Love and marriage

[Robert O'brien]

 Sanford Levinson asked:
> The
> question I asked (which no one has yet answered) is whether (any of) the
> classic Protestant Reformers--I am thinking primarily of John Milton,
though
> he may be wildly atypical--repudiated the Catholic notion of marriage and
> started us off on our path to identifying love and marriage and, thus,
> suggesting that when love disappears, so should the marriage.

The notion of the obligatory union of love and marriage occured about the
same time and in the same place as adoption of the notion that wedding is a
matter outside the concern of religion.  C. S. Lewis' _The Allegory of
Love_ (1935) argues that the union of love and marriage was accomplished
first in the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne writing in a
fifty-year period at the end of the sixteenth century and beginnng of the
seventeenth century.  My recollection is that a Puritan controlled
Parliament about 1610 passed the law making marriage a purely secular
matter (I seem to recall this date from a history of law I checked the last
time this issue arose here; my nearest law school library is 70 miles away
or I would provide a better citation).  My recollection is that Milton's
divorce tracts, each abundantly documented with biblical citations, had no
effect upon British law.

Louisiana's "covenant" marriage seems to invite all of the abuses pure
fault systems invite, i.e. out-of-state quickie divorces, fabrication (even
stageing) of faults, and so forth.  Of course, Louisiana's law of
"covenant" marriage will have effect only on those couples who choose to
remain in Louisiana.  We can only guess at the bad effects of the new law.
Divorce is easy to see; the bad effects of an ostensibly intact marriage
are harder to identify.  Item: a relative in Louisiana left his alcoholic
wife and lived the rest of his life, over twenty years,  with another
woman; he never got a divorce because it would have destroyed his business.


Robert O'Brien                                      West Virginia Wesleyan
College
obrien at .wvwc.edu