The Wonder of Marrage After the Fall
/JESSICA JONES
“O God, by whom woman is joined to man, and the companionship they had in the beginning is endowed with the one blessing not forfeited by original sin nor washed away by the flood.” So says the nuptial blessing in the Roman rite of marriage.
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If you’ve been to numerous weddings as I have, these words pronounced at the end of the nuptial Mass might seem familiar, comforting, even a tad stale. This part of the blessing, buried after praises for a God who created marriage as an inestimable gift of friendship and as a foreshadowing of the covenant Christ makes with his Church, does not seem remarkable. Praise for marriage as a gift of friendship and unity is not altogether unexpected.
Lately, however, I have been struck with this particular part of the nuptial blessing: that marriage is the one divine gift not forfeited by original sin. I wonder . . . why?
Why of all the gifts enjoyed preternaturally was marriage preserved for us who live in a postlapsarian world?
It cannot be that marriage, blessing though it is, preserves us completely from the effects of original sin. The priest friend who married us spoke of marriage at our reception as a “wound of love”: that through marriage, as with the rest of the sacraments, God takes imperfect, broken, sinful people, raising them up through their suffering (not in spite of, but through) to draw him closer to each other in true love and to Himself. So the gift must not be one that preserves us from the “something that is seriously wrong with human beings,” from the sin with which we still struggle after baptism or the guilt of original sin from which we must be expiated.
Then, why and how was marriage preserved? Saint Augustine gives a twofold answer of a natural and supernatural quality.
From the very beginning, Augustine reminds us that God created human beings with a certain nature. Our nature is not isolated or independent; our nature is social and dependent. For this reason, we thrive on the bonds of friendship and kinship—two of the greatest natural goods of human life.
The first “natural” bond of human beings, then, even prior to the Fall, is found most perfectly in marriage. In marriage, we have the coming together of two persons in friendship by a decision of their free will, which in turn leads to the propagation of that other great bond of nature, kinship. In the power of the marriage union, our very nature as social and dependent is made evident and even flourishes (De bon. coni. 9.9).
These natural bonds, of course, were not left untouched by the ravages of original sin—as Augustine describes so well in his Confessions, even the best of natural friendships without God’s grace are usurped by the desire to place earthly goods above God. We easily make idols.
But the supernatural answer to the preservation of marriage after the Fall provides a window into God’s plan for renewing our capacity to love him, others, and ourselves. Marriage is restored to its original glory in the sacrament: it becomes possible once more to enjoy true friendship and kinship through the bonds of Christian marriage.
If that was not enough, those natural goods are elevated. God reveals his ultimate design for marriage: it is to transform this covenant, as Augustine says, into a sign of “the unity of us all made subject to God, which shall be hereafter in one Heavenly City” (De bon. coni. 18.21).
The social nature of man, expressed in marriage before the Fall, is given an even more perfect salvific end. Marriage is a sign that redemption for us as individuals happens not alone but in community. God saves us according to our social nature, not in opposition to it.
Marriage is the one blessing not forfeited by the fall because we did not forfeit our nature because of the Fall. Our desires for friendship, kinship, and worship of God were badly broken, but not lost. At our reception, our priest friend spoke not only of the “wound of love,” but also of its communal character. Long before I met my husband, this friend had said to him once as they were converting to Catholicism, “You know I can’t do this without you.” Now we travel together—my husband and I in marriage, a covenant ordained by God to serve as the sign of the City of God, our friend wounded by love in a distinct, more perfect sense. His covenant with Christ is not mediated by another. And together, according to our nature, we live by God’s grace for the other side.
About the Author: Jessica Jones resides in Washington, D.C. and is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy. Her husband Patrick is also a Ph.D. student in moral theology. These days, you will find her, coffee in hand, writing furiously for her regular job or her dissertation on Plato, playing music with Patrick, winding her way through Julia Child's cookbook, or watching all Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson movies over again.