Marriage

2004

This article was resurrected as I felt it was very supportive of the "Eve" article appearing on this page.

The following information is compiled from:
THE WOMAN'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS AND SECRETS
by Barbara G. Walker

Are we still dealing with remnants of past attitudes concerning women and marriage?

The word marriage derives from the Latin maritare - "union under the auspices of the Goddess Aphrodite-Mari". Because the Goddess's patronage was constantly invoked in every aspect of marriage, Christian fathers were opposed to the institution!

Origen declared: "Matrimony is impure and unholy, a means of sexual passion."

St. Jerome: "The primary purpose of a man of God was to "cut down with an ax of Virginity the wood of Marriage."

St. Ambrose: "Marriage was a crime against God, because it changed the state of virginity that God gave every man and woman at birth. Marriage was prostitution of the members of Christ."

Tertullian: "Marriage was a moral crime, more dreadful than any punishment or any death." It was "obscenity," or "filth."

St. Augustine: "Marriage is a sin." Augustine also expressed disgust at feminine sexual and maternal functions. He coined the saying that birth is demonstrably accursed because every child emerges "between feces and urine."

St. Paul: Dammed marriage with faint praise, remarking that to marry was only better than to burn.

St. Jerome: "Every man who loves his wife passionately was guilty of adultery."

Church customs reflected many of the above views. There wasn't a Christian sacrament of marriage until the 16th century. Catholic scholars said the wedding ceremony was "imposed on" a reluctant church.

The Anglican marriage service came from Anglo-Saxon deeds used to transfer a woman's land to the stewardship of her "houseman" (husband).

About wedding ceremonies in Greece and the Balkans, an authority on Greek religion wrote: "With the modern Greeks as with other Europeans, the religious service of their church is intrusive, no real part of the ceremony of marriage, but an elaborate way of calling down a blessing on the ceremonial, or what is left of it, which constitutes the real wedding."

The Christian priesthood was fighting ancient traditions in which it was remembered that male spiritual authority was dependent on marriage.

Early Israelites also barred unmarried men from the priesthood. They thought a priest's spells and invocations would be powerless if he had no wife.

So much depended on a man's ability to remain married, in the most ancient times, that the first rules of marriage invented by men seem to have been rules for insuring permanent monogamy. Thus a husband could hold on to a woman's property and children by binding the woman herself.

Hellenic Greeks believed that men should seize every possible advantage in forcing wives to be obedient and (especially) faithful. Greek patriarch foreshadowed the patriarchal religion which, "in the form seen in Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, is basically nothing other than a formalization, by means of a projection upon deities, and the demand for obedience to their revealed command, of the father's desired sexual control of his wives and of their female children, and the forcible exclusion of male children from sexual activity."

The Greeks contempt for wives eventually led to their cult of homosexual romance, ignoring their families and taking young boys for true-love relationships. Some scholars say this belittling of marriage was founded on fear of women.

The Council of Trent decreed that a person who even hinted that the state matrimony might be more blessed than celibacy would be declared anathema - accursed and excommunicated. The earliest form of Christian marriage was a simple blessing of the newly wedded pair, in facie ecclesiae - outside the church's closed doors - to keep the pollution of lust out of God's house.

Common-law marriages were often informal. Mere cohabitation could constitute a valid marriage. Temporary trial marriages were legal up to the early 17th century. The church displayed remarkable reluctance to deal with the matter of marriage at all. During the Middle Ages there was no ecclesiastical definition of a valid marriage nor of any contract to validate one. In 1753 Lord Harwidke's Act made clerical blessing a requirement for legal marriage in England but the Act didn't apply to Scotland.

The Oriental heathen, whom Christians thought barbaric, were teaching: "The householder should never punish his wife, but should cherish her like a mother . . . By riches, clothes, love, respect, and pleasing words should one's wife be satisfied. The husband should never do anything displeasing to her."

Physical abuse and sexual coercion were so often the lot of a Christian wife that it came to be an accepted idea that no woman could love a husband. One good reason was the master-slave relationship. "Men were exhorted from the pulpit to beat their wives and wives to kiss the rod that beat them."

Up to the middle of the 20th century, American law upheld the so-called doctrine of immunity, which meant the "sanctity of the home" could not be invaded to stop husbandly violence. Josephine Henry reported that "The ownership of wife established and perpetuated through Bible teaching is responsible for the domestic pandemonium and the carnival of wife murder which reigns throughout Christendom. In the United States alone, by 1897, 3,482 wives, many with unborn children in their bodies, have been murdered in cold blood by their husbands . . . The by-paths of ecclesiastical history are fetid with the records of crimes against women; and "the half has never been told."

(This brings to mind the present day Laci Peterson Trial . . . where the husband, Scott Peterson, is suspected of murdering his wife and unborn child).

In 1977 Ellen Kirby of the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church wrote: "The institutional church either through it blatant sexist theology, which has blessed the subordination of women, or through it silence, blindness, or lack of courage, has allowed itself to be one of the leading actors in the continuing tragedy of abuse."

As a rule, women were driven into marriage by social pressures that made spinsterhood even less attractive economically. Though wives provide an essential support system, without which few men would be capable of carrying on productive careers, the "job" of a wife is the last relic of slavery in that it earns nothing. A woman can't collect unemployment insurance for losing this non-paid job, even when it means financial hardship for herself and her children. As a widow she is taxed at the highest level because she is not considered a contributor to her husband's estate.

Only recently, and grudgingly, did the clergy of some denominations remove the word "obey" from the bride's responses in the marriage service. Many clergymen still believe a wife should bow to her husband's wishes more than he bows to hers - not the best attitude in men who think themselves qualified to act as marriage counselors.

As the saying goes: You've come a long way, baby! But, there are still major considerations a woman should deal with before she plunges into a marriage. "Love" has to be earned. It must incorporate respect, dignity, honor, loyalty and commitment. "Lust" wears thin and is short-lived. Without true love, you allow yourself to be deceived.

It is evident that a condescending attitude towards a woman still prevails in many marriages and also in the business environment. This is changing however, as more and more women are becoming educated and competing on many levels in business and government very successfully. Education and the ability to earn a decent living certainly gives a woman an edge. She is equipped to enter into a relationship - and even a marriage - for the right reasons - to be treated as an equal, cherished, loved, and respected.