We must, I think, regard the protest of Jesus against marriage and
family ties as the claim of a particular kind of individual to be free
from them because they hamper his own work intolerably. When he said
that if we are to follow him in the sense of taking up his work we must
give up our family ties, he was simply stating a fact; and to this day
the Roman Catholic priest, the Buddhist lama, and the fakirs of all
the eastern denominations accept the saying. It is also accepted by the
physically enterprising, the explorers, the restlessly energetic of all
kinds, in short, by the adventurous. The greatest sacrifice in marriage
is the sacrifice of the adventurous attitude towards life: the being
settled. Those who are born tired may crave for settlement; but to
fresher and stronger spirits it is a form of suicide. Now to say of
any institution that it is incompatible with both the contemplative and
adventurous life is to disgrace it so vitally that all the moralizings
of all the Deans and Chapters cannot reconcile our souls to its slavery.
The unmarried Jesus and the unmarried Beethoven, the unmarried Joan of
Arc, Clare, Teresa, Florence Nightingale seem as they should be; and
the saying that there is always something ridiculous about a married
philosopher becomes inevitable. And yet the celibate is still
more ridiculous than the married man: the priest, in accepting the
alternative of celibacy, disables himself; and the best priests are
those who have been men of this world before they became men of the
world to come. But as the taking of vows does not annul an existing
marriage, and a married man cannot become a priest, we are again
confronted with the absurdity that the best priest is a reformed rake.
Thus does marriage, itself intolerable, thrust us upon intolerable
alternatives. The practical solution is to make the individual
economically independent of marriage and the family, and to make
marriage as easily dissoluble as any other partnership: in other words,
to accept the conclusions to which experience is slowly driving both our
sociologists and our legislators. This will not instantly cure all the
evils of marriage, nor root up at one stroke its detestable tradition
of property in human bodies. But it will leave Nature free to effect a
cure; and in free soil the root may wither and perish.
This disposes of all the opinions and teachings of Jesus which are
still matters of controversy. They are all in line with the best modern
thought. He told us what we have to do; and we have had to find the way
to do it. Most of us are still, as most were in his own time, extremely
recalcitrant, and are being forced along that way by painful pressure of
circumstances, protesting at every step that nothing will induce us to
go; that it is a ridiculous way, a disgraceful way, a socialistic way,
an atheistic way, an immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to be
ashamed of themselves and must be made to turn back at once. But they
find that they have to follow the vanguard all the same if their lives
are to be worth living.