Kanye West & The Sin of Divorce
KANYE WEST & THE SIN OF DIVORCE
The Kanye and Kim divorce drama has been all over the news lately, and I thought it might be fruitful to try and discern what I think about it all in this Substack post. The media narrative is clear: Kanye is being reckless and dangerous, is not respecting Kim’s space or her choice to divorce him, and we should have pity on Kim.
I, certainly, do not feel this way at all. And this primarily stems from a starkly different view on the nature of marriage and divorce. We have a crisis of meaning in marriage in our modern society, and it’s clear that this stems from the permissibility of divorce. Religious or not, if you want marriage to have meaning, you make divorce something impermissible. If you want marriage to mean nothing—as most people now think—then make divorce permissible. If you can break a life-long vow, then the vow doesn’t mean anything. And ultimately, that’s the attitude of the majority of young aged people in our modern world: Marriage is a pointless, arbitrary institution that means nothing, and so deserves minimal—if any—respect. This is a direct consequence of the permissibility of divorce. Divorce demeans marriage. Indissolubility imbues marriage with value.
Add to this the sacramental understanding of marriage, wherein spouses are wed in a spiritual union, two becoming one, and wherein spouses become a means and agent of grace for one another (grace = a share in the divine life), and marriage is filled with a transcendent meaning that cannot be matched by any other relationship this side of heaven.
All of this contextualizes my immediate response to the Kim & Kanye drama: Kanye is, justifiably, pained by the wound of divorce. Divorce itself is a serious sin, whether a person views it as so or not (sins are not sins on account of a person thinking they’re sins, but on account of the wound to human nature and charity in the soul that they cause). Kanye is in a state of serious spiritual, emotional, and psychological wound on account of the serious sin that Kim has inflicted on him, and given the confused and chaotic cultural climate we find ourselves in—one in which sins are championed as permissible, if not virtuous—, Kanye is unable to reconcile the pain he feels with the conception of marriage and divorce he’s tacitly—or explicitly—gone along with his whole life.
Kanye is going through a very Catholic moment.
Part I: The “Catholic” Moment
A Catholic moment is one of those moments when a person realizes that the way their conscience and nature is responding to the world is only firmly upheld, consistently and thoroughly, in one place: The Catholic Church. For some it’s the realization that Christ must be God, and thus consubstantial with God, if we are to be saved—otherwise we are still in despair, and still in our sins. The Catholic Church has more robustly defended and developed the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Christological understanding of Christ, than anywhere else in world history. For others it’s the realization that sexual activity affects relationships and the core of who we are, and so is subject to a more robust moral framework than the mere consideration of “consent” or “non-consent”, as our modern society tries to constrain it to. The Catholic Church is the only notable institution still possessing a firm clarity on the matters of contraception, open-to-life sex, marriage, and abortion. For others still it’s the realization that Christian faith is not about fitting Christ and God into your own conceptions of morality and the world, but about conforming yourself to Christ and God as they are and they present themselves to be. The Catholic Church—the Church of Christ there from the time of Christ—is the aggregator and authority of scripture itself, and the place where we can locate that Christian lineage, unbroken, all the way back to Christ himself. The same can go for the papacy, for the magisterial understanding of doctrine, clarity on matters of faith and morals, and the list goes on.
Kanye is having a Catholic moment.
He is beginning to see that the secular world does not understand the nature of the heart at all. Not only are they not right about it, they have perfectly inverted it. He’s not yet Catholic, so he doesn’t see that there is not just some small institution, but the largest, most long-standing institution in the history of the world, that perfectly defends, and perfects, the health and good of his soul, and the souls of others, seeing with pristine clarity the depth and breadth of the fault that he is experiencing a grave wound from.
Kanye’s heart is calling out for the clarity of the Catholic Church. That much is evident to myself, a convert, and anyone who’s ever truly converted 180-degrees away from themselves toward God and His Church.
Part II: Clarity
It’s clear the Kim Kardashian has sinned against Kanye, against the charity in her own soul—wherein she’s made the love she gives to another conditional on whether she feels pleased with them or not—, and against her family. She’s further aggravated this wrong by going and getting into a relationship with another man in the immediate wake of her having abandoned her husband. If she were doing this for herself, in any healthy sense of the term, there would be evidence to point to that self-development: namely, she would be alone with herself for some time. Maybe she’d go on an extended silent retreat, or she’d leave the kids to their father and take time for herself. But this is not what she’s done. She’s instead insisted on continuing to see her children, as she closes the door on her husband, because she wants her children to be with her; because she would be in utter despair if she were not to be with them (a despair she could easily envision happening to herself if she lost them, but won’t extend such a consideration to how Kanye must feel losing them). All of this is crystal clear. I don’t need the secular media to affirm this to see the intrinsic logic of everything laid out here. And anyone reading it can see it too. Whether they choose to accept or reject it, however, is another matter.
The wound is clear. The depth of the pain this would naturally cause to any loving husband, or wife, is even more clear. The actions taken in the wake of this are further aggravations of the wound, and that is still more clear. There’s no point where, from the perspective of Kanye and Kim, these things are not simple computations. Only if we separate Kanye and Kim, claim Kim is not wedded to him inextricably, can we even begin to make the calculations our modern secular world is making on the scenario—all of which I reject in its premises.
Part III: Call to Charity
The final consideration is that of how Kanye should respond. Due to his own lack of resounding clarity on the matter—a clarity that is not just of what he feels, but what he also understands with depth and breadth, and knows the support of a community that affirms and perfects those understandings outright—he’s not taking the appropriate steps for this transgression against him to be a cause of his own sanctification and growth in charity. Kanye is busy trying to drown out his pain by dating other women himself, women he has no emotional interest in being with, which is wrong of him to do, and a sin against his own charity and hope, and ranting at the world about the pain he’s feeling, as if the only authoritative source he has for feeling such pain is himself—his truth. He is not only escalating his own pain, he is killing charity in his own heart. There is one path forward for Kanye in reference to charity: he has to remain single, toil for the salvation of Kim’s soul, endure the wounds of abandonment and adultery with goodwill toward God, and be ready to receive Kim, and his family, back, should they ever be converted in spirit to return to their home. Kanye must grow in his faith, in his practice of self-mortification and self-denial, in his practice of religion, and persevere in his goodwill for Kim. Her soul is in grave danger of being lost entirely to the love of God, not that God lost His love for her, but that she will willfully reject God, the Holy Spirit, and the corrections and directions of the Holy Spirit, eventually even coming to hate them and see them as sources of evil in this world.
I’m reminded here of Saint Monica, who, upon the conversion of her husband Patricius to the Catholic faith at the end of his life, was welcomed back with joyous praise by Saint Monica, her neither taking account of the wrongs he committed when prior to his conversion, nor retaliating for the wounds he’d inflicted on her, but only rejoicing at the soul won to the glory of God. If Kim came back to Kanye, once they settled back into their life together, would he be able to let go of the wounds she’s inflicted on him in this time, or would he try to get back at her and retaliate by causing her pain anew? I don’t know the answer to this, but I know that he would not be abnormal for doing so. He just would also be outside of the life of grace if he did so.
And so Kanye and Kim are both in grave territory right now. Kanye is being called by the Holy Spirit, through the conviction of sin—the conviction that divorce is a sin; that his attitudes toward love, marriage, and divorce, need serious repentance and reformation; that his soul needs real, absolving confession, not just the vague and undefined attitude of repentance that Protestantism insists suffices for the health of ones soul—and my take is that I hope that Kanye responds to this invitation of the Holy Spirit, grows in moral clarity, in holiness, in repentance, in the virtue of religion, in divine charity, and becomes a true and lasting source of inspiration for those going through the same situation in our modern world—of which many are.
Ultimately, my wish is for this situation to spur Kanye toward Sainthood, to inspire Kim toward repentance and sainthood herself, to reunite the two of them in charity, and to be an example for the modern world of the true depth and possibility of love and the sanctifying love of marriage. +