JONATHAN M. SMITH, professor of geography at Texas A&M University, writes:

A long-time reader of your interesting blog, I would like to pass along a quote from the discussion of divorce in Timothy Dwight’s Theology Explained and Defended (1818-1819), vol. 4, pp. 270-271.

During the contentions of parents, which will usually be generated by the mere attainableness of divorce, and which become ultimately the occasion of granting it, the children will either be forgotten, or forced to take sides with the parents. . . . Jarring parents; and there will be millions of such parents wherever divorce prevails, to one where it does not; can never teach their children religion, either by precept or example. Amid their own irreligious contentions, the farce would be too gross for impudence itself to act, and too ridiculous to be received seriously even by children. They would be left to grow up Atheists or Nihilists, without religion, without God, without hope.

Dwight, the eighth president of Yale College, was a Congregationalist minister and theologian. His remarks on the transmission of faith are certainly interesting, and probably correct; but what most struck me was the connection he makes between contentious and jarring parents and the “attainableness of divorce.” It makes perfect sense, although I’ve never heard it expressed so clearly. I don’t suppose I would try so hard to keep up my body if I could discard it for another. Why should it be different with the “one flesh” we call marriage?

                                                                                — Comments —

A. writes:

Your post demonstrated what the deeper thinkers of the world have always known. The law is a teacher. If the law makes divorce difficult, the parties to a marriage are implicitly told to “work it out.” 

Many years ago, I dealt with the child of divorce who was angry at his mother and was going to move in with his father. My question to this young man was to ask him how he would handle his anger were his parents still married. He thought about it a day and came back and said that he would have to work it through with his mother were his dad still home. That, indeed, is what he decided to do. Good will works with some. The arm twisting of the law with most. 

The author’s description of the harm to children is spot on also. A father who leaves makes it difficult at the deeper emotional levels to conceive of a God who does not leave and there is forever, without a huge grace of healing, a God-vacuum in the child. 

There is, in Paul I think, an admonition to widows that he speaks for the Lord when he says to widows that although they may remarry, it is better not to do so. So much more true for the divorced, huh? And perhaps the Church would extend the admonition to men also, now that our tradition is developing the Gospel as it was told to do.

Sebastian C. writes:

In reference to your discussion on the availability of divorce, I think you and your readers will benefit from my late professor Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which is available in pdf here. Below is my own abridgment of the section on divorce. I’ve bolded the sentences that strike me as particularly thoughtful formulations on the phenomena I have experienced dating and befriending the children of divorce. Bloom was one of the last heavyweights to discuss divorce in any meaningful way. The passage is a little long but worth the effort.

A young person’s qualified or conditional attachment to divorced parents merely reciprocates what he necessarily sees as their conditional attachment to him, and is entirely different from the classic problem of loyalty to families, or other institutions, which were clearly dedicated to their members. In the past, such breaking away was sometimes necessary but always morally problematic. Today it is normal, and this is another reason why the classic literature is alien to so many of our young, for it is largely concerned with liberation from real claims-like family, faith, or country-whereas now the movement is in the opposite direction, a search for claims on oneself that have some validity. Children who have gone to the school of conditional relationships should be expected to view the world in the light of what they learned there. 

To children, the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary. The capriciousness of wills, their lack of directedness to the common good, the fact that they could be otherwise but are not- these are the real source of the war of all against all. Children learn a fear of enslavement to the wills of others, along with a need to dominate those wills, in the context of the family, the one place where they are supposed to learn the opposite. Of course, many families are unhappy. But that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings. 

A university teacher of liberal arts cannot help confronting special handicaps, a slight deformity of the spirit, in the students, ever more numerous, whose parents are divorced. I do not have the slightest doubt that they do as well as others in all kinds of specialized subjects, but I find they are not as open to the serious study of philosophy and literature as some other students are. I would guess this is because they are less eager to look into the meaning of their lives, or to risk shaking their received opinions. In order to live with the chaos of their experience, they tend to have rigid frameworks about what is right and wrong and how they ought to live. They are full of desperate platitudes about self-determination, respect for other people’s rights and decisions, the need to work out one’s individual values and commitments, etc. All this is a thin veneer over boundless seas of rage, doubt and fear. 

Young people habitually are able to jettison their habits of belief for an exciting idea. They have little to lose. Although this is not really philosophy, because they are not aware of how high the stakes are, in this period of their lives they can experiment with the unconventional and acquire deeper habits of belief and some learning to go along with them. But children of divorced parents often lack this intellectual daring because they lack the natural youthful confidence in the future. Fear of both isolation and attachment clouds their prospects. A large measure of their enthusiasm has been extinguished and replaced by self-protectiveness. Similarly, their open confidence in friendship as part of the newly discovered search for the good is somewhat stunted. The Glauconian eros for the discovery of nature has suffered more damage in them than in most. Such students can make their disarray in the cosmos the theme of their reflection and study. But it is a grim and dangerous business, and more than any students I have known, they evoke pity. They are indeed victims. 

An additional factor in the state of these students’ souls is the fact that they have undergone therapy. They have been told how to feel and what to think about themselves by psychologists who are paid by their parents to make everything work out as painlessly as possible for the parents, as part of no-fault divorce. If ever there was a conflict of interest, this is it. There are big bucks for therapists in divorce, since the divorces are eager to get back to persecuting the wretches who smoke or to ending the arms race or to saving “civilization as we know it.” Meanwhile, psychologists provide much of the ideology justifying divorce-e.g., that it is worse for kids to stay in stressful homes (thus motivating the potential escapees-that is, the parents-to make it as unpleasant as possible there). Psychologists are the sworn enemies of guilt. And they have an artificial language for the artificial feelings with which they equip children. But it unfortunately does not permit such children to get a firm grip on anything.

Laura writes:

Bloom is the only serious thinker who examined the effects of divorce on consciousness and higher learning. His insights explain some of the decadence of postmodern criticism and academic culture. The assault on tradition and learning is often a stance of toughness and self-protectiveness in the face of vulnerability. Even offspring of stable marriages can be influenced by disintegrating families and by this sense of impermanence. Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, made observations similar to Bloom’s. I highly recommend her book.

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