Friday, June 27, 2014

The Place of Sexual Differentiation in the Sacramental Vision of the Orthodox Church

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.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Let Us be Attentive!

Fellow Sojourners,

Christ has Ascended! In glory!

Welcome to our very own Orthodox reading forum! This blog is intended to be the venue by which we post and share the thoughts, reflections, concerns and questions that surface from our Orthodox readings this Summer. Please feel free to post any other materials (icons, prayers, excerpts, etc.) that strike your fancy. I have invited each of you to be authors of the site - do let me know if you have any trouble posting.

You will notice that the Three Holy Hierarchs (Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and Saint John Chrysostom) are lurking behind the post section. They are the patron saints of study/students and thus I thought it only fitting that they be so too the "patrons" of this blog.

I thought it also fitting to begin the posts with the following prayer:

Christ, the true light, who enlightens and sanctifies every person coming into the world, let the light of Your countenance shine upon me (us) that I (we) may see Your unapproachable light; and guide my (our) steps in the way of Your commandments, through the intercessions of Your all-holy Mother and of all the Saints. Amen.

I think that concludes my preliminary remarks! Happy posting!