I never imagined I would hear Sarah Silverman deliver the defining Christian ethical riposte in a film about infidelity, but then there was this:

[Silverman]: You think everything can be worked out if you just make the right move? That must be thrilling… Life has a gap in it. It just does. You don’t go crazy trying to fill it like some lunatic. 

It’s her final salvo in the otherwise uneven 2011 Take this Waltz, which until that line appears to be very sympathetic to its heroine, played by Michelle Williams. The film tracks the disintegration of Williams’ character’s marriage, a dissolution brought on by her boredom with her long-suffering, goofy, and ultimately bland husband, which is hastened by the arrival of a sexy and mysterious artsy-type neighbor. The husband is eventually and painfully dumped, and the neighbor replaces him with a montage of sexual licentiousness set to some Leonard Cohen (surprise.) Had it all ended there it would have been a fairly straightforward millennial film about sexual self-expression and the murkiness of relationships, and it would have been totally unmemorable. But it takes a turn: things with the neighbor aren’t so great; they get boring too, and instead of winding down as a reflection on the dangers of spontaneity or the defects of marriage itself it instead recognizes the role of tragedy in life.

And it is the right historical moment to make a point like that with respect to marriage and sexuality. Consider Leah Libresco, writing on the recent burst of ‘polyamory’ thinkpieces that have proposed multiple partners as the solution to marriage’s gaps:

“Monogamy isn’t premised on the idea that one person can ever be everything to a partner. When a marriage fails to fulfill “the full smorgasbord” it’s not a sign that anything’s wrong. An expectation that a partner (or full set of them) is meant to be a perfect complement is destructive to romantic and platonic relationships.”

Leah goes on to argue that the needs one has that a spouse can’t meet can be met by friends, relatives, or other forms of engagement, but that the mere presence of such un-met needs should not immediately predicate extra-marital sex. Including Leah’s piece in his excellent weekly ThinkProgress feature on conservative articles worth a read, my friend Jeff Spross notes the following:

“Things can get amusing, such as the moment in one of the articles Libresco cites when a woman in a non-monogamous marriage says she needs a second boyfriend to go to the theatre with her, since her husband isn’t a fan. As Libresco asks, why didn’t the woman “just book season tickets for herself and a friend?” Of course, the husband’s reason for taking on another partner was that his wife wasn’t interested in BDSM sexual practices — a problem that isn’t so easily solved by Libresco’s defense of a better understanding of the purpose of monogamous marriage.”

Emphasis mine. What Jeff is pointing out is that there are sometimes needs in a marriage that simply cannot be met by relying upon friends, family, or other forms of community engagement. These needs by their nature must shatter the monogamous commitment of marriage to be met. So the challenge to the Christian ethic of marriage becomes not “what do I do when my monogamous marriage isn’t meeting all my needs?” (which is the question Leah aptly answers) but rather “what do I do when my monogamous marriage cannot meet all of my needs?” That is, how do we cope with needs that are in direct conflict with the continued monogamy of marriage? Or more broadly, how do we cope with needs that are in direct conflict with any moral goods?

There is a lot of hemming and hawing that could be done here. We could mess around with the definition of ‘need.’ We could propose that some needs are perverse (in the ‘contrary to the good’ sense, not necessarily purely in the ‘kinky’ sense) and therefore don’t deserve a hearing in the court of adjudicating needs. We could argue there are classes of needs, like a Maslow’s hierarchy, that defines how we should think of them. And all of these are probably worthwhile thoughts. But none of these strategies would give us enough mileage to address every case in which a marriage cannot be monogamous and simultaneously meet all of each partner’s needs. There would always be some outlier, some limit case for which we would still have to account.

Instead I would propose we ask: what has given ‘needs’ such a weight of finality? That is, why is it that we feel a need being met is on the primary order of ethical concern, worth violating potentially all other principles for? Or worse, re-ordering all principles to serve? I would argue that we are inclined to view needs in such a way because we have lost the resolution offered by a healthy understanding of tragedy. In his essay “Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy”, Ben Quash defines tragedy as:

“the woundingly ‘embroiled’ character of human action…the way in which it is possible for human beings to be the often unwitting perpetrators of their own enslavement; to so far tangle themselves up that they cannot undo the knots or cut through the meshes they have made. In particular, this embroilment often takes the form of a warping of what we intuitively regard as the natural relation between capability and culpability — and at two levels. Relatively easy to understand are the occasions when our power to make moral decisions and follow them through (our capacity for the good) finds itself confounded, vitiated and becomes even – to our surprise – a decisive agent in the overthrow of our aspirations. Our moral capability can even kill us in such cases. Much more darkly disorienting, though, are the occasions when we appear to have no power at all to make moral decisions in the first place, but still seem held to account. We discover a culpability that never knew capability. In both cases what we assumed were the normal mechanisms for translating action into a creditable reward for our labors seem wholly lacking and we stand helpless before the undoing of ourselves.”

How can we possibly cope when, through no evident fault of our own, we come to require for our happiness that which is manifestly evil? That this is a condition of fallenness doesn’t offer any immediate answers. Yes, we come to such situations because we are fallen; but does this mean that we are honestly and truly in situations where happiness is, through no wrongdoing of ours, utterly impossible? For instance, consider the man who evidently needed BDSM to be happy, while his wife could not be happy with it. It would appear one or more of them was simply destined to be unhappy within the parameters of monogamous marriage. Neither of them were by their mere desires doing anything wrong, yet they wound up in a tragic sort of bind: live with un-met needs, or destroy the monogamous character of the marriage. This is tragedy.

But the view that a tragic situation must conclude in either gross unhappiness or an immediate violation of virtue is predicated upon the finality of tragedy, or the idea that “this is all that there is.” Quash points out that the Christian view of tragedy offers much more:

“My view is rather than stopping short of tragedy, circumventing tragedy or resting with tragedy, Christianity’s doctrines embrace and heighten tragedy when it is understood a certain way. They do so in order simultaneously to acknowledge tragedy’s full power to disrupt, disturb, and destroy – making people the dungeons of themselves – and also to let it mean more than itself. Far from being anti-tragic, and concerned with the evasion or denial of tragic experience, I will argue that the Christian narrative is about a full entry into such an experience, in order to suggest it might have a ‘beyond’ – thus refusing to make an idol of the tragic moment.”

The Christian view, in other words, acknowledges and realizes tragedy without permitting it to define an entire worldview, thus permitting all kinds of travesties, like the destruction of monogamy in marriage. Yes, the Christian frame agrees, there are tragic situations: but the needs which must go un-met or the desires un-fulfilled have no finitude because human life itself continues. Desires and needs that conflict with the good and the good of others are the result of a temporary disturbed order, but with God order is undisturbed, and the Christian hope points to eventual unity with that order. The un-met need, I mean to say, is only the primary ethical concern when you imagine need-meeting to be the totalizing, final frame of human existing. But if you allow tragedy to guide you to look beyond the meeting of needs, beyond the temporary scarcities and lacks of life on earth, you see that the irresolution of tragedy imagines a looming surprise.

For the Christian frame, this surprise is salvation, an infinite life in which all needs are perfectly harmonized. Does it mean the tragedies of life are less tragic, less painful? Not at all. But it contextualizes them in such a way as to demonstrate that they shouldn’t be made primary in our ethics. They are not eternal like hope is, but rather incidental. Life has a gap in it: it just does. You can’t resolve it because it’s just the nature of life on earth, but the fact that we must qualify ‘life’ with ‘on earth’ in the context of tragedy means that there is life beyond this one, and it’s toward that end that we orient our ethics. This alone allows us to register our unhappiness and dissatisfaction while still sojourning on.