Marriage is a melting pot for culture's most festering anxieties

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/02/marriage-melting-pot-culture-anxieties

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Another day, another anti-gay marriage statement from some Roman Catholic grandee. In the wake of his infelicitous midnight mass sermon in which the archbishop of Westminster accused ministers of acting to legalise same-sex marriage in defiance of public opinion, Vincent Nichols has called for parishioners to petition MPs against the government's bill on the subject, due to be tabled in mid-January.

In this latest protest, the leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales expressed a fear that schoolchildren will no longer be taught "the true nature of marriage". Another purpled panjandrum, Mark Davies, bishop of Shrewsbury, made a still more incendiary festive oration, comparing nuptial reformers to Nazis (something of an own goal, one might imagine, given John Cornwell's famous exposé of Pope Pius XII's capitulation to Hitler).

And on Tuesday, the current bishop of Rome opined on the need to preserve "the natural structure of marriage" versus "an offence against the truth of the human person", whatever this might mean. The principles behind the institution, Pope Benedict declared, "are common to all humanity" and "the church's efforts to promote them …addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation".

Enthusiasts of Wolf Hall and its sequel may wonder what the Catholic church is doing concerning itself with English civil law several hundred years after the codpieced one emphatically rejected any such interference, on the subject of marriage not least. Moreover, when the archbishop accuses the government of acting undemocratically, minds may naturally turn to statistics: there are approximately 5 million Roman Catholics in England and Wales, a mere million of whom are regular church attenders.

Still, it's a funny old thing, marriage, or rather it is a continually evolving fairly young thing. The conjugal is – like gods themselves – only ever the product of what humankind makes of it.

The Greeks and Romans associated eroticism and (vague) constancy with extramarital desire, rather than any conjugal paradigm. The idea that marriage might be equated with passion rather than duty would have been considered perverse. Moreover, even within the Christian tradition, marriage has proved nothing if not a contingent, mutable and constantly improvised affair.

Thirty years after the death of Christ, Paul of Tarsus wrote his First Letter to the Corinthians advocating a policy that, if marriage were to be considered good, virginity was even better. Asceticism ruled, wedlock deployed merely as sexuality's panic room, as he famously expressed in Corinthians 7:9: "But if they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn."

Early Christians sought to distinguish themselves from their pagan fellows by turning Greco-Roman values on their heads. As Simon Goldhill has observed in his coruscating Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives (2004), they exhibited this aim first and foremost in their attitudes to the body. Instead of being nourished, exercised and indulged, the Christian physique was starved, deprived and mortified.

In this sense, far from being self-evident or eternal, Christian marriage "itself began as a radical, alternative lifestyle", in which chastity remained the ideal. As Goldhill elaborates: "Marriage, a white wedding in church, might seem the place where things are clearest and easiest. But the service is actually testimony to the long-running crisis in thinking about sexuality, which stems from Christianity's first attempts to distinguish itself from classical culture." This is part of what leads to the institution's being a "still unresolved crisis in how modern life is to be lived", in which the issue of gay marriage is merely the latest instalment.

Throw in Henry VIII, Lawrence Stone's "companionate marriage", psychoanalysis, feminism, the waning of religious belief, and sexual revolution, and marriage becomes an overstuffed melting pot-cum-petri dish for culture's most festering anxieties. Small wonder that on Wednesday – known as "divorce day" by lawyers, when couples return to work after the not so festive season and initiate proceedings – thousands of Britons will cease striving to fathom their own definition.

December's 2011 census results revealed that, for the first time, married households are now a minority. More Britons are unwedded than wedded, with the traditional family unit increasingly feeling like an anachronism. Society is at a tipping point where being single – or some variation on the theme, for at least a proportion of one's adult life – is becoming the norm, getting hitched the aberration.

According to 2008's British Social Attitudes Survey, two thirds of people see little difference between marriage and cohabitation (a mere fifth taking issue). Even regarding children, where more conservative views often apply, only one in four believe that married couples make superior parents. Meanwhile, more than half declare weddings to be more about celebration than lifelong commitment.

In this happily heterogeneous context, culture's one opportunity to make the institution of marriage fashionable again would surely be to allow homosexual men and women to embrace it, were they – and not the Catholic establishment – happy to give it their blessing.