Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

“‘I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abideth in me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit. For without me you can do nothing.‘ We have seen when treating of the Mass the necessity of reproducing the sacrificial mind of Christ; when treating of marriage we have seen the necessity of interpreting human love in terms of the love of God. With the Mass and with marriage the secret lies in abiding with Him while He abides in us.” (105) A theological case study, in how to speak to Christians about polygyny? Read We Live with Our Eyes Open, a series of reflections by Dom Hubert Van Zeller, an English Benedictine monk and sculptor, as shown in this 1962 photo. Originally published by Sheed and Ward in 1949, Cenacle Press reissued it in this gorgeous paperback in 2023. A spare edition without any introductory or contextualizing material beyond what’s on the back cover, it’s available here: https://cenaclepress.com/en-us/products/we-live-with-our-eyes-open-zeller The original edition is on the Internet Archive, where it can be read for free; for convenience, pages reproduced from that edition. https://archive.org/details/welivewithoureye0000domh/ Very pleased I read it. I fully expected the clear, colorful English typical of the period, and the sage Christian musings on the nature of this life, but was pleasantly surprised to find recurring themes that brush on that thing I love, plural marriage. Surprising? Van Zeller never mentions polygyny—although, as he grew up in British-occupied Egypt, he may well have known some Muslim plural families (the only tale of colonial Egypt he relates is “a fight, in Alexandria, between a Greek barber and an Arab newspaper seller” that he witnessed as a boy (55)). But it‘s to be expected that Van Zeller points out and breaks down vices that hinder growth in charity, and prevent our growing closer to God. Cardinal among these evils, he says, is jealousy. Early on, he devotes a chapter it, beginning with a reference to a now obscure piece of music with the same name (I think he meant this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwy1ei7q3Jw, though I thought of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdV88f-OxCA), and it is clear, he sees jealousy as an almost unmixed evil, which he contrasts with envy. ”In the first place, jealousy must not be confused with envy. We can be envious of another’s talents, another’s wealth, another’s looks, chances, success and so on, but if we are jealous we have an eye on another’s affection—and this causes far more trouble. An envious person may be an uneasy person, never satisfied and often consumed with self-pity, but a jealous person is made miserable; jealousy is far more harrowing, far more unbalancing, than envy. A jealous person is made suspicious, furtive, morose, unreasonable. Jealousy is the most hideously withering evil: it finds a rose-tree and leaves a stick. Not only is jealousy far worse than envy for the individual concerned, but it is also far worse for everyone else.” (5) He then dismisses attempts to shift blame onto the one one is jealous of. ”’You tell me I’ve fanned it up in my imagination,’ objects the sufferer, ‘but I can trace a deterioration in the one I love. New loyalties have brought about a change for the worse in all sorts of things: in outlook, taste, behaviour. I know I’m right.’ Even allowing that this is true, there is no possible good to be got out of either showing, or allowing oneself to feel, jealousy. To indulge this particular emotion can only lead to harm: it brings into the relationship an element which rules out any idea of reciprocal confidence. Insignificant acts are charged with meaning, and then misinterpreted. Slights are seen everywhere, and where they are not seen they are imagined—swollen out of all plausibility and backed up by trivial little bits of evidence recalled from the remote past. Reason is submerged; emotion is on top. Panics, suspicions, memories, doubts, nerves, willies of every sort.” (8) Jealousy prevents mutual understanding, and every little gesture becomes an offense. The real fault, Van Zeller suggests, lies not in the other’s changed attitude toward the jealous, but in his lack of self-confidence. ”’My only sin,’ he tells himself, ‘lies in the fact that I have failed to retain what once I seem to have inspired.’ In saying this (and nearly all jealous people do say this, or something like it) he is not so far from the truth as might be imagined. At the root of jealousy there is a want of confidence: confidence, obviously, in the other, but a want of confidence also in self. Since there is a wrong and a right kind of self-confidence, it is as well that we should recognise the fruits by their tree. If we trusted each other more and mistrusted ourselves less—in other words, forgot about ourselves—there would be no room for jealousy.” (9) While Van Zeller has the teacher-student and similar relationships in mind, he also speaks expressly of the role of jealousy in dissolving marriages. ”Where jealousy is responsible for the breaking up of a relationship, it is nearly always the one who is jealous, and not the other, who takes the initiative and finally cuts adrift. To him it may appear as the great renunciation, but in actual fact it is the result of not being prepared to make the act of faith which love demands. It is want of generosity; there has not been enough trust. He has wanted to get from his love, and not to give to it. ‘Marriage,’ says Joyard, ‘is the kind of game in which the loser always wins.‘ This is true of all human relationships: the exacting are doomed to disappointment.” (10) These gloomy thoughts lead Van Zeller muse that, “it looks as if jealousy may serve a useful purpose after all: it can let us know when our amor benevolentiae is beginning to show signs of becoming amor concupiscentiae.” (11) Nor does he contain his critique of jealousy to one chapter. In the next, he tells a fairy tale-like story, of a princess so ill at ease with palace life, she runs off to be a goose girl. A prince takes interest in her, and attempts to draw her back into palace life. At first, she is reluctant, but then, she not only accepts a role as lady-in-waiting to the prince’s mother, the queen, she becomes the life of the court, outdoing everyone else in its society and amusements. But the prince, wishing to return to the days when he alone had her attentions, has the princess released from her service, and return to her geese, though without her former zeal for peasant life: she misses the court (16-18). “There is only one thing to add, and that is that to the end of his life the prince used, when he thought of the matter at all, which was every now and then, to say: ‘Well, anyway, she is happier as she is; I am glad I acted unselfishly.’ What he did not say, for it never crossed his mind to say it, was: ‘I too am happier as I am; it would have driven me mad to see her wasting on the court the love that was mine for the asking.’ “On second thoughts this story should have come at the end of the foregoing essay and not at the end of this one. Except that if it is our purpose in this book to keep our eyes open, then every essay might fittingly close with a story that explodes a self-deception... We must be sure that our alleged motives conform to our real ones.” (18) He laments that “jealousy can pitch its motive so high,” as to say the concern is all in the other’s interests, when it is really personal discomfort at not monopolizing the other’s affections (18). While the sexes are reversed, notice how exactly Van Zeller’s deconstruction of jealousy agrees with the key insight of polygyny: while a wife sleeping with another man harms her husband, by making the father of her children uncertain, and even challenging his headship of the family, a husband taking and mating additional wives, and providing support for all, upsets, at most, only her fictive or notional good. He can still gives her babies whenever she wants—by nature, he can give the marriage debt to as many women as will have him—but she wants him to have eyes only for her, her, her! Just as it was no harm to the prince if his princess was the life of the party at court, it isn’t any harm to the wife if her husband is so fortunate as to make several women more his wives, and have them all have his children. Celibate though he was, Van Zeller later turned to sex and marriage, providing advice for the sanctifying of both, in a civilization already grown over-sexualized eight decades ago. While he could amusingly quip his Christian disapproval of the current sensuality (“The editor of a popular daily paper once wrote to me asking for an article under the heading Is Sex O.K.? I sent him a somewhat formidable statement of the Catholic view, the burden of my remarks being ‘As things are, no sir’”, (44)), he has some really touching words on the dignity and holiness of married life. “If love be thought of in terms only of the flesh, what a travesty must be the mood in which love’s crowning expression is performed. That act which God intended as a sacred seal upon a union He has blessed, that pledge of mutual dedication to be approached with reverence and awe, that fulfilment of a promise divinely ordained… how does man acquit himself of this: The mind sickens at the thought of what the dispositions of one who holds un-Christian views may sometimes be. And even pagan-tainted Christians, how do they approach? Contemptuously? Coarsely? Even drunkenly: Men and women have before now taken too much to drink on the night of their marriage for perhaps no other reason than that they should not show self-consciousness in the performance of so intimate an act. With others—and these the more guilty—the act has arisen out of drunkenness. What would even the most indifferent Catholic think of the man who came on drunken and uncertain feet to receive the Holy Eucharist: The Blessed Sacrament is not the only Sacrament which is blessed. Holy Communion is not the only union which is holy.” (78) The Blessed Sacrament is not the only Sacrament which is blessed! Van Zeller anticipates Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, in his sex-positive attitude: don’t have sex drunk (or high, he’d add today), it’s too important. The height of Van Zeller’s teaching comes in the short chapter “The Mass and Marriage”. This is where he shows, as in the bulleted point on the rear, “How both the Mass and marriage call us to a Johannine [like St. John the Evangelist] charity”. ”Between the preparation and the consummation of the first Mass, our Lord gave to man the discourse of the Vine. ”The stem was just about to be severed. The grapes were to be torn away, scattered, trodden into the earth. But not all. Later, branches would shoot up from the same root, and new fruit would appear. And the fruit would remain. There would be pruning, there would be splitting, there would be the growth of strange twisted shapes. But the Vine would stand, and the grapes would go on coming year after year… The Mass and marriage.” (105) Then comes the lovely quote I give at the top. St. John‘s gospel is very intimate, alone recording many of the words Jesus spoke in private, before parting from His friends for a time with the Passion. Honestly, I had never thought of applying the Parable of the True Vine to marriage. But, Van Zeller reaches this conclusion. ”In the Mass—which is to say in Christ—is to be found the clue to the married life. The offering of two souls and bodies finds perfect precedent in the offering of Christ’s soul and body. It is the altar of love in either case. The very symbolism of the Mass is suited: as the ears of wheat are mingled in the making of the host and as the cluster of grapes becomes one thing in the formation of the wine, so the two become one in the sacrament of marriage. The resources are pooled, independence is renounced, the contribution is so united that what each brings is indistinguishable from the other and can never again revert to its own unwedded identity. Together the two members of the partnership give to each other and to God in the way that Christ gives to mankind and to the Father in the Mass. Sacrifice is the key.“ (106-107) Yes, but, isn’t he missing something beautiful, that Christ’s metaphor points us to? Sacrifice is key for both husband and wife… but their contributions are hardly indistinguishable. Christians should be familiar with St. Paul’s likening of the relationship of husband and wife to that of Jesus and the Church: ”Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. He is the saviour of his body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it.” (Ephesians 5:22-25) Even with “love”, it’s clear the relationship isn’t just egalitarian, but even orthodox theologians can’t decide what to make of it. What does this charitable patriarchy entail? A few verses later on—“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the church.” (31-32)—are even cited to back monogamy. But the significance is altogether otherwise, in light of the True Vine parable. “I am the vine, you are the branches”: as the man is the ‘head’ of his wife, so also is he the vine, and she the branch. Do you really think it is her place to say “Vine, you will have only one branch, me!”? Isn’t even wanting such a thing is absurd? Rather, it‘s self-evident that firstly, her part is to accept and bear all the fruits the vine gives her, and secondly, she ought fervently to wish for the vine—her man—to flourish to the greatest possible, with many other branches faithfully bearing his fruit if at all possible. To wish otherwise, would be as ridiculous as an apostle not wishing for the Church of Christ to grow. Is her man eager to marry a second wife, and she feels so wronged she wants a divorce? Recall, “Where jealousy is responsible for the breaking up of a relationship, it is nearly always the one who is jealous, and not the other, who takes the initiative and finally cuts adrift”: perhaps it is only her love and trust that is wanting. Doesn’t this complete Catholic theology, and show the self-giving love our Lord calls us to, in a manner the monogamy can’t? Might this interpretive key unlock spiritual fruits in many authors beyond Van Zeller? The Parable of the True Vine embodies the self-giving love and sacrifice that characterize plural marriages. #DomHubertVanZeller #WeLiveWithOurEyesOpen #jealousy #envy #holymatrimony #marriage #pluralmarriage #polygyny #polygamy #TrueVine #patriarchy #CatholicGab #CatholicChurch #Catholic #Christianity #Christian #theology #books