Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Amy and Leon Kass of the University of Chicago have produced an anthology of classic readings on courtship and marriage. Ranging from Homer and the Song of Songs to Allan Bloom and Miss Manners, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar is their constructive response to what they have observed over fifteen years of their students’ romantic perplexity and jadedness.
In their important introductory essay about the human necessity of marriage, the Kasses recount the episode that planted the seed for their book. On the first day of a course they were co-teaching on men and women in literature, they asked their students what they thought the most important decision in their lives would be. Most of the answers had to do with career. Only one young man replied, “Deciding who should be the mother of my children.” “For his eccentric opinion,” write his teachers, “and especially for this quaint way of putting it, he was promptly attacked by nearly every other member of the class.”
The Kasses, by contrast, marveled at his maturity. Equally, they were pained by what seemed to be the amorous aimlessness of a generation of students for whom “the way to the altar is uncharted territory.” And so they started collecting literary passages concerning marriage and courtship. They quickly saw that if the marital ideal is weak among the young, the reason is that the old — often disappointed and confused themselves — have failed to pass on any culturally prescribed pattern for channeling sexual attraction into lifelong marriage. And the reasons for that, in turn, are not far to seek.
The changes that have weakened the cultural inheritance are large and obvious and, for the Kasses, can be summed up as the decline of biblical morality. They cite, in particular, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the destigmatizing of illegitimacy, divorce, adultery, and abortion, together with the erosion of shame and awe in sexual matters, morally neutral sex education, the loosening of ties to place and extended family, the celebration of youth and independence, and an ethos lacking transcendent aspirations. These, they argue, are natural products of liberal democracy’s emphasis on liberty and equality and modern philosophy’s exalting of the individual: “The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient rights-bearing individuals will be decisively different from the courtship and marriage of people who understand themselves as, say, unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply.”
Undeterred by this profoundly pessimistic conclusion about our present situation, the Kasses affirm a view of marriage they contend is not socially constructed, but rooted in the truth about men, women, and sexuality. Their many-layered discussion of what it means that the species is divided into male and female — and thus of the meaning of shame, the connection between sex and beauty, the interrelation of sex and death, and the desire for self-transcendence — should be required reading for young people used to a starvation diet of rock-culture lewdness and “safe sex.” Marriage begins with eros, but it disciplines eros, making way for the renewal of the species and the shared work of rearing children. This central mission enhances “the singular friendship and love of husband and wife. Precisely because . . . children are yours for a lifetime,” they write, “this is a friendship that cannot be had with any other person. Uniquely, it is a friendship that does not fly from, but rather embraces wholeheartedly, the finitude of its members, affirming without resentment the truth of our human condition. Not by mistake did God create a woman — rather than a dialectic partner — to cure Adam’s aloneness.”
This exalted partnership, encompassing both the spiritual and the mundane, is what is captured in the title the editors have given their volume. It comes from Robert Frost’s poem on his daughter’s wedding, which ends: Two such as you . . . / Cannot be parted nor be swept away / From one another once you are agreed / That life is only life forevermore / Together wing to wing and oar to oar. Because marriage allows men and women to develop these higher possibilities, the young should be guided towards it. Courtship, unlike directionless dating and mating, is mutual inspection with a view to marriage. There is no resurrecting its vanished forms, but what can be done — what this volume helps to do — is cultivate insight, and thus inform behavior, rather than trusting solely to spontaneity in decisions so grave as whether and whom to marry.
It is possible to argue with the Kasses’ emphasis on our present romantic chaos as a necessary consequence of modernity. High ideals, after all, are besmirched in every age; there is no escaping the waywardness of man. Certainly one could fill as fat an anthology as this one with the chronicles of conjugal catastrophe, going back, as this collection does, to the Hebrews and the Greeks. The Kasses themselves, moreover, do not despair. They are a happily married, modern, two-career couple. And far from giving up on the young, they have responded to the longings they detect in their students for “wholeness, for a life that is serious and deep,” by searching the stores of civilization to assemble this wonderful anthology.
As befits a book whose purpose is Socratic, they have organized their selections under interrogative headings: Where Are We Now? Why Marry? What About Sex? Is This Love? How Can I Find and Win the Right One? Why a Wedding? and What Can Married Life Be Like? Though enthusiastically pro-marriage, the volume is provocative, rather than prescriptive. For all their own high philosophical predilections — signaled by passages from Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau, Kant, and Kierkegaard — the editors have not excluded from their pages, for example, Benjamin Franklin’s down-to-earth plea for “a Union of Minds, and a Sympathy of Affections; in a mutual Esteem and Friendship for each other in the highest Degree possible”; or anthropologist J. A. Pitt-Rivers’s empirical account of family formation in a mountain community in contemporary Spain; or Charles Darwin’s touching list of the pros and cons of marrying, written just two years before he mastered his fear that, once wed, he “should never know French, — or see the Continent, — or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take [a] solitary trip in Wales,” and cast his happy lot with Emma Wedgwood.
Many of the entries, moreover, are not theoretical at all, but narrative. The process of self-discovery through courtship springs to life in the excruciatingly roundabout progress of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy from first impressions to mutual love in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The blessedness of domesticity (invisible or even repellent to the young) is conjured up by no less a master than Tolstoy, in the transformation of the lithe Natasha into Pierre’s wife and a nursing mother in War and Peace. Loyalty cruelly tested finds its dazzling reward in the reunion of Penelope and her not exactly hearth-loving Odysseus after twenty years apart. I can’t resist quoting from the Robert Fagles translation the Kasses use:
But the royal couple, once they’d reveled in all
the longed-for joys of love, reveled in each
other’s stories,
the radiant woman telling of all she’d borne at
home. . . .
And great Odysseus told his wife of all the pains
he had dealt out to other men and all the hard-
ships
he’d endured himself — his story first to last —
and she listened on, enchanted. . . .
Sleep never sealed her eyes till all was told.
Another strength of the anthology is that it has much to offer readers both secular and religious. Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar sets William Tucker’s argument for monogamy based on sociobiology beside C. S. Lewis’s Christian praise for erotic play as manifesting “our human participation in . . . the natural forces of life and fertility.” It juxtaposes the Book of Genesis’ account of Adam and Eve awakening to shame in their nakedness after the Fall with social theorist Kurt Riezler’s “Comment on the Social Psychology of Shame,” arguing that “Nature herself seems to connect sex with shame. . . . All peoples exclude the observer.” But “mutual love banishes shame. . . . Without love, the companion becomes the observer. Shame decreases with increasing love.”
In all this, the Kasses do not attempt to propound any new dating code. Instead, their selections indirectly illuminate the chasm that separates wooing aimed at marriage — interested as it is not just in sexual attractiveness but also in “attentiveness, dependability, care, exclusiveness, and fidelity” — from, say, flirting, seducing, trysting, hooking up, and indeterminate being “in a relationship.” By breaking the cultural silence, as they put it, and exposing us to the wealth of our own cultural past, they enlarge our thinking on this literally vital theme.
In that, their book is an admirable first volume in the “Ethics of Everyday Life” series published through the University of Notre Dame Press under the auspices of the Institute of Religion and Public Life. Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar will soon be joined by anthologies on dying, edited by Richard John Neuhaus, on teaching and learning, edited by Mark Schwehn, on leading, edited by Timothy Fuller, and on working, edited by Gilbert C. Meilaender, each intended to spur the search for ordinary wisdom by which to live.
The great virtue of the Kasses’ book — but also, it must be said, its limitation — is that it challenges the sophisticated reader with a sampling of the finest fruits of Western thought and literary art. In so doing, it points to the need for a companion volume, a less philosophical anthology on courting and marrying intended for readers not quite up to Kierkegaard; a shorter book that nevertheless raises the same essential questions, from texts accessible to high-school students, their mothers’ book clubs, Oprah viewers, and the local adult Sunday School. Many of the Kasses’ selections are well suited to this purpose (Sullivan Ballou’s letter to Sarah, for example), and these could be supplemented from other sources. Precisely because the “Ethics of Everyday Life” project addresses a genuine and widespread need, its benefits should be extended beyond literary intellectuals. It should aspire to stimulate reflection wherever there are people who read — all of whom have a stake in the recovery of marriage.
Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
