SAME-SEX marriage has come to England and Wales, and in response
Churches are invoking the term "complementarity". Before using a
word, we should think about it carefully. What might
complementarity actually look like, in either same- or opposite-sex
relationships?
I should like to offer some philosophical tools for thinking it
through. Philosophy need not lead us into abstraction, but can help
us to understand real lives and relationships. I also want to
consider how complementarity features in marriage: not so much,
here, within a marriage, but - more provocatively -
between different kinds of marriage.
The Church of England holds that marriage is all about the
complementarity of men and women. That conviction underlies its
official position on same-sex marriage, as Professor Mike Higton
recently pointed out (Comment, 21
March). The appeal to complementarity is at the heart of the
Church of England's submission to the Government's 2012 marriage
consultation, and it explains the "no change" approach in the
recent episcopal Pastoral Guidance on same-sex marriage, as
Professor Higton also argued.
Is sexual difference the key?
COMPLEMENTARITY is central to any marriage. The Church, however,
holds that sexual difference is the foundation of that
complementarity.
What sort of claim is being made, here? Are we saying that
sexual difference is enough, by itself, for us to know that two
people complement each other, just as having a pulse is enough, by
itself, for us to know that someone is alive? (Philosophers would
call this a "sufficient condition": the pulse clinches it when
ascertaining life; and sexual difference clinches it when assessing
complementarity.)
Writers of church documents cannot mean that. Or, if they do,
then they are wrong. Any random woman and any random man would not
make for a complementary couple, just on the basis of their sexual
difference. Something else must be in view. Although sexual
difference might not be enough for complementarity, it is claimed
as a necessary starting-point, a sine qua non: if
complementarity is what we are after, then man-plus-woman is the
only place to start. (Philosophically, that would make sexual
difference a "necessary condition", not a "sufficient" one, just as
having a heart is a necessary condition for a human being to be
alive, but not a sufficient one, since a corpse might have a
non-beating heart.)
If opposite-sex partners are not automatically complementary,
then the only way to judge whether they are is to see whether their
relationship works in practice. Such a shift towards the empirical
is perilous for opponents of same-sex relationships, since it is
plain that some same-sex couples are complementary, are compatible.
The two people work together, which is why their relationship
lasts.
Sexual difference is obviously not sufficient to guarantee
complementarity; and it seems, empirically, that it is not even
necessary: not if the word "complementary" is taken to refer to
something real in the world.
Complementarity rests on more than sexual difference. As with
similarity and difference, it is worked out on many levels - many
more than the bishops acknowledge. It matters which experiences and
traditions a couple share, for instance, and which they do not. The
otherness that a woman finds in a man is not exhausted by his
maleness: there is also the fact that he is a Scot while she is
English, that he tends to think in concrete terms while she tends
to be abstract-minded, and so on. Similarities between a man and a
woman are also important. Our own experience confirms that a
certain irreducible difference exists between any two people, in
any kind of relationship. The difference of one person from another
is more profound than a difference of sex,even in an opposite-sex
relationship. When a man finds comfort in his female partner, for
instance, her femaleness is not a matter of indifference, but she
also matters as another human being: as someone to talk to, someone
to rely on, someone to share responsibilities with. Adam's first
response to the creation of Eve was to her similarity with him -
"This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" - not to
her difference.
So many elements of similarity and difference are interwoven in
a heterosexual relationship that picking out just one sort of
difference - sexual difference - as if it were all that mattered
for complementarity is remarkably short-sighted. No one loves
someone else simply as a man or simply as a woman, and not also as
funny, or serious, or Welsh, or practical, or tall, or dark-haired,
or a hundred other factors. A collapse of difference into
male-female difference, which so undergirds current Church of
England formulations, reduces our vision of sexual relationships to
the level of a budget brothel: you ask for a woman, you ask for a
man, and you take the first one who's free: sexual difference is
what matters, not particularity.
In this way, our discussions are being carried out in terms of
categories of people rather than in terms of individuals. Consider,
in contrast, Luther's perspective: that ideally women per se should
not interest him sexually, but rather his wife would do so, in her
particularity - as if his response to temptation might be, "Yes,
yes, she's remarkably beautiful . . . but she's just not Katharina"
(Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, in the section beginning at
Matthew 5.27).
The etymology of the word "complementarity" might help here. Its
roots are in what makes for the completion or fulfilment of
something, or someone; it does not come from anything to do with
either difference or similarity. God affords a measure of
completion and fulfilment through a life-long, faithful sexual
relationship; this is found in and through the particularity ofthe
other person, in the unique and concrete interweaving of many
similarities and differences.
Here the phenomenon of bisexuality becomes significant. This, we
might note, is also a dimension of human sexuality which has become
increasingly prominent in cultural discussions, for instance in
newspaper opinion-pieces. Think of the celebrities who have
recently either chosen to identify themselves as bisexual, or who
have wanted to focus on the person with whom they are in a
relationship rather than talk about attraction to any class of
people: the diver Tom Daley, the actor Angelina Jolie, the rapper
Frank Ocean. A person is singled out above a category to which they
belong. We ought to have something theological to say about
this.
Growing towards Christ
AGAIN moving on, consider how our current discussions of
complementarity buy into a static vision of who we are, and
therefore into a static account of similarity and difference. Of
course, no theologian should advance or celebrate a sense of
complete human malleability, but no account of our humanity is
properly Christian if it fails to see life as a process. We are
each a work in progress, and on a journey: "We do not know what we
shall then be," we read in 1 John.
In a relationship that lives up to what Christians might most
value, however, it is that how two people are similar or different
is understood within the call for each to change, and to grow into
the likeness of Christ. Plato recognised something of this dynamic:
consider the Lysis, where problems of "same" and
"different" are ably laid out. A friend cannot be the same as you,
because then we have one, not two; but neither can a friend be
completely different, since that would be a recipe for tension and
antagonism. In that dialogue, but even more in the
Symposium or the Phaedrus, Plato suggests a way
through this conundrum, not by resorting to some bland average,
along the lines of "a good friend is kind of similar and kind of
different", but with the proposal that true friendship is a common
journey to the Good. Any such journey is a transformation; both of
us will start from where we are and both of us will change. We
might wish that something of this perspective animated our
discussions of what "same", "different", and "complementary"
mean.
All marriages are not identical
PROFESSOR HIGTON remarked that marriage was "a complex
historical reality, which has always been evolving and appearing in
divergent forms". Marriage itself is always on something of a
journey, but perhaps "divergent" goes too far. Tracing the category
of marriage through history, we see a range of human relationships
that are closely aligned, but not identical.
Consider marriage in the Old Covenant and in the New; the
marriages of unbaptised people and of the baptised; a consummated
marriage and an unconsummated one. They are all marriages, but they
are not identical. An unconsummated marriage, for instance, is a
marriage that can be annulled. In earlier times, further categories
were in play, such as morganatic and dynastic marriages. In the
Middle Ages, the remarriage of a widow or widower was seen as
somewhat different from that of people who had not been married
before. The Orthodox Churches today consider marriages after
divorce to be somewhat different, again, from those where neither
party had been married previously.
To tease this out, three fearsome-looking philosophical words
may be useful: univocity, equivocity, and analogy. "Univocity"
simply means using a word in two different situations, and meaning
exactly the same thing in both cases: a terraced house is a
"dwelling", and a mansion is a "dwelling". But if we use a word in
two different senses, that is "equivocity": the "bark" of a tree
and the "bark" of a dog.
Christian debates over same-sex marriage have become stuck in
either univocity or equivocity. For conservatives, same-sex
relationships are so different from heterosexual ones that using
the word "marriage" in the phrase "same-sex marriage" is an example
of equivocity: "same-sex marriage" is no more connected to
"opposite-sex marriage" than the bark of a dog is connected to the
bark of a tree. In the opposite corner, liberals claim that same-
and opposite-sexual relationships differ in no fashion at all: "gay
marriage" and "straight marriage" deploy the word univocally. The
house and the mansion are both dwellings.
These two positions back themselves into corners because they
ignore the more fruitful concept of analogy. In contrast to what we
have seen so far, analogy weaves together similarity and
difference. We use a word analogically in two different situations
if we mean neither exactly the same thing in each case, nor
something completely different: a builder "made" a house; a poet
"made" a poem; a bishop "made" someone a deacon. The concept of
analogy offers some of the best fruit from the Christian
philosophical quest. This makes our unwillingness to think about
sexuality and mar- riage that way particularly poignant.
As we have seen, there are various forms of marriage which are
analogously related to one another: under the Old Covenant and in
the New, between the baptised and the unbaptised, consummated and
unconsummated, and so on. Parliament has now put one more our way:
same-sex marriage.
Against the liberal urge, we need not suppose that same-sex
marriage is exactly the same as what we have known hitherto, and
indeed it is not: annulment and adultery feature differently, for
instance, from the way they do in opposite-sex marriages.
Against the conservative urge, we need not suppose these
differences prevent same-sex marriages' being marriages, since
marriage is not one monolithic thing. Nor need recognising same-sex
marriages undo previous definitions of marriage, as conservatives
also argue.
We might put it like this: there has always been more than one
species within the genus we call marriage; and admitting a new
species to a genus does not change the definition of the other
species. Species Y can differ from species X, in the same genus,
without changing the definition of species X.
The theological angle
I WOULD like to end in a resolutely theological mood, with our
attention directed towards God. Theologians often invoke analogy to
talk about ways in which an image, or trace, of God's goodness is
to be found in the world. That reminds us to take God as the
exemplar, as the foundational case (or what a philosopher might
call the "primary analogate", if we are being technical).
So, for instance, we see an analogical relationship between
different human languages, but all speech rests on God's "speech",
first of all: the utterance of his eternal Word.
Similarly, we see an analogy between the beauty of the
landscape, the mathematical equation, and the statue, but all of
that rests on the same foundation: whatever is beautiful in the
world has some likeness to the beauty of God.
The emphasis needs always to be on God. So, if two examples of
human love are analogous, their similarity will rest on the even
more fundamental, and common, participation of human love in divine
love. That chimes with the proposal, found in Ephesians 5, that
Christians understand marriage through its likeness to something
divine: its likeness to the relationship of Christ to his
Church.
Remembering this, any claim that different forms of marriage are
related analogically need not subordinate one to another. We are
not necessarily saying that one is an imitation of the other. A
distinctively Christian vision of marriage - whatever it is,
whatever form it takes (and that is clearly under debate) - sees
marriage as an imitation of something about Christ and his
relationship with the Church, and as a participation in the life
and love of the Trinity.
That is ultimately where we must look for the source and meaning
of complementarity.
The Revd Dr Davison is Starbridge Lecturer
in Cambridge University.