TO WIN THE WAR ON WOMEN, RESTORE MARRIAGE:

With the coming of Christianity, the city could no longer command men and women to have children to replenish the human cannon fodder that had been lost in the last war, as it apparently it even commanded Socrates.  And it could no longer be understood to be allowed to treat persons like animals to be bred for improving the species or the city.  The objection we have to the eugenics schemes of Socrates in the Republic or those of the 20th century fascists in decisively personal or Christian.

That's why Christians have dissented from any theology that reduces persons to less than they really are.  The early Christians seemed like dangerous atheists to the Romans, and that why even or especially the most philosophic emperors--such as Julian and Marcus Aurelius--were so big on wiping them out before it was too late.

The Christians denied the very existence of the gods of the city, the divine foundation that secured the political community.  Their atheism, in fact, seemed more dangerous than that of the philosophers who exempted only themselves--because of their liberated minds--from the commands of the Laws.  For the Christian, every person is liberated from the degrading cave that was the ancient city.  No person--or not just philosophers--should submit to political domination.  We're all liberated by virtue of who each of us most deeply is.

The Christians are, in fact, political atheists because they know are made in the image of the personal God.  They are, above all,members of the City of God that transcends every political distinction by encompassing us all--Jew and gentile, Roman and barbarian, man and woman, black and white,  smart and not-so-smart, and so forth.

So Christian marriage is more personal than the civil marriage of the Greeks and Romans.  It's less political or less distorted by arbitrary patriarchal considerations.  Every innovation associated with Christian marriage aimed to elevate women to equality with men as free, relational persons, to reflect the truth, which we so readily deny with pride, that we are all equal as sinful persons under God.

The prohibition of divorce--a New Testament innovation--was for women, because divorce was rarely really available for them.  The sanctification of monogamy is all about the uniting of two equal persons for shared responsibilities.  Monogamy together with chastity were for locating sexual desire in a deeply relational or loving context, and so men could no longer exploit women as mere bodies.  Polygamy, found for example, in the Old Testament, was more a political than a relational institution, one that necessarily subordinates women to the will of men.

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