The Christian West has long struggled to develop any model for marriage's constitution not governed by some form of contractual logic.Footnote 1 In a passage which has dominated theologies of marriage, Paul canonically enshrined this logic in 1 Corinthians 7:3 when he admonished Corinthian husbands and wives to literally ‘pay the debt [τὴν ὀϕɛιλὴν ἀπoδιδóτω]’ to one another sexually. This reliance on contractual logic has produced a multifaceted myopia which continues to stymie Christian attempts to think and minister creatively and effectively in regard to marriage. In fact, the magnitude of these myopic consequences continues to grow as contemporary cultural, political and moral trends make these tasks increasingly urgent.
While the reasons why contractual logic is attractive can be easily identified,Footnote 2 the resulting accounts of marriage's constitution too easily bypass the actual lived dynamics of marital common life and supplant them with a ‘non-voidable contract’Footnote 3 defined in uniform and typically negative terms and duties like prohibitions on divorce, adultery and contraception. My goal in this article is to draw attention to the way in which this a priori contractual logic, at least in the paradigmatic case of Augustine, prevents a theological rendering of marriage's constitution which incorporates a christological description and telos for the mundane and irreducibly particular dynamics of the spouses’ common life together. ‘Marriage’, in this sense, remains extrinsic to the living of marriage. I take the ongoing pastoral analogue of this theological failure to be an inability to offer couples resources to deal with the deep ambivalence and struggle of marital life together that too often builds over time and climaxes in the events of adultery and/or divorce. In other words, one wonders whether the centuries-old Christian habit of making the extremes of marriage negatively constitutive for the thing itself actually feeds a relational poverty which literally hastens the tragic relevance of these prohibitions against contraceptives (and, by extension, abortion), adultery and divorce.
My constructive response proposes a critical retrieval of Augustine's theology of marriage which exchanges contractual logic for cultic images such as consecration and sacrifice as tropes through which to express Christian marriage's constitution and analogical relation to Christ and the church. Picking up these sacrificial images is, of course, not the mere imposition of categories, but rather the lifting up of a minority set of New Testament images which has often been silenced by way of reading 1 Corinthians 7 into and on top of Ephesians 5:21–33.
Perhaps this is best illustrated with reference to Augustine himself. Commenting upon the marital μυστήριoν described in this latter passage, Augustine writes the following in his treatise, ‘Marriage and Desire’:
[T]he reality signified by this sacrament is that the man and the woman united in marriage persevere inseparably in that union as long as they live . . . This is, after all, what is preserved between Christ and the Church, namely, that while Christ lives and while the Church lives, they are not separated by any divorce.Footnote 4
The problem with this virtually canonised reading of Ephesians 5 is that the relationship between marriage, life and death implied in the text is not at all as straightforward as Augustine makes it out to be, even if it is consonant with a contract voided upon death. Indeed, the passage betrays something of a peculiar reversal of logic: death is in some sense envisioned as the foundation and telos of marriage, not its dissolution. This is illustrated by one of the passage's central admonitions in which the shape and purpose of marriage are linked together with christology in distinctly sacrificial terms: ‘Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy . . . without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless’ (Eph 5:26). Nor is this the only time that marriage and sacrificial death are linked in the New Testament. In Revelation 19:7–9 the great multitude and the angelic chorus proclaim the eschatological arrival of the ‘wedding supper of the Lamb’ (Rev 19:9). When placed next to one another, these passages suggest an alternative set of images through which to articulate marriage's lived reality – in the space between its temporal founding and its eschatological telos – in terms propelled by the dynamics and goods born from sacrifice and self-giving.
My constructive proposal takes its orientation from this scriptural clue. The path to this proposal, however, runs both critically and positively through Augustine's theology of marriage. Accordingly, I will begin with a critical appraisal of the ways that Augustine's theology of marriage helps to establish a confluence of contractual and christological logic that doubly separates marriage's constitution from the embodied and – as I will argue – irreducibly ambivalent dynamics of marital common life. From here I will move to my proposal for a theology of marriage as consecrated sacrifice based in part on retrieved themes from Augustine's account. Finally, in my conclusion, I will take up the pressing feminist concerns that inevitably arise from a theology of marriage dependent on any notion of ‘sacrifice’ or ‘self-giving’. In truth, my constructive proposal is intended to take on feminist instincts from the very outset precisely because it is women who have traditionally been the objects most abused by contractual logic in marriage: traded as literal property exchanged upon the terms of a matrimonial contract agreed upon by their fathers, brothers and soon-to-be husbands.
Augustine: contract, christology and the (non-)remedy of marriage
The main lines of Augustine's theology of marriage are well known and thus I will not rehearse his full account. Put briefly, Augustine argued for a middle course between Jovinian and Jerome which affirms marriage's relative goodness. Marriage, in Augustine's judgement, is a lower good than both virginity and chaste widowhood (contra Jovinian), but still genuinely good (contra Jerome) on the basis of three particular goods in marriage: procreation, sexual fidelity and the spousal sacramental bond. Given that the first two goods are linked, I will treat them together and demonstrate how Augustine's advancement of contractual logic in regard to fidelity relativises and makes access to procreation contingent on the formation of a contracted, transactional relation. I will then examine how this logic determines his account of marriage's sacramental analogy to Christ and the church.
Procreation and fidelity: uniform duties and negative assents
At the opening of ‘The Excellence of Marriage’,Footnote 5 Augustine makes a statement which appears to doubly refute my thesis. He comments that children are ‘the one honorable fruit, not of the union of husband and wife, but of their sexual conjunction’ (1.1). The two sides of potential refutation are clear. First, Augustine suggests that there are multiple ‘fruits’ of the union of spouses even apart from their sexual practice. Second, he maintains that – even in sexual union – there is an irreducibly positive good: children.
As an initial response, it simply needs to be acknowledged that Augustine left an ambiguous legacy regarding a vocation for couples as parents. On the one hand, there are undoubtedly rich theological resources in his emphasis on spiritual progeny from which to form meaningful and moving admonitions for parents in their life with their children. However, whatever vocation of parenthood could be formulated via Augustine's thought, it would be difficult to argue that any such vocation is to be necessarily and uniquely attributed to biological parents.
In connection with this dynamic, my argument acknowledges that procreation remains for him a positive ‘good’ of marriage which is not itself governed by contractual logic. Nonetheless, his two-sided relativisation of procreation for Christians results in access to this good being contingently regulated by a logically prior good (fidelity/outlet for concupiscence) which is most definitely governed by contractual logic. In other words, as we will see, procreation is not a good which in itself justifies getting married and engaging in sexual activity; that justification, in Augustine's view, is found only in forming a contract for the marital outlet of concupiscence.
Before filling out this connection any further, it is first necessary to articulate more fully Augustine's two-sided relativisation of procreation (and, by extension, marriage) for Christians. The two fronts for this relativisation are: (1) the primacy of ‘spiritual’ children in the Christian dispensation and the corresponding elevation of virginity; and (2) the application of 1 Corinthians 7 as an argument that the only justification for Christian marriage is the formation of a contractual relation in which each partner agrees to be a transactional outlet for the other's sexual lust.
Augustine repeatedly states that Christians are commissioned primarily to produce kin who are ‘born spiritually from the virgin church’Footnote 6 rather than to reproduce biologically. Accordingly, Augustine argues that a change in the status of marriage and procreation took place in Christ's advent. Prior to Christ's advent, the patriarchs entered into marriage and sexual union as a prophetic ‘duty’, rather than ‘under the domination of lust’ (13.15). This duty was to ‘continue the race’ (13.15) until the time of Christ. Indeed, Augustine even attributes a sacramental symbolisation to the patriarchs’ polygamous marriages (cf. 24.32) and also maintains that the patriarchs possessed the ‘virtue of celibacy’ as a ‘habitual disposition of mind’ (21.26), but surrendered physical celibacy for the sake of the duty to procreate. However, in Christ's advent the status of marriage shifts in this stage of salvation history because the Virgin Mary's virginal procreation establishes an ideal continued in the church's virginal motherhood.Footnote 7 No longer is biological procreation a Christian ‘duty to human society’ (13.15). Rather, the chief vocation of Christians is found in the ‘imitation’ of the Virgin and the Lord by producing spiritual progeny while remaining virgins – spiritually and physically if possible.Footnote 8
Having relativised the procreative ‘duty’ – which is itself a telling designation – Augustine is left with a mixture of themes from 1 Corinthians 7 to explain on what grounds Christians could marry and engage in sex at all. While Augustine maintains that ‘sexual union that is necessary for the purpose of having children is blameless’ (10.11), it is difficult to envision any such ‘blameless’ sexual activity precisely because ‘having children’ is, by his own argument, not ‘necessary’. Instead, the only reason to either marry or have sex is because one's carnal lust ‘burns’ (1 Cor 7:9) to the point that one risks complete loss of ‘self-control’ in the ‘mortal sin’ of ‘fornication’ (6.6).
From this starting point of 1 Corinthians 7:9, Augustine turns to the implied transactional logic of 7:3–4 to further characterise marriage's constitution. Accordingly, he construes the Pauline language of ‘duty’ by way of two requirements which form the terms of the marriage contract, which Augustine compares to those that govern the ‘transaction’ of straw or gold (4.4). First, Christian spouses owe each other the ‘duty of fidelity’, which entails not committing adultery (4.4). Second, Christian spouses owe each other that which presumably drew them together in the first place: the ‘mutual service to relieve each other's weakness and thereby avoid illicit unions’ (6.6). Tellingly, this type of sexual union is never anything but sinful in Augustine's judgement. It constitutes a ‘venial sin’, forgiven on account of its marital context, which also wards off the mortal sins of ‘adultery and fornication’ (6.6).
The goal of this section has been to show that Augustine anchors his use of contractual logic in regard to marriage largely in the second ‘good’ – sexual fidelity – and that this functions to relativise and regulate access to the good of procreation. This result occurs in light of the fact that the only justification for marriage is the formation of a contracted relation for concupiscence's outlet. With this pivotal move, Augustine establishes the basic framework by which marriage can be theologically rendered in terms extrinsic to the lived common life of any given couple. The result is that marriage is largely understood to be a negotiated site of relations constitutively determined by two types of relations: uniformly universal duties of transaction (e.g. mutually functioning as a forgivable outlet for sexual desires) and negative assents (e.g. no adultery).
The determination of christology and sacrament
The first noteworthy thing about Augustine's description of marriage's sacramental relation to Christ and the church is the nearly complete absence of reference to the single biblical text expected to be referenced, namely Ephesians 5:21–33. The reason for reticence is clear: if marriage is inherently formed for the sake of providing an outlet for sinful lust, the last thing Augustine wants to do is to associate this lustful union with the virginal union of Christ and the church. Even in the instances when he finally does make use of the Ephesians 5 analogy – instances which come mostly later during his conflicts with the Pelagians – Augustine identifies the point of analogy solely in the fact and indissolubility of the union,Footnote 9 which, as we will see, is characteristic of what he says of the sacramental union apart from explicit reference to Ephesians 5. Nowhere does Augustine move beyond reference to the mere fact of the union between spouses into offering an account of how the spouses’ union and life together, which is after all what is under discussion in Ephesians 5:21–33, might actually participate in the purpose for which Christ ‘loved the church and gave himself up for her’, namely ‘to make her holy’ (Eph 5:25–7). We will return to this lacuna shortly. For the moment, however, it is important to note that Augustine's account of marriage's sacramentality reflects the contractual logic already determined in his description of sexual fidelity in two primary ways.
First, marriage offers a sacramental reflection of the singularity of Christ's bride. Whereas the patriarchs’ polygamous marriages symbolised the ‘plurality of people who would be subject to God in all nations of the earth’ (24.32), the ‘sacrament of monogamous marriage of our time is a symbol that in the future we shall all be united and subject to God in the one heavenly city’ (18.21). Accordingly, Christian marriage, as the singular union of a husband and wife, corresponds to the singularity on both sides of Christ's nuptial union to the church. In direct parallel to the good of fidelity reducing, in a certain sense, to an admonition against adultery, so too here the good of the ‘sacrament’ reduces to an admonition of ‘no divorce’.Footnote 10
On another front, however, Augustine's account of marriage's sacramentality functions as the capstone of his dependence on contractual logic which creates an account of marriage's constitution which is enduringly extrinsic to marital common life. This capstone arrives in the form of his conclusion that the marriage ‘contract’ is itself indissoluble and thus cannot be ‘annulled’ (7.7) even if the moral prohibitions that mark its constitution are violated. Even though Augustine allows for a ‘wife’ who commits adultery to be ‘put aside’ (7.7), the sacramental analogy with Christ and the church entails the affirmation that nothing, not even the ‘intrusion of divorce’, actually destroys the ‘marital partnership’ (7.7). To quote the passage from ‘Marriage and Desire’ already cited in the introduction: marriage continues to exist ‘as long as [husband and wife] are living’ and is something that ‘neither separation nor intercourse with another can destroy’.Footnote 11 And with this last point, Augustine provides the final foundational element, this time rooted in christology itself, for the dominant Christian account of marriage which views marriage essentially as a ‘non-voidable contract’Footnote 12 decided upon and secured in advance of and regardless of any actual common life of marriage.
Conclusion: the non-remedy of marriage
Having described Augustine's contractual and transactional logic which determines marriage extrinsically, I want to articulate further what is at stake in my constructive proposal by referencing (and critiquing) John Cavadini's article which discusses Augustine's theology of marriage in some detail.Footnote 13 There Cavadini attempts to synthesise Augustine's theology of marriage in his treatises with that found in his sermons and Enarrationes in Psalmos. ‘It is impossible’, Cavadini writes, ‘to acquire a complete picture of the “sacramentality of marriage” according to Augustine without considering first this primary notion of transformation-in-incorporation.’Footnote 14 By this he means that marriage should be placed within the larger context of the healing experienced in and through the church's union with Christ. Cavadini attempts to do this by describing Augustine's sermonic account of the way that Christians encounter Christ's ‘spousal love’ in the church and are thus increasingly healed from their concupiscence.Footnote 15 By way of this analogy, Cavadini argues for a reading of Augustine's theology of marriage in which the spousal love of marriage participates in this larger, ecclesial telos of increased continence.
The climax of Cavadini's account comes in the following passage in which he summarises what he takes to be the central lines of Augustine's theology of marriage:
Marriage is a state of life, a ‘gift from God’, in which the ‘two in one flesh’ of the literal marriage bond form a special, small Christian community in which to experience the ‘marrying love’ of Christ, the pure and purifying love of the Incarnation.Footnote 16
Surely in this passage Cavadini expresses how we might wish Augustine had synthesised his christological and sacramental ecclesiology with his theology of marriage, instead of expressing how Augustine actually and consistently failed to do so. Cavadini repeatedly elides passages in which Augustine staunchly defends married Christians’ ability to participate in the healing, virginal love of Christ by virtue of their membership in the churchFootnote 17 with the idea that this participation happens by way of marriage's ‘[mediation] of the “healing” or pure, transforming love that is the origin of the church in the first place’.Footnote 18 This, in fact, is precisely what Augustine does not offer in his theology of marriage. For him, marriage is not the gracious ‘cure for weakness’,Footnote 19 as Cavadini supposes, but rather a contractually negotiated site for the forgivable, but ultimately non-therapeutic, expression of weakness.
Towards a theology of marriage as consecrated sacrifice
From the start, I have argued that Augustine's theology of marriage paradigmatically sets up marriage's constitution apart from meaningful reference to the particular and mundane dynamics of marital common life. I also suggested early on that this trajectory for a Christian theology of marriage continues to bear with it myopically thin pastoral resources for marriage-related ministry. In my constructive proposal, I turn to what I have called a ‘minor’ set of sacrificial imagery for marriage – in contrast to the contractual imagery canonised in 1 Corinthians 7 – suggestively employed in passages such as Ephesians 5:21–33 and Revelation 19:7–9.
Given my polemic, I want to state at the outset how sacrificial imagery can help furnish categories to theologically describe the irreducibly particular dynamics of married life. By turning to sacrificial imagery, I suggest that every moment of marital life – mundane and ecstatic – is marked by the ambivalence of vulnerably and ‘deathly’ surrendering to one another, which is embodied in the surrender of Christ himself upon the cross.
In explicating this proposal I draw upon Rebekka Klein's recent account of ambivalence and Eberhard Jüngel's trinitarian ontology of love. Klein interprets the inherent ambivalence of human sociality in terms of that peculiar dynamic in which the same site of potential human relation can, in its actuality, signify either a profound fulfilment of the divinely intended humanity of human beings or a profoundly tragic expression of the inhumanity for which human beings are simultaneously capable.Footnote 20 Similarly, Jüngel's ontology of love interprets the cross as the event of love in which Jesus gives himself in deathly surrender to the one he called Father only to be united in love with this one on the other side of surrender: in the resurrection and the Pentecostal sending of their Spirit of love.Footnote 21 Jüngel summarises this understanding of Christian love in the following refrain: love is the ‘unity of life and death in favor of life’.Footnote 22
Taken together, Klein and Jüngel enable a theology of marriage centred around the ambivalence of deathly surrender and self-giving. On the one hand, when this type of surrender yields the fruits of love in mutual service and reciprocal embrace the result is purifying and generative of the type of loving holiness which is the telos of the Christian life, in analogy to the paradoxical logic of love embodied in the cross and resurrection. On the other hand, the posture of surrender, as the testimonies of countless women tragically attest, contains within it the dual possibility of intimate, loving embrace alongside that of inhuman abuse, rejection, subjection and manipulation. The ambivalence of marriage is constituted in the fact that these joint possibilities are inescapably linked in the posture of surrender and cannot be factored out ahead of time.
It is important to note that this type of risky surrender is characteristic of many forms of human sociality. However, marriage embodies this ambivalence in an especially luminous way because of the inherent temporal and spatial intensity of its interdependence and also because of the particular vulnerability of the sexual surrender itself. Indeed, perhaps marriage is so vividly exposed to both the promise and tragedy of sacrificial surrender precisely because – in a way so ironic for the Christian tradition – its dynamics can endure as one of the last sites of human sociality not necessarily regulated by and reducible to the logic of contract and negotiated transactions.
In light of the cumulative argument, it might appear that my constructive proposal is intended as a simple rejection of Augustine's theology of marriage. However, it actually takes form as a project of critical retrieval. This is reflected initially in that I make use of Augustine's own category of the libido dominandi, or ‘lust for mastery’Footnote 23, as the primary way of articulating the obvious dynamic of power involved in marriage's ambivalence.Footnote 24 Furthermore, my proposal of a theology of marriage as consecrated sacrifice proceeds by way of three elements of Augustine's theology which suggest themselves as ripe for retrieval: (1) the moral ambivalence of the sexual encounter; (2) the difference in significance for marriage before and after Christ's advent; and (3) a theology of sexual consecration.
The moral ambivalence of the sexual encounter
It seems unassailable that Augustine's theology of marriage takes its basic orientation from his reading of sex and its role within marriage. Unfortunately, my evaluation of his employment of this strategy concurs, to a significant extent, with David Hunter's conclusion: in the end, ‘Augustine could not find any truly positive role for sexuality or procreation in the Christian dispensation’.Footnote 25 However, not all accounts that grant sex a hermeneutical privilege in interpreting marriage arrive at his conclusions. Accordingly, what if we take this clue and argue that it is precisely in the sexual encounter that humans are simultaneously most nakedly exposed to the risk of encountering another's lust for mastery and yet also most open to the healing possibilities inherent within this act of exposure and surrender? Sex is perhaps the most ambivalent site of all human relations. It is the most vivid site of surrender and sacrifice in which one presents one's body and proclaims with great risk: ‘This is my body, which is for you’.
One might immediately think of a possible analogy with Pope John Paul II's concept of a spouse's ‘self-donation’ or ‘self-gift’.Footnote 26 However, here Augustine's dogged insistence on the sin-fraught ambivalence inherent in sexual acts returns to show the fruits of possible retrieval. Indeed, at the conclusion of the article that I critiqued above, Cavadini offers a commentary on the relation of Augustine's theology of marriage to that of John Paul II so acute that it should be quoted at length. Cavadini first notes that Thomistically inspired perspectives like that of John Paul's have been rightly hailed as offering a more positive account of sexual desire and in this sense providing a proper point of corrective to Augustine. Having said this, Cavadini continues:
[S]exual desire in Augustine is a much more ambiguous affair than in Thomas or in the theology of the body he has inspired, [and] it may make it easier to find a pastoral approach that understands the intractable problems that may arise in matters sexual. Sexual desire is not as self-evidently and unassailably positive and its expression not as straightforwardly uncomplicated, as more ‘positive’ views sometimes make it seem. These positive views may lend themselves, without the intention of doing so, to harsher pastoral expectations (if it is so straightforward, then it's your fault if you can't get it right) or to unnaturally idealistic or romantic expectations in those about to be married, which could end up in serious disillusion and rejection of the whole Catholic idea of marriage. Foregrounding the issue of ‘healing’, where that means a slow, patient formation in the humility of Christ, in the purifying love of the Incarnate, may not be such a terrible pastoral strategy in an age where everyone is convinced that anything that feels good is in fact evidently good, and where gratification, or an enthusiastic feeling of ‘self-donation’, cannot always be called forth.Footnote 27
The trick to heeding this wisdom is to extend the notion of ambiguity and ambivalence beyond simply ‘matters sexual’. Rather, the ambiguity of marital life and the ever present threat of lust for mastery extends into all the mundane things of marital common life in which this lust always seeks a return to calculated power relations, negotiated rights, patterns of self-seeking which give rise to being easily angered and keeping a record of wrongs (1 Cor 13:5). In this way, Augustine's keen sense that in marriage the ‘lust of the flesh’ is always palpably ‘burning’ can be extended even while retaining its pre-eminent transparency in sex.
Within the daily tasks of sacrificial self-giving – for instance doing housework, keeping track of finances, childrearing and determining and supporting vocations – there always lurks the threat of dominance, violently enforced lusts for power and passively and incrementally exacted plans of manipulation.Footnote 28 These risks cannot be factored out, nor can they be forgotten as real possibilities even amidst all the moments in which life and love might blossom from all the little acts of self-giving and mutual surrender. There always remains the risk that the ambiguity and fluidity of marital relations will once again slip into the too easily identifiable dynamics of dominance in which, in Augustine's unfortunate phrase, ‘one is in charge and the other compliant’ (1.1). If the reciprocity of surrender and sacrifice is forfeited, dominance (and in some sense the threat of death within the marriage) inevitably results. But it is precisely by way of the risk of surrender and sacrifice that it is possible at all to be mutually ‘made holy’ in the image of Christ's own self-giving.
Marriage before and after Christ's advent
There is a certain dissonance that arises when encountering Augustine's affirmation of the sacramentality of the patriarchs’ polygamy and its prophetically sacramental role for marriage before Christ's coming. While it was a matter of important debate between Augustine and Jovinian, it is troubling to read Augustine's sacramental justification for men impregnating multiple women at the same time (cf. 17.20) while maintaining that these patriarchs all the while possessed the habitual ‘virtue of celibacy’ (21.26). What if, however, one were to take the formal structure of Augustine's strategy and employ it as a way of reading marriage's fallenness in the order of creation as that which perpetuates its use merely according to contractual logic and – by extension – the libido dominandi? It is, after all, the abuse of this logic that has led to the use of marriage as a business contract – usually between men – in which women have been bartered and exchanged in ways precisely akin to the trade of gold and straw, to reference Augustine's analogy.
Such an alteration, if maintained alongside Augustine's attention to the way in which marriage takes a different shape in the wake of Christ, suggests a way of conceiving of marriage christologically as a possible site of relations in which the sinful struggles for power, pride and dominance can be exposed to the alternative logic of grace embodied upon the cross: ‘Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ’ (Eph 5:21) who gave himself up for the sake of the church. Such a feminist reading of Augustine and the author of Ephesians is precisely that – a feminist reading – that does not solve all the problems in either set of texts. However, it does helpfully open up ways of reading marital relations through a common lens ground on the wheel of christology. In the order of redemption, marriage's commission is redefined in terms which also enable the very ecclesiological parallel with which Augustine so struggled: in both marriage and within the larger Christian community, Christians are charged with developing graced sites of relation in which there exists the possibility of healing and liberation from the lust for mastery ingrained in our very selves and in the systems of this world. These possibilities are enabled by way of the same paradoxical logic that Jesus embodied and laid out for his disciples: one must die, in order to live. ‘For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it’ (Matt 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24). Christian love is, to cite Jüngel, the paradoxical unity of life and death in favour of life.
In this connection, one glimpses another way in which contractual logic has occluded possible alternative ways of connecting christology and marriage. Transactional logic inevitably nullifies a priori a crucial point of contact for christological themes, namely that of volitionally giving one's bodily self for the sake of another. Relatedly, the logic of the cross and sacrificial self-giving eludes reduction to the logic of contract and negotiated, transactional rights. For, in the event of the cross, God reveals Godself as the one who forfeits that which is rightfully God's own for the sake of another who does not in fact ‘have any right’ to demand this event of self-giving.
Finally, this retrieval of marriage in light of Christ also suggests, perhaps, a chastened and restricted account of contractual relations to be utilised as a part of both marriage and the larger church. Given that these graced relations continue to operate under the threat of the lust for power, contracts and analogous negotiated agreements might be used as means of establishing safeguards which manage some of the risks involved in the surrender and sacrifice of love. However, as opposed to Augustine's use of contractual logic which produced universal and extrinsic terms constitutively common to all marriages, these agreements would be ad hoc and negotiated in the midst of the lived common lives of Christians. Furthermore, such contracts would serve as instruments orientated towards ends which are contingent and practical within a given common life, instead of establishing universal, deontological norms for all. The risk, however, in suggesting this restricted use of contractual logic is that it would sneak back in as the primary mode of Christian social relations in such a way that the spontaneity, freedom and ambivalence of self-giving and self-surrender are factored out by means of effective ‘risk management’.
A theology of sexual consecration
Finally, the last element for retrieval in Augustine's theology of marriage is a sense of consecration which pervades Christian sexual and marital relations. In his companion treatise to ‘The Excellence of Marriage’ on the topic of consecrated virginity, Augustine employs a strikingly different set of themes to describe the state of consecrated virginity as compared to those he employs in his theology of marriage. Particularly striking is his employment of the themes of consecration, humility and love.
In ‘Holy Virginity’, Augustine continues his middle way through Jovinian and Jerome. Whereas in ‘The Excellence of Marriage’, he focuses on defending the relative good of marriage against Jerome, in ‘Holy Virginity’ he turns his attention to defending virginity's status as the ‘greater gift from God’Footnote 29 in comparison to marriage against Jovinian. His defence of virginity's superiority turns on three arguments. First, the union of Christ to his church yields virginal, spiritual fertility and offspring akin to that embodied by the Virgin Mary.Footnote 30 ‘For’, as Augustine writes, ‘the Church too is both virgin and mother’.Footnote 31 Second, virgins therefore participate in both the spiritual and physical virginity of Christ and the church, whereas married mothers only participate in their spiritual virginity.Footnote 32 Third, virgins are specially consecrated to God according to the higher counsel of Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 advocating singleness and Jesus’ talk of becoming eunuchs ‘because of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt 19:12).
One of the conspicuous things about this treatise is the transition that Augustine makes at the treatise's midpoint. In the first half, Augustine sets forth this account of virginity's superiority to marriage. In the second half, he warns virgins against the ‘danger of pride’ that threatens them in light of their ‘exalted’ status.Footnote 33 To do this, Augustine turns to a theology of humility and love which has played little to no role in either his theology of marriage or his theology of virginity described in the immediately preceding sections. He references the Christian teaching of ‘humility . . . as the means of acquiring and preserving love’Footnote 34 and he immediately connects this coupling of humility and love to the hymn of Philippians 2.Footnote 35 On account of this christological linking of humility and love, Augustine enjoins virgins to ‘follow the Lamb wherever he goes’ and to nurture humility for the sake of the perfection of love's protection of their virginity.Footnote 36
Augustine's assumption of crucicentric categories such as ‘Lamb’, ‘humility’ and ‘love’ is striking indeed, because they are not the categories through which he has established the connection between marriage and/or virginity and Christ's nuptial relationship to the church. For marriage, he drew upon the permanence of the sacramental union with no explicit reference to Jesus’ death. For virgins, he drew upon the enduring quality of Jesus’ own virginity ‘in body and heart’.Footnote 37 Might it be possible to use Augustine's own linkage of consecration, humility and love to shift the locus of each of these sexual states such that they share an interpretative analogy to the logic and model of Christ's self-giving upon the cross?
Such a shift would suggest that Christian marriage and virginity take the form of a graced repetition of Christ's own ambivalence and struggle, particularly glimpsed in Gethsemane, in losing himself and indeed dying in the passage to union with his Father and his bride. Both consecrated marriage and virginity share the notion that the only ‘means of acquiring and preserving love’ is through humble surrender to another. In virginity, that humble surrender occurs before God. In marriage, that humble surrender occurs before God and in relation to one's spouse. Both types of sexual consecration occur also, it must be said, in the witness of a community whose members are also called to the larger vocation of mutual, loving surrender. The only language which suggests itself in terms of this kind of lived deathliness embodied in surrender – in analogy to Christ's own self-giving and teleologically orientated to actual acts of offering our life up for another – is perhaps that found in Romans 12:1: ‘Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is true worship.’ Perhaps, in this connection, we gain a glimpse of the fact that marriage's eschatological telos is as a temporal preparation and formation for the ultimate act of surrender and sacrifice: the sacrifice and surrender of ourselves in worship – at the wedding feast of the One who surrendered himself for us – the Lamb himself (Rev 19:7–9).
Conclusion: the threat of death and the fruits of love
In this article, I have critically engaged Augustine's theology of marriage and tried to show that his over reliance on contractual logic drawn from 1 Corinthians 7 perpetuates an account of marriage which remains extrinsically related to the living of marriage. In addition, I have constructively lifted up the sacrificial images of Ephesians 5 and Revelation 19 and used them, in conjunction with a retrieval of certain elements of Augustine, to suggest a theology of marriage as consecrated sacrifice orientated towards the enduringly ambivalent healing of the lust for mastery. Throughout, I have attempted to suggest small ways in which this alternative reading possesses feminist resources and applications. However, in my conclusion, potential feminist objections need to be taken up explicitly.
One does not need to search very far to formulate ways in which the notion of ‘sacrifice’ can and has been used to fuel situations of gender-based violence and entrapment amidst marriage. In response to the woman whose body bears the bruises of attack and whose spirit reflects the bludgeoning of trauma, many a (male) pastor has responded with such haunting pastoral admonitions as: ‘Submit as Christ did upon the cross’. ‘Who knows’, they might continue, ‘how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband?’Footnote 38 One might especially wonder whether my proposal justifies such a response given the fact that it frankly observes that the risk of use and abuse can never be factored out of any surrendered posture characteristic of hoped-for love.
My response would move beyond a simple rejection of the pastoral advice as itself a misinterpretation and, most likely, a sin not only of ignorance, but also of the pastor's own lust for power. It would do so by suggesting that the account offered here points to the cross and resurrection as a trinitarian event with two protagonists: one who surrenders on Friday and one who responds in love on Sunday. In this sense, the image of God to which humanity's humanity is called to correspond is not simply constituted by the posture of Jesus, but also in the faithful response by the one he called Father. In other words, as the divinity of the triune God was truly measured and revealed in how the ‘Father’ responded to the complete surrender of the Son, so is this response also constitutive of the true humanity to which human beings are called to image in their sociality, including marriage. It is a defamation of the image of God to insist on the call to surrender to others and God and not to insist simultaneously that true humanity is just as measured by one's response to the human being(s) surrendered before you (and vice versa). Not only does this type of mutuality characterise the image of God, but it also characterises a full manifestation of God's Spirit of love.
Accordingly, despite the fact that there will inevitably be times in marriage in which the self-giving of one spouse is not immediately embraced by another or the equilibrium of mutual surrender grows out of balance, the very notion of ‘consecrated sacrifice’ suggests that there are actions so unilaterally undertaken (e.g. rape, abuse, unrepentant adultery and abandonment) that they act as a sheer profanation and desecration of the other's posture of surrender and sacrificial presentation of their bodies. In these instances, the luminous humanity and divinity of the cross and resurrection should never be used to justify these most profound instances of humanity's inhumanity. Indeed, it is precisely the burden of others’ humanity to respond to such victims of desecration by way of a loving self-giving of their own bodies, emotion and time.
There are, as there always have been, victims of marriage's ambivalence and risk. Here, Augustine's reticence about marriage's lust returns with vivid relevance. Of course, marriage is not inherently a cause of terror and domination, but its risks should not be underestimated. Perhaps, too, we could return to Paul in this context and not cast aside his admonition too hastily: ‘But if you do marry, you have not sinned . . . But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this’ (1 Cor 7:28). Or, to borrow a liturgical turn of phrase, the ambivalence of marriage ‘is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God’.Footnote 39
Furthermore, addressing abuse and domination in connection with the concept of consecrated sacrifice suggests that this motif might also be of some use in considering the events around marriage's possible dissolution. Here the notion of death inherent to the motif might indicate the other side of its ambivalence. In the type of situation above – the unilateral desecration of another's sacrifice through abuse or desertion – we might characterise this dynamic in terms of abandoning another such that the posture of deathly surrender yields not life, but death: of the relationship or, even more tragically, of the spouse herself in the most extreme (although certainly not to say uncommon) circumstances.
I recognise the risk in moving beyond this example. Victims of marital terror and abuse should not be neatly fitted into a continuum of common experience. And yet: often such extreme forms of marital death can be considered so beyond the possibilities of daily marital life that their occurrence seems unrelated and indeed shockingly foreign to the daily ambivalence of marriage. Here again Augustine's libido dominandi suggests itself as a significant reminder that the threat of dominance and violence lurks and burns in every human heart even amidst the tasks of daily life. Hence, in addition to illuminating the character of the most extreme forms of marital death, perhaps the concept of repetitious, consecrated sacrifice also opens up ordinary spaces in which divorce might be revealed as equally beholden to contractual logic as a single moment extrinsic to the lived common life of marriage. When cast in these terms, the deathly ambivalence of marriage might not signify only the extreme forms of marriage's death, but also the day-to-day ways in which marriage partners abandon one another – even unto death – at/upon the altar of marriage.
Finally, this gesture back to contractual logic raises an important question: has this proposal simply undone the link between contract and sacrifice in the other direction? I mentioned above one possible route of rapprochement between these logics: via instrumental, ad hoc contracts which serve practical and contingent ends within a given common life of marriage. Nonetheless, I think a final point of rapprochement is only available through their integration in a concept which has been conspicuously absent until this point: covenant. This strategy has been intentional in light of the fact that, as Theodore Mackin uncritically says in what appears like a harmless aside, covenant is too easily viewed as simply ‘the expression preferred nowadays to the term “contract”’.Footnote 40 That, of course, is precisely the problem.
A more promising account might point to a notion of ‘covenant’ which signifies the entire, complicated and contingent, history of God with God's people marked by seemingly endless cycles of sin, repentance, forgiveness and restoration. Intriguingly, that history is marked – to make the history admittedly too simple – as a narrative built upon a mix of deontological laws and cultic regulations which strangely find its fulfilment in a frail, vulnerable venture of love. Perhaps the founding of a marriage mirrors a similar dynamic: the initial ‘contractual’ vows speak into existence a temporalised space within which a daily, mundane life of love might – indeed ambivalently and vulnerably – come to pass and bear its fruits, in due time, by God's grace and the daily improvisations of love and sacrifice. It is precisely as this temporalised and teleologically orientated union of contractual and sacrificial elements that marriage finds its existence as covenant.
As a postscript, if such a route for rapprochement between contractual and sacrificial logic has any promise, then perhaps another verse from Paul commends itself in contrast to that with which we opened: ‘Let no debt remain outstanding (Mηδɛνὶ μηδὲν ὀϕɛίλɛτɛ), except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law’ (Rom 13:8).Footnote 41
