RECONSIDERING POLYGAMY

...Perhaps for many questions there could be, theoretically, an ideal solution...

...But the nature of man is not merely biological and psychological...

...Must we conclude therefore that the marriage union ol Elkanah and Hannah, or the union of Jacob and Rachel, was less than valid, not in accord with human dignity, and a manifestation of shallow love...

...While such love may be a desirable fruit of marriage, it is surely too fragile a hope to serve as the only foundation for the stability of marriage...

...To put it in other words, simultaneous or consecutive polygamy may be marriage-like unions, but in no sense are they valid realizations of conjugal love...

...they can be reconceived in the light of new ideas...

...It is evident," as Leonhard Weber says, in On Marriage, Sex and Virginity, "that economic revolutions are closely bound up with social changes within marriage and that they often determine the actual form of marriage to a greater extent than ethical and religious considerations...

...Ignace Lepp confirms this in a very revealing passage in Psychology of Loving: father Eugene hillman, c.s.sp., for 18 years a missionary in Africa and author of the newly published Polygamy Reconsidered (Orbis), is currently a Research Fellow at Yale Divinity School...

...The love of spouses is naturally so exclusive that it can only exist in absolute honesty if both partners give themselves to one another, wholly and unconditionally...

...For instance, there are continuous changes in the world of man in regard to the concept of woman's role in society, changes that reflect a different estimation of the relationship between man and woman...

...But this ideal solution could be applied to ideal conditions only when they are actualities in a certain time or a certain culture...

...One's conception of the ideal marriage is determined by the values that are emphasized in one's own culture...

...Still, it is quite natural that Western thinkers should have worked out, on the basis of their own culturally conditioned psychology of love, a philosophical proof that monogamy is the ideal form of marriage...

...Thus, for example, Otto Piper tells us that in The Biblical View of Sex and Marriage: The fact that some people are able to love more than one person at the same time does not prove that polygamy is as valuable as monogamy but that love can become shallow...

...Has Christian theology nothing to learn from this vast human experience...

...Erotic love establishes a direct bond between two persons...

...They adapt to changing circumstances...

...Marriage, as a pre-Christian social institution, is also experienced in a great variety of forms throughout the non-Western world where most humans live, and where therefore most of the world's marriages are experienced in their respective non-Western forms and structures...

...This contemporary understanding of human nature, with particular reference to the variations in the man-woman relationship, is set forth by Josef Fuchs in "Theology of the Meaning of Marriage Today," in Marriage in the Light of Vatican II, edited by James T. McHugh...

...Indeed, there is some evidence to sug-that family life in the Western world is deteriorating today precisely because of this late Western idea that marriage is based primarily upon a mutually fulfilling inter-personal relationship which is totally self-giving and exclusive...

...Where procreation is no longer the primary purpose of marriage, because of changed economic conditions and the lower mortality rate among children, greater emphasis may be given to the purpose of mutual love between husband and wife...

...Perhaps this is another case of an oppressed group having internalized the consciousness of the superordinate group, in the same way that many slaves in former times acquiesced in their condition and served their masters with genuine loyalty...

...The question of customary polygamy and church discipline, a recurring topic of debate in the Christian communities of Africa, is a timely example of this much wider problem of ethnocentric theologizing...

...For them, because of their culture, it is the ideal...

...and that non-Western peoples are progressive (civilized, mature, human, etc...

...The Norm...

...And if these particular conditions are not realized, then neither could this ideal solution be realized...

...Likewise, social conditions might legitimate a certain way of choosing a marriage partner in certain periods or countries...

...It is supposed, and this supposition is not always and only tacit, that Western peoples are superior (higher, more civilized, more mature, more human, further from primitive mankind) in the realm of social behavior as well as in technology and mercantilism...

...This is very apt to be the case where the man's role is that of patriarch, pater familias, father-leader of an extended family, where he tends to marry later in life, where the woman is in need of protection from an early age, and where the only available protection is marriage into a plural family unit-or at least where the plural family unit offers the best opportunities for a secure and dignified existence, and where all women are expected to find their fulfillment in marriage...

...Are they so dull that they do not know what is good for them...

...The same Western philosophical and emotional presuppositions, concerning the nature of personhood and the psychology of love, are reflected also in Bernard HMring's earlier writings, especially in the reasons he educes for the inappropriateness of polygamy in Marriage in the Modern World: Sexual love between man and woman, if it is in the fullest sense human and in accord with human dignity, tends of its inner nature to ex-clusiveness...

...It is by no means self-evident that the contemporary Western conception of conjugal love, at least as it is often idealized in relative isolation from the larger communities of kinship, is higher and more fully human than the broader conception of conjugal love in polygamous families...

...And what compassionate pastoral procedures do we have when, in these societies, Christians subsequently enter into plural marriages...

...This would certainly be the view of many older missionaries and even of older African Christians...

...There was no need for a law to require the civilized Moslems of North Africa, Egypt and elsewhere to renounce polygamy...

...Marriage, after all, is not a Western invention nor was monogamy a Christian innovation...

...Again: the movement from immaturity to maturity, backwardness to advancement, by imitating Western social behavior...

...It is difficult therefore for the majority of men, and psychologically impossible for most women, to love several persons simultaneously...

...Once we recognize that these non-Western cultural patterns are not less valid than our Western patterns, then we are hard put to prove that the Western conception of marriage, although profoundly influenced by the leaven of the gospel and canonized by the church in the West, must be taken as the universally absolute ideal or norm for Christians everywhere...

...both were already there in pre-Christian Greco-Roman culture, and polygamy was already forbidden for a Roman citizen, before the advent of Christ...

...In such a* society the right that every woman has to marriage, and the society's need for legitimate progeny, is actually well served by the system of polygamy...

...The axiom 'primum vivere, deinde philosophari' is clearly applicable here...

...Indeed, this very hypothesis seems to be established by projecting the attitudes and values of one group upon another group whose experience has given them some very different attitudes and values...

...so much so that this love aspect may even become detached from the family-making aspect of marriage...

...In different conditions of man and woman, including social conditions, different principles have to be applied...

...May we assume, anyway, that the attitudes and values of the African masses in the future will be identical with the attitudes and values of a present-day minority...

...Are the needs and interests, hence the attitudes and values, of both groups the same: the minority who have been "Westernized," and the masses who have not...

...What is normal behavior among one people may be abnormal among another people...

...whereas other social conditions would not so easily allow for the same way of choosing a partner at other times or in other conditions...

...But this does not mean that the ways of one of these peoples are less human than the ways of the other...

...But a hypothesis is not verified simply by affirming that it is so...

...Do the mass of African women accept polygamy as an ideal form of marriage, simply because they do not know any better...

...it is also historical and therefore always being reshaped and conditioned by changing and differing socio-economic situations...

...Is this an ad hominem type of apologetics...

...Popular Western psychology lends support to this view from the top of an imaginary ladder of progress...

...The nature of man, and also his sense of human dignity, is reflected in the institution of marriage...

...But all such change involves change of meaning-a change of idea or concept, a change of judgment or evaluation, a change of order or request...

...hence the system is widely supported and encouraged by women themselves...

...Under vastly different conditions in some other societies polygamy makes sense, especially where the idea of marriage is almost interchangeable with the idea of the extended family, and where a strong sense of community is all-pervading...

...Our theology, in other words, must recognize the necessity and the validity of the varied historico-cultural ways of human existence...

...to the extent that they approximate Western ways and values...

...Not if we look at the nature of marriage and the significance of cultural differences in the light of contemporary anthropology...

...The cultural-progress hypothesis, so dear to many Western intellectuals even today, and still pervasive in popular Western thinking, provides the ultimate "rational" argument against all distinctively non-Western forms and conceptions of marriage almost any time these are discussed by Christian theologians and churchmen...

...If the historicity and the cultural embeddedness of man is constitutive of human nature, then theologians must make allowances not only for vast changes, but also for great diversity, in the conceptualization and structuring of marriage and family life...

...If such is the case, then a minority of African women, especially those who have become "Westernized" through schools and churches, would seem to be in the vanguard of African womanhood "come of age...

...they can be subjected to revolutionary change...

...Similar rules for marriage and family in one case generate bliss and in another misery," says Bernard Lonergan who further elaborates the point in these words in Method in Theology: The family, the state, the law, the economy are not fixed and immutable entities...

...Polygamy and polyandry are conceivable only within human groups in which sexual possession is not yet intrinsically linked to love...

...They give themselves to each other totally...

...Even the most obvious objection to this culturally conditioned notion of conjugal love is apt to be anticipated with a confident show of logic...

...In such a situation must a missionary tell polygamist husbands that, if they wish to become Christians, they must first divorce the mothers of their own children...

...Not if we have abandoned the classicist view that one culture only, that of Western man, is universally normative for all men...

...What many of our Western theologians and churchmen have not yet fully recognized is that "in mankind as a whole there must be many different, complementary, and reciprocally stimulating expressions of married life...

...For complex socio-economic and historico-cultural reasons in this or that particular society, polygamy may happen to be the marriage structure which best safeguards the basic values in the human sexual relationship...

...From this highly individualistic and typically Western conception of love it follows that "a society which accepts polygamy as normal is...

...According to the cultural-progress hypothesis the Western experience, especially the socio-psychological experience of the past one hundred years, is taken as normative for the whole of humanity...

...This article was presented as a paper to the international convention of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Amsterdam, March, 1975...

...Thus, for example, in Learning to Love, Marc Oraison confidently assures us that "the practice of polygamy in a society is always a sign of psychological immaturity...

...With a view to illustrating this wider problem, and suggesting at the same time the need for a more catholic approach to the theology of marriage, the focus of attention here is upon the common form of plural marriage still widely practiced among most of the peoples in Africa south of the Sahara: simultaneous polygamy...

...The exclusive love union of two partners, with little or no reference to offspring or to the kinship bonds established through marriage, occurs only in, and perhaps only as a concomitant of, certain well known socio-economic conditions in modem industrial-consumer-mercantile societies...

...In a society which has no place for unmarried women, where marriage alone offers women the security and dignity required for their normal self-realization, and where economic forces prevent men from marrying at an early age, polygamy is apt to be both t social necessity and a positive cultural value...

...on a lower plane than one which outlaws it...

...In the concrete terms used by Fuchs, the question is "whether marriage is to be understood and lived according to the Congolese or Western European style...

...A sample of this kind of thinking is provided by Vittorio Bartoccetti, sometime Secretary of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature in the Roman Curia in the Dictionary of Moral Theology: "Monogamy is an accepted principle in the civil codes of the more progressive nations...

...Surely it is still an open question, deserving far more attention than it has so far been given by theologians: whether the marriage institution, canonized by the church, is in fact only a product of the Western historico-cultural experience, and not therefore a universally normative ideal to which the marriages of all non-Western Christians must conform...

...It passed away of its own accord as soon as their psychological maturity had attained to a sufficiently high level for them to look not only for the pleasure of the senses from a woman but also, and primarily, for spiritual communion with her...

...At the same time there are also many other peoples who are no less convinced, because of their different experience and mythology, that polygamy is the ideal...