EROS IN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
© Vladimir Moss, 2004
This book is dedicated to my godson James
and his bride Katerina,
on the occasion of their wedding in the
Orthodox Church.
CONTENTS
Foreword……………………………….………………...……………………………..4
Introduction………………………………………..……..……………………………5
The Problem Stated -
Naturalism, Manichaeism, Platonism, Stoicism – The “Realistic” and “Idealistic”
views of Eros
1. Eros in the
Beginning...…………………….….……….....………………………15
Introduction: The Limitations of Our
Knowledge – Male and Female – Dominion through Love - The Creation of Eve -
Neither Male nor Female – The Image of God and Sexuality - Angelic and Sexual
Modes of Procreation – Impure Means to a Pure End? –
Natural and Unnatural Modes of Procreation – The Bonds of the Family
2. Eros in the
Fall.……..……..…….…………………...…………………………….54
Marriage in the Fall – The
Garments of Skin – Innocent and Guilty Passion - Original Sin – Sexual Sin –
Sexual Shame - The Lust of Demons – Perversion – Fornication and Adultery –
Contraception and Abortion
3. Eros in
Christ…………....………….………………..…….………..……………..91
The Annunciation and
the Nativity – “Genesis” and “Gennisis” - The Marriage at Cana – The Wedding of
the Lamb – The Two Mysteries
4. Marriage and Monasticism……………………………………………………..113
The Definition of
Marriage – Troitsky’s Thesis – The Role of the Church – Remarriage and Divorce – Mixed
Marriages – The Purposes of Marriage -
Marriage and Monasticism – Lourié’s Thesis – Three Test-Cases - Stars
Differing in Glory
The Nature of Eros - The “Sublimation” of Eros –
Sublimation and “Falling
in Love”– Sublimation and Marriage –The Resurrection of the
Body – Eros and Agape – Love and Desire - Eros: Human and Divine
Conclusion and
Summary………………………………….………….…………..183
FOREWORD
This book owes its origin to a recent debate in the Russian Orthodox
theological literature and internet web-forums on the nature of eros and the
status of married Christians and sexual love within marriage.[1] This debate shows no sign of dying out, and I have felt
the need to present what I have learned from it in a more systematic form in
English and for English-speaking readers. The result is the present work, which
attempts to expound the nature of eros, marriage and monasticism from the
perspective of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church.
My main debt, of course, is to the Holy Fathers, especially the Greek
Fathers from the fourth to the fourteenth century, from St. John Chrysostom to
St. Gregory Palamas. I have also made use of Russian Fathers, such as St.
Demetrius of Rostov, St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, St. Seraphim of Sarov, Bishop
Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop Theophan the Recluse, Archbishop Theophan of
Poltava and New Hieromartyr Gregory (Lebedev). Also cited have been some more
recent Orthodox philosophers and theologians such as Bishop Nikolai
Velimirovich, Archpriest Lev Lebedev, Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, Vladimir
Soloviev, S.L. Frank, S.V. Troitsky, Vladimir Lossky, I.A. Ilyin, John
Romanides, Panagiotis Trembelas, Panagiotis Nellas, Georgios Mantzaridis and
Philip Sherrard. Among non-Orthodox authors who have helped me I should like to
mention the contemporary English philosopher Roger Scruton, as well as the
great bard, William Shakespeare, whose struggles with the concept of sexual
love first aroused my interest in the subject. (I should point out that the
fact that I quote from an author does not necessarily imply that I agree with
all his teachings.) In addition, I wish to thank my friend, Anton
Ter-Grigorian, for his stimulating discussion of the issues raised in this
book, and my pastor, Hieromonk Augustine (Lim), who struggles constantly to
keep me on the strait and narrow in thought and deed.
After writing the first drafts of this book, I came across the following
words by Fr. Seraphim Rose: “All of this [the true nature of sexuality, and of
human nature before the fall, from a patristic point of view] should one day be
written out and printed, with abundant illustrations from the Holy Fathers and
Lives of the Saints – together with the whole question of sexuality – abortion,
natural and unnatural sins, pornography, homosexuality, etc. With Scriptural
and patristic sources, this could be done carefully and without offensiveness,
but clearly…”[2]
This is what I have tried to do in this book. It is up to the reader to
judge the extent to which I have succeeded or failed. Although I have tried to
remain as close as possible to the teachings of the Orthodox Church, it goes
without saying that I, and I alone, am responsible for any errors that may have
crept into this book, for which I ask forgiveness.
Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers,
Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us! Amen.
East House, Beech Hill,
Mayford, Woking, England.
October 22 /
November 4, 2004.
INTRODUCTION
I want to purify our wedding celebrations:
to restore marriage to its due nobility
and to silence those heretics who call it
evil.
St. John Chrysostom, Homily 12 on
Colossians.
Is there such a thing as sexual love – that is, a love that is
sexual, but which is none the less love for being sexual, and which is not
devalued or defiled by its sexuality?
To this question
there are broadly three kinds of answer:-
The first answer is that of the naturalist pagan or atheist.
It leads to a permissive morality and the more or less rapid destruction of
civilized society. The second answer is that of the Manichaean, and it
leads to a rigorist morality – and the undermining of the institution of
marriage and the family. The third answer is that of the Orthodox Christian,
and it leads to the harmonious concord of the Orthodox Christian family in the
Orthodox Church of Christ.
The first two
answers are clearly related, in spite of the atheist and liberal character of
the one and the theist and rigorist character of the other. Both are
pessimistic about what I have called sexual love, but which they would identify
as such only in inverted commas. However, the pessimism of the naturalist
remains such only so long as he retains what he must in all consistency consider
to be his illusions about the existence of a non-animalian kind of “sexual
love”: once he has shed these, he is free to do “what comes naturally”, with no
guilt or shame – or joy. The pessimism of the Manichaean, on the other hand, is
real and tragic: he knows that love does exist, but is forced to the conclusion
that it cannot coexist with sexuality while remaining love, which means that
sexuality must be forcibly expelled from his life in all its forms if the ideal
of love is to be preserved. For the naturalist sexuality is neither good nor
evil, just a neutral fact of life, like eating and drinking: for the Manichaean
it is evil. For the Orthodox Christian, however, sexual love – as opposed to
lust - must be good, since it was created in the beginning by God, Who
is all-good, even if it has fallen from its original status and is frequently
perverted to evil uses: in this he is opposed in principle to the position of
the Manichaean. On the other hand, he believes that it is a characteristically human,
and not animalian, phenomenon, and therefore subject to the categories of moral
evaluation at all times: in this he is opposed in principle to the naturalist.
This book is devoted to a justification of this position.
Naturalism,
Manichaeism, Platonism, Stoicism
A few words need
to be said by way of introduction on the pagan cultural and philosophical
milieu in which the Christian doctrine of sexual love, or eros, was developed
in the early centuries of the Christian era.
We need say little about naturalism, because it is the “philosophy” of
all secular people in all ages, the natural justification of the fallen
impulses of unredeemed human nature. The position of the naturalist is the
position adopted, consciously or unconsciously, by the great majority of people
of a secular cast of mind, and also by very many people who would call
themselves believers. It is also relatively easy to refute for anyone who is
honest about his own humanity, who recognizes, as we shall see later, that the
human elements of reason, freedom and responsibility are ineradicable
constituents of human sexual relations, which cannot possibly be derived from
the life of the animals. However, the perception of this inalienably rational
and moral element in sexual relations carries with it the perception that
certain kinds of sexual relations are unlawful and degrade the man who indulges
in them; and it is that perception which the naturalist refuses to recognize.
“For the sinner praiseth himself in the lusts of his soul, and the unrighteous
man likewise blesseth himself therein” (Psalm 9.23).[3]
The position of the Manichaean is more rarely found, but remains a
temptation at times when there is a decline in morals in the Christian world,
or when the Christian understanding of morality is felt to be particularly
under threat. Thus we find it resurrected in the Bogomils and Cathari of the
Middle Ages, and traces, if not of strictly Manichaean thinking, at least of
thinking inclined in a Manichaean direction, in St. Augustine in the fifth
century, in pre-modern Roman Catholicism, in certain Protestant sects, and in
certain theological circles in Russia and Greece today. If naturalism would
seem to be the most immediate and obvious contemporary threat to Christian
morality, the subtler and more “spiritual” threat of Manichaeism and
neo-Manichaeism must also be understood and refuted.
Manichaeism, is named as such after the Persian teacher Mani or Manes,
“who was born in Babylonia c. 216 and suffered martyrdom under Bahram I c.
277. Often classified as a Christian heresy, it was really a completely
independent religion embodying Christian, but also Buddhist and Zoroastrian,
elements. Indeed, it claimed to be the only universal religion, giving in its
fullness the revelation which prophets prior to Mani had only communicated
fragmentarily. The elaborate, dramatic myths in which this revelation came to
be clothed, hardly concern us here. In essence Manichaeism was gnosis,
akin in some respects to… Gnosticism…, and as such offered men salvation
through knowledge. It was founded on a radical dualism, and taught that reality
consists of two great forces eternally opposed to each other, Good (that is,
God, Truth, Light) and Evil, or Darkness, the latter being identified with
matter. As he exists, man is tragically involved in the material order; he is
fallen and lost. Actually, however, he is a particle of Light, belonging to,
though exiled from, the transcendent world. He is of the same essence as God,
and human souls are fragments of the divine substance. His salvation lies in
grasping this truth by an interior illumination which may be spontaneous, but
usually comes in response to initiation into the Manichaean fellowship; and in
the process of salvation, paradoxically, God is at once redeemer and redeemed.
The all-important thing was to withdraw oneself from the contamination of the
flesh, matter being the fundamental evil.”[4]
According to the Manichaeans, “matter… was composed partly of good and
partly of evil, both being present in a given substance in a great or smaller
degree. Good and evil were permanently in conflict because the captive
particles of good or light were always struggling to escape from the evil or
darkness which enveloped them. In flesh of all sorts very few traces of the
light-element were present, and for this reason meat was not to be eaten by a
good Manichee. Light was present in greater quantities in vegetable matter,
which could therefore be eaten. The light-particles were freed from
imprisonment when the elect, or higher order of Manichees, ate these foods, but
it was wrong for a member of the sect to cut down a tree or even pluck fruit,
or to commit any other act of violence harmful to the good elements in plants.
These operations were to be performed by the wicked on behalf of the Manichees,
that is, by those who were considered lost souls and belonged to neither the
higher nor the lower order of the sect. The elect were supposed to be
particularly scrupulous and to avoid either doing violence to the good elements
or taking any action which might assist the powers of darkness. They were
forbidden to marry, because the act of procreation was construed as collusion
with these powers. For the lower order of the sect, called ‘hearers’ or
‘aspirants’, the rules were less strict, but they were expected to serve the
elect and to give food to no one but them, since to do so would be to deliver
the good elements into the hands of the devil.”[5]
It is this Manichaean teaching, according to St. John Chrysostom, that
was the target of St. Paul’s prophecy: “The Spirit speaketh expressly, that in
the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing
spirits, and doctrines of demons; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their
conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding
to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving
of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good,
and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving” (I Timothy
4.1-4). Manichaeism is demonic, explains St. John, because they condemn as evil
those things, such as marriage and certain foods, which are not evil in
themselves, but only if taken in excess. For “good things are created to be received…
But if it is good, why is it ‘sanctified by the word of God and prayers’? For
it must be unclean, if it is to be sanctified? Not so, here he is speaking to
those who thought that some of these things were common; therefore he lays down
two positions: first, that no creature of God is unclean; and secondly, that if
it has become so, you have a remedy: seal it [with the sign of the cross], give
thanks, and glorify God, and all the uncleanness passes away.”[6]
Manichaeism in its cruder forms was clearly exposed and condemned by the
Holy Fathers of the Church. However, in a more subtle form it managed to
penetrate the Christian milieu - through the older but still very influential
philosophy of Plato. For Platonism, though deeper and subtler than Manichaeism,
nevertheless has definite affinities with it in its dualism, its emphasis on
intellectual gnosis as the way of salvation, and its rejection of
matter.
“The key to Plato’s (c. 429-347 B.C.) philosophy is his theory of
knowledge. Being convinced that knowledge in the strict sense is possible, but
that it cannot be obtained from anything so variable and evanescent as
sense-perception, he was led to posit a transcendent, non-sensible world of
Forms or Ideas (eidh) which are apprehended by the intellect alone. His point
was that, while sensation presents us with great numbers of particular objects
which are constantly changing, the mind seizes on certain characteristics which
groups of them possess in common and which are stable. For example, it fastens
on the characteristic of beauty common to certain objects and of similarity
common to others, and so reaches the Forms of beauty-in-itself and
likeness-in-itself. The Forms thus resemble the universals of which modern
philosophers speak, but we should notice that for Plato they had objective
existence. It is an open question whether he believed there were Forms
corresponding to every class of sensible things, but we do know that he
regarded them as arranged in a hierarchy crowned by the most universal Form of
all, the Form of the Good (later he called it the One), which is the cause of
all the other Forms and of our knowledge of them. Being unchanging and eternal,
the Forms alone are truly real. They transcend, and are wholly independent of,
the world of particular sensible things. In fact, the latter, the world of
Becoming, is modelled on the world of Forms, and particulars only are what they
are in so far as the Forms are participated in, or copied, by them.
“The transition to Plato’s psychology… is easy. In his view the soul is
an immaterial entity, immortal by nature; it exists prior to the body in which
it is immured, and is destined to go on existing after the latter’s extinction.
So far from having anything to do with the world of Becoming, it properly
belongs to the world of Forms (that is, of Being), and it is in virtue of the
knowledge it had of them in its pre-mundane existence that it can recognize (he
calls this anamnhsiV, or recollection) them here. It is, moreover, a tripartite
structure, consisting of a higher or ‘rational’ element [nouV] which apprehends truth and by rights should direct the
man’s whole life, a ‘spirited’ element [qumoV] which is the seat of the nobler emotions, and an
‘appetitive’ element [epiqumia] which covers the carnal desires.”[7]
In spite of his very low opinion of carnal desire, Plato does allow that
it can strive towards objects not found in the material world. Sexual love, or
eros, is the love of that which is beautiful in a man or woman, but identifies
that beauty with nobility of soul rather than beauty of body. However, if the
body can be said to “bear the same stamp of beauty” as the soul, it must not
become the main object of attraction, and must not lead to specifically sexual
activity. [8]
Plato develops his concept of “Platonic love”
especially in The Symposium. Here the prophetess Diotima defines love
(eros) as a spirit “intermediate between the divine and the mortal” and “the
love of the everlasting possession of the good”.
The key word
here is “everlasting”; for “love is of the immortal”. But how can sexual love
(eros) be love of the immortal? Only if it is seen to be love of the soul,
rather than the body, a desire to beget, not perishable children through a
physical union, but imperishable objects through the spiritual union of the
lover with like-minded persons – for example, the creations of poets and
artists, of laws and constitutions.
“And after laws and institutions he will go on to the
sciences, that he may see their beauty, and not be like a servant in love with
the beauty of one youth or man or institution, slavish, mean, and petty, but
drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many
fair and lofty thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom until on that
shore he grows great and strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a
single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere.”
This ascent of the soul through what we may call heavenly, as opposed to
vulgar eros leads finally to the contemplation of the Idea of Beauty Itself:
“He who has been instructed so far in the mystery of love, and who has learned
to see the beautiful correctly and in due order, when he comes toward the end
will suddenly perceive a wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final
cause of all our former toils). It is eternal, uncreated, indestructible,
subject neither to increase or decay; not like other things partly beautiful,
partly ugly; not beautiful at one time or in one relation or in one place, and
deformed in other times, other relations, other places; not beautiful in the
opinion of some and ugly in the opinion of others. It is not to be imagined as
a beautiful face or form or any part of the body, or in the likeness of speech
or knowledge: it does not have its being in any living thing or in the sky or
the earth or any other place. It is Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and
everlasting, which without diminution, and without increase, or any change, is
imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. If a
man ascends from these under the influence of the right love of a friend, and
begins to perceive that beauty, he may reach his goal. And the true order of
approaching the mystery of love is to begin from the beauties of earth and
mount upwards for the sake of that beauty, using these as steps only, and from
one going on to two, and from two to all beautiful forms, and from beautiful
forms to beauty of conduct, and from beauty of conduct to beauty of knowledge,
until from this we arrive at the knowledge of absolute beauty, and at last know
what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates,’ said the stranger of
Mantineia, ‘is the life above all others which man should live, in the
contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would
see not to be after the measure of gold, and dress, and fair boys and youths,
whose sight now entrances you (and you and many others would be content to live
seeing them only and talking with them without food or drink, if that were
possible – you only want to look at them and to be with them). But what if man
had eyes to see the true beauty – the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and
unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and
vanities of human life – gazing on it, in communion with the true beauty simple
and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye
of the mind, he will be able to bring forth, not shadows of beauty, but its
truth, because it is no shadow that he grasps, but the truth; and he will give
birth to true virtue and nourish it and become the friend of God and be
immortal as far as mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?’”[9]
This famous passage, representing perhaps the summit of pre-Christian
religious philosophy, clearly contains much that is compatible with the
Christian faith; for, as the title of the most famous work of Christian
asceticism, the Philokalia, indicates, Christianity can also be
described as “the love of Beauty”, “simple and divine”. However there is also
much that is clearly inadequate or mistaken from a Christian, or even from a
simply logical, point of view. Thus, leaving aside the mythical elements of his
theory and the obvious criticism that “Platonic love” appears to be homosexual
by nature, Plato does not tell us who or what this ultimate, immortal and
absolute Beauty that is the end of love is (beyond calling it “God”), and how
it relates to the material world; nor, if Beauty itself is an eternal,
supersensible Form, how that which is sensible and passing can still be called
beautiful; nor how that which is sensible can have any purpose or value if it
simply “clogs up” the vision of immortal Beauty “with the pollutions of
mortality”.
Dualism is always threatening to blow apart
Plato’s system into two mutually self-exclusive sub-systems, one real, good and
static, and the other chimerical, evil and dynamic. On the one hand, there are
the Forms and the immortal mind of man, which are linked by a purely
intellectual kind of contemplation. On the other hand, there are material
objects and man’s carnal desire for them. The concept of eros serves as a link
between these two sub-systems. But eros itself appears to be a dualistic
element. If it can pierce the veil of sense and penetrate to the eternal Forms,
then it must surely belong to the mind. But then why does it appear to have its
seat in the body and lust after other material bodies? Perhaps there are in
fact two eroses, one “vulgar” and the other “heavenly”. But in that case what
is the relationship between them?
I
believe that Christianity, and Christianity alone, has solved this problem
first posed by Platonism, as I shall try to demonstrate in detail in this book.
However, elements of Platonic dualism continued to plague Christian writers
influenced by Platonism, leading in some cases to outright heresy, and in
others to deviation from the consensus of the Holy Fathers, if not on the most
fundamental issues, at any rate on that of sexuality. Thus the contemporary
English philosopher, Roger Scruton, writes: “Remnants of the
Platonic view can be found in many subsequent thinkers – in the neo-Platonists,
in St. Augustine, in Aquinas and in the Roman philosopher-poet Boethius, whose philosophy
of love was to have such a profound effect on the literature of medieval
Europe… It survives in the popular idea – itself founded in the most dubious of
metaphysical distinctions – that sexual desire is primarily ‘physical’, while
love always has a ‘spiritual’ side. It survives, too, in the theory of Kant,
despite the enormous moral and emotional distance that separates Kant from
Plato…”[10]
Among the Holy Fathers, it is not only in
St. Augustine and the many Western writers influenced by him that we find
remnants of the Platonic view of eros. In the East we find it also in, for
example, Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa. However, as I shall seek to show, on
the essential points the “Platonism” of St. Gregory is completely subordinated
to his Christian world-view.
One more pagan philosophy needs to be
briefly considered here – Stoicism. “Founded by Zeno of Citium c. 300
B.C., it was a closely knit system of logic, metaphysics and ethics. Its lofty,
if somewhat impersonal, moral ideal won it countless adherents; it taught
conquest of self, life in accordance with nature (i.e. the rational principle
within us), and the brotherhood of man. From the theological point of view,
however, what was most remarkable about it was its pantheistic materialism. The
Stoics reacted vigorously against the Platonic differentiation of a
transcendent, intelligible world not perceptible by the senses from the
ordinary world of sensible experience. Whatever exists, they argued, must be
body, and the universe as a whole must be through and through material. Yet
within reality they drew a distinction between a passive and an active
principle. There is crude, unformed matter, without character or quality; and
there is the dynamic reason or plan (logoV) which
forms and organizes it. This latter they envisaged as spirit (pneuma) or
fiery vapour; it was from this all-pervading fire that the cruder, passive
matter emerged, an in the end it would be reabsorbed into it in a universal
conflagration…. This active principle or Logos permeates reality as mind or
consciousness pervades the body, and they described it as God, Providence,
Nature, the soul of the universe (anima mundi). Their conception that
everything that happens has been ordered by Providence to man’s best advantage
was the basis of their ethical doctrine of submission to fate.
“Thus Stoicism was a monism teaching that
God or Logos is a finer matter immanent in the material universe. But it also
taught that particular things are microcosms of the whole, each containing
within its unbroken unity an active and a passive principle. The former, the
principle which organizes and forms it, is its logos, and the Stoics
spoke of ‘seminal logoi’ (logoi spermatikoi), seeds, as it
were, through the activity of which individual things come into existence as
the world develops. All these ‘seminal logoi’ are contained within the
supreme, universal Logos; they are so many particles of the divine Fire which
permeates reality. This leads to the Stoic doctrine of human nature. The soul
in man is a portion of, or an emanation from, the divine Fire which is the
Logos. It is a spirit or warm breath pervading the body and giving it form,
character, organization. Material itself, it survives the body, but is itself
mortal, persisting at longest until the world conflagration. Its parts are,
first, the five senses; then the power of speech or self-expression; then the
reproductive capacity; and, finally, the ruling element (to hgemonikon), which
is reason.”[11]
Stoicism taught that there are four main
passions: pleasure (hdonh), sorrow
or depression (luph), desire
(epiqumia) and
fear (foboV). These “are
irrational and unnatural; and so it is not so much a question of moderating and
regulating them as of getting rid of them and inducing a state of Apathy [apaqeia]. At least when the
passions or affections become habits (nosoi yuchV) they have to be
eliminated. Hence the Stoic ethic is in practice largely a fight against the
‘affections’, and endeavour to attain to a state of moral freedom and
sovereignty.”[12]
However, as Copleston goes on to note,
“the Stoics tended to moderate somewhat this extreme position, and we find some
admitting rational emotions - eupaqeiai - in the
wise man.”[13]
Thus Diogenes
Laertius taught that there are three primary eupaqeiai:
reasonable “joy” (cara) as
opposed to “pleasure” (hdonh);
“cautiousness” (eulabeia) as
opposed to “fear” (foboV); and
rational “wish” (boulhsiV) as
opposed to “desire” (epiqumia).
This concept of the “good passion” was
taken up by the Holy Fathers[14], who
rejected the Stoic ideal of
passionlessness, apaqeia, in
the sense of the complete extinction of all desire and passion, but accepted it
in the sense of the control, transmutation and redirection of the passions from
bad objects to good objects.[15]
As with Platonism, there are clearly
elements in Stoicism that are compatible with Christianity. And, again as with
Platonism, there are insoluble logical paradoxes within it. Both suffer from
the false presupposition, common to the whole of Greek philosophy, that reality
must be only one kind of “thing”. For the Platonists, reality is immaterial; so
that matter must be unreal. For the Stoics, reality is matter; so that the
immaterial must be a refined kind of matter.
Christianity has solved these dilemmas by
teaching that the immaterial God created the material universe out of
nothing, which both preserves the reality and the goodness of that universe,
and distinguishes it from the reality of God Himself. As a result of the fall,
created reality tore itself away from union with uncreated reality, God and
corrupted itself; but through the Incarnation of the Word the different
realities of the Creator and His creation were reunited without division or
confusion in the Person of Jesus Christ. And at the end of time all men who
have received and retained Christ in themselves will be united in the whole of
their transfigured natures, including their bodies, with the immaterial God.[16]
This means that eros can be regarded as a
created reality which is good in essence, but has become a bad in the fall, and
which through Christ can be restored to its original goodness…
The Russian canonist S.V. Troitsky has
contrasted two views of eros and marriage: the dualistic or “Platonic
Christian”, which he calls the “realistic” view, and the Orthodox Christian,
which he calls the “idealistic view. The latter is represented above all in the
text of the Orthodox marriage service, and in the later writings of St. John
Chrysostom.[17]
This pair of words is, I believe, ill-chosen, because the “idealistic” view is,
as I shall try to show, ultimately more realistic than the “realistic” one.
Nevertheless, for lack of a better terminology, I shall continue to use it.
The “idealistic” view which I shall be
trying to defend can be summarised in the following axioms:
1.
Man was created in the beginning, before the fall, as
a sexual being, whose sexuality and physicality were not “added” to his nature
in prevision of the fall and the need to procreate in the conditions of the
fall. Some secondary sexual characteristics may have been “added” with a view
to procreation (the genital organs). But “primary” sexuality, as it were, is a
fundamental, ineradicable element of human nature whose primary purpose is not
procreation.
2.
The primary purpose of sexuality and marriage is to
provide an image of the love between Christ and the Church and an innate, inner
intuition of the mystery of the incarnation. For this mystery is in essence a
marital mystery, a mystery of the Divine, uncreated Eros to which the human,
created eros is called to respond. By making us male and female from the
beginning, God granted us the means of understanding, by reflection on our own human
nature, the supra-human mystery of His Divine economy.
3.
This being so, the path out of the fall to a
restoration of human nature in its original purity and union with God lies, not
in a rejection of eros, but in its redirection, transmutation and “sublimation”
from unlawful objects of desire to lawful ones, and from lower objects of
desire to higher ones. Both marriage and virginity (monasticism), if undertaken
for the sake of Christ and with the blessing of the Church, are paths towards
this end, the end of chastity; but virginity is the higher path and has
a greater reward. Neither marriage nor virginity involves a radical
rejection of sexuality, but rather the reintegration of sexuality with love
that prevailed before the fall.
I shall quote St.
John Chrysostom more than any Father in my development of this view. However,
the insights that have enabled me to give a theoretical basis for this view in
a broader understanding of eros I owe to three later Byzantine Fathers: St.
Maximus the Confessor, St. Gregory of Sinai and St. Gregory Palamas, as well as
to more recent Russian writers. These insights are as follows:
1.
The major powers of the soul, including eros, are powers both
of the soul and of the body – more precisely, of the psychosomatic
unity that is man.
2.
Eros in its original, unfallen form proceeds from the soul
to the body, and not vice-versa; its origin is in the highest faculty of the
soul, the mind (nouV). It is the fall that
has reversed this flow, turning it against its source, and creating the
conflict between “flesh” and “spirit” that we are all too familiar with.
3.
Sexual love is only one manifestation of created eros,
which in its fullness embraces all the manifestations of man’s love for God and
His creation. As such it is not necessarily the highest or the most important
manifestation. However, for most people it is the first; that is, it is
sexual desire that, paradoxically, first gives us “intimations of immortality”
and resurrection, not only of our souls but also, and crucially, of our bodies.
Eros is a subject of Christian psychology or anthropology; marriage – of
sacramental theology; and monasticism – of ascetic theology. Of course, the
three subjects are closely interrelated, and benefit, I think, from being
treated together. I have chosen to do so within a framework roughly dictated by
the sequence of Scriptural history.
Thus in the first chapter I describe the origins of eros in the creation
of man and woman in Paradise; in the second - the effects on eros of the fall;
in the third – the redemption of eros brought about by Christ; in the fourth,
the consequences of Christ’s redemption of eros for marriage and monasticism;
and in the fifth – the nature of eros in general.
In recent years there has been a reaction in Orthodox theological
literature against the naturalist glorification of fallen sexuality in the New
Age movement and in liberal Orthodox circles influenced by that movement.[18] This
reaction is understandable and indeed necessary, and the correct points it
makes must not be ignored. At the same time, there is a danger of over-reaction
in a Neo-Manichaean direction, and of over-simplifying a highly complex
subject. This book aims to redress the balance, to encompass eros’s potential
for good as well as for evil (which is why it must be clearly distinguished
from the pejorative concept of “lust”), to show what it was in the beginning as
well as what it became in the fall, and what it can be in Christ. And in so
doing it hopes to show how central the study of eros is to Orthodox theology as
a whole, being at the crossroads, as it were, of dogmatics, pastoral theology
and canon law, of soteriology, ecclesiology and anthropology.
1.
EROS IN THE BEGINNING
Then God said, Let
Us make man according to Our image and according to Our likeness, and let them
have dominion… over all the earth… So God created man; according to the image
of God created He him; male and female created He them.
Genesis: 1.26-27.
In three things was I [Wisdom] beautified,
and stood up beautiful both before God and man: the unity of brethren, the love
of neighbours, and a man and a wife that agree together.
The Wisdom of Sirach 25.1.
Neither is the man
without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord.
I Corinthians 11.11.
“According to the eastern tradition,” writes Philip Sherrard, “what is
regarded as man's natural life, and so as the norm providing the basis for the
moral law, is that of the original creation.”[19] So the
clue to the understanding of eros, and the moral norms governing its
expression, is to be found in the first chapters of the book of Genesis. For it
is there that we find a description – the only description available to us – of
the relationship between the first man and woman in their original creation,
before the fall.
However, this immediately raises an important methodological problem,
the problem of understanding the nature of the world before the fall
from the point of view of someone living after the fall. For, as Fr.
Seraphim Rose writes: “The state of Adam and the first-created world has been
placed forever beyond the knowledge of science by the barrier of Adam’s
transgression, which changed the very nature of Adam and the creation, and indeed
the very nature of knowledge itself. Modern science knows only what it observes
and what can be reasonably inferred from observation… The true knowledge of
Adam and the first-created world – as much as is useful for us to know – is
accessible only in God’s revelation and in the Divine vision of the saints”.[20]
In order to illustrate the problem, let us consider the important
question of the nature of the body of Adam before the fall. According to the
great God-seer, St. Seraphim of Sarov, it “was created to such an extent immune
to the action of every one of the elements created by God, that neither could
water drown him, nor fire burn him, nor could the earth swallow him up in its
abysses, nor could the air harm him by its action in any way whatsoever.
Everything was subject to him…”[21] Again,
St. Gregory of Sinai writes: “The incorruptible body will be earthly, but
without moisture and coarseness, having been unutterably changed from animate
to spiritual, so that it will be both dust and heavenly. Just as it was created
in the beginning, so also will it arise, that it may be conformable to the
image of the Son of Man by entire participation in deification.”[22]
But how are we to understand the nature of a body that is “both dust and
heavenly”, which is made of real matter, real flesh, but which, like Christ’s
resurrected Body, can go through walls? The truth is that our fallen
imaginative faculty can only go so far, and no further, in understanding this
mystery.
But does that mean that we should not examine this question? Not at all.
For our understanding of our human nature now depends critically on our
understanding of it as it was in the beginning. And God would not have
given us the account of the creation of human nature in the first chapters of Genesis
if we were not meant to try and understand the mysteries contained
therein.
For, as St. Cyril of Alexandria writes, "our Lord Jesus Christ
requires those who love Him to be accurate investigators of whatsoever is
written concerning Him; for He said, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a
treasure hidden in a field.' For the mystery of Christ is deposited, so to
speak, at a great depth, nor is it plain to the many; but he who uncovers it by
means of an accurate knowledge, finds the riches which are therein."[23] Again,
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow writes: "None of the mysteries of the most
secret wisdom of God ought to appear alien or altogether transcendent to us,
but in all humility we must apply our spirit to the contemplation of Divine
things."[24]
Male and Female
How primordial is eros? Is it to be found
in the original constitution of man? Can we speak of eros in Paradise? Of
course, Adam and Eve, man and woman, were in Paradise. But does the fact of
sexual differentiation necessarily entail sexual feeling, the attraction of the
sexes to each other that we call erotic?
The realistic view gives a negative answer
to the last question. Adam and Eve may have been created as man and woman, the
argument goes; but it is not recorded that they had sexual relations in
Paradise. We are first told that “Adam knew his wife” in a sexual sense only
after the fall (Genesis 4.1). Thus St. John of the Ladder
writes that if Adam had not been overcome by gluttony, he would not have known
what a wife was - that is, he would have lived with her as with a sister.[25] The
capacity and desire for sexual relations were given by God to man only as a
result of the fall, and for the sake of the survival of the race in the fall.
Correspondingly, human sexual
differentiation was created by God in anticipation of the fall, for the sake of
the reproduction of the species. As St. John of Damascus writes: “God, having
foreknowledge, and knowing that [the man] would commit the crime and be subject
to corruption, created out him the woman, who would be his helper and like him
(Genesis 2.18): a helper so that after the crime the race should be
preserved by means of birth, one generation replacing another.”[26]
There can be no question that sexual
relations as we know them were unknown to Adam and Eve in Paradise.
However, this does not resolve the question whether sexual feeling in an unfallen
form existed already before the fall. Some of the Fathers have no doubt that
some such unfallen sexuality did exist before the fall. Thus St. Cyril of Alexandria
writes of Adam's body before the fall that it “was not entirely free
from concupiscence of the flesh”.[27] For
"while it was beyond corruption, it had indeed innate appetites, appetites
for food and procreation. But the amazing thing was that his mind was not
tyrannized by these tendencies. For he did freely what he wanted to do, seeing
that his flesh was not yet subject to the passions consequent upon
corruption".[28]
So just as Eve found the fruit “pleasant to eat”, but this was not
accounted to her as a sin until she allowed the attractiveness of the fruit to
overcome her mind and lead her to disobey God, so we may presume that Adam and
Eve had a natural, unfallen attraction for each other which was not sinful as
long as it remained completely subject to the mind and to the will of God. It
was in this failure to subject the desiring faculty to the mind, rather than
any supposed viciousness in the desiring faculty itself, that the fall
consisted.
We shall return to the question of the
feelings of our first parents for each other later. But first let us examine in
somewhat more detail the purpose for which God created the sexes in the first
place.
By contrast with the animals, whose sexual differentiation is not
mentioned, man is described from the beginning as being male and female: male and
female created He them. It would seem, therefore, that the
sexual differentiation of man is of the first importance. The question, then,
arises: is the sacred text here referring to one person who is both male and
female, or to man and woman as separate individuals constituting one species?
The former
answer is not as unlikely as it may sound. After all, before Adam was placed in
Paradise and Eve was taken out of his side, he had no mate, no “help like unto
him”[29]; the
species was not yet differentiated into complementary sexes. Moreover, if Eve
was taken out of Adam, does this not imply that formerly Adam had everything
that Eve had – that is, the whole of the female nature? Does this not suggest
that the creation of Eve and the differentiation of the sexes was in fact the
creation of a male being and a female being from a being that was both male and
female in the beginning – an androgyne? By “androgyne” here we do not mean
hermaphroditism, or a curious hybrid being having secondary characteristics of
both the sexes[30],
but rather a man, not a woman, that was complete sexually in a way that no
other man before Christ was complete, having the full complement of both
masculine and feminine qualities.
We shall return
to the creation of Eve in more detail later. At this point let us note that the
idea that Eve pre-existed, as it were, in Adam, allowing us to speak of Adam
before the creation of Eve as being both male and female, has some support in
the Holy Fathers. Thus St. Ephraim the Syrian writes: “Moses said, male and
female created He them, to make known that Eve was already inside Adam, in
the rib that was drawn out from him. Although she was not in his mind, she was
in his body, and she was not only in his body with him, but also in soul and
spirit with him, for God added nothing to that rib that He took out except the
structure and the adornment. If everything that was suitable for Eve, who came
to be from the rib, was complete in and from that rib, it is rightly said that male
and female created He them.”[31] “Adam,”
concludes St. Ephraim, “was both one and two, one in that he was man[32], two in
that he was created male and female”.[33] Again:
“He honoured [Eve]”, writes St. John Chrysostom, “and made them one, even
before her creation”.[34] But
“the wise counsel of God at the beginning divided the one into two; and wanting
to show that even after division it still remains one, He did not allow that
procreation should be possible through one person only….”[35] And so,
concludes the holy Father, “one may see that they are one, for she was made
from his side, and they are, as it were, two halves.”[36]
The conclusion
drawn by the two Antiochene Fathers is confirmed by the fact that men and women
are complementary, not only physically, for the purposes of sexual
reproduction, but also psychologically. Science indicates that the intellectual
and emotional differences between men and women may be related to hormonal differences
and to different patterns of activity in the right and left hemispheres of the
brain, which themselves complement each other rather like male and female.[37] It is
indeed as if each individual man and woman were one half of a single bisexual
organism, so that each man appears to be “missing” certain feminine qualities
that would make him more whole, while each woman appears to be missing certain
masculine qualities that would make her more whole.[38]
Thus we may look
at the “angelic” state of Adam in Paradise, of the true monk or nun, and of all
the saved after the general resurrection, when “they neither marry nor are
given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven” (Matthew 22.30) as
not much a sexless state as a sexually integrated state, a state
in which each person has the full complement of both the masculine and the
feminine qualities without any strain or longing for a partner to complement
him or her. Such a view would be in accord with the most ancient of the
apocryphal sayings attributed to Christ, that the Kingdom of heaven will come
“when you have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one
and the male with the female is neither male nor female”.[39] For in
the sexually integrated human being “the two become one” and “the male is with
the female” in such harmony and lack of tension that he (she) “is neither male
nor female” in the normal, bi-polar understanding of “male” and “female”. Such
a state is “angelic” and virginal in that in it there is no sexual intercourse between
people, but full sexual integration within each person.
Thus the words male
and female created He them can be taken to mean not only that mankind was
created from the beginning in two sexes, each of which is in the image of God,
so that the woman is as fully human, and as fully godlike, as the man, but also
that man in the beginning was created with the full complement of qualities
that we associate with the two sexes at their unfallen best, having the
rationality and strength of the male and the sensitivity and warmth of the
female. Perhaps we can go further. Perhaps we can say that man as the image of
God is man in the fullness of his male and female qualities, such as we find in
Christ, not in the unbalanced one-sidedness introduced by the fall.
Dominion through Love
Immediately after saying
that God created man in His image and likeness, the sacred narrative continues:
let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the
cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon
the earth. Why should dominion be mentioned in connection with the
image of God in man? And what connection does this theme have, if any, with the
differentiation of the sexes?
The first chapter of Genesis
presents us, above all, with God the Ruler of all, the Pantocrator.
But the description of God’s dominion would be incomplete if no mention were
made of the fact that God has delegated some of His dominion to one of His
creatures – man. Therefore the most salient characteristic of man at this stage
of the Biblical narrative is that he is a king in the image of the King, “the
impress of the supreme glory, and the image upon earth of Divine power”.[40] Man is
the master of all visible creation as God is the Master of all creation,
visible and invisible. This mastery is no ordinary, exploitative mastery, such
as we find in the fallen world, but mastery in the image of God’s Mastery.
That is, it is in essence loving, looking after all creatures and
leading them to happiness and fulfillment. And it is wise; for, as
Nicetas Stethatos writes, God made man “king of creation”, enabling him “to
possess within himself the inward essences, the natures and the knowledge of
all beings”.[41]
However, man’s mastery over external
creation is strictly proportional to his mastery over internal creation, his
own human nature. As
St. Irenaeus of Lyons writes: “Man was like God. Accordingly, he was free and
master of himself (autexousioV), having been made by God in
this way in order that he should rule over everything upon earth.”[42] Again,
St. Basil the Great writes: “You have dominion over every kind of savage beast.
But, you will say, do I have savage beasts within me? Yes, many of them. It is
even an immense crowd of savage beasts that you carry within yourself. Do not
take this as an insult. Is not anger a small wild beast when it barks in your
heart?… You were created to have dominion, you are the master of the passions,
the master of savage beasts… Be master of the thoughts within you in order to
be master of all beings. Thus, the power which was given us through living
beings prepares us to exercise dominion over ourselves.”[43]
Woman is equal to man by nature[44], so she, too, has dominion over
the animal and material kingdoms. For “the words ’Gain dominion and have control’,” says St.
John Chrysostom, “are directed to the man and the woman. See the Lord’s
loving kindness: even before creating her He makes her sharer in this control”.[45]
However, she is “a secondary authority”,
writes St. John Chrysostom, in the sense that while possessing “real authority
and equality of dignity”, it is her husband who “retains the role of headship”.[46] Even
before the fall, says St. Basil, the man was “the more authoritative part”[47], because
“the man is not from the woman, but the woman from the man. Neither was the man
created for the woman, but the woman for the man” (I Corinthians
11.8-9).
After the fall, the pattern is accentuated
in accordance with God’s word to the woman: “Your yearning will be for your
husband, and he will be your master” (Genesis 3.16). “I suffer not a
woman to teach,” says the Apostle Paul, “nor to usurp authority over the man,
but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived,
but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (I Timothy
1.11-14). Wives are to be “discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to
their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed” (Titus 2.5).
“Wives, be in subjection to your own husbands,” writes the Apostle Peter;
“that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the
conduct of the wives; while they behold your chaste conduct coupled with fear”
(I Peter 3.1-2).
The woman
is therefore subjected to the man in consequence of three facts: (i) that the
woman was created after the man and for his sake, (ii) that she was deceived by
the devil, while the man was not, and (iii) that her sin consisted, to some
degree, in the desire to dominate the man. As St. Ephraim the Syrian writes,
“she hastened to eat before her husband that she might become head over her
head, that she might become the one to give command to that one by whom she was
to be commanded and that she might be older in divinity than the one who was
older than she in humanity.”[48] The
devil tempted Eve in the guise of a serpent, writes St. Gregory Palamas, “in
order to deprive the woman of her dignity and thereby subject her to inferior
creatures which she, like Adam, had been worthily allotted to rule, honored by
God Who created her with His Own hand and word, fashioning her after His Own
image”.[49] As a
result, writes St. Isidore of Pelusium, the woman’s dominion was “diminished
and mutilated”, and she was made subject to the man in a stricter sense than
before the fall.[50]
But did not the man sin too? Indeed. And so for his disobedience to his Head,
Christ, and false obedience to his body, the woman, he is given a
responsibility for her that is full of suffering: “And to Adam He said, Because
thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and eaten of the tree concerning
which I charged thee of it only not to eat – of that thou hast eaten, cursed is
the ground in thy labours. In pain thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy
life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the
herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread until thou
shalt return” (Genesis 3.18-20). Thus for his weakness of will and lack
of true love for his wife, - for he could have saved her as well as himself by
refusing the eat of the fruit, - the man is condemned to work to support her
and his family for the rest of his life, groaning not only under the physical
burden, but also in anxiety of spirit. For “if any provide not for his own, and
specially for those of his house, he hath denied the Faith, and is worse than
an infidel” (I Timothy 5.8).
However, in
thus having to care for her, he will learn more truly to love her, subduing his
anger and bitterness: “Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against
them” (Colossians 3.19). “Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them
according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel,
and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not
hindered” (I Peter 3.7). As Christopher Ely writes: “Because men have
difficulty loving deeply, God gives them the primary responsibility of loving.
Because Eve was led by her emotions to be disobedient, women’s chief obligation
is to submit. The importance of love, however, to both man and wife, cannot be
stressed enough.”[51]
The man has dominion directly, as it were,
while the woman has it only indirectly and derivatively, through her union with
him, or as being his image and likeness.[52] This distinction
was implicit in the customs of ancient society, where an unmarried woman had no
independent status and ruled nothing: it was only when she married that she
entered into the rule of “other things”, as Blessed Theodoretus puts it – that
is, her household and her children. Hence the custom in ancient Roman law of
calling only a married couple “dominus” and “domina”.[53] In
English the equivalents are “master” (Mr.) and “mistress” (Mrs.); and in Greek
- “kyrios” and “kyria”. [54]
However, there was an exception to this
rule – when a woman became ruler of the empire in her own, and not her
husband’s right. But the exception proves the rule, for when the Empress Irene,
for example, entered into possession of the empire, the Byzantine documents
gave her the title basileus, “emperor”, rather than basilissa,
“empress”. They thereby demonstrated that they could not conceive of the master
of the inhabited world being of the female gender.[55]
Moreover, “for certain western contemporaries [notably, Charlemagne],” as
Judith Herrin writes, “it was the absence of a male ruler in Constantinople
which meant that the imperial title could legitimately be claimed by another.
For these writers, the title in question was the one previously held by
Constantine VI [the son of Irene], whose blinding disqualified him. They
refused to consider the imperial claims of Irene as basileus, for how
could a woman be emperor?”[56]
Another, still greater exception is the
Holy Virgin, who is called “Lady” (despoina), according to St. Gregory
Palamas, “because she has the mastery of all things, having divinely conceived
and borne in virginity the Master of all by nature. Yet she is the Lady not
just because she is free from servitude and a partaker of the divine power, but
because she is the fount and root of the freedom of the human race, especially
after the ineffable and joyful Birth. A married woman is ruled over rather than
being a lady, especially after her sorrowful and painful childbirth, in
accordance with the curse on Eve: ‘In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children;
and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’ (Genesis
3.16). Freeing the human race, the Virgin Mother received through the angel joy
and blessing instead of this curse.”[57]
And yet, of course, the Holy Virgin is
mistress of the whole of creation only through her perfect submission to her
Master, Christ God; so the pattern of man’s dominion over woman remains intact,
although in her case it is a dominion of completely free submission without a
hint of compulsion, of domination.
And in fact the only real exception to
this pattern of the man’s dominion over the woman is provided by the Apostle
Paul’s words: “the wife hath not power over her own body, but the husband; and
likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud
ye not one another…” (I Corinthians 7.4-5). In other words, the husband
is the master of his wife in all things except sexual relations. The
husband cannot refuse his wife sexual relations because his body is hers, and
vice-versa. In this sphere there is complete equality.
Why is this? Because sexual relations between husband and wife are the
expression of their essential unity of nature, of the fact that the woman came
from the man and is now returning to unity with him as it was in the beginning,
before the differentiation of the sexes, not only spiritually but also
physically. And while love does not abolish dominion and hierarchy entirely, it
nevertheless puts them in the shade, as it were, making them secondary aspects
of the relationship. When the fall dominates in the relations between men and
women, so does the domination of man over woman (or the reverse). But when the
fall is reversed, - and a true, Christian marriage is, at least in part, a
reversal of the fall, - then love, “the bond of perfection”, takes the place of
domination, and humility – of humiliation. The man is the lord of the woman (I
Peter 3.6), but he is not meant to “lord it” over her. For love “does not
vaunt itself, is not puffed up” (I Corinthians 13.4). In this the great
example, as always, is Christ, Who “thought it not robbery to be equal to God,”
but for love’s sake cast aside His hierarchical dominion, “made Himself of no
repute, and took upon Him the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of
man” (Philippians 2.6,7). And the end of love is union, which of its
nature involves a mutual “exchange of properties”, so that what belongs to the
one belongs also to the other, and vice-versa.
Thus if the image of God in man can be said to be dominion –
dominion over irrational nature, over his own rational nature, and over the
woman who is of the same nature as himself, - it is nevertheless a dominion
which exercises itself through love, which brings us naturally to the
conclusion that in a still deeper sense the image of God in man is love.
For “God is love” (I John 4.1), and “love, by its nature,” writes St.
John Climacus, “is a resemblance to God, insofar as that is humanly possible.
In its activity it is the inebriation of the soul”.[58] “Love
alone,” writes St. Maximus the Confessor, “properly speaking, represents true
humanity in the image of the Creator… for it persuades the will to advance in
accordance with nature, in no way rebelling against the inward principle of its
nature.”[59]
Love is not opposed to dominion, for love is that glue which holds the
hierarchy of being together; for, as Thalassios the Libyan writes, “love alone
harmoniously joins all created things with God and with each other”.[60] The
lover on the higher rung of the hierarchy desires only the union of the beloved
with himself, not to dominate her, though she be on a lower rung. While the
beloved on the lower rung in no way desires a change in their relative
positions, but only that their love may continue unchanged forever.
But love presupposes the existence of another person to love; being in
the image of the Divine Trinity of Persons, it must itself be a multiple image,
as it were. Which brings us to the words: It is not good that
the man should be alone… (2.18).
But this immediately raises the question:
how could a sinless being who was in direct and even visible communion
with God and His holy angels[61], be in
need of anything in Paradise?
One possibility is that the reference here
is not to Adam as an individual but to the Church and the human race as a
whole, which would have great need of the female sex in the future, and in
particular of the Most Holy Virgin Mary.[62]
A stronger possibility is that although Adam
was sinless, he was not yet fully mature and established in virtue, as his
subsequent fall demonstrated. As several of the Fathers point out[63], he was
still a child, spiritually speaking. And children have need of help – a help
immediately supplied by God. In the New Testament Church, when mankind will
have achieved maturity in Christ, we shall hear a different note: “It is good
for man not to touch a woman” (I Corinthians 7.1). But such a condition,
the condition of the monad or monk, will not be possible for all, but only “to
those to whom it hath been given” (Matthew 19.11) – that is, to whom has
been given a special grace, the grace of perpetual virginity…
But perhaps we are going too far, and Adam
was in need, not of help in the form of a wife and sexual partner, but of
something else? In order to answer this question, let us turn back and ask: why
does the Scripture describe the naming of the animals at this point? What has
this to do with Adam’s need for company?
God brought the animals to Adam to be
named by him, writes St. John Chrysostom, in order to demonstrate his wisdom,
and as a sign of dominion.[64] But in
the very act of naming the animals, he expressed his knowledge of their nature,
including the fact that they were not like him: “there was not found a
help like him”. “He added ‘like him’,” writes Chrysostom, because “even if many
of the brute beasts helped him in his labours, there was still nothing
equivalent to a woman, possessed as she was of reason.”[65] The
woman was possessed of freedom and rationality; that is, she was like him
in being a person, made in the image of God. Therefore the man could love her, not as he
loved the animals, not simply as a creature of God, but as one who could love
him as he loved her, in a fully mutual love, a love in the image of the
love of the Holy Trinity.
Personhood is that which distinguishes man
from the animals. Man, unlike the animals, can in a mysterious way first
transcend his own nature, and then orient it towards God. This ability is what
we call “being a person”. Personhood, the image of God in man, is not something
added to nature as an extra part of it, but rather the capacity of man to stand
freely “opposite” his nature, as it were, to say yes or no to its natural
impulses, to justify it or to criticize it, to keep it egoistically to himself
or to devote it in love to others. [66]
God is Three Persons in one nature.
Therefore to say that man is created in the image of God is to say that man,
like God, is a multiplicity of persons in a single nature. This interpretation
is confirmed by the fact that when God speaks of the duality of persons in man He for the
first time speaks about Himself, too, in the plural: “Let Us
make man according to Our image”. In other words, man is the image
of God in that in his relationships with other men of the same nature as
himself he reflects the relationship between the Persons of the Holy Trinity,
which is characterized above all by love. God is personal because His
nature is love, and His nature is love because He is supremely personal; for
His nature is to give Himself to other persons – both the other uncreated
Persons of the Holy Trinity and the created persons of men and angels. And man
made in the image of God is similarly personal. Giving himself freely in love,
he transcends nature and becomes one spirit with his Creator and his fellow
creatures (I Corinthians 6.17, 12.13).
The Latin Fathers, and some of the Greek, write that Eve helped Adam
primarily in the procreation of children.[67] The
Greek and Syrian Fathers, on the other hand, tend to emphasise other aspects.
Thus Clement of Alexandria writes that Eve was Adam’s “help in generation and
household management”, but that if the man has “some annoying faults that
affect the harmony of the marriage, the wife should try to remedy these
annoyances by using good sense and persuasion”.[68] St.
Basil the Great writes that the help which a wife gives her husband is the
general support that she gives him in passing through life, which, of course, includes
moral support.[69]
Again, St. Ephraim the Syrian writes: “Inside Paradise, the woman was very
diligent; she was also attentive to the sheep and cattle, the herds and droves
that were in the fields. She would also help the man with the buildings, pens,
and with any other task that she was capable of doing. The animals, even though
they were subservient, were not able to help him with these things. For this
reason God made for the man a helper who would be concerned for everything for
which God Himself would be concerned. She would indeed help him in many
things.”[70].
The Russian Fathers emphasize the moral
support provided by the woman. Thus St. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, writes:
"Without a helpmate [that is, a help like him] the very bliss of
paradise was not perfect for Adam: endowed with the gift of thought, speech,
and love, the first man seeks with his thought another thinking being; his
speech sounds lonely and the dead echo alone answers him; his heart, full of
love, seeks another heart that would be close and equal to him; all his being
longs for another being analogous to him, but there is none; the creatures of
the visible world around him are below him and are not fit to be his mates; and
as to the beings of the invisible spiritual world they are above. Then the
bountiful God, anxious for the happiness of man, satisfies his wants and
creates a mate for him - a wife. But if a mate was necessary for man in
paradise, in the region of bliss, the mate became much more necessary for him
after the fall, in the vale of tears and sorrow. The wise man of antiquity
spoke justly: 'two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up
his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not
another to help him up' (Sirach 4.9-10). But few people are capable of
enduring the strain of moral loneliness, it can be accomplished only by effort,
and truly 'all men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given' (Matthew
19.11), and as for the rest - 'it is not good for a man to be alone', without a
mate."[71]
Again, Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes: “Why is it ‘not good’ for
man to be alone? The answer is quite clear: because God, ‘in the image’ of Whom
man is created is a Trinity!... His nature experiences a natural need for this,
that is, he is oppressed, as it were, within the bounds of one person, or, in
any case, he potentially contains within himself the capability and striving to
belong to some multiplicity of
persons, but without dividing (for division and schism is contrary to nature).
From this point of view it becomes clear why a ‘help’ for Adam is created not
from the earth again (and not from water and not from someone else), but from
Adam himself!”[72]
Now in the beginning the only person of
the same nature as himself to whom Adam could exercise his personhood through
love was Eve. Therefore if he was to show in himself the image and likeness of
God as a multiplicity of Persons united in love, he could do so only in his
relationship with Eve. We come to the conclusion, therefore, that the image
of God in man was revealed in the beginning not only in Adam and Eve as
individuals, but also in Adam and Eve in their relationship with each other,
more specifically in their love for each other.[73] Thus the love between man and woman is according to the image
of the love between the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity.
And if some would say that while human
love is indeed in the image of God, this cannot be said of the love between man
and woman, since this is supposedly tainted by the sexual element in it, it
should be remembered that the love between Adam and Eve was the very first human love. In Paradise
there was no other love between human beings; in this sense it was primordial,
the first and the strongest, love par excellence.[74]
All other human loves, between parents and children, between friends, etc.,
came later chronologically, and were dependent on this first, primordial love
between man and woman. So if the two great commandments on the love of God and
the love of neighbour were carried out in Paradise before the fall, they were carried out by Adam and Eve in relation
first to God and then to each other. And if this second love
is “like” the first, as the Lord says (Matthew 22.39), it is because the
second, the love of Adam and Eve for each other, was indeed made in the
likeness of the love of God….
This teaching is strongly confirmed by St.
John Chrysostom: “A certain wise man, when enumerating which blessings are most
important included ‘a wife and husband who live in harmony’ (Sirach
25.1). In another place he emphasized this: ‘A friend or a companion never
meets one amiss, but a wife with her husband is better than both’ (Sirach
40.23). From the beginning God in His providence has planned this union of man
and woman, and has spoken of the two as one: ‘male and female created He them’
(Genesis 1.27) and ‘there is neither male nor female, for ye are alone
in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3.28). There is no relationship between
human beings so close as that of husband and wife, if they are united as they
ought to be. When blessed David was mourning for Jonathan, who was of one soul
with him, what comparison did he use to describe the loftiness of their love?
‘Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women’ (II Kings
1.26). The power of this love is truly stronger than any passion; other desires
may be strong, but this one alone never fades. This love (eros) is
deeply planted within our inmost being. Unnoticed by us, it attracts the bodies
of men and women to each other, because in the beginning woman came forth from
man, and from man and woman other men and women proceed…”[75]
But one will say: why must the loneliness of man be relieved, and the
functions of a helper carried out, precisely by a woman? Why not another
man? Or an angel? After all, a multiplicity of persons loving each other in the
image of the Love of the Holy Trinity does not have to be a multiplicity of sexually
differentiated persons…
The obvious answer to this question is
that only a woman could help in sexual reproduction, which fulfilled the plan
of God more perfectly than asexual reproduction in the conditions of the fall.
Moreover, the animality of sexual reproduction reminded men of how far they had
fallen from their original condition. As St. Symeon of Thessalonica put it: “God did
not wish that our origin should be irrational and from seed and filth. But
since we voluntarily became mortal, He allowed the reproduction of the race to
take place as with the animals, so that we should know from where we have
fallen”.[76]
However, this was not the only
reason for sexual differentiation. Let us continue with the sacred narrative: So the Lord God caused a deep
sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed
up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man
He made into a woman, and brought her to the man. And Adam said, This is now
bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she
was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and
shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be in one flesh. (2.21-24)
Why from the rib? The surgeon J.E. Shelley explains: “The account in Genesis
2.18-25 is as factual as words can make it. It read like the account which a
surgeon writes for the records of the operating theatre! God performs a
surgical operation under general anaesthesia, a rib re-section in this case.
Note the detail: ‘He closed up the flesh instead thereof’. In just such a
manner would a surgeon describe his closing up of an incision. Remarkably
enough, provided that the surgeon is careful to leave the periosteum (the
membrane which envelops the bones) of the removed rib, the rib will reform in a
non-septic case, and the operation performed upon Adam was truly aseptic. So
far as I remember, the rib is the only bone in the body of man which will do
this. God gave it this property, which is why He chose it. With the vast
reservoir of living cells contained in this rib, ‘He built up Eve’”.[77]
The Hebrew word tardema, here translated as “deep sleep”, is
translated into the Greek of the Septuagint as “ecstasy”. So it means, on the
one hand, lack of feeling, anaesthesia (in the Hebrew), and on the other hand,
heightened feeling, ecstasy (in the Greek). Taking the two meanings together,
we could be talking about a prophetic dream in sleep.[78]
Thus St. Ephraim the Syrian writes: “The man, awake, anointed with
splendour, and who did not yet know sleep, fell on the earth naked and slept.
It is likely that Adam saw in his dream what was done to him as if he were
awake.”[79] Again,
Serge Verkhovskoy writes: “The sleep which God brought upon Adam is in Hebrew
called tardemah. This word refers to a deep sleep, particularly a sleep
in which one sees visions (cf. Genesis 15.12). In Greek this sleep is
called ecstasis and in Russian istuplenie. Thus Adam’s state in
this sleep may be understood not as a state of complete insensibility (for,
according to St. Irenaeus, what we know as sleep did not exist in Paradise[80]), but
rather as a state of inner, supra-conscious tension, in which he was turned, so
to speak, to face his future wife. Does this not explain how he was able to
recognize her when he first saw her?”[81] Thus
Adam’s “ecstatic sleep” is a form of prophetic trance in which he stood out of
himself (for “ec-stasy” literally means “standing out”) in order to perceive
reality from a greater height and in an incomparably greater depth. [82]
But that is not the only possible interpretation. Another possibility is
hinted at by the fact that the words “sleep” and “ecstasy” are both used in the
context of the sexual act, the first as a kind of euphemism for it (“they are
sleeping together”) and the second as a description of its culminating point.
Is it too bold to see in this primeval act of sexual differentiation the first
act, paradoxically, of sexual union? And is not the ecstasy that accompanied it
akin – in a pure, unfallen mode – to the ecstasy of sexual union?
There is some patristic support for this view. Thus St. Methodius of
Olympus writes: “The ecstatic sleep into which God put the first man [was] a
type of man’s enchantment in love, when in his thirst for children he falls
into a trance, lulled to sleep by the pleasures of procreation, in order that a
new person, as I have said, might be formed in turn from the material that is
drawn from his flesh and bone…. Hence rightly is it said that ‘therefore a man
leave his father and his mother’: for man made one with woman in the embrace of
love is overcome by a desire for children and completely forgets everything
else; he offers his rib to his divine Creator to be removed that he himself the
father may appear once again in a son”.[83]
Here “the embrace
of love” is re-described as the man “offering his rib to the Creator”, as if
the creation of Eve from Adam was indeed a kind of sexual act. Moreover, the
“man’s enchantment in love” is described as a “thirst for children”, in which
he “is overcome by a desire for children”, as if the sexual act were at the
same time a giving birth – which in a certain sense it was in the case of the
creation of Eve, insofar as Eve was both the wife and the child of Adam. [84] Thus
this new creation through parthenogenesis has at the same time certain
characteristics of what we may call “parthenocoitus”. Adam gives rise to Eve as
a separate being out of himself, and at the same time recognizes her to be his
wife, “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones”; in her “standing out” (ec-stasis)
from him, he recognizes that she is most intimately united with him.
Thus the primal differentiation of the sexes is at the same time their first,
and most perfect, union, a union without sin and so not without joy, even
“ecstasy”.
“It is very
clear,” writes Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev), “that [St. Methodius] is speaking
about the positive meaning of sexual love in itself rather than about it being
necessary for procreation. God the Creator is in fact regarded as participating
in the sexual intercourse between man and woman. When men ‘are brought to
deposit their seed in the woman’s channels’, St. Methodius continues, ‘the seed
shares, so to say, the divine creative function’. All elements of sexual life,
such as ‘enchantment’, ‘pleasures’, ‘embrace of love’, ‘desire’ and ‘ecstasy’,
receive a positive and poetic interpretation in St. Methodius. There is no
suggestion that sexual union is something unclean or unholy. On the contrary,
the whole story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib is taken as symbolizing
sexual intercourse.”[85]
That there is a
marital mystery involved here is also indicated by the significance of the fact
that God brought her to the man – God as it were “gives away” the bride
to her bridegroom. For, as Troitsky writes: “It is not by chance that
the Slavonic translation uses the word privede [‘brought’]. The privedenie
[‘bringing’] of the wife was the form of religious marriage among the ancient
Slavs, corresponding to the Roman form confarreatio.”[86]
Again, when Adam
says of Eve: “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh: and she shall
be called woman [isha in Hebrew] because she was taken out of man [ish]”[87], he is
acknowledging that they are of one flesh – in other words, that they are
married. These words, as Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich writes, are “the
foundation of, and the reason for, the mysterious attraction and union between
man and woman”.[88]
They “have become,” writes St. Asterius of Amasea, “a common admission, spoken
in the name of all men to all women, to the whole female sex. These words bind
all the rest. For that which took place in the beginning in these first-created
ones passed into the nature of their descendants.”[89] “This
is the origin,” writes Archpriest Lev Lebedev, “of the irresistible attraction
of man to his ‘wife’ (the woman) as to the most necessary complement of his own
nature. Union in love with the woman can be replaced only by union in love with
God, which is immeasurably more profound. It is on such a union with God that
monasticism is founded, which is why it does not lead to psychological
complexes. But monasticism is not for everyone, it is the lot of special
people, ‘who can accommodate’ this condition (Matthew 19.11-12). But for
the majority the woman remains one of the most necessary conditions of a normal
existence.”[90]
Adam continues with the famous words which the Lord Jesus Christ and the
Apostle Paul saw as the founding document of marriage: Therefore shall a man
leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be
in one flesh. Why “therefore”? Because Adam sees in Eve his own flesh and
bones, his own bride.
St. John Chrysostom writes: “’A man shall leave his father and his
mother’, he says; but he does not say, ‘he shall dwell with’, but instead, ‘he
shall cling’ to his wife, thus demonstrating the closeness of the union, and
the sincerity of the love. And Paul is not satisfied with this, but goes
further, explaining the subjection of the wife in the context of the two being
no longer two. He does not say ‘one spirit’ or ‘one soul’ (union like this is
possible for anyone), but he says ‘one flesh’… The word ‘flesh’ and the phrase
‘shall cling’ both refer to love…”[91]
The difference between this primordial sexuality and the sexuality of
the fall is that whereas in the fall man and woman come to know each other
through union “into one flesh”, in Paradise they came to know each other
through “standing out” from one flesh.[92] In
Paradise man and woman recognise that they are one at the very moment of their
coming into individual existence; and in that knowledge is joy. In the fall,
they desperately to seek to create unity, having come to know isolation and
loneliness; and in that knowledge is sorrow. Every true marriage begins with
the aim of reliving, as far as it is possible in the conditions of the fallen
world, that original paradise of delight, in which there was no lust but there
was joy, and not even a shadow of division…
Both unity and otherness are essential to the experience of true love.
For the lover delights both in the otherness of the beloved and in his
overcoming of that otherness through his union with her. But this otherness is
neither isolation nor unlikeness; for as St. Gregory Palamas says, “all love
culminates in union and begins in likeness”.[93] The
recognition of otherness is rather the recognition of the uniqueness of
the other.
If, however, this uniqueness is not acutely felt, then the act is
merely self-love and self-gratification, which is lust. And if that otherness
is not felt to be overcome in a unity that includes and embraces without
destroying it, then the act only engenders estrangement and jealousy. The
otherness of persons is then felt to be an otherness of nature, an
absolute otherness which precludes love; which is why love achieved is “strong
as death”, but love lost is “cruel as the grave, her shafts are shafts of fire,
even the flames thereof” (Song of Songs 8.6).[94]
We come to the
conclusion that the differentiation of the sexes has a much greater
significance and purpose in God’s plan than merely providing a means of
reproduction in the fall. As we shall explain in more detail later, the love of
man and woman as seen in its original purity in the marriage of Adam and Eve,
was designed from the beginning as a mystery of love and life mirroring
the still greater mystery of love and life that is the Incarnation of Christ
and his salvation of mankind. The holiness of the marriage of man and woman is
derived from the holiness of its archetype, the marriage of God and man...
However, let us now examine the opposing view, according to which the
words: “In Christ there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3.28)
imply that there was no sexuality in the original creation, and that there will
be none in the new heaven and the new earth, when, as the Lord Himself says,
there will be no marrying and the elect will be like the angels in heaven (Matthew
22.30).
This teaching finds support in the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor
and St. Gregory of Nyssa. Thus St. Maximus writes: “He became perfect man, from
us, for us, and in conformity with us, possessing everything that is ours
without omitting anything except sin, and in no way needing the addition of anything
that is naturally connected with marriage. At the same time and by the same
token He revealed, in my opinion, that there also happened to be another method
of increasing the human race, a method foreknown to God, which would have
prevailed if the first man had kept the commandment and had not descended to
the level of the beasts by abusing his own faculties, thus bringing about the
distinction between male and female and the division of nature. Man, as I have
said, had no need at all of this division to come into being, and it is
possible for him to be without it in the future, there being no need for these
things to endure permanently. For in Christ Jesus, says the divine Apostle,
there is ‘neither male nor female’.”[95]
Again, St. Gregory of Nyssa comments
on the phrase, male and female created He them as follows: “I presume
that everyone knows that this is a departure from the Prototype: for ‘in Christ
Jesus,’ as the Apostle says, ‘there is neither male nor female’. Yet the phrase
declares that man is thus divided. Thus the creation of our nature is in a
sense twofold: one made like to God, one divided according to this distinction:
for something like this the passage darkly conveys by its arrangement, where it
first says, ‘God created man, in the image of God created He him’, and then,
adding to that which has been said, ‘male and female created He them,’ – a
thing which is alien from our conception of God.
“I think that by these words Holy
Scripture conveys to us a great and lofty doctrine; and the doctrine is this.
While two natures – the Divine and incorporeal nature, and the irrational life
of brutes – are separated from each other as extremes, human nature is the mean
between them: for in the compound nature of man we may behold a part of each of
the natures I mentioned – of the Divine, the rational and intelligent element,
which does not admit the distinction of male and female; of the irrational, our
bodily form and structure, divided into male and female: for each of these
elements is certainly to be found in all that partakes of human life. That the
intellectual element, however, precedes the other [irrational, bodily element], we
learn as from one who gives in order an account of the making of man; and we
learn also that his community and kindred with the irrational is for man a
provision for reproduction…
“He Who brought all things into being and
fashioned man as a whole by His own will to the Divine image… saw beforehand by
His all-seeing power the failure of their will to keep a direct course to what
is good, and its consequent declension from the angelic life, in order that the
multitude of human souls might not be cut short by its fall… He formed for our
nature that contrivance for increase which befits those who had fallen into
sin, implanting in mankind, instead of the angelic majesty of nature, that
animal and irrational mode by which they now succeed each other”.[96]
Let us examine this passage. First, St.
Gregory says that the sexuality of man is “a departure from the Prototype: for
‘in Christ Jesus,’ as the Apostle says, ‘there is neither male nor female’”.
However, these words of St. Paul refer, not to what is and what is not in the
Prototype or the image of God, but to who is entitled to receive baptism and
the gifts of grace that it bestows. The Apostle is saying that all human
beings, regardless of nationality, social status or sex, can receive this gift;
all - Greeks as well as Jews, slaves as well as freemen, women as well as men,
- can become one in Christ. [97]
Besides, Christ was born as a man of the male
sex. Are we to say that His maleness was not part of the Prototype? Or has He
now ceased to be male? Is it possible to think of Christ as not male?
It may be that since, as the Lord said,
there will be no marrying in the resurrection, but we shall be like the angels
in heaven, there will be no secondary sexual characteristics in heaven.
However, it runs counter to the intuition of Christians to argue that we will
cease to be men and women in any significant sense. Still more
counter-intuitive is it to assert that Christ will cease (or rather, since He
is already risen, has already ceased) to be a man, and that the Mother of God
will cease (or rather, since she is already risen, has already ceased) to be a
woman. For we see in
Christ and the Virgin Mary, the new Adam and Eve, a real man and a real woman
with no tendency towards “unisex”. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that
such primary sexual differences will disappear in the resurrection.
Thus
St. Jerome, in spite of his highly rigorist attitude to sexuality in general,
insists that sexual differentiation will remain after the resurrection: “When
it is said that they neither marry nor are given in marriage, the distinction
of sex is shown to persist. For no one says of things which have no capacity
for marriage, such as a stick or a stone, that they neither marry nor are given
in marriage; but this may well be said of those who, while they can marry, yet
abstain from doing so by their own virtue and by the grace of Christ. But if
you will cavil at this and say, how shall we in that case be like the angels
with whom there is neither male nor female, hear my answer in brief as follows.
What the Lord promises is not the nature of angels, but their mode of life and
their bliss. And therefore John the Baptist was called an angel even before he
was beheaded, and all God’s holy men and virgins manifest in themselves, even
in this world, the life of angels. When it is said: ‘Ye shall be like the angels’,
likeness only is promised and not a change of nature” [98]
Of course, the fall has accentuated and corrupted the differences
between the sexes. Thus men tend to be crude, insensitive and boastful, and
women – weak-willed, vain and easily led by all kinds of influences.[99] But these fallen differences do not entail
that in the beginning there was never meant to be any difference. The
restoration of the image of God in man involves, not the abolition of sexual
differences, but their return to their unfallen condition, the return to men of
real masculinity together with those feminine qualities which fallen
masculinity drives out; and vice-versa for women.
Modern medicine claims to be able to
change men into women, and women into men as regards their secondary sexual
characteristics. But the deeper aspects of sexuality – chromosomal makeup and
psychological masculinity or femininity – can in no way be changed.[100] Recently, Dutch scientists
working on the brains of men who have undergone operations to become women have
discovered that the hypothalamuses of the transsexuals have a typically female
character.[101]
It appears that these “men” wanted to change sex because they were indeed, from
the point of view of neurology, women, even if from the point of view of
anatomy they were men. This discovery, combined with the feasibility of
sex-change operations for some (we shall not discuss their morality or
immorality here) shows that gender is not such a superficial aspect of human
nature as the realists would like to believe; there is more to sexuality than
meets the eye. It gives some support to St. Gregory’s view in that secondary
sexual characteristics do appear to be removable, as if they were “added” to
the original man.[102] But
it also supports the position of the idealists in that there appears to be a
deeper, primary level of sexuality which is “wired into” the brain and cannot
be removed or changed.
St. Gregory goes on to argue that part of
our nature is made like God, and another part not like him – that is, the
irrational, animal-like part, including our sexuality, which is “alien from our conception of God”. In one
sense, this is obviously true. God is far above all created being, and He is
even further above the visible and irrational elements of creation than He is
above its invisible and rational elements. It follows that insofar as man is a
mixture of visible and invisible, rational and irrational, he is for that very
reason “a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8.5) with their unmixed,
purely noetic nature.
However, St. Gregory himself asserts that
“the image is not in part of our nature, nor is the grace in any one of the
things found in that nature”.[103] Moreover, if, as St. Maximus the
Confessor says, the soul and the body constitute “one form”, being
“simultaneously created and joined together, as is the realization of the form
created by their joining together”[104], then
it would seem quite logical to see the image of God as residing in the soul and
body together. “For neither could the soul ever appear by itself without
the body nor the body arise without the soul. Man is not, as the squawking
philosophers decree, merely a rational animal capable of understanding and
receiving knowledge.”[105] “It
was not merely a part of man,” writes St. Irenaeus, “that was made in the image
and likeness of God. Of course the soul and the Spirit are part of man
but not the man. For the whole man consists of the commingling and union
of the soul that receives the Spirit of the Father, with the fleshly nature,
which (commingling and union) was formed according to the image of God.”[106]
And so, as St. Gregory Palamas writes,
“The name ‘man’ is not applied separately to the soul or the body, but to both
together, for together they were made in the image of God”.[107]
Again, Christ God took on the whole of
human nature in His incarnation, including a material body, and raised it to be
seated at the right hand of the Father, Who has “raised us up with Him, and
made us sit with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians
2.6). That is why the Mother of God, who is not only a member of His Body, but
gave Him this Body, being glorified in and through this Body, is “more
honourable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the
seraphim”. If man is
made in the image of God, and Christ is God, then, as Tertullian points out,
man’s flesh is made in the image of Christ’s flesh, Who raised it far above its
original lowliness, “granting [it] to be nobler than its origin, and to have
its happiness increased by the change wrought in it [by Christ].”[108]
The Image of God and Sexuality
But if man’s flesh is made in the image of Christ’s flesh, why –
shocking though this may sound to many - should his original, unfallen
sexuality not be made in the image of Christ’s sexuality?…
First, it is necessary to dispel any hint
of feminist theologizing and affirm categorically that there is no sexuality in
God. None of the Persons of the Holy Trinity is male or female in His Divine
nature. Christ is male only in His assumed human nature. So when we say
that man’s original, unfallen sexuality was created in the image of Christ’s
sexuality, we are speaking of Christ in His human nature. There is no
analogy or likeness between human sexuality and the Divine nature.
In fact, since the nature of God is
unknowable and infinitely far above all created being, it is, strictly
speaking, inaccurate to speak of anything at all in common or similar
between the Divine and the human natures. For even such an attribute as the
immortality of the human soul, which plays such an important part in
philosophical and theological systems of a Platonic kind, cannot really be said
to be in the image or likeness of the immortal nature of God for the simple
reason that the human soul is not immortal by nature, but only by
grace.[109]
By grace, however, we are immortal; so that if God’s grace
dwells in us, we can indeed speak about a Divine likeness and godlike
immortality. The same applies to the other attributes of human nature that are
said to be in God’s image and likeness. For example, man’s rationality can be
said to be in the likeness of God’s Reason, but only if it is informed by the
grace of God: otherwise it descends to mere cogitation.
Thus man can be said to be in the image
and likeness of God only insofar as he has the Spirit of God. Likeness to
God is possible only through participation in Him: without that
participation the likeness disappears, and man “is compared to the mindless
cattle, and is become like unto them” (Psalm 48.21). Man is not in the
likeness of God by virtue of some special spiritual part of his soul in the
Platonic sense, but by virtue of possessing the Spirit of God to such a degree
that the Spirit becomes, as it were, a part of him, or is so thoroughly mixed
with the whole of him that he can be said to be, not just soul and body, but Spirit,
soul and body (I Thessalonians 5.23). As Romanides writes, following St.
Irenaeus: “the spiritual man for Paul is not one who does not have flesh but
one who has the Spirit of God. A man who does not have the Divine Spirit is
called ‘carnal’, ‘animal’ and ‘flesh and blood’. Without the Spirit’s energy to
render him incorruptible, man cannot participate in true immortality and the
kingdom of God… Paul’s spiritual man who has the Holy Spirit is exactly
identical to the man made in the image and likeness of God as taught by the
early Christian theologians.”[110]
It is true that many of the Fathers make a
distinction between the image and the likeness of God in man, according to
which the image is retained even by the carnal man who has lost the Holy
Spirit. However, the image of God in the carnal man is the potential to receive
back the Spirit, that is, the likeness of God, through repentance rather than a
specific Godlike quality that remains in him even in the state of sin. Thus a
portrait that has been completely blackened by dust and dirt is no longer an
image or likeness of anyone in the strict sense: it can be called an image only
in the sense that if the dust and dirt were removed, a likeness would then
reappear. To use a different analogy: if a jewel is removed from its setting,
the setting will still bear the imprint of the jewel, although it will possess
nothing jewel-like in a substantial sense. Similarly, the soul that was made
for God and in the image of God will still bear the imprint of God in his soul,
and will long for God even when God has abandoned him. [111]
We may agree, then, that the image may be
said to include sexuality only if it can be shown that sexual relations are not
incompatible with the presence of the Spirit of God. In other words, the
critical question is: are sexual relations “carnal” not only in the sense that
they involve the flesh or the body, but in the Pauline sense that they drive
out the Spirit? Now we have already established that before the fall Adam and
Eve did not have sexual relations in the sense of sexual intercourse. But they
did have a relationship which can be called sexual insofar as it was coloured
by their differentiated sexuality, by their sexual attraction to each other.
And insofar as this attraction did not constitute a fall into sin, and did not
lead to the departure of the Spirit of which we read only much later: “My
Spirit shall not always remain with man, since he is carnal” (Genesis
6.3), we must conclude that the basic fact of sexual attraction does not drive
out the Spirit and therefore does not disfigure the image of God in man.
We can go further. There is a likeness
between the relationships between Adam and Eve, on the one hand, and the Father
and the Spirit, on the other. St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “Adam, not having a created cause
and being unbegotten, is an example and image of the uncaused God the Father,
the Almighty and Cause of all things; while Eve, who proceeded from Adam (but
is not born from him) signifies the Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit proceeding.”[112]
Similarly, St. Anastasius of Sinai writes: "Adam is the type and image of
the Unoriginate Almighty God, the Cause of all; the son born of him manifests
the image of the Begotten Son and Word of God; and Eve, who proceeded from
Adam, signifies the proceeding Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit. This is why God
did not breathe in her the breath of life: she was already the type of the
breathing and life of the Holy Spirit."[113]
As Vladimir Lossky puts it: “And God
created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him; male and
female created He them. Thus the mystery of the singular and plural in man reflects
the mystery of the singular and plural in God: in the same way that the
personal principle in God demands that the one nature express itself in the
diversity of persons, likewise in man, created in the image of God. Human
nature cannot be the possession of a monad. It demands not solitude but
communion, the wholesome diversity of love… The Fathers relate the procession
of the Holy Spirit to what they call the ‘procession’ of Eve, different from
Adam yet of the same nature as him: unity of nature and plurality of persons
which evoke for us the mysteries of the New Testament. Just as the Spirit is
not inferior to Him from Whom It proceeds, just so woman is not inferior to
man: for love demands equality and love alone wished this primordial
polarization, source of all the diversity of the human species.” [114]
The analogy between Adam and Eve, on the
one hand, and the Father and the Holy Spirit, on the other, is not the only
relational likeness that the Fathers discern here. There is also the analogy
between Adam and Eve, on the one hand, and the Father and the Son, on the
other. And this analogy takes us still further into the deepest mysteries of
the New Testament. Its basis is to be found in the words of St. Paul: “I want
you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the
woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God” (I Corinthians 11.3).
Thus the man-woman relationship is a head-body relationship in the likeness of
the Father-Son relationship.
In fact, there are three such relationships
here: Father-Son, Son (Christ)-man, and man-woman. Two of these are between
beings that are equal in nature: the Father-Son and man-woman relationships.
The middle relationship, that between the Son (Christ) and man, is not between
two beings that are equal in nature. However, the Incarnation of the Son and
the Descent of the Holy Spirit has effected an “interchange of qualities”,
whereby God the Son has acquired human nature, and humanity has “become a
partaker of the Divine nature” (II Peter 1.4). As the Holy Fathers put
it, “God became man so that men could become gods”. Therefore the originally
unequal relationship between God and man has been to a certain degree leveled
out, as it were, by its transformation into the new relationship between Christ
and the Church. This relationship can, like that between the Father and the
Son, be described in the image of the relationship between head and body, and
is explicitly compared to the relationship between husband and wife in Ephesians
5.22-32.
The symbol of this hierarchical, head-body
relationship is the veil. The apostle continues: “A man ought not to cover his
head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the
man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man; neither was man
created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a woman ought to have a veil
on her head” (I Corinthians 11.7-10).
As Bishop Theophan the Recluse writes: “The
husband, as the image and glory of God amongst creatures, must not cover his
head in church, while the wife was taken from the husband later, created, as it
were, in accordance with his image, and is therefore the image of the image, or
the reflection of the glory of the husband, and must therefore cover herself in
church as a sign of subjection to her husband”.[115]
Thus the relationships between the Father
and the Son, Christ and the Church and the man and woman mirror each other, and
can in turn be likened to the relationship between the head and the body being
themselves iconic relationships. For just as “the head of Christ is God”, so
Christ is the Head of the Church and “the head of the woman is the man”. And
just as the Son is “the effulgence of the glory” of the Father and “the impress
of His Hypostasis” (Hebrews 1.3; Colossians 1.15), so is the
woman is “the glory of the man”, and “the image of the image”, and yet is of
the same nature as him.[116]
It follows that the supposedly
“primitive”, “all-too-human” relationship between man and woman has the
capacity to mirror and illumine for us, not only the relationship between
Christ and the Church, but also – albeit faintly, “as through a glass darkly” (I
Corinthians 13.12) – the supremely Divine intra-Trinitarian relationship
between the Father and the Son. Thus the man-woman relationship, and even the
basic structure of the human body, is an icon, a likeness of the most spiritual
and ineffable mysteries. For just as the head (the man) is lifted above the
body (the woman) and rules her, but in love for her and desiring her salvation,
so does Christ love and save the Church, His Body – all in obedience to His Head,
the Father, Who “so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whosoever
believeth on Him should not perish but have eternal life (John
3.16).
From this perspective we can see that the
psychological differences between man and woman reflect the differences in
spiritual function between Christ and the Church, and that these differences
were implanted in human nature from the beginning precisely in order to mirror
the spiritual relationships. The man is physically stronger, more aggressive
and more inclined to lead because he, like Christ, must wage war on the devil
and rescue the woman from his clutches. The woman is more intuitive,
compassionate and submissive because she must be sensitive to the will of the
man and submit to him in order to make their common struggle easier.[117]
If, in the fall, the man must still take
the lead, this is not because he is less fallen than the woman, or that only
the masculine qualities are necessary for salvation, but because obedience to
the hierarchical principle at all levels is the only way out of the fall. For
only if the woman obeys the man, and the man obeys Christ, as Christ obeyed the
Father, can grace work to heal fallen nature and restore “glory” to the fallen
lower levels of the hierarchy. Only if the man disobeys Christ, and demands
that the woman follow him in his disobedience, must she disobey him out of
obedience to Christ. In this case the hierarchical principle has been violated
at one level (the level of the man), but remains intact at another (the level
of the woman).
If the woman is placed at the bottom of
this hierarchy, she is nevertheless capable of being united with the very top.
For, as St. Paulinus of Nola puts it: “We might say that she is placed at the
base to support that body’s chain which is linked to God by the head of Christ,
to Christ by the head of man, and to man by the head of woman. But Christ makes
woman also belong to the head at the top by making her part of the body and of
the structure of the limbs, for in Christ we are neither male nor female…”[118]
Thus there is neither male nor female in
Christ not in the sense that sexual differences cease to have any importance in
Christ, but that if each sex carries out his or her differentiated role in love
in accordance with the will of God, there will be complete harmony and unity
throughout the hierarchy, and an “interchange of qualities” will take place,
not only between God and man, but also between man and woman, with the result
that God will be “all in all” (I Corinthians 15.28).
Angelic
and Sexual Modes of Procreation
Let us consider what was meant by God’s command to Adam and Eve that
they multiply. What kind of fertility or procreation is being spoken
of here?
Some of the Fathers interpreted the
command to procreate in a purely spiritual sense, as meaning the multiplication
of spiritual children and good works. Among these was St. Basil the Great, who,
as we have seen, interpreted man’s dominion over the wild beasts in a similarly
allegorical manner.[119] Again,
St. Augustine writes: “One is completely right to ask in what sense we should
understand the union of male and female before sin, as well as the blessing that
said Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Should we understand
it in a physical manner or spiritually? We are permitted to understand it
spiritually and to believe that it was changed into sexual fecundity after sin.
For there was first the chaste union of male and female, of the former to rule,
of the latter to obey, and there was the spiritual offspring of intelligible
and immortal joys filling the earth”.[120]
However, the patristic consensus is that
the command should indeed be understood in the first place to refer to the
procreation of physical children. Thus St. Methodius of Olympus writes: “God’s
statement, the commandment to beget children, is just as valid today, because
He is always an artist who is fashioning humankind. It is certainly true that
God is working even now on the world like a painter on his picture. The Lord
taught us this too by saying: ‘My Father is working still’ (John 5.17).
When the rivers no longer flow and no longer pour on to the great sea-bed, when
the light has been separated in a perfect way from the darkness (though for the
present this has yet to happen), when the good earth has ceased to produce
fruit, when reptiles and quadrupeds have stopped reproducing and when the
pre-arranged number of men and women has been reached, only then will there be
a need to refrain from begetting children. As things are, it is necessary for
humanity to collaborate in bringing into the world beings in the likeness of
God, because the world is already in existence, or rather it is being created. Be
fruitful and multiply is the word.”[121] Again,
St. Bede writes: “This multiplication of men and filling of the earth was not
to be accomplished except by the union of male and female… Blameless,
therefore, are the marriages which God has instituted for the propagation of
the human race and the filling of the earth with the blessing from above.”[122] And
St. John of Damascus writes: “God, Who knows all things before they have
existence, knowing in His foreknowledge that they would fall into more transgressions
in the future and be condemned to death, anticipated this and made male and
female, and bade them be fruitful and multiply.”[123]
It should be noted that human beings “collaborate” with God in bringing
children into the world, but it is God alone who creates them; it is He Who
“opens the womb” (I Kings 1.6). As the Church chants on the feast of the
conception of the Mother of God: “Today the whole world doth celebrate Anna’s
conceiving, which was brought about by God”.[124]
Clement of Alexandria writes that God is the cause of childbirth, while the
parents are only “servants of birth”.[125] Again,
Blessed Theodoretus writes of Hannah's infertility: "This teaches readers
not to place their hope [of conception] on marriage, but on calling on the
Creator for help. For just as it belongs to the cultivator to cast seeds into
the earth, but to God to bring that which is sown to perfection, so union is
the work of marriage, but helping nature and forming a living being - to
God."[126]
And St. John Chrysostom writes: “It is not the power of marriage that
multiplies our species”.[127] “We
must ascribe the birth of children, not to the intercourse of spouses, or to
anything other than the Creator of all”.[128] Again,
St. Cyril of Jerusalem writes: “It is God Who fashions every infant in the
womb. As Job says: ‘Like clay Thou hast moulded me, like milk Thou hast poured
me out, like cheese Thou hast curdled me. Thou hast clothed me in flesh and
blood, knit me together with bones and sinews’ (Job 10.9-11).”[129]
The question arises: since the command to be fruitful and multiply
was given before the fall, are we to suppose that sexual intercourse took place
in Paradise? As noted above, the Holy Fathers give a negative reply to this
question: “The clear and unanimous teaching of the Fathers [is] that before the
fall there was no use of marriage, as we understand it today, for the purpose
of reproduction.”[130] For
sexual intercourse as we know it presupposes the “garments of skin”, that is,
opaque bodies and animal-like desires, that were given to us only after the
fall, for the survival of the human race in the conditions of universal
corruption and death. The fact that the command was given before the fall
indicates, as St. Bede says, that marriage and procreation are blessed by God.
But it does not indicate that sexual intercourse as we know it was the only
possible method of procreation.
The Fathers teach that if man had not sinned, and had remained in
Paradise with his incorruptible body, he could have reproduced in a virginal,
quasi-angelic way. Thus St. Athanasius the Great writes: “God’s original
intention was that we give birth not through marriage and corruption; the
violation of the commandment introduced marriage as a result of Adam’s
transgression.”[131] Again,
St. Gregory of Nyssa writes that if we had not sinned, we would not have needed
marriage to multiply. For “whatever the mode of increase in the angelic
nature…, it would have operated also in the case of men, who were ‘made a
little lower than the angels’, to increase mankind to the measure determined by
its Maker”.[132]
Again, St. John of Damascus writes: “The commandment ‘go forth and multiply’
does not necessarily mean through conjugal union. For God could increase the
human race by another means, if people had preserved the commandment inviolable
to the end.”[133]
This hypothesis finds confirmation in the fact that the first multiplication of
man was indeed quasi-angelic and virginal. For it was the birth (although some
Fathers prefer not to use the term “birth”), not of Cain, but of Eve. As St. John Chrysostom says: “How, you
will say, would so many thousands have been born [except through sexual
intercourse]? If this thought strikes you so strongly, I will ask you in turn:
How was Adam born? How was Eve – without the mediation of marriage?”[134]
The words Be fruitful and multiply are repeated shortly after the
account of the fall (Genesis 5.2), which clearly indicates that the
blessing is not only on parthenogenesis, but also on sexual reproduction in the
fall. It is as if God is saying that the blessing on reproduction has not been
removed, that it continues even in the conditions of the fall when Adam knows
Eve in a different way, sexually and not virginally, and when he sees that it gives
birth not only to life in the form of Eve, but also death in the form of Abel’s
murder at the hands of Cain. [135]
However, there are some, even among the
Holy Fathers, who would seek to argue that the blessing is on the procreation
(in marriage) but not on sexual relations as such. This is the position adopted
by St. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, in the East, and by Blessed Augustine in
the West. The problem with this view is that it seems to contradict the
apostolic word that “marriage
is honourable in all, and the bed, i.e. sexual relations between husband and
wife, undefiled” (Hebrews 13.4); for sexual relations
are physiologically impossible without desire.
Again, if sexual relations within marriage
are considered impure and to be avoided, there is a danger of falling under the
anathemas of the Council of Gangra (c. 343): “9. If anyone shall remain virgin, or observe
continence, abstaining from marriage because he abhors it, and not on account
of the beauty and holiness of virginity itself, let him be anathema. 10. If anyone of those who are
living a virginal life for the Lord’s sake shall treat arrogantly the married,
let him be anathema. 14.
If any woman shall forsake her husband, and resolve to depart from him because
she abhors marriage, let her be anathema.”
Hieromonk Gregory (Lourié) attempts
to minimize the significance of these canons: “Who is going to define where
‘abhorrence’ and ‘arrogance’ begin? No-one could have had any doubt that both
the one and the other are sinful passions, but the conciliar canons are a
juridical document, and so it is always dangerous to allow too much leeway for
their interpretation. From the literal meaning of the canons one could form the
impression that marriage and virginity were equal in honour (we are talking about the
principles of the one and the other, which is not to be confused with
the equality in honour of all Christians in general) and even that it was
impermissible to dissolve a marriage for the sake of abstinence.”[136]
It is true that
it is not always easy to discern where a preference for virginity, which is
laudable, passes into an abhorrence of marriage, which is not. However,
there is no hint in these canons – which have been accepted as authoritative by
the Ecumenical Church - that marriage and virginity are to be considered equal
in honour, only that marriage should not be dishonoured by being considered to
be sinful. As for the idea that marriage should not be broken for the sake of
abstinence, unless it be with the mutual consent of the partners, this is
nothing more nor less than the teaching of the Church! The canons specifically
forbid clergy to put away their wives “under pretext of religion”[137],
“lest we should affect injuriously marriage constituted by God and blessed by His
presence, as the Gospel saith: ‘What God hath joined together, let no man put
asunder’; and the Apostle saith, ‘Marriage is honourable and the bed
undefiled’; and again, ‘Art thou bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed’”.[138]
This point is well illustrated by the Life of the British saint,
Monk-Martyr Nectan of Hartland (+c. 500). St. Nectan’s father, Brychan, was a
local prince who left his wife to practise the ascetic life in Ireland. After
several years of asceticism, he returned to his native land, and there, finding
his wife still alive, “although he had not proposed any such thing himself”, he
had relations with her and begat several sons and daughters – one for each year
of his unlawful abstinence. Brychan recognised his fault, saying: “Now has God
punished me for vainly intending to act contrary to His will.”[139]
Brychan and his children, all of whom became monastic missionaries in
south-west England, are counted among the saints of the British Church – a
happy ending which would not have come to pass if he had continued his unlawful
asceticism to the end of his life…
Again, we read of St. Seraphim of Sarov that “those who were married
[he] would not allow to separate, however hard it might be, even under the
pretext of a subsequent life of virginity. A married couple separated and
divided their children. The husband went to Sarov and came to Father Seraphim.
As soon as the Saint saw him, he began to rebuke him sternly and, contrary to
his wont, said to him in a menacing tone: ‘Why don’t you live with your wife?
Go to her, go!’”[140]
Lourié continues this theme in the critical section of his work
entitled “From the law of marriage to the grace of virginity – in one
individual life”, which consists of a detailed analysis of a story concerning a
married layman, Theonas, who, under the influence of the teaching of Abba John,
began to try and persuade his wife that they should henceforth abandon sexual
relations. “But in vain. We cannot say that the wife found no arguments at all
in favour of the opposite point of view. She ‘… said that she could never abstain
from conjugal relations the flower of her life, and that is she were abandoned
by him and committed some sin it would have to be imputed to him instead for
having broken the bonds of marriage...'”[141] But Theonas said that he would
continue to live with his wife only if they “escaped the punishment of Gehenna”
by abstaining from sexual relations.[142] And
eventually he left her and became a distinguished monk, much admired by St.
John Cassian.
However, Theonas’ argument is expressly
condemned by the holy canons: “If anyone shall condemn marriage, or abominate
and condemn a woman who is a believer and devout, and sleeps with her own
husband, as though she could not enter the Kingdom [of heaven], let him
be anathema…”[143]
Moreover, Lourié omits to tell us that St. John Cassian adds an
important qualifier to his story to show that he was not committing himself to
Theonas’ point of view: “No one should think that we have made all this up in
order to encourage spouses to divorce. We not only do not condemn marriage but
we even say in accordance with the words of the Apostle: ‘Marriage is honorable
among all, and the marriage bed is undefiled’... I ask the reader kindly to
find me blameless, whether he is pleased or displeased with this, and either to
praise or to blame the actual doer of the deed. I myself have not offered my
own viewpoint in this…”[144]
Lourié follows Abba Theonas in considering that the words of the
Gospel: “Whoever does not hate father and mother and children and brothers and
sisters and wife and fields, and his own soul besides, cannot be My disciple” (Luke
14.26) provide sufficient justification for his action. However, the Christian
does not cease to love his relatives: it is rather that he loves them “with a
more outside love”, to use St. Macarius’ expression.[145] And
Blessed Theophylact warns us: “See to it that you are not seized or carried
away by this saying, interpreting it literally and without understanding. The
Lover of man does not teach hatred for man, nor does He counsel us to take our
own lives. But He desires that His true disciple hate his own kin
when they prevent him from giving reverence to God and when he is hindered from
doing good by his relationship to them. If they do not hinder us in these
things, then He teaches us to honor them until our last breath.”[146]
Of course, every rule has its exceptions, and it may be that in this
particular case the breaking of the rule that the agreement of both partners to
abstain is necessary was blessed by God. But it is very dangerous to build any
kind of theological argument on exceptions to the rule, otherwise the rule
itself is seen to be despised and will be abandoned. We do not know what
happened to the woman in this case. Perhaps she bore her forced separation from
her husband with fortitude, and remained chaste for the rest of her life. But
if she did not, then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the
responsibility for her fall fell, at least in part, on her husband – and it was
precisely to prevent such falls that the rule that spouses should separate only
by mutual agreement was established.
As Lourié admits, the extremist viewpoint
expressed above by Abba Theonas was rejected by two of the greatest Fathers of
the Church - St. John Chrysostom and St. Barsanuphius the Great.[147] But Lourié shrugs off this fact on the grounds that the question of
leaving one’s wife without her consent is only a “pastoral” problem, about
which it is possible to disagree “without falling away from the Church”.
With regard to the wider questions of the role of sexual relations in
marriage, Lourié claims that St. Chrysostom shared
“the general patristic conviction” - which, without detailed argumentation, he
identifies with the position of the Egyptian monks just cited. Where there
appears to be a divergence, he argues, this is either because St. Chrysostom
was talking to a significantly less pious and monastically oriented audience
(the laity of Antioch and Constantinople, as opposed to the laity of Egypt), or
because the holy hierarch “sugared the pill” of his harder statements, hiding
them in the sub-text of his sermons… More likely, in the present writer’s
opinion, is that the views of the great hierarch simply developed with time,
from the “realistic” position of the early On Virginity to the
idealistic position of almost all his later writings.[148]
The attempt to
justify marriage and procreation while condemning, however obliquely, sexual
relations within marriage appears to involve an internal contradiction: it
blesses procreation while “cursing” the God-given means to it, sexual
relations. Is it likely that God would have blessed human procreation while
cursing the only means towards it?
Now we may agree
that sexuality can be theoretically distinguished from procreation.
According to Troitsky, multiplication is the main theme of Genesis 1,
and is an act of the species, as it were, which is why chapter 1 speaks of
“male” and “female” rather than “man” and “woman”. It is “the continuation of
the creation of the animal world, having no relation to marriage and in general
to anything that distinguishes it from the animals”.[149]
Marriage, on the other hand, which is the theme of Genesis 2, is
extremely personal, is not necessarily linked to the continuation of the
species, and is not found as such in the animals. It is therefore represented
in chapter 2 as involving Adam and Eve as individual persons with individual
names rather than “Adam” as the representative of the whole species
collectively.
However, while
sexuality and reproduction can in this way be distinguished abstractly, in
thought, in concrete reality they are, of course, inseparable.
So we repeat: if
the mixing of sexual pleasure with the propagation of the species is offensive
to God, it is difficult to understand how the marital bed can be undefiled.
When God blessed the end of procreation, He also blessed the means to that end,
the marriage bed. The heretics try to divorce the means from the end; they
approve of the latter while disapproving of the former. But in this they
blaspheme against the goodness of God’s creation, supposing that He “trapped”
those who desire children by forcing them to sin in order to become parents.
But St. John Chrysostom,
commenting on the words, “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled”
(Hebrews 13.4), writes: “Marriage is pure”.[150] Again,
Blessed Theophylact comments on the same verse: “By ‘in all’ he means ‘in every
way’ and ‘in every season’”.[151]
Bishop Theophan comments on the same verse:
“The marriage bed does not contradict chastity if it will be holy and
undefiled”, that is, “every vice of unfaithfulness, open or secret (in the
disposition of the heart) must be foreign to Christian marriage”.[152]
Natural and Unnatural Modes of
Procreation
Moreover, there are further evil consequences of this doctrine. For if
sexuality is evil even in marriage, the difference between sexual relations
inside and outside marriage is abolished (we shall discuss this in greater
detail later). Again, if the natural method of procreation is considered
sinful, then the path is open to unnatural, but “purer” (from a
Platonic-Manichaean point of view) methods, such as in vitro
fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, stem cell research, or cloning. Which in
turn opens the door to the creation of hybrid, half-human[153], or
“superhuman” species.
Modern man’s refusal seriously to discuss the moral consequences of
these developments is illustrated by the remark of the Oxford Professor of
Applied Ethics, Julian Savulescu, on stem cell research, which involves the
destruction of embryos: “We have voted with our feet on the moral status of the
embryo. There are 100,000 abortions every year [in Britain], nearly all for
social reasons. IVF, IUDs, the morning after pill and even some forms of oral
contraception destroy embryos. The deaths of a handful [!] of embryos for
life-saving research is not morally relevant in this context, in our society.”[154]
If the first half of the twentieth
century was distinguished by an amazing increase in our knowledge of the
physical world, the second half was distinguished by an even more amazing
increase in our knowledge of the biological world, and especially the world of
human genetics and human reproduction.
The vital break-through here was the discovery of DNA in 1953. Then came
the introduction of the contraceptive pill, in vitro fertilisation and
surrogate motherhood. As one journalist put it: “First, contraception severed
the connection between sex and reproduction. It became possible to have sex
without having babies. Then modern technology severed the connection between
reproduction and sex. It became possible to have babies without having sex.”[155]
The most alarming developments have been genetic manipulation and
cloning.
As early as 1976, the director of the Institute of Genetics of the
Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Academician N.P. Dubinin, was predicting the
scale of this revolution: “The achievements of human genetics, and of general
and molecular genetics, will push forward the problem of interference in human
heredity. The coming revolution in genetics will demand a decisive overturning
of the previously dominant view concerning the primacy of nature in its natural
form. Genetics will turn out to be capable of overcoming the natural story of
life and creating organic forms inconceivable in the light of the laws of
natural evolution… For the molecular genetics and the molecular biology of the
21st century there lies in store the prospect of creating cells as
the only self-regulating open living system, which will be bound up with the
understanding of the essence of life. An exchange of living forms will take
place between the earth and other worlds… The aim of genetic engineering is the
creation of organisms according to a given model, whose hereditary program is
formed by means of introducing the recipient of new genetic information. This
information can be artificially synthesised or separated in the form of natural
genetic structures from various organisms. In this way a new single genetic
system which cannot arise by means of natural evolution will be created
experimentally… Various manipulations with DNA molecules can lead to the
unforeseen creation of biologically dangerous hybrid forms… ”[156]
“We have to admit,” concludes Fr. Vladislav Sveshnikov, “that
contemporary science is preparing the ground for the coming of the Antichrist.”[157] How?
By the manipulation of genes in order to produce the “superman” or “man-god” of
Nietzsche’s imagination, who will be at the same time the “devil-man” or
“Antichrist” of Christian patristic teaching.
As regards cloning, Serge (Nedelsky) has written: “Cloning is the
technique of producing a genetically identical duplicate of an organism. In the
case of human cloning, the nucleus of an adult cell is injected into an
enculcated egg – meaning that the donor DNA replaces that in the egg – and then
cell division is electronically. The result becomes a human embryo genetically
identical to the donor. In the case of so-called ‘reproductive cloning’ (what
kind of cloning is not reproductive?) the egg is implanted into a woman’s
uterus to grow. Done successfully, it would result in the birth of an infant.
In the case of the benign-sounding ‘therapeutic cloning’, the embryo is never
implanted into the uterus. Instead, it is allowed to develop for a few days
before a part is removed to provide stem cells – which have the unique
potential to become almost any human cell and thus have potential for disease
treatment – before the embryo is destroyed or, more accurately, killed.
Reproductive cloning is currently opposed by nearly all responsible scientists
– Clonaid not included – but therapeutic cloning has widespread support, based
on the claim that it may provide a means to treatment and tissue replacement
for a series of incurable ailments.
“Both techniques are sinister. Both produce life artificially. As Father
Demetrius Demopulos, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics, writes: ‘As an Orthodox
Christian, I speak out in opposition to any attempt to clone a human being
because humans are supposed to be created in acts of love between two people,
not through the manipulation of cells in acts that are ultimately about
self-love. Our actions should bring us together in Christ, not separate us into
new and different classification.’ This manipulation of cells opens the door to
‘genetic enhancement’, an increased control over traits deemed desirable and
the elimination of those which are not. In other words, eugenics. This genetic
manipulation is ultimately an act of cruelty, subjecting the embryo to the
whims of scientists and, when resulting in birth, to unforeseen illness and
danger. As Professor Leon Kass of the University of Chicago testified before
Congress, cloning ‘constitutes unethical experimentation on the child-to-be,
subjecting him or her to enormous risks of bodily and developmental
abnormalities. It threatens individuality… It confuses identity… It represents
a giant step toward turning procreation into manufacture… And it is a radical
form of parental despotism and child abuse’. So-called ‘therapeutic cloning’ is
equally, of not more, inhuman. In the name of dubious medical evidence for
miracle cures, it produces life only to destroy it. Legalizing it would in fact
result in the first category of life which legally had to be killed. As Charles
Krauthammer put it, it represents ‘the most ghoulish and dangerous enterprise
in modern scientific history: the creation of nascent cloned human life of for
the sole purpose of its exploitation and destruction’….
“Many of the moral consequences of cloning have already been suggested:
the threat to the uniqueness of each life; the compromise of human identity;
the violation of human dignity; even the potential for eugenic manipulation
resulting in a tyrannic social structure of a genetically enhanced super class
ruling a lower class of genetically ‘inferior’ men. Reproductive cloning opens
the way for eugenics and designer babies, making children manufactured objects.
The practical consequences lead to unheard of absurdities: the whole structure
of the family is confused and overturned, with the potential of genetically
identical parents and children. In fact, male cells are not needed in reproductive
cloning, though the female ovum is paving the way for a world in which women
can reproduced without men, of fatherless children. The act of consummating
love which produces children could be made obsolete, making child-bearing
completely asexual.”[158]
It follows that
any attempt to separate marriage from sexuality, or sexuality from
reproduction, as if one term in each pair was “good” and the other “bad”, so
that marriage is good only without sexuality, or that reproduction is
permissible in a non-sexual way, must be condemned. This is not to identify
sexuality with reproduction, nor is it to see the purpose of sexuality in
reproduction alone. But it is to recognize the profound relationship between
sexuality and fertility.
It would be easier
to draw the conclusion that the sole purpose of sexuality and marriage is the
propagation of the race in the case of animals than of men. For, as St. Neilos
the Ascetic writes, animals “become conscious of the difference between male
and female only during one season of the year ordained by the law of nature for
them to mate in, so as to propagate and continue their species. The rest of the
year they keep away from one another as if they had altogether forgotten any
such appetite. In men, on the other hand, as a result of the richness of their
food, an insatiable desire for sexual pleasure has grown up, producing in them
frenzied appetites which never allow this passion to be still.”[159]
Sexuality
understood in a very broad sense to include what Scruton calls “gender”, that
is, our perception of a whole range of phenomena in terms of a
masculine/feminine polarity, has a far wider influence on human life than
animal sexuality has on animal life.[160] This
is partly because sexual passion in man is as much, if not more, a property of
the soul as of the body. [161]
Sexual passion is far less dependent on the state of the body in man than it is
in animals. Although women have menstrual cycles, this is less significant in
predicting sexual desire than in predicting reproductive fertility; and in
general human beings do not “go on heat” in the way animals do. Sexual passion
can lie dormant for long periods, then flare up at unexpected times, even at a
time of life when the body may be considered to be “dead” to this kind of
passion.
This would
appear to indicate that while procreation is clearly one of the purposes of
sexuality in man, it is not the only one. As Vladimir Soloviev writes: “Usually
the meaning of sexual love is supposed to reside in the multiplication of the
race, which it serves as a means. I consider this view wrong – not on the basis
of any idealistic considerations, but first of all on the basis of natural
historical factors. That the multiplication of living beings can take place
without sexual love is clear already from the fact that it can take place
without sexual differentiation. A significant part of the organisms both of the
vegetable and of the animal kingdoms reproduce asexually: by division, by
budding, by the spreading of spores, by grafting. True, the higher forms of
both organic kingdoms multiply in a sexual way. But first of all, those
organisms that multiply in this way, both plants, and partly also animals, can
also multiply in an asexual way (grafting in plants, parthenogenesis in
higher insects), and secondly, leave these examples to one side and accepting
as a general rule that higher organisms multiply by means of sexual union, we
must conclude that this sexual factor is linked, not with multiplication in
general (which can take place without it), but with the multiplication of higher
organisms. Consequently, we must seek for the meaning of sexual
differentiation (and sexual love) not in the idea of the life of species and
their multiplication, but only in the idea of the higher organism.
“We find a
striking confirmation of this in the following great fact. In the boundaries of
living beings that multiply exclusively in a sexual way (the vertebrates), the
higher we climb on the ladder of organisms, the less the power of multiplication
becomes, while the power of sexual attraction, on the contrary, becomes
greater. In the lowest class of this section – in fish – multiplication takes
place on a huge scale: the embryos begotten each year by each female are
counted in the millions: these embryos are fertilized by the female outside her
body, and the means by which this is done does not permit us to suppose a
powerful sexual attraction. Of all the vertebrates this cold-blooded class
undoubtedly multiplies more than all the rest and displays passionate love less
than all the rest. On the next step – that of the amphibians and reptiles –
multiplication is much less significant than with the fish…; but although they
multiply less we find among these animals more frequent sexual relations… In
birds the power of multiplication is much less not only by comparison with the
fish, but by comparison, for example, with the frogs, while the sexual
attraction and mutual attachment between the male and female reaches unheard of
proportions in the two lower classes of development. In mammals multiplication
is significantly weaker than in the birds, while sexual attraction, although
less constant in the majority, is much more intensive. Finally, in man by
comparison with the whole of the animal kingdom multiplication takes place to a
small degree, while sexual love attains its greatest significance and highest
power, uniting to an exceptional degree constancy of relations (as in the
birds) with intensity of passion (as in the mammals). And so sexual love and
the multiplication of the race are inversely related to each other: the
stronger the one, the weaker the other.
“In general the
whole animal kingdom develops in this respect as follows. At the bottom, a huge
power of multiplication with a complete absence of anything similar to sexual
love (with the absence of sexual differentiation itself); further up the
ladder, in the more perfect organisms, there appears sexual differentiation
and, corresponding to it, a certain sexual attraction – at the beginning
extremely weak, then constantly increasing in the later stages of organic
development in proportion as the power of multiplication decreases (that is, in
direct proportion to the perfection of the organization and in inverse
proportion to the power of multiplication), until finally, at the very top, in
man, there is the strongest possible sexual love combined, even, with complete
absence of multiplication. But if in this way, at the two ends of animal life,
we find, on the one hand, multiplication without any sexual love, and on the
other hand, sexual love without multiplication, then it is absolutely clear
that these two phenomena cannot be placed in inseparable connection with each
other. It is clear that each of them has its own independent significance and
that the meaning of the one cannot consist in being a means for the other.
“We get the same
result if we examine sexual love exclusively in the world of man, where it
acquires, to an incomparably greater degree than in the animal world, that
individual character by dint of which precisely this person of the other
sex has for the lover an absolute significance as the only and irreplaceable
one, as an end in and of herself.”[162]
The
Bonds of the Family
The sexual
method of procreation has another important advantage over the asexual methods
found in the lower animals: it strengthens the bonds uniting the human race.
For the necessity of finding a mate in order to reproduce reinforces the
interdependence of human beings, making them stronger (cf. Sirach
4.9-10). And the necessity of finding that mate outside the immediate family
circle reinforces the wider unity of the human race, under circumstances in
which all the fallen forces of human nature tend towards self-isolation and
disunity.
For “in this
way”, writes St. John Chrysostom, “God from the beginning contrived ten
thousand ways of implanting [love] in us. Thus, first, He granted one head to
all, Adam. For why do we not all spring out of the earth? Why not full grown,
as he was? In order that both the birth and the bringing up of children, and
the being born of another, might bind us mutually together. It was for this
reason that He did not make woman out of the earth. And since the fact of our
being of the same substance would not have been sufficient to shame us into
unanimity, unless we had also the same progenitor, He provided also for us.
Forif now, being only separated by place, we consider ourselves alien from one
another; much more would this have happened if our race had had two originals.
For this reason, therefore, He bound together the whole body of the human race
as it were from a single head. And since from the beginning they seemed to be
two, see how He binds them together again, and gathers them into one by marriage.
For ‘therefore’, saith He, ‘shall a man leave his father and his mother, and
shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh’.”
“Do you see how
many bonds of love God has created? And these He has placed in us as pledges of
concord by force of nature. For we are led to this both by our being of the
same substance (for every animal loves its like), and by the fact that the
woman is made from the man, and again by the fact that children are made from
both. From this also many kinds of affection arise. For one we love as a
father, another as a grandfather; one as a mother, another as a nurse; one as a
son or great-grandson, and another as a daughter or grand-daughter; one as a
brother, and another as a nephew; and one as a sister, and another as a niece.
Why do we need to recount all the forms of consanguinity?
“And He devised
another foundation of affection. For having forbidden the marriage of
relations, He led us out to strangers and drew them again to us. For since it
was not possible for them to be connected with us through natural kinship, He
connected us again by marriage, uniting together whole families through the
single person of the bride, and mingling entire races with races…”[163]
In another passage, the same saint emphasises again how the sexual
origins of the family reinforce the interdependence of each member of it on
every other, and how a child, coming into being only through the union of the
father and mother, reinforces that original unity: “They come to be made into
one body. See the mystery of love! If the two do not become one, they cannot
increase; they can increase only by decreasing! How great is the strength of
unity! God’s ingenuity in the beginning divided one flesh into two; but he
wanted to show that it remained one even after its division, so He made it
impossible for either half to procreate without the other. Now do you see how
great a mystery marriage is! From one man, Adam, He made Eve, then He reunited
these two into one, so that their children would be produced from a single
source. Likewise, husband and wife are not two, but one; if he is the head and
she is the body, how can they be two? She was made from his side; so they are
two halves of one organism. God calls her a ‘helper’ to demonstrate their unity,
and He honors the unity of husband and wife above that of child and parents. A
father rejoices to see his son or daughter marry; it is as if his child’s body
is becoming complete. Even though he spends so much money for his daughter’s
wedding, he would rather do that than see her remain unmarried, since then she
would seem to be deprived of her own flesh. We are not sufficient unto
ourselves in this life. How do they become one flesh? As if she were gold
receiving the purest of gold, the woman receives the man’s seed with rich
pleasure, and within her it is nourished, cherished, and refined. It is mingled
with her own substance and she then returns it as a child! The child is a
bridge connecting mother to father, so the three become one flesh… That is why
the Scripture does not say, ‘They shall be one flesh’, but that they shall be
joined together ‘into one flesh’, namely the child. But supposing there is no
child, do they then remain two and not one? No, their intercourse effects the
joining of their bodies and they are made one, just as when perfume is mixed
with ointment.””[164]
As if anticipating that his words might shock the Manichaeans of his day
as of ours, the holy Father goes on decisively to reject any attempt to degrade
the sexual method of reproduction: “I know that my words embarrass many of you,
and the reason for your shame is your own wanton licentiousness. ‘Let marriage
be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled’ (Hebrews
13.4), yet you give marriage a bad name with your depraved celebrations. Why
else would you be ashamed at what is honorable, or blush at what is undefiled?
That is why I want to purify our wedding celebrations: to restore marriage to
its due nobility and to silence those heretics who call it evil. God’s gift is
insulted. It is the root of our very existence, and we smother it with dung and
filth. So listen to me a little while longer. Remember that you can’t cling to
filth without picking up the stench. Some of you call my words immodest, because
I speak of the nature of marriage, which is honorable… By calling my words
immodest, you condemn God Who is the author of marriage...”[165]
“The family,” writes the Russian religious
philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin, “is the first union, at once natural and
sacred, into which man of necessity enters. He is called to build up this union
on a foundation of love, faith, and freedom, to learn the first conscious
movements of his heart in it; and to rise from it to those other forms of man’s
spiritual unity, the nation and the state.
“The family begins with marriage and is joined together in it. Man
begins his life, however, in a family which he did not create, the family
established by his father and mother, into which he enters just by being born,
long before he becomes fully aware of himself and the world around him. He
receives this family as a gift from fate. Marriage, by its very nature, is
based on a choice and a decision, whereas a child does not get to choose or
decide; its father and mother shape for their child, as it were, its
foreordained fate, which the child cannot refuse or change; it can only accept
what it is given and bear it for life. What will become of a man later in life
is determined in childhood and by that very childhood. There are, of course,
inclinations and gifts with which one is born, but early childhood determines
the fate of these inclinations and gifts – whether they will be developed in
time or will fade away, or, if they are to blossom, exactly how.
“For this reason the family is the primary nurturer of man’s culture.
All of us are formed in this medium, with all our possibilities, feelings, and
desires; each of us remains a lifelong spiritual representative of his
paternal-maternal family, a kind of living symbol of its familial spirit….
“Every true family arises out of love and brings man happiness. When
marriage is entered into without love, there is only the external appearance of
a family. When marriage does not bring man happiness, it does not fulfil its
first function. Parents can teach their children love only if they themselves
have known love in their marriage. Parents can give their children happiness
only to the extent that they themselves have found happiness in marriage. A
family which is held together by spiritual bonds of love and happiness is a
school of emotional, healthy, balanced personality and creative initiative….
“The chief condition for such family life is the capacity of parents for
mutual spiritual love. Happiness comes only with deep and long-lasting love.
This love is possible only in and through the spirit…”[166]
2.
EROS IN THE FALL
From my secret sins cleanse me, and from
those of others spare Thy servant. If they have not dominion over me, then
blameless shall I be, and I shall be cleansed from great sin.
Psalm 18.12-13.
I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my mother
bear me.
Psalm
50.5.
Our forefather Adam used his freedom to turn
toward what was worse, and to direct his desire away from what had been
permitted to what was forbidden. It was in his power to be united to the Lord
and become one spirit with God or to join himself to a prostitute and become
one body with her.
St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 7,
P.G. 91: 1092C-D.
As we have seen, marriage originated
in Paradise with Adam and Eve. Both the Old Testament (Tobit 8.6-7) and
the New ascribe the origins of marriage to God’s word in Paradise. Particularly
significant are the words of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, Who in His teaching
on marriage refers directly to the account of the creation of Adam and Eve in
the first and second chapters of Genesis: “Ye have read, have ye not,
that the One Who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and
said, ‘On account of this a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave
to his wife, and the two shall be into one flesh’? Therefore they are no longer
two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath yoked together, let not man
separate” (Matthew 19.4-6; Mark 10.2-12). These words were
confirmed as constituting the basis of marriage by the Apostle Paul (Ephesians
5.20-32). And they were confirmed again in the earliest Christian sources. Thus
Clement of Alexandria speaks of “the grace of marriage” in Paradise[167], and
Tertullian writes: “Adam was the one husband of Eve, and Eve his one wife”.[168] Among
the later Fathers, St. John Chrysostom speaks especially eloquently and at
length in confirmation of this teaching. And it is sealed by the Orthodox
marriage service in several places.
Not only did
marriage originate in Paradise: God Himself brought the bride and bridegroom
together. For true marriages are, literally, made in heaven and accomplished by
God. For “the wife is prepared for the husband (by God) from the ages” (Tobit
6.18), and “it is by the Lord that a man is matched with a woman” (Proverbs
19.14).[169]
According to this viewpoint, which, as we
have seen, has been called by Troitsky the idealistic approach to
marriage, it is possible for the love between man and woman to be sexual, and
yet pure; the words “sexual” and “love” are not mutually exclusive, nor is
“sexual love” to be equated with “lust”. Moreover, it is precisely the
possibility of a pure sexual love that forms the basis for the comparison
frequently made in Holy Scripture between the love of God for man, and of
Christ for the Church, on the one hand, and the love of a husband for his wife,
on the other. It affirms that since eros originated, not in the fall, but in
Paradise, it is not a force that must be extirpated, but rather purified,
redirected or “sublimated” (in a patristic, not Freudian sense), and that such
a purification of the sexual impulse is possible in and through both marriage
and monasticism.
The fall introduced important changes into marriage. But it is important
to emphasise that the institution continued to be good. There is not the
slightest hint in the Old Testament that any kind of stigma attached to the
marriages of Noah or Job, Abraham or Moses, Isaiah or Ezekiel or Hosea. Rather,
the blessed marriages of the Old Testament righteous, such as those between
Isaac and Rebecca, and Boaz and Ruth, shine out like points of purity and joy
amid the surrounding darkness. In them was the Scripture fulfilled: “In three
things was I [Wisdom] beautified, and stood up beautiful before God and man:
the unity of brethren, the love of neighbours, and a man and his wife ravished
with each other” (Sirach 25.1).
We see this especially in the beautiful story of the wedding of Isaac
and Rebecca (Genesis 24). The initiative here came not from the spouses
themselves, but from Isaac’s father Abraham, who was concerned that Isaac’s
bride should not be from the unbelieving Canaanites, but from the chosen race,
and from the servant of Abraham, who tested the virtue of Rebecca at the well.
According to the spiritual interpretation, Abraham here represents God the
Father, Who sends out the Holy Spirit to search for a fitting bride for His
Son, the Church of Christ, while the jewels that the servant gives Rebecca
after his choice of her represent the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives to the
Church. But the story is also an allegory of how every true marriage is
prepared. It is prepared by God Himself, Who brings the spouses together at
exactly the time and place ordained by His Providence.
Moses recounts the (clearly sexual) “playing” of Isaac and Rebecca
without disapproval (Genesis 26.8). And Solomon says: “Let thy fountain
of water be truly thine own, and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let thy
loving hart and thy graceful colt gambol with thee…; for, ravished with her
love, thou shalt be greatly increased” (Proverbs 5.18-19). On the latter
verse St. Gregory the Theologian comments: “For man and wife the union of
wedlock is a bolted door securing chastity and restraining desire. And it is a
seal of natural affection. They possess the loving colt which cheers the heart
by gambolling, and a single drink from their private fountain untasted by
strangers, which neither flows outwards, nor gathers its waters from without.
Wholly united in the flesh, concordant in spirit, by love they sharpen in one
another a like spur to piety…”[170]
Similarly, the whole of The Song of
Songs is a paean to married love, and is filled with the most sensual
erotic imagery; and many other Old and New Testament passages compare God to a
bridegroom and the soul to a bride (Hosea 2.19-20; Isaiah 54.5,
61.10; Ezekiel 16.8; Matthew 22.1-4, 25.1-13; John 3.29; Ephesians
5.32; II Corinthians 11.2; Revelation 19.7, 21.2). Even if
several of the Fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa, have interpreted such
passages allegorically to refer to the purely spiritual love between God and
the soul, this in no way annuls the more literal reading, but rather depends on
it, in that something sinful could not be the image of the highest spiritual
mystery. “After all,” writes Serge
Verkhovskoy, “no evil or superficial phenomenon could so clearly illustrated
the perfect love God has for man. If to be a husband or wife is an obscene and
degrading thing, then how can God and Christ be compared with the husband…, or
the soul that is turned to God (and even the entire Church) be compared with
the wife?”[171]
However, there is another powerful tradition in the patristic writings,
which asserts that marriage was created in and for the fall, its aim being
exclusively the procreation of children and the control of lust. We have
touched upon this tradition in the last chapter; it is called by Troitsky the realistic
approach to marriage, and is represented by such Saints as Gregory of Nyssa
in the East and Augustine of Hippo in the West. Neither the eastern nor the
western forms of realism deny the goodness of marriage as such; but both see
sexual desire and sexual pleasure, even in marriage, as inescapably involving
some measure of sin.
The most
influential variant of the realistic approach is to be found in St. Augustine,
who teaches that matrimony is good, but only insofar as it fulfils munus
matris, the duty of a mother, the duty of child-bearing. Sexual pleasure is
a sin, albeit a venial one, which is “covered” by the good of child-bearing.[172]
This view became increasingly dominant in the West[173],
and was probably the reason for the decisions of many Western councils to
forbid the marriages of the clergy.[174]
These decisions remained a dead letter throughout the Orthodox period[175],
but were savagely enforced after the fall of Orthodoxy in the West, especially
by Pope Gregory VII and the bishops in obedience to him.[176]
The Eastern
Church, however, condemned the Roman practice at the Council in Trullo
in 692: “Since we know it to be handed down as a
rule of the Roman Church that those who are deemed worthy to be advanced to the
diaconate or the priesthood should promise no longer to live with their wives,
we, preserving the ancient and apostolic perfection and order, will that lawful
marriages of men who are in holy orders be from this time forward firm, by no
means dissolving their union with their wives, nor depriving them of their
mutual intercourse at a convenient time… lest we should
affect injuriously marriage constituted by God and blessed by His presence, as
the Gospel saith: ‘What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder’; and
the Apostle saith, ‘Marriage is honourable and the bed undefiled’; and again,
‘Art thou bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed”.[177]
Protected by these conciliar decisions,
Eastern realism avoided the extremes of the Western, papist variant. And if we
consider only Eastern idealism and realism, we may ask: cannot these two approaches be reconciled, bearing
in mind the possibly quite different definitions of marriage and different
pastoral concerns of their proponents? The short answer to this is: yes, and a
major purpose of this book is to show how such a reconciliation is possible. At
the same time, it is necessary to state at the outset that in my opinion the
deepest and truest approach to the mystery of marriage, and of Eros in general,
is an idealistic one that includes the undoubted insights of the realists within
its own broader perspective, showing that it is in fact perfectly realistic
to be idealistic about marriage, because the idealistic tradition is not
romanticism or hedonism, but truth.
One of the strongest arguments in favour of the realist position
proceeds from the fact that Adam and Eve began ordinary sexual relations and
the procreation of children only after the fall. Since marriage is
defined as the one-flesh relationship established by sexual union (Matthew
19.6), it would seem to follow that marriage itself began only after the fall.
However, this is true only if marriage is defined as union in one flesh as
we understand that union now, in the conditions of the fall. But, as
we have seen, Adam and Eve were already one flesh before the
fall, and the act of sexual differentiation that is described in Genesis
2 was already, according to the sacred text, the foundation for the
attraction between the sexes and the institution of marriage itself. As for
procreation, that also took place already in Paradise, if the parthenogenesis
of Eve is understood as a kind of giving birth. So in a deeper sense Adam and
Eve were already husband and wife before the fall, as the Orthodox marriage
service and the general understanding of all mankind affirms. And their sexual
relationship was a continuation of essentially the same relationship, but in
the different conditions of the fall. As Troitsky writes: “The paradisial
church was not destroyed by sin, but continued to exist, and the family was
precisely that island that was not finally overwhelmed by the waves of sin.”[178]
The Garments of Skin
The challenge for the theologian of eros in the fall is to explain both
the good and the evil, avoiding both the Scylla of denying the good (the
Platonist-Manichaean tradition) and the Charybdis of underestimating the evil
(the naturalist-hedonist tradition). To this end it is necessary first of all
to study the effects of the fall on human sexuality.
The first consequence of the fall is the feeling of shame. We read
in Genesis: And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that
they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons
(3.7-8). Adam and Eve felt shame because the garment of grace that
had enwrapped them before the fall had been removed.
This garment of grace was “that glory from above”, in St. John
Chrysostom’s words, “which caused them no shame. But after the breaking of the
law, there came upon the scene both shame and awareness of their nakedness.”[179]
Now the original sin was not sexual, but spiritual. It consisted
in Eve’s proud disregard of the commandment of God and adherence to the lying
word of the serpent. For “the beginning of sin is pride” (Sirach 10.13),
not lust. As St. John Chrysostom says, “[Pride is] the root and the source and
the mother of sin”[180].
Nevertheless,
together with pride there was a sensual element in the original sin – Eve’s
failure to restrain her desire for the fruit. And this sensual element, the
element of gluttony, passed over immediately into sexual lust. The causal
relationship between gluttony (and drunkenness) and lust is mentioned by the
Apostle Paul: “The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play (I
Corinthians 10.7).[181] As St.
Diadochus of Photike writes: “So long as she [Eve] did not look with longing at
the forbidden tree, she was able to keep God’s commandment carefully in mind;
she was still covered by the wings of divine love and thus was ignorant of her
own nakedness. But after she had looked at the tree with longing, touched it
with ardent desire and then tasted its fruit with active sensuality, she at
once felt drawn to physical intercourse and, being naked, she gave way to her
passion.”[182]
Again, according
to St. Augustine, it was when Adam and Eve realised that they were naked that
the eyes of their minds were opened to the experience of lust. For “the
rational soul blushed at the bestial movement in the members of the flesh with
shame, not only because it felt that where it had never before sensed anything
similar, but also because that shameful movement came from the transgression of
the commandment. For it then realised with what grace it had previously been
clothed when it suffered nothing indecent in its nakedness. Finally, with that
disturbance they ran to the fig-leaves. For since they had forgotten things to
be gloried in (glorianda), they now covered things meet to be ashamed of
(pudenda).[183]
However, God soon replaced the fig-leaves with the garments of skin.
(3.22). Now skin is dead, and garments of skin can only be
obtained by the killing of an animal. Therefore “by a garment of this kind,”
writes the Venerable Bede, “the Lord signifies that they had now been made
mortal – the skins contain a figure of death because they cannot be drawn off
without the death of the animal”.[184]
Again, St. Ephraim writes: “Since it was said that the Lord made… and
clothed them, it seems most likely that when their hands were placed over
their leaves they found themselves clothed in garments of skin. Why would
animals have been killed in their presence? Perhaps this happened so that by
the animal’s flesh Adam and Eve might nourish their own bodies and that with
the skins they might cover their nakedness, but also that by the death of the
animals Adam and Eve might see the death of their own bodies.”[185]
Thus the spiritual death of man through his sin leads to the killing of
an animal, the first physical death in creation, which dead animality is then
placed on man like an outer garment. But this deadness and animality is not
simply placed on man: it enters into him, corrupting and
coarsening his whole psycho-physical nature. It takes hold of his natural
faculties and turns them into something different, what we call the passions.
Thus St. Gregory Palamas writes: “Through this sin we have put on the garments
of skin… and changed our abode to this transient and perishable world, and we
have condemned ourselves to live a life full of passions and many misfortunes”.[186]
There are three kinds of death: (i) spiritual death, which is the
separation of the Holy Spirit from the soul (and therefore, as we have seen,
the loss of the likeness of God), (ii) physical death, the separation of the
soul from the body, which comes later than spiritual death, but is an
ineluctable consequence of it, and (iii) eternal death, which is the fixed and
unchangeable abiding of a man in spiritual death after the resurrection of the
body to damnation (John 5.29).[187]
St. Gregory of Nyssa compares this fallen life, or spiritual death, to
“animals turning the mill”: “With our eyes blindfolded we walk round the mill
of life, always treading the same circular path and returning to the same
things. Let me spell out this circular path: appetite, satiety, sleep, waking
up, emptiness, fullness. From the former of each pair we constantly pass to the
latter, and back again to the former, and then back again to the latter, and we
never cease to go round in a circle…. Solomon well describes this life as a
leaking pitcher and an alien house (Ecclesiastes 12.6)… Do you see how
men draw up for themselves honors, power, fame and all such things? But what is
put in flows out again below and does not remain in the container. We are
always consumed with anxious concern for fame and power and honor, but the
pitcher of desire remains unfilled.”[188]
From this point of view, sexual desire, like hunger, the desire for
sleep and all the other passions are fallen, since they all belong to “the
pitcher of desire” that “remains forever unfilled”. For fallen man, like the
prodigal son of the parable, is forced to try and satisfy his hunger from the
husks of the constantly changing and delusive world of fallen nature – a diet
that only seems to nourish, but ends by making him hungrier than ever. It was
not like that in Paradise, where man’s unfallen nature did not need corruptible
food, but was constantly feasting on the incorruptible food provided by God
Himself.
St. Maximus the Confessor describes this cyclical alteration of desire
and fear, pleasure and pain as follows: “When God created human nature, he did
not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it; rather, he furnished it
with a certain spiritual capacity for pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings
would be able to enjoy God ineffably.[189] But at
the instant he was created, the first man, by the use of his senses, squandered
this spiritual capacity – the natural desire of the mind for God – on sensible
things. In this, his very first movement, he activated an unnatural pleasure
through the medium of the senses. Being, in His providence, concerned for our
salvation, God therefore affixed pain (odunh) alongside this sensible
pleasure (hdonh) as
a kind of punitive faculty, whereby the law of death was wisely planted in our
corporeal nature to curb the foolish mind in its desire to incline unnaturally
toward sensible things.[190]
“Henceforth, because irrational pleasure entered human nature, pain
entered our nature opposite this pleasure in accordance with reason, and, through
the many sufferings (paqhmata) in which and from which death
occurs, pain uproots unnatural pleasure, but does not completely destroy it,
whereby, then, the grace of the divine pleasure of the mind is naturally
exalted. For every suffering (ponoV), effectively having pleasure as
its primary cause, is quite naturally, in view of its cause, a penalty exacted
from all who share in human nature. Indeed, such suffering invariably
accompanies unnatural pleasure in everyone for whom the law of pleasure, itself
having no prior cause, has preconditioned their birth. By that I mean that the
pleasure stemming from the original transgression was ‘uncaused’ insofar as it
quite obviously did not follow upon an antecedent suffering.
“After the transgression pleasure naturally preconditioned the births of
all human beings, and no one at all was by nature free from birth subject to
the passion associated with this pleasure; rather, everyone was requited with
sufferings, and subsequent death, as the natural punishment. The way to freedom
is hard for all who were tyrannized by unrighteous pleasure and naturally
subject to just sufferings and to the thoroughly just death accompanying them.”[191]
At the same time, however, some of the passions are necessary for survival
in life after the fall. This is most obvious with hunger and sleep. If man did
not feel hunger or weariness, he would not eat or rest and would waste away;
for death, the first result of the fall, constantly erodes the strength of man
from within, necessitating his restoration through food and sleep. It is also
obvious in the case of sexual desire, which, while not necessary for the life
of the individual, is necessary for the survival of the species as a whole. As
St. Symeon of Thessalonica writes, marriage “is permitted because of the death
that follows the disobedience, in order that, until the life [zwh] and immortality that is through
Christ should come, this present corrupt life [bioV] should remain.”[192]
Moreover, sexual desire not only stimulates the act that propagates the
species. It is also an important factor in cementing the bond between the
father and mother far beyond the duration of the sexual act (in human beings
desire lasts longer, and fluctuates less, than in animals). The family unit in
turn is the building block of the State (and the Church), which provides other
essential survival functions.
It is not only these “crude” passions that have this dual character,
both positive and negative, in the fall. Thus Nellas writes, interpreting
Saints Gregory the Theologian and Maximus the Confessor: “Learning and work, in
particular, constitute a coarsening, so to speak, of the original natural
properties of wisdom and lordship over nature which man possessed as an image
of God. They constitute an expression and function of these properties in
material dress. Their aim when properly used was to lead man, and with him the
world, towards God. But with sin they became imprisoned in the corrupt
biological cycle, and they were coarsened and transformed into ‘garments of
skin’.
“The same is true, to mention one more example, with regard to the deep
and natural communion between persons which existed before the fall. (We have
seen that a fundamental dimension of man’s being ‘in the image’ is that he
constitutes at the same time both person and nature.) With the decline of man
into individuality this communion was corrupted and shattered, and consequently
in order to survive socially human beings needed some external organization,
that is to say, they needed the city and, by extension, political life.
“The laborious cultivation of the soil, then, the professions, the
sciences, the arts, politics, all the operations and functions by which man
lives in this world, make up the content of the ‘garments of skin’ and bear the
two-fold character which we have discussed above. On the one hand they are a
consequence of sin and constitute a misuse of various aspects of our creation
‘in the image’. On the other they are a result of the wise and compassionate
intervention of God and constitute the new clothing thanks to which human
beings are able to live under the new conditions created by the fall.”[193]
Thus, as St. Isaac the Syrian writes: “All existing passions are given
for the support of each of the natures to which they belong naturally and for
whose growth they were given by God. The bodily passions are placed in the body
by God for its support and growth; the passions of the soul, that is, the
soul’s powers, [are placed there] for the growth and support of the soul.” But
the fall has made each set of passions, though natural in themselves, opposed
to each other. And so “when the body is constrained to go out from its
passibility by abstaining from the passions in favour of the soul it is injured.
Likewise, when the soul leaves what is its own and cleaves to that which is of
the body it is injured.”[194]
So even in the fall, even in the act of clothing us with the garment of
the fallen passions, God in His Providence mixed mercy with punishment, life
with death. Just as He mixed the pain of childbirth for Eve with the promise
that she would give birth to the Redeemer Who would crush the head of the
serpent…
Moreover, even death for the individual is a good, in that it cuts off
sin, and by dissolving the body into its constituent elements gives the hope of
their eventual reassembling, free of any admixture of evil, at the general
resurrection… Thus St. Theophilus of Antioch writes: “God showed great
beneficence to man because He did not leave him in sin unto the ages… For just
as a vessel that has been made with a flaw is melted down or remolded to become
new and whole, the same thing happens to man by death. For he is broken into
pieces that he may rise whole in the resurrection; I mean spotless and
righteous and immortal”.[195] In
other words, physical death gives us a chance to be remade, and avoid eternal
death.
Thus in the longer term physical death is a good; but in the shorter
term, - that is, during the whole course of our earthly life, inasmuch as,
beginning from the day of our birth, we are constantly losing hundreds of
thousands of cells every day, - it is both evil in itself and one of the causes
of our committing further evil, both because it impairs the good working of the
brain and its ability to resist the machinations of the demons, and because it
engenders the fear of death and the love of pleasure, the supposed antidote to
death, in the soul. As Romanides writes: “In the first place, the deprivation
of divine grace impairs the mental powers of the newborn infant; thus, the mind
of man has a tendency toward evil from the beginning. This tendency grows
strong when the ruling force of corruption becomes perceptible in the body.
Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in man gives rise to
fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus,
Satan manipulates man’s fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up
sin in him, in other words, transgression against the divine will regarding
unselfish love, and provoking man to stray from his original destiny. Since
weakness is cause in the flesh by death, Satan moves man to countless passions
and leads him to devious thoughts, actions, and selfish relations with God as
well as with his fellow man. Sin reigns both in death (Romans 5.21) and
in the mortal body (Romans 6.20) because ‘the sting of death is sin’ (I
Corinthians 15.56).
“Because of death, man must first attend
to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle,
self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with
his original destiny of unselfish love. This state of subjection under the
reign of death is the root of man’s weaknesses in which he becomes entangled in
sin at the urging of the demons and by his own consent. Resting in the hands of
the devil, the power of the fear of death is the root from which
self-aggrandizement, egotism, hatred, envy, and other similar passions spring
up. In addition to the fact that man ‘subjects himself to anything in order to
avoid dying’ [St. John Chrysostom, Commentary 4 on Hebrews, 6; P.G. 43:61],
he constantly fears that his life is without meaning. Thus, he strives to
demonstrate to himself and to others that it has worth. He loves flatterers and
hates his detractors. He seeks his own and hates those who hate him. He seeks
security and happiness in wealth, glory, bodily pleasures, and he may even
imagine that his destiny is a self-seeking eudaemonistic and passionless
enjoyment of the presence of God regardless of whether or not he has true,
active, unselfish love for others. Fear and anxiety render man an
individualist. And when he identifies himself with a communal or social
ideology it, too, is out of individualistic, self-seeking motives because he
perceives his self-satisfaction and eudaemonia as his destiny. Indeed,
it is possible for him to be moved by ideological principles of vague love for
mankind despite the fact that mortal hatred for his neighbor rests in his
heart. These are the works of the ‘flesh’, under the sway of death and Satan.”[196]
St. Methodius of Olympus raises the question whether the
“garments of skin” are bodies as such. He replies in the negative, referring to
the verses in which Adam calls Eve “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”. For
here, “before the preparation of these coats of skin, the first man himself
acknowledges that he has both bones and flesh”.[197] The
“garments of skin”, therefore, are not the body as such, but “the body of this
death”, to use St. Paul’s phrase (Romans 7.24). “By which he does not
mean,’ writes St. Photius the Great, interpreting St. Methodius’ thought, “that
the body is death, but the law of sin which is in his members, lying hidden in
his members, lying hidden in us through the transgression, and ever deluding
the soul to the death of unrighteousness…. [The apostle] says not that this
body was death, but the sin which dwells in the body through lust…”[198]
But if the garments of skin do not signify the body as such, they do
signify a new state of the body, its mortality and its grossness. “Man,” writes
St. John of Damascus, “was ensnared by the assault of the arch-fiend, and broke
his Creator’s command, and was stripped of grace and put off his confidence
with God, and covered himself with the asperities of a toilsome life (for this
is the meaning of the fig-leaves), and was clothed about with death, that is,
mortality and the grossness of the flesh (for that is what the garment of skins
signifies).”[199]
Again, Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov writes, “the garments of skin signify our
coarse flesh, which changed after the Fall, losing its subtlety and
spirituality and receiving its present grossness.”[200]
Since the fall, bodies have acquired a mutual impenetrability, and so
can harm and destroy each other. Vladimir Soloviev defines the main
characteristic of our fallen world as “a dual impenetrability: 1)
impenetrability in time, by dint of which every succeeding moment of
existence does not preserve the preceding one in existence, but excludes or
squeezes it out by itself, so that every new thing in the world of matter takes
place at the cost of the preceding one or by harming it, and 2) impenetrability
in space, by dint of which two parts of matter (two bodies) cannot
occupy one and the same place, that is, one and the same part of space, at the
same time, but the one necessarily squeezes out the other. Thus that which lies
at the base of our world is existence in a condition of disintegration,
existence divided up into parts and moments that mutually exclude each other.”[201]
Impenetrability in time is expressed in aging, disease, failure of
memory and death, impenetrability in space - in the fact that bodies can no
longer intermingle as they did before the fall. Thus if marriage, the union in
one flesh, is to continue after the fall, it has to take on a different
character owing to the changed nature of human bodies. Since the bodies of Adam
and Eve cannot now interpenetrate effortlessly as before, union is possible
only through a specific physiological mechanism and with specific physical
consequences – the loss of seed, on the one side, and the loss of virginity, on
the other. And penetration has to be powered, as it were, by a specific new
force – sexual desire.
Thus St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “When we have put off that dead and
ugly garment which was made for us from irrational skins (when I hear ‘skins’ I
interpret it as the form of the irrational nature that we have put on from our
association with passion), we throw off every part of our irrational skin along
with the removal of the garment. These are the things which we have received
from the irrational skin: sexual intercourse, conception, childbearing, dirt,
lactation, nourishment, evacuation, gradual growth to maturity, the prime of
life, old age, disease and death.”[202]
“The garments of skin”, therefore, signify the new condition of man’s
body, its impenetrability in time and space, and all the consequences for his
biological life that flow from that. These have been superimposed, as it were,
on the original, sinless nature of man. For, as Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov
writes: “In our human nature good is mixed with evil. The evil that was
introduced into man was so mixed up and merged with man’s native good that the
native good can never act separately, without the evil also acting together
with it. Man has been poisoned by tasting of sin, that is, the experiential
knowledge of evil. The poison has penetrated into all the members of the body,
into all the powers and properties of the soul: both the body and the heart and
the mind have been afflicted by a sinful infirmity. Fallen men, flattering and
deceiving themselves to their destruction, call and recognize their reasoning
to be healthy. The reason was healthy before the fall; after the fall, in all
men without exception, it has become falsely so called, and for salvation must
be rejected. ‘The light of mine eyes is no longer with me’, says Scripture
about the reasoning of fallen nature (Psalm 37.11). Flattering and
deceiving themselves to their destruction, fallen men call and recognize their
heart to be good; it was good before the fall; after the fall its good has been
mixed with evil, and for salvation it must be rejected as defiled. God the
Knower of hearts has called all men evil (Luke 11.13). From the
infection of sin everything in man has fallen into disarray, everything works
incorrectly, everything works under the influence of lies and self-deception.
That is how his will works, that is how all the feelings of his heart work,
that is how all his thoughts work. In vain and falsely does blinded humanity
call them good, elegant, elevated! Profound is our fall, and very few are the
men who are conscious of themselves as fallen, in need of the Saviour; the
majority look upon their fallen condition as a condition of complete triumph,
and apply all their efforts to strengthen and develop their fallen condition.
“It has become impossible for man to
separate the evil that has been introduced from the native good by his own
efforts: man is conceived in iniquities and is born in sin (Psalm 50.5).
From his very birth man has not one deed, not one word, not one thought, not
one feeling, even for the shortest minute, in which good would not be mixed
with a greater or lesser admixture of evil. This is witnessed by Holy
Scripture, which says about fallen men that among them ‘a righteous man there
is no more; for truths have diminished from the sons of men. They are all gone
out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth
good, no, not one’ (Romans 3.10,12). Indicating his fallen nature, the
holy Apostle Paul says: ‘In me, that is, in my flesh, there dwelleth no good
thing’ (Romans 7.18). Here by ‘flesh’ the apostle means not the human
body as such, but the carnal condition of the whole man: his mind, heart and
body. And in the Old Testament the whole man is called ‘flesh’: ‘My Spirit
shall not abide in man for ever,’ said God, ‘for he is flesh’ (Genesis
6.3). In this fleshly condition, as if in its own body, lives sin and eternal
death. The apostle calls the fleshly condition ‘the body of death’ (Romans
7.14), ‘the body of sin’ (Romans 6.6). This condition is called flesh,
body, body of death and body of sin because in it thought and heart, which
should strive towards the spiritual and the holy, are aimed and nailed to the
material and sinful, they live in matter and sin.”[203]
This condition gets worse with the passing
of time. As Nicholas Cabasilas writes: “Because our nature was extended and our
race increased as it proceeded from the first body, so wickedness too, like any
other natural characteristic, was transmitted to the bodies which proceeded
from that body. The body, then, not merely shares in the experiences of the
soul but also imparts its own experiences to the soul. The soul is subject to
joy or vexation, is restrained or unrestrained, depending on the disposition of
the body. It therefore followed that each man’s soul inherited the wickedness
of the first Adam. It spread from his soul to his body, and from his body to
the bodies which derived from his, and from those bodies to the souls. This,
then, is the old man whom we have received as a seed of evil from our ancestors
as we came into existence. We have no seen even one day pure from sin, nor have
we ever breathed apart from wickedness, but, as the psalmist says, ‘we have
gone astray from the womb, we err from our birth’ (Psalm 58.4). We did
not even stand still in this unhappy lot of the sin of our ancestors, nor were
we content with the evils which we had inherited. So greatly have we added to
this wickedness and increased the abundance of evil that the primal sin has
been covered over by that which came later and the imitators have shown
themselves to be worse by far than the examples...”[204]
Some have argued that “the law of sin”, which we have just described,
was primarily sexual, a war of the body against the soul; so that it is
necessary to abstain from every expression of eros in order to avoid sin. But
this, too, is wrong. As we have seen, according to Bishop Ignatius, every faculty
of human nature, is fallen. If it were sinful to abstain from any expression
of every fallen faculty, then it would be necessary to abstain also from
every form of thinking, because the mind is fallen, and from every expression
of anger, because the incensive faculty is fallen. This nirvana-like state of
complete insensibility may be the ideal of Buddhism, but it is emphatically not
the ideal of Christianity!
As Fr. Seraphim Rose writes: “Sexual union, while blessed by the Church
and fulfilling a commandment of the Creator, is, in fallen humanity, inevitably
bound up with sin. This should not shock us if we stop to think that
such a necessary thing as eating is also almost invariably bound up with
sin – who of us is perfectly continent in food and drink, the thorough master
of his belly? Sin is not a category of specific acts such that, if we refrain
from them, we become ‘sinless’ – but rather a kind of web which ensnares us and
from which we can never really get free in this life.”[205]
Although pleasure and pain, fear and desire in their present form are
all “unnatural” according to St. Maximus’ definition, in that none of them were
present in this form in human nature before the fall, the Fathers nevertheless
make a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural”, “innocent” and “culpable”
desires and passions after the fall. The natural and innocent passions
are in all men, and remain natural and innocent as long as they are kept within
certain bounds. Culpable passions feed on natural ones like parasites: the
culpable passion of gluttony - on the natural passion to satisfy hunger, the
culpable passion of indolence - on the natural desire to rest weary limbs, the
culpable passion of lust - on the natural passion of sexual desire.
The expression of natural passions that have a foundation in nature
(such as sexual desire) is sinful in some circumstances but not in others,
while passions that have no foundation in nature (such as avarice) are sinful
at all times. Thus St. John Chrysostom writes: “Of desires some are necessary,
some natural, some neither the one nor the other. For example, those which, if
not gratified, destroy the creature are both natural and necessary, as the
desire of food and drink and sleep; carnal desire is natural indeed but not
necessary, for many have got the better of it, and have not died. But the
desire of wealth is neither natural nor necessary, but superfluous; and if we
choose we need not admit its beginning.”[206] And
again: “If a man were once for all deprived of money, he would no longer be
tormented with the desire of it, for nothing so much causes the desire of
wealth, as the possession of it. But it is not so with respect to sexual
desire, but many who have been made eunuchs have not been freed from the flame
that burned within them, for the desire resides in other organs, being seated
inwardly in our nature. To what purpose then is this said? Because the covetous
is more intemperate than the fornicator, inasmuch as the former gives way to a
weaker passion. Indeed it proceeds less from passion than from baseness of
mind. But desire is natural, so that if a man does not approach a woman, nature
performs her part and operation. But there is nothing of this sort in the case
of avarice.”[207]
That the natural passions are indeed natural, and not something for
which we are to be held personally responsible, is shown by the fact that they
exist even in children. Thus St. John Cassian writes: “Movement occurs in the
sexual organs not only of young children who cannot yet distinguish between
good and evil, but also of the smallest infants still at their mother’s breast.
The latter, although quite ignorant of sensual pleasure, nevertheless manifest
such natural movements in the flesh. Similarly, the incensive power exists in
infants, as we can see when they are roused against anyone hurting them. I say
this not to accuse nature of being the cause of sin – God forbid! – but to show
that the incensive power and desire, even if implanted in man by the Creator
for a good purpose, appear to change through neglect from being natural in the
body into something that is unnatural.” [208] Again,
St. Gregory Palamas writes that “the natural motions related to the begetting
of children can be detected in infants that are still at the breast… The
passions to which it [carnal desire] gives birth belong to us by nature, and
natural things are not indictable; for they were created by God Who is good, so
that through them we can act in ways that are also good. Hence in themselves
they do not indicate sickness of soul, but they become evidence of such
sickness when we misuse them. When we coddle the flesh in order to foster its
desires, then the passion becomes evil and self-indulgence gives rise to the
carnal passions and renders the soul diseased”.[209]
The natural passions are those that can clearly trace their origin to
some faculty of human nature that was existent before the fall. This is the case
both with hunger, since Eve was attracted to the fruit of the tree as being
“pleasant to eat”, and with sexual desire, since Adam and Eve, as explained in
the last chapter, had a natural, unfallen attraction for each other. Let us
remind ourselves of the words of St. Cyril of Alexandria (quoted already in
chapter 1) that Adam's body before the fall “was not entirely free from
concupiscence of the flesh”.[210] For
"while it was beyond corruption, it had indeed innate appetites, appetites
for food and procreation. But the amazing thing was that his mind was not
tyrannized by these tendencies; for he did freely what he wanted to do, seeing
that his flesh was not yet subject to the passions consequent upon
corruption".[211]
It is this fact of not being tyrannized by the passions that
constitutes the essential difference in their mode of operation before and
after the fall. Original sin gave to the natural passions a certain autonomy
and rebelliousness that they did not have before. The perfect integration of mind,
soul and body that we see in our first-parents before the fall was replaced by
a conflict between the faculties which issued in their descendants regularly
breaking the bonds of what is lawful.
Thus St. John Chrysostom writes: “When the body had become mortal, it
was henceforth a necessary thing for it to receive concupiscence, and anger,
and pain, and all the other passions, which required a great deal of wisdom to
prevent their flooding us, and sinking reason in the depth of sin. For in
themselves they were not sin, but, when their extravagancy was unbridled, it
wrought this effect. Thus (that I may take one of them and examine it as a
specimen) desire is not sin: but when it has run into extravagance, being not
minded to keep within the laws of marriage, but springing even upon other men's
wives; then the thing henceforward becomes adultery, yet not by reason of the
desire, but by reason of its exorbitancy.”[212] And
again he writes: “Blame not natural desire. Natural desire was bestowed with a
view to marriage; it was given with a view to the procreation of children, not
with a view to adultery and corruption.”[213]
What has been said about the passions applies also to the pleasures:
some are innocent, others - culpable. Thus St. John of Damascus divides them
into three categories: “Some pleasures are true, others false. And the
exclusively intellectual pleasures consist in knowledge and contemplation,
while the pleasures of the body depend upon sensation. Further, of bodily
pleasures, some are both natural and necessary, in the absence of which life is
impossible, for example the pleasures of food which replenishes waste, and the
pleasures of necessary clothing. Others are natural but not necessary, as the
pleasures of natural and lawful intercourse. For though the function that these
perform is to secure the permanence of the race as a whole, it is still
possible to live a virgin life apart from them. Others, however, are neither
natural nor necessary, such as drunkenness, lust (lagneia) and surfeiting to excess. For
these contribute neither to the maintenance of our own lives nor to the
succession of the race, but on the contrary, are rather even a hindrance. He
therefore that would live a life acceptable to God must follow after those
pleasures which are both natural and necessary: and must give a secondary place
to those which are natural but not necessary, and enjoy them only in fitting
season, and manner, and measure; while the others must be altogether renounced.
Those then are to be considered good (kaleV) pleasures which are not bound
up with pain, and bring no cause for repentance, and result in no other harm
and keep within the bounds of moderation, and do not draw us far away from
serious occupations, nor make slaves of us.”[214]
Important here is the last phrase: “nor make slaves of us”. For, as the
Apostle Paul writes: “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not
expedient. All things are lawful for me, but I will not brought under the
power of any” (I Corinthians 6.12). If we do not becomes slaves of
pleasure, then, as almost all the Holy Fathers agree, there is no sin in it.
And so, St. Maximus the Confessor writes, “we avoid pleasures, not because they
are evil, but because the sinful man is easily captivated by pleasures and becomes
their slave.”[215]
St. Photius the Great states that sexual pleasure in marriage is
“lawful”, while at the same time explaining why there could be no pleasure (or
pain) at the conception and nativity of Christ: "It was needful that a
mother should be prepared down below for the Creator, for the recreation of
shattered humanity, and she a virgin, in order that, just as the first man had
been formed of virgin earth, so the re-creation, too, should be carried out
through a virgin womb, and that no transitory pleasure, even lawful, should be
so much as imagined in the Creator's birth: since a captive of pleasure was he,
for whose deliverance the Lord suffered to be born."[216]
St. Gregory Palamas, too, speaks of “permissible pleasures”: “We, whose
bodies have become the temple of God through the Spirit, and in whom the Spirit
dwells, must be clean, or at least cleansed, and remain always undefiled,
contenting ourselves with permissible pleasures.”[217]
I have spoken about “the original sin” of
Adam and Eve, by which I have meant the personal transgression committed by
them in Paradise. However, the term “original sin” usually refers, not to the
original, that is, the first sin, but to the condition of
sin, or “law of sin” in which every man since Adam (with the exception of the
Last Adam, Christ) is born, and which has been the main theme of the last two
sections. This ambiguity in the meaning of “original sin”, coupled with
divergent translations of a critical passage on original sin, Romans
5.12, has led to much confusion, controversy and accusations of heresy; so some
clarification is necessary at this stage.
The paradox of the doctrine of original
sin consists in the fact that it appears to hold the whole human race
accountable for a sin committed only by Adam and Eve. This paradox was
expressed by Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov as follows: “What is this mystery –
the birth of a man in sin? How is it that one who has not yet lived has already
died? That one who has not yet walked has already fallen? That one who has done
nothing has already sinned? How are our forefather’s children, still in their
wombs, separated from him by thousands of years, participants in his sin? My
mind reverently gazes upon the judgements of God; it does not comprehend them…”[218]
Can we comprehend this mystery simply by
elaborating the distinction between two meanings of “original sin” adumbrated
above? Or, even after making such a distinction, does an irreducible mystery
remain? Let us see…
Let us begin by attempting to make the
distinction clearer. St.
Cyril of Alexandria writes: “What has Adam’s guilt to do with us? Why are we
held responsible for his sin when we were not even born when he committed it?
Did not God say: ‘The parents will not die for the children, nor the children
for the parents, but the soul which has sinned, it shall die’ (Deuteronomy
24.16). How then shall we defend this doctrine? The soul, I say, which has
sinned, it shall die. We have become sinners because of Adam’s disobedience in
the following manner… After he fell into sin and surrendered to corruption,
impure lusts invaded the nature of his flesh, and at the same time the evil law
of our members was born. For our nature contracted the disease of sin because
of the disobedience of one man, that is, Adam, and thus many became sinners.
This was not because they sinned along with Adam, because they did not then
exist, but because they had the same nature as Adam, which fell under the law
of sin. Thus, just as human nature acquired the weakness of corruption in Adam
because of disobedience, and evil desires invaded it, so the same nature was
later set free by Christ, Who was obedient to God the Father and did not commit
sin.”[219]
The critical words here are: “not because
they sinned along with Adam,… but because they had the same nature as Adam,
which fell under the law of sin”. Implicit here is a distinction between
“nature” and “person”. We are not sinners because we personally committed
Adam’s sin along with him, but because we are of the same nature as him
and receive its corruption from him by inheritance. As St. Anastasius of Sinai
writes: “Since Adam fathered children only after his fall, we became heirs of
his corruption. We are not punished for his disobedience to Divine Law. Rather,
since Adam was mortal, sin entered into his very seed. We receive mortality
from him.”[220]
And this mortality engenders sin – that is, writes St. Irenaeus, “the
passions…[of] grief and cowardice and perplexity, distress and all the rest by which
our nature afflicted with death and corruptibility is known.”[221]
The distinction between sin as an
individual transgression of the human person and sin as common condition
or state of human nature was in fact made by St. Paul in Romans
5.12, as Archbishop Theophan of Poltava points out: “The holy apostle clearly
distinguishes in his teaching on original sin between two points: paraptwma or transgression, and amartia or sin. By the first he
understood the personal transgression by our forefathers of the will of God
that they should not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
by the second – the law of sinful disorder that entered human nature as the
consequence of this transgression. When he is talking about the inheritance of
the original sin, he has in mind not paraptwma or transgression, for which only
they are responsible, but amartia, that is, the law of sinful
disorder which afflicted human nature as a consequence of the fall into sin of
our forefathers. And hmarton, ‘sinned’ in 5.12 must therefore
be understood not in the active voice, in the sense: they committed sin, but in
the middle-passive voice, in the sense of: amartwloi katastaqhsontai of 5.19, that is, became sinners
or turned out to be sinners, since human nature fell in Adam.”[222]
Thus the original sin of Adam, in the sense of his personal
transgression, the original sin which no other person shares, has
engendered in consequence sinful, corrupt, diseased, mortal human nature, the
law of sin, which we all share because we have all inherited it, but for which
we cannot be held personally responsible. And if this seems to introduce of two
original sins, this is in fact not far from the thinking of the Holy Fathers.
Thus St. Maximus the Confessor writes: “There then arose sin, the first and
worthy of reproach, that is, the falling away of the will from good to evil.
Through the first there arose the second – the change in nature from
incorruption to corruption, which cannot elicit reproach. For two sins arise in
[our] forefather as a consequence of the transgression of the Divine
commandment: one worthy of reproach, and the second having as its cause the
first and unable to elicit reproach”.[223]
So there is a sin attaching to persons,
for which they are personally responsible, and there is a sin
attaching to natures, for which the persons who possess that nature are
not responsible, but which nevertheless makes them sinners.[224] Adam’s
personal sin opened the way for the defilement of his nature by
the disease of sin. And since we inherit his nature, we, too, become sinners.
And yet, one may object, we inherit
diseases, not sin. And to call it “the disease of sin”, as does St. Cyril,
followed by many others, is simply to confuse two distinct categories. We are
responsible for sins we commit, but not for diseases we contract – unless, of
course, we caused the disease by our own sinful conduct, which is not the case
here, since the disease was caused by Adam and Satan.
Nevertheless,
let us pursue the disease analogy a little further. St. Cyril again: “Because
death had overrun Adam, he is like a plant that has been injured at its roots,
and the whole race that sprang from him is like the shoots that sprout from it
but must all wither.”[225] Again,
to take a more nearly contemporary Father, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow: “As
infected water naturally flows from an infected source, in the same way from
the founder of our race, infected by sin and therefore mortal, there come
descendants who are infected by sin and therefore mortal”.[226]
To which Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky) of Kiev objects: “’But a source and water are one thing, living
and responsible people – another. We are not the descendants of Adam by our own
desire. Why should we bear the blame for his disobedience? Has the condemnation
of all men because of Adam struck them apart from the guilt of each of them?”[227]
However, perhaps the analogy is closer than the metropolitan thinks. Consider
St. Paul’s argument that Levi, a great-grandson of Abraham, paid tithes to
Melchizedek when his great-grandfather paid them, “for he was yet in the loins
of his father when Melchizedek met him” (Hebrews 7.10). If we follow the
implication through with regard to ourselves, then we were literally in our
forefather Adam even during his lifetime, and therefore participated in his
sin.
The idea that we sinned in Adam is strongly suggested by the
ancient Western translations of Romans 5.12, as also by the Slavonic
translation made by Saints Cyril and Methodius, which translate the conjunction
“ef’w” as “in whom”, i.e. in Adam, so
that the phrase reads: “in whom [Adam] we all sinned”. Now it is generally
recognized that this translation is inaccurate, and that “ef’w” in fact means “because”, so
that the whole sentence reads: “Death came upon all men because all men
have sinned.”[228]
However, Bishop Theophan the Recluse has argued that although “because” is the
more literal translation, the old Western and Slavonic translations in fact
convey the real sense more accurately.
His argument is as follows. First he quotes
Romans 5.13-14: “Until the law sin was in the world, but sin not
reckoned where there is no law. But death reigned from Adam until Moses, even
over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s transgression…” On this he
comments: “Sin reigned in the world also before the giving of the Law through
Moses. But it was evidently not sin from transgression of the Law, which did
not exist at the time. ‘Sin is then reckoned when there is Law, and people
transgressing the Law and of necessity called sinners’ (Blessed Theodoreitus).
But death reigned even before Moses, that is, before the issuing of the
Law. That means that there was a sin through which death reigned: if it had not
existed there would have been no reign of death. But if it is proved there was
no sin in the sense of transgression of the Law, then it remains that the sin
was Adam’s, through which death reigned even over those who had not sinned like
Adam, but had been made participants of his sin.”[229]
Let us turn to the Fathers for further
understanding of this passage. St. Cyril of Jerusalem writes: “Paul’s meaning
is that, although Moses was a righteous and admirable man, the death sentence
promulgated upon Adam reached him as well, and also those who came after, even
though neither he nor they copied the sin of Adam in disobediently eating of
the tree”.[230]
Again, the unknown fourth-century Roman Father commonly referred to as
Ambrosiaster writes: “How is it then that sin was not imputed, when there was
no law? Was it all right to sin, if the law was absent? There had always been a
natural law, and it was not unknown, but at that time it was thought to be the
only law, and it did not make men guilty before God. For it was not then known
that God would judge the human race, and for that reason sin was not imputed,
almost as if it did not exist in God’s sight and that God did not care about
it. But when the law was given through Moses, it became clear that God did care
about human affairs and that in the future wrongdoers would not escape without
punishment, as they had done up to them.”[231] Again,
St. Augustine writes: “He says not that there was no sin but only that it was
not counted. Once the law was given, sin was not taken away, but it began to be
counted”.[232]
Thus before
Moses the personal sins of men were not imputed to them, and they were not
counted as having committed them. And yet they died. But death is “the
wages of sin” (Romans 6.23). So of what sin was their
death the wages? There can only be one answer: Adam’s.
Does this destroy the distinction
elaborated earlier between the two meanings of “original sin”? No; but it does
demonstrate a closer bond between the two kinds of sin – the propatorikon amarthma or “ancestral sin”
attaching to Adam alone, and the progonikh amartia or “original
sin”, attaching to the whole human race[233] – than
the critics of the “Augustinian theory of original sin” usually allow. Although
we are not responsible for Adam’s personal sin, there is a real sense in which
Adam lives in us, as we in him. For the word “Adam” in Hebrew denotes both the person
Adam and the human nature which we receive from him. So in receiving
Adam’s human nature we also, in a sense, receive him.
Thus St. Basil the Great
writes that what we inherit from Adam “is not the personal sin of Adam, but the
original human being himself”, who “exists in us by necessity”.[234] Again,
St. Cyril of Alexandria writes: “[All men] have been condemned to death by the
transgression of Adam. For the whole of human nature has suffered this in
him, who was the beginning of the human race.”[235] And St. Maximus the Greek: “Adam, in whose
fall our whole race fell”.[236] It
follows that, while we have not sinned as Adam sinned, his sin in a sense lives
on in us.
The
practice of infant baptism disproves Metropolitan Anthony’s argument that we
die because of our own personal sins, and not because of the sin of Adam, which
would, he says, be unjust. For babies are innocent of personal sin, and yet
they die. Therefore they must be baptized “for the remission of sins” – not
their own, but their ancestor’s. Thus the Council of Carthage in 252 under St.
Cyprian decreed “not to forbid the baptism of an infant who, scarcely born, has
sinned in nothing apart from that which proceeds from the flesh of Adam. He has
received the contagion of the ancient death through his very birth, and he
comes, therefore, the more easily to the reception of the remission of sins in
that it is not his own but the sins of another that are remitted.” This was
confirmed by Canon 110 of the Council of Carthage in 419, which was confirmed
by the Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Councils: “He who denies the need for young
children and those just born from their mother’s womb to be baptized, or who
says that although they are baptized for the remission of sins they inherit
nothing from the forefathers’ sin that would necessitate the bath of
regeneration [from which it would follow that the form of baptism for the
remission of sins would be used on them not in a true, but in a false sense],
let him be anathema. For the word of the apostle: ‘By one man sin came into the
world and death entered all men by sin, for in him all have sinned’ (Romans
5.12), must be understood in no other way than it has always been understood by
the Catholic Church, which has been poured out and spread everywhere. For in
accordance with this rule of faith children, too, who are themselves not yet
able to commit any sin, are truly baptized for the remission of sins, that
through regeneration they may be cleansed of everything that they have acquired
from the old birth.”
For “even
from the womb, sinners are estranged” (Psalm 57.3). And “who shall be
pure from uncleanness? Not even one, even if his life should be but one day
upon the earth” (Job 14.4). St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “Evil was mixed
with our nature from the beginning… through those who by their disobedience
introduced the disease. Just as in the natural propagation of the species each
animal engenders its like, so man is born from man, a being subject to passions
from a being subject to passions, a sinner from a sinner. Thus sin takes its
rise in us as we are born; it grows with us and keep us company till life’s
term”.[237]
And St. Gennadius Scholarius, Patriarch of Constantinople, writes: “Everyone in the following of
Adam has died, because they have all inherited their nature from him. But some
have died because they themselves have sinned, while others have died only
because of Adam’s condemnation – for example, children.”[238]
St. Paul goes on to give a still more powerful reason for this
interpretation: the exact correspondence between Adam and Christ, between
Adam who made all his descendants by carnal birth sinners and Christ Who makes
all His descendants by spiritual birth righteous: “As through one man’s
transgression [judgement came] on all men to condemnation, so through one man’s
act of righteousness [acquittal came] to all men for justification of life. For
as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience
many will be made righteous. Law came in to increase the transgression; but
where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in
death, grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus
Christ our Lord” (Romans 5.18-21).
St. John
Chrysostom writes: “Adam is a type of Christ in that just as those who
descended from him inherited death, even though they had not eaten of the fruit
of the tree, so also those who are descended from Christ inherit His
righteousness, even though they did not produce it themselves… What Paul is
saying here seems to be something like this. If sin, and the sin of a single
man moreover, had such a big effect, how it is that grace, and that the grace
of God – not of the Father only but also of the Son – would not have an even
greater effect? That one man should be punished on account of another does not
seem reasonable, but that one man should be saved on account of another is both
more suitable and more reasonable. So if it is true that the former happened,
much more should the latter have happened as well.”[239] Again,
St. Ephraim the Syrian writes: “Just as Adam sowed sinful impurity into pure
bodies and the yeast of evil was laid into the whole of our mass [nature], so
our Lord sowed righteousness into the body of sin and His yeast was mixed into
the whole of our mass [nature]”.[240] And
St. Ambrose of Milan writes: “In Adam I fell, in Adam I was cast out of
paradise, in Adam I died. How shall God call me back, except He find me in
Adam? For just as in Adam I am guilty of sin and owe a debt to death, so in
Christ I am justified.”[241]
As Archbishop
Seraphim of Lubny writes: “If we bear in mind that by the sufferings of One all
are saved, we shall see no injustice in the fact that by the fault of one
others are punished.”[242]
Sexual Sin
Some, especially in the West, have seen original sin as residing
especially in sexual sin. This is proved by the words: “I was conceived in
iniquities, and in sins did my mother bear me’ (Psalm 50.5). For sexual
intercourse is inescapably linked with lust; and “the lust of the flesh, the
lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (I John 2.16) are of the essence
of the fall. So original sin was transmitted to us through the practice of
sexual lust. Hence sexual lust is the root of original sin.
Although we have largely dealt with this argument in the section on
innocent and guilty passion, some further remarks are in order here. First it
should be pointed out that David’s words refer not only to conception but also
to childbirth – in which no pleasure or lust are involved, but only pain and
suffering. Secondly, St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the same verse, says
that David here “does not condemn marriage, as some have thoughtlessly
supposed”.[243] How could it, since, as the
Apostle Paul says, “the [marriage] bed is undefiled” (Hebrews 13.4)? And
again he says: “If you marry, you do not sin” (I Corinthians 7.28).
The distinction worked out in the last section is useful here. We are
conceived in sin, not in the sense that the act which brought us into being was
a sinful act for which our parents will be held responsible, but in the sense
that sexual relations (like all relations) have been affected by the fall, by
the tendency to passion which is ingrained in our common human nature. Sexual
relations in marriage are sinful only in the sense that they are tainted by
original sin, that is, determined by the coarseness of the matter of the fallen
body and the fallen, reflexive mechanism of sexual arousal which opens the path
for conception in such a body. As St. Gregory Palamas writes: “The flesh’s
impulse to reproduce is not subject to our minds, which God has appointed to
govern us, and is not altogether without sin. That is why David said, ‘I was
conceived in iniquities’.”[244] On the
other hand, there is no personal sin involved in sexual relations
carried out in lawful marriage. For, as we have seen, God blessed the
multiplication of the race through the natural mechanism of sexual intercourse,
and He would not bless an act that involved personal sin. St. Augustine invokes a similar distinction
when speaking of lust: "It is not however called sin in the sense of
making one guilty [i.e. personally guilty of personal sin], but
in that it is caused by the guilt of the first man [the original sin,
engendering original sin in us], and in that it rebels, and strives to draw us
into guilt if grace did not help us."[245]
Thus lust, fallen eros, exists in our bodies as part of our fallen human
nature. But if we control this hidden tendency from expressing itself in sinful
fantasies or actions, we are not accounted guilty. For, as David says: “From my
secret sins cleanse me, and from those of others spare Thy servant. If they
have not dominion over me, then blameless shall I be, and I shall be
cleansed from great sin” (Psalm 18.12-13).
Fallen eros appears to be seated in our bodies. And yet, as we have seen
in chapter 1, not only is it not a purely bodily phenomenon: its origin in the
original, unfallen nature of man was not in the body, but in the mind,
proceeding from the mind to the body. As St. Gregory Palamas writes: “The spirit
of man that quickens the body is a noetic longing (eros), a longing that
issues from the intellect…”[246] As such, eros cannot be a purely
instinctual faculty, but one that employs all the faculties of the soul, “the
offspring,” as St. Maximus puts it, of the gathering together of the soul’s
faculties in relation to divine realities, and of the union of those faculties
– rational, irascible and concupiscent.”[247].
That is why the word used for sexual union in the Scriptures, including
the union of Adam and Eve (Genesis 4.1), is “to know” (gignwskein), a word that has both dynamic
and static, both rational and appetitive connotations in the Holy Scriptures.[248]
The fall has impeded the flow of eros from mind to body,
allowing the body to develop its own, “autonomous eros”, and turning it against
the mind, creating the conflict of “flesh” and “spirit” of which St. Paul
speaks in Romans 7. This disjunction between the psychic and bodily
elements of eros in the subject, the lover, is reflected in a
disjunction in his perception of the psychic and bodily components of the object,
the beloved. Thus the disjunction in the intra-personal flow of
eros results in a disjunction in its inter-personal flow, turning
erotic love into lust. This means that the erotic attention of the lover is
concentrated on the body of the beloved independently of her soul, whereas
rightly functioning eros is directed to the soul and body together – not
to a soul which just happens to have a body, nor to a body to which a soul just
happens to be attached, but to an embodied soul, that is, a human
being, whose existence is composite, but essentially indivisible.
Thus the fall has produced a war between
the spirit and the flesh, dividing the originally undivided eros into two. “The
multitude,” in St. Dionysius’ words, “not seeing the unitary nature of the
Divine Name of Love (Eros), fell back, according to their natural tendencies,
to the divided and corporeal and separated love which is not the real love, but
an image of it, or rather is defection from the real love.”[249] Again, St. Gregory Palamas writes:
"Our mind itself stretches out in longing towards the One God Who Is, the
only Good, the only Desire, the only Bestower of pleasure unmixed with pain.
But once the mind has been enfeebled, the soul's ability for real love falls
away from what is truly desired, and, scattered among various longings for
sensual pleasures, is dispersed, pulled this way and that by desires for
superfluous foods, dishonourable bodies, useless objects, and empty, inglorious
glory."[250]
The reaction of the healthy mind to the
sundering of flesh and spirit in fallen eros is shame. The presence of
sexual shame in all but the most perverted of men tells us something very
important about sexuality that strikes at the heart of both the naturalist and
the Manichaean views.
Shame witnesses to the fall – indeed, it
is the very first consequence of the fall. But a close examination of its
psychology shows that it also witnesses to the fact that sexuality is no merely
animal phenomenon. For if it were, there would be no reason to feel sexual
shame. After all, animals feel no shame. If it were a purely biological need,
then a man would feel no more shame at feeling desire for a woman than he would
at feeling hunger or thirst.
The feeling of shame at nakedness is the
sign of a soul that has not lost all goodness and virtue. It is the
virtue of modesty, whose opposite is the vice of shamelessness.[251]
Neither shame nor shamelessness would be displayed by a person who had nothing
to be ashamed of, and who was so engrossed in the things of the spirit as to
pay no attention to the things of the flesh.
It follows that shame is absent only in children, who feel no shame
since they commit no sin, and in saints, who have mastered the passions,
conquered sin and reacquired the garment of grace of the first-fashioned man.
For example, St. Joseph the Fair, the son of Jacob, fled from the attentions of
the Egyptian woman, leaving his garment behind him. But, chants the Church,
“like the first man before his disobedience, though naked he was not ashamed.”[252]
Again, St. Symeon, the elder of St. Symeon the New Theologian, in the
words of the latter “did not blush before the members of anyone, neither to see
other men naked, nor to show himself naked, for he possessed Christ completely,
and he was completely Christ, and all his own members and everybody else’s
members, all and each one were always like Christ in his eyes; he remained
motionless, unhurt and impassive; he was all Christ himself and as Christ he
considered all the baptized, clothed with the whole Christ. While you, if you
are naked and your flesh touches flesh, there you are in heat like a donkey or
a horse…”[253]
Shame is not necessarily linked with sexuality, being the characteristic
reaction of the man who is not completely corrupted by sin in general.
However, it is an undeniable fact that there is a specific kind of shame
associated with sexuality which leads us to cover up specific parts of the body
and which leads even honourably married people to hide their sexual activity.
Indeed, one might argue that this shows the inescapably sinful character of
sexual relations, even in marriage. For if there were truly nothing in them to
be ashamed of, in the sense of nothing sinful, why hide them? And why should
exhibitionism, on the one hand, and voyeurism, on the other, be labelled as
sinful acts?
But sexual shame, far from being a sign of the inherent baseness of
sexuality, is actually a sign of its opposite. As Roger Scruton writes, “moral
shame is the peculiarly social form of guilt, but sexual shame is
something else – the sign not of sexual guilt, but of sexual innocence… The
normal occasions of shame are those of the prurient glance, the obscene gesture
or the lewd utterance. These provoke shame because they dirty what is in itself
not dirty. The thought of the subject is something like ‘I am defiled by his
glances’. The subject is made to feel shame, because he feels ‘degraded’
by the other’s interest, by the tone of his conversation or by the implications
of his gesture. It is not the other’s disgust at my body which provokes this
response, but, on the contrary, his pleasure in it. The woman who supposes that
she is being undressed in the imagination of the man who watches here, feels,
not that he is thinking of what is in itself dirty, but that he is thinking of
her body in a way that dirties it.”[254]
Thus shame is justly felt (for sometimes it is unjustly felt, being
simply the product of the inculcation of false social attitudes) if its object
is lewd, animal-like behaviour which depersonalises love, concentrating
attention, not on persons, but on bodies, or on something which, while not lewd
in itself, is likely to elicit such behaviour in observers. That is why even
honourably married couples prefer to make love in private - the violation of
privacy makes what is in itself without shame into something shameful in the
eyes of the spectator. Of its nature sexual love is an intense concentration,
even obsession, on just one person of the other sex, who is seen as quite
uniquely beautiful and irreplaceable. But precisely because of the intensely
personal and individual nature of this love, outsiders cannot share in it.
A couple making love see each other’s souls and bodies in a very special light
which it is only given to them to see and which they are not trying to
convey to others. For outsiders, who do not share their passion, the sight of
the lovers making love may be ridiculous, or ugly, or titillating: in any case,
it is quite different from that of the lovers to each other. This inevitable
and sharp incongruity between the attitude of the lovers to each other and of
the spectators to them creates the feeling of shame and embarrassment. It is
shameful for the spectators, whose emotion on watching the lovers is the sin of
voyeurism. But it is especially embarrassing for the lovers themselves, in that
they are forced to look at their own bodies now not through each other’s eyes,
but through those of the spectator – through the eyes, that is, not of love,
but of lust and/or disgust.
The shame of fallen eros witnesses to the
fact that there is an unfallen eros of which we should not be ashamed. The
perversion of lust witnesses to the fact that there is a rightly directed
erotic love. Having established that, it is now time to examine how eros can be
redeemed from its fall, beginning with its regeneration in the person and life
of the God-Man, Jesus Christ.
The Lust of Demons
Fallen eros has
tended to plumb ever deeper depths of evil, both within the life-spans of
individual men, and from generation to generation. For, as Archpriest Lev
Lebedev writes, “there is no limit, no bottom to the abyss of carnal
pleasures. Today – this far, tomorrow – further, and so on to loss of
consciousness, to self-annihilation.”[255]
A clear example
of this is to be found early in the sacred narrative: And it came to pass
when men began to be numerous upon the earth, and daughters were born to them,
that the angels of God [or: sons of God], having seen the daughters of men that
they were beautiful, took for themselves wives from all whom they chose. And
the Lord God said, My Spirit shall certainly not remain among these men for
ever, for they are flesh, but their days shall be one hundred and twenty years.
Now the giants were upon the earth in those days, and after that the angels of
God [sons of God] were wont to enter in to the daughters of men, and they bore
children to them. Those were the giants of old, the men of renown. (Genesis
6.1-5).
The understanding of this passage hinges on the meaning of the word
translated “angels of God” or “sons of God” in verses 2 and 4. In the Hebrew
Massoretic text the word is bene-ha-elohim, literally “sons of God”. In
the Greek translation of the Septuagint, which is the oldest and most
authoritative text that we have, the Cambridge text edited by Brooke-Mclean has
“angels of God” (aggeloi tou Qeou in verse 2, and “sons of
God” (uioi tou Qeou)in verse 4.
P. S. Alexander writes: “The translator has not been inconsistent, for
closer inspection shows that, though there are no significant variants at verse
4, a number of important witnesses at verse 2 read, not oi uioi tou Qeou but oi aggeloi tou Qeou. Moreover, the main support in
verse 2 for oi aggeloi tou Qeou (viz. Cod. A) has the reading
over an erasure. It seems most likely, then, that LXX [the Septuagint]
originally read oi uioi tou Qeou, “the sons of God”, in both
places. It was later altered, but inconsistently. The literal rendering [i.e.
“sons of God”] is found in other Greek texts, as well as in the Vulgate, the
Peshitta and the Biblical text of the Ps-Philonic Liber Antiquitatum
Biblicarum (=LAB).”[256]
Be that as it may, and even without absolute unanimity concerning which
reading is correct, there is complete unanimity, from the earliest Jewish
commentators until the early third century, about its meaning. All commentators
and writers agree that the reference here is to angels. Such an
interpretation is supported by the fact that in three passages of the Book of
Job (1.6, 2.1, 38.7) the phrase “sons of God” certainly refers to angels. Also,
the fact that the women gave birth to giants (cf. Baruch 3.26-28;
Sirach 16.7; Wisdom 14.6; Judith 16.7) suggests the result
of something that was not just a normal human coupling….
We find this interpretation both in pre-Christian Jewish literature -
for example, The Book of Enoch, Jubilees, The Testament of the 12
Patriarchs, Philo and Josephus - and in the early Christian Fathers and
writers such as Justin the Philosopher, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Clement of
Alexandria, Tertullian, Methodius of Olympus and Ambrose.
Thus Josephus writes: “Now this posterity of Seth continued to esteem
God as the Lord of the universe, and to have an entire regard to virtue, for
seven generations; but in process of time they were perverted, and forsook the
practices of their forefathers, and did neither pay those honours to God which
were appointed them, not had they any concern to do justice towards men; but
for what degree of zeal they had formerly shown for virtue, they now showed by
their actions a double degree of wickedness, whereby they made God to be their
enemy. For many angels of God accompanied with women, and begat sons
that proved unjust, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the
confidence they had in their own strength; for the tradition is, that these men
did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants. But Noah
was very uneasy at what they did; and being displeased at their conduct,
persuaded them to change their disposition, and their actions for the better:
but seeing they did not yield to him, but were slaves to wicked pleasures, he
was afraid they would kill him, together with his wife and children, and those
they had married; so he departed out of the land.”[257]
St. Justin the Martyr writes: “In ancient
times wicked demons appeared and defiled women.”[258] God
“committed the care of men and of all things under heaven to angels whom He
placed over them. But the angels violated this appointment and were captivated
by women and begat children who are called demons.”[259]
Again, St. Methodius writes: “The others remained in the positions for
which God made and appointed them; but the devil was insolent, and having
conceived envy of us, behaved wickedly in the charge committed to him; as also
did those who subsequently were enamoured of fleshly charms, and had illicit
intercourse with the daughters of men. For to them also, as was the case with
men, God granted the possession of their own choice.”[260]
Again, St. Irenaeus writes: “And for a very long while wickedness
extended and spread, and reached and laid hold upon the whole race of mankind,
until a very small seed of righteousness remained among them: and illicit
unions took place upon the earth, since angels were united with the daughters
of the race of mankind; and they bore to them sons who for their exceeding
greatness were called giants. And the angels brought as presents to their wives
teachings of wickedness, in that they brought them the virtues of roots and
herbs, and dyeing in colours and cosmetics, the discovery of rare substances,
love-potions, aversions, amours, concupiscence, constraints of love, spells of
bewitchment, and all sorcery and idolatry hateful to God; by the entry of which
things into the world evil extended and spread, while righteousness was
diminished and enfeebled…”[261]
Another very important, albeit not quite so clear witness in favour of
this interpretation is the passage from II Peter: “If God did not spare
the angels when they sinned, but cast them into tartarus, and committed them to
pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgement; if he did not spare the
ancient world, but preserved Noah...” (2.4-5; cf. Jude 6), which from
its context seems to be referring to the angels’ cohabitation with the
daughters of men.
However, in spite of all these early witnesses, the later Fathers from
about the second half of the fourth century - including John Chrysostom,
Ephraim the Syrian, Blessed Theodoretus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Blessed Jerome and
Blessed Augustine - turned sharply against this interpretation, choosing rather
to understand the term “sons of God” as denoting the men of the line of Seth,
and the "daughters of men" - the women of the line of Cain; so that
the event described in Genesis 6 involved an unlawful mixing between the
pious and the impious human generations.
Thus St. John Chrysostom writes that it would be “folly to accept such
insane blasphemy, saying that an incorporeal and spiritual nature could have
united itself to human bodies”.[262]
Again, St. Augustine, after noting that “the Septuagint calls them the
angels and sons of God”, goes on to say: “According to the Hebrew canonical
Scriptures [i.e as opposed to apocrypha such as The Book of Enoch],
there is no doubt that there were giants upon the earth before the deluge, and
that they were the sons of the men of earth, and citizens of the carnal city,
unto which the sons of God, being Seth’s in the flesh, forsaking righteousness,
adjoined themselves.”[263]
Again, St. Ephraim the Syrian writes: “The
daughters of Cain adorned themselves and became a snare to the eyes of the sons
of Seth… The entire tribe of Seth… was stirred to a frenzy over them… Because
the sons of Seth were going in to the daughters of Cain, they turned away from
their first wives whom they had previously taken. Then these wives, too,
disdained their own continence and now, because of their husbands, quickly
began to abandon their modesty, which up until that time they had preserved for
their husbands’ sake. It is because of this wantonness that assailed both the
men and the women, that Scripture says, All flesh had corrupted its way
(6.13).”[264]
To this same line of interpretation belong the words of Metropolitan
Philaret of Moscow: “According to the text of the Alexandrian Bible, [the words
are] ‘Angels of God’. Lactantius is of this opinion, as are many ancient
authors. Justin affirms that from the marriages of Angels with the daughters of
men there came demons. Athenagoras ascribes the fall of the Angels to these
same marriages, and it was from them that the giants came. Tertullian ascribes
to these Angels the acquisition of Astrology, precious stones, metals and some
female adornments. But all these traditions contradict the witness of Jesus
Christ, that the Angels do not marry (Matthew 22.30)…
“According to the opinion of the most recent interpreters, [they are]
the descendants of the race of Shem, who not only were sons of God by
grace (cf. Deuteronomy 14.1; I John 3.1), but they also
probably formed a society under this name (cf. Genesis 4.26)[265] which
was opposed to the society of the sons of men, that is, the descendants of
Cain, who were led only by their fallen human nature. Moses ascribes the
beginning of the mixing of such contrary societies to the fascination with the beauty
of the daughters of men; and as a consequence even those who belonged to the
society of those who walk in the Spirit became flesh, and light itself began to
be turned into darkness.”[266]
However, even if we exclude the possibility of a real, hypostatic union
between angels (demons) and men, it is another question whether demons may not desire
such a union and strive for it.
But why should they wish to unite with
women?
First, because demons, in spite of their
bodiless nature, are possessed by lust, according to Bishop Ignatius
Brianchaninov.[267] In
this connection the words of the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 11.10 are
relevant: “For this cause ought the woman to have authority on her head on
account of the angels”. Commenting on this passage, St. Paulinus of Nola
writes: “Let them realize why Paul ordered their heads to be clothed with a
more abundant covering: it is because of the angels, that is, the angels who
are ready to seduce them and whom the saints will condemn.”[268] So the
veil not only shows, as we saw in the first chapter, the woman’s submission to
her God-given leader, the man: it also shows that she is not subject to
the dominion of “the sons of God”, or the fallen angels.
A second reason is that Satan almost certainly wishes to imitate the
union of the two natures in one Person that Christ achieved at His incarnation,
only substituting the demonic nature for the Divine, a whore for the Virgin
Mother of God, and the Antichrist for Christ. Such a motive is suggested by the
fact, emphasised by many of the Fathers, that the Antichrist will seek to
imitate Christ in all things. And if in all things, why not in his very birth?
We shall not explore this idea here, except to note how costly for
mankind is the transgressing of God’s laws concerning marriage and the
begetting of children - nothing less, perhaps, than the birth of the
Antichrist!
Perversion
Let us return to the sacred text. Almost immediately after the attempt
of the “sons of God” to seduce the daughters of men, and the birth from these
unions of giants, there came the universal flood which swept away all mankind
except Noah and his family. Whether or not there is a direct causal connection
between the two events is not indicated: but their close proximity is very
suggestive. Moreover, the Lord said: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall
it be also in the days of the Son of Man. They did eat, they drank, they
married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day Noah entered into the
ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all” (Luke 17.26-27). The
period we are living through now is very similar to the period the Lord was
speaking about, and so also to the period just before the Flood. Now, as then, men
have begun to multiply on the earth, and now, as then, the condition of mankind
is an abyss of moral degeneration.
Thus Archpriest
Lev Lebedev writes: “Individual people can hold themselves back at
certain levels of this abyss, but as a tendency in the life of society
it has no end. Just as society’s permissiveness or debauchery in
the present world of various ‘pleasures’ has no limit. If, 40-50 years ago, one
had said that male homosexuals or female lesbians would be officially
registered as ‘conjugal’ pairs, then the reply would not even have been horror,
but rather a friendly laugh. However, that is the reality now! In a
series of western countries they are officially registered and ‘crowned’.
What next? Perhaps there will follow a recognition of bestiality as one
of the forms of ‘refined and elegant’ sex? And then?… ‘Progress’ is ‘progress’
because it strives for infinity…
“According to
the just formulation of F.M. Dostoyevsky, ‘if God does not exist, then everything
(!) is permitted’. In fact, if God does not exist, then the holy ‘holy
thing’, idol of highest value of existence is undoubtedly ‘pleasure’.
Whatever it may consist of and for whoever it may be. If!
“But if God does
exist? Then what? Then it is necessary what laws He placed in the nature
of man and what man is ‘prescribed’ to do, what not, and why…
“But who is
now trying to ‘free’ men from the commandments of God and ‘allow’ them the cult
of ‘pleasure’? The medieval (and contemporary!) Templars represent ‘him’
in the form of a goat with a woman’s torso, sitting on the earth’s
globe, with a five-pointed star on his goat’s forehead, and between his horns a
torch, a symbol of ‘enlightenment’, ‘reason’. On one hand is written: ‘free’,
and on the other ‘permit’. He is called ‘Baphomet’. He is an idol, one of the
representations of the devil (Lucifer). He whispers into the ears of his
worshippers the idea that he is ‘god’, but he lies, as always. He is a fallen
creature of God and will be punished with eternal torments, where he will with
special ‘pleasure’ mock those who, at his suggestion, serve ‘pleasure’ as an
idol. But before that before the Second Coming of Christ, he will try to
establish his dominion over the whole world with the help of his ‘son’ – the
Antichrist. But he, in his turn, in order to gain dominion over men, will,
among other methods, particularly strongly use sex. For sex,
which turns people into voluntary animals, makes their manipulation very much
easier, that is, it destroys the primordial structure of mankind, the nation
and the state – the correct family, thereby as it were annihilating the
‘image of God’ in mankind.”[269]
Now we have seen that the cardinal sin of self-love (Greek: filautia), though spiritual in essence,
is closely linked to the carnal sin of lust, in that the latter represents a
corruption and redirection of man’s natural erotic feeling from the other to
the self. The passionless delight in the other becomes a passionate
desire for the other; “flesh of my flesh” becomes “flesh for my
flesh”. As such, it is a devouring, egocentric force, the very opposite of
love.
As St. Maximus the Confessor teaches, in Hans Balthasar’s interpretation
of his thought: “Two elements come together in the concept of filautia, which is the essential fault: egoism and carnal
voluptuousness. To sin is to say no to the authority of God, it is ‘to wish to
be a being-for-oneself’, and in consequence, for man it is to slide towards
sensual pleasure. But in this double element there also lies hidden an internal
contradiction of the sin which manifests itself immediately as its immanent
chastisement. In sensual pleasure, the spirit seeks an egoistical substitute
for its abandonment of God. But this abandonment itself isolates it
egoistically instead of uniting it to the beloved. Voluptuousness ‘divides into
a thousand pieces the unity of nature, and we who take part in this
voluptuousness tear each other apart like ferocious beasts’.
“Filautia has even torn apart the one God
into a multitude of idols as it has torn nature, and ‘to obtain a little more
pleasure, it excites us against each other like animals’. This ‘deceiving and
pernicious love’, this ‘cunning and tortuous voluptuousness’ ends by pitting
our flesh: ‘the flesh of every man is a valley pitted and gnawed by the
continuous waves of the passions’ and ends ‘in the disgust which overthrows the
whole of this first affection’.”[270]
There are many illustrations of the ferocious and death-dealing power of
this fallen sexuality in the Old Testament.
Thus we have the story of the Levite’s concubine, whose body he cut up
in twelve pieces, literally “dividing the unity of nature into pieces” (Judges
19). Again, “the overthrow of the first affection” is illustrated by the story
of the incestuous rape of David’s daughter by his first-born son Amnon. The
sacred writers says that Amnon loved Themar and “was distressed even unto
sickness” because of her. And yet, having raped her, “Amnon hated her with a
very great hatred; for the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the
love with which he had loved her” (II Kings 13.1,2,15).
For, writes St. Maximus the Confessor,
“the torment of suffering is intimately mixed with pleasure, even when it seems
to be snuffed out by the violence of the impassioned pleasure of those who are
possessed by it”. “Nature punishes those who seek to do violence to her to the
extent that they deliver themselves to a manner of living contrary to nature;
they no longer have at their disposal all the forces of nature such as she had
given to them originally; so here they are diminished in their integrity and
thus chastised.” “Wishing to flee the painful sensation of grief, we hurl
ourselves towards pleasure… and in forcing ourselves to soothe the wounds of
grief by pleasure, we thereby confirm still more the sentence directed against
themselves. For it is impossible to find a pleasure to which pain and grief are
not attached.” [271]
St. Maximus again: “Man acquired an
impulse to pleasure as a whole and an aversion to pain as a whole. He fought
with all his strength to attain the one and struggled with all his might to
avoid the other, thinking that in this way he could keep the two apart from
each other, and that he could possess only the pleasure that is linked to self-love
and be entirely without experience of pain, which was impossible. For he did
not realise… that pleasure can never be received without pain; the distress
caused by pain is contained within pleasure.”[272]
This intimate connection between pleasure
and pain means that perhaps the most characteristic of all the sexual
perversions is sado-masochism. For here, as Scruton points out, “there is
frequently an aspect of punishment: the sadist’s punishment of the other for
failing to return his desire or for failing to play sincerely the role that the
sadist has devised for him; the masochist’s desire for punishment, which
relieves him of the burden of a culpable desire. The masochist may indeed
receive the strokes of the whip as a kind of ‘permission’ – a reassurance that
he is paying her and now for his sexual transgression, and that the claims of
conscience have been satisfied.”[273]
Perversion may be defined as the diversion
of sexual desire from a person of the opposite sex (normality) to a body
of the opposite sex (rape, sadomasochism, paedophilia), or to a person of
the same sex (homosexuality), or to an animal (bestiality), or to
an inanimate thing (fetishism). At the root of all forms of perversion
is self-love, the utilization of another, who (or which) is seen as no more
than an instrument for one’s pleasure (or pain). With the possible exception of
homosexuality, all perversions involve a rejection of a fully mutual personal
relationship of love in favour of an impersonal relationship of use (or rather:
abuse).
As for homosexuality, the Apostle Paul
sees its cause in the pagan worship of the creature instead of the Creator, of
which modern atheism and naturalism can be seen to be another form: “When they
knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain
in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing
themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the
incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and
four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to
uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own
bodies between themselves, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and
worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, Who is blessed
forever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even
their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And
likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their
lust (orexei)
one towards another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving
in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet…” (Romans
1.21-26).
St. John Chrysostom comments on this
passage: “Here he sets the pleasure according to nature, which they would have
enjoyed with more sense of security and greater joy, and so have been far
removed from shameful deeds. But they would not; which is why they are quite
beyond the pale of pardon, and have insulted nature itself. And still more
disgraceful than these is the women seeking these couplings, for they ought to
have more sense of shame than men.… Then, having reproached the women first, he
goes on to the men also, and says, ‘And likewise also the men leaving the
natural use of the woman’ This is clear proof of the ultimate degree of
corruption, when both sexes are abandoned. Both he who was called to be the
instructor of the woman and she who was told to become a help like the man now
behave as enemies to one another. Notice how deliberately Paul measures his
words. For he does not say that they loved and desired (hrasqhsan kai epequmhsan) each other but that ‘they
burned in their lust (exekauqhsan en th orexei) for one another’! You see that
the whole of desire (epiqumiaV) comes from an excess which
cannot contain itself within its proper limits. For everything which
transgresses God’s appointed laws lusts after monstrous things which are not
normal. For just as many often abandon the desire for food and come to feed on
earth and small stones, and others, possessed by excessive thirst, often long
even for mire, so these also charged into this explosion of lawless love. But
if you ask, where did this intensity of lust come from? [I answer:] it was from
being abandoned by God. And why were they abandoned by God? Because of their
lawlessness in abandoning Him: ‘men with men working that which is unseemly’.
Do not, he means, because you have heard that they burned, suppose that the
evil was only in desire. For the greater part of it came from their
luxuriousness, which also kindled their lust into flame…. And he called it not
lust, but that which is unseemly, and that rightly. For they both dishonored
nature, and trampled on the laws. And see the great confusion which fell out on
both sides. For not only was the head turned downwards but the feet too were
turned upwards, and they became enemies to themselves and to one another…. It
was meet that the two should be one, I mean the woman and the man. For ‘the two,’
it says, ‘shall be one flesh’. But this was effected by the desire for
intercourse, which united the sexes to one another. This desire the devil first
took away and then, and having changed its direction, thereby divided the sexes
from one another, and made the one to become two in opposition to the law of
God. For it says, ‘the two shall be one flesh’; but he divided the one flesh
into two: here then is one war. Again, these same two parts he provoked to war
both against themselves and against one another. For even women again abused
women, and not men only. And the men stood against one another, and against the
female sex, as happens in a battle by night. So you see a second and third war,
and a fourth and fifth. And there is also another, for beside what has been
mentioned they also behaved lawlessly against nature itself. For when the devil
saw that it is this desire that, principally, draws the sexes together, he was
bent on cutting through the tie, so as to destroy the race, not only by their
not copulating lawfully, but also by their being stirred up to war, and in
sedition against one another.”[274]
Clearly, then, there is a difference in
kind between natural sexual desire, fallen though it is, and unnatural
homosexual desire. (St. Maximus calls all the pleasures and pains, fears
and desires of man in the fallen state “unnatural”, but we will keep to the
commoner Pauline usage.) The one was implanted in nature by God: the other is
unnatural, and is incited by demonic forces outside human nature to which
sinners give access through their idolatrous worship of creation.
Like the demonic lust of “the sons of God”
for the daughters of men, homosexuality is a demonically inspired undermining
of the natural order. Many who have been led to think that they are homosexual
return quickly and joyfully to the natural order once they have been freed from
the demonic power that controlled them. It was homosexuality that brought about
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, so it is justly called the “Sodomite”
sin.
Fornication and
Adultery
Although more “natural” than homosexuality, fornication and adultery
also lead directly to hell (I Corinthians 6.9-10). Fornication consists
in uniting the Body of Christ – for the body of every Christian is a part of
the Body of Christ – to a body that is not Christ’s, and has a different
spirit. “Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I then
take the members of Christ and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.
What? Know ye not that he who is joined to an harlot is one body [with her]?
For two, saith He, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined to the Lord is one
spirit [with Him]. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is outside the
body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.” (I
Corinthians 6.15-17).
All fornication with human beings is adultery from God insofar as the
soul is married to God – and not only the soul, but also the body through the
sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. We shall have more to say on this in
a later chapter. In the meantime let us consider the question: if fornication
consists in uniting the Body of Christ with a body that is not Christ’s, can
there be fornication between Christians who both belong to the Body of Christ?
There can indeed, because while all acts of sexual intercourse create
“one flesh”, not all “one flesh” unions, even between Christians, are lawful
unless they have first been sanctified by the prayers of the Church in the
sacrament of marriage. Marriage, as we shall argue in detail in a later
chapter, is not simply the public recognition of an already accomplished fact,
but involves the bestowal of grace by God. And if a couple, even a Christian
couple, seeks to unite without the grace of God, the grace of God will withdraw
from that one-flesh union, making it a union not within, but outside the Body
of Christ.
Not only sexual intercourse, but also the entertaining of fantasies
about a man or woman who is not one’s spouse is counted as adultery, according
to the words of Christ: “Every man who looks at a woman lustfully has already
committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5.28). Again,
pornographic writing or film-making is sinful, as is the voluntary reading or
watching of such material. This is evident from the literal meaning of the word
“pornography” in Greek, which is “the writing (or description) of fornication”.
The harm done by sexual fantasizing has been described by Archpriest Lev
Lebedev: “A poll carried out by the FBI among sexual murderers showed that they
all had sexual murder in their fantasies for a long time. These were for
them just as real as the murders themselves, while their own real murders, in
their turn ‘could not be distinguished from fantasy’ by the condemned
men. All the murderers confessed that they had used pornography. There
it is, the ‘tail’ by which one can take hold of the clever snake – pornography!
Erotic pictures in journals, books, the cinema, television, on postcards
and in works of art excite sensuality, lustful imaginings, which for
many take the place of reality, since this reality becomes either
completely unnecessary, or they take it as a continuation of their
imaginings, where it must be no less, but even more exotic that the experiences
they have already had in their fantasies… ‘Pictures’ bring many youths
to the very unhealthy passion of solitary self-satisfaction. And this is yet
again deliberately encouraged. According to the data of the journal Communication
Research (December, 1998), the exceptional degree of sexual fantasizing of
the students in the two universities under investigation was linked with the
reading of a pornographic journal well-known in America, which seeks ways of increasing
its production…
“The harm of erotica and pornography, between which there is in fact no
boundary (difference), is not exhausted by what we have said. According to the
data of the same Americans, even ‘soft pornography’ (without illustrations of
cruelty) brings with it an interest in the ‘cruel’ type, sharply reduces
respect for women, lessens ‘satisfaction with one’s own sexual partner’, leads
to ‘a reduction in the valuing of faithfulness, and also a reduction in the
valuing of love in sex’, makes easier betrayal and the falling apart of the
family and, finally, sexual murders and rapes, including of children!
Well, in this respect we do not now have to look at America; we now have more
of all this [in Russia], including the ‘experiments’ such as that of
Chikotillo, than in the U.S.A.”[275]
As Hieromonk Seraphim Rose writes: “In the ‘free world’ a great
exploitative force is that of ‘sex’. It seems to be today a vast, impersonal
power that holds men in its jaws, leading them on not only to reproduce their
kind but – thanks to the many devices for ‘exploiting’ this power more
efficiently – to indulge this impersonal force for its own sake. Some may
object that ‘sex’ is indeed a very ‘personal’ thing, but nothing could be
further from the truth. Like all other human impulses, the sexual instinct may
be subordinated to the power of personality and attain its proper place as an
expression of married, chaste love; but only the most naïve romanticist
could affirm that such is the ‘sex’ that is exalted today. Sex as pleasure, as
an expression of man’s freedom to do what he pleases: this is what it means to
contemporary man. Marriage, banished from the Church, has become a mere license
for sexual activity; sex has become the basis of marriage, another case of the
‘lower’ usurping the place of the higher. The easy divorce laws make of
marriage as practiced by most moderns merely a kind of legalized promiscuity.”[276]
Even sexual behaviour inside lawful marriage which does not serve to
build up that marriage in the image of Christ’s marriage with His Church, such
as the forcing of unnatural sexual acts by one partner on the other, or the
withholding of sexual relations by one partner from the other, must also be
considered to be sinful. By the same token, lawful marriages concluded for money
or the continuation of the family name, and not for love, are no less shameful
than marriages whose sole purpose is the satisfaction of animal desires.
For a marriage that is lawful from a canonical point of view, and to which the
grace of God has been communicated in the sacrament, may nevertheless trample
on the grace that has been given it and fail to imitate the love of Christ and
the Church, and will therefore be found wanting in the balance of God’s
justice.
Vladimir Soloviev distinguishes between three levels of marriage: the
animal, the social and the Divine. Just as a body and a soul without the
life-giving spirit breathed into them by God are fallen, and in the course of
time disintegrate and die, so is it in marriage. If the animal and social
elements are not integrated into the Divine, the marriage dies. Consequently,
the expression of the animal element in a sexual relationship in disjunction
from the Divine is felt to be unnatural by the inner man, that is, human
nature as it was originally created, before the fall, however natural it
may appear to the outer man after the fall. In such a state of
disjunction, therefore, sexual feelings and acts elicit shame - but, it
must be emphasised again, not because sexuality as such and in the
proper context of the integration of the Divine, the social and the animal is
shameful, but precisely because sexuality as something merely animal is
an insult to the human being, who is not a mere animal, nor even a rational
animal, but an animal, as one of the Fathers said, who has received the command
to become a god.
“In general,” writes Soloviev, “speaking of naturalness or
unnaturalness, one must not forget that man is a complex being and that what is
natural for one of his constituent principles or elements may be unnatural for
another and, consequently, unnatural for the whole man.
“For man as an animal the unlimited
satisfaction of his sexual needs by means of a certain physiological act is
completely natural, but man as a moral being finds this contrary to his higher
nature and is ashamed of it… As a social animal it is
natural for man to limit his physiological functioning in relation to other
people by the demands of the social-moral law. This law limits and cuts
off animal functioning from without, making it the means for a social end – the
formation of a family unit. But this does not change the essence of the matter.
The family unit is still based on the external material union of the sexes, it
leaves the man-animal in his previous disintegrated, half-and-half condition,
which necessarily leads to further disintegration of the human being, that is,
to death. If man, beyond his animal nature, were only a social-moral being,
then from these two warring elements – which are identically natural for him –
the final victory would be with the former. The social-moral law and its main
objectification, the family, will lead the animal nature of man into the limits
necessary for the progress of the species; they give order to the mortal life,
but do not open the path to immortality. The individual being is depleted and
dies in the social-moral order of life to just the same degree as if it
remained exclusively under the law of animal life. The elephant and the raven
are even significantly longer lived than the most virtuous and correct man. But
in man, besides his animal nature and social-moral law, there is a third,
higher principle – the spiritual, mystical or Divine. Even here, in the sphere
of love and sexual relations, it is that ‘stone which the builders rejected’
and ‘which is become the head of the corner’. Before physiological union in the
animal nature, which leads to death, and before lawful union in the
social-moral order, which does not save from death, there must be a union in
God, which leads to immortality, because it does not limit only the mortal life
of nature by human law, but also regenerates it by the eternal and incorrupt
power of grace. This third and – in the true order – first element with the
demands that are inherent in it is completely natural for man in his
wholeness as a being that partakes of a higher, Divine principle and mediates
between it and the world. But the two lower elements, the animal nature and the
social law, which are also natural in their place, become contrary to nature
when they are taken separately from the higher element and put in its
place. In the sphere of sexual love not only is every disordered
satisfaction of sensual needs in the manner of the animals (besides the various
monstrous phenomena of sexual pathology) contrary to nature for man: also
unworthy of man and contrary to nature are those unions between people of
different sexes which are concluded and supported only on the basis of
civil law, exclusively for moral-social aims, with the removal or inaction of
the spiritual, mystical principle in man.”[277]
Contraception and Abortion
In the conditions of the fall, the fulfilment of the commandments
concerning marriage and the family requires considerable asceticism, a mental
as well as a physical struggle involving the selfless renunciation of personal
desires for the sake of the family.
Thus Clement of Alexandria writes of the man’s struggle: "The
particular characteristic of the married state is that it gives the man who
desires a perfect marriage an opportunity to take responsibility for everything
in the home which he shares with his wife. The apostle says that one should
appoint bishops who by their oversight over their own house have learned to be
in charge of the whole church... The prize in the contest of men is won by him
who has trained himself by the discharge of the duties of husband and father
and by the supervision of a household, regardless of pleasure and pain - by
him, I say, who in the midst of his solicitude for his family shows himself
inseparable from the love of God and rises superior to every temptation which
assails him through children and wife and servants and possessions."[278]
As for the woman, it is not enough for her simply to bear children: she
is responsible for bringing them up "in faith and love and holiness"
(I Timothy 2.15) – a difficult task at the best of times and extremely
difficult in our age of apostasy.
Is, then,
the begetting of children an essential element of marriage? No, for there have
been many pious childless couples, such as Abraham and Sarah, Joachim and Anna,
and Zachariah and Elizabeth, who had children only very late in life but were
not dishonoured by God for that. As St. John Chrysostom writes: “As for the
procreation of children, marriage does not absolutely enjoin it. That responds
rather to this word of God in Genesis: ‘Increase and multiply and fill
the earth’ (1.28). The proof of this is the large number of marriages which
cannot have children. That is why the first reason for marriage is to regulate
lust, and especially now that the human race has filled the whole earth.”[279]
If, however, the infertility is self-induced, then the couple
is frustrating one of the principal purposes of marriage. It is demonstrating a
lack of faith in the Providence of God, Who, whether He gives children or not,
does all for the best and provides all that is necessary for those who believe
in Him. For who knows? - a child that is not wanted for financial or other
reasons may turn out to be a great benefactor of mankind like Moses, whom the
Egyptians tried to kill at his birth.
“In fact,” writes Fr. John Meyendorff, “childbirth and the raising of
children are indeed a great joy and God’s blessing. There can be no Christian
marriage without an immediate and impatient desire of both parents to receive
and share in this joy. A marriage where children are unwelcome is founded upon
a defective, egoistic and fleshly form of love. In giving life to others, man
imitates God’s creative act and, if he refuses to do so, he not only rejects
his Creator, but also distorts his own humanity; for there is no humanity
without an ‘image and likeness of God’, i.e., without a conscious, or
unconscious desire to be a true imitator of the life-creating Father of all.”[280]
There be no doubt that the killing of an embryo before birth is no less
of a sin than killing one after birth. Thus the very early Teaching of the
Twelve Apostles forbids the killing of embryos, St. Basil the Great
counts it as murder[281], and
the sixth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, St. John the Faster, lists the
following sins in his Penitential: "desire for sterility, abortion,
use of herbs to avoid conception..."[282]
As Nedelsky writes: “The Biblical, patristic, canonical, and liturgical
traditions of the Church all point to the beginning of individual human life at
the moment of conception. Saint Luke in his Gospel tells of the Mother of God’s
visit to Saint Elizabeth, in whose womb Saint John the Baptist leapt for joy at
hearing of the coming of Christ (Luke 1.41-44). Saint Gregory of Nyssa
in On the Soul and Resurrection writes, ‘The beginning of existence is
one and the same for body and soul’. The canons condemn abortion at any
stage of pregnancy, ‘whether the fetus be formed or unformed’ in the words
of Saint Basil the Great (Ep. 188, Canon 3). The Church’s liturgical tradition
likewise recognizes conception as the beginning of existence, celebrating the
Conception of the Mother of God (December 9), Saint John the Baptist (September
23), and Christ Himself in the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25). These
examples, which could easily be multiplied, demonstrate that the Church has
always regarded conception as the beginning of individual human life, and
underscore that embryotic life is fully human and personal.”[283]
Not only abortion and contraception, but also the modern techniques of in
vitro fertilisation, drug-induced fertility and surrogate motherhood, are
forbidden. For while the aim here is not to avoid the bearing of children, the
means used are unnatural and usually murderous (for the producing of one extra
embryo requires the killing of those surplus to the one) or adulterous (for
surrogate motherhood is adultery). Thus God's purpose is in any case
frustrated. For only if He, the Creator, blesses the means and timing of human
procreation, will the family thus formed become a true icon of Christ and the
Church, or of the Holy Trinity.
“Where two or three are gathered together
in My name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18.19). The
Christian family is one such gathering; it is truly a “little church”, as St.
John Chrysostom calls it. Two are sufficient to form such a church if each of
the spouses carries out the obedience given to them – love from the husband,
obedience from the wife. If God wills to increase the two into three, then the
unity is still richer and the likeness to the One God in Trinity still closer.
But if the two wish to prevent their multiplication into three, or on the
contrary create it in an unnatural manner contrary to God’s will, then the icon
is destroyed…
3.
EROS IN CHRIST
God desired a harlot... and has
intercourse with human nature, [whereby] the harlot herself… is transformed
into a maiden.
St. John Chrysostom, On
Eutropius, II, 2.
I have betrothed you to one
spouse, that I might present you a chaste virgin to Christ.
II Corinthians 11.2.
He came to bind to Himself the principle of
desire…, that it might take on a procreative disposition fixed and unalterable
in the good.
St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua
42.
Just as the fall corrupted everything, including the relations between
man and woman, so the Coming of Christ renewed everything, including the
relations between man and woman. The pure streams of Eros, which had been
diverted and defiled by the fall, were restored to their former paths. This was
done by Christ Himself entering into marriage with humanity and recreating
human eros in the image of His Own Divine Eros. Divine Eros took upon
Himself human eros in order to give it new life to it by uniting it to Himself
in a pure and undefiled union.
This marriage of God and man takes place in several stages. In the
first, the new Adam, Christ, is united with the new Eve, the Ever-Virgin Mary,
at the Annunciation and is born from her at the Nativity. In the second, the
Heavenly Spouses renew the blessing on all earthly spouses at the wedding in
Cana of Galilee. In the third, the marriage of Christ with the Church is
prepared through the Cross, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ and the
Descent of the Holy Spirit. In the fourth, Christ enters into union with each
member of the Church through the sacrament of His Body and Blood. In the final,
eschatological stage, He enters into union with the fullness of redeemed
humanity from every age in the Wedding of the Lamb.
The Bride of God at the Annunciation is usually held by the Fathers to
be human nature, or the flesh. Thus St. Augustine writes: “The Bridegroom’s
chamber was the Virgin’s womb, where Bridegroom and Bride, Word and flesh, were
joined together. It is written: ‘And the two shall be in one flesh’, or, as the
Lord says in the Gospel, ‘therefore they are no longer two, but one flesh’ (Genesis
2.24; Matthew 19.6). So finely does Isaiah make the two one, when he
speaks in Christ’s Person, ‘He put a band upon My head as a bridegroom, and
adorned Me as a bride with her ornaments’ (Isaiah 61.10). The one
Speaker makes Himself both Bridegroom and Bride; for they are ‘not two, but one
flesh’, since ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1.14).
When to that flesh is joined the Church, there is the whole Christ, Head and
Body.”[284]
In a more personal sense, Mary herself is the bride. For the parallel
between the marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise and the marriage of Christ and
the Virgin in Nazareth is very close. The first Eve was to the first Adam both
wife and daughter, and the new Eve was to the new Adam both wife and daughter
and mother. For “David the forefather praised thee of old in hymns, O Virgin
Bride of God, calling thee Daughter of Christ the King: Him thou has born as
Mother and hast fed Him as thy Child”.[285]
That Mary is the mother of Christ is obvious. But she is also His
daughter as being His creation. As the
sixth-century Irish Saint Cuchumneus sings:
Mary, O most wondrous Mother,
Gave to her own Father birth,
By Whom washed are all in water,
Who believe throughout the earth.[286]
She is “the daughter of the King” (Psalm
44.12), Christ Himself being the King, as St. Athanasius the Great explains:
“Since He knew that He was to be born of the Virgin, He in no way kept it
silent, but forthwith gave indication thereof, by saying in the 45th
Psalm: ‘Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thine ear: and forget thy
people and thy father’s house. And the King shall greatly desire thy beauty’.
For this is like what Gabriel said: ‘Rejoice, thou who art full of grace, the
Lord is with thee’. For when he spoke of Him as Christ, he at once made known
His human generation that was from the Virgin by the words, ‘Hearken, O
daughter’. And you see Gabriel calls her by her name, ‘Mary’, because he was of
a different nature from her, whilst David with reason calls her ‘daughter’,
since she was to spring from his won seed.”[287]
That Mary was also the bride of Christ is clear from the fact that at
the age of three she is exhorted to forget her own people and her father’s
house in order to be united with the King in the innermost sanctuary of the
Temple. Then, at the Incarnation they became one flesh, as St. Zeno, bishop of
Verona in the fourth century, writes: “O prodigy! Mary conceives of Him Whom
she brings forth!”[288] Again,
St. Proclus of Constantinople writes: “Mary is that beautiful spouse of the Song
of Songs, who put off the old garment, washed her feet, and received the
immortal Bridegroom within her own bridal chamber.”[289]
St. Symeon the Theologian asks who is the bride that God the Father
chose for His Son and for Whom He prepared a marriage feast (Matthew
22.1). And he replies: “the daughter of one who rebelled against Him, one who
committed murder and adultery” – that is to say, Mary, the daughter of David,
who murdered Uriah and committed adultery with his wife. So “here you see the
Master and Lord of all, the Holy of holies, the blessed God and unique
Sovereign, the One Who dwells in unapproachable light, so condescending as to
take from a rebel the bride of His only-begotten Son – Who Himself is
invisible, unknowable, unsearchable, the Creator and Maker of all – and all of
this for your sake and for your salvation! So who is the adulterer and murdered
whose daughter God has chosen as a bride for Himself? Why, it is David, Jesse’s
son, who both slew Urias and committed adultery with his wife. It is David’s
daughter, I mean Mary the all-undefiled and all-pure virgin, who is brought
forth as the bride. I call her all-undefiled and all-pure in relation to us and
to the men of the past, comparing her with them and with us, her servants. In
relation to her Bridegroom and His Father, however, she is simply human – but
still holy, all-holy, and pure and immaculate beyond the people of any
generation. This is the one whom God chose and led to marriage with His Son. In
what manner? Listen carefully.
“God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, send down one of His
servants, I mean Gabriel the archangel, from the heights of His holy place, to
declare to Mary the salutation. The angel descended from above to present the
mystery to the virgin, and said to her: ‘Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with
you!’ And, together with the word of greeting, the personal, co-essential, and
co-eternal Word of God the Father entered wholly into the womb of the maid,
and, by the descent and co-operation of His co-essential Spirit, took on flesh
endowed with intelligence and soul from her all-pure blood, and became man.
Here, then, is the inexpressible union, and this the mystical marriage, of God,
and thus occurred the exchange of God with men.”[290]
In one Church hymn the Virgin says to the Angel, who appeared to her “in
the form of a man”: “Childbirth comes from mutual love: such is the law that
God has given to men… I know not at all the pleasure of marriage: how then dost
thou say that I shall bear a child?”[291]
Clearly she suspected an attempt at seduction, a proposal of unlawful carnal
relations. But the Angel reassured her that while a marriage union was indeed
in question, it would not be carnal union; it would not be a mystery of the
lower kind between fallen men and women, but a higher mystery analogous to the
virginal union of Adam and Eve in Paradise, a virginal union between herself
and the Son of God, Who would come down from His Father in heaven to cleave to
His Bride, becoming one flesh with her, but keeping her ever-virgin, as the
first Adam and Eve remained virgin.
In his Homily on the Annunciation St. Demetrius of Rostov
describes the mystery as follows: “Having received this glad tiding from the
angel, the Most Pure one gave her assent to the will of the Lord and with the
deepest humility replied from her heart, filled with love for God: ‘Behold the
handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to thy word’ (Luke 1.38).
And in the same instant, by the action of the Holy Spirit, the unspeakable
conception took place in her holy womb, without fleshly delight, but not
without spiritual delight. Then the Virgin’s heart with particular fervour
melted with divine desire, and her spirit burned with flaming seraphic love,
and her entire mind, being as if outside itself, submerged itself in
God, ineffably taking delight in His goodness. In this delight of her spirit in
the all-perfect love of God, and her mind in the vision of God, was conceived
the Son of God, and ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’ (John
1.14).”[292]
Thus the
Incarnation of the Word from the Virgin is the real archetype of human
marriage, including the paradisial marriage of Adam and Eve. It is the “great”
mystery in the image and likeness of which the “small” mystery of ordinary
human marriage was created. God became man, Spirit took on flesh, without seed
and “without fleshly delight, but not without spiritual delight”.
As Adam gave
“birth” to Eve in an ecstatic sleep, and then recognized in her “bones of my
bones and flesh of my flesh”, so did the new Eve give birth to the new Adam in
a pure and unfallen ecstasy, recognizing in her Child her own flesh and blood –
indeed, more her flesh and blood than the child of any previous human mother,
in that He was her child alone, having no human father, but being, like the
first Adam, “the Son of God” (Luke 3.37).
For how could
the reunion of God and man after so many centuries of separation not be the
occasion of the greatest spiritual joy? How could the human race not rejoice
that in the person of the Virgin it was pregnant again by the Spirit, and able
to bring forth spiritual fruit to its Maker and Husband? All true marriages
look back to their archetype in Paradise. But they also look back to, and take
their truth and grace from, “the archetype of the archetype”, the marriage of
God and man, Christ and the Virgin. And it is through “the archetype of the
archetype” that marriage, and human life in general, is restored to its
archetype in Paradise.
Since marriage is the type of such great and joyous events, its nature
is essentially festal, even in the fall. When a couple marries in the Lord, the
marriage service reminds us of the ecstatic marriage of Adam and Eve, of the
righteous marriages of the Old Testament, but, above all, of the supernatural
marriage of God and man at the Incarnation. That is why the icon of the
Incarnation precedes the married couple into the church, and, after the human
couple have been crowned and are being led, holding their crowns, three times
around the table, the choir chants: “Rejoice, O Isaiah! The Virgin is with
child, and has borne a Son, Emmanuel, Who is both God and man; and Orient is
His name. Him do we magnify, and call the Virgin blessed…”
However, one may object, is not the Incarnation an archetype, not so
much of marriage in the flesh, as of the virginal life? In fact, is it not a
sign of the eschatological abolition of sexuality? After all, did not Christ by
His virginal birth from the All-holy Virgin achieve the purpose of marriage,
which is procreation, without the sexuality that accompanies it in the
fallen world?
The short answer to these last two questions is: yes. However, there is
no contradiction here with what it has been written above, because the
Incarnation of the Word is the archetype both of the married life and
of the virginal life. For, as we shall see in more detail later, they are both
marital mysteries…
St. Maximus draws a distinction between two kinds of birth: “genesis” (genesiV), or “coming into being” as the
direct creation of God without sexual intercourse, and “gennisis” (gennhsiV), or “generation” through sexual
intercourse. Adam came into being through “genesis”, while all his children
born in the fall were generated through “gennisis”. “Genesis” is the superior
form of birth, because it involves no corruption or transmission of sin; and
Christ as the New Adam, desiring to recreate human nature in His own Person in
the glory of the original, unfallen creation, was bound to be born in this
superior, sinless way. At the same time, however, He wished to assume the
fallen nature of man in order to destroy that fall within himself, to be “made
of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law” (Galatians
4.4-5). And so His birth combined elements of both “genesis” and “gennisis”,
being on the one hand from a Virgin (the equivalent of the virgin earth from
which the first Adam was formed) without the help of man but with the Divine
“inbreathing”, and on the other bearing all the signs in His body of the fall
that is transmitted through sexual intercourse, having corruptible flesh
subject to all the innocent passions, such as hunger, thirst, weariness, fear
and pain. Christ’s “genesis” guaranteed His freedom
from original sin, and His “gennisis” - His passibility in the image of our
passibility. “For when, in His voluntary abasement, He underwent the
human birth punitively instituted after the fall, He assumed the natural
liability to passions but not sinfulness. He became the New Adam by assuming a
sinless creaturely origin [genesis] and yet submitting to a passible birth
[gennisis]. Perfectly combining the two parts in Himself in a reciprocal
relation, He effectively rectified the deficiency of the one with the extreme
of the other, and vice versa…”[293]
Does this mean that Christ abolished sexuality through His own virginal
conception and nativity? If the only purpose of sexuality was to continue the
species in the fall, then the answer is: yes. For Christ’s conception and
nativity did indeed show, as St. Maximus writes, “that there also happened to
be another method of increasing the human race, a method foreknown to God,
which would have prevailed if the first man had kept the commandment.” And in a
sense He did overcome the division between the sexes – but without abolishing
it entirely.[294]
But, as we have seen in the first chapter, there were other purposes.
The most important of these was that the lower marital mystery between man and
woman should reflect the higher marital mystery between God and His creation,
between Christ and the Church. And this greater mystery began to be unfolded
precisely here, at the conception and nativity of Christ. For in His union with
the Virgin Christ both gave an archetype of virginity, in that it was
completely pure and without carnal desire, and of marriage, in that it was
truly a union “in one flesh”…
The unfolding of the archetype is accomplished at the same time as the
purification of the type. If the marriage of Christ and the Virgin is the first
miracle of the Gospel, the second is the miracle at the marriage of Cana in
Galilee. For the new Adam and the new Eve, having recreated in their own
relationship the true image of God’s relationship with man in its original
virginal-marital purity and joy, now wish to communicate that purity and joy to
the marriages of their children, the children of the Church.
“The history of the Church in Paradise
begins with a marriage,” notes Troitsky, “and the history of the New Testament
Church begins with a marriage”.[295] Of
course, there is a difference. In Paradise, it was God Himself Who celebrated
the sacrament and created the one-flesh union. Here, in Cana of Galilee, He is
not the celebrant; He is only a guest. And yet He is a guest Who by His
presence changes the marriage in a significant way; it becomes “a
mystery of the presence of Christ”.[296] As the 13th Canon of
the Sixth Ecumenical Council says, “marriage was instituted by God and blessed
by His presence”.
The nature of the blessing can be inferred
from the nature of the miracle He wrought: the changing of the water into wine.
By this miracle, Christ showed that He came not only to approve of marriage,
but to change it, to raise it to a higher level, to rescue it from the
fall. As St. Andrew of Crete says: “Marriage is honourable in all, and the
marriage-bed undefiled. For on both Christ has given His blessing, eating in
the flesh at the wedding in Cana, turning the water into wine and revealing His
first miracle, to bring, thee, my soul, to a change of life.”[297] Christ
came that we “might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John
10.10). And here He comes to an ordinary human couple so as to give their
marriage more abundant life, to transform the water of their fallen love into
“the new wine of the birth of Divine joy of the Kingdom of Christ”.[298] As St.
John Chrysostom says: “If thou wilt, He will even now work miracles as He did
then; He will make even now the water wine; and what is much more wonderful, He
will convert this unstable and dissolving pleasure, this cold desire, and
change it into the spiritual. This is to make water wine.”[299]
And the Mother of Jesus was there (John
2.1). Of no other miracle in the Gospel is it recorded that “the Mother of
Jesus was there”, and in no other miracle of Christ is such an important
intercessory role ascribed to another human agent. The reason is clear: the
miracle accomplished here is the restoration of the relationship between man
and woman to its original purity and joy, as it was with Adam and Eve in
Paradise. And how was that to be done without the participation of both the new
Adam and the new Eve, in whose own relationship that restoration had already
been accomplished, and in whose image marriage was originally established?
Again, if the original rupture in the relationship was caused by the sinful
approach of the first Eve to the devil, how was that to be reversed if not by
the innocent approach of the new Eve to God?
But Christ replies in an unexpected
manner: Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come (2.4).
Many have interpreted this as a rebuke to the Virgin, as if it was wrong for
her to put herself forward and intercede at this time. However, the Virgin does
not then act as if she had been rebuked. On the contrary, she acts as if she
has received some kind of assurance from Him, and tells the servants: Whatsoever
He saith unto you, do it (2.5). Moreover, Christ does not refuse her
request, but performs the miracle.
One possibility is that Christ did not
want to perform a miracle without being asked to do it by the hosts. He was not
refusing to do a miracle, but everything had to be done at the right time and
in the right manner. So the Mother speaks to the servants, according to Blessed
Theophylact, “in order that her request should be strengthened through the
approach and petition of them themselves, so it should be clear that the
refusal was not as a result of powerlessness, but with the aim of averting the
opinion that he was resorting to the working of a miracle out of boastfulness
and empty pomposity”.[300]
The Lord’s use of the word Woman
recalls the prophecy that was given to the first Eve in the garden concerning
the Woman whose Seed, it was promised, would crush the head of the serpent (Genesis
3.15). Now the Virgin is indeed the Woman of that prophecy, as Christ is the
Seed Who will crush the power of satan – only the time for that victory is not
yet come. So it is as if He is saying: “What is my relationship with you? Am I
the Seed that is to crush the head of the serpent and you the Woman who gives
birth to Him? Yes indeed: but do not think that I have yet achieved that
victory, or that you can yet ask Me to act openly as the Victor over sin and
death. Mine hour – the hour of My Crucifixion when I will crush the
serpent’s head - is not yet come. Only when I have been crucified and
risen from the dead will I be able to send the Spirit to mankind. Then and only
then will the new wine of Divine joy be poured out upon all flesh.”
Christ often refers to the Crucifixion as Mine
hour (John 7.30, 8.20,12.23, 12.27, 13.1, 16.32, 17.1). And that He
is doing so again here is confirmed by St. Irenaeus of Lyons: “With Him nothing
is incongruous or out of due season, just as with the Father there is nothing
incongruous. For all these things were known by the Father; but the Son works
them out at the proper time in perfect order and sequence. This was the reason
why, when Mary was urging Him on to work the wonderful miracle of the wine, and
was desirous before the time to partake of the cup of emblematic significance
[the Eucharist], the Lord checking her untimely haste, said…”[301]
According to St. Gaudentius of Breschia,
the Lord was not rebuking the Virgin, but looking forward to the Cross: “Our
Lord was speaking in a mystery, meaning thereby that the wine of the Holy
Spirit could not be given to the Gentiles before His Passion and Resurrection,
as the Evangelist attests: ‘As yet the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus
was not yet glorified’ (John 7.39). With reason, then, at the beginning
of His miracles, did He thus answer His Mother, as though He said: ‘Why this
thy hasty suggestion, O Woman? Since the hour of My Passion and Resurrection is
not yet come, when, - all powers whether of teaching or of divine operations
being then completed – I have determined to die for the life of believers.
After My Passion and Resurrection, when I shall return to My Father, there
shall be given to them the wine of the Holy Spirit.’ Whereupon she too, that
most blessed one, knowing the profound mystery of this answer, understood that
the suggestion she had just made was not slighted or spurned, but, in
accordance with that spiritual reason, was for a time delayed. Otherwise, she
would never have said to the waiters, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it.”[302]
And there were set six waterpots of
stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three
firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water
(2.6-7). “The stone water-pots,” writes Blessed Theophylact, “were used for the
purification of the Jews. For the Jews washed almost every day and only then
began to eat. If they touched a leper, or a corpse, or had had sexual intercourse
with a woman, they washed as being already unclean. And since Palestine was
waterless and it was impossible to find many springs, they always filled
water-pots with water so as not to have to run to the rivers when they were
defiled.”[303]
The waterpots may be interpreted to refer
to human families, each containing two or three people (childless and fertile
marriages respectively). Since the fall, these had become stony and dry through
the activity of the passions. But the Lord came in order to purify marriage,
washing it clean of every stain, and then pour into it the grace of the Holy
Spirit, thereby raising it to a higher level even than it had been in Paradise.
However, the pots, the water and the
number six may together constitute a symbol of the fallen human nature. For man
was created on the sixth day from water and clay and the breath of the Holy
Spirit, but the whole mixture had become stony and dry through the loss of the
Spirit. Now the Creator, having taken flesh from the virgin earth of the Virgin
Mary, recasts the bodies and souls of men through the water and the Spirit, so
that they may become fitting vessels, “new bottles” into which to pour the “new
wine” of the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit (Mark 2.22). Thus the
miracle signifies the transformation of the fallen man of the old creation into
the “new creature” recreated by Christ in and through the Holy Spirit.
As St. Gaudentius says: “They had no
wine because the wedding wine was consumed, which means that the Gentiles
had not the wine of the Holy Spirit. So what it here referred to is not the
wine of these nuptials, but the wine of the preceding nuptials; for the nuptial
wine of the Holy Spirit had ceased, since the prophets had ceased to speak, who
before had ministered unto the people of Israel. For all the prophets and the
Law had prophesied until the coming of John, nor was there any one to give
spiritual drink to the Gentiles who thirsted, but the Lord Jesus was awaited,
Who would fill the new bottles with new wine by His baptism, ‘for the old
things have passed away: behold all things are made new’ (II Corinthians
5.17).”[304]
Consistent with this interpretation is the
saying of Philo the Alexandrian, who saw in Melchizedek a type of the Word Who
would “bring forth wine instead of water, and give your souls to drink, and
cheer them with unmixed wine, in order that they may be wholly occupied with a
divine intoxication, more sober than sobriety itself”.[305]
However, the reference to Melchizedek reminds us that he brought forth “bread
and wine” to Abraham, which, as St. Cyprian of Carthage tells us, is a type of
the offering of bread and wine to God at the Eucharist.[306]
Therefore the miracle of the transformation of water into wine may be a
foreshadowing of the miracle of the transformation of wine into blood at the
Mystical Supper.
For, as St Cyril of Jerusalem writes: “He
once in Cana of Galilee turned the water into wine, akin to blood, and is it
incredible that He should have turned wine into blood? When called to a bodily
marriage, He miraculously wrought that wonderful work; and on the children of
the bride-chamber shall He not much rather be acknowledged to have bestowed the
fruition of His Body and Blood?”[307]
But this greatest of miracles must also await
“My hour”, the hour of the Crucifixion of Christ…
And He saith unto them, Draw out now,
and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of
the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was
(but the servants which drew the water knew), the governor of the feast called
the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth
good wine, and when they have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou
hast kept the good wine until now (2.8-10).
In the beginning, in Paradise, the
Governor of the feast of life, God the Father, set forth the good wine of the
paradisial, unfallen eros. But this wine was turned into water by the fall. Now
the Divine Bridegroom of the human race, has turned that water into a wine
better than the original, for it has been mixed with an infusion from “the true
Vine” (John 15.1). And this wine, squeezed out by the winepress of the
Cross, and distributed in abundance on the Day of Pentecost, has inebriated
those who follow Him with the “sober intoxication” of the Holy Spirit (Acts
2.13).
The Wedding of the Lamb
This beginning of miracles did Jesus in
Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth His glory, and His disciples believed on
Him (2.11). The grace of the Holy Spirit is called glory in the
Gospel. It was first manifested at the Incarnation, when we beheld His
glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father (1.14). The glory of
this grace was such that it transformed human nature into a fitting Bride for
the Son.
However, the Incarnation was only the
beginning of the mystery, its firstfruits, as it were; the fullness of
grace, and the communication of the mystery to the whole of mankind, could not
come before the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. “For the Holy Spirit was not
yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7.39) by His
Sacrifice on the Cross. Only after the Cross could all mankind enter into union
with God through the Church, the Bride of Christ, each individual Christian
becoming a bride of Christ through his participation in the sacraments. Until
then, there was a glimpse of the coming glory at Cana, and an announcement of
the coming glory, “the Kingdom of God is at hand”, by St. John the Forerunner,
"the friend of the Bridegroom" (John 3.29), who continued to
call the Bride to the marriage feast of the Lamb until his own martyric death.
But the hour of Christ was not yet come…
The death of the Forerunner marked the end
of the preparation period. The Bridegroom now set off to meet the Bride, to
consummate His union with Her on the Cross, to rise from the Bridal chamber of
the tomb, and finally to bestow the gift of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles
so that through them He could enter into a mystical marriage with all the
children of the Church throughout all generations. For “it was for her [the
Church’s] sake, writes St. Methodius of Olympus, “that the Word left His
heavenly Father and came down to earth in order to cling to His Spouse, and
slept in the ecstasy of His passion”.[308]
The Cross was the climax both of pain and of joy. Through the pain and
sorrow the sins of the Bride were wiped out, and she was thereby made worthy to
enter into the joy of the Bridegroom. And so at the moment of death pain passed
into joy: “Through the Cross joy is come into the world”.
At that moment the union was consummated with the words “it is finished”
(consummatum est), and "forthwith came there out blood and
water" (John 19.34) - the seed of the Church, the fruit of the
consummated union. Just as the first Adam gave birth to the first Eve, the
mother of all who live only to die again, so the new Adam gave birth to the new
Eve, the Church, the Mother of all who die to themselves in order to live
eternally. And like the first Adam the new Adam gives birth out of His side, in
an ecstatic sleep, the sleep of death that gives birth to life.[309]
St. John Chrysostom writes: "We all know that Eve came from the
side of Adam himself. Scripture has told this plainly, that God put Adam into a
deep sleep and took one of his ribs, and fashioned the woman. But how can we
show that the Church also came from the side of Christ? Scripture explains this
too. When Christ was lifted up on the cross, after he had been nailed to it and
had died, one of the soldiers pierced His side and there came out blood and
water. From that blood and water the whole Church has arisen. He Himself bears
witness to this when He says, 'Unless one is born again of water and the
Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of heaven.' He calls the blood 'spirit'. We
receive birth from the water of baptism, and we are nourished by His blood. Do
you see how we are made from His flesh and His bones, as we are given birth and
nourished by that blood and water? Just as the woman was fashioned when Adam
slept, so also, when Christ had died, the Church was formed from His
side."[310]
The children of the Church, the fruit of the command to "be
fruitful and multiply" (Genesis
1.28), are brought into being by the water and the blood and the Spirit
which flow from the side of Christ. For "there are three that bear witness
on earth: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three are
one..." (I John 5.8). But since this is the mystery of marriage,
the higher mystery of the marriage of Christ and the Church, it is the work not
only of the new Adam, but also of the new Eve; and the new Eve must be present
with the new Adam. And the new Eve is there; in fact she is the first to
receive the blood falling from His side.[311] Moreover,
the new Adam again addresses her as the Woman rather than simply his
Mother: “Woman, behold thy son” (John 19.26). John is the new son of the
new Adam and the new Eve, a virgin son of virgin parents, and one born, as he
himself writes, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of
man, but of God” (John 1.13).
The link between the Cross and Cana is emphasised in the Church service
for Great Friday: “Seeing her Lamb led to the slaughter, Mary His Mother
followed Him with the other women and in her grief she cried: ‘Where dost Thou
go, my Child? Why dost Thou run so swiftly? Is there another wedding in Cana,
and art Thou hastening there, to turn the water into wine?”
[312]
And then, on the third day (the marriage at Cana was also on the
third day (John 2.1)), the Bridegroom emerges from the
bridal-chamber of the tomb in the radiant beauty of His resurrected and
glorified Body. “Adorn thyself, exult and rejoice, O Jerusalem, for thou hast
seen Christ the King, like a bridegroom coming forth from the tomb.”[313]
According to the constant tradition of the Church, the first to meet Him
then was Mary, His Mother, from whom He had received His Body at the
Annunciation, and who had stood at the foot of the Cross.[314] In the
Gospel account, however, it was not Mary the Virgin whom the Lord met and
hailed on the morning of the Resurrection, but Mary Magdalene (John 20.
13-16). There is no contradiction here, however: the first meeting was veiled
in silence, for fear of profanation (the Jews would have ridiculed a mother's
witness), while the second was proclaimed to the world...[315]
But later the two Marys go together to the tomb (Matthew 28.1),
for they represent the two aspects, as it were, of the Church. The one is
already "holy and without blemish", "not having spot, or
wrinkle, or any such thing" (Ephesians 5.27); while the other is
"black, but comely" (Song of Songs 1.5), being not yet
completely purified through repentance. The one represents the Church
Triumphant, already "full of grace" (Luke 1.28) and crowned
with the Bridegroom at the right hand of the Father; while the other is the
Church Militant, still having to struggle with sin both within and outside her.
Mary Magdalene mistakes Christ for the gardener - we remember that the
first Adam was a gardener. But like Eve after the fall Mary is not yet allowed
to touch the Tree of Life: "Touch Me not, for I have not yet ascended to
My Father" (John 20.17). The other myrrh-bearers, on the other
hand, "took hold of His feet and worshipped Him" (Matthew
28.9). Again we have a distinction between two kinds of believers: those who
through purity and repentance have been initiated into the mysteries and can
enter into full union with the Bridegroom, and those whose thoughts have not
yet ascended far enough above earthly things to grasp the Divinity of Christ,
for they still see Him primarily as a man, rather than as God seated at the
right hand of the Father.
For now, in the light of the Resurrection, it is no longer permitted to
love the Lord as a man only. As St. Ephraim the Syrian writes: "As long as
He was a servant, all men had power over His Body, since publicans and sinners
came to touch Him. But once He was established as Lord, the fear which He
inspired was the fear of God."[316]
St. Cyril of Alexandria gives this interpretation a eucharistic
application: “We too drive away from the holy table those who are indeed
convinced of the Godhead of Christ, and have already made profession of faith,
that is, those who are already catechumens, when they have not as yet been
enriched with the Holy Spirit. For He does not dwell in those who have not
received Baptism. But when they have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit,
then indeed there is nothing to hinder them from touching the Saviour Christ.
Therefore, also, to those wish to partake of the blessed Eucharist, the
ministers of Divine mysteries say, ‘Holy things to the holy’, teaching that
participation in holy things is the due reward of those who are sanctified in the
Spirit.”[317]
It is, therefore, only after the Ascension that the Bride finally
understands that the Bridegroom's physical and tangible presence is not
necessary for her continued union with Him, Who as God is in all places and
fills all things. But having witnessed His Ascension, and having ascended in
spirit with Him, she can return to the arena of her earthly pilgrimage
"with great joy" (Luke 24.52). And this spiritual ascension
takes place in the soul of every chosen Christian, weaning him from reliance on
his physical senses and carnal feelings; for “though we once regarded Christ
after the flesh, now we do so no longer" (II Corinthians 5.6).
Especially is this necessary in approaching the Body of Christ in the
Eucharist, where we must not trust our physical senses, but by faith alone
“discern the Body of the Lord” (I Corinthians 11.29).
And yet the Bride is not deprived of the
Bridegroom, even physically, after the Ascension. For ten days later, at
Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends upon her in the Upper Room, and through the
ministry of the apostles the mystery of the marriage in the flesh of the Bride
and the Bridegroom is accomplished throughout the world, in the sacraments of
Baptism, Chrismation and the Eucharist.
And from that moment the union is
permanent, unless the Bride commits adultery. For, as St. Symeon the New
Theologian says, “how can the bride be separated from her spouse, or the
husband from his wife to whom he is once united? The legislator, tell me, will
he not observe the law? The one who says: ‘They will be two in one flesh’, how
will the man not be totally spirit with her? For the woman is in the man and
the man is in the woman and the soul is united in God and God is in the soul”.[318]
But then comes the final Day when the
Bridegroom returns at the midnight of world history (Matthew 25.6) in
order to rescue His Bride, complete her transfiguration and resurrection in
both soul and body, and take her into the heavenly Bridal-chamber. In this
sense Mine hour is not yet come until the very end of time, when all
those who do not have a clean wedding-garment, who are “spots in your feasts of
charity” (Jude 12), have been cast out (Matthew 22.13).
Only then is the scene properly set for
the heavenly vision: "And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down
out of heaven from God, prepared as a Bride for her Husband..." (Revelation
21.2).
The Two Mysteries
The mystery of the marital union of each believer with Christ in the
sacraments of Baptism, Chrismation and the Eucharist is the higher mystery of
which the lower mystery of human marriage is the type and the icon. That is
why, when the Apostle Paul is talking of the lower mystery of human marriage,
his mind is immediately lifted to its archetype: “but I speak of Christ and the
Church” (Ephesians 5.32). Even earlier in the chapter he switches easily
from the lower mystery – “so ought men to love their wives as their own bodies”
(v. 28) – to the higher – “for we are members of His Body, of His flesh, and of
His bones” (v. 30).
The Holy Fathers take up the same theme
and imagery. Thus St. Macarius the Great writes: “Let your soul have communion
with Christ, as bride with bridegroom”.[319] And
Blessed Theophylact writes: “He took human nature as His bride and united her
to Himself, wedding her and cleaving to her, becoming One Flesh. Indeed, He did
not make just one wedding, but many. For every day the Lord in heaven is wedded
to the souls of the saints.”[320] For,
writes St. Symeon the New Theologian, “it is truly a marriage which takes
place, ineffable and divine: God unites Himself with each one – yes, I repeat
it, it is my delight – and each becomes one with the Master. If therefore, in
your body, you have put on the total Christ, you will understand without
blushing all that I am saying.”[321]
Again, St. John of Kronstadt writes: “The
Liturgy is the continually repeated solemnization of God’s love for mankind,
and of His all-powerful mediation for the salvation of the whole world, and of
every member separately: the marriage of the Lamb – marriage of the King’s Son,
in which the bride of the Son of God is every faithful soul, and the giver of
the Bride is the Holy Spirit.”[322]
However, before
examining the two mysteries in more detail, it will be worthwhile to emphasise
that the lower mystery, though lower, is still a mystery – indeed, “a great
mystery”, in St. Paul’s words. Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich writes: "It is
a great mystery when a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his
wife. The Apostle himself, who has been raised to the third heaven and beheld
many heavenly mysteries, calls the marriage of natural man on earth a great
mystery. It is the mystery of love and life... The only mystery that exceeds
this [the mystery of human marriage] is the mystery of Christ’s bond with His
Church. Christ calls Himself the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride. Christ so
loves the Church that He left His heavenly Father for her - though remaining
equal with Him in unity of essence and divinity - and came down to earth and
clave to his Church. He suffered for her sake that He might, by His Blood,
cleanse her from sin and from all impurity and make her worthy to be called His
Bride. He warms the Church with His love, feeds her with His Blood, and
enlivens, enlightens and adorns her with His Holy Spirit." [323]
“Yes, for it is
truly great,” writes St. John Chrysostom. “What human reckoning will be able to
grasp the nature of what takes place in marriage when one considers that the
young wife, who has been nourished with her mother’s milk, and kept at home,
and judged worthy of such careful upbringing, suddenly, in a single moment,
when she comes to the hour of marriage, forgets her mother’s labor pains and
all her other care, forgets her family life, the bonds of love, and, in a word,
forgets everything, and gives over her whole will to that man whom she never
saw before that night? Her life is so complete changed that thereafter that man
is everything to her; she holds him to be her father, her mother, her husband,
and every relative one could mention. No longer does she remember those who
took care of her for so many years. So intimate is the union of these two that
thereafter they are not two but one.
“Adam, the
first-formed man, with prophetic eyes foresaw this very thing and said: ‘She
shall be called woman, because she was taken out of her man. Wherefore, a man
shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they two
shall be one flesh.’ The same thing could be said of the husband, because he
too has forgotten his parents and his father’s house to unite himself and
cleave to the wife who on that night is joined to him. Furthermore, to point
out the closeness of this union, the Holy Scripture did not say: ‘He shall be
united to a wife’, but ‘He shall cleave to his wife’. Nor was Holy Writ content
with that, but added: ‘And they two shall be one flesh’. For this reason Christ
too brought forward this testimony and said: ‘Therefore, now they are no longer
two, but one flesh’. So intimate is this union and adherence that the two of
them are one flesh. Tell me, what reckoning will be able to discover this, what
power of reason will be able to understand what takes place? Was not that
blessed teacher of the whole world correct in saying that it is a mystery? And
he did not simply say ‘a mystery’, but: ‘This is a great mystery’.”[324]
In another place
the same holy father expands on this idea: “The girl who has always been kept
at home and has never seen the bridegroom, from the first day loves and
cherishes him as her own body. Again, the husband, who has never seen her,
never shared even the fellowship of speech with her, from the first day prefers
her to everyone, to his friends, his relatives, even his parents. The parents
in turn, if they are deprived of their money for another reason, will complain,
grieve, and take the perpetrators to court. Yet they entrust to a man, whom
often they have never even seen before…, both their own daughter and a large
sum as dowry. They rejoice as they do this and they do not consider it a loss.
As they see their daughter led away, they do not bring to mind their closeness,
they do not grieve or complain, but instead they give thanks. They consider it
an answer to their prayers when they see their daughter led away from their
home taking a large sum of money with her. Paul had all this in mind: how the
couple leave their parents and bind themselves to each other, and how the new
relationship becomes more powerful than the long-established familiarity. He saw
that this was not a human accomplishment. It is God Who sows these loves in men
and women. He caused both those who give in marriage and those who are married
to do this with joy. Therefore Paul said, ‘This is a great mystery’.”[325]
However, Paul goes on to say: “But I speak concerning Christ and
the Church”(v. 32). The word “but” indicates that while the lower mystery of
human marriage provides apt imagery for a description of the higher mystery,
one must not think that they are the same mystery. This would amount to
a pagan “sexualization of salvation” which is not the apostle’s meaning.
“Nevertheless,” he immediately continues, “as for every one of you, let each
love his wife as himself’ (v. 33). In other words, they are not the same
mystery, and the higher must not be reduced to the lower, but also the lower is
not to be despised, being an imitation of the higher. As St. John Chrysostom
writes: “The blessed Moses, - or rather, God – surely reveals in Genesis that
for two to become one flesh is a great and wonderful mystery. Now Paul speaks
of Christ as the greater mystery; for He left the Father and came down to us
and married His Bride, the Church, and became one spirit with her: ‘he who is
united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him’ (I Corinthians 6.17).
Paul says well, ‘This is a great mystery’, as if he were saying, ‘Nevertheless
the allegorical meaning does not invalidate married love’”.[326] Again,
as Bishop Theophan the Recluse writes: “With this mystical, spiritual
understanding by the Apostle of the command concerning marriage, one might come
to the thought that in Christianity, according to the thought of the Apostle,
marriage in the flesh is in itself unfitting. St. Paul replies to this: v. 33.
‘Thus let each of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife respect her
husband’. It is as if the Apostle says: ‘I understood the words on marriage in
a mystical sense. However, this does not repeal the law expressed literally
here by which the relations of husband and wife are defined.’”[327]
St. Paul’s words
on the two mysteries come after he has outlined the different duties of husband
and wife. The husband is exhorted to love his wife as Christ loves the Church,
and the wife - to obey her husband as the Church obeys Christ (Ephesians
5.21-30). The husband is exhorted above all to love his wife because it was a
failure of true love that caused Adam to neglect to protect his wife against
the wiles of the serpent, although he himself was not deceived by him (I
Timothy 2.14). And the wife is exhorted above all to obey her husband
because it was disobedience that caused her to eat of the fruit without
consulting with her husband, although she knew the command of God and her
origin from her husband.[328] Thus
every Christian husband is exhorted to correct the fall of Adam by his love for
his wife in imitation of the new Adam, just as every Christian wife is exhorted
to correct the fall of Eve by her obedience to her husband in imitation of the
new Eve. As the spouses come closer to this goal, the lower mystery partakes
more and more fully of the grace of its archetype in such a way that, as St.
Gregory the Theologian writes, “in every marriage, Christ is venerated in the
husband and the Church in the wife”.[329]
The difference
in the roles of the sexes (here we return to theme first treated in chapter 1)
is described by St. John Chrysostom: "Why does Paul speak of the husband
being joined to the wife, but not of the wife to the husband? Since he is
describing the duties of love, he addresses the man. He speaks to the woman
concerning respect, saying that the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ
is the head of the Church; but to the husband he speaks of love, and obliges
him to love, and tells him how he should love, thus binding and cementing him to
his wife. If a man leaves his father for his wife's sake, and then abandons her
for whose sake he left his father, what pardon can he deserve? Do you not see,
husband, the great honor that God desires you to give your wife? He has taken
you from your father and bound [literally 'nailed'] you to her. How can a
believing husband say that he has no obligation if his spouse disobeys him?
Paul is lenient only when an unbeliever wishes to separate: 'But if the
unbelieving partner desires to separate, let it be so; in such a case the
brother or sister is not bound' (I Corinthians 7.15). And when you hear
Paul say 'fear' or 'respect', ask for the respect due from a free woman, not
the fear you would demand from a slave. She is your body; if you do this, you
dishonor yourself by dishonoring your own body. What does this 'respect'
entail? She should not stubbornly contradict you, and not rebel against your
authority as if she were the head of the house; this is enough. If you desire
greater respect, you must love as you are commanded. Then there will be no need
for fear; love itself will accomplish everything. The female sex is rather weak
and needs a lot of support, a lot of condescension... Provide your wife with
everything and endure troubles for her sake; you are obliged to do so. Here
Paul does not think it appropriate to illustrate his point with outside
sources, as he does in many other cases. The wisdom of Christ, so great and
forceful, is sufficient, especially in the matter of the wife's subjection...
The wife is a secondary authority, but nevertheless she possesses real
authority and equality of dignity while the husband retains the role of
headship; the welfare of the household is thus maintained. Paul uses the
example of Christ to show that we should not only love but also govern, 'that
she might be holy and without blemish'. The word 'flesh' and the word 'cling'
both refer to love, and making her 'holy and without blemish' refer to
headship. Do both these things, and everything else will follow. Seek the things
which please God, and those which please men will follow soon enough. Instruct
your wife, and your whole household will be in order and harmony. Listen to
what Paul says: 'If there be anything they desire to know, let them ask their
husbands at home' (I Corinthians 14.35). If we regulate our households
in this way, we will also be fit to oversee the Church, for indeed the
household is a little Church. Therefore it is possible for us to surpass all
others in virtue by becoming good husbands and wives."[330]
Vladimir
Soloviev continues the theme: “As God relates to His creation, as Christ
relates to His Church, so must the husband relate to his wife. These words are
as well known as they are little understood. As God creates the universe, as
Christ builds up the Church, so must man create and build up his feminine
complement. That the man represents the active, and the woman the passive
principle, that the former must in an educative way influence the mind and
character of the latter – these, of course, are elementary propositions, but we
have in mind not this superficial relationship, but that ‘great mystery’ of
which the apostle speaks. This great mystery represents a substantial analogy,
albeit not identity, between the human and the Divine relationship. After all,
the building up of the Church is already distinct from the creation of the
universe by God as such. God creates the universe out of nothing, that is, out
of pure potentiality of being or emptiness, which is later being filled, that
is, receives from the activity of God real forms of comprehensible things,
while Christ builds up the Church out of material which has already been shaped
into many forms, given life and in some of its parts self-acting life, to which
only the principle of new, spiritual life needs to be communicate in a new,
higher sphere of unity. Finally, man has for his creative action material in
the person of the woman, who is equal to him in her level of actualization, and
over whom his only superiority is… the right and duty of taking the first step
on the path to perfection, and not actual perfection. God relates to creation
as the All to nothing, that is, as the absolute fullness of being to pure
potentiality of being; Christ relates to the Church as actual perfection to the
potential of perfection, which is being formed into actual perfection; but the
relationship between husband and wife is the relationship of two differently
acting, but equally imperfect potentials that are attaining perfection only
through a process of mutual influence. In other words, God receives nothing
from creation for himself, that is, no addition, but gives everything to it;
Christ receives no addition from the Church in the sense of perfection, but
gives all perfection to her, but He receives from the Church an addition in the
sense of the fullness of His collective body; finally, man and his feminine
alter ego mutually complete each other not only in a real, but also in an ideal
sense, attaining perfection only through mutual interaction. Man can constructively
restore the image of God in the living object of his love only in such as at
the same time restore this image in himself too; but for this he does not have
strength in himself, for if he did, he would not need restoration; but not
having it in himself, he must receive it from God. Consequently, man (the
husband) is the creative, constructive principle in relation to his feminine
addition not in himself, but as the medium or channel of Divine strength.”[331]
The commands given to Adam and Eve immediately after the fall are now
repeated, but in a more family-oriented context and in a form that emphasises
that if they are not obeyed, the result this time will be, not pain and toil
and physical death, but eternal death. Thus the husband, who was told in the
Old Testament to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow is now told: "If
any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath
denied the faith and is worse than an infidel" (I Timothy 5.8). And
the wife, who was told in the Old Testament that she would bring forth children
in pain, is now told that she “will be saved through bearing children, if they
continue in faith and love and holiness with sobriety” (I Timothy 2.15).
But if the penalties for quenching the redemptive grace given by Christ
to marriage are great, so are the rewards of absorbing it. “You have a wife,”
writes St. John Chrysostom, “you have children; what is equal to this
pleasure?… Tell me, what is sweeter than children? Or what is more delightful
than a wife for a man who desires to be chaste?… Nothing is sweeter than
children and a wife, if you wish to live with reverence.”[332] In
this way, writes Nellas after quoting this passage, has “the Lord clothed
pleasure in the positive dress of joy…”[333]
As
we have seen, the Holy Fathers witness that the Eucharist is indeed a marital
mystery – more precisely, the marital mystery. Having sanctified the
firstfruits, or root, of human nature by union with Himself in the Virgin’s
womb, God in the sacrament of His Body and Blood extends this union from the
root to the branches, from the firstfruits to every individual human being, by
sending the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine and transforming them into His
Body and Blood. Just as the Holy Virgin was both daughter and mother and bride
of Christ at the Incarnation, so all Christians who partake of the Body and
Blood of Christ become His children and brides, insofar as the mystery of the
Eucharist is, as it were, a continuation of the mystery of the Incarnation. [334]
Thus St. John Chrysostom writes: “Moses in
his account of the first man has Adam say: ‘Bone of my bone and flesh of my
flesh’, hinting to us of the Master’s side. Just as at that time God took the
rib of Adam and formed a woman, so Christ gave us blood and water from His side
and formed the Church… Have you seen how Christ unites to Himself His Bride?
Have you seen with what food He nurtures us all? It is by the same food that we
have been formed and are fed. Just as a woman nurtures her offspring with her
own blood and milk, so also Christ continuously nurtures with His own Blood
those whom He has begotten”.[335]
Georgios Mantzaridis writes, interpreting
St. Gregory Palamas: “The union between God and man achieved in Christ far
surpassed all human relationship and kinship. On assuming flesh and blood, the
Logos of God became a brother to man; but He became our friend as well, in that
He ransomed us from slavery and made us participate in His sacraments. Indeed,
Christ Himself said to His disciples that He does not call them servants,
because the servant does not know what his master is doing, but He calls them
friends, because He has made known to them all that He heard from His Father.
Christ is also men’s father and mother, for He gives them new birth through
baptism and nourishes them like children at the breast – not only with His
blood instead of milk, but with His body and spirit. Joined in one flesh with
the faithful through the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, Christ becomes, in addition,
the bridegroom of mankind. The similarity between God’s love towards humanity
and conjugal love was familiar and widespread among the Old Testament writers,
and particularly so among the mystical theologians of the Church. Palamas
recognizes conjugal love as being the most exalted degree of worldly love, and
he stresses the vastness of God’s love towards men in contrast to it,
especially as this finds expression in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. In
marriage, he says, there is a cleaving ‘in one flesh’ but not ‘in one spirit’ [Homily
56, 6]. Through the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, however, we not only
cleave to the body of Christ, we intermingle with it, and we become not merely
one body with Him, but one spirit: ‘O many-sided and ineffable communion!
Christ has become our brother for He has fellowship with us in flesh and
blood…. He has made us His friends, bestowing on us by grace these His
sacraments. He has bound us to Himself and united us, as the bridegroom unites
the bride to himself, through the communion of His blood, becoming one flesh
with us. He has also become our father through divine baptism in Himself, and
He feeds us at His own breast, as a loving mother feeds her child’ [Homily
56, 7]”.[336]
The younger contemporary of St. Gregory, Nicholas Cabasilas, takes up
the same theme: “The sacred meal effects between Christ and us a closer union
than that which was realized by our parents when they begat us. In truth He
does not only share with us some particles of His flesh or some drops of His
blood, but gives us both in all their fullness; He is not only a principle of
life as are our parents, but in very truth Life Itself.”[337] “O
wonder of wonders! That Christ’s spirit is united to our spirit, His will is
one with ours, His flesh becomes our flesh, His blood flows in our veins. What
spirit is ours when it is possessed by His, our clay when set on fire by His
flame!”[338]
“We are penetrated by Him and become one spirit with Him; body and soul and all
the faculties are deified when there is union of soul with Soul, body with
Body, blood with Blood”.[339] “The
faithful are called saints because of the holy thing of which they partake,
because of Him Whose Body and Blood they receive. Members of His Body, flesh of
His flesh, and bone of His bone, as long as we remain united to Him and
preserve our connection with Him, we live by holiness, drawing to ourselves,
through the holy mysteries, the sanctity which comes from that Head and that
Heart.”[340]
We have
established that we are indeed speaking about two mysteries here, one in
the image of the other and in imitation of it. However, the relationship is
more than iconic when the lower mystery takes place between Christians, in
the Church. For an ordinary icon does not
have to be of the same substance as its archetype; but the two mysteries of
marriage are consubstantial, as it were, if both the bride and the bridegroom
in the lower mystery have been united with the Bridegroom, Christ Himself, in
the higher mystery of the Church. This takes place, as we have seen, when each
is washed in the water of Baptism as if in a kind of prenuptial bath, so as to
be presented “without spot and wrinkle” to the Bridegroom, before entering into
actual physical union with Him in His Most Holy Body and Blood. In this sense the
hour of Christian marriage was not yet come at Cana, because the
wine at the marriage had not yet been turned into the Blood of Christ shed on
the Cross and communicated to every Christian in the sacrament of the
Eucharist, which alone could change the one-flesh marriage of two fallen human
beings into one strengthened and purified through the one-flesh marriage of
each with the Divine Bridegroom.
The
participation of the bride and bridegroom in the Body and Blood of Christ is
both the foundation and the seal of their union. It is the foundation, because true unity between
the spouses is impossible without the union of each individually with Christ.
And it is the seal, because without the union of each with Christ their union
with each other must eventually fall apart. That is why the rite of marriage in the early
Church formed part of the Divine Liturgy, being sealed by the communion of both
spouses in the Body and Blood of Christ; for, as St. Symeon of Thessalonica writes, “Holy
Communion is… the end of every rite and the seal of every divine mystery”.[341] And so the lower mystery, that
of the “little church”, in St. John Chrysostom’s words, comes into being in and
through the higher mystery, that of the Great Church, the former being a
building block of the latter.
Troitsky writes:
"Just as a crystal does not splinter into amorphous, uncrystalline parts,
but only into similarly shaped pieces that look like wholes, and the smallest
part of the crystal is still a crystal, so the family is both a part of the
Church and itself a Church. Clement of Alexandria calls the family, like the
Church, the house of the Lord, and Chrysostom directly and precisely calls it a
'little Church'. The paradisial family coincides with the Church, for at that time
mankind had no other Church, and the Christian Church is the continuation of
the paradisial Church, the new Adam-Christ replacing the Old Adam in it (I
Corinthians 15.22). This explains why the New Testament and the oldest
Christian literature, the Holy Scriptures that refer to marriage, refer also
the Church and vice-versa.”[342]
A true Christian marriage is therefore an
example of that true Christian unity in the image of the unity of the Holy
Trinity spoken of by St. Cyril of Alexandria: "Christ, having taken as an
example and image of that indivisible love, accord and unity which is
conceivable only in unanimity, the unity of essence which the Father has with
Him and which He, in turn, has with the Father, desires that we too should
unite with each other; evidently in the same way as the Consubstantial, Holy
Trinity is united so that the whole body of the Church is conceived as one,
ascending in Christ through the fusion and union of two peoples into the
composition of the new perfect whole. The image of Divine unity and the
consubstantial nature of the Holy Trinity as a most perfect interpenetration
must be reflected in the unity of the believers who are of one heart and
mind" - and body, he adds, for this "natural unity" is "perhaps
not without bodily unity".[343]
The physical, bodily element cannot be removed from the type without
diminishing its typical, iconic quality. For God in His descent to, and union
with, mankind did not merely use the woman as a channel for His Divine
energies. He actually became a man; the Word was made flesh. And
the union between the Word and the flesh was permanent, “unconfused and yet
undivided”, just as the union of man and woman in marriage is permanent,
“unconfused and yet undivided”. Thus the full reality of the Incarnation can be
expressed in opposition to those various heretics who deny its fullness only
through an image that is fully physical, that expresses full union, union in
the flesh. Hence the difference, and yet inseparability, of the sexes, both
in the beginning, when God made them male and female, and in the last times,
when “God sent forth His Son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4.4). And so
“neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without the woman, in the
Lord. For just as the woman was from the man [Eve from Adam], so was the man
from the woman [Christ from the Virgin]; but all things from God [the Father]”
(I Corinthians 11.11).
4.
MARRIAGE AND MONASTICISM
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in
the wife of your youth, a lovely hind, a graceful doe. Let her affection fill
you at all times with delight, be infatuated always with her love…
Proverbs 5.18-19.
It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
I Corinthians 7.1.
Are you not yet married to the flesh? Fear not this consecration; you
are pure even after marriage. I will take the risk of that. I will join you in
marriage. I will dress the bride. We do not dishonour marriage because we give
a higher honour to virginity. I will imitate Christ, the pure Bridegroom and
Leader of the Bride, as He both worked a miracle at a wedding, and honours
marriage with His Presence.
St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration on
Holy Baptism, 18.
The Neo-Manichaeans argue that marriage
involving physical union is less truly marriage than a purely spiritual union.
Thus G.I. Benevich and A.M. Shufrin first quote St. Gregory of Nyssa: “One must
love God with all one’s heart and all one’s soul and strength, and all one’s
feeling, and one’s neighbour one must love as oneself, and one’s wife – if she
has a pure soul as Christ loves the Church, and if she is more passionate, as
one’s body”.[344]
Then they point to the subtle difference in the form of love recommended for a
passionate wife and a not-so-passionate wife, and draw the conclusion that for
a passionate wife sexual relations are permitted (perhaps even recommended),
whereas for a non-passionate wife the marriage is to be virginal (as, it is
supposed, was Gregory’s marriage with his wife Theosebeia). Both kinds of
marriage, they argue, are lawful and in the image of the marriage of Christ and
the Church; but only the virginal marriage is not only in the image, but also
in the likeness.[345]
If by “virginal marriage” these authors meant the marriage of Adam and
Eve in Paradise, or of Christ and the Virgin at the Annunciation, then we would
not only agree that the first marriage is a perfect likeness of the marriage of
Christ and the Church, but also that the second is the marriage of
Christ and the Church. However, if, as seems more likely, they mean that
ordinary human marriages in which there is no physical union are higher than
those in which it exists, then we demur. Such Platonic “marriages” may be
admirable in themselves, evincing a high level of sublimation and true love; but
insofar as they do not involve a physical element, they are not in fact
marriages according to the Lord’s own definition of marriage as the union of
two in one flesh. For the Lord does not say: “they are no longer two,
but one spirit”, but: “they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matthew
19.5). And the priest in the marriage service prays that the union will be in
both spirit and flesh: “Join them in one mind; crown them into one flesh”. Thus
if we seek to define the difference between marriage and other unions between
human beings, we are forced to return to that which the Gospel places, without
any false shame, in the forefront: marriage is the union of two human beings of
different sexes into one flesh, into one physical unit.[346]
It follows that we must exclude the view
that would see in sexual union an at best unnecessary and at worse sinful
element in the marriage bond. Marriage is not marriage if it is not a physical
union “into one flesh”, according to the words of the Lord Himself. This conception of marriage,
writes S.V. Troitsky, “was included into the official canonical collections of
the East. The Eclogue of the year 740 defines marriage as the union of
two people in one flesh, in one substance. Together with the Eclogue,
this definition entered into the Slavonic Kormchaia Kniga. Balsamon
defines marriage as ‘the union of husband and wife into one substance, into one
man with [almost] one soul, but in two hypostases”.[347] To the
Neo-Manichaeans it may seem that the definition of marriage as a one-flesh
union is the clearest proof of its lowliness, even its sinfulness. However, it
is precisely because marriage is a one-flesh union that divorce, adultery and
fornication are seen as the truly sinful phenomena that they are, insofar as
they tear apart that physical union which God Himself put together.
Let us look more closely at the difference
between marriage and fornication. Clearly not every one-flesh union between a
man and a woman constitutes a marriage. Thus St. Basil the Great writes that not
only is fornication “not marriage, but is not even the beginning of marriage.”[348] More generally, St. John
Chrysostom, commenting on the words: “It is by the Lord that a man is matched
with a woman” (Proverbs 19.14), writes: “He means that God made marriage,
and not that it is He that joins together every man that comes to be
with a woman. For we see many that come to be with one another for evil, even
by the law of marriage, and this we should not ascribe to God”.[349] Again,
Fr. Sergius Shukin writes: “Let us recall the words of the Savior to the
Samaritan woman: ‘Thou hast well said, ‘I have no husband;’ for thou hast had
five husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband’ (John
4.17-18). This shows that from a spiritual viewpoint, not every marriage is a
Christian marriage; it becomes Christian only when it has been entered into for
the goals defined and established by God.”[350]
The words of Fr. Sergius need to be
qualified here: since the Samaritan woman was not, at the time of this conversation,
a Christian, and did not even belong to the Old Testament People of God, the
distinction made here by the Lord was not between Christian and non-Christian
marriage, but between marriage and fornication. By implication, His
words appear to admit the possibility of true marriage among the Gentiles.[351]
Consequently, there is a real difference, recognized by God, between a lawful
union in one flesh, which He calls marriage, and an unlawful union, which we
call fornication.[352]
In what does this difference consist? St. John Chrysostom writes: “When
we speak of marriage we do not mean carnal union – on that basis, fornication
would also be marriage. Marriage consists in the fact that the married woman
contents herself with a single husband; this is what distinguishes the
courtesan from the free and wise woman. When a woman contents herself during
her life with a single husband, this union merits the name of marriage. But if
she opens her house not to one man only, but to several bridegrooms, I do not dare
to call this behaviour fornication, but I will say of this woman that she is
very far behind the woman who has known only one husband. The latter has in
effect heard the word of the Lord: ‘For that a man will leave his father and
his mother and will cleave to his wife, and they will be two in one flesh’; she
has cleaved to her husband as if he was really her flesh and she has not
forgotten the master who has been given her once and for all; the other woman
has considered neither her first husband nor the second marriage as her own
flesh; the first has been dispossessed by the second who is in his turn
dispossessed by the first; she would not be able to preserve a faithful memory
of her first husband while attaching herself after him to another; as for the second,
she will not look at him with the appropriate tenderness, since a part of her
thought is distributed in favour of the one who has gone. The consequence?…
Both of them, the first as well as the second, are frustrated of the esteem and
affection which a wife owes to her husband.”[353]
“Marriage consists in the fact that the married woman contents herself
with a single husband”. Clearly this constancy is a necessary part of true
marriage. But is it sufficient? Is it not possible for a man and a woman to
live together permanently, “forsaking all other”, but outside lawful wedlock?
Is not the rite of marriage also a necessary element? And if so, what
kind of rite?
Troitsky’s
Thesis
One answer to this series of questions is provided by the canonist S.V.
Troitsky, who concludes, on the basis of his study of Roman and Byzantine law,
that no religious rite is necessary to conclude a true Christian marriage. As I
shall argue later, such a conclusion does not take into account several
important facts and is unacceptable from a Christian point of view. However,
let us hear his argument first: “From the sovereign character of the family
Roman law drew the conclusion that it was not the state that made a marriage a
marriage, and not a religious organization, but exclusively the marrying
parties themselves, their mutual love, their will, their agreement. Nuptiae
solo affectu fiunt, nuptiae consensu contrahentium fiunt, consensus
facit nuptias – such was the basic position of Roman and Byzantine,
ecclesiastical and civil law in the first 8 centuries of Christian history.
Moreover, in more ancient times the religious form of marriage, confarreatio,
was necessary not to make marriage valid, but for manus, that is, for
the acquisition by the husband of authority over the wife.
“But if marriage is concluded by the
marrying parties themselves, then in what does the task of the State in
relation to marriage consist? Only in verifying its existence for itself, only
in registering the marriage, to the extent that this was necessary for the
resolution of various questions of family and inheritance law. And Roman law
left it to the will of the marrying parties to choose any form of marriage they
liked, contenting itself with the minimum for its own verification.
“In
ancient Rome there existed a view with regard to marriage that was the opposite
of our own. We have a presumption that those living together are not married.
In our time a married couple must itself prove with documents, witnesses, etc.,
that it is in lawful wedlock. In Rome, by contrast, the presumption was that
those living together were married.
“Every permanent sexual relationship of a
fully entitled man and woman was seen as a marriage. ‘We must see living
together with a free woman as marriage, and not concubinage,’ writes the noted
Roman jurist Modestinus. Therefore it was not the marrying parties that had to
prove that they were in wedlock, but a third interested party had to prove that
there existed some kind of impediment which did not allow one to see this
living together as marriage. To put it more briefly, onus probandi lay
not on the spouses, but on the third parties. Only when there was a basis for
thinking that it was in the family or property interests of the parties to
present a temporary relationship as marriage was the question of the formal
criteria of marriage raised. But even in this case Roman law contented itself
with the minimum. For this it was sufficient, for example, to show that there
had been de facto living together for a year, the testimonies of
witnesses that the parties had indeed agreed to marry or to call each other Mr.
and Mrs., that some kind of marital rite had been performed, the presentation
of documents with regard to the dowry, etc. In a word, speaking in legal terms,
in Rome the participation of the State in the conclusion of a marriage did not
have a constitutive, but only a declarative character.
“Byzantine legislation adopted the same
point of view until the end of the 9th century. The constitution of
the Emperors Theodosius and Valentinian in 428 says that for the validity of
marriage neither a wedding feast is necessary, nor documents on a dowry, nor
any festivity, since no law hindered the marriage of fully entitled people.
Marriage acquired validity by means of agreement and the testimony of
witnesses. Although Justinian, in his novella 74 of December, 537, prescribed
that middle-class people should go to church to conclude their marriage, this
demand was based on considerations, not of a religious, but only of an economic
character, which is indicated by the fact that the very separation of this
class of people was in accordance with their property census. And indeed,
Justinian demanded that middle-class people should go to church not in order to
be crowned, but only in order to draw up a document on marriage in front of an
ecclesiastical lawyer and three or four clergy as witnesses. But even this
formality did not last long, and on December 11, 542, novella 117 (ch. 4) freed
even middle-class people from this obligation. Only upper-class people (illustres
et senatores), again for reasons having to do with property, had to write
documents on the dowry, while the lower classes were not obliged to write any
documents at all. In the same novella 74 (chapter 5), Justinian gave the
significance of an optional form of marriage, not to crowning, but to the oath
‘to take as my wife’ while touching the Bible. Only in a legislative collection
of the 8th century, more precisely: in the collection of 741 of the
iconoclast emperors Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus known as the Eclogue,
was a blessing as a juridical form of concluding a marriage mentioned for the
first time. But even here a blessing is not an obligatory form for the
conclusion of a marriage, but only one of four forms of marriage, the choice of
which depends on external circumstances and the will of the marrying parties;
in other words, here a Church blessing is only an optional form of marriage,
and even then not always, but only in case of necessity, and it is precisely
the Eclogue that prescribes that marriage must be concluded by means of
the drawing up of a document of a definite form, and when, as a consequence of
the poverty of the spouses, it is impossible to draw up the document, the
marriage can be concluded either through the agreement of the parents, or
through a Church blessing, or through the witness of friends (Eclogue,
II, 1,3,8). It is exactly the same with crowning; it is an optional form of
marriage, say also the later laws of the Byzantine emperors – the Prochiron
of 878 (IV, 6,14,17,27), the Epanagoge of 886 (XVI, 1) and the
collection known as Blastaris’ Syntagma of 1335 (G., 2, translation of
Ilyinsky, p. 103). ‘Marriage,’ we read in Blastaris, ‘is concluded by means of
a blessing, or crowning, or an agreement’.
“That is how the ancient Church, too,
looked on the form of marriage. The basic source of the Church’s teaching on
marriage, the Bible, does not say that the institution of marriage arose some
time later as something established by the State or the Church. Here we find
another teaching on marriage. Neither the Church nor the State is the source of
marriage. On the contrary: marriage is the source of both the Church and the
State. Marriage precedes all the social and religious organizations. It was
established already in Paradise, it was established by God Himself. God brings
the woman to Adam, and Adam himself proclaims his marital union independently
of any earthly authority, even the authority of parents (Genesis 2.24;
cf. Matthew 19.6). Thus the first marriage was concluded ‘by the mercy
of God’. In the first marriage the husband and wife are the bearers of the
highest earthly authority, they are sovereigns to whom the whole of the rest of
the world is subject (Genesis 1.28). The family is the first form of the
Church, it is the ‘little Church’, as Chrysostom calls it, and at the same time
it is the source also of the State as an organization of power, since according
to the Bible the basis of every authority of man over man is to be found in the
words of God on the authority of the husband over the wife: ‘he will be your
lord’ (Genesis 3.16). Thus the family is not only a little Church, but
also a little State. And if that is so, then the relationship of the family
with the Church and the State must have a character of equality, the character
of international and inter-Church relations. Therefore the performers of
marriage are considered in the sources of the Church’s teaching to be the
spouses themselves, and the participation of a representative of authority,
whether of the Church or of the State, is not an essential element of marriage,
is not a condition of its validity. In the whole Bible, both in the Old and in
the New Testaments, we do not find a single word on any kind of obligatory form
of marriage, although here we do find many prescriptions of a ritual character.
The relationship of the Church and the State to marriage is expressed not in
its conclusion, but only in its verification, in its recognition as an already
accomplished fact. Just as the recognition of authority in a State on the part
of another State does not give this authority new rights, but is only the
condition of normal relations between these States, so the participation of a
representative of society, whether of the Church or of the State, is the
condition of normal relations between them and the new family.
“Therefore the relationship of the Church
to marriage was one of recognition. This idea is well expressed in the Gospel
account of the marriage in Cana of Galilee (John 1.1-11). Reference is
sometimes made to this account as a proof of the teaching that the accomplisher
of marriage is the priest. In fact, the Gospel account is not in agreement with
this point of view. The Gospel makes no mention whatsoever of the participation
of Christ in the rite of the conclusion of the marriage. Christ came with His
apostles as a guest; he was invited to the wedding feast. But participation in
the wedding feast was, generally speaking, an expression of the recognition of
marriage on the part of society, and the presence of Christ and the apostles
had the significance of a recognition of the Old Testament institution of
marriage on the part of the new Church.
“This is also how the ancient Christian
Church herself looked on the form of marriage. Her teaching on the form of
marriage coincides with the teaching of the Bible and Roman law. Therefore the
ancient Christians, who did not permit the slightest compromise with the State
pagan religion and preferred a martyr’s death to participation in the smallest
pagan rite, entered into marriage in the time of the persecutions and later in
exactly the same way as the other citizens of the Roman State. ‘They, that is,
the Christians, conclude marriage in the same way as everyone,’ says an ancient
Christian writer of the 2nd century in the Epistle to Diognetus
(V, 6). ‘Each of us recognizes as his wife the woman whom he took in accordance
with the laws published by you (i.e. the pagans),’ says Athenagoras in his Apology
(33, P.G. 6:965) submitted to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (166-177). St.
Ambrose of Milan says that Christians take wives ‘in accordance with the
tablets’, that is, in accordance with the Roman laws of the 12 tablets (On
the Institution of Virginity, 6; P.L. 16:316). Chrysostom says
definitively: ‘Marriage is concluded in no other way than by agreement
according to the laws’ (Homily 56 on Genesis, 29; P.G. 54:488).
The first canon of the Council of Laodicea demands that marriage should be
concluded only ‘freely and lawfully’, that is, in accordance with the Roman
laws. The ancient Church completely assimilated the basic teaching of Roman
marital law, that marriage is concluded by the spouses themselves, that consensus
facit nuptias. This teaching is found among the most authoritative
representatives of Church teaching both in the East and in the West, for
example, in John Chrysostom, Balsamon, Ambrose of Milan, Blessed Augustine,
Isidore, Pope Nicholas I, and others.
“Finally, we find the same teaching in the
official collections of Byzantine law which have been adopted by the Orthodox
Church.”[354]
The Role of the Church
And yet for many centuries now, in both
East and West, a marriage between Christians that has not been performed by a
priest in Church has been considered invalid. So why did the change take place,
if it did indeed take place? Or perhaps Troitsky is overlooking certain points…
Thus he asserts that Christ’s presence at
Cana signified no more than His recognition of the validity of Old Testament
marriage.[355]
And yet the tradition of the Church, as we have seen, sees more in it than
that: not a recognition merely, but a blessing, the addition of a Divine
element that was not there before, the changing of the watery element of
pre-Christian marriage into the soberly intoxicating element of Christian
marriage. Moreover, it is going beyond the evidence to suppose that Christ was
merely a passive spectator at the marriage. We are told that He and His
apostles were “invited”, which implies a certain desire for His presence on the
part of the spouses, a desire which must have been the stronger in that the
bridegroom was himself an apostle, St. Simon the Zealot. In response to this
active desire on the part of man for the participation of God, is it likely
that God would not respond, would refuse to play any active role Himself?
This was certainly not the view of, for
example, St. Gregory
the Theologian, who says to those preparing to be baptised: “Are you not yet
married in the flesh? Fear not this consecration; you are pure even after
marriage. I will take the risk of that. I will join you in marriage. I will
lead in the bride. We do not dishonour marriage because we give a higher honour
to virginity. I will imitate Christ, the pure Bridegroom and Leader of the
Bride, as He both worked a miracle at a wedding, and honours marriage with His
Presence.”[356]
This
passage, as well as attributing an active role to Christ as “Leader of the
Bride”, attributes an analogous role to the Christian priest. Just as God led
Eve to Adam in Paradise, thereby making them man and wife, so does every
Christian priest at every Christian marriage. That it is God Who is the initiator and consecrator of true
marriage is confirmed by other patristic writings, some of which are quoted by
Troitsky himself. Thus Tertullian writes: “Marriage takes place when God unites two into one
flesh”.[357]
And St. John Chrysostom writes: “God unites you with your wife”.[358] As
it is expressed in a Novella of Emperor Alexis I, those being married “receive God”, Who
“walks amidst those being united”.[359]
Again, Metropolitan Cyprian of Kiev (1376-1406) writes in his service book that
“husband and wife are united by Thee [God]”.[360]
Troitsky
asserts that the early Church did no more than recognize the validity of
marriages performed according to Roman law. And yet the very earliest witness
we have to the early Church’s practice implies rather more than that. Thus St.
Ignatius the Godbearer writes: “It is right for men and women who marry to be
united with the knowledge of the bishop (meta gnwmhV tou Episkopou), that the marriage may be according to the Lord
and not according to lust".[361] This shows that “marriage as a
sacramental action has an apostolic origin, or, as Stavrinos indicates,
‘marriage from the beginning was sanctified by the Church, being accomplished
by her prayers and blessing’”.[362]
It may
be that in the early Christian centuries there was no specific rite of marriage
carried out in the Church apart from the blessing of the bishop, and that
Christians continued to be married according to the non-Christian procedures of
the pagan Roman empire. But this is in no way implies that the Church was
merely a passive spectator, any more than Christ was a passive spectator at
Cana. If the marriage had to be “in the Lord”, in the words of the Apostle Paul
(I Corinthians 7.39), and “with the knowledge of the bishop”, as St.
Ignatius says, then it is clear that some Episcopal screening was carried out
beforehand to ensure that the marriage would not be contrary to the Church’s
ethical and canonical norms. Moreover, the Church then added her own seal and
blessing to the marriage performed outside her walls, if only by communicating
the married couple as a couple in
the Body and Blood of Christ. [363]
For, as St. Symeon of Thessalonica writes, “Holy Communion is… the end of every
rite and the seal of every divine mystery”.[364]
Do the
early sources betray any embryonic elements of a specifically Christian rite of
marriage? Some have seen a marital blessing in the following remark of Clement
of Alexandria: “On whom does the presbyter lay his hand? Whom does he bless?
Not the woman decked out, but another’s hair [i.e. a wig], and through it
another head.”[365]
Less ambiguous are the words of Tertullian: “[The happy marriage is the one
that] the Church joins, which the offering [oblatio, i.e. the Eucharist]
strengthens, which the blessing [benedictio] seals, which the angels
proclaim and which the heavenly Father confirms”.[366] “Secret
unions [occultae conjunctiones], that is, ones that have not been
professed beforehand in the Church, are judged to be equivalent to fornication
and adultery”.[367]
As
Troitsky himself points out, both the Byzantine Church and the State characterized
secret unions (laqrogamia) as
fornication.[368]
This is enough in itself to refute his suggestion (which is in agreement with
the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, but not of the Orthodox) that
marriage is concluded by the spouses themselves. For marriage is a public event
with public consequences, and as such has to be sealed by society as a whole –
which, for a Christian, must include the society of the Church.
The
Church in her wisdom did not reject the secular rite of the Roman state, but vetted
who should participate in it beforehand and sealed it afterwards through her
own grace-filled rites, which included, as a minimum, the Divine Liturgy
insofar as the latter is, in the words of St. Symeon of Thessalonica, “the end
of every rite and divine mystery”.[369]
This
fact becomes more and more indisputable as we turn from the pre-Nicene to the
post-Nicene sources. Thus St. Basil the Great calls marriage “a yoke through a
blessing”.[370]
Again, St. Gregory the Theologian asks Olympiada to forgive him for not being
present at her wedding, but says that in spirit he, as a priest, places the
right hands of the couple on each other and both in the hand of God.[371]
Again, St. Timothy of Alexandria in his 11th canon answers a
question relating to a priest being invited to perform a wedding by “making an
offering [prosjoran]”.
Again, Synesius of Ptolemais, a married bishop of the early 5th
century, tells us that he took his wife from the hand of Bishop Theophilus of
Alexandria.[372]
Again, St. Augustine calls marriage, not simply a marital bond, but an
“indissoluble sacrament”.[373]
From the
above examples it is clear that “in the first years of Christianity the
dominant position was held by political marriage with the thought that it was
recognized by the Roman State, but the Church blessed the faithful newly weds in
parallel with some form of priestly
act.”[374]
The
essential independence of the Church from the State in this matter is indicated
by the controversy between Popes Callistus and Hippolytus in the mid-third
century concerning the permissibility of free-born women Christians marrying
their slaves. This was forbidden by Roman law, but allowed by Pope Callistus.[375]
Troitsky
claims that the 38th, 40th and 42nd Canons of
St. Basil the Great prove that “if the parties started to live together before
marriage, their fornication is turned into marriage of itself, without any
rite, immediately the external obstacles are removed”.[376]
However, a closer examination of the text of the canons proves only that a
marriage has to be public and approved by parents or masters (in the case of
slaves) in order to be valid. It says nothing about the presence or absence of
a rite.
One way of looking at the matter is to see the civil marriage for
Christians as not so much a marriage, as a betrothal, and the Christian rite
(even if, at the beginning, that consisted in little more than the blessing of
the bishop and participation in the Eucharist) as the marriage itself. This is
the approach adopted by P. Kuzmenko: "In Christianity marriage has been
blessed since apostolic times. Tertullian, the church writer of the third
century, says: 'How can we represent the happiness of Marriage, which is
approved by the Church, sanctified by her prayers and blessed by God!'
"In antiquity the rite of marriage was
preceded by betrothal, which was a civil act and was performed in accordance
with local customs and decrees, insofar - it goes without saying - as this was
possible for Christians. Betrothal was performed triumphantly in the presence
of many witnesses who ratified the marriage agreement. The latter was an
official document defining the property and legal relations of the spouses.
Betrothal was accompanied by a rite of the joining together of the hands of the
bride and bridegroom. Moreover, the bridegroom gave the bride a ring of iron,
silver or gold, depending on his wealth. Clement, bishop of Alexandria, says:
'The man must give the woman a golden ring, not for her external adornment, but
so as to place a seal on the household, which from this time passes into her
control and is entrusted to her care.'…
"Towards the 10th and 11th centuries betrothal lost its civil
significance, and this rite was performed in the church, accompanied by the
corresponding prayers. But for a long time yet betrothal was performed
separately from crowning and was united with the service of Mattins. Finally
the rite of betrothal received its unique form towards the 17th century.
"In antiquity the rite of marriage crowning itself was performed by
a special prayer, by the bishop's blessing and by the laying on of hands in the
church during the Liturgy. A witness to the fact that marriage crowning was
introduced in antiquity into the rite of the Liturgy is the presence of a
series of corresponding elements in both contemporary rites: the opening
exclamation, 'Blessed is the Kingdom...', the litany of peace, the reading of
the Epistle and the Gospel, the extended litany, the exclamation: 'And
vouchsafe us, O Master...', the singing of 'Our Father' and, finally the
drinking from a common chalice. All these elements were evidently taken from
the rite of the Liturgy and are similar to the Eucharist (the sacrament of
Communion)."[377]
Thus just as betrothal was not yet marriage, so a State union was not
yet a Christian marriage. The Church made the State’s marriage Christian by
modifying the State’s ceremonies and adding her own blessing. Thus as D.S.
Bailey writes, "the nuptials of the faithful continued to take place with
the formalities customary at the time. The traditional ceremonies were not
modified, save for the omission of non-essentials which were either unedifying
in themselves or redolent of pagan superstition, and the substitution of the
Eucharist and the benediction for the sacrifice and other accompanying
religious observances. Hence the Church Orders contain no Christian marriage
rite, nor is there any reference to one in the literature of the period, while
the ancient sacramentaries merely give the prayers of the nuptial Mass and the
blessing…
“Marriage, then, among Christians and pagans alike, was effected by the
successive ceremonies of sponsalia or desponsatio (the betrothal)
and nuptiae (the wedding), both of which the Church adapted to the use
of the faithful by the introduction of certain modifications which did not,
however, change the basic structure or purpose of these rites. What was the
character of the resultant union – especially as regards its permanence or
impermanence? According to Roman law, marriage was simply a contractual
relationship established by consent and voicable like any other contract – in
this instance, by a mere revocation of the consent, either by mutual agreement
(divortium ex consensus) of by unilateral action (repudium)… For
the Church, however, there was another law than that of the State – a law for
whose authority the Fathers pointed to Scripture and to the teaching of
Christ…"[378]
Concerning the rite of crowning, which became the central element of the
rite of marriage, as opposed to betrothal, Fr. John Meyendorff writes:
"Since the fourth century a specific solemnization of the sacrament is
mentioned by Eastern Christian writers: a rite of 'crowning', performed during
the Eucharistic Liturgy. According to St. John Chrysostom, the crowns
symbolized victory over 'passions'... From a letter of St. Theodore the Studite
(+826) we learn that crowning was accompanied by a brief prayer read 'before
the whole people' at the Sunday Liturgy, by the bishop or the priest. The text
of the prayer, given by St. Theodore, is the following: 'Thyself, O Master,
send down Thy hand from Thy holy dwelling place and unite these Thy servant and
Thy handmaid. And give to those whom Thou unitest harmony of minds; crown them
into one flesh; make their marriage honourable; keep their bed undefiled; deign
to make their common life blameless' (Letters I, 22, P.G. 99,
col. 973). The liturgical books of the same period (such as the famous Codex
Barberini) contain several short prayers similar to that quoted by St. Theodore.
These prayers are all meant to be read during the Liturgy. "[379]
From
early in the tenth century, the rite of crowning began to be separated from the
Liturgy. First Emperor Leo VI made it compulsory to be married in Church by
crowning.[380]
This created the problem of how Christians who for one reason or another were
not considered worthy of receiving Communion were to be married. If marriage
was to remain as an integral part of the Liturgy and be sealed by Communion,
they could not be married. But then they might fall into fornication. In order
to avoid this, the Church separated marriage from the Liturgy, but introduced
the common cup of wine into the rite as a reminder of the former link with the
Liturgy. “From the 12th century, we have two cups, the eucharistic
and the ‘common’, from which those who were unworthy to commune drank.”[381]
In the 15th century St. Symeon
of Thessalonica sums up the teaching of the Church on the nature of a true
marriage: "(the priest) takes the holy chalice with the Presanctified
Gifts and exclaims: 'The Presanctified Holy things for the Holy'. And all
respond: 'One is Holy, One is Lord', because the Lord alone is the
sanctification, the peace and the union of His servants who are being married.
The priest then gives Communion to the bridal pair, if they are worthy. Indeed,
they must be ready to receive Communion, so that their crowning be a worthy one
and their marriage valid. For Holy Communion is the perfection of every
sacrament and the seal of every mystery. And the Church is right in preparing
the Divine Gifts for the redemption and blessing of the bridal pair; for Christ
Himself, Who gave us these Gifts and Who is the Gifts, came to the marriage (in
Cana of Galilee) to bring to it peaceful union and control. So that those who
get married must be worthy of Holy Communion; they must be united before God in
a church, which is the House of God, because they are children of God, in a
church where God is sacramentally present in the Gifts, where He is being
offered to us, and where He is seen in the midst of us. After that the priest
also gives them to drink from the common cup, and the hymn 'I will take the cup
of salvation' is sung because of the Most Holy Gifts and as a sign of the joy
which comes from divine union, and because the joy of the bridal pair comes
from the peace and concord which they have received. But to those who are not
worthy of communion - for example, those who are being married for a second
time, and others - the Divine Gifts are not given, but only the common cup, as
a partial sanctification, as a sign of good fellowship and unity with God's
blessing".[382]
It follows that the idea that there can be Christian marriage outside
the Church is mistaken. It is true that for non-Christians there can be
marriage outside the Church – that is, a sexual union that is not counted as
fornication. Even there, certain criteria must be met: the free consent of the
spouses, conformity to the laws of the State, public recognition by parents or
guardians. But for a Christian more is required: the seal of the Church, which
is conferred by, at a minimum, the blessing of the priest and communion as
couple in the Body and Blood of Christ. The failure to remember that marriage
of the man and woman in Christ is accomplished through marriage in the Church
of Christ, and that the bride and bridegroom are “crowned into one flesh”, as
the marriage rite puts it, in and through the flesh of Christ, leads to a
diminished consciousness of the real significance of marriage, and hence a
greater tolerance of sexual sin in general.
When the Bolsheviks introduced civil marriage with divorce-on-demand for
one rouble into Russia (Commissar Alexandra Kollontai, Lenin’s lover, said that
sexual relations had no more significance than drinking a glass of water), the
Russian Orthodox Church resisted this innovation fiercely, insisting that civil
marriage was not enough for a Christian.
The leader of the Russian Church at the time was New Hieromartyr Tikhon.
Before he became Patriarch, when he was still Archbishop in America, he wrote:
"In order to be acceptable in the eyes of God, marriage must be entered
into 'only in the Lord' (I Corinthians 7.39), the blessing of the Church
must be invoked upon it, through which it will become a sacrament, in which the
married couple will be given grace that will make their bond holy and high,
unto the likeness of the bond between Christ and the Church (Ephesians
5.23-32), which will help them in the fulfilment of their mutual duties.
Sometimes, as in this country, for instance, Church marriage is deemed
unnecessary. But if without the help of God we can accomplish no perfect and
true good (John 15.5), if all our satisfaction is from God (II
Corinthians 3.5), if God produces in us good desires and acts (Philippians
2.14), then how is it that the grace of God is unnecessary for husband and wife
in order to fulfil their lofty duties honourably? No, a true Orthodox Christian
could not be satisfied with civil marriage alone, without the Church marriage.
Such a marriage will remain without the supreme Christian sanction, as the
grace of God is attracted only towards that marriage which was blessed by the
Church, this treasury of grace. As to civil marriage, it places no creative
religious and moral principles, no spiritual power of God's grace, at the basis
of matrimony and for its safety, but merely legal liabilities, which are not
sufficient for moral perfection."[383]
Remarriage
and Divorce
Troitsky’s thesis that the Church simply
accepted the State’s definition of marriage without more ado would appear to
have stronger evidence in the case of second marriages, insofar as these did
not involve the participation of the Church at the beginning, being, in St.
Theodore the Studite’s words, “civil”.[384] However,
insofar as the twice-married couple was then admitted to the Eucharist, we
cannot assert that the Church had no part to play in those marriages; for, as
we have seen, admission of a couple to communion constitutes a seal on the
marriage, its sanctification, and not simply a recognition that the couple are
already married. Later, the Church introduced a rite for second marriages,
though without crowning and with a penance of two years without communion.[385]
As with marriage in general, so in relation to divorce and remarriage,
the Church did not simply adopt the State’s legislation without question, but
modified and strengthened it. The State allowed divorce freely: the Church
allowed it only in the case of adultery. The State allowed remarriage: the Church
also allowed it, but emphasised the superiority of first marriage over second
or third marriages[386], and
forbade fourth marriages[387].
Christ permits divorce for one reason only – adultery, because adultery
destroys the one-flesh union that is marriage, creating another-flesh union not
blessed by God. Correspondingly, “whoever divorces his wife, except for
unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a
divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 19.9).
Although the Church has admitted other reasons besides adultery, they
all relate to this primary reason in that they all make the one-flesh union de
facto impossible.[388]
Tertullian, however, went further, forbidding not only divorce, but also
second marriages precisely because, in his opinion, they violate the one-flesh
union.[389]
The Church did not follow him in this, considering the death of the first
spouse to constitute ipso facto the end of the one-flesh union with that
spouse.[390]
While placing first marriages above second marriages, the Church
followed the Apostle Paul in allowing second marriages (I Timothy 5.14; Romans 7.1-3), provided that they are “in the
Lord” (I Corinthians 7.39), by which is meant, according to St. Basil the
Great, that the spouses enter into them not for the sake of pleasure but in
order to have each other’s spiritual help in passing through life.[391] Even the rigorist St. Ambrose of
Milan admitted second marriages, while seeing them as impediments for the
priesthood: “A man who has married again, though he commits no sin and is not
polluted thereby, is disqualified for the prerogative of the episcopacy.”[392]
As regards the remarriage of divorcees, the Western Church tended to
adopt a more rigorist approach than the Eastern, forbidding it even for the
innocent party. But the Eastern Church, while forbidding the remarriage of the
guilty party, was condescending in relation to the innocent party.[393]
Thus St. Epiphanius of Cyprus writes: “He who cannot keep continence
after the death of his first wife, or who has separated from his wife for a
valid motive, such as fornication, adultery, or another misdeed, if he takes
another wife, or if the wife takes another husband, the divine word does not
condemn him nor exclude him from the Church or the life; but she tolerates it
rather on account of his weakness.”[394]
The strict discipline of the Church in relation to remarriage and
divorce by no means proceeds from the principle of hatred of the flesh, as
modern liberal critics charge, but rather from its opposite: a profound
understanding of the importance of the flesh in general, and of the sexual
union of man and woman in particular. Axiomatic is the principle that sexual
union is not simply a physiological act with no important moral consequences,
but the creation of an ontologically new human unit. And if that unit is
united with the Body of Christ, its significance, and the sinfulness of the
destruction of that unit, is even greater.
The Lord forbade divorce, saying: “What God hath joined together, let no
man put asunder” (Matthew 19.6), because it destroys this new unit,
which was created, not by man, but by God. For marriage is indeed, not procreation
only, but creation, the creation of one new being out of two; for “they
two shall be one flesh, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh' (Matthew
19.6). As Holy New Hieromartyr Gregory (Lebedev) writes:, that is, the people
have ceased to exist separately even in the physical sense. They have become
one physical body, 'one flesh'. That is what the fulfilment of the will of God
has done... It has not only completed and broadened their souls in a mutual
intermingling, it has changed their physical nature and out of two physical
existences it has made one whole existence. That is the mystery of marriage.
Having explained it, the Lord concludes with a mild reproach to the Pharisees:
‘Well, what do you want? What are you asking about? How, after this, can a man
leave his wife? That would be unnatural! In marriage we have a natural completion
of life! But you want Me to approve of the destruction of this life?! And in
marriage we have a creative act, an act of God, Who creates one life… How can
you want Me to destroy life created by God? This is unnatural… Don’t think of
encroaching on marriage! What God has joined together, let man not put
asunder.”[395]
Mixed
Marriages
Marriage, as we have noted, existed before the coming of Christ, and not
only among the Jews, but also among the pagan Gentiles. But in the Church of
Christ it is raised to a higher level, not only than marriage in the Fall, but
even than marriage in Paradise. Why? First, because marriage in the Church is,
deliberately and explicitly, an imitation of the marriage between Christ and
the Church (which it obviously could not be so intentionally before the
Incarnation of Christ), and partakes of the grace of that higher and mystical
marriage to the extent that this imitation is a true likeness. And secondly,
because the Christian husband and wife, before becoming one flesh with each
other, are each already one flesh with Christ in the Eucharist, so that
the likeness of the lower mystery to the higher mystery is not a likeness
between an archetype and type of different natures (as in icons of Christ and
the saints), but of the same nature.
The body of a Christian is holy because it is united to the Body of
Christ and the Holy Spirit. Therefore it cannot be united with a body that is
not also Spirit-bearing. This fact increases the intimacy and depth of the
union of the Christian husband and wife and makes a betrayal of that union
through fornication or adultery a greater sin; for in committing fornication, a
husband not only unites his and his wife’s body with the body of another[396], but
unites the Body of Christ with the body of another. This point was made
with particular force by the Apostle Paul: “Ye know that your bodies are
members of Christ, do ye not? Having taken up then the members of Christ, shall
I make them members of a harlot? May it not be! Or know ye not that he that is
joined to the harlot is one body? For ‘the two,’ saith He, ‘shall be into one
flesh’. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every
sin whatsoever a man might do is outside the body, but he who committeth
fornication sinneth against his own body. Or know ye not that your body is a
temple of the Holy Spirit Who is in you, Whom ye have from God, and yet are not
your own? For ye were bought with a price; glorify then God in your body and in
your spirit, which are God’s” (I Corinthians 6.15-20).
For, as Bishop Theophan writes: “He who should be one with Christ is
torn away from Christ and becomes one with a harlot, and this is in accordance
with the law of the original institution of marriage. Marriage is a Divine
institution blessed by God, and those who cleave to each other in it become one
body in Christ. But the harlot serves Satan, and therefore he who cleaves to
her becomes one body with her in Satan. That fornication is the service of
Satan is evident also from the fact that it darkens not only the body, but also
the soul of the fornicator, drives away from his Angel Guardian and tears him
away from the Lord, for it is impossible for a darkened and evil-smelling one
to be united with the Lord”.[397]
It follows that Christians can only marry other Christians, and not
schismatics or heretics (and still less pagans or atheists) who do not belong
to the Body of Christ and do not possess the Holy Spirit. As the holy canons
declare: “Let no Orthodox man be allowed to contract a marriage with a
heretical woman, nor moreover let any Orthodox woman be married to a heretical
man. But if it should be discovered that any such thing is done by any one of
the Christians, no matter who, let the marriage be deemed void, and let the lawless
marriage be dissolved.”[398]
And if this seems excessively harsh (especially by comparison with
today’s excessively lenient practice), let us recall that even in the Old
Testament the lawgiver Ezra, with the consent of the leaders of Israel, dissolved
all marriages of Israelites with pagans (Ezra 10).
Similar reasoning underlies the prohibition on the faithful receiving
communion in heretical churches. Since the mystery of the Eucharist is a
marital mystery, it is forbidden to the faithful to communicate anywhere else
than in the Church of Christ. Thus the Apostle Paul says: “Ye cannot drink the
cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s
table and of the table of demons. Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy?” (I Corinthians
10.21-22).
Jealousy is the natural response of a lover at the sight of his
beloved’s adultery, and adultery was what St. John the Almsgiver considered
receiving communion from heretics to be: “Another thing the blessed man taught
and insisted upon with all was never on any occasion whatsoever to associate
with heretics and, above all, never to take the Holy Communion with them, ‘even
if’, the blessed man said, ‘you remain without communicating all your life, if
through stress of circumstances you cannot find a community of the Catholic
Church. For if, having legally married a wife in this world of the flesh, we
are forbidden by God and by the laws to desert her and be united to another
woman, even though we have to spend a long time separated from her in a distant
country, and shall incur punishment if we violate our vows, how then shall we,
who have been joined to God through the Orthodox Faith and the Catholic Church
– as the apostle says: ‘I espoused you to one husband that I might present you
as a pure virgin to Christ’ (II Corinthians 11.2) – how shall we escape
from sharing in that punishment which in the world to come awaits heretics, if
we defile the Orthodox and holy Faith by adulterous communion with heretics?’”[399]
There are other weighty reasons for forbidding mixed marriages. In the
first place, a couple who do not share the same faith are not united in that
which is most important in life. They may be united in body and soul, but not
in spirit. This will lead to quarrels and possibly the tearing away of the
believing spouse from the true faith for the sake of peace with his unbelieving
spouse.
St. Ambrose compares mixed marriages to the disastrous marriage of
Samson and Delilah. For: ”how can love be suited if faith be different?
Therefore, beware, Christian, to give your daughter to a Gentile [i.e. a pagan]
or to a Jew. Because, I say, the Gentile woman, the Jewess, the foreigner, viz.
do not take a wife who is a heretic, or any stranger to your Faith. The grace
of purity is the first faith of marriage. If she worships idols whose
adulteries are proclaimed, if she denies Christ, Who is the Teacher and
Rewarder of chastity, how can she love chastity? Even if she is a Christian,
this does not suffice unless ye are both consecrated by the Sacrament of
Baptism. Ye must rise together for worship, and God is to be entreated by joint
prayers. Another sign of purity is added if ye believe that the marriage which
has fallen to your lot was given to you by your God. Hence, Solomon, too, says,
‘A wife is suited to a man by God’ (Proverbs 19.14).”[400]
Tertullian lists all the disadvantages of being married to an
unbelieving husband, especially the difficulty of avoiding taking part in pagan
festivals.[401]
And then he lists the joys of a marriage between believers: “Where can we find
sufficient words to tell the happiness of that marriage which the Church
cements, and the offering confirms, and the blessing signs and seal, news of
which the angels carry back [to heaven], which the Father takes as ratified?
For even on earth children do not rightly and lawfully wed without their
fathers’ consent. What kind of yoke is that of two believers, partakers of one
hope, one desire, one discipline, one and the same service? Both are brethren,
both fellow-servants, there is no difference of spirit or flesh between them;
they are truly ‘two in one flesh’. Where the flesh is one, there is the spirit
too. Together they pray, together prostrated, together fast; mutually teaching,
mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining. They are equally to be found in the
Church of God, equally at the banquet of God, equally in straits, in
persecutions, in refreshments. Neither hides anything from the other; neither
shuns the other; neither is troublesome to the other. They freely visit the
sick and relieve the needy. They give alms without fearing reprisals; they
offer sacrifices without scruples; the sign of the cross is not made
stealthily, greetings without trembling, blessings without muteness. They sing
psalms and hymns together, and challenge each other who will chant better to
the Lord. Such things Christ sees and hears with joy. To these He sends His own
peace. Where two are, there is He Himself in their midst. Where He is, there
the evil one is not.”[402]
Mixed marriages were forbidden even in the Old Testament. The downfall
of Samson and Solomon were attributed to their foreign wives. And Nehemiah
said: “I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab; and
half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak
the language of Judah, but the language of each people. And I contended with
them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I
made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, ‘You shall not give your
daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for
yourselves. Did not Solomon king of Israel sin on account of such women? Among
the many nations there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his God, and
God made him king over all Israel; nevertheless foreign women made even him to
sin. Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act
treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?” (Nehemiah
13.23-37).
The Apostle Paul allows an exception to this rule for couples who were
married before becoming Christian. In such a case, when one of the spouses
becomes Christian while the other remains outside the Church, the marriage is
not dissolved. “For the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife,
and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. Otherwise, your
children would be unclean, but as it is they are holy. But if the unbelieving
partner desires to separate, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister
is not bound. For God has called us to peace. For do you know, wife, whether
you will save your husband? Or you, husband, do you know whether you will save
your wife?” (I Corinthians 7.14-16). As Bishop Theophan comments, “in
this union according to love and agreement, the purity of the Christian side is
not destroyed; on the contrary, by its influence it can assist the conversion
to Christianity of the pagan husband or pagan wife, and still more the children
born in this marriage.”[403]
In this way the Church strives to preserve existing unions, only
forbidding and dissolving those unions which involve a retrograde step away
from Christ for the believing partner, exposing him or her to the danger of
apostasy.
From the above it will be clear that
marriage has two aspects: its mystical and iconic aspect, which relates both to
the original marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise and to that of Christ and the
Church in eternity, and a more practical aspect relating to the struggle of the
spouses to fulfil the commandments of God in the conditions of the fall.
If we consider marriage only from its more
practical aspect, then its purposes can be stated as: the prevention of
fornication and the procreation of children. Of these two purposes the first is
the more important, as is explicitly stated by the Apostle Paul in I
Corinthians 7, and reiterated by the apostle’s most faithful interpreter,
St. John Chrysostom, who writes: “As for the procreation of children, marriage
does not absolutely enjoin it. That responds rather to this word of God in Genesis:
‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth’ (1.28). The proof of this is the
large number of marriages which cannot have children. That is why the first
reason for marriage is to regulate lust, and especially now that the human race
has filled the whole earth.”[404]
However, chastity and procreation are the
particular purposes of marriage in the fall: they do not exclude the
higher purpose of marriage, which consists in the creation of a likeness of the
love of Christ and the Church and, if a child is included in the type, of the
Holy Trinity. In fact, the chastity that marriage in its more practical aspect
produces enables it to fulfill its nature in its mystical aspect, by
“releasing”, as it were, the erotic power that is in man in his unfallen state
and directing it towards its Archetype. For a love that is purely carnal, with
no grace coming down from above and no striving upwards from below, loses its
iconic properties. It is like a Catholic picture of the Madonna rather than an
Orthodox icon of the Mother of God: what we see is a fallen, earthly woman
rather than the Queen of heaven.
Marriage is both an end in itself in the
same way that an icon is an end in itself – a thing of beauty mirroring Eternal
Beauty, – and one of the paths whereby the spouses can attain to a closer union
with Eternal Beauty Himself. We all know that no husband measures up to the
infinite patience and self-sacrificial love of Christ for the Church, just as
no wife measures up to the infinite humility and obedience of the Church
towards Christ, as exemplified most perfectly in the All-holy Virgin Mary. But
the grace of marriage and the struggles of the married life are a path whereby
he can attain to truly Christian love. This grace is therefore like a seed
dropped in the fallen nature of man which, as it grows, drives out the works of
the flesh, “which are… adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
heresies…, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife”, and establishes in
their place the fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians
5.19,20,22-23). As St. Gregory the Theologian writes, the spouses in a true
marriage are “wholly
united in the flesh, concordant in spirit, sharpening in each other by love a
like spur to piety…”[405]
So the purposes of marriage in the fall for each individual spouse are
broader than simply the control of lust or the reproduction of the human race.
By carrying out the laws of marriage as a whole, and not only those concerning
sexual relations, the spouses both save themselves and spur each other on to
salvation. And then, as each spouse comes closer to perfection in and through
marriage, the higher purpose of marriage, which was ordained before and
independently of the fall, is also fulfilled: the creation of a true icon
of the love of Christ and the Church.
Married love can literally save a spouse. Thus the wife of
Monk-Martyr Timothy of Esphigmenou had been abducted by a Moslem after
apostasising from the Faith. “The good heart of Triantaphylos [the future Monk
Timothy] was overcome by bitter sorrow on seeing the perdition of his wife who
for the sake of temporary and ephemeral happiness was depriving herself of that
which is eternal.
“Finding relief from his sorrow only in prayer, he began to pray
ardently to the All-Highest Creator, beseeching Him to turn back the one who
had perished to the light of true knowledge. But at the same time, he was
afraid for his daughters lest the same lot befall them as had their mother. For
this reason he sent them to his relations, asking them to help these
unfortunate ones.
“The grief over the loss of his beloved wife weighed heavily on poor
Triantaphylos and he decided, come what may, to wrest her from the grasp of the
devil. Besides sincere prayer, he secretly admonished her through others to
abandon the Moslem faith, warning her of the eternal punishment her apostasy
would bring. This sincere prayer, offered up from the fullness of his heart,
was heard by the Heavenly Creator Who in His great mercy placed a good thought
in the mind of the apostate woman so that she soon felt a repulsion towards
Islam. Having come to her senses, she bitterly repented of her fall and
resolved to accept the Christian faith again.
“But knowing that it would be difficult to escape by her own efforts
from the clutches of her captor, she suggested to Triantaphylos that he pretend
to accept the Moslem faith and then by legal process demand her back from her
captor; it was impossible for her to be freed from the harem in any other way.
Then, when she would be liberated, they would leave the world: he could become
a monk on the Holy Mountain of Athos, where he could beseech God and ask
forgiveness for his involuntary fall; she could go to a convent where, like
him, she could heal her wounds through repentance.
“In order to regain his perishing wife and upon hearing her request,
Triantaphylos decided to fulfil her wish, imitating in this case the Apostle
Paul who, for the sake of the salvation of the brethren, himself desired to be
separated from Christ. Thus placing his hope in God, he went to the tribunal
where he declared his desire to accept the Moslem religion, but only on
condition that his wife be returned to him. Triantaphylos’ wish was promptly
granted. He was joined to the faith of the Moslems and, having received
circumcision, was given back his wife. Thereafter, although Triantaphylos
appeared to follow the Moslem law, with his wife he secretly confessed the
Christian faith and fulfilled all the Church rituals. No matter how much they
tried to keep this secret, the Turks nevertheless suspected them of betrayal
and began to keep a very close watch on them. In the meantime, Triantaphylos
realized that it would be impossible for them to remain among the Moslems any
longer and entrusted his daughters to relatives. After bidding farewell to
them, he secretly set off with his wife to the city of Enos, and from there to
Cedonia where he left her in a convent. He himself went to the Holy Mountain”,
from where he later set out on the feat of martyrdom for Christ…[406]
Now only a churlish person would wish to deny that the love of St.
Timothy was both conjugal and of a very high spiritual order, of the kind of
which the Lord said: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his
life for his friends” (John 15.13). Moreover, it was a love precisely in
the image of Christ’s love for the Church, as conjugal love is supposed to be:
its goal was certainly no passing pleasure or joy, but the eternal salvation of
the beloved. And the cost was the highest possible: the possible loss of his
eternal soul. Just as Christ, taking upon Himself the sins of the whole world and
identifying Himself completely with apostate Israel, said: “My God, My God, why
hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27.46), so did St. Timothy take upon
himself the sin of apostasy of his wife and feel the weight of God’s
abandonment of the apostate.
And
if it be objected that the real significance of the story lies in the fact that
St. Timothy was led by God’s Providence out of the lower state of marriage to
the higher state of monasticism and, eventually, martyrdom, we reply: “Yes
indeed. But if God’s Providence led St. Timothy from marriage to monasticism,
was there nothing on his own side that led him in that direction? In fact, was
it not precisely the exact fulfilment of the law of marriage that led him
upwards and beyond marriage to monasticism and martyrdom?”
A
similar example is provided by the Lives of the Right-believing Prince
Peter, in monasticism David, and Prince Febronia, in monasticism Euphrosyne,
wonder-workers of Murom. As we read: “The right-believing Prince Peter was the
second son of Prince Yury Vladimirovich of Murom. He ascended the throne of
Murom in 1203. Several years before this St. Peter fell ill with leprosy, from
which nobody was able to heal him. In a dream vision it was revealed to the
prince that the pious daughter of a bee-keeper, the virgin Febronia, could heal
him. She was a peasant woman of the village of Laskovaia in Ryazan region. St.
Peter sent his men to the village.
“When the prince saw St. Febronia, he so fell in love with her for her
piety, wisdom and kindness that he gave a vow to marry her after he was healed.
St. Febronia healed the prince. The grateful prince was united with her in
marriage, although the Murom nobility opposed this. They said: ‘Either let him
dismiss his wife, who has insulted the noble women by her origin, or let him
leave Murom.’ The prince firmly remembered the words of the Lord: ‘What God has
put together, let not man put asunder. He who dismisses his wife and marries
another is an adulterer.’ For that reason, faithful to his duty as a Christian
spouse, the prince agreed to renounce his princedom. They sailed away from his
native city in a boat on the river Oka. The prince remained with few means of
subsistence, and sorrowful thoughts involuntarily began to assail him. But the
clever princess supported and comforted him: ‘Sorrow not, prince, the merciful
God will not abandon us in poverty.’ In Murom quarrels and arguments quickly
appeared, seekers of power took to their swords and many of the nobles were
killed. The Murom boyars were forced to ask Prince Peter and Princess Febronia
to return to Murom. Thus did the prince, faithful to his duty, triumph over his
enemies.
“In Murom Prince Peter’s rule was righteous, but without severe
strictness, merciful, but without weakness. The clever and pious princess
helped her husband with counsels and works of charity. Both lived according to
the commandments of the Lord, they loved everyone, but they did not love pride
or unrighteous avarice, they gave refuge to strangers, relieved the lot of the
unfortunate, venerated the monastic and priestly ranks, protecting them from
need.
“Once while the princess was sailing along the river in a boat she
ordered a nobleman, who had been captivated by her beauty and was looking at
her with evil thoughts, to take up some water from each side of the boat and
swallow it. When he had fulfilled her will, she asked: ‘Do you find any
difference between the one and the other water?’ ‘None,’ replied the nobleman.
The saint then said: ‘The nature of women is exactly identical. In vain do you
abandon your wife and think of another.’
“The holy spouses died at the same day and hour on June 25, 1228, having
accepted the schema before that with the names David and Euphrosyne. The bodies
of the saints, in accordance with their will, were placed in one grave.
“Sts. Peter and Febronia are a model of Christian married life. By their
prayers they bring heavenly blessings on those who are entering the married
life.”[407]
Marriage
and Monasticism
Tradition records that the bridegroom at the marriage in Cana was the
holy Apostle Simon the Zealot. After the marriage, it is said, Simon was so
struck by the miracle of turning the water into wine that he immediately left
his bride and followed Christ. Thus did God's blessing of an earthly marriage
lead to its eclipse, as it were, by the glory of the Heavenly Bridegroom, the
earthly icon being left behind in the zeal for its Heavenly Archetype.[408]
Such transformations of the marital home into a monastery are common in
the Lives of the Saints.[409] They
point, in spite of all that has been said about the essential goodness, indeed
glory, of Christian marriage - which goodness is enshrined, not only in the
Holy Scriptures, but also in the Sacred Canons of the Church,[410] - to a
certain tension between this teaching and the teaching that there is a better
way, that of virginity or monasticism, which requires, if not a Manichean
despising of marriage and its pleasures, at any rate a fleeing from them as if
from something defiling.[411]
Thus on the one hand: "marriage is honourable in all, and the bed
undefiled" (Hebrews 13.4). But on the other: "These are they
which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins" (Revelation
14.4). On the one hand, Christ blessed the marriage at Cana in Galilee by His
presence. On the other hand, he exhorted those who could receive it to become
eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake (Matthew 19.12).
It would be easy, following the critical methodology of western
scholarship, to remove this paradox by ascribing it to textual corruption or
foreign influences (pagan Greek philosophy is usually the favoured candidate).
However, this is not the method of Orthodox Christian hermeneutics. It would be
the height of arrogance to consider our theology purer than that of the Holy
Scriptures, or our philosophizing more acute than that of the Holy Fathers.
When an apparent contradiction appears, we do not, in the manner of the
heretics, take this as an excuse for picking and choosing those parts of Divine
Revelation which we like best while discarding the rest, but rather as the sign
of the presence of a mystery, and an invitation to search deeper into the
meaning of it with the help of the Holy Spirit.
We may therefore begin our investigation by examining St. Paul's
explanation of why virginity is preferable to marriage: "I would have you
without care. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the
Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things
that are of the world, how he may please his wife. There is a difference also
between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the
Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she that is married
careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I
speak for your own profit, not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that
which is comely, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction"
(I Corinthians 7.32-35).
The delicacy, lack of fanaticism and inspired common sense of this
explanation is striking. Sexuality comes into it not at all. Virginity is
preferable to marriage, not because it involves no sex, but because it involves
less distraction from the "one
thing necessary" (Luke 10.42) for salvation, less of all those
cares and tribulations and "trouble in the flesh" (I Corinthians
7.28) that are an inescapable part of married life and which cool the ardour of
the spirit in its ascent to God. Especially interesting is the reference to the
necessity of pleasing one's wife. It was Adam's fear of offending his wife that
led to his fall in Eden...
Similarly St. Gregory Palamas, in asserting the superiority of
virginity, emphasises, not sexual relations, but the ties imposed on a married
woman by all her relatives: “If one considers the body’s indignation and
insubordination towards virtue, or better said, its rebellious nature which we
carry around, why then should we agree to increase the obstacles towards
virtue, by bonding with many and otherwise diverse bodies? How can she acquire
freedom, towards which she vowed to aspire, by being connected with natural
ties of husband and children and all blood relatives? How can she serve the
Lord free of anxieties, when she has undertaken concerns about so many people?
How can she acquire quietude when she is occupied with such a multitude of
people?… Cleansing can also be accomplished by those who live in marriage, but
with utmost difficulty.”[412]
Virginity is not preferable to marriage because it involves less sex,
for it in fact it involves more, in
the sense of a greater struggle with sexual thoughts and fantasies.
Paradoxically, therefore, it is marriage that is preferable to virginity from
the point of view of sexual distraction
- "it is better to marry than to burn" (I Corinthians 7.9).
Virginity reveals its superiority only in the context of the Christian life
taken as a whole; for at the price of a sharper and more difficult struggle
with sexual temptation (victory over which brings a greater reward), the virgin
can devote herself more single-mindedly to the service of God alone, "that
she may be holy both in body and in spirit" (I Corinthians 7.34).
St. Gregory Palamas compares the two callings as follows: “’You shall
not be unchaste’ (Exodus 20.14), lest instead of being united to Christ
you become united to a prostitute, severing yourself from the Divine Body,
forfeiting the Divine inheritance and throwing yourself into hell. According to
the law (cf. Leviticus 21.9), a daughter of a priest caught whoring is
to be burnt, for she dishonours her father; how much more, then, does the
person who defiles the Body of Christ deserve endless chastisement. If you are
capable of it, embrace the path of virginity, so that you may become wholly
God’s and may cleave to Him with perfect love, all your life devoting yourself
undistractedly to the Lord and to what belongs to Him, and in this way
anticipating the life to come and living as an angel of God on earth. For the
angels are characterised by virginity and if you cleave to virginity you
emulate them with your body, in so far as this is possible. Or, rather, prior
to them you emulate the Father Who in virginity begot the Son before all ages,
and also the virginal Son Who in the beginning came forth from the virginal
Father by way of generation, and in these latter times was born in the flesh of
a virginal Mother; you likewise emulate the Holy Spirit Who ineffably proceeds
from the Father alone, not by way of generation, but by procession. Hence if
you practise true chastity in soul and body you emulate God and are joined to
Him in imperishable wedlock, embellishing every sensation, word and thought
with virginal beauty.
“If, however, you do not choose to live in virginity and have not
promised God that you will do this, God’s law allows you to marry one woman and
to live with her alone and to hold her in holiness as your own wife (cf. I
Thessalonians 4.4), abstaining entirely from other women. You can totally
abstain from them if you shun untimely meetings with them, do not indulge in
lewd words and stories and, as far as you can, avoid looking at them with the
eyes of both body and soul, training yourself not to gaze overmuch upon the
beauty of their faces. For ‘whoever looks at a woman with lust has already
committed adultery with her in his heart’ (Matthew 5.28), and in this
way he is impure before Christ Who sees his heart; and the nest step is that he
commits shameless acts with his body also. But why do I speak of fornication
and adultery and other natural abominations? For by looking overfondly on the
beauty of bodies a person is dragged down unrestrainedly into lascivious acts
contrary to all nature. Thus, if you cut away from yourself the bitter roots,
you will not reap the deadly harvest but, on the contrary, you will gather the
fruits of chastity and the holiness which it confers, and without which ‘no one
will see the Lord’ (Hebrews 12.14).”[413]
Further insight into this question is provided by Archbishop Theophanes
of Poltava, who was asked the following question: "Why do I always have
the impression that a girl or woman - a Church person, of course - is moving
away from the Lord when she marries? More than once I have seen wives or
mothers for whom all the things of God would not have been of merely secondary
importance. But in this respect they all became worse after getting
married."
Archbishop Theophanes replied: "It is necessary, first of all, to
establish the correct understanding of marriage in principle, and then to
examine the question from a practical point of view. There are two extreme
viewpoints with regard to this question that are in principle incorrect: both
that which considers marriage to be an evil and that which completely abolishes
the difference in inner merit between marriage and virginity. The first extreme
is seen in many mystical sects, the second is a generally accepted opinion in
the Protestant West, from where it has succeeded in penetrating Orthodox
literature also. According to the latter viewpoint, both the married and the
virginal ways of life are simply defined as individual characteristics of a
man, and nothing special or exalted is seen in the virginal way by comparison
with the married state. In his time Blessed Jerome thoroughly refuted this
viewpoint in his work: Two books Against Jovinian. While the positive
teaching of the Church was beautifully expressed by St. Seraphim in his words:
'Marriage is a good, but virginity is a better than good good!' True Christian
marriage is the union of the souls of those being married that is sanctified by
the grace of God. It gives them happiness and serves as the foundation of the
Christian family, that 'house church'. That is what it is in principle; but
unfortunately it is not like that in our time for the most part. The general
decline in Christian life has wounded marriage, too. Generally speaking, people
in recent times have forgotten that the grace of God is communicated in the
sacrament of marriage. One must always remember this grace, stir it up and live
in its spirit. Then the love of the man for the woman and of the woman for the
man will be pure, deep and a source of happiness for them. For this love, too,
is a blessed gift of God. Only people do not know how to make use of this gift
in a fitting manner! And it is for this simple reason, that they forget the
grace of God! 'The first thing in the spiritual life,' says St. Macarius the
Great, 'is love for God, and the second - love for one's neighbour. When we
apply ourselves to the first and great task, then the second, being lesser,
follows after the first and great task. But without the first the second cannot
be pure. For can he who does not love God with all his soul and all his heart
apply himself correctly and without flattery to love for his brothers?' That
which has been said about love in general applies also to married love. Of all
the kinds of earthly love it is the strongest and for that reason it is
represented in Holy Scripture as an image of the ideal love of the human soul
for God: 'The Song of Songs,' says Blessed Jerome, 'is a nuptial song of
spiritual wedlock,' that is, of the union of the human soul with God. However,
with the blessedness of the virgins nothing can be compared, neither in heaven
nor on earth..."[414]
True virginity is the fulfilling of the first and greatest commandment,
to love God with all one's soul and mind and heart and strength. It is a
burning love of God so strong that there can be no thought of a human bride or
bridegroom. For such a thought would indeed be a defilement for one who has
dedicated himself exclusively to the Heavenly Bridegroom. Thus the path of this
mystery lies in the renunciation of everything that can in any way distract
from the love of God. For as an eagle in its flight to the sun can be kept on
earth by even the smallest impediment on its talons, so the flight of
Christians to the Sun of Righteousness can be impeded by even the most innocent
of affections - which can then become in a real sense idols. That is why the
Prophets Elijah and Jeremiah, the greatest denouncers of idolatry in the Old
Testament, - which sin is always depicted under the image of adultery (cf. Jeremiah
3; Hosea 4) - were also the only virgins; while another great prophet,
Ezekiel, had to suffer the pain of the death of his beloved before he could
enter upon the most difficult part of his mission (Ezekiel 24.16). As
for "the greatest of those born of women" (Matthew 11.11), St.
John the Baptist, that "burning and shining light" (John 5.35)
who compelled the admiration even of the Pharisees and who prepared the way of
the Lord in the spirit of Elijah, he, too, was a virgin. Of him the Church
chants: "Having embraced chastity and temperance, he possessed them by
nature, while he fled contrary to nature, fighting against nature".[415]
In a similar way, true marriage is the fulfilment of the second
commandment, to love one's neighbour as oneself. For in loving his wife, a man
is loving his neighbour as himself, in that "he that loveth his wife loveth
himself" (Ephesians 5.28). Moreover, it is a training ground for
those virtues that will enable him to love all men, and even his enemies, as
himself.
The idea that marriage is in any way incompatible with true Christian
love is contrary to the Holy Scriptures. Who showed more love for man than the
God-seer Moses, who was willing to sacrifice his own salvation for that of the
People of Israel? - and he was a married man. To whom was entrusted a greater
authority and a weightier burden in the service of the Church than the Apostle
Peter? - and he, as St. John Climacus points out, "had a
mother-in-law".[416]
Therefore, says St. Gregory the Theologian to those preparing to be baptised:
“Are you not yet married to the flesh? Fear not this consecration; you are pure
even after marriage. I will take the risk of that. I will join you in marriage.
I will dress the bride. We do not dishonour marriage because we give a higher
honour to virginity. I will imitate Christ, the pure Bridegroom and Leader of
the Bride, as He both worked a miracle at a wedding, and honours marriage with
His Presence.”[417]
For fallen man, marriage is a virtual necessity; and even in Christ it
is the best path for most to the goal of chastity. However, Christ by His
Coming and Example has opened up another path to the same end - that of
monasticism. Christ, writes Vladimir Lossky, “… for the redemption of ‘eros’,
opens two paths…: the path of Christian marriage and the path of monasticism”.[418]
Monasticism is the more direct, more arduous way to the summit; and to reach it
by this path brings a special reward. True monastics attain in this life to the
condition of the life to come, in which "they neither marry nor are given
in marriage... for they are equal to the angels" (Luke 20.35, 36).
Marriage is the longer, less direct route to the same summit, with many stops
on the way and with the consequent danger of becoming distracted by the scenery
along the way. That is why St. Paul says: "I would that all men were even
as myself [i.e. virgins]... But every man hath his proper charisma, one
after this manner, and another after that" (I Corinthians 7.7).
It is in this contrast that we can perhaps find the solution to the
paradox of marriage: that it can be both "on account of fornication" (I
Corinthians 7.2) and "not on account of fornication" (Tobit
8.7), both "honourable in all" (Hebrews 13.4) and defiling for
some (Revelation 14.4).
First it is necessary to establish that the aim of marriage is identical
to that of monasticism: namely, the purification and redirection of eros, or
chastity[419],
a pure heart, without which no one can either see God or truly love his
neighbour. But for some one way will be preferable, for others - the
other. For the few, the more direct
assault on the fallen passions is the path chosen for them by Divine
Providence. These are they who earn their reward "in the burden and heat
of the day" (Matthew 20.12), without seeking a respite in the shady
cool of marriage. Some have even chosen this path at the outset of married
life, as we have seen, living as brother and sister with their wives. Others
come to it later, after the death of their spouse. Many of the greatest saints,
such as Spyridon of Cyprus and John the Almsgiver, Juliana of Lazarevo and
Theodora of Sihla, Metrophanes of Voronezh and Innocent of Moscow, and many of
the holy kings and queens, have trodden this path to the Kingdom.[420]
However, for most people this more direct approach is too difficult and
dangerous (because of the danger of falling into fornication, or for other
reasons). That is why God has blessed marriage, not only as an end, the
restoration of the fallen unity of Adam and Eve in Paradise, but also as a
means, to avoid fornication, to provide children, and to provide an arena of
struggle and self-perfection parallel to the still more testing arena of
monasticism. For those called by God to this path, the measured rhythm of
coming together and abstinence in sexual relations (I Corinthians 7.5),
combined with all the trials and tribulations, the responsibilities and
obediences of married life, is the best means to the attainment of chastity.
For, in New Hieromartyr Gregory’s words, marriage “completes and broadens [the
spouses’] souls in a mutual intermingling”.[421]
Archbishop Ambrose (von Sivers) writes: “Abstinence and virginity are
the other side of the medal from marriage, for abstinence (monasticism) with
virginity and living together in marriage are counterbalancing forms of human
wedlock: in the first case, with abstinence, of the soul of man with God; in
the second, with the union of husband and wife in one flesh, also with God. The
relationship of Christianity to the one and the other is simple: ‘We do not
introduce enmity between virginity and marriage – on the contrary, we respect
both the one and the other as mutually beneficial. Virginity is glorious, but
true virginity, because there is a difference in virginities: some virgins
dozed and fell asleep, while others kept vigil (Matthew 25.1-13).
Marriage is also worthy of praise, but faithful and honourable marriage,
insofar as many have kept its purity, and many have not’.[422] In
other words, virginity (+abstinence) and marriage are two paths in one
sacrament, where in the first case it is performed with one who is alone
(monacoV),
and in the second – with a couple (husband and wife). More exactly, the one and
the other are two aspects of one Sacrament, both of which were realised
at the same time in human history in only one person – the All Holy and Most
Pure Mother of God and Virgin Mary.”[423]
Although the parallel drawn here is somewhat forced, it is true that in
the Church every Christian is married to God, either as a celibate or in union
with his wife. But not only are marriage and monasticism compatible in this way:
"the many-coloured wisdom of God" (Ephesians 3.10) has placed
them in a relationship of mutual dependence, each order gaining in humility
from contemplating the feats of the other. Thus the married man will ponder
deeply on the fact that the vast majority of non-martyr saints have been
monastics. Beholding their feasts of self-denial, he will remember that the
Kingdom of Heaven is won by those who take up the cross and deny themselves,
doing violence to their fallen nature (Matthew 10.38, 11.12). If he has
read something about the true monk's inner life, even if he cannot understand
it from experience, he will nevertheless realise that, quite apart from his
external struggle, the monk suffers from such assaults of the flesh and the
devil as he, the married man, can hardly conceive. This will make him less
inclined to compliment himself on his purely external and pharisaic fulfilment
of some of the commandments, remembering that "unless your righteousness
shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no
case enter into the Kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5.20). He will
realise that, even when his life is peaceful, this is probably because the
passions are still dormant in him, for he has never really entered into battle
with them. Finally, he may come to realise that, if he is to fulfil his won
vocation in the world, he, too, must become something of a monk - internally,
at any rate. For there is no other way than that of the Cross, and that, as St.
John Chrysostom points out, the commandments are the same for monks and laymen
with the single exception of the prohibition to marry for the former.
The monk, on the other hand, having turned his back on Egypt for ever,
will nevertheless admire those who remain pure amid its fleshpots, fulfilling
the commandments while encumbered with wives, children, possessions, cares,
honours and responsibilities. For, as St. John Chrysostom says, "it is
possible to surpass all others in virtue by becoming good husbands and
wives".[424]
If he is beginning to pride himself on his asceticism, he will have cause to
humble himself on beholding the "crowned icon" of a truly Christian
marriage. He will remember the words of one of the greatest of his own order,
St. Macarius the Great, who, on being shown the lives of two married Christian
women who, as God had revealed to him, were his equals in virtue, said:
"In truth there is neither virgin nor married, neither monk nor secular.
But God seeks only the intention of each, and gives the Spirit of life to all."[425]
Understood in this way, there is no
opposition between the two charismata; for they both fulfil the
commandments, and in both the grace is given of a pure, chaste and
single-minded fidelity. Only monasticism must be accorded the higher place. For
there is no limit to the love of God, which is higher than the love of man;
whereas the love of man is good only so long as it is less than, and
subordinated to, the love of God. For, as St. Barsanuphius of Optina says, “a
woman… wants to love her bridegroom with a passionate love and remain devoted
with all her soul to Christ, but these are incompatible. In love for one’s
bridegroom there is, of course, no sin; but if love for him is stronger than
love for God, it will distance her from Christ. The Lord Himself said, ‘No man
can serve two masters’ (Matthew 6.24). To work only for Christ, people
go to a monastery…”[426]
Again, if, as St. Macarius the Great says, it is impossible to love
one's neighbour with a pure heart unless one has first come to love God, it
follows that married people must first master the art of monastic
self-discipline if they are to achieve a perfect union with each other. For, as
Vladimir Lossky writes, "our fallen condition always endures, demanding
for the accomplishing of our human vocation not only the integrating chastity
of marriage but also, and perhaps primarily, the sublimating chastity of
monachism."[427] This
"sublimating chastity of monachism" is necessary even for the married
because, as St. Maximus says, "it is impossible for those who have not
first cloven singlemindedly to God to harmonise with each other in their mutual
tendencies."[428] Thus
it would appear to be necessary to attain intrapersonal unity within the monad, the unmarried man or woman,
before interpersonal unity can be attained within the dyad, the married couple.
In practice, however, while marriage can lead to monasticism later, the
reverse is impossible. For the love of God, while compatible with the love of
neighbour, is incompatible with those forms of it which require a return to the
world; and while marriage and the raising of children necessarily involve some
immersion in the world, the monk has vowed to renounce the world forever. The
true monk has chosen “the good part” (Luke 10.42), which will not be taken
from him. Having set his hand to the plough, he will not turn back (Luke
9.62). Having climbed the heights of dispassion, far from the Sodom and
Gomorrah of the world, he will not want to return to Zoar (Genesis
19.30), that refuge from sin that nevertheless overlooks Sodom and is close
enough to smell its stench…[429]
In any case, the specific kind of interpersonal union that is marriage
will not take place in the resurrection (Matthew 22.30); for then,
intra-personal union having been achieved by all, all will also be united
inter-personally in the Body of Christ, the only form of interpersonal union
that will endure forever. This is not to say that husbands and wives on earth
will not be united in the heavens, only that there union will no longer be a
marital one. For the union “up there will be closer, the union of soul with
soul, much more delightful and more noble.”[430]
This view of the relationship between marriage and monasticism has been
challenged by Hieromonk Gregory Lourié. His major thesis, as we have
seen, is that abstention from sexual relations is a necessary condition of the
life of grace, the life of the New Testament, whereas the married state belongs
to the Law, to the Old Testament. Thus a married Christian must necessarily
abstain from relations with his wife (whether with her permission or without)
in order to “pass from the life of the Old Testament to that of the New”.[431] True,
“it is necessary to call those who cannot ‘accommodate’ this to Christian
marriage – there is no argument about that; only to a marriage that is
Christian, and not to fornication under a crown (blud pod ventsom)”.[432]
However, for Lourié
any expression of sexual desire, even in marriage, is sinful, is fornication;
so that a sinless marriage, for him, can only be a virginal marriage. “Fornication is fornication, even if it is committed
with one’s lawful wife”.[433]
A variant of this heresy, whose appearance
was prophesied by the Apostle Paul (I Timothy 4.3), was rebutted by
Clement of Alexandria: “There are some who say outright that marriage is
fornication and teach that it was introduced by the devil. They proudly say
that they are imitating the Lord Who neither married nor had any possession in
this world, boasting that they understand the Gospel better than anyone else.
The Scripture says to them: ‘God resists the proud but gives grace to the
humble’ (James 4.6; I Peter 5.5). Further, they do not know the
reason why the Lord did not marry. In the first place He had His own Bride, the
Church; and in the next place He was no ordinary man that He should also be in
need of some helpmeet after the flesh. Nor was it necessary for Him to beget
children, since He abides eternally and was born the only Son of God.”[434]
Through his teaching on marriage, Lourié also introduces an
ecclesiological heresy, a fundamental distortion of the relationship between
the Old and the New Testaments. Membership of the New Testament is open to all those who believe
correctly in Christ and belong to His Church, whether they live in marriage,
widowhood, or monasticism. Certainly, monks and virgins, if they are good
monks and wise virgins, live a more perfect life from the Christian
point of view than married people. But they do not for that reason constitute a
special class of “New Testament Christians”, as opposed to the “second-class”,
“Old Testament” Christians of the married state. As St. Paul made abundantly
clear in his words against the Judaizing Christians, there is no such thing as
an “Old Testament Christian”, and any attempt to mix the Old Testament Law with
New Testament grace is subjected by him to anathema (Galatians 1.8-9).
Lourié tries to justify his innovative understanding of the
difference between the Old and the New Testaments by the following argument:
“Being ‘in the grace of Christ’ does not depend on the time in which a person
lives – before or after the Coming of Christ in the flesh. For the Orthodox Church
Tradition there is nothing exotic in this thought. It is sufficiently obvious –
otherwise the Church of the New and the Old Testaments would not constitute one
Church, that is, the Body of Christ, and it would be necessary to make a sharp
distinction in ecclesiastical veneration between the saints of the Old
Testament time and those of the New Testament (of which distinction, it goes
without saying, there is no mention). If the righteous of the Old Testament
receive ‘perfection not without us’ (Hebrews 11.40), then, all the more,
we receive it ‘not without them’.”[435]
True; and yet before the Coming of Christ in the flesh all the righteous
of the Old Testament went to hades (cf. Genesis 37.35), and were saved
only by His descent into hades after the Crucifixion. Clearly, the Coming of
Christ brought something absolutely vital which was not available to even the
holiest men of the Old Testament, but which is available to those who
partake of the sacraments of the New Testament Church - that is, the grace of
redemption, the forgiveness of sins and the communication of a new, unfallen
human nature. Through the sacraments of Baptism, Chrismation and the Body and
Blood of Christ, the Holy Spirit not only works through the saints, as
He worked through the Prophets of the Old Testament, but works in them
as a constituent part of their new nature, redeemed from corruption and death.
For “before holy baptism,” writes St. Diadochus of Photike, “grace
encourages the soul towards good from the outside, while Satan lurks in its
depths, trying to block all the intellect’s ways of approach to the divine. But
from the moment we are reborn through baptism,” which can only take place in
the New Testament Church, “the demon is outside, grace is within.”[436]
As Blessed Theophylact writes, “Those who lived under the Law also had
the Spirit, but they had Him in images and shadows, whereas now we can say that
Truth Himself has descended essentially to the disciples… He comforts the
apostles when He says that the world cannot receive Him, but this excellent
gift will be given to you and He will remain ‘with you’, and, what is more,
will abide ‘in you’. For the words ‘with you’ point to an external help from
nearby, but ‘in you’ – to a more internal dwelling and strengthening.”[437]
In this sense, “he who is least in the Kingdom of heaven”, that is, in the
New Testament Church, “is greater than” John the Baptist or any of the Old
Testament righteous (Matthew 11.11), not because he is intrinsically
greater than John the Baptist (who can be greater than John the Baptist?) but
because he possesses in himself, in his very body and blood, that Holiness that
was not in any of the Old Testament righteous during their earthly lives. For,
as Vladimir Lossky writes, “it is only through the [New Testament] Church that
the holiness of the Old Testament can receive its fulfilment… in a perfection
which was inaccessible to humanity before Christ.”[438]
Lourié’s working out of this thesis is paradoxical, for he
ascribes the grace of the New Testament to several Old Testament saints, such
as Abraham, Moses and David, who, since they were married (and in fact had
several wives and/or mistresses in some cases), should, by Lourié’s own
criteria, be deprived of New Testament status; whereas New Testament Christians
who have only one wife and partake of all the sacraments of the New Testament
Church are relegated to the status of the Old Testament for no other reason
that that they did not free themselves in time from what are, in Fr. Gregory’s
opinion, the defiling pleasures of marriage!
The Lives of the Saints do not support Lourié’s thesis.
Consider the Life of St. Thomais of Alexandria, who was killed for
refusing to submit to the lecherous advances of her father-in-law. As far as we
know, she led a normal married life with her husband, and exhibited no special
gifts or exploits. And yet St. Daniel of Skete recommended that monks suffering
from sexual temptations should pray to her for relief, which would appear to
indicate that her virtue lay precisely in her refusal to succumb to sexual sin.
Her martyrdom did not “remove sexual sin”, but was the culmination of her
successful struggle against sexual sin![439] This
shows that she was not only a saint in spite of the supposedly defiling
pleasures of marriage, but because of her resistance to unlawful
passions, which virtue enables her to give help to monks to this day!
Lourié degrades the sacrament of marriage by refusing to see in
it any specific charisma that would raise it above the simple satisfaction of
carnal desire, and by insisting that the act that constitutes marriage, the
union in one flesh, inescapably involves sin insofar as it involves pleasure.
For “pleasure… from sexual relations is recognised as the sign of illness, the
inevitable result of which is physical death…”[440]
Marriage is “good” only in a negative way, in that, by permitting a little sin,
it avoids the commiting of a greater sin, like a safety valve letting off steam
or a doctor administering controlled doses of heroin to a drug addict.
We have already discussed the subject of pleasure and desire. Certainly,
the cycle of pleasure and pain was introduced into our nature as a result of
the fall. But just as nobody would be so mad as to assert that the suffering of
pain is a sin, but only the excessive fear of pain, so pleasure is not
sinful in itself, but only the enslavement to pleasure. As for desire,
according to St. John Chrysostom, “desire is not sin”, but only its overflowing
its lawful boundaries[441], a
position supported by St. John of Damascus[442].
In order to justify his position, Lourié is forced to give a
completely unnatural interpretation to St. Paul’s words: “He who marries should
be as though he were unmarried” (I Corinthians 7.29), as though this
meant that he should not have sexual relations with his wife. But the correct
interpretation is provided by Clement of Alexandria: “He should consider his
marriage inseparable from his love of the Lord. His affection for his wife
should be subordinate to that of the Lord.”[443]
Lourié misinterprets in a similar direction the apostle’s words
to married couples: “Deprive not each other [of sexual relations] except by
agreement for a season, in order that ye may have more leisure for prayer” (I
Corinthians 7.5). He argues that “in both of Chrysostom’s interpretations
of Paul, ‘Do not deprive’ has turned out to be only a form of ‘Deprive’ for
tender ears”.[444]
Amazing! So the saint really meant the
exact opposite of what he actually said! But what does Chrysostom in fact
say? “‘Let not the wife,’ says he, ‘exercise continence, if the husband be
unwilling; nor yet the husband without the wife's consent.’ Why so? Because
great evils spring from this sort of continence. For adulteries and
fornications and the ruin of families have often arisen from it. For if when
men have their own wives they commit fornication, much more if yon defraud them
of this consolation. And well says he, ‘Defraud not’, ‘fraud’ here, and ‘debt’
above, that he might show the strictness of the right of dominion in question.
For that one should practise continence against the will of the other is
‘defrauding’; but not so, with the other's consent: any more than I count
myself defrauded, if after persuading me you take away any thing of mine. Since
only he defrauds who takes against another's will and by force. A thing which many
women do, working sin rather than righteousness, and thereby becoming
accountable for the husband's uncleanness, and rending all asunder. Whereas
they should value concord above all things, since this is more important than
all beside.
“We will, if you please, consider it with a view to actual cases. Thus,
suppose a wife and husband, and let the wife be continent, without consent of
her husband; well then, if hereupon he commit fornication, or though abstaining
from fornication fret and grow restless and be heated and quarrel and give all
kind of trouble to his wife; where is all the gain of the fasting and the
continence, a breach being made in love? There is none. For what strange
reproaches, how much trouble, how great a war must of course arise! since when
in an house man and wife are at variance, the house will be no better off than
a ship in a storm when the master is upon ill terms with the man at the head.
Wherefore he saith, ‘Defraud not one another, unless it be by consent for a
season, that ye may give yourselves unto prayer.’ It is prayer with unusual
earnestness which he here means. For if he is forbidding those who have
intercourse with one another to pray, how could ‘pray without ceasing’ (I
Thessalonians 5.17) have any place? It is possible then to live with a wife
and yet give heed unto prayer. But by continence prayer is made more perfect.
For he did not say merely, ‘That ye may pray’; but, ‘That ye may give
yourselves unto it’; because this thing [intercourse] produces only listlessness
in prayer, not uncleanness”.[445]
There is no support for Lourié’s interpretation of Chrysostom
here. The saint not only insists that “do not deprive” does mean what it
says. He also says that the exhortation to abstain from intercourse for periods
is not because intercourse is unclean, nor because it makes the command to pray
without ceasing impossible to fulfil, but because abstinence enables prayer to
be more intense. True, he adds that their coming together again is “because of
your incontinence”. But the resumption of intercourse is not itself
incontinence, but a rather a remedy against incontinence, and therefore not
evil in any way.
Since St. John Chrysostom’s homilies consistently expound a quite
different approach to marriage and sexuality from Lourié’s, he is
constantly employed in trying to “reinterpret”, i.e. distort the holy Father.
Thus when the saint writes: “Use marriage temperately, and you will be the
first in the Kingdom of heaven and be counted worthy of all its blessings”[446], Lourié
argues that “temperately” means “virginally”, insofar as “the meaning and aim
of Christian marriage… does not differ in any way from the celibate life”.[447]
But what does the saint in fact say? “It is possible, very possible,
also for those who have wives to be virtuous, if they wish. How? If they, while
having wives, shall be as though they had them not, if they will not rejoice in
acquisitions, if they will use the world as if not using it (I Corinthians
7.29-31). But if some have found marriage an obstacle, let them know that it is
not marriage that serves as an obstacle, but self-indulgence ill-using
marriage, just as wine does not produce drunkenness, but evil self-indulgence
and its intemperate use. Use marriage in a temperate way, and you will be the
first in the Heavenly Kingdom and will taste all its blessings, which may we
all be worthy of through the grace and love for man of our Lord Jesus Christ…”[448]
The critical comparison here is between wine and sexual relations. Just
as it is possible to drink wine sparingly without getting drunk, so it is
possible to have sexual relations in marriage “in a temperate manner”, without
it serving as an impediment to the spiritual life. Complete abstinence from
sexual relations is definitely not indicated. If it were, then the saint
would have said that one must not drink wine even in small quantities because
even the smallest consumption leads to drunkenness. But the whole point of the
comparison is that in wine-drinking, as in marital relations, small, “measured”
use is not harmful, and even sometimes beneficial. (Did not Christ change water
into wine at the marriage in Cana? And is it not true that wine is prescribed
at Church feasts because it is then that the people should rejoice, and “wine
maketh glad the heart of man” (Psalm 103.17)?[449]) So
there is no evidence that St. John meant here by “temperance” “complete
abstinence”.
Lourié’s provocative phrase “fornication under a crown” further
undermines the traditional teaching on marriage, for it obscures the essential
difference between marriage and fornication, namely, the fact that in marriage
sexual union is with “one’s own flesh”, whereas in fornication it is with
“strange flesh”, that is, flesh that is not one’s own through the
sacrament of marriage. It is true, of course, that it is possible to sin
sexually within the bounds of lawful marriage. But to call this “fornication”
is a dangerously misleading misuse of language. It is an attempt to create an
association between the deadly sin of fornication and the lawful pleasures of
an undefiled marriage-bed. For, according to Lourié, sexual union even
within marriage is “the satisfaction of lust, albeit in a limited degree”[450], and
therefore ipso facto sinful. In this opinion, he comes very close to the
opinion of Tertullian in his later period, when he had become a Montanist
heretic: “What is the thing that takes place in all men and women to produce
marriage and fornication? Commixture of the flesh, of course; the concupiscence
whereof the Lord put on the same footing with fornication. ‘Then,’ says
[someone], ‘are you this time destroying first – that is, single – marriage,
too?’ And not without reason, inasmuch as it, too, consists of that which is
the essence of fornication.”[451]
And yet, as we have seen, the Scriptures and the Fathers distinguish the
evil passion of lust that is manifest in fornication and adultery from the
innocent passion of sexual love that we see in lawful marriage.
Three Test-Cases
Let us consider three test-cases. First, in the Life of St.
Wulfhilda of Barking, we read that for eighteen years before the conception of
Wulfhilda, her pious parents, who had already had several children, had been
living as brother and sister so as to give themselves up more completely to
prayer and fasting. “One night, however, an angel appeared to each of them
separately three times, and told them that they should come together so as to
beget a daughter who would become a bride of Christ. The next morning they told
each other the vision, and discovered that it had been identical for the two of
them. So they accepted it as having come from God. Thus was the saint conceived
and born…”[452]
This is a difficult case to explain according to Lourié’s schema.
For clearly here God called two people living the life of grace to return to
the life of the law, in Lourié’s terms. They returned to “the
satisfaction of the passion of lust, albeit to a limited degree” – for, of
course, even if the purpose of the act, as here, is solely child-bearing, it is
physiologically impossible (unless we are talking about a rape, which is out of
the question here) to accomplish this purpose without the experience of
pleasure, which Lourié says is sinful and leads to death. But would God
ever call anyone to satisfy a sinful lust? Or to return from the life of grace
to the life of the law? Of course not! The only conclusion must be, therefore,
that sexual relations in a Christian marriage do not impede the life of grace.
In this case, we might expect Lourié to avail himself of
Blessed Augustine’s argument, that sexual relations in marriage are “covered”
by the aim of childbearing.[453] But
Lourié is keen to avoid any association with westernism or
Augustinianism, and accepts the patristic argument that childbearing is less
important now that the Messiah has been born. However, the fact remains that
his position on marriage and sexuality is close, not so much to that of Blessed
Augustine (who respects marriage more than Lourié) [454], as to
earlier and later heretical Latin doctrines (those of Tertullian and the Roman
Catholic Church).
A
second test-case: the mother of the writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky,
Maria Fyodorovna Dostoyevsky, who wrote to her husband: “My present pregnancy
is the seventh tight bond to be tied by our mutual love, a love that on my part
is pure, holy, chaste and passionate, unchanged from the day of our marriage…
No one sees my love, no one understands my feelings, people regard me with base
suspicion, whereas my love is my life. Meanwhile, time and the years go by; my
face grows all wrinkled and yellow, natural cheerfulness turns into melancholy
– that is my sad fate, that is the reward for my chaste, passionate love…”
Evidently, Dostoyevky’s mother saw no necessary conflict between chastity and
passion in love. Nor did her son. [455]
A
third test-case: the holy Tsar-Martyr Nicholas and his spouse, the
Tsaritsa-Martyr Alexandra. Anyone who has read the diaries of these saints will
know that their love was far from platonic, and by no means without passion.
And yet nobody has suggested that their love for each other, being “fallen”,
was an impediment to their holiness.
On the contrary, as Fr. Sergius Furmanov writes, “The family of the Tsar
was an icon of the family… The holy royal couple, who constructed their family
happiness on a love that was in no way darkened in the course of 24
years of marriage, shows the path to young people, that they may with prayer to
God for help seek for partners in life.”[456] There
can be no doubt that the royal couple were willing, if necessity demanded, to
give up the married life that brought them so much consolation and strength
(the Tsar even offered, after the birth of the Tsarevich, to become a monk and
then patriarch). And God Who knows all things knew of this willingness of
theirs. And yet He did not require this sacrifice of them; such a sacrifice was
not pleasing to Him. Their path to holiness lay in and through marriage. He loved her as Christ loved the Church,
and he loved his nation as a father loves his children; while she was a “help
like” him in everything…
Stars
differing in glory
That which is less than the ideal, or the lesser ideal, is not
necessarily sinful: this obvious, but often neglected fact needs to be
emphasised especially in this context. Just as “one star differs from another
in glory” (I Corinthians 15.41) without any of the stars being anything
but full of light, so one condition of the Christian life can differ from
another in glory without either being sinful or in any way not pleasing to God.
Monasticism is higher than marriage because it involves the greater struggle,
less distraction and greater concentration on the highest, most beautiful
Object of desire – God Himself.
However, that which is higher in general and in principle is not
necessarily better for each individual person. Since the pattern of men’s
characters and fallenness is very varied, God devises very varied paths for the
overcoming of that fallenness, and different charismata for different
men. For one man, monasticism would lead to salvation, while marriage would
lead to damnation. For another man the reverse is true: if he became a monk, no
matter how hard he tried, he would fail. For it is not only man’s will that
matters but also God’s. And God’s choice for each individual cannot be defied,
even for the best of motives, without sin and tragedy. Thus St. Martha, the
mother of St. Symeon the Stylite, at first did not want to follow her parents’
will and marry. However, St. John the Baptist appeared to her and told her that
it was the will of God that she marry. She married, became the mother of one of
the Church’s greatest saints, and herself is numbered among the saints…[457]
Again, we read in the biography of St. Seraphim of Sarov: “How many
people came to him with questions about marriage, and sometimes about
monasticism! And he solved their doubts and difficulties with such faith that
it seemed as if the all-seeing eye of God were looking through him. Often he
did not give the decision that was expected. Here are a few striking examples.
“Once two ladies visited him. One was young and belonged to a merchant
family; the other was middle-aged and of noble birth. The latter had a great
desire for the monastic life, but her parents would not give her their
blessing; the former did not even think of monasticism. But the Saint’s
spiritual insight led him to give them advice which was just the opposite of
their intentions. He firmly urged the noble lady to marry.
“’Married life,’ he said to her, ‘is blessed by God Himself. It is only
necessary for both parties to keep marital fidelity, love and peace. You will
be happy in marriage. Monasticism is not the way for you. The monastic life is
difficult; not everyone can endure it.
“But
the Saint told the younger woman to enter monasticism, and even told her the
name of the Monastery where she would be saved. Both visitors were dissatisfied
with the talk, and left the Elder disappointed. But subsequently everything
turned out exactly as Father Seraphim foretold.
“The thought of the blessedness of marriage the Saint often repeated to
his visitors. Once a young man came to him and asked him to bless him to enter
a Monastery. But the Saint, wishing to test his firmness and strengthen him in
his good intention, spoke to him of marriage: ‘”Not all can receive this
counsel” (Matthew 19.11), and the Lord does not compel them to do so.
But,’ he added, ‘”all things are possible to him who believes” (Mark
9.23). Remain in the world, get married. Don’t forget conjugal intercourse and
hospitality. Practise the virtues which will be remembered at the awful
judgement of God, according to the Holy Gospel. “I was hungry, and you gave Me
food. I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink. I was naked, and you clothed Me” (Matthew
25.35-36). Herein is your salvation! And also observe chastity. Remain
continent on Wednesdays and Fridays, as well as on Sundays and all holidays.
For not practising chastity on Wednesdays and Fridays children are born dead,
and for not observing holidays and Sundays wives die in childbirth.
“The young man returned home, but Father Seraphim’s advice kindled still
more his desire for monasticism and a year and a half later he entered the
Sarov Monastery.
“Sometimes Father Seraphim unexpectedly linked the lives of people who
had never met before. An officer came to ask for his blessing to marry. Father
Seraphim told him that his bride was already there, at the hostel. This young
lady also soon came for a blessing to marry some other man.
“’No, your bridegroom is here, in Sarov,’ the Elder told her.
“The young people became acquainted, and later both came to the Saint
who gave them his blessing to marry. The marriage was an extremely happy one.”[458]
“Without Me,” said the Lord, “you can do nothing” (John 15.5).
Without the grace of God that is given to a man to be a monk (or married), he
could make no progress. Of course, the man must also apply his own will. But
the will of man alone is not enough. If God does not also will it, then no
amount of striving will make him achieve success in the calling he has chosen.
Fallen nature underlies and hinders all our efforts, whatever our calling.
The struggle against sexual sin in thought, feeling and deed is a struggle
that must be undertaken by all, whether they are in the monastic or the married
state. It is not the case that all virgins or monastics necessarily sin less
sexually than married people (let us remember that lusting only in one’s heart
is adultery, according to the word of the Lord (Matthew 5.28)). Many
married people have reached high levels of chastity and sanctity, while many
foolish virgins have failed to enter the marriage-chamber of the Lamb.[459] Thus
it is not the path to the end, but the end itself which matters in the long
run. And that end is attainable by both.
Having said that, it is still necessary to emphasis that virginity is
not only higher than marriage: it is the only viewpoint from which marriage can
be correctly evaluated, and the apparently contradictory scriptural texts on
marriage understood. For whereas a perfect marriage is the end of most men’s
dreams, “paradise on earth”, the ideal of virginity points to a still higher
end – not paradise on earth, but the Kingdom of heaven. Although these two ends
are not incompatible, and in fact have the same end in view, everyone,
both the monk and the married, must love the Kingdom more than paradise on
earth if he is not ultimately to be deprived of both the one and the other; he
must be ready in his heart to reject all earthly delights, however lawful, for
the Kingdom’s sake. For paradise on earth will not last, - at the very most for
the duration of earthly life, - whereas the Kingdom of heaven endures for ever
and ever. And in the end, those who will be counted worthy of salvation, both
the monastics and the virgins, will be “like the angels, who always behold the
face of the Father in heaven” (Matthew 18.11). For when the Supreme
Object of desire is present, lesser objects are necessarily eclipsed, not
because they are flawed or lacking in beauty, but simply because they are
lesser. As St. Maximus the Confessor writes: “It is like the light from the
stars. The stars do not shine in the day. When the greater and incomparable
light of the sun appears, they are hidden and cannot be seen by the senses.
With respect to God this is even more so, for God is infinite, and uncreated
things cannot be compared to created things.” [460]
That is why the holy Apostle Simon the Zealot, the bridegroom at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, abandoned not only the water of a fallen marriage, but even the wine of a marriage transformed and elevated to iconic status by Christ, for love of the Divine Bridegroom Himself…
4. EROS AND HUMAN NATURE
It is God Who sows these loves.
St. John Chrysostom, Encomium to Maximus,
3; P.G. 51:230.
All things must desire and yearn for and
love the Beautiful and the Good.
St. Dionysius the Areopagite, On the
Divine Names, 4.
When desire is redirected from the flesh to
the spirit, it raises us to such heights… We must make haste to attain purity
and chastity and avoid fornication and every uncleanness, in order to rejoice
throughout all ages with the pure Bridegroom in the unsullied bridal-chambers.
St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 5, On the
Meeting of the Lord, 7, 24.
Having discussed the origins of eros, its fall and its redemption in
Christ and in the institutions of marriage and monasticism, we can now pose the
direct question: what is eros?
Let us begin with a patristic definition.
St. Diadochus of Photike writes: “The natural love of the soul is one thing,
and the love which comes to it from the Holy Spirit is another. The activity of
the first depends on the assent of our will to our desire. For this reason it
is easily taken over and perverted by evil spirits when we do not keep firmly
to our chosen course.”[461] Eros,
then, is a natural love of the soul, whose expression requires the assent of
our will and which can be perverted to evil ends.
This natural
love of the soul, or eros, is necessary for salvation. For, as St. Maximus the
Confessor writes: “The passionless knowledge of divine things does not convince
the mind altogether to scorn material things; it is like the mere thought of a
sensible thing. Hence many men may be found with much knowledge who yet wallow
in fleshly passions like swine in the mire…
“As the simple
thought of human things does not force the mind to scorn the divine, so neither
does the simple knowledge of divine things persuade it to scorn completely
human things; because the truth now exists in shadows and figures. Therefore
there is need for the blessed passion of holy eros; it binds the mind to
spiritual objects and persuades it to prefer the immaterial to the material,
the intelligible and divine to the sensible.”[462]
Eros is usually identified with the desiring or appetitive faculty of
the human soul (erwV or to epiqumhtikon). The other faculties, as we
have seen, are defined by the Holy Fathers, following Plato, as the intellect
or intelligence (nouV or to logistikon) and the incensive or irascible
faculty (qumoV or to qumikon). Thus St. Ambrose of Milan
writes that “the soul has three states of feeling in the body, the first
rational, the second desiring, and the third impetuous, viz., logistikon, epiqumhtikon, qumikon”.[463]
Although we have identified eros with the desiring faculty of the soul,
this is not quite accurate, according to St. Maximus. Rather, Eros is “the
offspring, as it were, of the gathering together of the soul’s faculties in
relation to divine realities, and of the union of those faculties – rational,
irascible and concupiscent”.[464] This
illustrates the important principle that no individual faculty of the human
soul, whether the rational, the irascible or the concupiscent, is completely
independent of the others, just as there is no important human function which
is completely spiritual, with no participation of the body, or completely
bodily, with no participation of the soul or mind.
Taken together, the incensive and desiring faculties are called the
“passible aspect” of the soul (to paqhtikon). It is this passible aspect
which has to come under the control of the intellect. In the morally healthy
man the intellect rules the incensive and desiring faculties as a charioteer
rules his horses. Thus, as St. Anthony the Great says, “when the soul endowed
with intelligence firmly exercises her freedom of choice in the right way, and
reins in like a charioteer the incensive and appetitive aspects of her nature,
restraining and controlling her passionate impulses, she receives a crown of
victory; and as a reward for all her labours, she is granted life in heaven by
God the Creator.”[465]
The intellect is not to be confused with the discursive power of the
mind. It is located, not in the head, but in the heart, and is the first
receptacle of divine grace. Thus St. Diadochus of Photike writes: “The grace of
God dwells in the very depths of the soul – that is to say, in the intellect…
The heart of those who are beginning to experience the energy of the Spirit is
only partially warmed by God’s grace. The result is that, while their intellect
begins to produce spiritual thought, the outer parts of the heart continue to
produce thoughts after the flesh, since the members of the heart have not yet
all become full conscious of the light of God’s grace shining upon them.”[466]
Under the
influence of Divine grace, and with the cooperation of the free will of man,
the intellect exerts power over the “outer” regions of the heart, the incensive
and desiring faculties. It “informs” the heart, so that all the actions of the
heart become “rational” or “noetic”. When thus purified and under the control
of the intellect, the incensive and desiring faculties by no means hinder the
soul in its ascent to God: on the contrary, they help it. Thus St.
Isaiah the Solitary writes with regard to the incensive faculty: "There is
among the passions an anger of the intellect, and this anger is in accordance with
nature. Without anger a man cannot attain purity; he has to feel angry with all
that is sown in him by the enemy."[467]
The
“Sublimation” of Eros
The idea that the natural passions can, under the influence of grace,
help rather than hinder the soul in its striving for salvation, is sometimes
confused with the Freudian idea of “sublimation” and therefore condemned as
heretical. Thus Fr. Gregory
Lourié mocks the idea that “one’s sexual energies can be directed toward
God in an acceptable spiritual way”.[468]
However, in this rejection he shows his kinship to the heretic Barlaam[469], to
whom St. Gregory Palamas writes: “But, philosopher, we have not been taught
that dispassion is the putting to death of the soul’s passionate part; on the
contrary, it is the conversion of the passionate part from the lower to the
higher, and its active devotion to divine realities, completely turned away
from evil and towards what is good”.[470]
The saint’s words were confirmed by the Athonite Fathers: “Once the
soul’s passible aspect is transformed and sanctified – but not reduced to a
deathlike condition – through it the dispositions and activities of the
body are also sanctified, since body and soul share a conjoint existence.”[471]
The most recent major work on the anthropology of St. Gregory Palamas,
written, as it happens, by a close disciple of Lourié, confirms that
eros is not meant to be extirpated in man, but changed in its direction from
lower to higher objects: “The investigator of the teaching of Palamas and the
language of his homilies comes up against the thought: is it not possible… to
deduce the advice that the passions and impulses of the lower parts of the soul
should be converted to lofty, spiritual and absolute values, thereby somehow
justifying the existence of the given parts?… Insofar as, according to the
patristic teaching, ‘that which is not received is not healed’, and nothing in
man was created superfluous, we are obliged – by means of a process of
perfection – to purify these potentialities of the soul also, and open for the whole
man an entrance into the Kingdom of God…
“… To this programme of asceticism [of Palamas] should be added one more
point: the transfer of the lower, passion-immired potentialities of the soul to
higher objects and aims, and first of all – onto God and His Kingdom…
“… For the teacher of hesychasm the purification of the passionate part
of the soul was equivalent not to its cutting off, but its change to the
better.”[472]
Not only St. Gregory Palamas, but several of the Holy Fathers teach
this. Thus St. Maximus the Confessor writes: “The passions become good in those
who are spiritually earnest once they have wisely separated them from corporeal
objects and used them to gain possession of heavenly things. For instance, they
can turn desire (epiqumia)
into the appetitive movement of the mind’s longing for divine things, or
pleasure (hdonh)
into the unadulterated joy of the mind when enticed toward divine gifts, or
fear (joboV)
into cautious concern for imminent punishment for sins committed, or grief (luph) into corrective repentance of a
present evil…
“The spiritually earnest use the passions to destroy a present or
anticipated evil, and to embrace and hold on to virtue and knowledge. Thus the
passions become good when they are used by those who ‘take every thought
captive in order to obey Christ’ (II Corinthians 10.5).”[473]
We shall call this process of purification by redirection “sublimation”;
but it must be understood that the word “sublimation” here (other possibilities
are: “redirection”, “transmutation”) is used in a strictly patristic, not
Freudian sense. For Freud, as an atheist, understood neither the truly sublime
heights to which eros can ascend, nor the fact that true sublimation is impossible
without the grace of God and in the Church of Christ.
Since the sublimatory potential of the desiring faculty is both critical
to a proper understanding of sexuality, and specifically denied by
Lourié and others, we shall cite the Holy Fathers in confirmation of it
in some detail:
(i)
St.
Basil the Great: Desire, irascibility and the other passible faculties “each
becomes a good or an evil for its possessor according to the use made of it.”[474]
(ii)
Evagrios
the Solitary: “To help man [God] has given him incensive power and desire, so
that with the first he may drive away wolflike intellections, while with the
second he may loving tend the sheep, even though he is often exposed to rains
and winds”.[475]
(iii)
St.
John Cassian: “Movement in the sexual organs was given to us by the Creator for
procreation and the continuation of the species, not for unchastity; while
incensive power was planted in us for our salvation, so that we could manifest
it against wickedness, but not so that we could act like wild beasts towards
our fellow men. Even if we make bad use of these passions, nature itself is not
therefore sinful, nor should we blame the Creator. A man who gives someone a
knife for some necessary and useful purpose is not to blame if that person uses
it to commit murder.”[476]
(iv)
St.
Ambrose of Milan: The soul and the body “agree in the unanimity of inseparable
love when the flesh, submissive to its superior, obeys saving commands… so that
the flesh becomes an appurtenance of the soul, no longer a procuress of vices,
but an enemy thereof and, so to speak, a handmaiden of virtue.”[477]
(v)
St.
Hesychius the Priest: “We should use the three aspects of the soul fittingly
and in accordance with nature, as created by God. We should use the incensive
power against our outer self and against Satan. ‘Be incensed’, it is written,
‘against sin’ (cf. Psalm 4.4), that is, be incensed with yourselves and
the devil, so that you will not sin against God. Our desire should be directed
towards God and towards holiness. Our intelligence should control our incensive
power and our desire with wisdom and skill, regulating them, admonishing them,
correcting them and ruling them as a king rules over his subjects. Then, even
should they rebel against it, our inmost intelligence will direct the passions
in a way that accords with God’s will, for we shall have set it in charge of
them. The brother of the Lord declares: ‘He who does not lapse in his inmost
intelligence is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body’ (James
3.2). For the truth is that every sin and transgression is brought about
through these three aspects of the soul, just as every virtue and good action
is also produced through them.”[478]
(vi)
St.
Diadochus of Photike: “If we learn persistently to be detached from the good
things of this world, we shall be able to unite the earthly appetite of the
soul to its spiritual and intellectual aspiration, through the communion of the
Holy Spirit” “A controlled incensive power is a weapon implanted in our nature
by God when He creates us. If Eve had used this weapon against the serpent, she
would not have been impelled by sensual desire.”[479]
(vii)
St.
Theodore the Great Ascetic: “Every deiform soul is tripartite, according to
Gregory the Theologian. Virtue, when established in the intelligence, he calls
discretion, understanding and wisdom; and when in the incensive power, he calls
it courage and patience; and when in the faculty of desire, he calls it love,
self-restraint and self-control. Justice or right judgement penetrates all
three aspects of the soul, enabling them to function in harmony.”[480]
(viii) St. Theodore the Great Ascetic:
“With respect to its intelligent aspect, to purify the soul is to eradicate and
completely expunge from it all degrading and distorted features, all ‘worldly
cares’, as the Divine Liturgy puts it, all turbulence, evil tendencies and
senseless prepossession. With regard to its desiring aspect, it is to purge
away every impulsion towards what is material, to cease from viewing things
according to the senses, and to be obedient to the intelligence. And with
respect to the soul’s incensive power, purification consists in never being
perturbed by anything that happens.”[481]
(ix)
St.
Gregory the Theologian: “I am united to God in an indivisible identity of will,
and that through making reasonable in a fitting manner the irrational powers of
the soul by leading them through reason to a familiar commerce with the mind: I
mean anger and desire. I have changed the one into charity, and the other into
joy.”[482]
(x)
St.
Gregory of Nyssa: “If we use our reason aright and master our emotions,
everything can be transformed into virtue; for anger produces courage, hatred -
aversion from vice, the power of love - the desire for what is truly
beautiful…”[483]
(xi)
St.
Gregory of Nyssa: “The desiring faculty has grown and matured not towards the
good by nature, for the sake of which it was sown in us, but instead it has
made the harvest beastly and irrational. This is where the impulse of desire
has been led by misjudgement concerning the good. In the same way also the seed
of anger has not been tempered into courage, but has armed us for battle with
our own kind. Likewise the power of love has turned away from the intelligible,
running riot in the immoderate enjoyment of the sensual… We might be [deprived
of the better part] if desire were altogether rooted out along with the useless
growth. For if this should happen to our human nature, what is there which
would raise us towards the union with the heavenly? Or if love is taken away,
in what manner will we be joined with the divine? If anger is quenched, what
weapon will we have against the adversary?… These emotions are neither virtuous
nor wicked in themselves, since they are impulses of the soul which lie in the
power of the users to serve good or otherwise. When their movement is toward the
better, we shall declare that they are material for praise, as desire was for
Daniel, anger for Phineas, and grief for the one who mourns rightly. If, on the
other hand, their inclination is towards the worse, then they become passions
and are named accordingly.”[484]
(xii)
St.
Maximus the Confessor: “Let our intelligence, then, be moved to seek God, let
our desire be roused in longing for Him, and let our incensive power struggle
to keep guard over our attachment to Him. Or, more precisely, let our whole
intellect be directed towards God, tensed by our incensive power as if by some
nerve, and fired with longing by our desire at its most ardent”.[485]
(xiii)
St.
Maximus the Confessor: “For him whose mind is continually with God, even his
concupiscence is increased above measure into a divinely burning love; and the
entire irascible element is changed into divine charity.”[486]
(xiv)
St.
Maximus the Confessor: “The incensive power and desire… are to be treated like
the servant and the handmaid of another tribe. The contemplative intellect (nous),
through fortitude and self-restraint, subjugates them for ever to the lordship
of the intelligence, so that they serve the virtues. It does not give them
their complete freedom until the law of nature is totally swallowed up by the
law of the spirit, in the same way as the death of the unhappy flesh is
swallowed up by infinite life (cf. I Corinthians 5.4), and until the
entire image of the unoriginate kingdom is revealed, mimetically manifesting in
itself the entire form of the archetype. When the contemplative intellect
enters this state it gives the incensive power and desire their freedom,
transmuting desire into the unsullied pleasure and pure enravishment of an
intense love for God and the incensive power into spiritual fervour, an
ever-active fiery élan, a self-possessed frenzy”.[487]
(xv)
St.
Maximus the Confessor: “The second of the mind’s elders or captains is the
concupiscent faculty, whereby divine love (agape) is produced. Through this
love, the mind, voluntarily attaching itself to the desire for the undefiled
Godhead, has a ceaseless longing for what it desires. Still another elder or
captain is the irascible faculty, whereby the mind ceaselessly clings to the
peace of God, drawing its movement toward the divine passion (eros) or desire
(epithymia).”[488].
(xvi)
St.
Maximus the Confessor: “He came to bind to Himself the principle of desire…,
that it might take on a procreative disposition fixed and unalterable in the
good.”[489]
(xvii) St. Isaac the Syrian: “The work
of the cross is twofold. And this corresponds to the duality of nature which is
divided into two parts: into endurance of bodily afflictions which comes
through the energy of the irascible part of the soul and is called practice;
and into the subtle work of the mind in sacred studies and constant prayer and
so forth, which is done with that desiring part and is called contemplation.
Practice purifies the passionate part through the power of zeal; contemplation
refines that part capable of knowing by means of the energy of the love of the
soul, which is its natural longing.”[490]
(xviii) Blessed Theophylact: “He teaches
that we ought not to love God partially, but to give all of ourselves to God.
For we perceive these three distinctions of the human soul: the vegetative, the
animal, and the rational. When the soul grows and is nourished and begets what
is like unto it, it resembles the plants; when it experiences anger or desire,
it is like the animals; when it understands, it is called rational. See, then,
how these three facets are indicated here. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart’ – this is the animal part of man; ‘and with all thy soul
[or life]’ – this is the vegetative part of a man, for plants are alive and
animate; ‘and with all thy mind’ – this is the rational.”[491]
(xix)
St.
Peter of Damascus: “’Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul and
with all thy might’ (Deuteronomy 6.5). When I heard the words ‘with all
thy soul’ I was astounded, and no longer needed to hear the rest. For ‘with all
thy soul’ means with the intelligent, incensive and desiring powers of the
soul, because it is of these three powers that the soul is composed. Thus the
intellect should think at all times about Divine matters, while desire should
long constantly and entirely, as the Law says, for God alone and never for anything
else; and the incensive power should actively oppose only what obstructs this
longing, and nothing else”.[492]
(xx)
St.
Gregory Palamas: "Not only hast Thou made the passionate part of my soul
entirely Thine, but if there is a spark of desire in my body, it has returned
to its source, and has thereby become elevated and united to Thee."[493]
(xxi)
St.
Gregory Palamas: “Impassibility does not consist in mortifying the passionate
part of the soul, but in removing it from evil to good, and directing its
energies towards divine things… Through the passionate part of the soul which
has been orientated towards the end for which God created it, one will practise
the corresponding virtues: with the concupiscent appetite, one will embrace
charity, and with the irascible, one will practise patience. It is thus not the
man who has killed the passionate part of the soul who has the pre-eminence,
for such a one would have no momentum or activity to acquire a divine state and
right disposition and relationship with God; but rather, the prize goes to him
who has put that part of his soul under subjection, so that by its obedience to
the mind, which is by nature appointed to rule, it may ever tend towards God,
as is right, by uninterrupted remembrance of Him... Thus one must offer to God the
passionate part of the soul, alive and active, that it may be a living
sacrifice. As the Apostle said of our bodies, 'I exhort you, by the mercy of
God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God' (Romans
12.1)."[494]
(xxii) St. Gregory Palamas: “The
impassible man is one who no longer possesses any evil dispositions, but is
rich in good ones, who is marked by the virtues, as men of passion are marked
by evil pleasures; who has tamed his irascible and concupiscent appetites
(which constitute the passionate part of the soul), to the faculties of
knowledge, judgement and reason in the soul, just as men of passion subject
their reason to the passions. For it is the misuse of the powers of the soul
which engenders the terrible passions, just as misuse of the knowledge of
created things engenders the ‘wisdom which has become folly’.”
(xxiii) St. Gregory Palamas: “But if one
uses these things properly, then through the knowledge of created things,
spiritual understood, one will arrive at knowledge of God; and through the
passionate part of the soul which has been orientated towards the end for which
God created it, one will practise the corresponding virtues: with the
concupiscent appetite, one will embrace charity, and with the irascible, one
will practise patience. It is thus not the man who has killed the passionate
part of his soul who has the pre-eminence, for such a one would have no
momentum or activity to acquire a divine state and right dispositions and
relationship with God; but rather, the prize goes to him who has put that part
of his soul under subjection, so that by its obedience to the mind, which is by
nature appointed to rule, it may ever tend towards God, as is right, by the
uninterrupted remembrance of Him.… Thus one must offer to God the passionate
part of the soul, alive and active, that it may be a living sacrifice.”[495]
(xxiv) St. Gregory Palamas: “Therefore
those who love the Good (oi erastai twn kalwn) carry out a transposition (metaqesin) of this faculty and do not make
it die; they do not suck it into themselves without letting it move, but they
show it to be active in love towards God and neighbour”.[496]
(xxv) St. Gregory Palamas: “The great
Paul says, ‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh’
(Galatians 5.16). Elsewhere he exhorts, ‘Stand, therefore, having your
loins girt about with truth’ (Ephesians 6.14). For the contemplative
part of the soul strengthens and supports the part concerned with desires, and
chases away fleshly lusts. The great Peter tells us with absolute clarity what
the references to the loins and the truth mean. ‘Wherefore’, he says, ‘gird up
the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to
be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (I Peter 1.13).”[497]
Sublimation
and “Falling in Love”
We can better understand the role that the “sublimation” of eros plays
by turning to the highly ambiguous phenomenon known as “falling in love”. On the one hand, the word “falling” indicates
that this is a phenomenon close to lust. And certainly, the element of
compulsion in falling in love indicates the influence of the fall. On the
other, the use of the word “love” is not out of place; for falling in love, as
we shall see, takes a person out of himself, makes him capable of self-sacrifice
and is the first step to a God-blessed marriage. This shows that it is more
than just a lust, but rather the first step, at least in some, to the
sublimation of lust.
It is a striking fact about “falling in love” that the more intense it
is, the purer and more independent, as it were, of the physical act of sexual
union it appears to the lovers themselves. The act of sexual union is, of
course, the longed-for climax and consummation of their love, but it is the
love itself that is central, that consumes the time and energy of the lovers,
that appears to them to be a goal in itself, even if the relationship is for
one reason or another not consummated. This important psychological fact is
well documented in Orthodox Christian literature – but more or less completely
discounted by secular psychologists.
Thus St. Augustine writes: “We know that many of our brothers by mutual
agreement refrain from carnal love, but not from marital love. The more
strongly the former is suppressed, the more the latter is strengthened”.[498] Again,
“when purity is preserved,” writes St. Asterius of Amasia, “peace is preserved
as well as mutual attraction, but when the soul is overwhelmed by unlawful and
sensual lust, it loses the lawful and just love”.[499] Again,
St. John Chrysostom says that “love is born from chastity”[500], that
“love makes people chaste”, and that “lewdness comes from nothing else than a
lack of love”.[501]
Philip Sherrard writes: “Though it is a fully sexualised love, in that
it involves the fully differentiated beings of man and woman, this sexual
element does not necessarily have any so-called carnal (or genital) expression:
not because the man and woman have taken any vow of virginity or regard
celibacy as a superior state of existence, but simply because the kind of
communion they experience makes such expression superfluous – a descent into a
lower key”.[502]
As Scruton has pointed out, “Desire is indeed a natural phenomenon, but
it is one that lies beyond the reach of any ‘natural science’ of man.”[503]
Science can understand love, desire and “falling in love” only by reducing them
to the category of instinctual animal behaviour and chemical reactions in the
brain.[504]
The problem is that while being in love is clearly influenced by instinctual forces,
it differs from instinctual behaviour in important ways.
First of all, it is highly personal and individual. If
John is in love with Mary, then his desire is focussed exclusively on her, and
her alone. No other woman can take her place, and if she rejects his love, then
it is no good suggesting to him that he find another. In fact, the very
suggestion is likely to offend him deeply! Only when his passion for her fades
will he be able to be strongly attracted to another.
Even a Don Juan, whose passions for women change with exceptional speed,
does not love all women at the same time. He loves first one particular
woman, and then another particular woman. His love may be fickle, but it is at
all times personalised and individualised. But this is quite
unlike typically instinctual behaviour. If a man is hungry, then any food
will do. If he is tired, then any kind of bed will satisfy his need to rest
weary limbs.
Secondly, the strength of the phenomenon does not vary in any simple way
in accordance with hormone levels or frequency of intercourse. Of course, the
likelihood of falling in love increases dramatically with the onset of puberty,
and decreases with the onset of old age. And there is evidence that the
menstrual cycle and the level of hormones such as testosterone influence levels
of desire. And yet human beings, unlike animals, do not “go on heat”. In fact,
by comparison with those of animals, human beings’ passions are both more constant
and obsessive, and less dependent on biological forces and cycles.
The Russian religious philosopher S.L. Frank writes about being in love:
“What can so-called empirical psychology observe in it? First of all it
will fall on the external, physical symptoms of this phenomenon – it will point
out the changes in blood circulation, feeding and sleep in the person under
observation. But remembering that it is, first of all, psychology, it will pass
over to the observation of ‘mental phenomena’, it will record changes in
self-image, sharp alterations in mental exaltation and depression, the stormy
emotions of a pleasant and repulsive nature through which the life of a lover
usually passes, the dominance in his consciousness of images relating to the
beloved person, etc. Insofar as psychology thinks that in these observations it
has expressed, albeit incompletely, the very essence of being in love – then
this is a mockery of the lover, a denial of the mental phenomenon under the
guise of a description of it. For for the lover himself all these are just
symptoms or consequences of his feeling, not the feeling itself. Its essence
consists, roughly, in a living consciousness of the exceptional value of the
beloved person, in an aesthetic delight in him, in the experience of his
central significance for the life of the lover – in a word, in a series of
phenomena characterizing the inner meaning of life. To elucidate these
phenomena means to understand them compassionately from within, to recreate
them sympathetically in oneself. The beloved will find an echo of himself in
artistic descriptions of love in novels, he will find understanding in a
friend, as a living person who has himself experienced something similar and is
able to enter the soul of his friend; but the judgements of the psychologist
will seem to him to be simply misunderstandings of his condition - and he will
be right.”[505]
Why will the judgements of the
psychologist fall short of their mark? Because the “object-consciousness” (to
use Frank’s term) of the psychologist, and of the scientist in general, is
appropriate only in relation to things which are indeed just objects, and not
capable of having an “object consciousness” of their own. But human beings do
have object consciousness; and this object consciousness is not suspended
during the state of “being in love”, but is, on the contrary, heightened.
Object-consciousness – or, as more
contemporary philosophers prefer to call it, intentionality - is beyond
the capacity of animals. Still more beyond their capacity is the characteristic
that enables two people to relate to each other not only as subjects and
objects, but as inter-penetrating subjects-cum-objects who share, albeit
from different initial points of view, their perceptions of each other.
Frank calls this simply “communion”, and
defines it as follows: “When we speak to a person, or even when our eyes meet
in silence, that person ceases to be ‘object’ for us and is not longer a ‘he’
but a ‘thou’. That means he no longer fits into the frame-work of ‘the world of
objects’: he ceases to be a passive something upon which our cognitive gaze is
directed for the purposes of perception without in any way affecting it. Such
one-sided relation is replaced by a two-sided one, by an interchange of
spiritual activities. We attend to him and he to us, and this attitude is
different from – though it may co-exist with – the purely ideal direction of
attention which we call objective knowledge: it is real spiritual interaction.
Communion is both our link with that which is external to us, and a part of our
inner life, and indeed a most essential part of it. From an abstract logical
point of view this is a paradoxical case of something external not merely
coexisting with the ‘inward’ but of actually merging with it. Communion is at
one and the same time both something ‘external’ to us and something ‘inward’ –
in other words it cannot in the strict sense be called either external or
internal.
“This can still more clearly be seen from
the fact that all communion between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ leads to the formation of a
new reality designated by the word ‘we’ – or rather, coincides with it.”[506]
It is as if the two are like two mirrors
placed opposite each other. What is reflected in mirror A is immediately
reflected in mirror B, and vice-versa, in an indefinite reciprocal regression.
The knowledge each has of the other is therefore objective and subjective at
the same time; in fact, the objectivity and subjectivity of the vision or
visions are logically and chronologically inseparable: “My awareness of myself
is in part constituted by my awareness of me, and my awareness of him is in
part constituted by my awareness of his awareness of me”.[507]
Sexual love heightens this characteristic
to an extraordinary degree, generating an indefinitely long chain of
reciprocity, in which “she conceives her lover conceiving her conceiving him…”[508]
It will be obvious that this kind of
communion or “inter-subjective consciousness” is both absolutely central to the
structure of human sexual relations and quite impossible to describe in terms
of instinctual feelings alone. For instinctual feelings are “blind”; they do
not relate to objects so much as devour them. And it goes without saying that
they cannot form the basis of inter-personal communion, although they obviously
“colour” that communion. Irrational, instinctual desire seeks only the
achievement of a certain purely subjective satisfaction. It is egoistical,
solipsistic; it needs the other only in order to make it no longer the other,
engulfing it in its own self, just as food no longer remains food when it has
been absorbed into the body that eats it.
On the other hand, “rational” (i.e.
intentional, mind-directed, quintessentially human) desire contemplates the
other and seeks to be united with it, but not by engulfing it, nor by
destroying it, but, on the contrary, by preserving it in its unique,
individual, separate existence for ever. As such, it is not subjective,
but objective – more precisely, interpersonal. In fact, if sexual love
is to achieve its goal of personal union with the other, it is essential that
the other remain the other; the union must be “undivided but unconfused”.
The fall of
sexuality consists in the instability of its intentionality, its tendency to
allow impersonal animality to overwhelm personal humanity, so that the mind is
diverted from the contemplation of the embodied soul of the other to his
“unpsyched” body – that concentration on body as mere flesh which causes shame
in all normal people:
Th’ expense of
spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in
action…. [509]
Moreover, fallen
sexual love reveals in the very moment of its consummation a certain barrier to
complete union. At a superficial level, this is manifested in the fact that, as
a result of the fall, the lovers’ bodies are opaque, can never merge entirely
and therefore have to separate eventually. They become “one flesh”, and yet
remain two bodies. More profoundly, the souls, too, withdraw behind “the middle
wall of partition” between them (Ephesians 2.14) created by their
egoism. Passion ebbs, embodiment fades away, and opaqueness returns, returning
the lovers to the cold reality of their fallen, divided existence.
Let us examine the progress, as it were, of the sexual
impulse from its inchoate, undirected, instinctual beginnings in childhood and
adolescence to its fixed, focused and “intentional” end in adult married
love.
In the beginning, the sexual impulse is
closer to primitive biological desires such as hunger than it will ever be later
on. Under the influence of hormonal changes in his body, the adolescent boy is
filled with a vague longing or wanderlust, an indefinite dissatisfaction which
he knows not how to satisfy.
Even at this early stage, however, the
sexual impulse is not “purely” animal, but is heavily influenced by other
passions characteristic of a rational being, such as pride. Thus Metropolitan
Anthony (Khrapovitsky) writes: “When the male organism matures, a feeling of
self-satisfaction is aroused in the young man. This is strengthened by the
change in the youth’s social position: he becomes an independent member of
society – a student; or, as a senior schoolboy, he is preparing to become one –
to enter this totally uninhibited group of people. In student society he feels
like a bridegroom – he is no longer under the constant supervision of his
parents, he earns some money for himself. In general, his conditions of life
favour the development of a feeling of self-satisfaction. The newly aroused
sexual passion on its part has also something in common with this feeling, and
now he wants to live without any restriction; mentally he says to himself:
‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,… and walk in the ways of thine heart and
in the sight of thine eyes’. But the words which follow in Ecclesiastes
will be revealed to him by the voice of his conscience even if he has never
read them, and will cause him intense irritability and will arouse a feeling of
enmity against God and against religion. Here are these words” ‘But know, that
for all these things God will bring thee into judgement’ (ch. 11, v. 19).”[510]
But then he meets a girl who for the first
time focuses and “incarnates” his hitherto bodiless, unshaped longing. And not
only focuses it, but also humbles it. For the feeling of
self-satisfaction noted by Metropolitan Anthony flees with the advent of true
(or, at any rate, truer) love. Before the image of beauty he humbles his proud
mind. Now he and his own desires are no longer his first priority; he seeks to serve
the object of his love. This way in which falling in love humbles the lover is
illustrated by the words of a German Nazi during the invasion of Russia: “I
fell in love with a Russian girl, although nothing ever came of it, and for the
first time I began to doubt our racial superiority. How could I be better than
her?”[511]
Does the instinctual longing then
disappear? No. And yet one can no longer call it purely instinctual. For what
precisely is this longing for? The sexual act? Hardly, especially if the
youth is still a virgin. In fact, the very idea would probably disgust him, as
if it polluted the absolute purity of his new feeling. A particular form of
sensual pleasure? Not at all, for he does not yet know what sexual pleasure is,
still less how it is produced. In fact, the paradoxical thing is that at the
first appearance of the object of desire, desire as such is stilled, at any
rate temporarily. It is as if a thirsty man having come upon a river in the
desert is so stunned by the beauty of the water that he forgets to drink…
When vague longing has matured into “being
in love”, the boy longs for a specific individual girl, the girl, not
for just any girl, not for anything about the girl, but the girl herself.
He does not long for certain pleasures which she may be able to give him. He
does not long for her body as such, nor any part of her body. He longs for her.
John longs for Mary, not for anything or anyone else.
Even definitely unlawful love, as that
between Abelard and Héloise, is not necessarily reducible to mere
animalian lust and nothing more. Thus Héloise wrote to Abelard: “God
knows I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply you,
nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage-bond, nor marriage portion, and it was
not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but
yours.”[512]
Héloise’s was an unlawful love, and so she could hope only (as she goes
on to say) for the title of his “mistress” or “whore”. And yet if love is
defined as a transfer of the desires of the soul from the service of self to
the service of another, then this was certainly love, even if unlawful in the
given case.[513]
Returning to the youth, we may note that,
even after falling in love, he still feels a fascination for certain parts of
the girl’s body, and here undoubtedly the instinctual, animal-like part of his
nature is manifested. And yet the part of the body which fascinates him most is
not any of the specifically sexual members or “erogenous zones”, but the
face. Scruton writes: “Schopenhauer – whose view of these matters is a good
example of the chaos that ensues from the premature attempt to explain them –
argues that the face is the least important of all the indices of beauty, since
it is the least relevant to the reproductive function which underlies and
explains desire. That is almost the opposite of the truth. Although a pretty
face surmounting a deformed or mutilated body may indeed fail to arouse sexual
interest, it is well known that a pretty face may compensate for much bodily
ugliness… A beautiful body, however, will always be rendered repulsive by an
ugly face, and can certainly never compensate for it.”[514]
Why the face? Because the face, far more
than any other part of the body, reveals the soul, the person. That is
why the word for “face” and person” in Russian is the same – litso. And
why the Latin word persona, whence comes the English “person”,
originally referred to the masks, or faces, that actors assumed during
performance.[515]
If we wish to know who a person is and what he is feeling, then while we may
take into account other elements of body language, it is the movements of the
face, - the smiles, the blushes[516], the
laughs, the tears, - and especially the expression of the eyes, that we will
study most closely. For it is the eyes that are, as the proverb says, “the
mirror of the soul”, making the workings of the invisible soul visible with an
extraordinary transparency:
Beshrew your eyes,
They have o’erlooked
me and divided me,
One half of me is
yours, the other half yours –
Mine own I would
say: but if mine then yours,
And so all yours.[517]
But what has sexual desire to do with the workings of the invisible
soul? Nothing, if the Platonic-Kantian-Freudian line of thought is to be
believed, which sees sexual desire as a purely biological phenomenon having
nothing to do with the noetic realm. But this only goes to prove that this line
of thought is inadequate to describe, let alone explain, the phenomenon of
sexual desire, which, the more focused and concentrated it is, the more
intensely personal it is.
For sexual desire in all but its most
perverted manifestations is not in the first place directed to the flesh of the
desired one but to the soul. It is not the purely physical pleasure of the caress,
the glance or the kiss that is the vital element, but the fact that it is his
(or her) caress, glance or kiss; the physical pleasure is
inseparable from the knowledge of the person who gives it. This
knowledge makes the physical contact the sign, the “incarnation”, the icon, as
it were, of a non-physical reality.
Thus the true object of desire that has not
completely lost its intentional – i.e. individual, personal, as opposed to
generic, impersonal, – character, is not the body as such, but the body as
the expression of the soul, not the pleasure as such, but the pleasure as
the expression of the thought. It is this iconic quality of the
flesh in sexual love, enabling the veneration paid to the flesh to ascend to
its “archetype”, the soul, that transforms the temporality of pleasure into the
eternity of true love:
Eternity was in our
lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows’
bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of
heaven.[518]
And if that same physical pleasure were
provided by another person, it would entirely lose its significance and thrill.
This is proved by the fact that if the lover discovers that the pleasure he
receives comes not from the person he thought it came from, but from someone
else, the pleasure immediately evaporates and often turns to disgust. As
Scruton writes, “the knowledge that it is an unwanted hand that touches me at
once extinguishes my pleasure. The pleasure could not be taken as confirming
the hitherto unacknowledged sexual virtues of someone previously rejected. Jacob
did not, for example, discover attractions in Leah that he had previously
overlooked: his pleasure in her was really pleasure in Rachel, whom he wrongly
thought to be the recipient of his embraces (Genesis 29.25).”[519]
Being in love
therefore represents an acute experience of the unity of the human
being, not only the de facto inseparability of body and soul, but of the
fact that the person is his body as well as his soul, so that contact
with the body is contact with the soul. Scruton calls this the
experience of embodiment: “My sense of myself as identical with my body,
and my sense of you as identical with yours are crucial elements, both in the
aim and in the reception, of the arousing caress. I am awakened in my
body, to the embodiment of you. Underlying the woman’s state of arousal
is the thought: ‘I, in my body, am something for him’, and her response – the
‘opening’ to this approaches, and all that is entailed in that – must be
understood in part as an expression of that thought, and of the interpersonal
intentionality that is built upon it.”[520]
Thus in the eyes
of the lover, the beloved’s soul is totally embodied in her body, and
her body is totally transparent to his soul.[521]
But what does
the lover actually see in the “embodied soul” of his beloved? And: with
what does he see it? He sees with the eyes of the mind, and not of
the body. Or rather, he sees with the power of eros, which, as we have seen, is
a power of the mind no less than of the body. For
If any, so by
love refined,
That he soul’s
language understood,
And by good
love were grown all mind,…
Erotic love must become “all mind” in order to see its true
object. And this object must be, to use Platonic language, an ideal, unmoving
and not a sensory object. For
This ecstasy doth
unperplex
(We said) and
tell us what we love,
We see by
this, it was not sex,
We see, we saw
not what did move.
“It was not sex” – that is, simple lust – by which the
lovers saw each other. And yet it was eros. For the love in question here is
not Platonic, but one in which
Our eye-beams
twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon
one double string.
So to engraft
our hands, as yet
Was all the
means to make us one. [522]
The object of
erotic love that is true cannot be her body, which is changeable, nor the moods
of her soul, which are also changeable, but that which is in essence
unchanging, the image of God in her. Only such an object is
worthy of love and can raise love from the corruptible to the incorruptible.
Hence the intuition that true love must survive the fading of bodily
beauty; it must be immortal, since its true object is immortal.
This intuition
was wonderfully expressed by Shakespeare, who begins by pointing out that even
erotic love is in essence the marriage “of minds”:
Let me not to
the marriage of true minds
Admit
impediments. Love is not love
Which alters
when it alteration finds,
Or bends with
the remover to remove.
O, no! it is
an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on
tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star
to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s
unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not
Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his
bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters
not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it
out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error,
and upon me prov’d.
I never writ,
nor no man ever lov’d.[523]
And yet what we
are in essence, our Godlikeness, which alone is worthy of an undying love,
rarely corresponds to what we show ourselves to be in everyday life. And this
discrepancy between the image of God and the image of sin - in the soul both of
the lover and of his beloved – causes intense anguish and pain – moral pain
– to the lovers. For, as Scruton writes: “Desire obliges you to find value in
its object, and so to ‘see him as’ the embodiment of virtue’”.[524]
Not only that:
you want him to see you as the embodiment of virtue, and you are
prepared to work on yourself to make yourself more worthy. Thus falling in love
becomes a major incentive to moral improvement.
This inextricable
– and highly creative - relationship between love and esteem is the analogy and
reflection, on a much lower level, of Christ’s making His Bride into one that
is “without spot or wrinkle” (Ephesians 5.27). “One may describe the
course of love as a kind of ‘mutual self-building’… I want you to be worthy of
my love, behind which desire lies, always compelling me. And I too want to be
lovable, so that you may reciprocate my affection. Hence we begin to enact a
cooperative game of self-building.”[525]
This
“cooperative game of self-building” may lead to quarrels – but quarrels with a
creative element, because the relationship becomes an arena of moral
improvement, spurred on by desire. Hence the English proverb:
The falling
out of lovers is the renewal of love.[526]
Thus even
Cleopatra, the embodiment of sensual desire, wishes in the end to become not
simply a mistress for Anthony, but a wife, having shed all downward-looking
elements, the “earth and water” of lust, in order that only the “fire and air”
of pure love should remain:
Husband, I
come.
Now to that
name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and
air; my other elements
I give to
baser life.[527]
Of course, a
lover may wish to “build up” himself or his beloved for selfish, vainglorious
reasons: because he considers himself to be a good person, and “only the best
will do” for such a good person. However, this attitude is already at one
remove from the initial experience of being in love, which in its simplicity is
an encounter with what one’s perceives to be goodness incarnate. For not only
does love reveal beauty to be truth: it also reveals it to be goodness.
But is it in
fact virtue or goodness? Does not love see beauty sometimes in the most
worthless objects? Is it not so much the perception of an ideal as an
idealization of something that is far from ideal, a form of self-deception?
It certainly can
be; for the intuitive power of the lover’s erotic vision is strictly dependent
on his own moral level. An unspiritual man is not likely to fall in love with a
spiritual woman, because he will neither see her spirituality nor admire
it if he did. But a spiritual man will love a woman who is like him in
being spiritual -although he, too, can be deceived into loving an object
unworthy of his love. For like can recognize like only in the case of one whose
eros is sufficiently purified to see the likeness. But for one whose eros is
less purified, there will be many misperceptions and mismatches in love, giving
fertile ground for the proverb that love is blind. And yet eros in its essence,
purified of that veil of darkness that the fall has draped over it, is the
opposite of blind: it is an instrument given by God to us in order to pierce
the veil of the flesh and see the true person underneath.
If falling in
love were always and necessarily a purely instinctual phenomenon that obscures
the truth of the beloved in a fog of hormone-fuelled intoxication, we would
expect the intensity of the initial falling in love to be inversely proportional
to the depth and duration of the subsequent relationship. And that is certainly
what the Platonic model, which tends to oppose love and desire as antagonistic
opposites, would suggest. But such scientific research as approaches this
essentially supra-scientific sphere does not come to this conclusion.
Thus Winston
writes: “The evidence suggests that, over time, the first mad fever of love
becomes replaced by a more solid partnership, one more ideally suited to the
raising of children. But some research has suggested that the most long-lived
relationships are those that preserve a degree of the earlier, less rational
phase. Dr. Ellen Berscheid, Regents Professor of Psychology at the University
of Minnesota, was the first to identify the ‘pink-lens effect’, whereby couples
in love idealize their partners and make overoptimistic judgements about them.
We think, for instance, that our lovers are ‘brilliant’ and ‘wonderful’; we
over-estimate their intelligence, their honesty, their generosity and their looks….
This effect has been shown to decrease over time. In general we would expect
that, as a relationship progresses, we become more realistic about our
partner’s strengths and weaknesses – we ‘love them for what they are’, rather
than the idealized, rose-tinted view we may have picked up in the initial
frenzy of attraction.
“But a study at
the University of New York, Buffalo, has also shown that the greater the
intensity of the pink-lens effect, the greater the likelihood of the couples
staying together. Another, more long-term study at the University of Texas,
Austin, followed 168 couples who married in 1981. Once again, the couples who
idealized one another the most at the outset were also those whose
relationships were the most long-lived….”[528]
Winston here uses such words as
“irrational”, “mad” and “frenzy” which presuppose us to think that falling in
love must necessarily involve self-deception and “rose-tinted” falsification.
And yet the research itself suggests something different: that while falling in
love in a sense idealizes the beloved, this idealization may not always be
self-deceiving. It may sometimes be a more accurate vision of the true nature
of the beloved, an ideal vision which nevertheless lights up something that is
real, and therefore helps rather than hinders the durability of the
relationship.
Similarly, while
falling out of love may be the consequence of seeing “the bitter truth”
about the beloved, it may in also involve a loss of true vision, an
obscuring of that ideal reality which was so wonderfully obvious before. Since
human beings are a mixture of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the
image of God and the image of the beast, there are objective grounds for both
kinds of vision - the vision which accompanies falling into love and the
vision which accompanies falling out of love.
Sublimation
and Marriage
And so falling in love remains an ambiguous phenomenon, on the frontier
between good and evil. But whether good or evil, it is always essentially
human, and irreducible to mere lust. Its moral quality depends, first, on the
spiritual maturity and purity of the person who loves, and secondly, on whether
God is in the process, guiding and inspiring it to the end-state of lawful
marriage. If He is not in that process, and He is not leading it to that end,
then the love is likely to fade and may lead to fornication or an unhappy
marriage or even divorce. If, on the other hand, He is in it, then the
experience will be truly “in the Lord”, that is, “in all decency and in
honour”.[529]
For, as St. John Chrysostom says, “it is God Who sows these loves”[530], in
that “it is by the Lord that a man is matched with a woman” (Proverbs
19.14).
Falling in love that leads to a stable and happy marriage may be called
the first stage in the sublimation of fallen eros. It involves the redirection
of all sexual desire from "strange flesh" (Jude 7) to one’s
own flesh, that is, one’s spouse; for through the sacrament of marriage that is
what the lovers become in reality. In this state, the state of true monogamy,
as Alexis Khomyakov put it, "for the husband, his companion is not just
one of many women, but the woman; and her mate is not one of many men, but the man. For both of them the rest of the race has no sex."[531]
Insofar as marriage involves the sublimation
of fallen eros, its redirection in an upward direction, it cannot be
called lust, which is by definition the direction of eros downwards.
Thus Tobit says on his wedding night: "O Lord, I take not this my
sister for the satisfaction of lust, but in truth" (Tobit 8.7). And
St. Ignatius the Godbearer writes that a marriage that is carried out with the
blessing of the bishop, whose job it is to discern whether God has really
brought these two persons together, will be “not according to lust [epiqumia]”, but “according to the Lord”.
In this context there need by no shame about the satisfactions that marriage
brings: "Speak to my sisters that they love the Lord, and be satisfied
with their husbands in flesh and in spirit. In the same way enjoin on my
brothers in the name of Jesus Christ 'to love their wives as the Lord loved the
Church'."[532]
It follows that “falling in love”, when confirmed, strengthened and
sanctified by marriage, can turn out to be, not a “fall”, but a “rise” in the
spiritual life, taking a hitherto self-absorbed and completely self-oriented
person “out of himself” into a new realm, a realm marked out for him by God, in
which he can make greater spiritual progress than if he were unmarried. Thus Metropolitan
Anastasy (Gribanovsky) recounts the following case: “There exists a common
conviction that only woes lead people to God, and that happiness rather ties
them to the earth and makes them forget about Heaven. However, there are
exceptions to this rule. Pirogov writes in his autobiography that the first
days of his married life were filled with such a lofty blessedness that his
soul as it were melted and was purified under the breath of this blessedness,
and he who before had suffered from the infirmity of little faith saw God in
the radiance of his pure familial joy…”[533]
Again, Fr. Alexander Elchaninov writes: “An integral knowledge of
another person is possible in marriage, a miracle of sensation, intimacy, of
the vision of another person… Before marriage, the human person glides above
life, seeing it from outside. Only in marriage is he fully immersed into it,
and enters it through another person. This enjoyment of true knowledge and true
life gives us that feeling of complete fullness and satisfaction which renders
us richer and wiser. And this fullness is even deepened when out of the two of
us, united and reconciled, a third appears, our child.”[534]
Insofar as the husband longs for his wife as a person, spirit, body
and soul, that is, as a being of the same nature as himself, made in the
image of God, and not just as a hunk of flesh, then, by virtue of the grace of
the sacrament of marriage, which not only legalizes but also sanctifies their
union, making them of one flesh not accidentally, as it were, as would be the
case outside marriage, but essentially, their love is a chaste love. For such a
love does not hinder the love of God. Nor is it animalian, but fully human.
This is not to say that fallen lust cannot coexist with a chaste erotic love,
undermining and defiling it. But we cannot deny the possibility of a chaste
erotic love unless we deny that there was such an erotic love between Adam and
Eve before the fall – which, as we have seen, we cannot do…
It will be immediately apparent, however, that even this, the lowest
level of sublimation, is very hard to achieve. Our fallen nature is not
attracted to only one member of the opposite sex, but to many; the “natural”
state for fallen human beings (especially men) is polygamy or “serial monogamy”
rather than true monogamy. So the individualisation of eros on one and
one only person on a permanent basis is an exploit in itself, especially in the
young.
Rightly directed eros is iconic. That is, just as in the veneration of
the icons the veneration paid to the icon ascends to its archetype, so that the
icon is venerated, not for its own sake, as piece of wood, but for the sake of
its archetype, the person depicted in it, so in rightly directed erotic love
the beloved’s body is not admired for its own sake, but as being the
expression, the icon, as it were of her soul. For “rightly directed eros
[is directed to] the beauty of the soul, and not of the body.”[535] And
“chaste love does not admire the beauty of the flesh. It admires the beauty of
the spirit. With such love, a person sees the body only as an image. His
admiration carries him through to the Artist Himself – to true beauty”.[536]
It is this upward direction of eros rightly directed, from the body of
the beloved to her soul and then to her Creator, that anchors the perception of
her beauty in truth. This truth is twofold – the truth of the created
person that the beloved is, and the truth of the Uncreated Person in Whose
image she is made, Who is Truth. On the other hand, eros that stops at
the body, i.e. lust, tells a lie about it – that the body is not
essentially the expression of a soul, that it is not inseparable from that soul
and has no value independently of it. Moreover, this lie about the other
proceeds from a lie about the self – that the lover’s love can be satisfied by
the body alone, that it does not need a higher beauty, a beauty anchored in
truth.
Eros rightly directed acts as a kind of filter to the senses,
concentrating and heightening their powers so that they are able to pierce the
veil of the flesh to the immaterial world beyond, connecting, not body with
body, but spirit with spirit, man with man. [537] The
truth of Platonism lies in its acknowledgement of this fact, of the existence
of a love that pierces through corruptible sensibilia to incorruptible “ideas”.
Its falsehood lies in its insistence that sexual love is quite different from
this, being a purely physical or physiological phenomenon, no different in
essence from the “love” of animals on heat. It is this false dichotomy that has
enabled the religious to attempt to banish sexuality from “respectable” life
altogether (we think of the seventeenth-century Puritans and the
nineteenth-century Victorians), and the irreligious to create a “science of sex”
on the grounds that sexuality is an object of science like any other.
Erotic love that rests on the body alone,
finding its beauty and desirability exclusively in its physical characteristics
independently of the soul that animates it and of the Creator Who is the true
source of its beauty, is impure. It is impure because it is idolatrous, because
it loves the creature more than the Creator, thereby betraying the true Lover
of the human soul and committing adultery in relation to Him; for every preference
of a creature to the Creator is called adultery in the Holy Scriptures. In this
sense, and this sense only, we can talk about lust and fornication defiling the
relations even of lawfully married spouses.
However, the neo-Manichaeans’ claim that
sexual relations between spouses are necessarily lustful
is unfounded. The Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers confirm that sexual
relations within marriage can be pure. And the
priest in the marriage service would not pray for the descent of a “pure and
perfect” love on the couple, an undefiled bed and many children, if such a
combination were impossible. Of course, we are not talking here about the human
nature that underlies that act. Lust, impure erotic desire, remains a part of
the nature of all men and women, both married and monastic, who have not yet
attained to passionlessness, the complete redirection of all desire from
unlawful to lawful objects.
As we have seen, such a fundamental
redirection is possible, because, although our love made in the image of God’s
love has been defiled and obscured by sin, Christ has restored that image by
taking on all the consequences of sin in the form of our nature tossed between
the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain, and then resisting every temptation
to pleasure while voluntarily assuming every form of pain, including the
ultimate pain of death. And through the sacraments God has communicated this
nature that has triumphed over the evil passions to our passionate nature,
destroying the passions by His Passion. For, as St. Maximus the Confessor
writes, “in exchange for our passions, [Christ] gives us His life-giving
Passion as a salutary cure which saves the whole world.”[538]
The possibility of purity in married
sexual relations depends on several conditions: (1) God’s own calling of the
couple to the married state; (2) the communication of the grace of marriage to
the couple through a lawful Christian marriage; and (3) the working together of
this grace with the couple’s own striving to keep the commandments. The
fulfilment of these three conditions makes possible the continual sublimation
of the couple’s erotic loves towards the things of the spirit. It also raises
the couple themselves to a new level, conforming them to the image of the
Wedding of Christ and the Church – which, as we have seen, was the original
purpose of the differentiation of the sexes and the introduction of marriage in
the first place, in the Paradise of delight.
It follows from the above that while Christianity works to suppress downward-looking eros, or lust,
it liberates upward-looking eros, or
true love; for, as St. John Chrysostom says, “it is God Who sows these loves (erwtaV)”[539].
For example, in the Life of
the fifth-century St. Brigit of Ireland we read: “A certain man of Kells… whom
his wife hated, came to Brigit for help. Brigit blessed some water. He took it
with him and, his wife having been sprinkled [therewith], she straightway loved
him passionately.”[540]
Another, still more striking example from the Life of St.
Columba, Apostle of Scotland (+597): “Another time, when the saint was living
on the Rechrena island, a certain man of humble birth came to him and
complained of his wife, who, as he said, so hated him, that she would on no
account allow him to come near her for marriage rights. The saint on hearing
this, sent for the wife, and, so far as he could, began to reprove her on that
account, saying: ‘Why, O woman, dost thou endeavour to withdraw thy flesh from
thyself, while the Lord says, ‘They shall be two in one flesh’? Wherefore the
flesh of thy husband is thy flesh.’ She answered and said, ‘Whatever thou shalt
require of me I am ready to do, however hard it may be, with this single
exception, that thou dost not urge me in any way to sleep in one bed with
Lugne. I do not refuse to perform every duty at home, or, if thou dost command
me, even to pass over the seas, or to live in some monastery for women.’ The
saint then said, ‘What thou dost propose cannot lawfully be done, for thou art
bound by the law of the husband as long as thy husband liveth, for it would be
impious to separate those whom God has lawfully joined together.’ Immediately
after these words he added: ‘This day let us three, namely, the husband and his
wife and myself, join in prayer to the Lord and in fasting.’ But the woman
replied: ‘I know it is not impossible for thee to obtain from God, when thou
askest them, those things that seem to us either difficult, or even
impossible.’ It is unnecessary to say more. The husband and wife agreed to fast
with the saint that day, and the following night the saint spent sleepless in
prayer for them. Next day he thus addressed the wife in presence of her
husband, and said to her: ‘O woman, art thou still ready today, as thou saidst
yesterday, to go away to a convent of women?’ ‘I know now,’ she answered, ‘that
thy prayer to God for me hath been heard; for that man whom I hated yesterday,
I love today; for my heart hath been changed last night in some unknown way –
from hatred to love.’ Why need we linger over it? From that day to the hour of
death, the soul of the wife was firmly cemented in affection to her husband, so
that she no longer refused those mutual matrimonial rights which she was
formerly unwilling to allow.”[541]
Of course, we are not here advocating the sexual permissiveness of
modern culture. We are not advocating it because it is precisely downward-looking
eros that modern culture permits, while putting every obstacle in the way to
the resurrection of upward-looking eros. What we are pointing to is the
practice of the saints in encouraging, rather than quenching, the love between
husbands and wives – and by “love” we mean precisely eros in its sexual
expression.
In the context of a lawful marriage in which the grace of the sacrament
is fully assimilated by the spouses, their erotic love is fully lawful because
it is not downward-looking, but upward-looking – looking up to the image of God
in the other, and to the creation of the new cell in Christ’s Church, a new
likeness of the love of Christ and the Church. Of course, it is not necessarily
so, and will not be so if the grace of marriage is despised. But experience
shows that it can be so, and that the grace of marriage can transform lust into
a kind of passionate tenderness which is not self-seeking and fully deserves
the name of love. Consequently, the quenching of eros here is contrary to God’s
will, insofar as it endangers the harmony of the icon. And for that reason the
saints were prepared to pray for the resurrection of desire in the spouses –
and their prayers were answered.
A
certain Orthodox Christian put it well: “Physical relations may be elicited by
lust, but they may [also] be elicited by love. The spouses enter into physical
relations not with the aim of removing over-excitement and quenching the
ragings of the flesh, but because they love each other, because they are
striving for unity… The aim of marriage is to lessen the element of lust in
physical relations and increase the element of love.” And again: “The unity of
spouses, on being accepted into the Church is liberated in the Church from its
limitedness. Love for one’s spouse becomes a school of love for all.” [542]
The
Resurrection of the Body
But monogamy is only the first stage of sublimation. To the degree that
a man is purified, his eros becomes stronger and keener; it penetrates the veil
of the flesh, seeing it as an icon, a window or door into a higher,
supersensual world. First, the soul of his spouse, created in the image of God;
then the beautiful, rational order revealed by true science and art and
reflecting the Mind of the Creator[543]; and
finally the invisible, uncreated Beauty of God Himself.
In this way, to use the language of Platonic philosophy, his
"vulgar Eros" is changed into "heavenly Eros", on whose
wings he ascends into the world of supersensual, unchanging reality.
St. John Climacus writes of this ascent or “sublimation” of eros:
“Blessed is he who has obtained such love and yearning for God as an enraptured
lover has for his beloved…. So it is with our bodily nature; and so it is in
spirit.”[544]
And he gives an example of crucified and resurrected Eros: "Someone
told me of an extraordinarily high degree of purity. He said: 'A certain man,
on seeing a beautiful woman, thereupon glorified the Creator; and from that one
look, he was moved to the love of God and a fountain of tears. And it was
wonderful to see how what would have been a cause of destruction for one was
for another the supernatural cause of a crown.' If such a person always feels
and behaves in the same way on similar occasions, then he has risen immortal
before the general resurrection."[545]
The reference to the general resurrection here reminds us that the final
end of man is not only the resurrection of the soul, but also of the body,
and therefore of all the body’s faculties as originally created by God. This
must include eros. And to eros, as to the body as a whole, the words of the
apostle apply: “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is
sown in weakness; it is raised in power; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised
in glory” (I Corinthians 15.42-44).
According to a common interpretation of
the Holy Fathers, the wedding-garment that every person called to the marriage-feast
of the Son of God must have is love.[546]
But according to the interpretation of St. Gregory Palamas, it is the
body, the covering of the soul.[547] There
is no contradiction between these interpretations if we remember that the
natural love of the soul, or eros, is rooted in both the soul and the body, and
therefore it is precisely a purified, redirected, deified eros that we must
possess if we are to enter the marriage-feast of Christ at the general
resurrection of the dead.
To this the neo-Manichaean may object:
“But the Lord says that in the resurrection we shall not marry, being like the
angels in heaven. If we shall not marry, there will be no place in us for
erotic love. After all, the angels do not experience eros.”
In answer to this objection, we reply: “We shall be like the angels in
heaven, not marrying or giving in marriage, because the continuation of the
race in time through sexual procreation will no longer be necessary. However,
we shall still have bodies, which the angels do not have. And we shall still be
men and women, just as Christ and the Mother of God will still be a man and a
woman. And this extra complexity of human nature, including its physicality,
means that the unity it attains at its completion and fulfilment at the resurrection
will be broader and deeper than that attained by the bodiless angels. It will
be broader and deeper above all because it will be united to Christ not only by
grace, as the angels are united to Him by grace, but even by nature,
insofar as we will be – and already are, as members of the Church – partakers
of His human nature.”[548]
The Holy Fathers teach that the angels, too, have an intense longing for
God that is called eros. But the eros of human beings is higher than that of
the angels – shocking as this may sound to the Platonic-Manichaean mind-set - precisely
because an earthly body is conjoined to it. Thus St. Gregory Palamas
writes: “Our intellect, because created in God’s image, possesses likewise the
image of this sublime Eros or intense longing – an image expressed in the love
experienced by the intellect for the spiritual knowledge that originates from
it and continually abides in it… The noetic and intelligent nature of angels
also possesses intellect, and the thought-form (logos) that proceeds
from the intellect and the intense longing (eros) for its thought-form.
This longing is likewise from the intellect and coexists eternally with the
thought-form and the intellect, and can be called spirit since by nature it
accompanies the thought-form. But this spirit in the case of angels is not
life-generating, for it has not received from God an earthly body conjoined
with it, and so it has not received the power to generate and sustain life. On
the other hand the noetic and intelligent nature of the human soul has received
a life-generating spirit from God since the soul is created together with an
earthly body, and so by means of the spirit it sustains and quickens the body
conjoined to it…”[549]
How far away we are from Platonism here!
Far from the soul being brought down by the body, it is exalted through its
association with the body! For by its conjunction with the body it “has
received a life-generating spirit from God”, a spirit that the saint calls
eros, whereas the eros of angels, not being associated with a body is not
life-generating.
Eros and Agape
At this point a word should be said about
the relationship between the concepts denoted by the words “eros” and “agape”.
In the Catholic and Protestant West a
sharp distinction is usually made between the two. Thus Schopenhauer sees eros
as part of the Will to life, and as such completely egoistical. To this he
opposes agape, which is sympathy, a selfless kind of love: “All true and pure
love is sympathy (Mitleid), and all love which is not sympathy is
selfishness (Selbstsucht). Eros is selfishness; agape is sympathy.”[550]
The Lutheran Bishop Andres Nygen adopts the same view in his book Agape and
Eros, arguing that the Greek word agaph (agape), being a purely biblical term not found in earlier Greek[551],
denotes a kind of love that is completely different from that denoted by the
older term erwV (eros) which was predominant in
the pagan Hellenistic world. The task of Christianity, according to this view,
was to replace eros with agape in the hearts of men.
The Holy Fathers sometimes make a
distinction between eros and agape. Thus Lars Thunberg writes that for St. Maximus the Confessor
“charity, the summit of the virtues… is a natural desire [eros] sustained by
divine charity [agape], the fruit of which is divine-human and at the same time
the perfection of all that is in man.”[552]
However, we can see here that eros and agape are not sharply opposed as if one
were good and the other bad, but are rather seen as complementary, eros being a
human, created (but good) love which goes out to meet the Divine, uncreated
love.
In
any case, it is much more common, in both biblical and patristic usage, to find
“eros” and “agape” used almost interchangeably.
In
the Bible the word “agape” and its cognates is used to denote sexual love,
sometimes very fallen sexual love. Thus it is the main word used to denote both
the clearly sexual love of The Song of Songs and Amnon’s very fallen
love of Themar, which resulted in her rape (II Kings 13.1,2,15).
We find the same in the Holy Fathers. Let
us take, for example, St. John Chrysostom. Even Fr. Gregory Lourié has to admit that,
for this saint, “eros” and “agape” are virtual synonyms, as are other words
such as “epithymia” and “pothos”.[553] “This
love (agape),” he writes, “is more tyrannical than any tyrant. For other
desires are strong, but this desire (epithymia) possesses both strength and
constancy. For there exists a certain love (eros) implanted in [our] nature
which in a manner that is hidden from us weaves together these bodies.”[554] Here
“agape”, “epithymia” and “eros” are used more or less interchangeably. Again: “Those who shine with the
beauty of the soul… thereby make love (eros) warmer in their husbands, as also
their own love (agapin) which attaches to him… When the mother is beautiful and
chaste and endowed with every virtue, she will by all means be able to draw her
husband and enjoy his desire (potho) for her.”[555] Here
“agape”, “eros” and “pothos” are used interchangeably. And again: “For love
(eros) is not of necessity. For nobody loves (philei) by necessity, but
willingly and by choice.”[556] Here
“eros” and “philia” are used interchangeably.
And again: “Often it happens that from that day [of marriage]
fornication takes the bridegroom prisoner and removes him from his friends and
quenches his love (eros) for his bride, and drags down kind feelings and
dissolves the love (agapen) that was kindled before and drops the seeds of
debauchery.”[557]
This shows not only that the impulse to fornication is not to be identified
with eros, but actually quenches it, as if they were opposites…
We find a similar use of “eros” and
“agape” in St. Gregory of Nyssa, who calls God “the one truly worthy of agape
and eros” (to monon tw onti agaphton kai erasimon), as if the two
concepts were interchangeable.[558]
As Nygen points out, what Plato calls eros “Gregory calls alternately epiqumia and agaph. Thus Agape means for him fundamentally love in the
sense of desire”.[559]
St. Gregory of
Nyssa was concerned, like Origen before him, that the “heavenly eros” of the
saints should not be confused with the “vulgar eros” of fallen human sexuality.[560]
However, he accepted that there was a kinship between the heavenly and vulgar
eroses, since the heavenly eros is the desiring faculty of man directed to
heavenly things, while the vulgar eros is the
same faculty directed to earthly things.
Nygen expounds the thinking of St. Gregory (disapprovingly) as follows:
“In true Platonic spirit Gregory writes: ‘Since our nature is indigent of
Beauty, it always reaches out after what it lacks. And this longing is the
desire that lies in our constitution’… This natural desire in man,
aroused by the sense of his own deficiency and reaching out towards the
Beautiful, is plainly the same reality which Plato calls Eros; Gregory,
however, calls it alternately epiqumia and agaph. Thus Agape means for him
fundamentally love in the sense of desire; constitutive of it is its
connection with the Beautiful and its ceaseless effort to win this for itself.
“Agape is the yearning in every man for what can make his life richer
and happier. But it can seek its good in two different directions; it can ‘by
reason of a false judgement concerning the good, be balked of it, or by reason
of a right judgement, find it’ [On the Soul and Resurrection, P.G. 46:92C].
The former happens when the search is directed downwards towards the
sense-world, the latter when it is directed upwards towards God. The danger of
life in the world is that men are tempted to pursue the shadows of the
sense-world. In order to avoid this the virgin life is recommended [On
Virginity, P.G. 46:317]. It is not, however, intended that desire should be
abolished outright. For desire is an integral part of man’s nature, indeed it
actually belongs to the image of God in man [What is ‘In the image of God’,
P.G. 46:1336C]. Even if the Agape-desire happens for the moment to be
misdirected downwards towards things sensible and irrational [On the Soul
and Resurrection, P.G. 46:65A], that is no reason for wishing to tear it up
by the roots; to do so would be to ‘pull up the wheat with the tares’ (Matthew
13.29). ‘Therefore the wise husbandman leaves this growth that has been
introduced amongst his seed to remain there, so as to secure our not being
altogether stripped of better hopes by desire having been rooted out along with
that good-for-nothing growth. If our nature suffered such a mutilation, what
will there be to lift us up to grasp the heavenly delights? If Agape is taken
from us, how shall we be united to God?’ [Ibid.].
“Desire is not to be rooted out, but purified and directed to the
right objects – that is, to that which is in itself Beautiful, or God. Desire
(Agape), by its very nature, turns in its intention towards the Beautiful, and
likewise the Beautiful by its very nature arouses desire and draws it to itself
[Ibid. 89:B]. These two, desire and the Beautiful, are meant for one
another and must find one another. Their union can be hindered only if the
sense-world comes between and draws desire to itself. But if desire has been
purified from all taint of sense, there is no longer anything to distract it,
no obstacle to its union with God…
“Without desire, Gregory holds, there would be nothing ‘which could lift
us up to union with the heavenly’ [On the Soul and the Resurrection, P.G. 46:61].
Therefore he does not intend that desire should be rooted out of us. It only
needs to be purified and directed upwards. In one passage he illustrates this
function of desire in the ascent, by the simile of a ‘chain, which draws us up
from earth towards God’ [On the Soul and Resurrection, P.G. 46:89A]. If
we add that desire, epiqumia, in Gregory’s view is synonymous
with agaph, we
are thus given the idea of ‘the chain of love’.”[561]
The same can be said of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, who points out, as
Robert Wilken writes, “that in places the scriptures use the term agape when
they mean desire or erotic love, implying that this is the case in other
passages. His example comes from (the Septuagint version of) 2 Samuel
1.26, David’s lament over Jonathan, at the end of which David speaks of the
love between them. David cries out: ‘Your love for me was wonderful, surpassing
the love of women’. Here, where one would expect to find the term eros, the
scriptures use “agapesis” – love having no carnal element and thus its highest
form. Dionysius concludes from this: ‘To those listening properly to the divine
things, the term ‘love’ is used by the sacred writers in divine revelation with
the exact same meaning as the term ‘eros’.”[562] In
fact, in the same passage Dionysius asserts that “to some of our writers on
sacred things the name ‘eros’ seemed to be more divine than ‘agape’”.[563]
Again, St. Maximus the Confessor, as Blowers writes, “projects the
transformation of desire (epiqumia) both into agaph and erwV. There is no interest to
segregate agaph, as
self-transcending charity, and erwV, as the driving passion deeply
rooted in the individual soul; both express the truly graced and indeed
‘natural’ motion of the concupiscible faculty. In this conception of love
Maximus approximates what one contemporary theologian has termed ‘affective
conversion’, a kind of transforming passion that subsumes both falling-in-love…
and deliberate or intelligent commitment. Such is the kind of love that
transforms the whole desire, and thus the whole individual person, in relation
to, and in the full interest of, the beloved.”[564]
Love
and Desire
What are we to conclude from these striking facts? That the Holy
Scriptures and Holy Fathers are careless in their language, mixing up love with
desire? Or that the mistake is not in the sacred texts but in our preconceived
ideas about love and desire, ideas inherited from heterodox philosophical traditions?
It is our preconceived ideas that are at fault here, not the Holy
Fathers.
The natural love which the Holy Fathers call eros can be represented as
a spectrum of feeling rather than a single feeling, but a spectrum rooted in a
single reality. At one end of the spectrum, assisted by Divine grace, this
reality strives to the very heights, to God Himself and other heavenly visions.
At the other end of the spectrum, deprived of grace and divided against itself,
it fixes its blunted and narrowed vision on the lowest of objects. But it is
one and the same love-desire that finds true fulfilment in the one case and
barren frustration in the other. And if we choose to call upward-looking eros
“love”, and downward-looking eros “desire” or “lust”, this should not blind us
that we are talking about a spectrum rooted in a single reality.
Now since downward-looking eros leads away from God and towards the
depths of hell, it is natural that the ascetic literature should urge its destruction
and crucifixion. As St. Paul says, “They that are Christ’s have
crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5.24). And
yet it is not eros as such that is to be destroyed or crucified, but its
downward-looking tendencies, which tendencies only came into existence after
the fall.
For eros as such not only should not, but cannot be destroyed,
because it is a fundamental force of human nature. Downward-looking eros, or
lust, must indeed be crucified in all its manifestations with the utmost determination.
But it must be remembered that that which is crucified can rise again in a new
form, and that the crucifixion of eros in its downward-looking tendencies is in
fact the path to the resurrection of eros in its upward-looking tendencies.
Earlier I offered a definition of love as “a transfer of the
desires of the soul from the service of self to the service of another”.
According to this definition, love presupposes desire, and the
difference between love and lust consists not in the presence of desire in the
one and not in the other, but in the direction of desire, and in its
personal or intentional quality. Thus if a person’s desire fixes only on the
body of the other, and only in order to please himself, it can be characterized
as lust. If, on the other hand, his desire fixes on the body of the other with
the penetrating intuition of the mind, seeing through it, as it were, to
the soul beyond, and he fervently desires to serve the other, even at the
expense of his own interests, as in the experience of “being in love”, then
there is nothing to stop this being called love.
Although love presupposes desire, desire
does not imply love; it can remain inchoate, fixed on the flesh, lustful. But,
as Scruton points out, “it provides a motive to love”.[565] That
is, if it can ascend from lust to “falling in love”, then its object is no
longer the flesh, but the soul – or rather, an embodied soul, a person. And a person
(as opposed to a hunk of meat[566]) can
only be loved, not lusted after…
Love appears to be opposed to desire
because it always involves a readiness for sacrifice, and sacrifice, to
many, implies a conflict between duty and desire. However, this is a
superficial description, which has a certain validity only when we are speaking
of lower levels of desire, when other desires interfere with the desire for the
beloved. When love for the beloved is weak, it is justified on the grounds that
it is “duty”. Thus for the Kantian-Protestants love is justified precisely
because its object is not desired, but rather commanded by some
“categorical imperative” that transcends nature and is obeyed out of a “pure”,
“passionless” sense of duty towards that imperative. For them, good works do
not proceed from cooperation between human nature and Divine grace, but from a
Divine command that does not correspond to any answering desire in human
nature, but which simply compels obedience in some inexplicable manner.
However, in the Lives of the Saints
we find the opposite: a natural love for God which, when united with Divine
grace, sweeps away all egoistic tendencies that would oppose God’s will, an
intensity of desire for the beloved in which there is no hint of “duty”, even
when desire for the beloved entails the ultimate sacrifice, life itself. This may
be described as the conquest of desire by love, where “desire” means eros in
its downward-looking tendencies:
Rejoice, love that vanquishes all desire![567]
And yet this conquest of desire by love
can be represented in a most erotic manner. Consider, for example, the Virgin-Martyr Agnes of Rome, who repulsed the advances
of a potential earthly bridegroom by speaking of her far stronger eros for her
Heavenly Bridegroom, Christ: “Trouble me no more, kindler of the flame
of sin, slave of impure passions, fuel for the unquenchable fire! I have
pledged myself to One Whose beauties, lineage, and rank incomparable surpass
yours. He has adorned me spiritually: I wear the ring of faith in Him; my
wrists and neck glimmer with gems and golden coins He has bestowed upon me; my
waist is girded with His glittering, jewelled belt; and I am ‘arrayed in a
vesture of inwoven gold’ (Psalm 44.8) from His stores. I have glimpsed
the treasures He promises if I remain true; therefore, do not hope that I shall
betray Him. I do not care even to look at another; much less will I forsake my
first love, to Whom I am bound by ardent devotion. His origin is sublime, His
power is unequalled, He is ‘comely in beauty more than the sons of men’, and
His affections are incomparably sweet. Our wedding-chamber is already prepared.
Never have I heard a more pleasant voice than His; the taste of milk and honey
is upon His lips. He has already pressed me to His chaste bosom; my flesh is
even now joined to His; His blood is rouge upon my cheeks. His mother is a
virgin, His Father has never known a woman, He is served by angels, the sun and
moon marvel at the perfection of His countenance, the dead rise at His command,
the ailing are cured by His touch, His wealth is never diminished, and His treasures
never fail. To Him I am utterly loyal; to Him I surrender myself
wholeheartedly. Joined
to Him in wedlock, I shall remain forever a virgin; touching Him, I shall never
be sullied. Daily our union will produce fruit, yet I shall remain without
children.”[568]
Here we see both the desiring and
incensive faculties of the soul given unfettered expression. But there is no
shame in this, because these desires are completely “informed” by the nous,
wholly concentrated, on the one hand, on preserving union with the Supreme
Object of desire, God Himself, and on the other, on repelling all other
possible objects of affection. For just as for John who loves Mary the prospect
of union with any other woman will be shameful, so for the soul that is in love
with God and has betrothed herself to Him alone the prospect of union with any
human being whatsoever will be repellent. Hence the paradox that the saints
speak of God in highly erotic language, and yet repel the thought of human
sexual relations with vehemence.
We find another example of such a conquest
of desire by love in the Life of the nineteenth-century ascetic and
friend of St. Seraphim of Sarov, George the Recluse of Zadonsk: “Early on he
realized all the vanity of worldly life and went to a monastery, but was not
satisfied even with this and chose for himself absolute solitude – reclusion.
Here he spent his time in fasting, prayer and contemplation of God, but
temptations did not leave him. When he was still in the world, he had loved a
girl with a pure love, and her image often stood before him, disturbing his
state of spiritual calm. Once, sensing his helplessness in the struggle, he
cried out: ‘O Lord, if this is my cross, give me the strength to bear it; but
if it is not, then erase the very recollection of her from my memory.’ The Lord
heard him. And on that very night he saw in a dream a young maiden of uncommon
beauty, clothed in gold raiment. In her gaze there radiated such unearthly
beauty, majesty and angelic purity that George was unable to tear his eyes away
from her, and with reverence he asked, ‘Who are you? What is your name?’ ‘My
name is chastity,’ she replied, and the vision came to an end. Coming to
herself, the ascetic offered up thanks to the Lord for bringing him to reason.
The image he had seen in his dream was so ingrained in his mind that it
completely erased all other images.”[569]
A
metaphor may help to illustrate the inter-relationship of love, desire and the
grace of God in the economy of salvation. We may compare man to a rocket
pointed upwards to the heavens. The natural passions of man, his desiring and
incensive faculties (eros and thymos), may be compared to the liquid fuel
element in the rocket. When this passible element is properly integrated into
the whole of the rocket mechanism (that is, fully controlled and “informed” by
the nous), its ignition propels the rocket away from the earth and into the
stratosphere of God’s love. Several factors may impede this trajectory and lead
the rocket to fall back towards the earth: the force of gravity (the world), a
mechanical failure leading to a premature or uncontrolled ignition of fuel (the
flesh) and an external attempt to abort the mission (the devil). However, if
the launch is successful and the rocket ascends higher, the force of gravity
will gradually become weaker (the pleasures of the world will seem less
attractive), the heavy fuel tanks will fall away (purely instinctual feelings
will become weaker) and the influence of ground-based saboteurs will recede
(“resist the devil and he will depart from you”). Then, having freed itself
from the earth’s atmosphere (entered the sphere of passionlessness), the rocket
will be propelled not so much by its own power (although that will continue to
exist) as by a new force coming, not from the earth, but from the sun (the
grace of God). New dangers may appear: passing meteorites (more subtle
temptations) and space-based saboteurs (the demons of the air). But for the
rocket which preserves itself in good working order, with full harmony between
its control and power mechanisms (the rational, the desiring and the incensive
faculties), the energy of the sun will bring it closer and closer to its
desired goal, union with the sun (the Sun of righteousness, God Himself)…
Eros:
Human and Divine
In conclusion, let us attempt to place
eros in the context not only of human nature but also of the Divine nature in
Whose image it was created.
St. Dionysius the Areopagite writes: “Holy
Scripture says: ‘Of Him and through Him and to Him are all things’ (Romans
11.36)… All things must desire and yearn for and love the Beautiful and the
Good… [Eros is] a faculty of unifying and conjoining and of producing a special
commingling together in the Beautiful and the Good: a faculty which pre-exists for
the sake of the Beautiful and the Good, and is diffused from this Origin and to
this End, and holds together things of the same order by a mutual connection,
and moves the highest to take thought for those below and fixes the inferior in
a state which seeks the higher. And the Divine Eros brings ecstasy, not
allowing them that are touched by it to belong to themselves but only to the
objects of their affection. This principle is shown by superior things through
their providential care for their inferiors, and by those which are of the same
order through the mutual bond uniting them, and by the inferior through their
diviner tendency towards the highest… Words of the most holy Hierotheus from
the Hymns of Eros: ‘Eros (whether
it be in God or in angel, or spirit, or animal life, or nature) must be
conceived of as a uniting and commingling power which moves the higher things
to a care for those below them, moves co-equals to a mutual communion, and
finally moves the inferiors to turn towards their superiors in virtue and
position’.”[570]
Thus eros is both an uncreated Energy of
God Himself, and a created energy made in the image of the uncreated Energy
that exists at every level of creation. It is a kind of universal life-force
which is communicated to different creatures on different levels in different
ways depending on the degree they can participate in it by nature. At each
level above the animal it may be rightly directed or wrongly directed; but it
remains in essence good.
Eros directed upwards is chastity; for St. Methodius of
Olympus writes: “It is not right that the wings of chastity should be dragged
down to earth by their own nature. Rather they should soar aloft into the pure
ether and to the life that is close to the angels”. [571]
Directed downwards, to the earth, it is desire in its fallen state, lust. Thus at the level of sexual life in men,
“the depraved sinner, though bereft of the Good by his brutish desire, is in
this respect unreal and his desires unrealities; but still he hath a share in
the Good insofar as there is in him a distorted reflection of true Love and
Communion. And anger has a share in the Good insofar as it is a movement which
seeks to remedy apparent evils, converting them to that which appears to be
fair. And even he that desires the basest life, yet insofar as he feels desire
at all and feels desire for life, and intends what he thinks the best kind of
life, to that extent participates in the God. And if you wholly destroy the
Good, there will be neither being, life, desire, nor motion or any other
thing.”[572]
St. Maximus the Confessor writes in the
same vein: “The beautiful is identical with the good, for all things seek the
beautiful and good at every opportunity, and there is no being which does not
participate in them. They extend to all that is, being what is truly admirable,
sought for, desired, pleasing, chosen and loved. Observe how the divine force
of love – the erotic power pre-existing in the good – has given birth to the
same blessed force within us, through which we long for the beautiful and good
in accordance with the words: ‘I sought to take her for my bride, and I became
a lover (Gk: erasthV) of her beauty’ (Wisdom
8.2), and ‘Love her (erasqhti authV) and she shall
keep thee’ (Proverbs 4.6).
“Theologians call the divine sometimes an erotic force, sometimes love,
sometimes that which is intensely longed for and loved. Consequently, as an
erotic force and as love, the divine itself is subject to movement; and as that
which is intensely longed for and loved it moves towards itself everything that
is receptive of this force and love. To express this more clearly: the divine
itself is subject to movement since it produces an inward state of intense
longing and love in those receptive to them; and it moves others since by
nature it attracts the desire of those who are drawn towards it. In other
words, it moves others and itself moves since it thirsts to be thirsted for,
longs to be longed for, and loves to be loved.
“The divine erotic force also produces ecstasy, compelling those who
love to belong not to themselves but to those whom they love. This is shown by
superior beings through their care of inferiors, by those of equal dignity
through their mutual union, and by lower beings through their divine conversion
towards those that are highest in rank. It was in consequence of this that St.
Paul, possessed as he was by this divine erotic force and partaking of its
ecstatic power, was inspired to say: ‘I no longer live, but Christ lives in me’
(Galatians 2.20). He uttered these words as a true lover and, as he
himself says, as one who has gone out from himself to God (cf. II
Corinthians 5.13), not living his own life but that of the beloved, because
of his fervent love for Him…
“God is said to be the originator and begetter of love and the erotic
force. For He externalised them from within Himself, that is, He brought them
forth into the world of created things. This is why Scripture says that ‘God is
love’ (I John 4.16), and elsewhere that He is ‘sweetness and desire’
(cf. Song of Songs 5.16), which signifies the erotic force. For what is
worthy of love and truly desirable is God Himself…
“We should regard the erotic force,
whether divine, angelic, noetic, psychic or physical, as a unifying and
commingling power. It impels superior beings to care for those below them,
beings of equal dignity to act with reciprocity, and, finally, inferior beings
to return to those that are greater and more excellent than they”.[573]
Eros is therefore a truly cosmic force, that power that “makes the world
go round”. But it is on the complementary relationship of Divine, Uncreated
Eros and human, created eros that we should like to concentrate in these
closing pages. This is the same complementarity as exists between Christ and
the Church, of which the complementarity between man and woman is the image.
The initiative comes from the Divine, Uncreated Eros of the Bridegroom for His Church, whereby He bowed the heavens and came
down to earth, and was united to her in flesh as well as spirit, giving to her
His Spirit and receiving from her her flesh, in order to rescue her from the
dominion of death and raise her to the heavenly bridal-chambers. The response
comes from the human, created, but completely deified eros of the Church for
her Bridegroom, whereby she cries with ever-increasing desire, “Come!” (Revelation
22.17) until the very last of their children in the Spirit and in the flesh
have been born, redeemed and resurrected in glory.
This marital yet virginal intermingling of
the icon and its Archetype, the human with the Divine, the created eros with
the Uncreated Eros – humanly Divine in the Bridegroom, divinely human in the
Bride – constitutes the mystery of our salvation, “the crown of our salvation”,
as the Church calls it.[574]
It was first accomplished in the Most Holy Virgin Mary, the first member of the
Body of the Church and the first to be deified and resurrected in the body. She
stands “at the border between created and uncreated nature”, in St. Gregory
Palamas’ phrase.[575]
She is the “Bride unwedded”, as the Akathist to the Mother of God proclaims
– a “bride” because a truly marital mystery took place in her, a union into one
flesh and spirit, but “unwedded” because neither was her virginity broken nor
was any fallen element of marriage as we know it in the fallen world present in
her union with the Son of God. Therefore to her as to the model and prototype
of the soul’s perfect union in love with God we chant:
Rejoice, thou who
didst give birth to the Sower of purity!
Rejoice,
bridechamber of a seedless marriage!
Rejoice, thou who
dost wed the faithful to the Lord!
Rejoice, good
nourisher of virgins!
Rejoice, adorner of
holy souls as for marriage!
Rejoice,
thou Bride unwedded![576]
CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY
My Eros
is crucified.
St.
Ignatius the Godbearer, To
the Romans, 7.
No other set of religious writings speaks more about Eros in both its
fallen and unfallen forms than the Sacred Scriptures of the Church of Christ.
As St. Gregory Palamas says: “Who could recount all the sayings of the Apostles
and Prophets on this subject?”[577] The
question arises: why this “obsession with sex”, as the enemies of Christianity
would put it?
First, let us emphasise again that this is no mere “obsession with sex” in
the narrow sense of the word. More accurate would be to call it an obsession
with love, “love” being understood as the natural force in the human soul,
eros, which in its original, incorrupt movement propels the soul out of itself
towards other rational beings and above all towards God. Eros occupies such a
central place in Christian theology and anthropology precisely because
Christians understand that it is the quality of our love more than anything
else that determines our relationship with God, because “God is love”.
The natural power of love that is called eros was created by God in
order that man should understand, in the depths of his psychophysical being,
the fundamental pattern and dynamic that holds the creation together in God,
and, through knowing it, should be drawn to it and enter into it; for, as
Nicholas Cabasilas writes, “the beginning of every action is desire, and the
beginning of desire is reflection”[578]. This
pattern is unity-in-diversity and unity-in-hierarchy, and the dynamic is the
attraction of complementary lovers on one level of hierarchy into unity on a
higher level. The complementary lovers are the Creator and His creation,
especially His rational creation. The Creator is the male pole of the
attraction, while His creation is the female pole. The male seeks out the
female, that is, the Creator seeks out His creature, wishing to be united with
her in love.
Therefore the natural love of the creature for the Creator, and the
natural movement of all rational created beings to their end in God, is most
naturally described in the language of sexual love. As St. Maximus writes: “If
the intellectual being is moved intellectually in a way appropriate to itself,
it certainly perceives. If it perceives, it certainly loves what it perceives.
If it loves, it certainly experiences ecstasy (ekstasiV) over what is loved. If it
experiences ecstasy, it presses on eagerly, and if it presses on eagerly it
intensifies its motion; if its motion is intensified, it does not come to rest
until it is embraced wholly by the object of its desire. It no longer wants
anything from itself, for it knows itself to be wholly embraced, and
intentionally and by choice it wholly receives the life-giving delimitation.
When it is wholly embraced it no longer wishes to be embraced at all by itself
but is suffused by that which embraces it.”[579]
But the creature rejected the love of her Creator. Nothing daunted, the
Creator did not give up His pursuit of her. He even became a man in
order to seek out His woman - in the first place, the Virgin Mary, the only
creature who did not sin against him voluntarily. And then through her and
together with her He sought out to-be-redeemed humanity, the Church, His Body
and Bride. It could not be otherwise, because, according to the sexual
archetype that is implanted in human nature and throughout creation by God
Himself, it is the man who saves, the woman who is saved; it is the man whose
strength and courage destroys the destroyer, the woman whose beauty and grace
inspires him to such feats. So when God came to save mankind from the power of
the devil, He necessarily came as a man to save His woman. And He saved her by
uniting with her – physically, but at the same time virginally, with a Divinely
“passionless passion”. Before the union, He was the invisible Word: after it –
the incarnate Christ. As the liturgical verse puts it: “The Lord visibly passed
through the closed gate of the Virgin. He was naked on entering her, but was
seen to be God incarnate at His coming forth”.[580] Then,
having saved the Church by His Sacrifice on the Cross, He entered into union
with each of her members in the sacraments. And when all her members have been
united to Him individually, He will come again to unite Himself with the Church
wholly, and take her to live with Himself forever in the heavens.
This is not, as some might argue, to ascribe sexuality to God in the
manner of the heretical feminists and sophianists, but the opposite: to ascribe
Godlikeness to the virginal but at the same time physical relationship between
Christ and the Church. This relationship embraces not only God and man, but
also heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, men and angels, male and female: all
divisions are transcended in the Wedding of the Lamb, the Marriage Feast of
Christ and the Church. However, this union of the Divine, uncreated Eros with
the created eros of rational beings is possible only after the created eros has
been purified of all corrupt, downward-looking elements and shines forth in the
original beauty of its uncreated Archetype. Paradoxically, therefore, eros and
lust are opposed to each other as the spirit is opposed to the flesh. The full
flowering of eros is possible only after the complete purging of sexuality in
the fallen state, the complete reorientation of eros from the flesh to the
spirit, from earth to heaven, from the created to the uncreated.
Eros in its full, unfettered, incorrupt form finds its satisfaction in
God alone. That is why the first and greatest commandment is to love God “with
all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy strength” (Mark 12.30; Deuteronomy
6.5). This statement is not only a prescriptive command, but also a revelation
of fact: that only God can be loved in such an unlimited way. By
comparison with this love for the Creator our love for created beings - “thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” - is necessarily limited: “A limit and
measure,” writes St. Gregory the Great, “is set to the love of our neighbour…
The love of God, however, is marked by no limit.”[581] Thus
love for God and love for neighbour are the same love, from the same fount: but
the one love is limited, and the other unlimited.
This love is sometimes called “eros”, sometimes “agape” by the apostles
and fathers of the Church; and all attempts to make a sharp distinction between
these two words have foundered on the fact that “agape” is sometimes used in
the Holy Scriptures in the most erotic, overtly sexual of contexts, while
“eros” is used in the most exalted of contexts. Clearly, whether “eros” or
“agape” is used to name it, the love of God must be clearly distinguished from
the fallen passion of lust. Equally clearly, however, the love of God is more
intense, more all-consuming and more “passionate” than the most passionate of
earthly loves.
Some are scandalised by the fact that the absolutely pure love of God
that is above space and time and matter is described in the same terms as a
love that is narrowly restricted in space and time, and inescapably centred on
a physical being and certain specific characteristics of that being. But there
is nothing to be scandalised about here. We do not degrade the love of God by
describing it as “eros”, nor do we purify our language by choosing some other
term without sexual connotations, such as “agape”.
The reason for this is that the sexual and erotic forces in human nature
were originally created to be directed towards God and the image of God in
created beings, and were only later, as a result of the fall, redirected
downwards towards the corruptible objects of sense-perception. Eros as
originally created was a single, unitary force embracing and integrating all
the forces of the soul and body. However, to the extent that it was diverted
from its primary object, God, it began to divide up and degrade itself. This is
not to say that the love of a created being is in itself degrading. But it must
be love of that creature in God, in the Creator; it must be the love of the
image of God in him. Love of the creature in God, and of the image of God
in the creature, is in no way incompatible with the love of God but is another
expression of that love. For, as the Lord said, the second commandment is
“like” the first. Indeed, if the Divine, uncreated Eros was expressed in love
of the creature, and in dying for him, how can the human, created eros created
in the image of the Divine Eros not involve the love of creatures? As the
Apostle of love writes: “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how
can he love God Whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from Him,
that he who loveth God love his brother also” (I John 4.20-21).
The degradation of eros began when the creature began to be loved for
itself, independently of God. This is idolatry. And it is highly
significant that idolatry is almost always described in the Holy Scriptures as fornication
or adultery. Nor is this simply a figure of speech. Idolatry is
fornication in the proper sense of the word, while the fornication that takes
place between sinful men and women is best described as a special form of
idolatry, the idolatry directed towards human bodies. Thus sexual fornication
is that form of fornication in which a member of the opposite sex is desired
independently of God, in such a way that the love of God Himself is weakened in
the lover.
Idolatry in the proper sense of the word leads to idolatry in the form
of sexual fornication, and thence to the even worse idolatry of sexual
perversion. For, as St. Gregory Palamas says, “they should be aware that if
they do not quickly make a stand against this passion, in time they will be
delivered up to worse, shameful, unnatural passions”.[582] For,
as the Apostle Paul writes, it was because men “changed the truth of God into a
lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” that “God
gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural
use into that which is against nature” (Romans 1.25-26).
Other, non-sexual loves for human beings may be no less idolatrous and
therefore adulterous in relation to God; they are called carnal even if no
physical contact is involved, because they express the will of the flesh in
opposition to the will of the spirit no less clearly than physical fornication.
Such can be loves for parents, for children, for spiritual and political
leaders, for nations, and even for humanity as a whole if humanity is loved in
itself and not in God. Not in vain did the Lord say that “he that loveth father
or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that loveth son or daughter
more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10.37), and “if any man come
to me, and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren
and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke
14.26).
The love of man for God is described in various terms in the Holy
Scriptures: as the love of a son for his father, a brother for a brother, a
disciple for his master, a friend for his friend… But most often it is
described as the love of a bride for her bridegroom. Why? First, because of all
the natural loves between human beings, sexual love is the strongest and
therefore the best image of that strongest of all loves which is the love
between God and man. Secondly, because sexual love is actually the origin of
all other human loves, just as Adam and Eve are the origin of the human race in
general, coming before them and engendering them. Thirdly, because sexual love
is exclusive and jealous by nature (if that nature has not been so corrupted as
to prefer “free”, promiscuous love to monogamy). Therefore it is the best image
of God’s love for man, which is also exclusive and jealous (in an unfallen
sense), not permitting any rival to God in the beloved’s heart, but insisting
that the beloved love Him alone with all his heart and mind and strength. And
fourthly and most importantly, because God’s love for man was expressed in the
Word becoming flesh, and continues to be realised by the giving of His
Body and Blood to every believer, so that the two become one flesh, as in
marriage.
We see now that those who attack the possibility of a sinless erotic
love between men and women in marriage also indirectly attack the possibility
of a total, all-consuming love of man for God in the sense of a love
that engages all the powers of his soul and body. These Neo-Manichaeans are
forced into affirming that the erotic force in man was not part of his nature
as originally created, but was “added” after the fall, and is the cause of evil
in human nature. But if God added to human nature that which causes us to sin,
then He is the cause of the evil in our nature, which is blasphemous…
In any case, we have seen that even those Fathers, such as Gregory of
Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, who allow that sexuality was in some sense
“added” after the fall (in the sense that the secondary sexual characteristics
were not there at the beginning and will not be there at the end), nevertheless
insist that the erotic force in man is not meant to be discarded and
annihilated in the ascent to God, but redirected towards Him. This
teaching is especially developed by St. Gregory Palamas, who demonstrates that
eros was a part of human nature from the beginning, before the fall, that it
was degraded after the fall by being diverted, as it were, from God to the
objects of sense, but that it is capable, through the grace of God and as a
result of the renewal of the whole of human nature through the Incarnation, of
being redirected back to the original object of its desire.
The Neo-Manichaeans, being unable to discern any difference between eros
and carnal lust, propose to eliminate both at the same time. But this is,
first, sinful for the same reason that self-castration is sinful, as implying a
hatred of that which God created good in the beginning. Secondly, it is
impossible, because eros, being an inalienable part of human nature, both of
the soul and of the body, cannot be destroyed. And thirdly, even if it were
possible to destroy eros altogether, the result would be a soul incapable of
rising to God, of loving Him, and therefore of fulfilling the first and
greatest commandment. For the soul rises to God and is united to Him through
the power of its erotic faculty in conjunction with, on the one hand, its
contemplative faculty, and on the other, the grace of God. Nor does the
activation of eros necessarily involve the activation of carnal lust. On the
contrary, as St. Gregory Palamas points out, “the contemplative part of the
soul strengthens and supports the part concerned with desires, and chases
away fleshly lusts.”[583]
In support of their heretical position, the Neo-Manichaeans invoke the
superiority of monasticism to marriage, as affirmed by St. Paul and the Holy
Tradition of the Orthodox Church. Their argument is that monasticism is
superior to marriage because while monasticism involves a decisive and complete
rejection of eros, marriage involves a certain compromise with it in the form
of sexual relations between man and wife. A necessary consequence of this view
is that a marriage which is not virginal is for that reason sinful, even if the
sin is venial or permitted for the sake of avoiding a greater sin
(fornication).
This view, which is also in essence the view of the Latins, not only
contradicts the testimony of St. Paul that sexual relations in marriage are
innocent: it misrepresents the highly complex comparison between marriage and
monasticism. Monasticism is a way of life constructed in all its details by God
for the salvation of those whom He calls to enter upon it. As is marriage for
those whom He calls to enter upon this path.
One of the God-inspired elements of the monastic life is complete
abstinence from sexual relations. One of the God-inspired elements of the
married life is measured sexual activity for as long as one or both spouses
feel the need for it. Just as it is a sin for a monk to engage in sexual
activity, so it is a sin for a married person not to engage in sexual relations
with his or her spouse, unless by agreement for a limited period of time for
the sake of greater concentration in prayer. The superiority of monasticism to
marriage does not consist primarily in its absence of sexual activity, but in
the fact that it facilitates concentration on God without all the cares and
distractions that inevitably form part of the married life (especially if
children are involved). However, this general superiority does not translate
into the affirmation that monasticism is better for every individual Christian:
for many – indeed, most Christians – marriage provides the safer and better
path to salvation.
The aim of both monasticism and marriage is the gradual redirection, not
only of eros, but of all the faculties of the soul and body, from sin and death
to virtue and eternal life. In the case of eros, this means from unlawful
material objects of desire to lawful and immaterial objects (God and the image
of God in creatures). Both involve the ascension of eros: from the sub-human to
the properly human in the case of marriage, and from the sub-human to the
Divine in the case of monasticism. There is therefore no contradiction between
them: neither path denies eros, both seek to raise and redeem it, to restore it
to its original path and purpose. Neither is evil; for neither denies the
goodness of God’s creation, neither permits the perversion of human nature to
subhuman ends. Both are good; both are “strong as death” (Song of Songs
8.6) and lead to life; for both are directed upwards, away from the fallen
passions and towards the “passionless passion” of God, the Lover of man. Only
the one goes further and higher along that same path, and therefore calls on
her fellow, her “little sister” (Song of Songs 8.8), to go higher with
her, towards the most complete union with the Divine Bridegroom, the Uncreated
Divine Eros…
[1] See Hieromonk Gregory
Lourié, Prizvanie Avraama (The Calling of Abraham), St.
Petersburg, 2000; Protopriest
Michael Makeev, V. Moss, A. Ter-Grigorian, I. Grigoriev, Supruzhestvo, Zakon
i Blagodat’ (Marriage, the Law and Grace), Moscow, 2001 (in
Russian).
[2] Rose, in Hieromonk Damascene
(Christensen), Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, Platina, Ca.:
St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2003, p. 804.
[3] In Christian countries,
naturalism appears especially when the doctrine of original sin is undermined.
Thus we read of the 19th century proto-socialist sect of the
Saint-Simonists: “Rejection of the dichotomies stemming from the doctrine of
original sin led… to the affirmation of all instincts and urges as good and
deserving fulfilment. The rehabilitation of woman, the senses and the flesh
assumed the character of a test of faith…” (J.L. Talmon, Romanticism and
Revolt, Europe 1815-1848, London: Thames & Hudson, 1967, p. 66).
Where naturalism passes over into
occultism, this emphasis becomes not only a test of faith, but the entrance
into some higher mystery of life. Then sex becomes, in the words of Malcolm
Muggeridge, “the mysticism of the materialists”.
[4] J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian
Doctrines, London: Adam & Charles Black, 1977, pp. 14-15.
[5] R.S. Pine-Coffin, introduction
to his translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions, London: Penguin Books, 1961, pp. 13-14.
[6] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
12 on I Timothy.
[7] Kelly, op. cit., pp.
15-16.
[8] Thus in
Plato’s ideal state there would be a law “to the effect that a lover may seek the
company of his beloved and, with his consent, kiss and embrace him like a son,
with honourable intent, but must never be suspected of any further familiarity,
on pain of being thought ill-bred and without any delicacy of feeling” (The
Republic, III, 402. Translated by F.M. Cornford, Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1941, pp. 89-90).
[9] Plato, The
Symposium, 189 f. Translated by Sir R.W. Livingstone, Plato: Selected
Passages, Oxford University Press, 1940, pp. 67-71.
[10] Scruton, Sexual
Desire, London : Phoenix, 1994, p. 2.
[11] Kelly, op. cit., pp.
17-18.
[12] F. Copleston, A History of
Philosophy, Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1962, vol. I, part II, p. 142.
[13] Copleston, op. cit., p.
142. The idea of the “rational emotion” was taught by Zeno and Chrysippus, for
whom the passions were not to classified as exclusively bodily in origin, being
infused with a rational element, while rational judgements contained a dynamic,
desiring element. See Paul M. Blowers, “Gentiles of the Soul: Maximus the
Confessor on the Substructure and Transformation of the Human Passions”, Journal
of Early Christian Studies 4:1,1996, pp. 58-59.
[14] Blowers, op. cit., pp. 57-85.
[15] The only Father who seems to
support the Stoic idea is Clement of Alexandria, who writes: “The fruit that
comes from complete elimination of desire is apatheia (Miscellanies
6.9.71, 74). But at least from the time of Lactantius (early fourth century),
this idea was rejected. Thus Robert L. Wilken writes: “Drawing on
Aristotle’s explanation of human action[who wrote: “the proximate reason for
movement is desire” On the Motion of Animals, 701a35], Lactantius argued that the Stoics ‘deprive
human beings of all the affections by whose instigation the soul is moved,
namnely desire, delight, fear, grief’. These affections, he continues, have
been implanted in us by God for a reason: without them it is impossible to have
a moral life. His statement, ‘without anger there can be no virtue’ [On the
Divine Institutions, 6.15], though not the most felicitous, makes the
point: anger, when properly used, can contribute to the virtuous life. If there
is no movement toward the good (or away from evil), there can be no virtue”
(“Maximus the Confessor on the Affections”, in Vincent L. Wimbush, Richard Valantasis
(eds.), Asceticism, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 413).
[16] For more on the relationship
between Christianity and Greek philosophy, see J. Romanides, The Ancestral
Sin, Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 1998, chapter 1.
[17] Troitsky, Philosophia
khristianskogo braka (The Philosophy of Christian Marriage), Paris,
1930s (in Russian).
[18] Archimandrite Luke, “New Age
Philosophy, Orthodox Thought, and Marriage”, Orthodox Life, vol. 47, ¹ 3, May-June, 1997, pp. 21-37.
[19] Sherrard, Christianity
and Eros, London: SPCK, 1976, p. 26.
[20] Rose, in Monk Damascene, op.
cit., pp. 542-543.
[21] St. Seraphim of Sarov, Conversation
with Motovilov, in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, Platina,
Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, p. 442.
[22] St. Gregory of Sinai, 137
Texts on Commandments and Doctrines, 46; in Rose, op. cit, p.
443.
[23] St. Cyril of Alexandria, On
Luke, Sermon 146.
[24] Metropolitan Philaret, Sermons
and Addresses of the Metropolitan Philaret, Moscow, 1844, part II, p. 87;
quoted in Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church,
London: James Clarke, 1957, p. 8.
[25] St. John Climacus, The Ladder
of Divine Ascent, Step 15. Again, St. John Chrysostom writes: “When he was
created, Adam remained in Paradise, and there was no question of marriage. He
needed a helper and a helper was provided for him. But even then marriage did
not seem to be necessary… Desire for sexual intercourse and conception and
pangs and childbirth and every form of corruption were alien to their soul” (On
Virginity, 14; P.G. 48:543). And again: “After their disobedience,
after their loss of the garden, then it was that the practice of intercourse
began. You see, before their disobedience they followed a life like that of the
angels, and there was no mention of intercourse. How could there be when they
were not subject to the needs of the body? So at the outset and from the
beginning the practice of virginity was in force, but when through indifference
disobedience came on the scene and the ways of sin were opened, virginity took
its leave for the reason that they had proved unworthy of such a degree of good
things, and in its place the practice of intercourse took over for the future.”
(Homily 18 on Genesis, 12).
[26] St. John of Damascus, An
Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 30.
[27] St. Cyril of Alexandria, On I
Corinthians 7; quoted in Walter Burghardt, The Image of God in Man
according to Cyril of Alexandria, Woodstock, Maryland: Woodstock College
Press, 1957, p. 98.
[28] St. Cyril of Alexandria, Against
Julian, 3, P.G. 76, 637; quoted in Burghardt, op. cit., p.
98.
[29] St. Ambrose notes that only the
woman was created in Paradise, while Adam was created before the planting of
Paradise, in Eden (On Paradise, 4.25; cited in Troitsky, op. cit.,
p. 26).
[30] Plato describes a still stranger
idea of the androgyne in his Symposium: “The sexes were not two as they
are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and a
combination of the two. The primeval man was round, his back and sides forming
a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking
opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two
privy members, and the remainder to correspond… Each of us when separated has
one side only, like a flat fish, and is but the indenture of a man, and he is
always looking for his other half.”
[31] St. Ephraim the Syrian, Commentary
on Genesis, 1.29.
[32] “Adam” – the name of
the species is the same as the name of the individual man in Hebrew
[33] St. Ephraim the Syrian, Commentary
on Genesis, 2.12; quoted in Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and
Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 302.
[34] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
31 on I Corinthians, 5.
[35] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
12 on Colossians, 5.
[36]
St. John Chrysostom, Homily
12 on Colossians, 5. Cf. John Donne’s
poem, “The Canonization”:
The
phoenix riddle hath more wit
By
us; we too being one, are it.
So
to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We
die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious
by this love.
[37] Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, The
Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, London: Allen
Lane The Penguin Press, 2003.
[38] Intriguing, in this connection,
is the following remark of Clement of Alexandria: “This, then, is the mark of
the man, the beard, by which he is seen to be a man, is older than Eve, and is
the token of the superior nature. In this God deemed it right that he should
excel, and dispersed hair over man’s whole body. Whatever smoothness and
softness was in him He abstracted from his side when He formed the woman Eve,…
while he (for he had parted with all his smoothness) remained a man, and shows
himself a man.” (The Instructor, III, 3) The inference is that Adam was
of the male sex before, as after, the creation of Eve. However, Clement also
seems to be implying that he lost certain of his more feminine attributes
(here, his smoothness) and so was more masculine after than before her
creation.
[39] Gospel according to the
Egyptians, quoted in Pseudo-Clement, Homily 12, 2, and by Clement of
Alexandria, Miscellanies, III, 13.
[40] St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary
on Genesis, 1; P.G. 69: 20. Cf. St. John Chrysostom: “‘Image’
refers to the matter of control, not anything else. In other words, God created
man as having control of everything on earth, and nothing on earth is greater
than man, under whose authority everything falls.” (Homily 8 on Genesis, 8. 10). And St.
Gregory of Nyssa: “The best Artificer made our nature as it were a formation
fit for the exercise of royalty…: for the soul immediately shows its royal and
exalted character… in that it owns no lord, and is self-governed, swayed
autocratically by its own will; for to whom else does this belong than to a
king?… If the Deity is the fullness of good, and this is His image, then the
image finds its resemblance to the Archetype in being filled with all good.
Thus there is in us the principle of all excellence, all virtue and wisdom, and
every higher thing that we conceive: but pre-eminent among all is the fact that
we are free from necessity, and not in bondage to any natural power, but have
decision in our own power as we please.” (On the Making of Man). And Metropolitan
Philaret of Moscow: “Man was created after all the visible creatures. For: (a)
the general order of the visible creation consisted in a constant ascent to
what was most perfect. (b) Man is a microcosm, the summary and as it were the
purest extract from all the natures of the visible world. (c) All the other earthly
creatures were created to serve him: and for that reason he is introduced into
the world as a master into his house, as a priest into his church, perfectly
constructed and adorned.” (Zapiski
rukovodstvuiuschaia k osnovatel’nomu razumeniu Knigi Byti (Notes Leading to a
Basic Understanding of the Book of Genesis), Moscow, 1817, 1867,
p. 20 (in Russian)).
[41] Nicetas Stethatos, Century 3,
10; P.G. 120, 957D-980A; quoted in P. Nellas, Deification
in Christ, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987, p. 85. Cf. St. Ambrose of
Milan: “God granted us the power of being able to discern by the application of
sober logic the species of each and every object, in order that [we] may be
induced to form a judgement on all of them” (On Paradise, 11).
[42] St. Irenaeus, On the
Apostolic Preaching, 11.
[43] St. Basil the Great, On the
Origin of Man, 1.19; in Rose, op. cit., p. 154. Cf. Bishop Theophan
the Recluse: “What dominion is this, and why is it desirable above all? Let us
recall the construction of human nature. God breathed the breath of His Divine
life into the face of him who had been built out of the dust of the earth. This
is the spirit of man, the higher part of our nature, where there live
consciousness, freedom, rationality, the fear of God, conscience and dissatisfaction
with everything created. The goal of the spirit is to be in God and to raise
everything to God, everything that is in man and around him. For this he has
been given authority over the lower powers of his nature. Receiving strength
from God, in Whom the spirit lives, the latter draws into the same life the
soul with its reasoning and its sciences, with its will and its manifestations,
with its taste and its arts – the works of his hands, and also its lower
capacities – imagination and memory. And it draws the body, too, with its
needs. And on all external orders it casts the reflection of the same life.
When this is in man, he is a real man, corresponding to his idea. And he
clearly is his own spirit, the master over himself and everything that is in
him and around him. But it is also evident that he can receive such a power of
dominion for his own spirit only from God, after devoting himself to Him and to
life in Him. If you separate the spirit from God, this power will be taken from
him. Then he will no longer be able to deal either with the strivings of his
soul or with the needs of his body or with anything external. In the first
construction of life man lived entirely within himself (in the spirit) before
God, in the second – completely outside himself and forgetful of God. Into this
latter construction there penetrate passions from self-love, which give to the
whole of his life and evil direction contrary to the spirit and the fear of
God, a direction that does not build up, but destroys. Such is the fallen man.
But God did not will to leave fallen man in destruction and made for him a
means of rising from the fall. The Son of God by His death on the cross, His
resurrection, ascension and sitting at the right hand of the Father, opened a
path for fallen man to the Holy Spirit, Who re-establishes the spirit of man
and arouses him to his former strength. In what way? At first the grace of the
Holy Spirit works on the spirit as it were from outside, arousing the
conscience and the fear of God. But when determination and a readiness to live
according to God is formed in the spirit, the grace of the Holy Spirit in the
sacraments enters into the spirit, and from this time man’s inner life begins
before God; his psychosomatic needs not only cease to rule him, on the
contrary, he himself begins to rule them, following the indications of the
Spirit. In this way our spirit, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, again
becomes autocratic, both within and without.” (Tolkovanie Poslanij
sv. Apostola Pavla, St. Petersburg,
2002, pp. 446-447)
[44] St. Basil the Great writes: “The
virtue of man and woman is the same, since creation is equally honoured in
both; therefore, there is the same reward for both. Listen to Genesis:
‘God created man,’ it says, ‘in the image of God created He him; male and
female created He them’. They whose nature is alike have the same reward. Why,
then [since their nature is alike], when Scripture made mention of man, did it
leave women unnoticed? Because it was sufficient, since their nature is alike,
to indicate the whole through the more authoritative part.” (Homily 10 on Psalm 1; quoted in Patrick Mitchell, The
Scandal of Gender, Salisbury, MA: Regina Orthodox Press, 1998, p. 34).
It was in
order to indicate their equality of nature, writes Professor Panagiotes
Trembelas, that Eve was created out of Adam’s side: “He wanted by this to show
that the help He was giving was of equal honour with him. Neither was it
fitting to put her at his head, nor that she should sit below his feet. She was
to remain at his side, at precisely the spot where the rib was from which she
had been created.” (Adam
kai Eva (Adam and Eve)), Athens:
Sotir, 1979, p. 32 (in Greek).
[45] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
10 on Genesis, 9. And again: “Why, tell me, does
he now say, ‘Let them have control’? Evidently he is already revealing
to us at this point some mystery lying hidden. Who are to have control? Quite
clearly he has spoken this way to hint at the formation of woman” (Homily 10 on Genesis, 7).
[46] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
20 on Ephesians. And again: “In the rank of monarch – the husband; in the
rank of lieutenant and general – the wife” (Homily 24 on I Corinthians,
5).
[47] St. Basil, Homily 10 on Psalm
1. Cf. St. Augustine: “We must believe that even before her sin woman had
been made to be ruled by her husband and to be submissive and subject to him.”
(On Genesis
according to the letter; quoted
in Mitchell, op. cit., p. 35).
[48] St. Ephraim, Commentary on
Genesis; quoted in Mitchell, op. cit., p. 36.
[49] St. Gregory Palamas, One
Hundred and Fifty Chapters, 43, P.G. 150:1152A; quoted in Fr.
Michael Azkoul, The Teachings of the Holy Orthodox Church, Buena Vista,
Co.: Dormition Skete Publications, 1986, part I, p. 102.
[50] St. Isidore of Pelusium, Letters
3, 95; P.G. 78: 801.
[51] Ely, “God, Man and Woman”, Living
Orthodoxy, #134, vol. XXIII, no. 2, March-April, 2003, p. 19.
[52] Cf. St. Cyril of Alexandria: “The
woman is made in the image and likeness of the man (that is, Adam), not alien
to him, but rather of the same nature and form; and this our ancestor Adam
himself clearly acknowledges, saying, ‘This is now bone of my bone, and flesh
of my flesh’, and so forth.” (Commentary on I Corinthians 11, P.G. 74, pp. 879-882; quoted in
Mitchell, op. cit., p. 29)
[53] Troitsky, op.
cit., p. 174.
[54] The same meaning is
implicit in the use of crowns in the Christian marriage service. As Fr. Valery
Lukianov writes, “the crowns – token of royal power – are bestowed upon the
bridal pair as a blessing when they are to become masters, so to speak,
of a new generation.” (“The
Symbolism of Holy Matrimony”, Orthodox Life, vol. 21, ¹ 2, March-April, 1971, p. 35). He
goes on: “The crowns also recall the crowns with which the ‘martyrs’, or
witnesses of Christ, are crowned in heaven. As in ancient times they adorned
the heads of conquerors, so now the crowns are placed on the heads of the
bridal pair as a reward for their chastity prior to marriage”.
[55] Not only in Byzantium was this
the case. When St. Tamara was declared co-ruler of Georgia at the age of 12,
“the Georgian Church and chronicles commemorate her as a king – ‘King Tamara’”
(“Holy Righteous Queen Tamara of Georgia”, Orthodox Life, vol. 53, ¹ 2,
March-April, 2003, p. 8.
[56]
Herrin, Women in Purple, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 121.
[57] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
14 on the Annunciation, 8. The Mother of God is called “Sovereign Lady” in
all the litanies of the Church. As St. John of Kronstadt writes: “The Virgin
May is the most merciful sovereign of all the sons and daughters of
men”.
[58] St. John Climacus, The Ladder
of Divine Ascent, Step 30, 7.
[59] St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions
to Thalassius, 61, P.G. 90: 628B; quoted in Nellas, op. cit.,
p. 71.
[60] Thalassios, On love,
self-control and life in accordance with the intellect, I, 5; in G.E.H.
Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (translators), The Philokalia,
London: Faber & Faber, 1995, vol. II, p. 307.
[61] St. John of Damascus: “Living
bodily in a sensible paradise on earth, in soul he communicated with the
angels, cultivating Divine thoughts and being nourished by them” (Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 30).
[62] Tertullian, Against Marcion, 2.4.
[63] St. Theophilus: “God transferred
him from the earth, out of which he had been made, into Paradise, giving him
the means for advancement in order that, maturing and becoming perfect, and
even being declared a god, he might thus ascend to heaven in possession of
immortality. For man had been made a middle nature, neither wholly mortal nor
altogether immortal but capable of either” (To Autolycus 2.24).
St. Irenaeus: “It was proper, first of all, that man should be created, and
having been created, should grow; and having grown, should mature; and having
matured, should increase; and having increased, should gain dominion; and
having gained dominion, should be glorified; and having been glorified, should
see his Master” (Refutation 4, XXXVIII, 3). Both quotations from
Romanides, op. cit., pp. 125, 126-127.
[64] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
14 on Genesis, 19; Homily 9 on Genesis, 8. Cf. St. John of Damascus:
“[Adam] prophetically, like a master, produced the naming of the living beings
who were given to him as servants. For the universal Creator and Master
naturally entrusted to him who had arisen as rational, thinking and autocratic
in the image of God, authority over that which was on earth” (Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 30).
[65] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
14 on Genesis, 17. And not only of reason, but of every other perfection. “How great was the power of God,
the master craftsman, making a likeness of those limbs from that tiny part [the
rib of Adam], creating such wonderful senses and preparing a creature complete,
entire and perfect, capable both of speaking and of providing much comfort to
man by a sharing of her being. For it was for the consolation of this man that
this woman was created. Hence Paul also said, ‘Man was not created for the
woman, but woman for the man’ (I Corinthians 11.9).” (Homily 15 on
Genesis, 11).
[66]
Vladimir Lossky writes:
“The image cannot be objectified, ‘naturalized’ we might say, by being
attributed to some part or other of the human being. To be in the image of God,
the Fathers affirm, in the last analysis is to be a personal being, that is to
say, a free, responsible being. Why, one might ask, did God make man free and
responsible? Precisely because He wanted to call him to a supreme vocation:
deification; that is to say, to become by grace, in a movement as boundless as
God, that which God is by nature. And this call demands a free response; God
wishes that this movement be a movement of love…
“A personal being is capable of loving
someone more than his own nature, more than his own life. The person, that is
to say, the image of God in man, is then man’s freedom with regard to his
nature, ‘the fact of being freed from necessity and not being subject to the
dominion of nature, but able to determine oneself freely’ (St. Gregory of
Nyssa).” (In the
Image and Likeness of God,
Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, 1989, pp. 71-72). Cf.
Vasily Zenkovsky, “Printsipy Pravoslavnoj Antropologii” (“The Principles of
Orthodox Anthropology”), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia
(Messenger of the Russian Christian Movement), 1988, II-III (in Russian).
[67] Cf. St. Ambrose of Milan, On
Paradise, 10.48; St. Augustine, On the Literal Interpretation of
Genesis, IX, 5, 9; St. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the
Orthodox Faith, II, 30.
[68] Clement of Alexandria, The
Instructor, III, 3; Miscellanies, in The One Who Knows God, Tyler,
Texas: Scroll Publishing, 1990, pp. 108, 106.
[69] St.
Basil the Great, On Virginity.
[70] St. Ephraim the Syrian, Commentary
on Genesis, 2.11. Blessed Theodoretus writes: “He commanded her to satisfy
the man’s desire, not a passion for pleasure, but by showing him the rational
need for her company.” (Commentary on Deuteronomy, 21.13). St. John Chrysostom goes further:
“[The spouses] share the toil so as to share the crown also. Everything in
marriage is in common. Let that which pertains to virtue be in common also. I
have taken you as a helper. Be a helper to me also in the higher things.” (On
Psalm 68, 5; P.G. 55:506). “A woman undertakes no small share of the
administration, being the keeper of the house. And without her not even
political affairs could be properly conducted. For if their domestic concerns
were in a state of confusion and disorder, those who are engaged in public
affairs would be kept at home, and political business would be ill managed. So
that neither in those matters, nor in spiritual, is she inferior. For she is
able, if so inclined, to endure a thousand deaths. Accordingly many women have
suffered martyrdom. She is able to practise chastity even more than men, no
such strong flame disturbing her; and to show forth modesty and gravity, and
‘holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord’ (Hebrews 12.14), and
contempt of wealth, if she will, and in short all other virtues.” (Homily 10
on I Timothy). Finally, St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain writes: “Woman
is a teacher of every virtue by word and deed within her own province at home”
(Commentary on Canon 70 of the Sixth Ecumenical Council; quoted in
Patrick Mitchell, The Scandal of Gender, Salisbury, MA: Regina Orthodox
Press, 1998, pp. 75-76. Among modern commentators, Professor Panagiotis
Trembelas puts it thus: man and woman help each other by "exercising
mutual forbearance, encouraging one another, so as to bring their different
characters into harmony, so as to love and serve one another, experiencing
together the same joys and sorrows, supporting one another in their weaknesses,
giving a helping hand in time of need, spending themselves wholly for one
another, together carrying the burden of life and the responsibility of a
family." (Dogmatique de l'Eglise Orthodoxe Catholique
(Dogmatics of the Orthodox Catholic Church), Chevetogne, vol. III, p. 351 (in French)). Again,
Lady Namier writes: "In the East marriage and the whole of family life are
seen as a discipline often likened to that of monasticism. Both rub away the
sharp edginess of personality, as pebbles tossed together by sea-waves rub each
other smooth in the long run" (The Listener, 12 December, 1957).
[71] "An Address of the Right
Reverend Tikhon", Orthodox Life, vol. 37, ¹ 4, July-August, 1987, pp. 3-4.
[72] Lebedev, “O Edinstve
Chelovechestva” (“On the Unity of Mankind”), Zhurnal Moskovskoj Patriarkhii
(Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate), 1983, ¹ 5 (in Russian).
[73] As Vladimir Soloviev
writes: “It is not to some separate part of human nature that the mysterious
image of God, in accordance with which man is made, relates from the beginning,
but to the true unity of his two main sides, male and female.” (“Smysl’ liubvi” (“The Meaning of
Love”), Sochinenia (Works), Moscow, 1994, p. 287 (in Russian)). However,
this does not entail the heretical ideas about the “feminine side of God” that
Soloviev expounds in his later writings.
[74] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
56, 6.
[75] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
20 on Ephesians, 1; in Roth, C.P. and Anderson, D., St. John Chrysostom:
On Marriage and Family Life, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1986, op. cit., pp. 43-44.
[76] St. Symeon, On the sacraments, 38, P.G.
155:381; quoted in Troitsky, op. cit., pp. 93-94.
[77] Shelley, How God created Man,
a Bible Christian Unity Fellowship Study, p. 6.
[78] Tertullian distinguishes between
sleep and ecstasy, and defines “ecstasy” as the power of dreaming that precedes
sleep. “Thus, in the beginning, sleep was preceded by ecstasy, as we read: ‘God
sent an ecstasy upon Adam, and he slept’. Sleep brought rest to the body, but
ecstasy came over the soul and prevented it from resting, and from that time
this combination constitutes the natural and normal form of the dream” (On
the Soul, 45.1-3).
[79] St. Ephraim, Commentary on
Genesis, 2.12.
[80] St. Irenaeus, On the
Apostolic Preaching, 13.
[81] Verkhovskoy, “The Creation of
Man the Establishment of the Family in the Light of the Book of Genesis”, St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1964, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 9.
[82] St. Augustine writes: “The
ecstasy will be correctly understood as being imposed so that the mind of Adam,
with the help of this ecstasy,… should enter into the sanctuary of God and
receive knowledge of the future. As a result, having awoken and being as it were
filled with prophecy, he saw the bone, that is, his wife, being brought to him,
and immediately said (the apostle calls these words a great mystery): ‘Behold
now…’… Although according to the Holy Scriptures, these words were the words of
the first man, nevertheless the Lord in the Gospel declares that they were
pronounced by God” (On Genesis according to the letter, IX, 19; in
Troitsky, op. cit., p. 118). Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies,
I, 135, 3. St. Jerome also calls Adam a “prophet” (vates).
[83] St. Methodius, The Symposium,
Logos 2. 2. According to St. Augustine, Adam and Eve may have known some
form of sexual union, without fallen lust, in Paradise (The City of God,
XIV, 26). However, it seems that Augustine was not referring to the creation of
Eve as being that sexual union of which he was talking.
[84] At this point we have to be cautious, because the Fathers
prefer not to speak of Eve’s creation out of Adam as a “giving birth” or
“begetting” or “generation”, using these words only for the procreation that
takes place in the fall (St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 31, 11; St.
John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 30).
However, as we shall see later, they acknowledge the likeness between the
creation of Eve out of Adam and the birth of the New Adam, Christ, from the New
Eve, Mary.
[85] Bishop Hilarion, The Mystery
of Faith, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002, p. 151.
[86]
Troitsky, op. cit., p. 48, footnote.
[87] The Hebrew words ish and isha
emphasise the unity of the sexes in a single human nature. Only English among
modern European languages preserves this philological reflection of the
ontological reality. For “this name,” as St. John Chrysostom says, “should
reveal their common creation and become the foundation of a durable love and
the cement of their union” (Homily 6 on Genesis, 5).
[88] Velimirovich, The Prologue
from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, volume IV, p. 241, November
25.
[89] St. Asterius, Sermon on
Matthew 19.3, P.G. 40:228; quoted in S.V. Troitsky, “Brak i Tserkov’”
(“Marriage and the Church”), Russkoe Vozrozhdenie (Russian Regeneration),
1986 (III), ¹
35, pp. 25-26 (in Russian).
[90] Lebedev, “O masterakh i
margaritakh” (“On Masters and Margaritas”), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox
Life), 53, N5 (640), May, 2003, p. 31 (in Russian).
[91] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
20 on Ephesians; translated in Roth & Anderson, op. cit., pp.
56, 57.
[92] This “paradisial ‘eros’”, as
Vladimir Lossky calls it, “would have been as different from our fallen and
devouring sexuality as the sacerdotal royalty of man over created being should
be from our actual devouring of each other… The narrative of creation, let us
not forget, is expressed in the categories of the fallen world. But the Fall
has changed the very meaning of the words. Sexuality, this ‘multiplying’ that
God orders and blessed, appears in our universe as irremediably linked to
separation and death. This is because the condition of man has known, at least
in his biological reality, a catastrophic mutation. But human love would not be
pregnant with such a paradisiacal nostalgia if there did not remain painfully
within it the memory of a first condition where the other and the world were
known from the inside…” ("Creation: Cosmic Order", Orthodox
Theology, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, 1978, p. 67).
[93] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
56, 6.
[94] Cf. the Chinese philosopher
Gi-ming Shien: The love between husband and wife “excludes the love of others
if respect does not underlie affection. Desire makes one approach,
respect keeps them apart; the union of the two is affection or love which
abides. Respect is the regulating force of love” (in Hieromonk
Damascene, op. cit., p. 74).
[95] St. Maximus, Ambigua, P.G. 91;
quoted in Nellas, op. cit., p. 214.
[96] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Making of Man, 16-17; in Rose, Genesis, op. cit. According to
Constantine Tsirplanis, “the so called ‘double creation’ doctrine of St.
Gregory of Nyssa should be understood as man’s essential and simultaneous
composite nature, from the very beginning, in which the brutal passions
existed, but were inactive, neutral and powerless, and they would remain so if
the reason had not abused its freedom… There was no second act of creation” (The
Concept of Universal Salvation in Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Thessalonica,
1980, p. 24).
[97] As Bishop Theophan
the Recluse writes: “When all Christians are through the grace of the Holy
Spirit are created inwardly in accordance with one image – the Lord Jesus
Christ, then it is clear that they are all in spirit identical, they are all one
in Jesus Christ, they are all as one, or both the one and the other: what
is given to one is also given to the other. Nobody is deprived, because of
external differences, of that which is necessary to him as a Christian. That
which is external has no significance in Christianity; in it everything depends
on strength of faith, devotion to Christ the Lord and readiness to make all
kinds of sacrifices to please Him. Therefore in Christ Jesus there is neither
Jew nor Greek. ‘Neither is the Jew better because he is circumcised, nor is the
Greek worse because he is uncircumcised; but both the one and the other are
better or worse solely in accordance with the quality of their faith. In the
same way the slave and the freeman can be different in Christianity, but not in
status, only in faith. Equally, the man and the woman differ in the strength
and weakness of the body, but faith is defined by the disposition of the heart,
and it often happens both that the wife saves the husband, and that the husband
precedes the wife in faith’ (Jerome)”. (op. cit., p. 90).
[98] St. Jerome, Letter 108, 23.
[99] The Fathers tend to emphasise the weaknesses
of women more than those of men, perhaps because they are “the weaker vessel” (I
Peter 3.7). “’Women are unstable, prone to error, and
mean-spirited,’ writes St. Epiphanius of Cyprus in the Panarion. The
woman is ‘somewhat talkative,’ ‘fond of ornament,’ and ‘in some sort a weaker
being and easily carried away and light minded,’ says St. John Chrysostom [Homily
13 on Ephesians and Homily 37 on I Corinthians]. ‘The sex is
somewhat weaker, and needs much support, much condescension,’ he adds elsewhere
[Homily 20 on Ephesians]; ‘the sex is weak and fickle’ [Homily 9 on I
Timothy]. “Their fickle and vacillating minds, if left to their own
devices, soon degenerate,’ says St. Jerome, of female anchorites [Letter 130
to Demetrias].” (Patrick Mitchell,
op. cit., p. 96).
David Bailey tries (not altogether
convincingly) to mitigate the harshness of such judgements by pointing to “the
youth and personal immaturity of the average fourth-century bride who, if she
were the daughter of believing parents, would have been kept in strict
seclusion until the time of her marriage. It is hardly surprising that the
deficiencies in their education and their exclusion from social life should
have earned for women the contemptuous epithets of many of the Fathers – weak
and frail, slow of understanding, light and unstable of mind, liable to
deception, and unsafe to admit to the deliberation of public affairs.
“These failings can all, for the most
part, be attributed to the various disabilities suffered by the female sex in
ancient times” (The Man-Woman Relation in Christian Thought, London:
Longmans, 1957, pp. 62-63).
[100] Cf. Dorothy Kimura, "Sex
Differences in the Brain", Scientific American, vol. 267,
September, 1992, pp. 80-87; Baron-Cohen, op. cit.
[101] Channel 4 TV, “Sex Change”, May
1, 2003.
[102] And since there will be no marriage in the resurrection, it follows, writes St. Gregory, that these secondary characteristics will not exist in the Kingdom: “If the organs of marriage exist for the sake of marriage, when that function does not exist we shall need none of the organs for that function” (On the Soul and the Resurrection, 10).
[103] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Making of Man, 16. Cf. St. Epiphanius of Cyprus: “Church doctrine believes that
man was created according to the image of God, but does not define precisely in
what part of his essence the image of God exists… There is no need at all to
define or affirm in what part of us that which is in the divine image is
effectuated” (Against
Heresies, 70, 2;
P.G. 42:341).
[104] St. Maximus the Confessor, Letter
15; P.G. 91: 552, D6-13; quoted in M.-H. Congourdeau, “L’animation de
l’embryon humain chez Maxime le Confesseur” (“The Animation of the Human Embryo
in Maximus the Confessor”), Nouvelle Revue de Théologie (New Review
of Theology), 1989, pp. 707-708 (in French).
[105] Tatian, To the Greeks, in
Romanides, op. cit., p. 148.
[106] St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Refutation,
5, VI, 1; in Romanides, op. cit., pp. 148-149.
[107] St. Gregory Palamas, Prosopopeia,
P.G. 150: 1361C. Cf.
[108] Tertullian, On the
Resurrection of the Flesh, 6.
[109] For
patristic references, see Romanides, op. cit., p. 128.
[110] Romanides, op.
cit., pp. 145, 146.
[111] For, as Blessed
Augustine writes, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are
restless until they find rest in Thee” (Confessions).
[112] St. Gregory of Nyssa, in
Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern), Antropologia sv. Grigoria Palamy (The
Anthropology of St. Gregory Palamas), Paris, 1950, p. 157 (in Russian).
[113] St. Anastasius, On the Image
and Likeness, P.G. 89:1145BC; in John Meyendorff, Catholicity and
the Church, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1983, pp.
24-25.
[114]
Lossky, "Creation: Cosmic Order", op. cit., pp. 67, 69-70.
Archpriest Lev Lebedev develops this theme: “Man was created not only as ‘I’,
but simultaneously as ‘we’. At first the Lord created Adam, then brought his
wife Eve out from his body and commanded them to multiply, so that each child
born to them would be at the top of a particular triangle: husband, wife and
child, all of them with one uniform nature, Adam’s nature, but all three, Adam,
Eve and child, individual in being, freely rational persons. And nowadays all
of the many millions of people have as their basis a tertiary structure,
husband, wife and child, and thus conform to the image of the Holy Trinity.
“But God’s image and likeness are not only
in the structural makeup. These principally reflect love and agreement. The
Father is the source of all holiness common to every godly nature. This is His
hypostatic property. The Son is ‘born’ before eternity from the Father, and the
Holy Spirit proceeds before eternity from the Father. These are their
hypostatic properties, their specific nature and thus the Persons of God behave
accordingly, but in such a way that with a perfect love for each other, they
are always in perfect and voluntary agreement.
“To just such an image of existence was
man called, first of all in personally life, in family relations, and then also
with regard to all mankind…” (What is Truth? St. Vladimir’s Russian
Orthodox Information Center, 1996, pp. 9-10).
[115] Bishop Theophan, op. cit.,
p. 179.
[116] Cf. St. Cyril of Alexandria: “Because
the woman is the likeness of the man and the image of the image, and the glory
of the glory, he admonishes her to nourish the hair on her head on account of
her nature. And yet why would the former begrudge grace to the latter,
especially as the woman herself displays the image and likeness of God? But
nevertheless she does so in a sense through the man, because the nature of the
woman differs in some small way” (P.G. 74,
pp. 881-884; quoted in Mitchell, op. cit., p. 30). And Blessed
Theodoretus writes: “He is called the image of God on account of being
entrusted with dominion over all things on earth. The woman, on the other hand,
being placed under the authority of the man, is the glory of the man, just as
she is also the image of the image. Now she herself also rules other things,
but is justly subjected to the man” (Commentary on I Corinthians 11, P.G. 82, pp. 309-314;
quoted in Mitchell, op. cit., p. 29.)
[117] The psychologist Professor Simon
Baron-Cohen (op. cit.) has argued in detail for a difference between a
“systemising” male brain and an “empathising” female brain.
[118] St. Paulinus of Nola, Letter
23: To Severus, 24, 25.
[119] St. Basil the Great in On the
Six Days, X, 5, and Second Homily on the Creation of Man, 5.
[120] St. Augustine, Two Books on
Genesis against the Manichaeans, I, 19, 30.
[121] St. Methodius of Olympus, The
Symposium, 2, 1.
[122] St. Bede the Venerable, On
Genesis, I, 1.28.
[123] St. John of Damascus, Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV, 24.
[124] The Conception of the Most Holy
Mother of God, Menaion, December 9, Mattins, kontakion. In the same
service the conception is called “holy” (Mattins, canon, Ode 3, sedalen).
[125] Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies,
III, 12, P.G. 8:1189; Troitsky, op. cit., p. 39.
[126] Blessed Theodoretus, On I
Kings, 3.
[127] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
10 on Genesis, 4-5, P.G. 53:86; in Troitsky, op. cit., p. 40.
[128] St. John Chrysostom, On
Virginity, 15, P.G. 48:544; in Troitsky, op. cit., p. 40.
[129] St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses
12.26, P.G. 33:757; cf. 9.15, P.G. 33:653.
[130] Nellas, op. cit., p. 72.
I have in fact found one exception to this rule – the teaching of St. Augustine: “Although it was
after the expulsion of the man and the woman from Paradise that they came
together in sexual intercourse and begat children, nevertheless I do not see
what could have prohibited them from honourable marital union and ‘the bed
undefiled’ even in Paradise. God could have granted them this if they had lived
in a faithful and just manner in obedient and holy service to him, so that
without the tumultuous ardour of passion and without any labour and pain of
childbirth, offspring would be born from their seed” (On the Literal
Interpretation of Genesis, 9,3,5; The City of God, XIV, 26).
[131] St. Athanasius, Commentary on
Psalm 50.
[132] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Making of Man, 17, 2.
[133] St. John of Damascus, Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV, 24; P.G. 94: 1208D.
[134] St. John
Chrysostom, quoted in Metropolitan Philaret, op. cit., p. 24.
[135] Moreover, the blessing is
repeated after the destruction of the world by the Flood and Noah’s emergence
from the ark (Genesis 9.1); for Noah and his family after the Flood are
like Adam and Eve after the fall – on them depends the survival of the human
race. “See how marriage was again permitted for the sake of increase,” comments
St. John of Damascus (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV, 24).
[136] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 21. See
also his commentary on Fr. John Meyendorff, Zhizn’ i trudy svyatitelia
Grigoria Palamy (The Life and Works of the Holy Hierarch Gregory Palamas),
St. Petersburg: Vizantinorossika, 1997, pp. 378-379 (in Russian).
[137] Apostolic Canon 5.
[138] Sixth Ecumenical Council, Canon
13.
[139] Gilbert Noble, The Saints of
Cornwall, Oxford: Holywell Press, volume V, 1970, pp. 65-66.
[140] Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, St.
Seraphim of Sarov: A Spiritual Biography, Blanco, TX: New Sarov Press,
1994, p. 293.
[141] St. John Cassian, Conference 21,
IX, 1; Lourié, op. cit., p. 111. The wife’s argument is supported
by, among others, Origen, who writes, commenting
on the Gospel phrase “maketh her an adulteress” (Matthew 14.23), that a
husband can, by omitting to satisfy the physical desires of his wife, “under
the appearance of greater gravity and self-control”, place her in serious
temptation, for which he himself is responsible (Commentary on Matthew.
14.24; quoted in Bailey, op. cit., p. 82, note 4).
[142] St. John Cassian, Conference 21,
IX, 1; Lourié, op. cit., p. 116.
[143] Council of Gangra, Canon 1.
[144] St. John
Cassian, Conference 21, X, 1,2.
[145] St. Macarius the Great, Homily
4, 15.
[146] Blessed
Theophylact, Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, 14.26;
House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press, 1997, p. 187. In the life of Holy
New Hieroconfessor Alexander of Omsk (+1977), we read that it was on reading
this Gospel passage that he decided to leave his wife and family. However, he
did this because staying with his family in the conditions of Soviet life would
have endangered his soul, “because he was not allowed to serve honorably as a
priest under Soviet power and his conscience did not allow him to become a
traitor” (“Holy Hieroconfessor Alexander of Omsk”, Living Orthodoxy, vol.
XVIII, ¹ 2, March-April, 1997, p. 5).
[147] Lourié,
op. cit., pp. 112-113.
[148] This is also the view of
Troitsky (op. cit., p. 18, footnote 37).
[149] Troitsky, op.
cit., p. 37.
[150] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
30 on Hebrews, P.G. 63:281 (col. 210).
[151] Bl. Theophylact, P.G.
125:756B (col. 389).
[152] Bishop Theophan, op. cit.,
p. 618.
[153] See J. Bottom, “The Pig-Man
Cometh”, The Weekly Standard, October 23, 200; in Orthodox Christian
Witness, June 5/18, 2000, pp. 2-4.
[154] Savulescu, in Michael Gross,
“New cells for old?”, Oxford Today, vol. 17, 31, Michaelmas,
2004, p. 30.
[155] Anthony Daniels, “How far has
humanity sunk when we treat the creation of life just like ordering a new
car?”, Daily Mail (London), August 13, 2001, p. 12.
[156] Dubinin, Obschaia Genetika
(General Genetics), Moscow: Nauka, 1976; quoted by Protopriest Vladislav
Sveshnikov, “Rabota adova delaetsa uzhe” (“The Work of Hell is already being
Done”), Kontinent, 71, 1992, pp. 270-271. Cf. Sergius Bufeev, “Pochemu
pravoslavnij ne mozhet byt’ evoliutionistom” (“Why an Orthodox Christian cannot
be an Evolutionist”), in Deacon Daniel Sysoev, Shestodnev protiv evoliutsii
(The Six Days against Evolution), Moscow: “Palomnik”, 2000, pp. 267-269 (in
Russian).
[157] Sveshnikov, op. cit., p.
271.
[158] Nedelsky, “An Orthodox Christian
Perspective on Human Cloning”, Orthodox Life, vol. 52, ¹ 6, November-December, 2002, pp.
19-20, 21.
[159] St. Neilos the Ascetic, “Ascetic
Discourses,” The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 247.
[160] Thus Scruton quotes the
anthropologist Margaret Mead: “In every known society, mankind has elaborated
the biological division of labour into forms often very remotely related to the
original biological differences that provided the original clues. Upon the
contrast in bodily form and function men have built analogies between sun and
moon, night and day, goodness and evil, strength and tenderness, steadfastness
and fickleness, endurance and vulnerability… we know of no culture that has
said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in
the way they contribute to the next generation.” And then he goes on: “Men and
women develop separate characters, separate virtues, separate vices and
separate roles.” And if this is somewhat exaggerated from a Christian point of
view, we can nevertheless fully agree with the following: “The result of gender
construction is that we perceive the Lebenswelt as subject to a
great ontological divide. Not only is there an intentional distinction between
person and thing, there is another between the masculine and the feminine,
which is initially a distinction among persons. But this second ontological
divide, while it takes its sense from our understanding of persons, is not
confined to the personal realm. On the contrary, it reaches through all nature,
presenting us with a masculine and a feminine in everything. A willow, a
Corinthian column, a Chopin nocturne, a Gothic spire – in all these one may
receive the embodied intimation of femininity, and someone who could not
understand the possibility of this is someone with impoverished perceptions.” (op.
cit., pp. 266-267, 273)
[161] Thus Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) writes: “If purely
physical sensations and needs are closely connected with the desires and moods
of a person’s soul, then sexual life is far more closely connected with them.
Why is it that desire, apparently so strong, will desert even the healthiest
and youngest men when they are in deep grief or extremely worried or
preoccupied by something? Thus it is not so much in the body, as in the soul.” (On Confession, Jordanville,
N.Y., 1996, p. 66).
[162] Soloviev, op. cit., pp.
252-254.
[163] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
24 on I Corinthians, 5. And again: “Can you see now how close this union
is, and how God providentially created it from a single nature? He permitted
Adam to marry Eve, who was more than sister or daughter; she was his own flesh!
God caused the entire human race to proceed from this one point of origin. He
did not, on the one hand, fashion woman independently from the man; otherwise
man would think of her as essentially different from himself. Nor did He enable
woman to bear children without man; if this were the case she would be
self-sufficient. Instead, just as the branches of a tree proceed from a single
trunk, He made the one man Adam to be the origin of all mankind, both male and
female, and made it impossible for men and women to be self-sufficient. Later,
He forbade men to marry their sisters or daughters, so that our love would not
be limited to members of our families, and withdrawn from the rest of the human
race. All of this is implied in Christ’s words: ‘He Who made them from the
beginning made them male and female’ (Matthew 19.4)” (Homily 20 on
Ephesians, 1; in Roth & Anderson, op. cit., p. 44). Cf.
St. Augustine: “Since each man is a part of the human race, and human nature is
sociable, and also has friendship as a great and natural good, for this reason
God willed to create all men out of one, in order that they might be held in
their society not only by likeness of kind, but also by bond of kindred. Therefore
the first natural bond of human society is man and wife. Nor did God create
these each by himself, and join them together as alien by birth: but He created
the one out of the other.” (On the Good of Marriage, 1).
[164] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
12 on Colossians; in Roth & Anderson, op. cit., p. 76. And again
he writes: “A man leaves his parents, who gave him life, and is joined to his
wife, and one flesh – father, mother, and child – results from the commingling
of the two. The child is born from the union of their seed, so the three become
one flesh.” (Homily 20 on Ephesians; in Roth & Anderson, op. cit.,
p. 51).
[165]
St. John Chrysostom, Homily 12 on Colossians; in Roth & Anderson, op.
cit., pp. 76-77.
[166] Ilyin, “On the Family”, Orthodox
Life, vol. 46, ¹
6, November-December, 1996, pp. 7-8, 10, 11.
[167] Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies,
III, 4; P.G. 8, 1096
[168] Tertullian, To his Wife, 2.
[169] St. John Chrysostom comments on
this passage: “He means that God made marriage, and not that it is He that
joins together every man that comes to be with a woman. For we see many
that come to be with one another for evil, even by the law of marriage, and
this we should not ascribe to God” (Homily 23 on Romans, 1).
[170] St. Gregory the Theologian, In
Praise of Virginity, 11.263-75, translated in Orthodox Life,
November-December, 1981.
[171] Verkhovskoy, op. cit.
[172] St. Augustine, On the Good of
Marriage, 6.
[173] Thus towards the end
of the sixth century St. Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome, wrote to St.
Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury: “Desire itself is not blameless. For
David, who said: ‘behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my
mother conceive me’, was not himself born of any illicit union, but in lawful
wedlock. But knowing himself to have been conceived in iniquity, he grieved
that he had been born in sin, like a tree bearing in its branches the sap of
evil drawn up from the root. In saying this, he does not term the bodily union
of married people iniquity, but the desire of such union. When lust takes the
place of desire for children, the mere act of union becomes something that the
pair have cause to regret.” (Venerable
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, London: Penguin,
1990, pp. 85-86).
[174] The earliest during the time of
Pope Siricius, in the later fourth century.
[175] It was also rejected by some of
the Popes, as for example, the last Greek Pope Zachariah (+752), in a letter to
St. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany (R. Emerson, The Letters of Saint
Boniface, New York: Octagon Books, 1973, p. 84).
[176] Thus we read of Bishop Wulfstan
of Worcester (+1095) that "the sin of incontinence he abhorred, and
approved continence in all men, and especially in clerks in holy orders. If he
found one wholly given to chastity he took him to himself and loved him as a
son. Wedded priests he brought under one edict, commanding them to renounce
their fleshly desires or their churches. If they loved chastity, they would
remain and be welcome: if they were the servants of bodily pleasures, they must
go forth in disgrace. Some there were who chose rather to go without their
churches than their women: and of these some wandered about till they starved;
others sought and at last found some other provision..." (William of
Malmesbury, Vita Wulfstani).
[177] Sixth Ecumenical Council, Canon
13. Also, the 5th Apostolic Canon forbids clergy from abandoning
their wives “under pretext of religion” and the Council of Gangra (c. 343)
anathematises (no less!) anyone who abstains from receiving Communion from a
priest because he is married (Canon 4). The idea of forbidding the marriage of
the clergy was first brought up at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, but
was abandoned after a speech in defence of married clergy by the (virgin)
confessor Paphnutius.
[178] Troitsky, op.
cit., p. 54.
[179] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
15 on Genesis, 14. We are baptised naked because through baptism we
return to the condition before the fall. As Chrysostom writes: [The priest]
reminds you of your former nakedness, when you were in Paradise and you were not
ashamed. For Holy Scripture says, ‘Adam and Eve were naked and were not
ashamed,’ until they took up the garment of sin, a garment heavy with abundant
shame” (Baptismal Instructions, 11, 28).
[180] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 9
on John, 2. Again, Blessed Augustine writes: “the first fall of man was
self-love” (Sermon 96, II, 2). As St. Gregory the Wonderworker
writes: “Eve, dancing alone in Paradise, with her intellect in a state of
indolence, feebleness and stupor” accepted the words of the devil without much
attention, and thus “the wisdom of the intellect was corrupted”. The devil
introduced death into the world through the intellect” (Homily 1,
Bepes 17, 351) (Nikolaos Vassiliadis, The Mystery of Death, Athens:
Sotir, 1997, p. 89).
[181]
This relationship is also often noted in secular literature. Cf. Shakespeare, Venus
and Adonis, 803:
Love
surfeits not: Lust like a glutton dies.
Love
is all truth: Lust full of forged lies.
[182] St. Diadochus, “On Spiritual
Knowledge”, 56; in The Philokalia, vol. I, London: Faber, 1983, p. 269.
[183] St. Augustine, On Genesis
according to the letter, XI, 32.
[184] The Venerable Bede, On
Genesis, I, 3.22.
[185] St. Ephraim the Syrian, Commentary
on Genesis, 2.33.1.
[186] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
31, P.G. 151:388C; quoted in Nellas, op. cit., p. 85.
[187] For this distinction, see
Chrestos Androutsos, Dogmatiki tis orthodoxou anatolikis Ekklesias (The
Dogmatics of the Orthodox Eastern Church), Athens, 1907, p.
164 (in Greek).
[188] St. Gregory of Nyssa, Funeral
Oration on Placilla, P.G. 46:888D-889A; quoted in Nellas, op. cit.,
p. 87.
[189] Since, according to St. Maximus,
pleasure is defined as “that for which we naturally strive” (Ambigua 7, P.G.
91: 1088D), some kind of pleasure was present in us even before the
fall. But this was a spiritual pleasure, a pleasure in God rather than in
sensible things. (V.M.)
[190] There is a pun here on the words
“pain” and “pleasure”, odunh and hdonh, which sound similar in Greek.
(V.M.)
[191] St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions
to Thalassius, 61; translated by Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken in
On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: St. Maximus the Confessor,
Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003, pp. 131-133.
[192] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Peri
tou timiou nomimou gamou (On Honourable and Lawful Marriage), P.G.
155:504C. As a modern novelist has written: “Those burning
Romantic poets weren’t wrong. Sex and death belong together, joined in our
imaginations as they are in our DNA. Sex and death are our original parents.
For some of us, the only family we’ll ever have.” (Jeanette Winterson, The Power Book,
London: Vintage, 2001, p. 176).
[193] Nellas, op. cit., p. 89.
[194] St. Isaac the Syrian, On the
Ascetical Life, III, 8.
[195] St. Theophilus, To Autolycus,
2,26. And St. Irenaeus writes: “He set a boundary to the sin of man,
interposing death, and thus causing the end of sin, putting an end to it by the
dissolution of the flesh in the earth so that man, ceasing to live unto sin and
dying to it, might begin to live unto God” (Refutation, 3, XXVII, 6).
Quoted in Romanides, op. cit., pp. 99-100. See also St. Ambrose’s
discourse, On the Good of Death.
[196] Romanides, op.
cit., pp. 162-164.
[197] St. Methodius of Olympus, Discourse
on the Resurrection, 2.
[198] St. Photius the Great, A
Synopsis of some Apostolic Words from the same Discourse [on the Resurrection,
by St. Methodius of Olympus], 3.
[199] St. John of Damascus, Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III, 1.
[200] Bishop Ignatius, “Slovo o
chuvstvennom i o dukhovnom videnii dukhov” (“A Word on the Sensual and
Spiritual Vision of Spirits”), Sochinenia Episkopa Ignatia Brianchaninova
(The Works of Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov), St. Petersburg, 1905, vol. 3,
pp. 10-11 (in Russian).
[201] Soloviev, op. cit., p.
298.
[202] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Soul and Resurrection, chapter 10; translated by Catherine Roth, Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, p. 114. It may be surprising to think of
“gradual growth” as a consequence of the fall. But St. Ephraim the Syrian
writes that in Paradise “just as the trees, the vegetation, the animals, the
birds and even humankind were old, so also were they young. They were old
according to the appearance of their limbs and their substances, yet they were
young because of the hour and moment of their creation. Likewise, the moon was
both old and young. It was young, for it was but a moment old, but was also
old, for it was full as it is on the fifteenth day” (Commentary on Genesis, 1.24.1).
Thus while there might be moral development in Paradise, there was no physical
development or ageing. That came only as a result of the fall.
[203] Bishop Ignaty Brianchaninov,
“Slovo o razlichnykh sostoianiakh estestva chelovecheskogo” (“A Word on the
Various Conditions of Human Nature”), Tvorenia (Works), Moscow, 2001,
vol. II, pp. 343-344 (in Russian).
[204] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life
in Christ, II, 7; Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974, p.
77.
[205] Rose, in Christensen, op.
cit., p. 804.
[206] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
74 on John, 3.
[207] St. John Chrysostom, Homilies
on Titus, V, 2.
[208] St. John Cassian, On the Eight
Vices, “On Avarice”; The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 78.
[209] St. Gregory Palamas, To the
Most Reverend Nun Xenia, 41; The Philokalia, volume IV, p. 309.
[210] St. Cyril of Alexandria, On I
Corinthians 7; quoted in Burghardt, op. cit., p. 98.
[211] St. Cyril of Alexandria, Against
Julian, 3, P.G. 76, 637; quoted in Burghardt, op. cit., p.
98.
[212] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
13 on Roman, 1.
[213] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 2
on Ephesians, 3; P.G. 62:20. And again he writes, distinguishing
between the natural desires and their unnatural expression: “Nothing that is
natural is evil. Why then does he call carnal affections sins? Because whenever
the flesh exalts herself, and gets the mastery over her charioteer, she
produces ten thousand mischiefs. The virtue of the flesh is, her subjection to
the soul. It is her vice to govern the soul. As the horse then may be good and
nimble, and yet this is not shown without a rider; so also the flesh will then
show her goodness, when we cut off her prancings… The virtue therefore of the body
consists in this, in its submission to the soul, since of itself the flesh is
neither good nor evil. For what could the body ever do of itself? It is then by
its connection that the body is good, good because of its subjection, but of
itself neither good nor evil, with capacity, however, both for one and for the
other, and having an equal tendency either way. The body has a natural desire,
not however of fornication, nor of adultery, but of pleasure; the body has a
desire not of feasting, but of food; not of drunkenness, but of drink. For in
proof that it is not drunkenness that is the natural desire of the body, mark
how, whenever you exceed the measure, when you go beyond the boundary-lines, it
cannot hold out a moment longer. Up to this point it is of the body, but all
the rest of the excesses, as e.g., when she is hurried away into sensualities,
when she becomes stupefied, these are of the soul. For though the body be good,
still it is vastly inferior to the soul, as lead is less of value than gold, and
yet gold needs lead to solder it, and just so has the soul need also of the
body. Or in the same way as a noble child requires a conductor, so again does
the soul stand in need of the body. For, as we speak of childish things, not to
the disparagement of childhood, but only of those acts which are done during
childhood; so also are we now speaking of the body.” (St. John Chrysostom, Homily
5 on Galatians, 3).
[214] St. John of Damascus, Exposition
of the Orthodox Faith, II, 13.
[215] St. Maximus, quoted by “lxe” at http://www.livejournal.com/users/abbatus-mozdok,
November 28, 2003. I have not been able to find the original reference. St.
Maximus also said the desire for pleasure in the fall is the corruption of the
original “potentiality for pleasure, namely the natural desire of the intellect
for God” (Questions to Thalassius, 61; P.G. 90:628A; quoted in Nellas, op.
cit., p. 91, footnote).
[216] St. Photius, Homily on the
Birth of the Virgin, 9; in Cyril Mango, The Homilies of Photius,
Patriarch of Constantinople, Harvard University Press, 1958. Cf. St.
Gregory Palamas: “If the conception of God had been from seed, He would not
have been a new man, nor the Author of new life which will never grow old. If He
were from the old stock and inherited its sin, He would not have been able to
bear within Himself the fullness of the incorruptible Godhead or to make His
Flesh an inexhaustible Source of sanctification, able to wash away even the
defilement of our First Parents by its abundant power, and sufficient to
sanctify all who came after them.” (Homily 14, on the Annunciation, 5).
[217] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
5, On the Meeting of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
[218] Bishop Ignatius, “My Lamentation”, The Orthodox
Word, ¹ 222, January-February, 2002, p. 11.
[219] St.
Cyril of Alexandria, On
Romans, 5.18, P.G. 74:
788-789. Again, St. John Chrysostom writes: “’Through the wrong-doing of one
man many became sinners’. There is nothing improbable about the proposition
that when Adam sinned and became mortal, those who were descended from him
should become mortal also. But how should it follow that from his disobedience
anyone else should become a sinner? For unless a man becomes a sinner on his
own responsibility, he will not be found to merit punishment. Then what
does ‘sinner’ mean here? I think it means liable to punishment, that is,
condemned to death” (Homily 10 on Romans). But this does not solve the
problem, for why should I be condemned to death for something I did not do?
[220] St. Anastasius of Sinai, Questions
and Answers on Various Chapters, 143; P.G. 89:796.
[221] St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Fragment
52b. VEPES, vol. V, p. 186.
[222] Archbishop Theophan, Sviatootecheskoe
Uchenie o Pervorodnom Grekhe (The Patristic
Teaching on Original Sin) (in Russian).
[223] St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions
to Thalassius, 42.
[224] Romanides writes: “Sin is not
imply and exclusively an action taken in knowledge by a responsible person”,
but also the condition into which we are born. “Precisely for this reason, as
many as were born into that condition ‘were made sinners’ (Romans
5.19)”. (op cit., p. 165).
[225] St.
Cyril of Alexandria, On Romans, P.G. 74: 785; quoted in Romanides, op.
cit., p. 162, footnote. St.
Gregory Palamas also uses the root metaphor: “Before Christ we all shared the
same ancestral curse and condemnation poured out on all of us from our single
Forefather, as if it had sprung from the root of the human race and was the
common lot of our nature. Each person’s individual action attracted either
reproof or praise from God, but no one could do anything about the shared curse
and condemnation, or the evil inheritance that had been passed down to him and
through him would pass to his descendants.” (Homily 5: On the Meeting of our
Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ, in Christopher Veniamin, The
Homilies of Saint Gregory Palamas, South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary
Press, 2002, vol. I, p. 52).
[226]
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Extended Christian Catechism of the
Orthodox Catholic Eastern Church, 1823.
[227]
Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), The Dogma of Redemption, Montreal:
Monastery Press, 1972, pp. 59-60.
[228] And there is a third possible
translation: “Death came upon all men, because of which [death] all have
sinned”. This is argued by Romanides (op. cit., p. 167), citing St.
Irenaeus’ use of the phrase “because of death” (epi tw qanatw) in: “the passions that have
naturally befallen us because of death; I refer to grief and cowardice and
perplexity, distress and all the rest by which our nature afflicted with death
and corruptibility is known” (Fragment 52b).
[229] Bishop Theophan, op. cit.,
p. 345.
[230] St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical
Lectures 15.31.
[231] Ambrosiaster, Commentary
on Paul’s Epistles, CSEL 81:165, 167, 169.
[232] St. Augustine, On Romans,
27-28.
[233] Fr. Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox
Dogmatic Theology, Platina: St. Herman Brotherhood, 1983, pp. 165-166.
[234] St. Basil, in Demetrios Tzami, I
Protologia tou M. Vasileiou, Thessaloniki, 1970, p. 135 (in Greek).
[235] St. Cyril of Alexandria, On
Romans 5.15, P.G. 74:785C.
[236] St. Maximus the Greek, Canon
to the Holy Spirit, Ode 6, irmos.
[237] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Beatitudes, 6, PG. 44, 1273.
[238] St. Gennadius Scholarius, in K.
Staab (ed.) Pauline Commentary from the Greek Church: Collected and Edited
Catena, Munster in Westfalen, 1933, 15:362.
[239] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
10 on Romans. Again, And St. Gregory Palamas writes: “Just as through one
man, Adam, liability to death passed down by heredity to those born afterwards,
so the grace of eternal and heavenly life passed down from the one divine and
human Word to all those born again of Him” (Homily 16, 17; Veniamin, op.
cit., p. 190).
[240] St. Ephraim, quoted by
Archbishop Theophan, op. cit.
[241] St. Ambrose of Milan, On the
death of his brother Satyrus.
[242] Sviatitel’ Seraphim Sobolev
(The Holy Hierarch Seraphim Sobolev), Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska
Brotherhood Press, 1992, p. 72 (in Russian).
[243] St. John Chrysostom, On Psalm
50, M.P.G. 55:583. Cf. Blessed Theodoretus:
“Sin, having prevailed over our primogenitors, made itself a kind of
road and pathway in our nature. Blessed Paul speaks of this: ‘By one man sin
entered into the world, and death by sin… for all have sinned’ (Romans
5.12)…. This teaches us that the power of sin is not a natural power (for were
it actually that way, then we would be free from punishment) and that our
nature, troubled by the passions, is inclined to fall. Therefore by
understanding in precisely that way these words – ‘I was conceived in
iniquities, and in sins did my mother bear me’ – it is not marriage that the
Prophet indicts, as some have suggested, and it is not marital relations that
are called iniquitous, as others have foolishly suggested. On the contrary, he
has in mind that iniquity, which the primogenitors of humanity made bold to
commit, and he says that it became the spring of these streams. That is, if
they would not have sinned, then they would not have been subjected to the
punishment of death for their sin: along with not being subject to decay,
without a doubt, would be combined passionlessness; and when passionlessness
would be present, sin would have no place. But inasmuch as our primogenitors
sinned, they became subject to decay; having become subject to decay, they gave
birth to children of the same ilk; and so now desires and fear, pleasures and
sorrows, anger and envy attend them.” (Commentary on Psalm 50;
translated in Orthodox Life, vol. 53, no. 1, January-February, 2003, pp.
44-45).
[244] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
14, on the Annunciation, 5.
[245] St. Augustine, Against Julian,
i. 2, §32. Romanides, op. cit., who condemns Augustine, not only for
false views on original sin, but for introducing a whole false system of
theological thought based on pagan Greek philosophy into the Christian Church.
However, Romanides cites Augustine very rarely, and leans rather on western
estimates of the influence of Augustine on Catholic and Protestant thought.
Moreover, his judgement goes against the consensus of the Holy Fathers, who
embraced the man as Orthodox (and called him “holy” at the Fifth Ecumenical
Council), while distancing themselves from the exaggerations in his thought.
[246] St. Gregory Palamas, Topics
of Natural and Theological Science, 38; The Philokalia, vol. IV, p.
362. Cf. Georgios Mantzaridis, The Deification of Man, Crestwood, N.Y.:
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984, p. 19.
[247] St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions
to Thalassius, 49.
[248] Wilkens (op. cit., p.
418) writes: “In his Commentary on the Gospel of John Origen explained
how the term ‘knowledge’ is used in the Bible. He is commenting on John
8.19: ‘You know neither Me nor My Father. If you knew Me, you would know My
Father also’. ‘One should take note,’ he says, ‘that the Scripture says that
those who are united to something or participate in something are said to know
that to which they are united or in which they participate. Before such union
and fellowship, even if they understand the reasons given for something, they
do not know it.’ As illustrations, he mentions the union between Adam and Eve,
which the Bible describes as ‘Adam knew his wife Eve’, and I Corinthians
6.16-17, the reference to union with a prostitute. This shows, he says, that
knowing means being joined to or united to…
“For Maximus [the Confessor] knowledge of
God does not simply mean knowing something but knowledge that fashions the
knower by that which is known. Such knowledge is not possible from a distance;
it entails a relation. Hence, it cannot be attained without the affections,
that is love that binds the knower to the object of love….”
[249] St. Dionysius the Areopagite, On
the Divine Names, IV.
[250] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
3, 15.
[251] “Give me not up to a shameless
soul” (Prayer of St. Antioch).
[252] Triodion, Holy Monday,
Mattins, Aposticha, Glory… Both now…
[253] St. Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns
of Divine Love, 16; Denville, N.J.: Dimension books, p. 56. Some of the
Desert Fathers were naked and were not ashamed – St. Onuphrius, for example.
And there is a story of St. Serapion of Egypt, who challenged a virgin of Rome
to follow him in walking naked through the streets. When she declined, he said
that this showed that she had not, as she claimed, completely conquered the
passions.
[254] Scruton, op.
cit., pp. 141-142, 143. It is in this context that we are to understand St. Paul’s
words: “those parts of the body which we think less honourable we invest with
the greater honour, and our unpresentable parts we invest with the greater
modesty, which are more presentable parts do not require” (I Corinthians
12.23-24).
[255] Lebedev, “’Seksual’noe obrazovanie’
so shkol’noj skam’i?” (“Sexual Education from the School Bench?”), Russkij
Pastyr’ (Russian Pastor), ¹
24, I-1996, p. 86 (in Russian).
[256] Alexander, “The Targumim and
Early Exegesis of ‘Sons of God’ in Genesis 6”, Journal of Jewish Studies,
1972, ¹ 23, pp.
60-71.
[257] Josephus, Antiquities of the
Jews, I, 3.
[258] St. Justin, First Apology
V, 2.
[259] St. Justin, Second Apology, 5.
[260] St. Methodius, Discourse on
the Resurrection, 7.
[261] St. Irenaeus, The
Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, 18.
[262] St. Chrysostom, On Genesis
5:136-7.
[263] St. Augustine, The City of
God, XV, 23.
[264] St. Ephraim, Commentary on
Genesis, 6.3. Quoted in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early
Man, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, p. 244.
[265] According to Aquila’s translation,
this verse reads: “Then they began to be called by the name of the Lord” – that
is, “sons of God”. Cf. Metropolitan Philaret, Zapiski, op. cit.,
p. 100.
[266] Metropolitan Philaret, Zapiski,
op. cit., p. 108.
[267] Bishop Ignaty, “On Orthodoxy”.
[268] St. Paulinus, Letter 23: To
Severus.
[269] Lebedev,
“‘Seksual’noe obrazovanie’”, op. cit., pp. 86-87, 90-91.
[270] Hans
Balthasar, Liturgie Cosmique: Maxime le Confesseur (Cosmic Liturgy :
Maximus the Confessor), Paris : Aubier, 1946, pp. 142-143 (in French).
Cf. St. Maximus: “The more human nature sought to preserve itself through
sexual procreation, the more tightly it bound itself to the law of sin,
reactivating the transgression connected with the liability to passions” (Questions
to Thalassius 21).
[271] St. Maximus, in Balthasar, op.
cit, pp. 143-143.
[272] St. Maximus, Questions to
Thalassius, P.G. 90: 256A.
[273] Scruton, op.
cit., p. 303.
[274] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 4
on Romans.
[275] Lebedev, “’Seksual’noe
obrazovanie’” (“Sexual Education”), op. cit., pp. 85-86.
[276] Rose, in Christensen, op.
cit., p. 151.
[277]
Soloviev, op. cit., pp. 283-285.
[278] Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies,
III. Translated by J.E.L. Oulton and H. Chadwick in The Library of
Christian Classics, II, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1954.
[279] St. John Chrysostom, First
Discourse on Marriage.
[280] Meyendorff, op. cit., pp.
47-48.
[281] St. Basil the Great, Canon 2.
[282] Archimandrite Seraphim
Papacostas, Repentance, Athens: Zoe, 1970, p. 36, footnote.
[283] Nedelsky, op. cit., p.
20. Cf. M.-H. Congourdeau, op. cit., pp. 693-709 ; Spyros N.
Troianos, « L'embryon dans le droit canon byzantin » (« The
Embryo in Byzantine Canon Law »), Ethique (Ethics), ¹ 4, Spring,
1992, pp. 44-57 (in French).
[284] St. Augustine, Homily 1 on I
John, 2.
[285] Menaion, November 21,
Feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, Matins, Canon, Ode
1, verse.
[286] St. Cuchumneus, in Thomas
Livius, The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries, London:
Burns & Oates, 1893, p. 460.
[287] St. Athanasius the Great, Epistle
to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms, 1; in Livius, op.
cit., p. 79.
[288] St. Zeno, Tractatus, 9; P.L.
11:416; in Livius, op. cit., p. 127. Cf. St. Peter Chrysologus,
commenting on the fact that “Mary was espoused to Joseph” (Matthew
1.18): “Why is it that the secret of heavenly innocence is destined for a
spouse and not for a free woman?… No points, no letters, no syllables, not a
single word, no names, no persons in the Gospel are without divine meaning. A
spouse is wanted, that, even then, Christ’s spouse, the Church, may be
signified according to the words of the Prophet Hosea: ‘I will espouse thee to
Me in justice and judgement and mercy and commiserations; and I will espouse
thee to Me in faith’ (Hosea 2.19, 20). Hence John says, ‘He that has the
Bride is the Bridegroom’ (John 2.29). And the blessed Paul: ‘I have
espoused thee to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to
Christ’ (II Corinthians 11.2). Verily a spouse, who with virginal
childbirth brings forth again the infancy of Christ… “God send to the Virgin a
winged carrier, who in conveying grace, gives the marriage portion and bears
the dowry; that is, he brings faith, and delivers the gifts of virtue, being
about to arrange the pledging of virginal consent. With haste the angelic agent
flies to the bride, to ward off from the spouse of God, and to suspend, any
affection to human espousals. Not indeed to take away the Virgin from Joseph,
but to restore her to Christ, to Whom she was pledged in the womb, when first
she was created. Thus Christ receives His own spouse, He carries not off
another’s; nor does He make separation, when He joins to Himself His own entire
creature in one body.” (Sermon 146; P.L. 52, p. 592; in Livius, op.
cit., p. 137).
[289] St. Proclus, Homily 6, 17; in
Livius, op. cit., p. 98. Cf. Methodius of Olympus: “One may interpret
this in another way: the Spouse means the Lord’s spotless flesh [which He took
from the Virgin], for the sake of which He left the Father, came down hither
and cleaved to it, and becoming man dwelt therein.” (Symposium, VII, 7;
in Livius, op. cit., p. 100). Vladimir Lossky writes: “In the degree
that she represents the Church, she has no other husband than her Son. In this
conception without seed, the seed is the Word Himself” (“Original Sin”, op.
cit., p. 93).
[290] St. Symeon the New Theologian, First
Ethical Discourse, 9; in On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourse, volume
I, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995, pp. 53-54.
[291] Menaion, March 25, Feast
of the Annunciation of the Theotokos, Mattins, Canon, Ode 8, verse.
[292] St. Demetrius of Rostov, Menaion
for March 25; translated in Orthodox Life, March-April, 1969.
[293] St.
Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 42; in Blowers and Wilken, op. cit.,
p. 81.
[294] For the whole passage, see St. Maximus the Confessor,
Ambigua, P.G. 91:1304D-1312B (translated
in Nellas, op. cit., pp. 211-216), where the saint describes the
overcoming of the divisions, not only between the sexes, but between the
Creator and creation, Paradise and earth, the intelligible and the sensible,
men and angels. Cf. Lossky’s paraphrase of this passage in Orthodox Theology,
op. cit., pp. 74-75: St. Maximus "has described with an
incomparable power and fullness the mission devolving upon man. To the
successive divisions that constitute creation there must correspond unions or
syntheses accomplished by man, thanks to the 'synergy' of freedom and grace.
"The fundamental division in which the very reality of the created
being is rooted is that of God and the assemblage of creatures, of the created
and the uncreated. Created nature accordingly divides itself into celestial and
terrestrial, into intelligible and sensible. In the sensible universe, heaven
is separated from earth. On the latter's surface, Paradise is set apart.
Finally, the inhabitant of Paradise, man, is himself divided into two sexes,
male and female.
"Adam must overcome these divisions by a conscious action to
reunite in himself the whole of the created cosmos and to become deified with
it. He must first overcome the sexual separation by a chaste life, by a union
more total than the external union of the sexes, by an 'integrity' which would
be integration. At a second stage, he must reunite Paradise to the rest of the
terrestrial cosmos, by a love of God which would at once detach him from
everything and allow him to embrace everything; always carrying Paradise in
himself, he would have transformed the whole earth into Paradise. In the third
place, his spirit, and his body itself, would triumph over space by unifying
all of the sensible world, the earth and its firmament. At the next stage, he
must penetrate into the celestial cosmos, live like the angels, assimilate
their intelligence and reunite in himself the intelligible world to the
sensible world. Finally, the cosmic Adam, by giving himself without return to
God, would give Him back all His creation, and would receive from Him, by the
mutuality of love, that is to say by grace, all that God possesses by virtue of
His nature. Thus in the overcoming of the primordial separation of the created
and uncreated, there would be accomplished man's deification, and by him, of
the whole universe.
"The Fall has rendered man inferior
to his vocation. But the divine plan has not changed. The mission of the first
Adam accordingly must be fulfilled by the celestial Adam, namely Christ: not
that He substitutes Himself for man, for the infinite love of God would not
replace the bond of human freedom, but in order to return to man the
possibility of accomplishing this task, to reopen for him the path to
deification, this supreme synthesis, through man, of God and the created
cosmos, wherein rests the meaning of all of Christian anthropology. Thus,
because of sin, in order that man might become God, it was necessary that God
should become man, and that the second Adam should inaugurate the 'new
creation' in surmounting all the divisions of the old one. Indeed by His
virginal birth, Christ overcomes the division of the sexes and, for the
redemption of 'eros', opens two paths, united only in the person of Mary, at
once virgin and mother: the path of Christian marriage and the path of
monasticism. On the cross Christ reunited the whole of the terrestrial cosmos
to Paradise: for when He allowed death to enter Him to consume it by contact
with His Divinity, the darkest place on earth becomes radiant; there is no
longer any accursed place. After the Resurrection, the very body of Christ
mocks spatial limitations, and in an integration of all that is sensible,
unifies earth and heaven. By the Ascension, Christ reunites the celestial and
terrestrial worlds, the angelic choirs to the human race. Finally, He Who sits
at the right hand of the Father introduces humanity above the angelic orders
and into the Trinity Itself..."
[295] Troitsky, op.
cit., p. 56.
[296] St. John Chrysostom, P.G.
62:387,390.
[297] St. Andrew of Crete, Canon, Ode
9, troparion, Triodion, Thursday of Fourth Week..
[298] Pentecostarion, Mattins
of Pascha, Canon, Canticle 8, troparion.
[299] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
12 on Colossians, 7.
[300] Blessed Theophylact, Explanation
of the Gospel of John 2.5.
[301] St. Irenaeus, Against
Heresies, III, 7.
[302] St. Gaudentius, Sermon 9;
P.L. 20, p. 900; in Livius, op. cit., p. 173. And in another
place the same saint says that Christ, “after the hour of His Passion, so far
consummated the reality of the mystery which had gone before that the water of
the Incarnation became the wine of the Divinity.” (Sermon 19; P.L.
20, p. 990; Livius, op. cit., p. 174).
[303] Blessed Theophylact, Explanation
of the Gospel of John, 2.6. Sir Edwyn Hoskyns calculates that “the six
waterpots were capable of holding 18 to 27 gallons each, that is, from 108 to
162 gallons in all. The Evangelist draws attention to the immense quantity of
water not so much because he is thinking of the amount of purification required
during the week of wedding ceremonies, but because he has in mind the fullness
which all who believe in Jesus received from Him (1.16)” (The Gospel of
John, London: Faber & Faber, 1947, p. 189).
[304] St. Gaudentius, Sermon 8;
P.L. 20. Translated by M.F. Toal, Patristic Homilies on the Gospels,
Cork: The Mercier Press, 1955, volume 1, p. 313.
[305] Philo, Leg. Alleg. III,
82; in Hoskyns, op. cit., p. 192.
[306] St. Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle
62, 4. Later in the same letter St. Cyprian writes: “Because among the Jews
there was a want of spiritual grace, wine also was wanting. For the vineyard of
the Lord of hosts was the house of Israel; but Christ, when teaching and
showing that the people of the Gentiles should succeed them, and that by the
merit of faith we should subsequently attain to the place which the Jews has
lost, of water made wine; that is, He showed that at the marriage of Christ and
the Church, as the Jews failed, the people of the nations should flow together
and assemble: for the divine Scripture in the Apocalypse declares that the
waters signify the people, saying: ‘The waters which thou sawest, upon which the
whore sitteth, are peoples and multitudes, and nations of the Gentiles, and
tongues’ (Revelation 17.15), which we evidently see to be contained also
in the cup” (12).
Then, referring to the practice of adding
warm water (zeon) to the eucharistic chalice, he continues: “In the
water we understand the people, but in the wine is showed the Blood of Christ.
But when the water is mingled in the cup with wine, the people is made one in
Christ” (13).
[307] St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical
Discourses, XXII, 2.
[308] St. Methodius, The Symposium,
Logos 3. 8.
[309] “Death”, like “sleep” and
“ecstasy” is, of course, another word with sexual connotations.
[310] St. John Chrysostom, Third
Discourse on Marriage, in Roth & Anderson, op. cit., pp. 93-94.
Cf. St. Bede (On Genesis): "The woman was made out of the side of
Adam to show how strong that union must have been. But that it was done in his
sleep, and flesh filled up the place whence the bone had been taken, was for a
higher mystery. For it signified that the sacraments of salvation would come
out of the side of Christ as He slept in death on the cross - that is, the
blood and water from which the Church was created as His Bride... It was to
typify this same mystery that Scripture says, not 'made' or 'formed' or
'created', as in all the previous works, but 'the Lord God built the rib which He had taken from Adam into a woman', not as if
it were a human body, but rather a house, which house we are if we keep our
faithfulness and glory of hope right up to a strong end." (On Genesis,
2.20-22) And Blessed Theophylact: “And so, when you approach the chalice of the
communion of the Blood of Christ, so dispose yourself as if you were drinking
from the rib itself. Notice, please, how it is by means of the pierced rib that
the wound of the rib is healed, that is, of Eve. There Adam, having fallen
asleep, was deprived of a rib; and here the Lord, having fallen asleep, gives
His rib to the soldier. The spear of the soldier is an image of the sword
whirling and driving us out of Paradise (Genesis 3.24). And just as
everything that whirls around is not stopped in its movement until it hits on
something, so the Lord shows us that He will stop this sword, and presents His
rib to the sword of the soldier so that it should be clear to us that just as
the sword of the soldier, on striking the rib, was stopped, so the flaming
sword will be stopped and will no longer terrify us by his whirling or prevent
us from entering Paradise.” (Explanation of the Gospel of John, Kiev:
Kiev Caves Lavra, 2002, p. 312 (in Russian)).
[311] “The Lord of the wedding-feast
hung on the Cross in nakedness, and whosoever came to be a guest, He let fall
His blood upon him” (Mar Jacob, Homily on Guria and Shamona)
[312]
Triodion, Holy and Great Friday, Mattins, Canon, ikos.
[313] Pentecostarion, First
Sunday of Pascha, Mattins, Paschal Stichera.
[314] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
18, on the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, 4.
[315] St. Gregory Palamas: “The
Ever-Virgin was the first to come to the tomb and receive the good tidings of
the Resurrection, but afterwards many women came together and they too saw the
stone rolled away and heard the angels” (Homily 18, on the Sunday of the
Myrrhbearers, 13).
[316] St. Ephraim, Commentary on
the Diatessaron, XXI, 26.
[317] St. Cyril of Alexandria, On
John 10; P.G. 74:341D; quoted in Ezra Gebremedhin, Life-Giving Blessing:
An Inquiry into the Eucharistic Doctrine of Cyril of Alexandria, Uppsala,
1968, p. 68. Cf. St. Cyril of Jerusalem: “Holy are the gifts presented, since
they have been visited by the Holy Spirit; holy things therefore correspond to
holy persons” (Catechetical Lectures 5.19).
[318] St. Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns
of Divine Love, 27; op. cit., p. 143.
[319] St. Macarius the Great, Homily
38, 5.
[320] Blessed Theophylact, Explanation
of the Gospel according to Luke, 12.35.
[321] St. Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns
of Divine Love, 15; op. cit., p. 55. Cf. St. Tikhon of Zadonsk:
“That which takes place between a bridegroom and bride takes place between
Christ and the Christian soul. The bride is betrothed to the bridegroom – in
the same way the human soul is betrothed by faith to Christ the Son of God and
is washed in the bath of Baptism. The bride leaves her house and parents and
cleaves to her only bridegroom – in the same way the Christian soul, having
been betrothed to Christ the Son of God, must leave the world and worldly lusts
and cleave to her only Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, to which the Holy
Spirit through the prophet exhorts her: ‘Hearken, O daughter, and see, and
incline thine ear, and forget thine own people and thy father’s house. And the
King shall greatly desire thy beauty’ (Psalm 44. 9-10). The bride puts
on a colourful dress and is adorned, so as to please her bridegroom – in the
same way the Christian soul must put on a fitting garment and adorn herself
within, so as to please her Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. The garment of the soul
is indicated by the Holy Spirit through the apostle: ‘Put on, therefore, as the
elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of
mind, meekness, long-suffering’ (Colossians 3.12). A good bride remains
faithful to her bridegroom – in the same way the Christian soul must be
faithful to Jesus Christ until death, concerning which Christ Himself says to
her: ‘Be faithful unto death, and I will give you a crown of life’ (Revelation
2.10). A good bride loves nobody as much, or more than, her bridegroom – in the
same way the Christian soul must love nobody as much, or more than, her
Bridegroom, Jesus Christ.” (Spiritual Treasure gathered from the world, 22,
Moscow, 2003, pp. 102-103).
[322] St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ, quoted in Orthodoxy
America, vol. XIX, ¹
6 (170), June, 2004, p. 1. “Why,” asks St. Gregory Palamas, “does the original
not say that the King of Heaven made a marriage for His son, but use the words
‘ nuptials’ in the plural? Because whenever Christ, the Bridegroom of pure
souls, is mystically united with each soul, He gives the Father to rejoice over
this as at a wedding” (Homily 41, 9).
[323]
Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, The Prologue of Ochrid, vol. II, p. 238,
May 29.
[324] St. John Chrysostom, First
Baptismal Instruction, 3-13. New York: Paulist Press, 1963.
[325] St. John Chrysostom, Encomium
to Maximus, 3; P.G. 51:230; in Roth & Anderson, op.
cit., p. 95.
[326] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
20 on Ephesians; in Roth & Anderson, op. cit., p. 52.
[327] Bishop Theophan, op., cit.,
pp. 469-470.
[328] It should be noted, however,
that the wife’s obedience to her husband does not preclude her exhorting him on
occasion. Thus St. Tikhon of Zadonsk writes: “The husband and wife must lay
virtue, and not passion, as the foundation of their love, that is, when the
husband sees any fault in his wife, he must nudge her meekly, and the wife must
submit to her husband in this. Likewise when a wife sees some fault in her
husband, she must exhort him, and he is obliged to hear her “ (Journey to
Heaven, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, p. 117).
Again, Fr. Alexander Elchaninov writes:
“The philosophy of family quarrels: they often result from the wife’s
reproaches, borne reluctantly by the husband even though they may be deserved
(pride). It is necessary to discover the original cause of these reproaches.
They often come from the wife’s desire to see her husband better than he is in
reality, from her asking too much, that is to say from a kind of idealization.
On these occasions, the wife becomes her husband’s conscience and he should
accept her rebukes as such. A man tends, especially in marriage, to let things
slip, to be content with empirical facts. The wife tears him away from this and
expects something more from her husband. In this sense, family discords,
strange as it may seem, are proof that the marriage has been fulfilled (not
only planned): and in the new human being, in which two persons have merged,
the wife plays the role of conscience.” (The Diary of a Russian Priest,
London: Faber & Faber, 1967; quoted in Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 90).
[329] St. Gregory the Theologian, Sermon
on Matthew 19.1-13, P.G. 36:292.
[330] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
20 on Ephesians, translated in Roth & Anderson, op. cit., pp.
55-57. And in another place he says: “This is a true relationship, this is the
duty of a husband, while not taking too much notice of his wife’s words but
making allowance for natural frailty, to make it his one concern to keep her
free from anguish and tighten the bonds of peace and harmony. Let husbands take
heed and imitate the just man’s restraint in according their wives such great
respect and regard and making allowances for them as the frailer vessel so that
the bonds of harmony may be tightened. This, you see, is real wealth, this is
the greatest prosperity, when a husband is not at odds with his wife but rather
they are joined together like one body – ‘the two will come to be one flesh’,
Scripture says. Such couples, be they even in poverty, be they in low estate,
would be more blessed than all the rest, enjoying true delight and living in
unbroken tranquillity” (Homily 38 on Genesis, 15).
[331] Soloviev, op. cit., pp.
287-288.
[332] St. John
Chrysostom, Homily 38 on Matthew, 6; P.G. 57: 428; quoted in
Nellas, op. cit., p. 80.
[333] Nellas, op.
cit., p. 80.
[334]
St. Symeon the New Theologian writes: “since our generation in corruption came
through the woman, Eve, so our spiritual generation and re-fashioning comes to
be through the man, the second Adam, Who is God. Now, notice here that my words
are exact: the seed of a man, mortal and corruptible, begets and gives birth
through a woman to sons who are mortal and corruptible; the immortal and
incorruptible Word of the immortal and incorruptible God, however, begets and
gives birth to immortal and incorruptible children, after having first been
born of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit.
“According to this reasoning, therefore, the mother of God is the lady
and Queen and mistress and mother of all the saints. The saints are all both
her servants, since she is the mother of God, and her sons, because they
partake of the all-pure flesh of her Son – here is a word worthy of belief,
since the flesh of the Lord is the flesh of the Theotokos – and by communing in
this same deified flesh of the Lord, we both confess and believe that we
partake of life everlasting…
“So this is the mystery of the marriages which the Father arranged for
His only-begotten Son” – the marriage first of all with the Virgin at the
Incarnation, and then with every member of the Church in the Eucharist. (First Ethical Discourse, 10; op.
cit., pp. 59-60).
[335] St. John
Chrysostom, Baptismal
Instructions,
III, 18,19.
[336] Manzaridis, op.
cit., pp. 52-53.
[337] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life
in Christ, 612 C, D.
[338] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life
in Christ, 585A.
[339] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life
in Christ, 584D.
[340] Nicolas Cabasilas, A
Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, 36, London: S.P.C.K., 1966, p. 89.
[341] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Against
the Heresies and on the Divine Temple, P.G. 155:512D.
[342]
Troitsky, “Brak i
Tserkov’” (“Marriage and the Church”), Russkoe Vozrozhdenie (Russian
Regeneration), 1986 (III), ¹
35, pp. 7-8 (in Russian).
[343]
St. Cyril of Alexandria, On John 17.21; quoted in Archbishop Ilarion
Troitsky, Christianity or the Church? Holy Trinity Monastery,
Jordanville, 1971, p. 9. Italics
mine (V.M.).
[344] St. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary
on the Song of Songs, in Opera, ed. H. Langerbeck, volume
6, p. 122.
[345] Benevich
and Shufrin, “Besedy o pravoslavnom dogmaticheskom bogoslovii, beseda 3: O
liubvi i obozhenii” (“Conversations on Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, conversation
3: On Love and Deification”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (Orthodox Way), 2002,
pp. 131-143 (in Russian).
[346]
Metropolitan Philaret’s Extensive Christian Catechism defines marriage
thus: “Marriage is the mystery in which conjugal union is blessed, as the image
of the spiritual union of Christ with the Church, and in which is asked the
grace of a pure unity of soul, blessed child-bearing and the Christian
upbringing of children.” This is a somewhat paradoxical definition, because
while every element in it is essential, it leaves out the definitive element
according to the Gospel: the union in one flesh.
[347] Troitsky, op.
cit., p. 18. Balsamon’s
text reads: “ena scedon omoyucon en dusi upostasesi”.
[348] St. Basil the Great, Canon
26. Cf. Canons 6, 60: “the fornications of nuns must not be counted
as marriages, and in any case the unions must be broken”; for “she who has made
a profession of virginity and then has gone back on her promise, must be under
the same sentence as prescribed for adultery.”
[349] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
23 on Romans, 1.
[350] Shukin, “On Marriages with the
Heterodox”, Orthodox Life, vol. 27, ¹ 2, March-April, 1977, p. 29.
[351] According to Bailey, the Fathers
accepted “even pagan unions as in principle indissoluble, though of a lower and
less stable character than those of the faithful” (op. cit., p. 100).
And Troitsky writes: “Did the Christians themselves see a sacrament in the
marriage of Jews and pagans? We must give a positive answer to this question,
since this is asserted by direct testimonies of ancient literature and the de
facto attitude of the Christian Church in antiquity to the Jewish and pagan
marriages. Clement of Alexandria sees no difference between Old Testament and
New Testament marriages. ‘Since the Old Testament law is holy, marriage also is
holy,’ he writes. And Old Testament marriage was a sacrament as being a type of
Christ and the Church, of which the Apostle speaks [Miscellanies, III,
12; P.G. 8:1195]. ‘Marriage is an honourable affair both with us and
with the pagans,’ writes Chrysostom [Homily on I Corinthians 12; P.G.
61:103], thereby relating the words of the apostle: ‘marriage is honour in all…
also to pagan marriages. And St. Zeno of Verona tries to show that pagans have
all the virtues of marriage, since he is perplexed about what he could teach
them. ‘In truth,’ he adds ironically, ‘we conquer only in the fact that Christian
women by virtue of their holiness marry more often, and even with pagans, which
I cannot mention without great sorrow and sobs’ [Tractatus 4; P.G.
11:306]” (op. cit., p. 64).
Alexis Khomiakov writes: “The Church
considers marriage as a sacrament,l and yet admits married heathens into her
community without re-marrying them. The conversion itself gives the sacramental
quality to the preceding union without any repetition of the rite. This you
must admit, unless you admit an impossibility, viz., that the sacrament of
marriage was by itself complete in the lawful union of a heathen pair” (Third
Letter to William Palmer, Living Orthodoxy, ¹ 138,
November-December, 2003, p. 24).
[352] Also, St. Basil the Great in his
fourth canon, which defines a third marriage as “no longer to be called a
marriage, but polygamy, or rather mitigated fornication”, writes: “Wherefore
the Lord told the Samaritan woman who had had five husbands in succession, ‘and
he whom thou now has is not thy husband’, as being no longer themselves worthy
of being called husband or wife”.
[353] St. John Chrysostom, On
Monogamy, II, 2.
[354] Troitsky, op.
cit., pp. 174-181.
[355] He quotes the following texts in
his favour: (i) “He brings a gift in order to honour the work” (St. John
Chrysostom, Homily 4 on Isaiah 6.1; P.G. 56:246); (ii) “to
confirm that He Himself established marriage (in Paradise)” (St. Augustine, On
John, 9.2); (iii) “He is present here as one invited to the wedding feast,
which took place already after the celebration of the marriage, and by His
presence He witnesses that marriage concluded in accordance with the laws and
customs of the Hebrew people is a true, God-pleasing marriage.” (Pavlov, 50-aia
glava Kormchej Knigi (The 50th Chapter of the Rudder), Moscow,
1887, p. 58).
[356] St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration
on Holy Baptism, 18.
[357] Tertullian, On Monogamy, 9.
[358] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
20 on Ephesians, 4; P.G. 62:135.
[359] Athenian Syntagma, V,
286-291; quoted in Trotsky, op. cit., p. 49.
[360] Troitsky, op.
cit., pp. 49-50.
[361] St. Ignatius, To Polycarp,
5.
[362] I.
Kogkoulis, Kh. Oikonomos, P. Skaltstis, O Gamos (Marriage),
Thessalonica, 1996, p. 187 (in Greek).
[363] In a somewhat
similar way, an emperor was proclaimed emperor for the first time outside the
walls of the Church, but then received the blessing and anointing of the Church
within them. “It is
not in vain,” writes Pavel Kuzmenko, “that marriage crowning involves the
laying of wreaths similar to royal crowns on the heads of the newly married. It
symbolizes that the family is a small kingdom in the earthly sense and a small
church in the spiritual sense” (Nashi Traditsii: Kreschenie, Venchanie,
Pogrebenie, Posty (Our Traditions: Baptism, Crowning, Burial, Fasting),
Moscow: Bukmen, 1996, p. 106 (in Russian).) During the coronation of the
Russian Tsars, the bystanders were showered with gold and silver, symbolizing
the betrothal of the Tsar with the State. See Fr. Nikita Chakorov (ed.), Tsarskie
Koronatsii na Rusi (Royal Coronations in Rus’), Russian Orthodox Youth
Committee, 1971, p. 22 (in Russian).
[364] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Against
the Heresies and on the Divine Temple, P.G. 155:512D.
[365] Clement of Alexandria, The
Instructor, III, 11; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 188.
[366] Tertullian, To his Wife, II,
9; P.L. 1:1302A; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 189.
[367] Tertullian, On Chastity,
4; P.L. 2:1038-1039; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 189.
[368] References in Troitsky, op.
cit., p. 182.
[369] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Peri
tou timiou nomimou gamou (On Honourable and Lawful Marriage), P.G.155: 512D.
[370] St. Basil the Great, On the
Hexaemeron, P.G. 29:160B; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 190.
[371] St. Gregory the Theologian, Letter
183, P.G. 37:313; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 190.
[372] Synesius, Letter
105, P.G. 66:1485A; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 190.
[373] St.
Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, I, 10, 11; P.L. 44:
419; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 191.
[374] Kogkoulis et
al., op. cit., p. 192.
[375] Bailey, op.
cit., pp. 99-100.
[376] Troitsky, op.
cit., p. 183.
[377] Kuzmenko, op. cit., pp.
113-114.
[378] Bailey, op. cit., pp.
74-75, 80-81.
[379] Meyendorff, Marriage: An
Orthodox Perspective, Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1970, pp.
27-29.
[380] Novella 89 (893). The
text is in Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 98-99. Leo introduced this law
because he himself wanted to marry a second time – but with crowning, which is
forbidden for second marriages by the Church. So he made crowning compulsory by
law for all kinds of marriages.
[381] Kogkoulis et
al., op. cit., p. 48. The authors continue: “The common cup reminds [them]
of the joy of the marriage in Cana and in general constitutes a symbolical act,
so that the newly-weds should know that they are beginning their life with the
prayer of the Church that they should live inseparably and should together
share in all the good things and all the joys and sorrows which they will
meet”.
[382] St. Symeon of
Thessalonica, Against the Heresies and on the Divine Temple, 282, P.G. 155:512-3.
[383] Hieromartyr Tikhon, op. cit.
[384] Troitsky, op. cit., p.
184.
[385] Does this penance indicate that
the second marriage is sinful? No; for the Apostle Paul counselled younger
widows to marry, and he would hardly have counselled them to commit a sin.
Also, St. Xenia of St. Petersburg (January 24) once counselled a just-widowed
man to marry again. And even some of the saints, such as Theodore of Yaroslavl
(September 19), appear to have entered into blessed second marriages. However,
the text of the service does point to a certain lack of temperance in the
spouses that makes this second marriage necessary for them; and for
intemperance penitence is, of course, fitting.
[386] For second marriages a penance
of one or two years without communion was applied (St. Basil the Great, Canon
4; St. Nicephorus the Confessor, Canon 2), and for third marriages –
five years without communion (St. Nicephorus, op. cit.; Tome of Union
of Constantinople, 920).
[387] Tome of Union of
Constantinople, 920.
[388] Thus the Local Council of the
Russian Church held in 1917-18 allowed ten other reasons for divorce, including
apostasy, syphilis, madness and impotence. These were all, as Hieromonk
Theodosius writes, “reasons that violated the sanctity of the marriage bond or
that destroyed its moral or religious basis and, thus, effectively prevented
the spouses from achieving the aim of marriage” (“Economy”, Living Orthodoxy,
#121, January-February, 2000, p. 28). The Greek Church has a similar list (see
A.M. Allchin, “The Sacrament of Marriage in Eastern Christianity”, in Marriage,
Divorce and the Church, London: SPCK, 1971).
[389] Tertullian, On Monogamy,
4; P.L. 2:934.
[390] See Bailey, op. cit.,
pp. 88, 89-90, 90-92. Athenagoras,
however, follows Tertullian in his rigorism. After calling a remarried divorcee
an “adulteress”, he writes: “He who rids himself of his first wife, although
she is dead, is an adulterer in a certain disguised manner” (Apology of the
Christians, P.G. 6:968).
[391] St. Basil the Great, On
Virginity; quoted in The Rudder, edited by D. Cummings, Chicago:
Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957, p. 821.
[392] St.
Ambrose, Epistle 63, 63. The same saint considered a man could
not be considered for the priesthood if his wife had been married twice, even
if the first marriage was before her baptism: "And I have thought it well not to pass
by this point, because many contend that having one wife is said of the time
after Baptism; so that the fault whereby any obstacle would ensue would be
washed away in baptism. And indeed all faults and sins are washed away; so that
if anyone have polluted his body with very many whom he has bound to himself by
no law of marriage, all the sins are forgiven him, but if any one have
contracted a second marriage it is not done away; for sin, not law, is loosed
by the laver, and as to baptism there is no sin but law. That then which has to
do with the law is not remitted as though it were sin but is retained. And the
Apostle has established a law, saying: "If any man be without reproach the
husband of one wife." So then he who is without blame the husband of one
wife comes within the rule for undertaking the priestly office; he, however who
has married again has no guilt of pollution, but is disqualified for the
priestly prerogative..." (Quoted by Bishop Tikhon in “Re: [paradosis] Re:
Formication and Adultery”, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com,
December 19, 2003).
[393] Sixth Ecumenical Council, Canon
87.
[394] St. Epiphanius, Against
Heresies, 69; P.G. 41:1024C-1025A; quoted in Meyendorff, op. cit.,
p. 45.
[395] Hieromartyr
Gregory, Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, Moscow, 1991, p. 106 (in
Russian). As Blessed Theophylact says, “since they have become one flesh,
joined together by means of marital relations and physical affection, just as
it is accursed to cut one’s own flesh, so is it accursed to separate husband
and wife” (Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, House
Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press, 1992, p. 162).
[396] St. John Chrysostom says: “When
you see a harlot tempting you, say, ‘My body is not mine, but my wife’s’” (Homily
19 on I Corinthians, P.G. 124:160A (col. 648)).
[397] Bishop Theophan, op. cit.,
p. 150.
[398] Sixth Ecumenical Council, Canon
72. Cf. 14th Canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council; 10th
and 31st Canons of the Council of Laodicea; 58th rule of
the Nomocanon. Although Peter the Great pressured the Russian Church into
allowing marriages with Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Presbyterians (but not
Molokans, Baptists and Stundists), the Church in her ukases of August 18, 1821
and February 28, 1858 reminded the faithful that such unions could not be
allowed until the sectarians accepted Orthodoxy. See Bishop Nathaniel of
Vienna, “On Marriage with the Heterodox”, Orthodox Life, vol. 44, ¹ 3, May-June, 1994, pp. 42-45.
[399] Life of St. John the
Almsgiver, in Elizabeth Dawes and Norman H. Baynes, Three Byzantine
Saints, London: Mowbrays, 1977, p. 251.
[400] St. Ambrose, On Abraham, 84.
[401] Tertullian, To His Wife,
5,6.
[402] Tertullian, To His Wife, 8.
[403]
Bishop Theophan, op. cit., p. 154. St. John Chrysostom writes: “If ‘he
that is joined to an harlot is one body,’ it is quite clear that the woman also
who is joined to an idolater is one body. True: it is one body. However, she
does not become unclean, but the cleanness of the wife overcomes the
uncleanness of the husband; and again, the cleanness of the believing husband
overcomes the uncleanness of the unbelieving wife.
“How then in this case is the uncleanness overcome, and therefore the
intercourse allowed; while in the woman who prostitutes herself, the husband is
not condemned in casting her out? Because here there is hope that the lost
member may be saved through the marriage; but in the other case the marriage
has already been dissolved; and there again both are corrupted; but here the
fault is in one only of the two. I mean something like this: she that has been
guilty of fornication is utterly abominable: if then ‘he that is joined to an
harlot is one body,’ he also becomes abominable by having connection with an
harlot; wherefore all the purity flits away. But in the case before us it is
not so. But how? The idolater is unclean but the woman is not unclean. For if
indeed she were a partner with him in that wherein he is unclean, I mean his impiety,
she herself would also become unclean. But now the idolater is unclean in one
way, and the wife holds communion with him in another wherein he is not
unclean. For marriage and mixture of bodies is that wherein the communion
consists.
“…Again, in that case, after the
fornication the husband is not a husband: but here, although the wife be an
idolatress, the husband's rights are not destroyed. However, he does not simply
recommend cohabitation with the unbeliever, but with the qualification that he
wills it. Wherefore he said, ‘And he himself be content to dwell with her.’
For, tell me, what harm is there when the duties of piety remain unimpaired and
there are good hopes about the unbeliever, that those already joined should so
abide and not bring in occasions of unnecessary warfare? For the question now
is not about those who have never yet come together, but about those who are
already joined. He did not say, If any one wish to take an unbelieving wife,
but, ‘If any one hath an unbelieving wife.’ Which means, If any after marrying
or being married have received the word of godliness, and then the other party
which had continued in unbelief still yearn for them to dwell together, let not
the marriage be broken off. ‘For,’ he says, ‘the unbelieving husband is
sanctified in the wife.’ So great is the superabundance of your purity.” (Homily
19 on I Corinthians).
[404] St. John Chrysostom, First
Discourse on Marriage.
[405] St. Gregory the Theologian, In
Praise of Virginity, 11.263-75, translated in Orthodox Life,
November-December, 1981.
[406] ”The
Life of St. Timothy of Esphigmenou”, Orthodox Life, vol. 26, ¹ 6,
November-December, 1976, pp. 2-3.
[407] Zhitia
russkikh sviatykh (Lives of the Russian Saints), Tutaev, 2000, vol.
I, pp. 694-695 (in Russian).
[408] Cf. St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives
of the Saints, vol. IX (May), pp. 298-300; translated in Orthodox Life,
vol. 32, ¹ 3,
May-June, 1982.
[409] Cf. St. Ammon of Egypt
(Palladius, The Paradise of the Fathers, I, 8); SS. Andronicus and
Athanasia (Menaion, October 9); a Christian in the diocese of St. Basil
the Great (Menaion, January 1); Martyr Conon (Menaion, March 5);
St. Alexis the Man of God (Menaion, March 17); Martyrs Chrysanthus and
Daria (Menaion, March 19); Martyr Cecilia (Menaion, November 22);
the chaste lovers of fourth-century Gaul (St. Gregory of Tours, History of
the Franks, I, 47); the twice-married St. Athanasia the Wonderworker (April
18); SS. Peter and Febronia of Murom (Russian Menaion, June 25); St.
Martha, Mother of St. Symeon the Stylite (Menaion, July 4); St. Juliana
of Lazarevo (Orthodox Life, vol. 47, ¹ 1, January-February, 1997); St.
John of Kronstadt (Orthodox Life, vol. 26, ¹ 5, September-October, 1976); St.
Elizabeth the New Martyr.
[410] Cf. Council of Gangra, canon 1;
Sixth Ecumenical Council, canon 13.
[411] Origen writes: “To think that
marital life leads to destruction is useful, since it elicits a striving for
perfection” (On Jeremiah, 14.4, P.G. 16:508-509; quoted in
Troitsky, op. cit., p. 94, note).
[412] St. Gregory Palamas, Treatise
on the Spiritual Life, 4; Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Company,
1995, pp. 44, 43.
[413] St.
Gregory Palamas, “A New Testament Decalogue”, 6, 7; The Philokalia, volume
IV, pp. 328-329.
[414] Pis’ma Arkhiepiskopa Feofana
Poltavskogo (The Letters of Archbishop Theophan of Poltava), Holy Trinity
Monastery, Jordanville, 1976, pp. 35-37 (in Russian).
[415] Menaion, June 24, The
Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Vespers, Aposticha, Glory...
[416] St. John Climacus, The Ladder
of Divine Ascent, Step 15, 67.
[417] St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration
on Holy Baptism, 18.
[418] Lossky, Orthodox Theology, op.
cit., p. 75.
[419] Cf. Chrestos Yannaras: “Marriage
and virginity in Christ are two parallel ways towards the healing and
restoration of affective desire” (Honest to Orthodoxy, Athens, 1967, p.
76).
[420] See Monk Moses of the Holy
Mountain, Married Saints of the Church, Wildwood, Ca.: St. Xenia Skete,
1991.
[421] Hieromartyr Gregory, Interpretation
of the Gospel of Mark, Moscow, 1991, p. 106 (in Russian). Cf. Fr. Alexander
Elchaninov: “Before marriage man hovers above life, observing it from without;
only in marriage does he plunge into it, entering it through the personality of
another. This delight in real knowledge and real life gives us a feeling of
achieved plenitude and satisfaction which makes us richer and wiser” (in
Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 88).
[422] St. Amphilochius of Iconium; in
Fr. Gregory Diachenko, Uroki i primery khristianskoj zhizni (Lessons and
Examples of Christian Life), St. Petersburg, 1900, p. 608 (in Russian).
[423] Archbishop Ambrose, “Brak:
Tainstvo i Profanatsia” (“Marriage: Sacrament and Profanation”) (in Russian).
[424] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 7
on Hebrews, 4.
[425] St. Macarius, in Archimandrite
(now Bishop) Kallistos Ware, "The Monk and the Married Christian: Some
Comparisons in Early Monastic Sources", Eastern Churches Review,
vol. VI, ¹ 1, Spring,
1974, p. 80. Bishop Kallistos comments: "The Christian in the city, by
virtue of his very involvement in worldly things, can attain a distinctive type of sanctity - of
detachment, humility and inner simplicity - not accessible to the monk in the
desert" (p. 82).
[426] Afanasyev, op. cit., p.
643.
[427] Lossky, Orthodox Theology,
op. cit., p. 77.
[428] St. Maximus, Epistle 2, P.G.
91, 396D.
[429] Cf. St. Gregory the Great:
“Since there are many who relinquish indeed the sins of the flesh, and yet,
when placed in the state of wedlock, do not observe solely the claims of due
intercourse, Lot went indeed out of Sodom, but yet did not at once reach the
mountain heights; because a damnable life is already relinquished, but still
the loftiness of conjugal continence is not thoroughly attained. But there is
midway the city of Zoar, to save the weak fugitive; because when the married
have intercourse with each other even incontinently, they still avoid lapse
into sin, and are still saved through mercy. For they find as it were a little
city, wherein to be protected from the fire; since this married life is not
indeed marvellous for virtue, but yet is secure from punishment” (The
Pastoral Rule, III, 27).
[430] St. John Chrysostom, To a
Young Widow, 7.
[431] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 118.
[432] Lourié, op. cit., p. 171.
[433] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 19, note 32.
[434] Clement
of Alexandria, Miscellanies; in Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 82-83.
[435] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 109.
[436] St. Diadochus, “On Spiritual
Knowledge”, 76; in The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 279.
[437] Blessed Theophylact, Explanation
of the Gospel of John, 14.16.
[438] Lossky,
“Panagia”, In the Image and Likeness of God, London: Mowbrays, 1975, p.
201.
[439] “The
Martyrdom of St. Thomais”, Orthodox Life, vol. 25, ¹ 4, July-August,
1975, pp. 4-7. She is commemorated on April 14.
[440] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 135.
[441] St. John
Chrysostom, Homily 13 on Romans.
[442] St. John of Damascus, Exposition
of the Orthodox Faith, II,
13.
[443] Clement
of Alexandria, Miscellanies; in The One Who Knows God, p. 94.
This is why it is in vain for Lourié
to cite Luke 14.26: “If any man come to Me, and hate not his father and
mother and wife and children and brothers and sister, yea, and his own life
also, he cannot be My disciple”. As Blessed Theophylact and other Fathers make
clear, this “hatred” is in order only when the wife or other family member
hinders the Christian from fulfilling the commandments of God. If they do not,
then not only do family ties not hinder the life in Christ: whole families can
attain the highest crowns as single units, as we see in the lives of SS.
Joachim, Eustathius, Xenophon and Tsar-Martyr Nicholas.
[444] Lourié, op. cit., p. 146.
[445] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
19 on I Corinthians.
[446] St. John Chrysostom, Homilies
on Hebrews, VII, 4.
[447] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 132.
[448] Cf. the same saint’s Homilies
on Genesis, 21.18: “See once more another good man [Noah] with his wife and
family achieving great satisfaction in God’s eyes and opting for the way of
virtue in the sight of everyone, hindered in no way either by marriage or by
family responsibilities.”
[449]
As New Hieromartyr John (Steblin-Kamensky) writes, “the Christian is not a stranger to earthly joys. On the contrary, he
appreciates them to a much higher degree than the unbeliever, because he
believes that they have been given to him not by chance, and the joy of this or
that experience of event in life is united in him with the spiritual experience
of boundless gratitude to the One Who knows all our needs. The Christian is not a stranger to earthly joys, but does not make them the aim of his life; he does not
fight against his neighbour for their sake, and does not seek them. Therefore
he receives them ‘pure’, and they do not darken his spirit.” (in Igumen
Damaskin (Orlovsky), Mucheniki, ispovedniki i podvizhniki blagochestia
Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi XX stoletia (Martyrs, Confessors and Ascetics of
Piety of the Russian Orthodox Church of the 20th Century), Tver:
“Bulat”, 2000, vol. 4, p. 247.
[450] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 117.
[451] Tertullian, An Exhortation to
Chastity, 9.
[452] V. Moss, The Saints of
Anglo-Saxon England, volume III, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1997, p. 7.
A similar story is to be found in the Life
of St. Gerald of Aurillac (+909): “His father was so careful to
conduct himself chastely in his marriage, that he frequently slept alone far
from the marriage bed, as though for a time giving himself to prayer according
to the apostle. He is said to have been warned in sleep on a certain night that
he should know his wife, because he was to beget a son, and they say that it
was announced to him that he should call his name Gerald, and that he would be
a man of great virtue…” (in Thomas F.X. Noble and Thomas Head (eds.), Soldiers
of Christ, London: Sheed & Ward, 1995, p. 298)
[453] However, St. Dionysius of
Alexandria permits even older married people to have sexual relations at their
discretion, when procreation cannot be their aim (Epistle to Bishop
Basilides, canon 3).
[454] Even while St. Augustine does
not approve of marital intercourse that is not for the sake of childbearing, he
specifically rejects the view that this is “fornication under a crown” or any
such thing: “The question is often asked whether this should be called
marriage: when a male and female, neither of whom is married to anyone else,
come together, not for the begetting of children, but by reason of
incontinence, for the sake of sexual intercourse alone, there being between
them this trust, that neither will he do it with any other woman, nor she with
any other man. Perhaps this may, not without reason, be called marriage, if
both parties have resolved [on faithfulness to each other] until the death of
one of them, and if they do not try and avoid the begetting of children,
although they have not come together for that reason.” (On the Good of
Marriage, 5).
[455] Geir Kjetsaa writes that his
letters to his much-beloved second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, maintain a high
temperature of passion: “’It is not simply that I love you – I am still in love
with you, you are the only mistress of my soul, and this after twelve years!’
She has also kept her power of attraction ‘in the most earthly sense’, for when
a woman is thirty-two she is still in her full flower. Anna was doubtless of
the opinion that her husband was apt to overdo things in this respect, and she
was not above complaining a little about it to her female friends. But in his
eyes sexuality was the fundamental condition for the relationship between man
and woman. ‘You think perhaps that this is only one aspect of the matter, the
coarsest one even. But there is nothing coarse about; everything else is
dependent on it.’ There was also no need to worry that their letters were being
read by strangers: ‘Let them envy us!’” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s
Life, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 321-322).
[456]
Furmanov, Russkij Pastyr’ (Russian Pastor), 36, ¹ 1, 2000, p. 34. Italics mine
(V.M.).
[457] Menaion, July 4.
[458] Moore, op. cit., pp.
290-292.
[459] Thus Joachim and Anna, according
to St. Gregory Palamas, “were exceptionally chaste, and that chastity,
conceiving through prayer and asceticism, [became] the mother of virginity”,
the Holy Virgin Mary (Homily 44, 5).
[460] St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua
7, P.G. 91:1077A.
[461] St. Diadochus of Photike, “On
Spiritual Knowledge”, 34; The Philokalia, London: Faber & Faber,
1981, vol. I, p. 263.
[462] St. Maximus the Confessor, Century
III on Charity, 66, 67. St. Gregory of Nyssa appears to contradict St.
Maximus here, writing: “The soul will be joined with the divine through its
purity, adhering to that which is proper to it. If this should happen, there
will no longer be a need for the impulse of desire to lead us toward the light;
if he should come into the light, attainment will replace desire. The
possibility of attainment makes desire useless and vain.” (On the Soul and
the Resurrection, ch. 6; Roth, op. cit., p. 77). Earlier, however,
he writes: “If desire were altogether rooted out…, what is there which would
raise us towards the union with the heavenly? Or if love (agaph) is taken away, in what manner
will we be joined with the divine?” (On the Soul and the Resurrection, ch.
3; Roth, op. cit., p. 59).
[463] St. Ambrose, Exposition of
Saint Luke, VII, 139. In another place the saint proposes a variant to this
schema, adding a fourth faculty, that of perception (to dioratikon), to the other three (On
Abraham, 54, Etna, Ca.: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2000,
p. 78).
[464] St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius, 49.
[465] Attributed to St. Anthony the
Great, On the Character of Men, 143; The Philokalia, vol. I, p.
351.
[466] St. Diadochus of Photike, On
Spiritual Knowledge, 79, 88; The Philokalia, vol. I, pp. 280, 287.
[467] St. Isaiah, On Guarding the
Intellect: Twenty-Seven Texts, 1. St. Ambrose of Milan writes: “Admittedly,
it is natural to be angry, or there is generally cause for anger. Still, it is
our duty as human beings to moderate our anger, and not be carried away by a
brutal fury knowing no restraint. It is our duty not to sow strife, not to
exacerbate family quarrels. ‘A wrathful man diggeth up sin’ (Proverbs
15.18). You cannot ‘be one’ if you are double-minded, if you cannot control
yourself when you are angry, of which David well says: ‘Be angry, and sin not’
(Psalm 4.5). He is not commanding us to be angry, but making allowance
for human nature. The anger which we cannot help feeling we can at least moderate.
So, even if we are angry, our emotions may be stirred in accordance with
nature, but we must not sin, contrary to nature. If a man cannot govern
himself, it is intolerable that he should undertake to govern others.” (Letter 63,
60).
[468] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 135, note 236.
[469] Which is more than a little
ironic, since Lourié considers himself an expert on Palamism, and likes
to label his Orthodox opponents “Barlaamites”.
[470] St. Gregory Palamas, Triads, II,
2, 19.
[471] “Declaration of the Holy
Mountain in Defence of Those who Devoutly Practise a Life of Stillness”, 6; The
Philokalia, vol. IV, p. 423.
[472] D.I. Makarov, Antropologia i
Kosmologia sv. Grigoria Palamy (The Anthropology and Cosmology of St. Gregory
Palamas), St. Petersburg, 2003, pp. 269, 270, 271 (in Russian).
[473] St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions
to Thalassius, I, 48, 49.
[474] St. Basil the Great, Homily
against those who get angry, 6; P.G. 46.61B, 65B-68A, 88D-89A;
quoted in Blowers, op. cit., p. 72.
[475] St. Evagrios the Solitary, On
Discrimination, 16; The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 48.
[476] St. John Cassian, On the
Eight Vices, “On Avarice”; The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 78.
[477] St. Ambrose of Milan, Exposition
of Saint Luke, VII, 141.
[478] St. Hesychius the Priest, On
Watchfulness and Holiness, 126; The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 184. Cf.
[479] St. Diadochus of Photike, On
Spiritual Knowledge, 29, 62; The Philokalia, vol. I, pp. 261, 272.
[480] St. Theodore the Great Ascetic, A
Century of Spiritual Texts, 24; The Philokalia, vol. II, p. 18.
[481] St. Theodore the Great Ascetic, Theoretikon;
The Philokalia, vol. II, p. 38.
[482] St. Gregory the Theologian,
quoted by St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, P.G. 91, 1665D.
[483] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Making of Man, XVIII, 5.
[484] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Soul and Resurrection, chapter 3.
[485] St. Maximus the Confessor, On
the Lord’s Prayer; The Philokalia, vol. II, p. 298.
[486] St. Maximus the Confessor, Second
Century on Charity, 48.
[487] St. Maximus the Confessor, Third
Century on various texts, 54; The Philokalia, vol. II, p. 253.
[488] St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions
to Thalassius, 49.
[489] St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua
42.
[490] St. Isaac the Syrian, On the
Ascetical Life, II, 21.
[491] Bl. Theophylact, Explanation
of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew, 22.
[492] St. Peter of Damascus, 24
Discourses: On Love.
[493] St. Gregory Palamas, Triads, I,
ii, 1.
[494] St. Gregory Palamas, Triads,
II, ii, 5.
[495] St. Gregory Palamas, Triads, II,
ii, 19, 20.
[496] St. Gregory Palamas, Triads, III,
iii, 15.
[497] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
11, On the Precious and Life-Giving Cross, 7.
[498] St. Augustine, Sermon on
Concupiscence, 11, P.L. 38:345; quoted in Troitsky, op. cit.,
p. 28.
[499] St. Asterius of Amasia, Sermon
on Matthew 19.3, quoted in Troitsky, op. cit., p. 29.
[500] St. John Chrysostom, Sermon
on ‘Kiss Aquila and Priscilla’, quoted in Troitsky, op. cit., p. 29.
[501] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
33 on I Corinthians, quoted in Troitsky, op. cit., p. 28.
[502] Sherrard, op. cit., p. 3.
[503] Scruton, op.
cit., p. vii.
[504] See, for example, Robert
Winston, The Human Mind, London: The Bantam Press, 2003, chapter 8.
[505] Frank, Dusha
Cheloveka (The Soul of Man), 1917, Paris: YMCA Press, pp. 43-44 (in Russian).
[506] S.L.
Frank, Reality and Man, London: Faber & Faber, 1965, p. 61.
[507] J.
Heron, “The Phenomenology of the social encounter: the gaze”, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, XXXI, 1970-1971, pp. 243-264.
[508] Scruton, op.
cit., p. 26.
[509] Shakespeare, Sonnet 129.
[510]
Metropolitan Anthony, op. cit., pp. 63-64.
[511] Henry
Metelmann, in Julian Llewellyn-Smith, « From Third Reich to
Charterhouse », The Sunday Telegraph (London), November 30, 2003,
review page 4.
[512]
Héloise, in Scruton, op. cit., p. 244-245.
[513] St.
Ambrose of Optina did not refuse the word “love” when referring to the fallen
relationship of another French Catholic woman : “You are suffering, you cannot
forget your friend. That is how it is with all who love someone not with Godly
love, but with human love” (Fr. Sergius Chetverikov, St. Ambrose of Optina, Platina,
Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1997, p. 184).
[514] Scruton, op.
cit., p. 70.
[515] In
modern English, “persona” has come to mean a role or act, something which does
not so much reveal the person as hide it. On the other hand, the word for
“person” in Greek, hypostasis, literally means “that which stands under”
the face.
[516] Maslow writes: “there is in the
real world no such thing as blushing without something to blush about”; in
other words, blushing presupposes object-consciousness and personal communion
with another human being; it is always “blushing in a context” (V. Frankl,
“Self-Transcendence as a Human Phenomenon”, Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, vol. 6 (2), 1966, p. 101).
[517]
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, III, 2.
[518]
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I, 3, 35.
[519] Scruton, op.
cit., pp. 21-22. St. Cyril of Alexandria writes that Jacob’s reward for
serving Laban was “quite small: marriage… “ (On Hosea, 6; quoted in Burghardt, op. cit.,
p. 98)!
[520] Scruton, op.
cit., p. 26.
[521] Antony Ter-Grigorian rightly
notes: “The point does not lie in a division of love into a physical (fallen)
and a non-physical (non-fallen) kind. This is not a valid distinction, since
all levels and manifestations of love are ‘transparent’” (personal
communication).
[522] John Donne, The Ecstasy.
[523]
Shakespeare, Sonnet 129.
[524] Scruton,
op. cit., p. 237. Cf. Phineas Fletcher’s poem, Love:
When nothing else kindles desire,
Even virtue’s self shall blow the fire.
Love with thousand darts abounds,
Surest and deepest virtue wounds…
[525] Scruton, op.
cit., pp. 241-242.
[526] David Pickering, Cassell’s Dictionary of Proverbs, London: Cassell, 2001, p. 293.
[527] Shakespeare, Antony and
Cleopatra, V, 2, 285.
[528] Winston, op. cit., p.
297.
[529] St. John Chrysostom, On
Marriage, II, 4; P.G. 41:223.
[530] St. John Chrysostom, Encomium
to Maximus, 3; P.G. 51:230.
[531] Khomyakov, in Orthodox Life,
November-December, 1983, p. 22.
[532] St. Ignatius, To Polycarp,
5.
[533] Metropolitan Anastasy, Besedy
s sobstvennym serdtsem (Conversations with One’s own Heart), Jordanville,
1998, pp. 14-15 (in Russian).
[534] Elchaninov, in Bishop Hilarion, op.
cit., p. 153.
[535] St. John Chrystosom, Homily
20 on Ephesians, 2.
[536] Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies;
in The One Who Knows God, p. 91.
[537] St. John Chrysostom writes: “God
implanted a filter (filtron) in our nature, so that we should love one
another. ‘Every beast loves his like, and every man his neighbour’ (Sirach
13.15).” (Homily 2 on Ephesians, 3; P.G. 62:20).
[538] St. Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy,
8; P.G. 91:688C. Quoted by Paul M. Blowers, “The Passion of Jesus Christ
in Maximus the Confessor”, Studia Patristica, 2001, vol. 37, p. 376.
[539] St. John Chrysostom, Encomium
to Maximus, 3; P.G. 51:230.
[540] Bethu Brigte, edited by
Donncha O hAodha, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1978, 45, p. 32.
[541] St. Adamnan, Life of St.
Columba, II, 42; translated by William Reeves, Lampeter: Llanerch
Enterprises, 1874, 1988, pp. 103-104.
[542] Oleg VM, “O lyubvi. Kak govoril
ministr-administrator”, http://webforum.land.ru/mes.php?
Id=2297293&fs=0&ord=1&1st=&board=12871&arhv=
[543] With regard to science, cf. Sir
Francis Bacon: “God forbid,” wrote he,
“that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the
world: rather may He graciously grant to us to write an apocalypse or
true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on His creatures.” (The
Great Instauration, “The Plan of the Work” (1620)). And with regard to art,
cf. Michelangelo Buonarroti, “Sonnet for Tommaso Cavalieri”:
But God, in His graciousness,
does not show Himself
More fully elsewhere to me than
in some lovely mortal veil;
And I love that solely because in
it He is reflected.
St. Barsanuphius of Optina says that “in the
soul of an artist there is always a streak of asceticism, and the more lofty
the artist, the more brightly that fire of religious mysticism burns in him”
(Victor Afanasyev, Elder Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St.
Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, p. 500).
[544] St. John Climacus, The Ladder
of Divine Ascent, Step 30.11, 13.
[545] St. John Climacus, The Ladder
of Divine Ascent, Step 15.60.
[546] St. Gregory the Great, Homily
38, On the Marriage Feast: “What can we understand by this garment but
charity? We must suppose, then, that this man enters without a wedding garment
who is a member of our holy Church by reason of his faith, but who lack
charity. It is so called with good reason because our Maker wore it when he
came as a Bridegroom to unite Himself with the Church.”
[547] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
41, On the Marriage Feast: “As every
soul has its companion, the body, as its covering, anyone who fails to preserve
his body and cleanse it in this life by means of self-control, purity and
chastity, will possess it then as a useless garment, unworthy of that
incorruptible bridechamber, and the cause of his being thrown out.”
[548] There is an argument that man is
in the image of God not so much as an individual, or as a family, but as the
fullness of the whole of saved humanity. Thus Tsirplanis writes: “According to
St. Gregory of Nyssa, each soul as the Image of God is the human as well as
the cosmic plhrwma, includes ‘all humanity’, ‘the entire
plenitude of humanity’; ‘our whole nature, extending from the first to the
last, is so to say, one image of Him Who is’; it is ‘the nature of man in its
entirety and fullness’” (op. cit., pp. 32-33).
[549]
St. Gregory Palamas, 150 Chapters, 37, 38; in The Philokalia,
vol. IV, pp. 362-363. St. Gregory of Sinai explains this in more detail: “The
natural law is the potential power to energize inherent in each species and in
each part. As God does with the respect to the whole of creation, so does the
soul with respect to the body: it energizes and impels each member of the body
in accordance with the energy intrinsic to that member. At this point it must
be asked why the holy fathers sometimes say that anger and desire are powers
pertaining to the body and sometimes that they are powers pertaining to the
soul. Assuredly, the words of the saints never disagree if they are carefully
examined. In this case, both statements are true, if correctly understood in
context. For indescribably body and soul are brought into being in such a way
that they coexist. The soul is in a state of perfection from the start, but the
body is imperfect since it has to grow through taking nourishment. The soul by
virtue of its creation as a deiform and intellective entity possesses an
intrinsic power of desire and an intrinsic incensive power, and these lead it
to manifest both courage and divine love. For senseless anger and mindless
desire were not created along with the soul. Nor originally did they pertain to
the body. On the contrary, when the body was created it was free from
corruption and without the humours from which such desire and uncontrollable
rage arise. But after the fall anger and desire were necessarily generated
within it, for then it became subject to the corruption and gross materiality
of the instinct-driven animals. That is why when the body has the upper hand it
opposes the will of the soul through anger and desire. But when what is mortal
is made subject to the intelligence it assists the soul in doing what is good.
For when characteristics that do not originally pertain to the body but have
subsequently infiltrated into it become entangled with the soul, man becomes
like an animal (Psalm 49.20), since he is now necessarily subject to the
law of sin. He ceases to be an intelligent human being and becomes beast-like.
“When God through His life-giving breath
created the soul deiform and intellective, He did not implant in it anger and
desire that are animal-like. But He did endow it with a power of longing and
aspiration, as well as with a courage responsive to divine love. Similarly when
God formed the body, He did not originally implant in it instinctual anger and
desire. It was only afterwards, through the fall, that it was invested with
these characteristics that have rendered it mortal, corruptible and
animal-like. For the body, even though susceptive of corruption, was created,
as theologians will tell us, free from corruption, and that is how it will be
resurrected. In the same way the soul when originally created was
dispassionate. But soul and body have both been defiled, commingled as they are
through the natural law of mutual interpenetration and exchange. The soul has
acquired the qualities of the passions or, rather, of the demons; and the body,
passing under the sway of corruption because of its fallen state, has become
akin to instinct-driven animals. The powers of body and soul have merged
together and have produced a single animal, driven impulsively and mindlessly
by anger and desire. That is how man has sunk to the level of the animals, as
Scripture testifies, and has become like them in every respect.” (137 Texts
on Commandments and Doctrines, 81,82; in The Philokalia, vol. IV,
pp. 227-228)
[550] Schopenhauer, in Fr.
Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 7, part II:
Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1965, p. 48).
[551] J.H. Thayer, Greek-English
Lexicon of the New Testament, Edinburgh: T. &T. Clarke, 1901, p. 4.
[552] Thunberg, Man and Cosmos: The
Vision of St. Maximus the Confessor, Crestwood, N.Y.; St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 1985, p. 102, p. 102.
[553] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 138, note 239. Chrysostom’s usual word for “lust” is lagneia (On Virginity;
P.G. 48:552).
[554] St. John Chrysostom, Homily
20 on Ephesians, 1; P.G. 62: 135.
[555] St. John Chrysostom, Encomium
to Maximus, 5; P.G. 51: 233,240.
[556] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 2
on Ephesians, 3; P.G. 62:20.
[557] St. John Chrysostom, On ‘On
account of fornication’, P.G. 51:212.
[558] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Soul and Resurrection, 450; in Tsirplanis, op. cit., p. 27.
[559] Nygen, Agape and Eros,
London: S.P.C.K., 1982, p. 437.
[560] St. Gregory of Nyssa, Homily
13 on the Song of Songs, 1048C; Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs,
Prologue.
[561] Nygen, op. cit., pp.
437-439, 446.
[562] Wilken, op. cit., p. 419.
[563] St. Dionysius the Areopagite, On
the Divine Names, IV; P.G. 3:11-12.
[564] Blowers, op. cit., p. 77.
[565] Scruton, op.
cit., p. 238. My italics (V.M.).
[566] Not without reason, therefore,
are the objects of female lust called “hunks” in modern parlance.
[567] Akathist to the Mother of God,
ikos 7.
[568] St.
Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints,
House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press, 2002, vol. V, January 21, p. 394.
[569] Victor Afanasiev, Elder
Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood,
2000, p. 454.
[570] St. Dionysius the Areopagite, On
the Divine Names, IV, 10, 12-13, 15.
[571] St. Methodius, The Symposium,
Logos 8.2.
[572] St. Dionysius the Areopagite, On
the Divine Names, IV, 20.
[573] St. Maximus, Fifth Century on
various texts, 83-85, 87, 90; The Philokalia, vol. II, pp. 280-282.
[574] Menaion, March 25,
Troparion of the Annunciation.
[575] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
37, On the Dormition, 15.
[576] Akathist to the Mother of
God, ikos 10.
[577] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
5, On the Meeting of the Lord, 19.
[578] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life
in Christ, VI, 3.
[579] St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua
7, P.G. 91:1073C-D; in Blowers and Wilken, op. cit.,
p. 51.
[580] Octoechos,
Tone 3, Sunday Mattins canon, Ode 9, irmos.
[581] St. Gregory the Great, Homily
38 on the Marriage Feast.
[582] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
5, On the Meeting of the Lord, 16.
[583] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily
11, On the Precious and Life-Giving Cross, 7. Cf. Homily 20, 16.