As
most of you know, I have been falling in love with Orthodoxy over the past
three years—even during the times when I thought I was consciously moving away
from it. No matter how hard I try to theorize Orthodoxy away, the Paschal joy
that permeates all of Orthodox life keeps pulling me back. I have come to see
how icons, Mariology, the liturgy, ecclesial organization, asceticism, saints,
and even incense manifest and proclaim the great Paschal Mystery. Naturally,
then, I want to join the community of Christians who, as Christos Yannaras puts
it, “transfigure every corner of life into eucharist.”[1]
It would be a beautiful thing to join fully in the work of revealing “the
personal dimension of matter, its capacity to manifest the personal operation
of God the Word.”[2]
And yet my biggest reservation about Orthodoxy concerns
precisely the nature of “the personal dimension of matter” as it pertains to
sexual difference and marriage. I have repeatedly found in Orthodox
theologians—both contemporary writers and Church Fathers—a theology of sexual
difference which seems incongruent with the rest of Orthodoxy’s sacramental
vision. As I understand it, Orthodoxy believes that the telos of all creation
is a cosmic Eucharist; man offers creation up to God who transforms it by the
Spirit into communion. This transformation is not the destruction, abolition,
or suppression of nature but its fulfillment and perfection. So, for example,
after the Fall Christ does what Adam failed to do; he unites creation to
himself and offers it to the Father “on behalf of all and for all.” But this
doesn’t mean that Adam is destroyed. Christ is the “second Adam” who fulfills
and perfects Adam (“man”) and raises him up to Divinity. From creation through
the drama of salvation all the way to the resurrection of the dead Adam as
created is fundamentally good; the change that takes place through these stages
is one of restoration and perfection, not abolition.
With this in mind, consider the following passage from St.
Maximus concerning sexual differentiation.
He who, as Scripture says, sees all
things before their coming to be, having regarded or rather having foreseen in
advance by the power of His anticipatory knowledge in which direction the
movement of man’s free and independent choice would incline, having thus seen
how it [the Fall] would come to pass, added to the image [of God] the division
into male and female: a division which has no relation to the divine Archetype,
but which, as we have said, is in agreement with irrational nature.”[3]
Vladimir
Lossky explains regarding this passage that the division of human nature into
male and female “becomes definitive after sin, in the state of fallen human
nature;” it was a division “made by God in prevision of sin.”[4]
As I see it, Lossky’s gloss on this passage is problematic because it seems to
imply either (1) that the original creation of man as male and female was not
good or (2) that man was not divided into male and female until after the fall
(a position which seems to me to lack Scriptural warrant).
Whereas Lossky’s treatment of this passage poses problems concerning
the origin of sexual difference, Yannaras’s gloss on the same passage poses
problems for the other end of salvation history, the eschaton:
Certainly, the removal of a distinction
between the sexes is related to the eschatological fullness of existence, the
Kingdom of God. The life of the Kingdom abolishes the division of human beings
into men and women, because the differentiation of the sexes is a natural differentiation—a necessity of
nature which ensures its autonomous perpetuation. It [sexual difference] has no
place in the Kingdom because it bears no relation to that personal
distinctiveness and freedom from nature which is the life of the Kingdom. The
differentiation of the sexes does not represent an ontological distinction,
like that between nature and persons or between nature and energies: it does
not relate to the mode of existence, the image of God imprinted on man. The
distinction between the sexes is a differentiation in natural energies “which
no longer looks to the divine archetype,” but merely foreshadows the fall. This
is why it is done away with in the life of the last days.[5]
Compare
Lossky and Yannaras’s understandings of sexual difference to the role of Adam described
above. Whereas Adam was created good and then restored from his fallen state
and perfected in the eschatological dimension, sexual difference is apparently
not created good (?) and/or is not restored and perfected in the eschatological
dimension but “abolished” and “done away with.” Now, I should note that
Yannaras does not say that the Church
“lives out the truth of the last days” by abolishing sexual difference here in
the time before the eschaton.[6]
On the contrary, he speaks of the Church’s disposition toward sexual
differentiation in a manner in keeping with the rest of her sacramental vision:
“the transfiguration of life and its change into incorruption within the Church
requires the assumption of natural life, of man’s flesh and the flesh of the
world. Consequently, it requires a faithfulness to the differentiation in the
natural functions which go to make up life.”[7]
In fact, this transfiguration “means a change in nature’s mode of existence,
not the abolition of nature and its existential possibilities.”[8]
So when it comes to sexual difference here and now, the Church treats it just
like she treats everything else: it is offered to God and transformed by the
Spirit into communion, in this case sexual union. And in the marriage liturgy
(which Meyendorff describes as an entrance into the Kingdom) the two are
blessed by the Church that they may “share in the ministry of transforming the
differentiated natural energy into a personal self-transcendence and communion
in sexual love.[9]
It seems strange that there should be a difference in the
understanding of the original creation and the ultimate eschatological state of
sexual difference from the rest of creation when the Church treats sexual
difference here and now in the same way that it treats everything else.
Everything else is created good, restored in salvation history, and perfected
in the eschaton. When the Church blesses and offers to God for the sake of
communion, she thereby participates in Christ’s soteriological work of
restoring and perfecting. But why bless sexual differentiation in marriage if
it is not to be restored and perfected but ultimately abolished?
What I find so compelling about John Paul II (and for that
matter the rest of his Western heritage on this issue) is that his understanding
of sexual difference in creation and the Kingdom seems more congruent with the
sacramental vision of Orthodoxy than that put forward by Orthodox theologians
themselves. For example, whereas as Lossky and Yannaras (following Nyssa and
Maximus) contend that sexual differentiation has no relation to the divine
archetype and is therefore not an aspect of the image of God in man, JPII
argues that sexual difference makes possible the “communion of persons which
man and women form from the beginning”—a communion that reflects the communion
of the Trinity and is therefore one of the most profound senses in which it is
said that man is made in the image of God. On this point JPII writes,
the account of the creation of man
in Genesis 1 affirms from the beginning and directly that man was created in
the image of God inasmuch as he is male and female. The account in Genesis 2,
by contrast, does not speak of the ‘image of God,’ but reveals, in the manner
proper to it, that the complete and definitive creation of ‘man’ (subject first
to the experience of original solitude) expresses itself in giving life to the
‘communio personarum’ that man and woman form… man became the image of God not
only through his own humanity but also through the communion of persons, which
man and woman form from the very beginning. The function of the image is that
of mirroring the one who is the model, of reproducing its own prototype… He is,
in fact, ‘from the beginning’ not only an image in which the solitude of one
Person, who rules the world, mirrors himself, but also and essentially the
image of an inscrutable divine communion of Persons.[10]
Moreover,
since JPII holds that there is no such thing as generic “human being” but that
humans exist in the image of God as male
and female, he contends that sexual difference is restored and perfected in the
resurrection from the dead: “resurrection means restoration to the true life of
human bodiliness.” When Christ explains to the Sadducees that
in the ‘other world’ … ‘they will
take neither wife nor husband’—then it is clear that here we are dealing with a
development of the truth about the same
man. Christ points out man’s identity, although this identity is realized
in a different way in eschatological experience than in the experience of the
very beginning and of all history. And nevertheless, man will always be the
same, just as he came forth from the hand of his Creator and Father. Christ
says, ‘they will take neither wife nor husband,’ but he does not affirm that
this man of the ‘future world’ will no longer be male and female as he was
‘from the beginning.’[11]
While
the meaning of the body and the way in which it realizes its fundamental
truth—the image of God as communion of persons—will no longer be in marriage,
procreation, and celibacy, the meaning of the body will still “be realized as a
meaning that is perfectly personal and communitarian at the same time.”[12]
In other words, marriage, procreation, and celibacy are the ways in which human
beings as male and female partake in the communion of persons in the dimension
of history. The end of this age and the coming of the Kingdom do not mean that
sexual difference is abolished but that the manner in which we will realize the
communion of persons will be transformed. The goodness of creation will be
restored and perfected. Thus JPII concludes that “the man of the ‘future world’
will find in this new experience of his own body the fulfillment of what he carried in himself perennially and
historically.”[13]
To sum up, the vision of sacramental union with God that
Orthodoxy manifests so marvelously seems to me to be most congruent with a
theological anthropology that affirms both the original (and “very good”)
creation of man and woman and the continuation of sexual differentiation in the
eschaton. As Dr. Snell would say, the body is both fundamentally personal and
fundamental to the person (a conviction that seems to harmonize with Yannaras’s
emphasis on the “personal dimension of matter”). Thus, if the body is
fundamental to the person and sexual difference is abolished in the
resurrection, a fundamental aspect of our personhood is lost at death. But, as the
Orthodox Church has proclaimed throughout the world, death has been conquered
by Christ. And the Life that we even now live in Christ is one of personal communion—how then can such a
fundamental part of the person as sexual differentiation be abolished and
denigrated?
[1] Christos Yannaras, The
Freedom of Morality, trans. Elizabeth Briere (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 1984), 90.
[2] Ibid., 95.
[3] Vladimir Lossky, The
Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1944, 109.
[4] Ibid., 108.
[5] Yannaras, The Freedom
of Morality, 100.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.,101.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.,103.
[10] John Paul II, Man and
Woman He Created Them: A Theology of
the Body. trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media), 163.
[11] Ibid., 398.
[12] Ibid., 399.
[13] Ibid., 400.
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