even more so in Aragorn's marriage to Arwen (though I can't get over the death of Aragorn and how it is depicted), and in Eowyn and Faramir's marriage. Perhaps it is true of marriage more generally in LOTR?
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