Still we need to ask: what is marriage?

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So, what is marriage? Does the world we live in today require a new definition from what has been handed down as part of the wisdom tradition of ages past? Are humans now somehow different from humans who came before and who lived in a myriad of cultural groupings, large and small, but who had a common insight into the symmetry of man and woman and child? 

From that rich vein of experience that is history, the Catholic Church is clear on the anthropology of the human person, even before revelation offers its confirmation. The Church's study of how to be optimally human, that is, how each person— and each society—can flourish, has come to be termed the "theology of the body". 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children. Christ the Lord raised marriage between the baptized to the dignity of a sacrament (#1660).

Writer Leila Miller comments:

Jesus spoke about marriage as a one-flesh union that only husbands and wives can form [...] Marriage is a special kind of communion between one man and one woman that is ordered toward their mutual love and toward the procreation of children—bonding and babies. 

In 1930, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage, Casti Connubii, which says that “the child holds the first place” as a blessing in marriage. Second is “the blessing of conjugal honor which consists in the mutual fidelity of the spouses in fulfilling the marriage contract” (19).

This understanding of marriage is not merely a “Catholic thing.” It is universal, a part of our human nature. All cultures in human history recognized, until about two seconds ago, historically speaking, that marriage is a union of man and woman ordered to children and families.

As the Catechism says: The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes (1603).

Christians are "imposing their view”

Leila Miller tackles the difficulty some people have, perhaps those who did not have an intellectually challenging experience during their higher education and continue to live in a bubble of an myopic present:

People who claim that the Church is “imposing” its view of marriage on others don’t realize that anyone who claims to define marriage for himself also “imposes” a view of marriage. For example, laws that define marriage as “the union of two adults” impose that view on polygamists and those who believe in child brides (both of which are practices that, unlike SSM, actually have historical precedent).

The only way not to impose a definition of marriage is to say that marriage is “what anyone wants it to be”—in which case it ceases to be anything at all. 

Christianity did not exist until a little over 2,000 years ago, and yet, until just 2001 when the Netherlands became the first to legalize “gay marriage,” the entire history of the pagan and non-Christian world had only known bride-and-groom marriages. 

Neither ancient cultures that approved of homosexuality nor modern atheistic regimes that are fiercely opposed to religion had or have “gay marriage.” 

Why? Because the natural-law understanding of marriage (conjugal union of bride and bridegroom, woman and man) has always been a universal human understanding. The conjugal view of marriage is the only view that explains why government has an interest in regulating marriage in the first place: because it’s the only type of union that produces a child.

This type of relationship is unique among all others, and society rightly sees the need to bind fathers to mothers formally, in order to secure and promote a stable environment in which to rear and educate children born from their union. If we are going to accept the new “relational” or “romantic” view of marriage (that marriage is solely about the love that exists between two people), then none of the remaining marital norms that almost everyone—including supporters of SSM—accepts should still apply.

When people think that marriage is simply for companionship or romantic love, they have a hard time understanding why companionship and romance between same-sex couples should not be recognized as a marriage. They also don’t understand why sex should be saved for marriage when marriage is just about a fuzzy concept of “love” rather than a one-flesh union that is ordered to result in a child.

However, when we recognize that only a man and woman can form the “one-flesh” bodily union of marriage, any relationship that lacks this element, no matter how dedicated or caring it may be, is not a marriage. 

While it's not deemed politically correct to view marriage as being for the sake of the child and for the welfare of society as a whole, the consequences of the loss of that understanding through the social upheaval that the Sexual Revolution has wrought are devastating those chained to the Western experience. See these headlines:

💢 US suicides hit all time high in 2022  

💢 Mental health emergency in UK as urgent referrals for under 18s triple

Augusto Del Noce, an Italian philosopher and political thinker, is regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers after World War II. He traced the dis-ease in the West to a particular cause:

Del Noce describes the sexual revolution as the essence of the “Occidentalist heresy,” the radical abolition of the sacred. After that abolition, there is no objective, cosmic order of truth to which individual behavior and social norms and institutions must conform.  

Wherever the Occidentalist heresy is introduced, the “True in itself and the Good in itself (permanent values) are denied, and thus religion, metaphysics, and morality in the traditional sense are destroyed.” Indeed, in a society secularized by Occidentalism, not only is there no longer any tradition, but “every expression (novel, show, etc.) is made meaningful only by the intensity or novelty with which it denies some traditional ­value.”

The goal is to ensure that “there is nothing that can be handed down . . . no more fatherland, or family.” Del Noce wrote these words in 1970, and since then the West has gone a long way toward vindicating his analysis. 

Consider also these words concerning the path laid to dismiss the concept of the sanctity of a marriage of a man and a woman for the sake of the child:

Like Wilhelm Reich, who popularized the term, Del Noce sees the sexual revolution as the culmination of “total revolution.” It is one face of a “new, more dangerous, and more radical form of totalitarianism” than any seen heretofore, “even though these new positions claim to represent the highest degree of democracy and anti-fascism.” Unlike previous authoritarianisms, it is not a positive political program bent on world domination, but a negative “totalitarianism of disintegration” aimed at the perpetual destruction of antecedent order.

Another writer comments on this graph:

You think a child whose life was torn apart by his parents’ divorce is going to be excited about the sexual freedom [the Boomer] generation won for themselves? Even if he accepts their moral values regarding sex and sexuality, he can’t escape knowing that there is a cost.

For the old order— in the West—the earth moved. From a study of Philip Larkin's sad, sour poem Annus Mirabilis:  

Sex, or private life, is the big deal in the new order, its distinctive creation. That is the new freedom. But while eros is a democrat, in that eroticism is no respecter of class or virtue, it is also true that eros is a master over willing slaves: Men abandon their dignity because of eros. (Source)

Ω See also: The most important philosopher you have never hear of 

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