Names and Roman Weddings

“Ubi tu Caius, ego Caia.”
“Wherever thou art Caius, there I am Caia.”

I first came upon this phrase when reading Quo Vadis, and thought it was the sweetest thing ever.  After having given it some thought, I like it even more.  These are the words that were spoken by a Roman bride at her wedding, probably in response to the groom’s question, “What is your name?”

After the bride’s response, the groom would then (ideally) sweep her off her feet and carry her across the threshold into his home.

I think the phrase is pretty much the most succinct and, at the same time, possibly the most romantic one I have ever heard or read of in a wedding.  But there are specific reasons I find it so, which transcend mere sentimentality.  Those Romans were not much for bandying about words.  Not like the Greeks, in any case.  The less said the better, if it got the point across.  And these words are loaded.

We are all familiar with the traditional wedding vows, and the Roman one is much like them.  One might even find that our modern form originates here in part.  In this phrase, the bride vows to go and to be wherever her husband is, whenever he is.  Eternity is implied.  The phrase encapsulates the marriage vow (at least the bride’s side of it) into five words in the Latin.

It is also a symbolic renaming.  The bride declares that she is taking the name of her groom.  In this case, not literally.  There were dudes not named “Caius” who got married in Rome.  The name Caius/Caia (or Gaius/Gaia) means happiness and rejoicing.  An appropriate description of a wedding, intended to portend the fortunes of the new couple.

But no matter the given names of the couple, the symbolism remains.  The bride declares that she will henceforth be identified with her husband, as she has been identified with her father until this point.  In fact, by using the name Caius/Caia, she pledges not only her physical presence but her heart and her emotions as well.  Wherever he rejoices, there she also will find her joy.

To a Christian, what does this mean?  Can we possibly learn anything from the pagan Romans?  Sure, why not?  In the same way that the bride pledges her life to her groom and takes his name upon herself, we also have pledged our lives to Christ and taken His name.

The Church is the Bride of Christ, and every one of the baptized community is a member.  From the point of our entrance into that body to now, and until Christ returns, we should ever be saying:  “Wherever thou art Christ, there I am Christian.”

In fact, we do something like this every week before we come to the Lord’s table, our earthly foretaste of the Lamb’s marriage supper.  When the officiant asks the congregation: “Christian, in whom do you believe?” we respond, “I believe in one God the Father Almighty . . . And in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . And in the Holy Spirit.”

“In whom do you believe?” is a question very much like “What is your name?”  For we become identified with that in which we believe.  Our Credo is an affirmation of our baptism into the name of the Triune God.  And having confessed Christ and having declared our identity in Him as a body, we are then welcomed to the wedding feast at His table.

Love or Idolatry?

Observations on romantic love: the husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church and gave His life for her.

Love necessarily requires sacrifice. However, there is an important distinction between sacrifice for the bride and sacrifice to the bride.  The former is what Christ does.  It maintains the proper structure of authority and headship found in the Bible.  On the other hand, the latter reverses the authority structure, and corrupts the symbol.

When a man sacrifices for a woman he loves—when he is willing to give up convenience, comfort, and life for her—he is properly reflecting Christ.  However, when he gives in to her every whim and becomes subservient he has ceased to reflect the truth of Christ and the Church.  He is now sacrificing to her and has crossed the line into idolatry.

Love, Jealousy, and Envy

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, so I suppose this is rather timely. Honestly, I didn’t even think of it until I’d almost finished writing this post. I considered waiting until the 14th to hit the “publish” button, but I’ve decided it might be nice for everyone to be able to read my thoughts here leading all the way up to the official day of sickly pink, instead of only after it has arrived. So without further ado . . .

“If the theory of love were perfectly clear to you and Love’s dart had ever touched you, your own feelings would have shown you that love cannot exist without jealousy, because . . . jealousy between lovers is commended by every man who is experienced in love . . .”

So said Andreas Capellanus, the scribe of The Art of Courtly Love, during the reign of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in England. It was the time of chivalry and pageantry, when kings and knights marched boldly to Crusade in the Holy Land . . . or to rape and plunder their neighbors—whichever impulse took them first.

Capellanus revolutionized the idea of romantic love. There is some debate over whether he was being totally serious about what he was writing. So much of Courtly Love oozes with cynicism and satire. In any case, I ran across this particular “rule” of courtly love earlier today while reading a book, and that made me stop and think.

Is this statement true? Is love really impossible without jealousy? Shouldn’t true love be generous, giving and forgiving, tolerant, and unconditional? I suppose that would require one to define jealousy. First, I think we must distinguish it from envy. Often the two are confused with one another. But envy requires an object—a person to be envious of. When one envies, one covets something that object of envy possesses.

On the other hand, jealousy is an attitude. A particular way of regarding a relationship. A man might be a jealous person without having anyone to be jealous of. Capellanus defines jealousy thus:

“Now jealousy is a true emotion whereby we greatly fear that the substance of our love may be weakened by some defect in serving the desires of our beloved, and it is an anxiety lest our love may not be returned, and it is a suspicion of the beloved, but without any shameful thought.”

That last is, as he makes clear later, any “shameful thought” regarding the beloved’s fidelity. In other words, “suspicion” of faithlessness without actually believing that the beloved is unfaithful. Well, that is worded a bit subjectively for a definition, so let’s abstract it a little bit. Essentially, jealousy is the lover’s desire for the beloved to requite one’s affections and the displeasure the lover has in the case that the beloved does not, and especially, at the notion that the beloved might love another.

Okay, so where am I going with this? I had a couple observations regarding this definition of jealousy.

First, I think Capellanus is correct. Without this kind of jealousy, it is impossible to love. Today’s idea of free-wheeling male-to-female and casual-intimate relationships, which is so glorified and idealized in modern media and story is not love. Any “love” that cares not whether the beloved is exclusively faithful is false. That means “you do whatever you like with whomever you like” is something entirely other than love.

Secondly, jealousy is a reflection of the divine, just as love is a reflection of the divine.

For YHWH your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
~Deuteronomy 4:24

The covenant God of Israel gets a lot of flack because skeptics look at this verse and others like it and say, “God is jealous? What kind of an almighty deity would be subject to such a petty emotion as jealousy? Surely God, if he/she/it does exist, is above that.”

But apply my distillation of Capellanus’s definition of jealousy, and one then reads this to mean that YHWH Elohim desires for his chosen people to love Him (with all their heart and soul and mind), and is most displeased when they do not love Him, choosing instead to go after idols and strange gods.

When people say today that so-and-so is “not a jealous man,” it’s usually intended as a compliment. But a lover who does not urgently desire the affections of the beloved and cares little whether or not his beloved loves someone else is no lover at all. Capellanus observes that such a lover will not go to any great length to secure the affections of the beloved. He has no concern that what he does will offend or displease his beloved, and he will not exhibit any of the other things that Capellanus has on his list of things that lovers do, because he doesn’t care enough to do so.

An un-jealous God would be incapable of the covenant sacrificial love with which YHWH regards his chosen people. Those who say that God should be above jealousy are in fact saying that God should be above loving them. If you say “God is so great that he does not care what I do. He is above being offended by such a little thing as me,” you are really saying, “I am so insignificant that God cannot and does not love me. And by the way, I don’t want him to.” Which is a truly terrifying thing to say.

We ought to be thankful for God’s jealousy. It is precisely because God loves that He is jealous. And it is because He is jealous that He loves. Were it not for his jealousy, He would not have cared whether we wandered in sin and darkness, chasing false gods and destroying ourselves with them. It is because of God’s jealous love—because of His desire that we should love Him as He loves us—that He sent Jesus, his only Son, to reclaim us.

God loves perfectly, and he is perfectly jealous. When man is jealous, even as when man loves, he is imperfect. That does not mean that jealousy of itself is sinful. Rather, it is when envy and covetousness creep in and taint jealousy that it becomes sin. God loves perfectly, and his love for his people is a jealous love. So we must conclude that in order to love more perfectly as God loves, we also must be jealous in our love.

On the point of jealousy, Capellanus is correct in the most essential sense. A love that is not jealous is not love, and he who is not jealous cannot love.

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of YHWH.
~Song of Solomon 8:6

Sources and additional reading:

Read more »