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 L