Illuminations
The Wedding Guest
by Anthony Esolen
I don't know that I've ever seen turkey vultures squabbling over a dead animal on the side of the road. Vultures seem to be cooperative sorts. Plenty of meat for everybody, boys. Not so perhaps with man.
Our fiercest social battles now have to do with marriage—what it is, who gets to enjoy it and how many, what it means, and whether children are accidental or accessory to it, like handbags. One would think that everyone was battering down the door of every house of an eligible young person of either or (in our time) indeterminate sex, so that a girl (or in our time, a boy, or a whatnot) could hardly reach the age of fifteen without having to fend off a proposal. Sadie Hawkins, thou shouldst be alive at this time!
It isn't so, though. Nobody is getting married, and half of the nobodies get divorced. Nobody seems to know what marriage is, and it is hard to imagine how people beset with fog can steer young people into the marital harbor. Or there is no need to imagine it, because Nobody tries; Nobody is at the tiller.
Witness what our weddings are like, or how much they cost—a year's worth of college education, with no brighter prognosis for those who endure it. If you ask, "What do people sing at weddings?" the answer, even for Christians, will not likely be hymns that meditate upon marriage, upon the will of the Creator "from the beginning," upon the parables of the Lord that reveal to us the nature of Heaven, or upon the Lamb's feast seen by John in ecstasy on Patmos. "Amazing Grace" is listed among the favorites for a Christian wedding—evidently because it will be familiar to those in attendance who come from Samaria or further afield. That perhaps also explains the presence of "How Great Thou Art" and "Morning Has Broken" and such.
I won't say anything ill about those three hymns, except that they are not pertinent here. They have nothing to do with the event, or with the Scriptures that open to us the meaning of male and female and their union, or with the analogy that people have suggested between marriage and the inner life of the Trinity.
A Hymn Fit for Marriage
So I am delighted, on the suggestion of a reader, to recommend a splendid hymn that is most fit for marriage:
"O Father All Creating," by John Ellerton (1826–1893), often set to the melody Aurelia (best known for "The Church's One Foundation"), but to my ear far better set to Michael Praetorius's sweet and lilting melody Ach Gott, Vom Himmelreiche. The hymn does what contemporary songsters do not do, as far as I have seen. Each of its stanzas is a separate interpretation of an event from Scripture, each is in praise of a separate person of the Trinity, and each successive stanza builds upon the others, until we end with intimations of eternity.
We begin with the Father:
O Father all creating,
Whose wisdom, love, and power
First bound two lives together
In Eden's primal hour,
Today to these thy children
Thine earliest gifts renew—
A home by thee made happy,
A love by thee kept true.
The key here is union. The Father is named, but the characteristics in the second line suggest the action of the Trinity, for it is the three-personed God who has made a universe, not a chaos, and he binds not merely two bodies male and female, but two lives extended in time from that first dawn of Eden. The garden is not wholly ruined, because the praise of Adam is to be repeated by every man, "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," and for this reason, says Jesus, a man shall leave his mother and father and cleave unto his wife. The "earliest gifts" are not trees laden with fruit, but "a home by thee made happy, / A love by thee kept true." For we do not learn that Adam and Eve, having sinned once, were ever untrue to one another after.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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