The Difficulties and Opportunities in Defending Marriage

The great Ryan T Anderson has a thought provoking post up at First Things.

The two-thousand-year story of the Christian Church’s cultural and intellectual growth is a story of challenges answered. For the early Church, there were debates about who God is (and who is God). In response, the Church developed the wonderfully rich reflections of Trinitarian theology and Christology. In a sense, we have the early heresies to thank for this accomplishment. Arius’s errors gave us Athanasius’s refinements on Christology. Nestorius’s blunders gave us Cyril’s insights. In truth, of course, we have the Holy Spirit to thank for it all. He continually leads the Church to defend and deepen its understanding of the truth, against the peculiar errors of the age.

He then connects the current confusions about the nature of man, including the nature of marriage, to "the peculiar errors of the age" and proposes that the Church will have to deepen it's understanding of marriage and man himself to combat it.

I can't say I had actually thought of that before.  At least not all of it.  I thought a bit more along the lines of Chesterton.

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible. (Orthodoxy, chapter 6, The Paradoxes of Christianity)

Reading the various responses that Catholics, and Catholic leaders have made to the recent attacks on marriage certainly brings to mind Chesterton's "ordinary intelligent man".  I think it's fair to say that for centuries, no defense of marriage was necessary and so no justification was developed.  When the social justice warriors of the last ten or twenty years started asking sharp questions about what marriage is, no one could answer because they never thought of it. I certainly never did.  A clever rhetorician could demolish most arguments, and there are some very skilled rhetoricians on the other side.

But not all is lost.  The Summer 2014 Volume of Communio is full of thoughtful, beautiful ideas about marriage.  So is the so-called "Five Cardinals book".  Actually, while browsing through those books, I found myself wanting to rush out and renew my marriage vows.  But they are a bit deep.  I'm not sure that the "ordinary intelligent man" will dive right into them.  We need a modern-day Fulton Sheen who can turn the theological and historical (and dry) prose into ordinary rhetoric and can be understood and remembered.

I think that it's clear that the foundation is being laid.  It'd be nice if we had all this done a few years ago so the innovators at the Family Synods wouldn't have such an easy time of it. But as they say: The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.  The second best time to plant a tree is today.