388. Taste and Belief

In The Atlantic, October, 2017, the latest in do-it-yourself wedding vows: "I promise to be your greatest fan and your toughest adversary, your partner in crime and your consolation in disappointment," says the groom.  The bride replies, "I promise faithfulness, respect, and self-improvement.  I will not only celebrate your triumphs, I will love you all the more for your failures.  And I promise to never wear heels, so you won't look short."  (Esther Perel, "Why People in Happy Marriages Cheat.")

Well, we know that the great events of life, birth and marriage and death, are too much for any human being to handle in words, so we don't call it banality when a grieving young son says in his eulogy that his mother was "real special."  That call is for a teacher marking a composition theme.  It should be the same way, probably, with wedding vows.  Love trumps style.

But still, we can't lose our eye for banality.  And keeping traditional words, the best that the best writers of the past have been able to think up, keeping them in view is our best help.  If we don't fully realize how superficial and juvenile the above performance is — two children showing adults their advancement to serious magazines, and, still, their cuteness — we need to recall the traditional vows.  You all know them but, for old times' sake, I'll ask you to give them another read.  A slow one.  "In the Name of God, I take you [my bride] to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part."  That will bring the other great words to mind, "Cleave only unto her…,"  "…let no man put asunder."

Listen to these adults as a child in a pew and you say, "So this is what lies ahead — possible poverty filled with sickness, with death at the end."  It's like the first time you listen to Hamlet, his problems fading after he parts the curtain on the life ahead, a sea of troubles — "the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes."

People who do things in the name of God do them with a sure view of the dark realities of life; people who do them in their own name may or may not have a view of those realities.  In any case if you speak in the name of God you speak rich and tasteful words; in your own name you speak bare banalities.

But you can't speak "in the name of God" without revealing your credulousness.  That, today, is a mark of superstition.  You have not been enlightened by the Enlightenment.  You are benighted.  So a child in a pew hearing the hard truths of life in rich and tasteful language is growing up in darkness and a child who remains a child reading magazines selling self-improvement is growing up in light.

If you are content to see the big contest going on here as a contest between taste and belief, and you have lived long enough, you can't help wondering how things stand in that contest now.  There was a time, in my circle, when good taste didn't have a chance against belief.  If you didn't believe in the existence of God the most discriminating taste, the most sensitive style, the most comprehensive imagination got you nothing more than a more ornamented car to hell.  Then came a time when I had friends for whom belief in the non-existence of God scored you the same way, zero for taste, style, and imagination.  Nothing made up for an offense against reason.  Reason, we had decided in a dormitory bull session, was the key to enlightenment and civilization.  Doubting God was the mark of reason.

Where do my friends stand now?  Being out of touch with them I'll have to extrapolate from their last known position and personality.  Returning to the bull session I read aloud to them the two sets of vows.   Everybody takes the contemporary couple to be unbelievers.  

Philip, still militantly unbelieving, will swallow the juvenility because nothing, as before, makes up for credulousness.  It's a hard swallow, though, as he senses the improved taste of those around him. To lessen our disapproval he makes a face, showing what a struggle it is. 

Fred, loose at the beginning, is loosy-goosy now.  Neither taste nor theology matter that much.  He's got a lump on his neck he's worried about. 

Time has played a joke on Carl.  He was an easy believer, and in the dormitory was easily laughed out of his belief.   Now he waits to see which way the laughs are going and is stumped.  He sees that he's facing a serious issue, but not clearly.

For Livingston, an esthete into theology, the weight of God kept taste, alas, way down there.  God lost weight but taste did not rise.  He wanted to have them pulling together.  OK, let weightless "God" stand for "order in the universe."  Ah, he's in the ranks behind the heavy thinker who said,  "Without order in the universe there can be no order in daily life."  But does good taste depend on good ordering?  Liv has to look at Rob, who has nothing in order, in life or head, but has unerring taste.

Rob has a grip on one rule: don't look or sound like Looey, the low-class family friend his mother kept making fun of.

Will's girlfriend Margaret, with us now, started High Church and moved higher, taking her family with her.  She reads the made-up vows, points her finger down her throat, leans as if to throw up in a basin at her side, and goes on to more interesting things.  Her economy tells me not to make a big deal out of this.

Clarence, back from France, is the surprise.  He was an intense family fundamentalist and an intense college atheist, with never an opening for taste.  Only his roommate, perhaps, sensed the refinery below, building pressure.  Life with poets in Paris opened the valve.  "No, no," he says, "No, any belief as an alternative to what produced 'partner in crime.'"  Then he overdoes it. "I'll bow down to wooden poles.  I'll make phylacteries.  I'll wear hair shirts.  Anything to avoid 'self-improvement.'"

Korey, out for years and in a long relationship, so wants the serious blessings of society on his hoped-for ceremony that nothing but "till death" and "cleave" and "asunder" will do.  He says he'll start looking for a safe place if he gets called his partner's "greatest fan."