Love Wins! The “utilitarian” Nature of Marriage and the orientation of Love

Hardened conservatives often dismiss JPII as too liberal, pointing to his writings on Love within marriage as proof of concept.  Whereas the modern mind post enlightenment could find a sort of surety in the prescriptive decrees of the Church on marriage, the descriptive truths informing those prescriptions are not so clearly outlined - at least, not if you are looking for a simple list of “do this, avoid that.”  But these descriptions are precisely what JPII concerns himself with.  Knowing all too well the sterility of a Faith and worldview boiled down to data and Cartesian-level concrete fact, JPII steps in to return the human element to ethics, especially marital ethics.  And his descriptives are echoed by his contemporaries, showing remarkable unity in the key minds the Holy Spirit used to guide in the next millennium of the Church.  Today, the highlight we will focus on is one point of overlap between Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Marriage and JPII’s Love and Responsibility.

JPII is concerned with reuniting the subjective with the objective.  In other words, overcoming humans as data-driven individuals and yet not devolving into a world of individualized subjectivity.  He focuses on this especially in the opening chapter of Love and Responsibility where he tackles the problem of “use.”  Recognizing that even humans are objects within the created world, there is, he admits, some sense of utility that I as subject orient upon an object that happens to be human.  He qualifies this even further in his treating on the second use of the verb, “to use,” which turns out is more a narrower application of his first definition (that is, using is beholding as means to another end and not as end in itself).  

Now the human person is always another subject, with their own ends and own freedom.  The Social Contractors would insist that therefore, we can only use others, but we must only do so when mutually agreed upon.  JPII rejects this premise.  Even dogs are subjects, in a sense, and do as much as the Social Contractors suggest (in a limited sense).  Rather, what is “exclusively the portion of human persons” is Love.  Love, he says, is the opposite of use, because it, “is not something ready-made.  It begins as a principle or idea which people must somehow live up to in their behavior, which they must desire if they want - as they should - to free themselves from the utilitarian, the ‘consumer’ attitude towards other persons (LaR, p. 29).”  

Marriage is a prime place where we see this play out.  The apparent utility in which the Church insists marriage is oriented to (that is, procreation of children) seems to boil down matrimony to nothing more than an act of utility where one person acts upon the other out of duty - or, worse, acts upon the other because this is the only licit way God allows for fulfilling the sensual drive which He Himself created.  For this reason, JPII insists that, “Marriage is one of the most important areas where this principle [that is Love, or conditioned by the common attitude of people towards the same good which they have chosen as their aim and to which they subordinate themselves] is put into practice (LaR, 30).”  In order for Matrimony to be worthy of humans, to even be included in the Sacraments, it must have a human element: it must have love, lest it devolve into utilitarianism.  And, one step further: it cannot have simply any good end mutually agreed upon between the spouses; it must be the good the Church has already objectively stated.  In other words, the common end and purpose which ends in love must be, “procreation, the future generation, a family, and, at the same time, the continual ripening of the relationship between two people, in all the areas of activity which conjugal life includes (LaR, 30).”

Love as the element within marriage which precisely warrants its elevation above the animal and into the realm of human is also prominently seen in von Hildebrand’s book, Marriage.  There, he states that, “Marriage has been chosen as the image of the perfect union between the soul and Christ because in marriage, likewise, the center and core is love.  No other earthly community is constituted so exclusively in its very substance by mutual love (5).”  He makes a crucial distinction between marriage’s primary end vs. its meaning, echoing JPII’s key for avoiding any sort of use within the context of marriage.  Von Hildebrand writes that, “Love is the primary meaning of marriage just as the birth of new human beings is its primary end.  The social function of marriage and its importance for the State are something secondary and subordinate (7).”  And so, in Von Hildebrand as in JPII, we find that the only way to overcome marriage as a necessary concession to the sensual and lower in the moral order which otherwise is oriented highest to lowest is to hold Love as the key center.

JPII could not have emerged at a more crucial time.  The Industrial Revolution was underway, giving credence to the lie of feminism that says women and men ought to operate identically.  Humanae Vitae had been written, promulgated, and condemned in favor of the tumultuous sexual revolution.  World Wars, Vatican II, and the logical conclusion of the enlightenment and modernity ushered in a complex world into which the dynamics of human experience were lost upon progressives and conservatives alike.  Progressives commonly wrote off the human experience as entirely subjective, arrested in the insurmountable human isolation.  Conservatives, reacting against the combined absurdities of feminism, industrialism, sexual freedom and subjectivism, saw the complexities of human individuality perhaps as irrelevant to an unforgiving objective world order into which they must order themselves.  This false dichotomy persists even today in the most extreme minds of both sides, showing JPII (and contemporaries like von Hildebrand), just as relevant and important today as they were 60 years ago.