Lewis on marriage
I just came across an old article (Nov. '03) on the Christianity Today Web site about how C.S. Lewis' influence on modern society is in many ways greater than that of John F. Kennedy. They both died on the same day several years before my birth. But I can say that even if JFK changed the state of politics in my country in bigger ways, Lewis had a far more profound impact on me personally. There was a period of time in high school when I couldn't bear to read anything not written by him. Even today, I'm almost incapable of discussing a spiritual matter without eventually quoting him.
Having said that, I'm not sure what to make of this passage I recently came across in his book The Four Loves. Here he writes of the analogy the Bible draws in comparing a marriage to Jesus' relationship with believers (husband is to wife as Christ is to the church). I've tried tackling this subject before on this site, but the whole issue remains a sort of ethereal mystery in my own mind, and I'm not sure how to flesh it out in the real world.
Here are Lewis's words. Make of them what you will.
Christian law has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage, bestowing—or should I say, inflicting?—a certain 'headship' on him …. As we could easily take the natural mystery too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery not seriously enough. Christian writers (notably Milton) have sometimes spoken of a husband's headship with a complacency to make the blood run cold. We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church—read on—and gave his life for her (Ephesians 5:25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs….
To say this is not to say that there is any virtue or wisdom in making a marriage that involves such misery. There is no wisdom or virtue in seeking unnecessary martyrdom or deliberately courting persecution; yet it is, none the less, the persecuted or martyred Christian in whom the pattern of the Master is most unambiguously realized. So, in these terrible marriages, once they have come about, the 'headship' of the husband, if only he can sustain it, is most Christ-like.
The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown offered to it either in the Pagan or in the Christian mystery. For the one is of paper and the other of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands may grasp the latter too eagerly; but that they will allow or compel their wives to usurp it.
