164. Love of spouse compared with love of self
164. LOVE OF SPOUSE COMPARED WITH LOVE OF SELF
Should you love your spouse more than you love your parents, or less?
Should you love your spouse more than yourself, or “as” you love yourself? If the latter, what does this “as” mean? As much as? As if your spouse were yourself? Or because your spouse in some way is in fact yourself?
On the part of the good which is the object loved, a man should love his parents more than his wife because he loves them as his principles. . . . But on the part of the union, the wife ought to be loved more, because she is united with her husband as one flesh . . . the Apostle says (Eph 5:33) that a husband should love his wife as himself . . . a man’s love for himself is the reason for his love of his wife, since she is one with him. . . . [T]he principal reason why a man loves his wife is her being united to him in the flesh (II-II,26,11).
As with the previous question, St. Thomas distinguishes the object of love (the beloved) from the subject of love (the lover), and answers the question differently for each of these two aspects of it. Not only do you owe more to your parents than you owe to your children, you even owe more to your parents than you owe to your spouse. They gave you more. They gave you life.
But “on the part of the union”, i.e., the lived relationship, your relationship with your spouse and your love to your spouse is by nature, and should be by choice, greater than the relationship to your parents, because it is a closer relationship. Before you were born you were in a very intimate biological relationship with your mother (and, more indirectly and causally, your father), but once you were born you grew more and more biologically and even psychologically independent of her and of your father. But the intimacy with your spouse is meant to keep increasing, for it is greater, and is unique: you are “one flesh”.
“One flesh” in Scripture means not merely “participating in sexual intercourse” but “becoming one person, body and soul, without ceasing to be two persons”. Thus sex is a remote but real and holy image of Trinitarian life. (See John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body”.) “Flesh” in Scripture does not mean merely “body” but “whole natural mortal person.” It is composed of two dimensions, “body” and “soul”. “Flesh” is contrasted not to “soul” but to “spirit”, i.e., “the whole person as inhabited and inspired by the Holy Spirit, participating in immortal supernatural life”.
St. Paul says that the husband should love his wife “as himself”. What does this mean? The next sentence says that what follows from this is that the man’s love of himself is the reason for his love of his wife. This means that the union is more than sexual and more than psychological, it is ontological. The man and his wife really are one flesh, one natural person. When you love your wife you are loving yourself, just as when you love your body (or your soul) you are loving yourself because you do not have your body (or your soul), as you have your possessions; you are your body (as well as your soul), and when you love your wife you are loving yourself because you do not have your wife, as you have your possessions, you are your wife (as well as yourself). The two really become one. It’s literal.
So if you hate your spouse you are hating yourself, just as when you hate your body (or your soul) you are hating yourself.
This is a radical, life-transforming vision that even the Christian world today has yet to fully appreciate and understand. God raised up a great prophet in Pope St. John Paul II to unfold and explore this precious mystery in a profoundly new and personalist yet profoundly old and Thomistic way, exactly at the time when the mystery of marriage, sex, and family (the one most indispensable foundation for all human society) is being trashed and violated in a historically unprecedented way.