Andrew Kania centres this final commentary on Christian marriage around the plot of Anatole France's 1912 classic, "The God's will have Blood". Dr Kania concludes by wondering: "perhaps society as a whole has taken the form of Elodie Blaise, knowing that she is spiralling downward, but unwilling to grasp that one reality for the sake of having to admit to themselves or others that a gross error of judgement has been made; or perhaps for fear of having to forgo that sweet forbidden fruit, which she knows is poisoning her, but to which she has now become so accustomed."

The Nobel Prize winning novelist Anatole France in his work, "The Gods Will Have Blood" ("Les Dieux ont soif", 1912), paints a picture for his audience of two lovers living within the homicidal period of Robespierre's Reign of Terror. The novel's central character, Evariste Gamelin is an aspiring yet frustrated artist, who at the opening of the tale, pursues Elodie Blaise.

Elodie, for her part, is a passionate young woman who soon reciprocates Gamelin's intentions — or so she perceives Gamelin's intentions to be. Gamelin, a supporter of Robespierre, quickly finds himself diverted from his artistic goals to take up a position as a magistrate, judging those bourgeois defendants who are charged with treason and who face the guillotine for their 'crimes'.

During his first case, Gamelin appeals for mercy for one of the accused and rescues this man's life. Elodie witnesses the event, and after the court is adjourned, throws her arms around Gamelin's neck; filled with passion and awe, she invites Gamelin to her room, where they partake in the first of many and regular sexual encounters. Elodie is progressively of the belief that she and Gamelin will one day marry and begins preparing for such a life.

Nothing could be further from Gamelin's immediate thoughts. No doubt he loves Elodie in his own fashion, but his greatest thirst is not for marital bliss, but to eradicate France of all her aristocratic enemies and all who sympathize with the monarchy. Gamelin, 'the merciful', soon becomes Gamelin 'the executioner'. Elodie becomes aware that the man of her dreams enters her room having spent a day condemning the innocent to death. But Elodie cannot recoil; she must have Gamelin close to her heart; she is revolted by what he does, but she is desperate for him. She realizes that what she loves is destroying her, but she is too far gone.

Elodie becomes increasingly aware that her dreams are illusory, and that she is becoming a mere shell of a person. After Gamelin's execution, she takes another lover, the philanderer Desmahis. As she offers herself completely to this new man, she utters verbatim the words she once spoke to Gamelin. Desmahis is none the wiser, but the reader understands that Elodie, once vivacious and hopeful, is now a serial monogamist, offering herself to the lowest common denominator, spiralling morally downward. The fullness of innocence has been exchanged for the emptiness of cynicism.

When Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956) announced that, "the only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform", many of his era took this at face value; the words having been issued by an eminent scientist. What was forgotten was that the founder of 'sexology' was a zoologist, and left much out of the sexual equation which related to the 'spiritual' and 'emotional' aspects of sexuality which go beyond the mere physicality of sexual behaviour. Certainly Elodie and Gamelin would have passed any Kinsey test, but what destroyed Elodie, was not a lack of desire, but a giving of herself to a monster to the point of emotional and spiritual bankruptcy. Each act of 'sexual love' is not only a physical offering of oneself, but also an emotional and spiritual giving.

For Elodie, the image of Gamelin the Adonis, masked the void which lay in the disparity of values between the two lovers. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm would explain this void in the following terms: "To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical powers but for the growth and development of all his human powers."

In such a light the words of Pope John Paul II in his Familiaris Consortio (1981), are given added meaning: "sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death. The total physical self-giving would be a lie if it were not the sign and fruit of a total personal self-giving, in which the whole person, including the temporal dimension, is present: if the person were to withhold something or reserve the possibility of deciding otherwise in the future, by this very fact he or she would not be giving totally".

Elodie's story is sadly that of so many people, who have been told in zoological terms that they are animals, and should be at their happiest when behaving as beasts, behaving solely at a physical level, stripping the spiritual and emotional component of sexuality, and forsaking the need to commit to others. One popular contemporary song, even boasted: "You and me baby ain't nuthin' but mammals".

	The search and fulfilment of authentic love

Sex without commitment is a form of abuse, for it places short-term pleasure before the long-term good of the other. Sexuality without emotional and spiritual giving is the height of emptiness, a willingness to drink from an empty but expensive glass, or to embrace a lifeless corpse. For this reason Benedict XVI remarked in an address to families in Rome, in June 2005: "The greatest expression of freedom is not the search for pleasure." The greatest expression of freedom is the search and fulfilment of authentic love; to be respected, listened to, cared for, nurtured, and to be committed to someone or something outside of ourselves.

In The Gods Will Have Blood, Elodie had hoped that her self-annihilation would convince Gamelin of the need to commit. Yet commitment entails responsibility, and responsibilities must be maturely and soberly taken, or they can never be made. Sex without commitment is the creation of a plaything out of the precious; far less than what the gift inherently demands.

In a key study by Rutger's University of 2002, researchers concluded that what was destroying the institution of marriage, was the frequency of pre- and extra-marital liasions. The State of our Unions Report (2002, p.6), concluded among other findings as to Why Men Won't Commit, that: men today do not need to commit to marriage, as they can have a relationship without commitment with increasing regularity and with the affirming aura of societal acceptance; hence the crude modern maxim: "Why should a man buy the cow, if the milk is coming free?"

There was no need for Evariste Gamelin to contemplate marrying Elodie, because many of his most basic needs were being met without him even having to consider any responsibility he owed to Elodie. Those such as Evariste who have phobias with regard commitment are thus in the best possible world in contemporary society where nothing seems to be expected of any them beyond the physicality of the present moment.

Kinsey's sexual revolution, it would seem, has helped destabilise society by convincing individuals to trade the fullness of sexuality for dehumanized lives of bitterness, disappointment and cynicism. With a decreased belief in God and institutional religion, trial and error has now become the basis of modern sexual norms and mores, such as: "if it feels good, it must be right", or in the worn apologetic of the adulterer: "God could not be against something so beautiful".

Whereas in the past marriage and commitment were encouraged, many today advocate that such notions are either archaic or constraining. Old-fashioned as the idea of marriage and the notion of commitment is, it is hard to conceive of a person, who would trade the goal of a happy life with one sexual partner, for a life of shattered dreams, rejection, regrets and brokenness with a multitude of sexual partners. Or perhaps society as a whole has taken the form of Elodie Blaise, knowing that she is spiralling downward, but unwilling to grasp that one reality for the sake of having to admit to themselves or others that a gross error of judgement has been made; or perhaps for fear of having to forgo that sweet forbidden fruit, which she knows is poisoning her, but to which she has now become so accustomed.

IMAGE SOURCES: The wedding image used in the main header for this article comes from stock.xchng – Photographer: Amy Jacobs, Volga, SD, United States. Clicking on the other images will take you to the original source.

Email this article to a friend	Post your feedback in our forum

©2007 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

[Andrew Kania's Archive]