Bosphorus

I am rushing in here where I should fear to tread, but I won’t learn if I don’t risk foolishness. On “Mere Comments”, appended to Anthony Esolen’s latest posting, there is a brief but interesting dispute about the status of being single, being celibate and being married. The two disputants are Stuart Koehl and DGP. One aspect of the dispute I found especially interesting is this: how are being single, being celibate and being married related? It is tempting to treat being single and being celibate as the same. But they aren’t. A person who is celibate is committed to a certain way of life. A person who is single happens to be living life a certain way, but is not committed to a way of life. Marriage, too, is a commitment to a certain way of life. We might say that celibacy and marriage are alike in that both involve resolution. Viewed this way, it seems right to say that both celibacy and marriage are determinates of the determinable, being single. In other words, being single is to being celibate and being married as red is to scarlet and crimson. To move from the determinable state to the determinate state is to commit, to resolve.

Of course, there’s the phenomenon of the confirmed bachelor(ette). But the confirmation there, if you will, is the confirmation of habituation, not of commitment or resolve.

I’m stressing the human side of things here. Another way to think about the relationship is (as SK and DGP did) to think of it in relation to divine gifts. Each of celibacy and marriage is a charism. Being single is not. From this angle, to move from the determinable state to the determinate state is to receive a divine gift.

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