synaxis · 2019-12-31 · words, it’s not just the things they ofﬁcially organize; it’s...

SYNAXIS the symposium journal

Theophany 2019 Vol. 6, No. 1 U.S. $15

EROS AND THE MYSTERY OF GOD On the Body, Sex & Asceticism

n. a periodical gathering published by eighth day institute

EIGHTH DAY INSTITUTE WICHITA, KS

2019

EROS & THE MYSTERY OF GOD ON THE BODY, SEX & ASCETICISM

EDITED BY Erin Doom

SENIOR EDITOR & DESIGNER Erin Doom

BOOK REVIEW EDITORS The Eighth Day Books Crew

SYNAXIS is published to promote the renewal of culture through faith and learning. Published by Eighth Day Institute, 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS, 67214, Synaxis is a tri-annual publication, published in conjunction with the annual Eighth Day Symposium in January, the annual Florovsky Week in July, and the annual Eighth Day Books Anniversary celebration at the Inklings Oktoberfest in October. Subscriptions are automatically included with all levels above the “Donor” level of Eighth Day Memberships (see inside back cover for details).

Theophany 2019, Volume 6, Number 1. Copyright © 2019 by Eighth Day Institute, a nonprofit corporation. All contributions above the cost of subscription are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

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Financial contributions, back issue orders, letters to the editor, manuscript submissions, and inquiries should be directed to our editorial office at Eighth Day Institute, 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS, 67214, or by email to [email protected].

Although Eighth Day Institute and Eighth Day Books have no formal affiliation or financial relationship, our support for each other is mutual and enthusiastic. Our mission of “renewing culture through faith and learning” is carried out through not-for-profit educational endeavors that seek to accomplish what Eighth Day Books does as a for-profit business through book sales: connect people to classics which shed light on ultimate questions and expose people to the teachings of the Holy Fathers.

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With tears Abba Zosimas said, “O mother, filled with the spirit, by your mode of life it is evident that you live with God and have died to the world. The Grace granted to you is apparent—for you have called me by name and recognized that I am a priest, though you have never seen me before. Grace is not recognized by one’s orders, but by gifts of the Spirit, so give me your blessing, for I need your prayers.”

~The Life of St. Mary of Egypt

TABLE of CONTENTS the LETTERS et alia AUniqueCommunityofInquiry&FellowshipbyHansBoersma 2

ThePast,thePresent&theFuturebyJoshuaSturgill 2

AStatementonCulturalRenewalbyRalphWood 3

the DIRECTOR’S DESK RenewingLanguage:Eros,Body,Sex&AsceticismasGloriousWordsbyErinM.Doom6Neo-PatristicSynthesis:ANewTheologicalMissionbyErinM.Doom 8Neo-PatristicSynthesis:AnAscetic&PhilokalicEndeavorbyErinM.Doom 14VeronicabyJoshuaSturgill 17

the ESSAYS The Hatred of Purity by Frederica Mathewes-Green 20

TheAsceticsofAuthenticitybyBenT.Davis 22

God Is Agape & Eros: Benedict XVI’s Message for a Made World by Matthew Umbarger 25

DeusCaritasEst:GodIsLovebyPopeBenedictXVI 27

NotesTowardsaDeOinitionofPatriarchybyJoshuaSturgill 32

Christianity&SexbyChristopherDawson 34

Same-SexEroticism:AScripturalPerspectivebyEdithM.Humphrey 41TheMysteryofLovebyAlexanderSchmemann 46

the REVIEWS Christianity&ErosRevisited:MakingLoveasSacramentalActbyHansBoersma 54TheMysteriesofAttractionbyChristopherLasch 56Theosis&Eros,Celibacy&MarriagebyAdamCooper 59

FiguralReading:ADisruptiveChristianPracticebyGeoffreyR.Boyle 62

Solomon’sEroticImaginationbyScottCairns 63

TABLE of CONTENTS the INKLINGS and friends Marriage&theModernMindbyG.K.Chesterton 66

RomanticTheologybyCharlesWilliams 69

TheEroticHerobyW.H.Auden 72

GoingtoChurchbyCoventryPatmore 73

the FATHERS TheFirstHomilyontheSongofSongsbyOrigen 76

ExpositionoftheSongofSongsbySt.GregorytheGreat 77

HomilyOne:SongofSongs1:1-4bySt.GregoryofNyssa 80

ACompendiumontheSongofSongsbyAlcuinofYork 85

HomilyTwo:SongofSongs2:4-7byOrigen 87

TheologyoftheBody:OntheSongofSongsbyPopeSt.JohnPaulII 89

OnCharitybySt.MaximustheConfessor 92

Hymn16bySt.SymeontheNewTheologian 94

the TRADITION SongofSongs1:1-7bySolomon 96

TheSacramentofHolyMatrimony:OrthodoxChristianServices 96

TheLifeofSt.MaryofEgyptbySt.SophroniusofJerusalem 101

TheSynodicalLetter:ChristologicalProfessionbySt.SophroniusofJerusalem 106

the ECUMENICAL WORD ThoughtsAfterLambeth:Ecumenism&CulturalRenewalbyT.S.Eliot 110

Listen&Translate:TwoGiftstoEcumenismbyW.H.Auden 111

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the LETTERS

et alia

Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company. ~Lord Byron

WINTER CAMPAIGN LETTER A Unique Community

of Inquiry & Fellowship

Hans Boersma A. D. 2018

NOT TOO long ago, a friend asked me, “What’s your favorite place to go to for a conference?” I didn’t have to think about the answer. “Wichita, Kansas,” I immediately responded. Anyone who has ever attended one of the events put on by the Eighth Day Institute will straightaway nod in agreement. Of course, the answer would be Wichita, Kansas.

The reason? Wichita is the place where contemporary saints mingle with the saints of old. It’s an absolutely lovely place, where the line between heaven and earth becomes strangely thin. Whenever I listen to Erin Doom hold forth on Georges Florovsky or when I browse the stacks of Warren Farha’s Eighth Day Books, I feel like the Unicorn: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here.”

You’ll know what I mean when you attend an Eighth Day Symposium. Unfeigned hospitality and genuine friendship, depth of genuine theological conversation across traditions, beer and meals, sacred icons and otherworldly chants—it’s all part of what makes a Symposium in Kansas unlike any other get-together. In other words, it’s not just the things they officially organize; it’s rather the unfailing intuition of what truly matters—theologically, culturally, aesthetically, and socially.

And, lest I be misunderstood, let me spell it out: the importance of the Eighth Day Institute isn’t just that it gives visitors a taste of heaven on earth. No, the activities, events, and publications give our culture a glimpse of what life together can be like. That’s why, when you visit the Eighth Day Institute, you don’t just thank God for a great event; you end up praying that the Eighth Day Institute may reach numerous hearts and minds.

No sense beating around the bush: you need to become a donor! When you support the Eighth Day Institute, you’re taken up into a unique community of inquiry and fellowship. Not yet convinced? Go and visit Wichita! When you attend one of the Eighth Day events you’ll never want to leave. Why not? The Eighth Day folks don’t just talk about sacramental ontology. They practice it.

WINTER CAMPAIGN LETTER The Past, the Present & the Future

Joshua Sturgill A. D. 2018

OUR FIRST tasks were stripping old carpet and tile off the floors and hanging a ladder from the ceiling to prepare the space we'd already decided would be called The Ladder. Back then, our working title was The St. John of Damascus Institute, which would have The Ladder as its headquarters and primary gathering place. Now, of course, the walls are flush with icons, photographs, and paper copies of famous heroes. But when we held our first Hall of Men, the walls were bare, and our few icons (still there!) sat expectantly on the mantle, waiting to be joined by a cloud of witnesses. Before the Eighth Day Symposium, before the Sisters of Sophia or the Inklings Festival, and before a website chock-full of content, we were just a few friends discussing Erin Doom’s vision of cultural renewal starting locally and bringing like-minded folks into a timeless conversation.

To have continued in this vision, despite all the cultural and financial obstacles, is a testament both to Erin’s tenacity and to the courage of the EDI community. The surrounding culture is, if anything, more chaotic and distorted than it was a decade ago. Yet the work of renewal continues.

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http://www.eighthdayinstitute.org


Just as at the beginning, Eighth Day Institute is about the people and the hope of a safe and thriving place for family, spiritual maturity, history, hope. My own course has taken me in and out of Wichita over the last several years, but I always feel that EDI is an anchor—a bit of sanity in a rather insane world.

Please consider giving to the work of Eighth Day Institute. Give what you can: prayer, money, time, presence. Wherever you happen to be, you can always pray for God’s protection and inspiration. The planning, financing, and execution of EDI’s projects—like the Symposium or Feast Days or the print and digital publications—require the prayerful involvement of committed people both locally and abroad. There has never been a time we didn't need help of some kind—and never a time when we had to shut down the work because help didn't come! When we were stripping floors and painting walls, we had no idea what God would bring us in the next few years. But we knew it would be good, and we knew it would be important for the health of our souls. From hopeful beginnings to the possibilities of the present, EDI’s full story hasn't yet been told. How will you be part of our future?

A STATEMENT ON CULTURAL RENEWAL

Ralph Wood A. D. 2018

CULTURE is a word related both to cult and to agriculture—i.e., to religious devotion and the cultivation of the crops. In the former sense, it pertains to all those things that do not bear directly on such matters as civil society, government, nationhood, patriotism, even civilization itself—although all of these may be

turned into a ‘cult’ in the bad sense. As G. K. Chesterton observed, the Church has already survived the collapse of two civilizations, the Greco-Roman and the Medieval. We are now living in the ruins of a third collapsed civilization—the modern West. We are witnessing the truth of Oswald Spengler’s prophecy in his famous book of 1922, The Decline of the West, although Walker Percy much preferred a literal and livelier rendering of the German: Die Untergang des Abendlands: The Going Under of the Evening Land.

“Renewing culture” in the usual sense of the phrase means reading and discussing important books, visiting art galleries, attending dramatic productions, and the like. Thus do we become more sophisticated and “cultured.” This usually means that we join what is now called “the winning side of history,” by villainizing the deplorables and divinizing the righteous. In neither case, does the Church have any essential role. The evening land of the modern West continues its rapid plunge into the abyss. The old divides between left and right, sacred and secular, even church and state, remain rather much the same.

Eastern Orthodoxy has the unique advantage of not being crippled by these late Western divisions. It seeks always to build up its own religious culture so as to weld soul (church) and body (nation) into a seamless whole. Hence the Slavophilia of both Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. This is no longer possible in our secular setting, except by ruthless coercion. Hence the attempt of the Eighth Day Institute to renew our culture in a radical new sense—i.e., to help make it possible for the Gospel to be heard, received, and embraced afresh, unblocking the doors that both western Christians and secularists have thrown up. To adopt a phrase from Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker Movement, it seeks “to make it easier for people to be good.”

Yet we are not meant to read this phrase in the moralistic sense of doing good, for we can “do good” without God, thus prompting us to cluck in self-congratulation for not needing God, and thus opening ourselves to a deadly secularity, whether of the right or the left. It’s an altogether

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different thing to be good in a Christian way. This requires our radical participation in the very life of God via liturgical worship and all the things that it trenches upon. Not least of these is our ecumenical engagement with major cultural artifacts; i.e., great books and other artistic masterpieces. We undertake such labor so as to discern the points at which they reflect, complement, but also sometimes clash with holy things. In all three cases, we seek to renew our culture with meat and drink it hungers and thirsts for.

Thus Eighth Day Institute does not seek “to make the world a better place,” but to help shift the balance between good and evil, seeking to tilt our culture more toward the former. This shift is finely figured in the Russian cross with its slanted lower bar. The left arm signals the malefactor who cast the final trajectory of his life downward, alas, in rejection of divine life. The right arm, by contrast, symbolizes the good thief who tilted his life upward, albeit in the last moment, toward eternally renewed participation in God’s own life.

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Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture by Ralph Wood There are those who contend we live in a ‘post-cultural age’ of such widespread individualism and rapid ethnic amalgamation that the only remaining universal value is self-fulfillment. Ralph Wood goes even farther to say that ours is “an anti-cultural era: an era that is rejecting, with increasing vehemence, even the most basic requirements of life together and life before God.” He maintains it is the Church’s task not “to create a counter-culture, so much as a new culture based on one so ancient and nearly forgotten that it looks freshly minted.” Addressing issues of education, worship, the arts, apologetics, politics and even the idea of romance, Wood means to show us that our faith is not centered in private and inner experience. Rather, it is based in an outer, public life—“a life displayed in Scripture and Tradition and practiced in the Church.” Dialoguing with the likes of Russell Kirk, Mark Noll, Richard Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder, Karl Barth, Jaroslav Pelikan, and a host of literary greats—Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain, and Emily Dickinson—Wood measures our culture through the focus of the cross, “the narrowest of apertures” opening onto “the widest of worlds.” He affirms the good and decries the evil, calling on Christians to make their own apologia by way of the Gospel.

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This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. ~St. Paul

the DIRECTOR’S DESK

RENEWING LANGUAGE Eros, Body, Sex & Asceticism

As Glorious Words

Erin M. Doom A. D. 2019

LAST YEAR, at the 8th annual Eighth Day Symposium, we explored the theme of friendship: “Strangers & Society: Cultivating Friendship in a Fractured Age.” I’m convinced friendship is one of the greatest needs of our day. It’s why my priest Fr. Paul O’Callaghan wrote an entire book on the subject: The Feast of Friendship. It’s also why Eighth Day Press published it. If you don’t yet have a copy, you really should get one.

The theme for this year’s Symposium builds on last year. And in terms of engaging our current culture, I think it is even more important: “Eros & the Mystery of God: On the Body, Sex & Asceticism.”

Orthodox theologian Metropolitan Kallistos Ware recently suggested that the most important question for Orthodox theology in the twentieth

century was ecclesiology, i.e., “What is the Church?” While this remains an important theme for the twenty-first century, he goes on to remark:

The key question in Orthodoxy today is not only “What is the Church?,” but also and more fundamentally “What is the human person?” What does it imply to be a person-in-relation according to the image of God the Holy Trinity? What does it mean to attain “deification” through incorporation into Christ? Obviously the two questions, “What is the Church?” and “What is the human person?” are intimately linked: for it is only within the Church that human persons become authentically themselves.

I wholeheartedly agree with Metropolitan Kallistos. The nature of human personhood is the single most important question the world is wrestling with today. It is therefore also the most vital question for all Christians to be considering. We must contemplate what it means to have been created male and female, to have been made in

the image of God, to have been called to grow in the likeness to God, or in Pauline language, to be transformed from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18), or in Petrine language, to participate in the very nature of God (1 Pet. 1:4).

We have a mission to our fallen world. It’s a biblical mandate. I believe it is our responsibility to both articulate and demonstrate through our lives the glorious vision of what it means to be human creatures of God, male and female. G. K. Chesterton captures this responsibility best in a book that provoked our 2nd annual Symposium back in 2012:

The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have called this book “What Is Wrong with the World?” and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

Eros. Body. Sex. Asceticism. Today these words are pregnant with negative connotations. This is unfortunate. Each and every one of them should intimate something positive, even glorious. But we as Christians have failed to pass down the traditional biblical understanding of these words, the glorious and divine nature of each one of them. We have failed miserably at asking what is right. We’ve failed to demonstrate the glory of what it means to be human, whether married or celibate. I hope the Symposium this weekend, and the content in this issue of Synaxis, will make a humble contribution to redeeming these words, to restoring the glorious vision of what it means to be human.

So, taking our cue from Metropolitan Kallistos—and from Fr. Paul who coined this year’s main theme—we’ve organized a stellar line-up of presenters to explore the human person within the context of these four key words: eros, body, sex, and asceticism.

I MUST admit I was exceedingly thrilled when I began receiving the lecture titles from our speakers. Many of them are looking back to the Fathers as a resource for addressing these issues. And as so

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many of you already know, I believe this is THE key to cultural renewal. I’m convinced it’s our only hope for successfully navigating the murky waters of our secular age. In fact, under the spell of Fr. George Florovsky’s call for this sort of path to renewal, I am so convinced of it that I’ve included here in the Director’s Desk two pieces from my dissertation. I offer them to you as a way to help you better understand Fr. Florovsky and his influence on me and the mission of Eighth Day Institute. I offer them to help you capture more clearly the driving impulse behind all of the work at Eighth Day Institute…including this particular Symposium and the coming 2nd annual Florovsky Week (June 5-8).

As I write this, it is the feast day of St. Anthony the Great (d. 356). He is one of my great heroes. He was the first hero I ever presented at the Hall of Men, way back in November of 2008. His icon sits on our makeshift iconostasis—the fireplace mantle at our headquarters, the Ladder. He was the hero of our second Symposium festal banquet. I’ve read the story of his life by St. Athanasius many times, with many different people. And I look forward to reading it many more times. If there ever was an early Christian life that should be made into a Hollywood movie, it would be St. Anthony’s. All of that is said to begin ending this Symposium reflection by connecting Anthony to our conference theme.

Asceticism—literally athletic training for the spiritual life—is too frequently perceived to be an unhealthy attitude toward and treatment of the body. After spending twenty years of what we would call hard-core asceticism while enclosed in an abandoned fort—serious fasting, continual prayer, singing the Psalms, signing the cross, combatting demons, etc.—you would imagine the body of St. Anthony to be frail and emaciated. But in St. Athanasius’ account we read that his friends “were amazed to see that his body had maintained its former condition, neither fat from lack of exercise, nor emaciated from fasting and combat with demons, but he was just as they had known him before his withdrawal.” Asceticism, then, is actually a pathway to transfiguring the body.

But asceticism isn’t just about the body. It’s also a ladder of divine ascent. It’s how we conquer our passions, thereby opening the way for a deeper union of erotic love between the human and the divine. This is the message of that most sublime, nuptial poem in scriptures: the Song of Songs. Check out the section “The Fathers” to learn how the Fathers interpreted this book. It’s also the message of St. Paul’s eloquent—but controversial for 21st century folks who can’t help but breathe the poisonous air of our secular age—passage in Ephesians on the sacrament of marriage, which according to Paul is “a great mystery” because he isn’t just speaking about the marriage of male and female but about “Christ and the Church” (Eph. 5:32). Be sure to check out the section “the Tradition”, which contains the Orthodox marriage service, and the essay by Fr. Alexander Schmemann in “the Essays”, which provides a beautiful reflection on that service.

As is my annual custom, I’ll end this opening piece with the message of two Fathers, one ancient and one living:

Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex,” has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness. Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise

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“in ecstasy” towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.

~Pope Benedict XVI

The most intense of pleasurable activities (I mean the passion of erotic love) is set as a figure at the very fore of the guidance that the teachings give: so that by this we may learn that it is necessary for the soul, fixing itself steadily on the inaccessible beauty of the divine nature, to love that beauty as much as the body has a bent for what is akin to it and to turn passion into impassibility, so that when every bodily disposition has been quelled, our mind within us may boil with love, but only in the Spirit, because it is heated by that “fire” that the Lord came to “cast upon the earth.”

~St. Gregory of Nyssa

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Feast of St. Anthony the Great Anno Domini 2019, January 17

NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS A New Theological Mission


The modern world has arisen from Christianity and will turn back to it. ~Florovsky, Commenting on Bultmann at 1967 Conference

FR GEORGE Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis is an ecumenical endeavor with missiological implications for Christian theology. Florovsky emphasized the common ground that East and West have in the patristic tradition of the first thousand years. We have a common ancestry in the baptized Hellenistic world and, according to

Florovsky, we are like Siamese twins who have been dangerously separated. We belong together. And it is only through rediscovering our common roots in the Fathers that we can stand together in a common mission. Indeed, the Church does have a theological mission, which is central to Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis.

In a 1937 review of Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology, Nicholai Berdyaev spent thirteen pages thrashing Florovsky’s book. According to Berdyaev, Florovsky merely condemned Russia’s past as a pseudomorphosis, as a long history of western captivity. And in doing so he failed to offer a solution. But, as Dobbie-Bateman commented, Berdayev was “wide of the mark,” perhaps because he did “not fear secularization.” Fr. George, on the other hand, “sees in secularization a failure of the church.” Indeed, Florovsky makes just such a claim: “If our culture, which we used, rather complacently, to regard as Christian, disintegrates and falls to pieces, it only shows that the seed of corruption was already there.”

But Florovsky’s highly indeterministic view of history would not allow him to disregard this fact. Instead, his Ways was a critique in a diptych that included a positive, constructive proposal for the solution, namely the neo-patristic synthesis. But even in Ways, he made it clear that there was action to be taken: “Returning to the fathers […] does not mean abandoning the present age, escaping from history, or quitting the field of battle. Patristic experience must not only be preserved, but it must be discovered and brought into life.” He continues, with an ecumenical impulse underlying his proposed action:

Orthodox thought must perceive and suffer the western trials and temptations, and, for its own sake, it cannot afford to avoid and keep silent over them. The entire western experience of temptation and fall must be creatively examined and transformed; …Only such a compassionate co-experience provides a reliable path toward the reunification of the fractured Christian world and the embrace and recovery of departed brothers. It is not enough to refute or reject western errors or mistakes—they must be overcome and surpassed

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through a new creative act. This will be the best antidote in Orthodox thought against any secret and undiagnosed poisoning. Orthodox theology has been called upon to answer non-Orthodox questions from the depths of its catholic and unbroken experience and to confront western non-Orthodoxy not with accusations but with testimony: the truth of Orthodoxy.

So not only is there a responsibility to examine the trajectory of Western history, as Charles Taylor has so masterfully done for us in his magnum opus A Secular Age, but East and West need a “compassionate co-experience” of the “fractured Christian world.” And an exaggeration and rejection of western errors will not do; they must be overcome. And they must be overcome through a “new creative act,” which we can justly exchange with terminology Florovsky will later coin, through a “neo-patristic synthesis.” And For Florovsky, this synthesis is motivated by a mission.

A missionary impulse can be found throughout Florovsky’s writings. The New Testament, he argues, has a “missionary background” that should not be overlooked. “‘The Apostolic Preaching,’ therein embodied and recorded, had a double purpose: the edification of the faithful and the conversion of the world. Therefore the New Testament is not a community-book in the same exclusive sense as the Old Testament surely was. It is still a missionary book.” And what we find in the New Testament is that the Church has a mission: “men are called to be Christ’s witnesses: His Messengers and Apostles. The Church is essentially a missionary institution.” We should be thankful for those who have gone before us, but we must remember that we too are implicated in that missionary enterprise: “one should not be too easily satisfied with what has been done by others. So much has been left not done by us.” In Ways, he illustrates the missionary spirit in Ivan Vishenskii, a 17th century Russian whose writings demonstrated a concern with the “fundamental predicament” of his day:

the worldliness of the contemporary Church and the lowering of the Christian standard. Vishenskii’s approach to the problem was thoroughly ascetical. . . . His was not simply a call for passive resistance. It

was an invitation to enter battle, but a battle of the spirit, an “unseen warfare.”

The “Apostolic Preaching” and Vishenskii’s ascetic approach through unseen warfare were not, for Florovsky, an outdated, superstitious approach of the past, but rather a model to be followed.

In fact, the early Christian approach to the pagan Empire is precisely the model Florovsky advocated. For in Florovsky’s eyes, that world—“when the seed was sown and germinated in the untransfigured world through the sanctified first sowing”—was not totally dissimilar from our own.

At that time the bearers of the Good News had to speak most often precisely to untransfigured hearts, to the dark and sinful consciences of the “pagans” to whom they were sent and who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. The godless and “unbelieving” world of the present is in a certain sense precisely the pre-Christian world revived, in all its variegated interweaving of pseudo-religious, skeptical, and antireligious attitudes.

According to Florovsky, the world desperately needed to be reconverted to Christianity, and this is precisely what had to be preached. Indeed, a reconversion of our world, for Florovsky, “is the only way out of that impasse into which the world has been driven by the failure of Christians to be truly Christian.”

Florovsky’s insistence on preaching a reconversion, however, was both a sacramental and a theological task. As a sacramental task, the Church is to introduce the world to the new life in Christ, which is experienced in His Body, the Church.

The Church is more than a company of preachers, or a teaching society, or a missionary board. It has not only to invite people, but also to introduce them into this New Life, to which it bears witness. It is a missionary body indeed, and its mission field is the whole world. But the aim of its missionary activity is not merely to convey to people certain convictions or ideas, not even to impose on them a definite discipline or a rule of life, but first of all to introduce them into the New Reality, to convert them, to bring them through

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their faith and repentance to Christ Himself, that they should be born anew in Him and into Him by water and the Spirit. Thus the ministry of the Word is completed in the ministry of the Sacraments.

He also insisted on a theological role for the Church as a missionary institution in a world similar to that of the early Christians. According to Florovsky, it is theology that must “witness before such a world.”

Theology is called upon not to judge but to heal. One must enter into the world of doubts, subterfuges, and self-deceptions in order to respond to doubts and reproaches. But one must enter into this unsettled world with the sign of the cross in one’s heart and the prayer of Jesus in one’s mind, for this is a world of dizzying mysteries where everything is double, crumbling in a certain play of reflections, as if surrounded by mirrors. The theologian is summoned to testify in the world.

But how is theology to be a witness? How can it heal the doubts and deceptions of the world? How should a theologian testify? The passage provided gives a good starting point, a suggestion that affirms Florovsky’s philokalic sensibility: first and foremost with prayer, with the sign of the cross in one’s heart and the Jesus Prayer on one’s lips. But this is only one part of the answer.

As a missionary institution, Florovsky also argued that the Church has an unavoidable apologetic duty, which requires a theological knowledge. As he put it, “to undertake apologetics without a fundamental knowledge of the appropriate sciences or command of their methods, while relying and becoming dependent upon popular literature, was the most dangerous course of all. Such second or third-hand apologetics could never be convincing.” He would articulate it a decade later, at the opening of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, in a description of the difficult nature of theological education, which also reiterated aspects of his neo-patristic synthesis:

the task of a contemporary Orthodox theologian is intricate and enormous. He has much to learn still before he can speak with authority. And above all he has to realize that he has to speak to

an ecumenical audience. He cannot retire into a narrow shell of some local tradition—simply because his Orthodox, i.e. the Patristic, tradition is not a local one, but basically an ecumenical one. And he has to use all his skill to phrase this ecumenical message of the Fathers in such a way as to secure an ecumenical, a truly universal appeal. This obviously cannot be achieved by any servile repetition of the Patristic letter, as it cannot be achieved by a Biblical fundamentalism either. But servility is alien both to the Bible and to the Fathers. They were themselves bold and courageous and adventurous seekers of the Divine truth. To walk truly in their steps means to break the new ways, only in the same field as was theirs. No renewal is possible without a return to the sources.

In contrast to a servile repetition of the Patristic letter or a Biblical fundamentalism, the theologian has three primary tasks. First, one must reacquire the archaic language of Bible. We must “bend our thought to the mental habits of the biblical language and relearn the idiom of the Bible.” Second, one must learn the ancient idiom of the ancient Patristic Church. Just as one needs a command of the original Biblical language to interpret the Scriptures’ message accurately in a new language to a new people, the same is required for the interpretation of Christian dogma. As Florovsky explains it,

to render it in a modern tongue, we must command the original language, in which it has been first uttered. Unless we can do so, we would always be poor interpreters. We would depend slavishly upon some conventional dictionary, in which certain “correspondences” between the isolated and detached “words” in two idioms are registered and fixed. This isolation inevitably betrays both the musical phrase and the whole style of composition. The best dictionary is not yet the living language. And language lives just when it is spontaneously used, and not when it is used simply for class-composition. This was the reason for including the sacred languages of the Scripture into the regular theological curriculum, and every reliable minister of the Word is expected to be able to check all modern “translations” and interpretations, otherwise his interpretation would be inadequate. The same applies to dogma. In order to interpret the mind of the ancient Church,

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i.e., the mind of the Fathers, we have to be Patristically-minded ourselves. Otherwise, we would be in danger of inventing new meanings, instead of interpreting the old. Is this suggestion that we learn the idiom of the ancient Church really ridiculous? Are there not in our time many who endeavor to learn the language of the great Reformers, to rediscover and regain it as their mother tongue and to use it, in the modern environment, for preaching and theological thinking? In fact there are not a few who do really speak the idiom of Luther and Calvin in our day, and do not mind being out of date for that. Just as there are many in the Church of Rome who use the idiom of St. Thomas. As matter of fact in our troubled age almost everyone is ambitious not to speak in theology a vulgar and debased contemporary idiom but to use something nobler and elaborate. Why should we not try to use the idiom of the Fathers? Why should the idiom of the fourth and fifth centuries be eliminated from the contemporary Tower of Babel?

Returning to the sources, however, is not limited to just the Bible and the Fathers. The liturgical Tradition must also be included:

But it must be a return to the sources, to the Well of living water, and not simply a retirement into a library or museum of venerable and respectable, but outlived relics And this: Lex orandi is, and must be, not only a pattern or authority for the lex credendi, but above all a source of inspiration. It is, and ought to be, not so much a binding and restricting authority, as a life in the Spirit, a living experience, a communion with the Truth, with the living Lord, who is not only an authority, but the Truth, the Way and the Life. The true theology can spring only out of a deep liturgical experience. It must once more, as it has be in the age of the Fathers, a witness of the Church, worshiping and preaching, and cease to be merely a school-exercise of curiosity and speculation. This liturgical approach to Theology has always been the distinctive mark of the Orthodox Church.

NOW THAT Florovsky has established the missionary nature of the Church and the three primary educational tasks of the theologian who is called to testify before the world, we’ll end by

making a more explicit connection between Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis and the charge to testify before the world.

Like Charles Taylor, Florovsky is a problem solver. In Florovsky’s words,

My interest has always been in problems. I wanted to be a philosopher from the very beginning. What very early mattered to me most was to have a responsible world view, and to be able to defend it. For this I knew I would have to study science, but not science only.

In his discussion of the philosophical awakening in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, Florovsky presents an outline of the task of philosophical dogmatics offered by Alesksei Vvedenskii, a conservative professor of the Theological Academy. It’s fundamental method involved searching behind every dogma for the question to which that dogma responded:

First, one must establish the positive witness of the Church from Scripture and Tradition, “and here a mosaic of texts is never sufficient but only an organic growth of knowledge.” Then dogma comes alive and discloses itself in its entire speculative depth—as a divine answer to human questions, as a divine Amen and as a witness of the Church. It appears as a “genuine self-understanding” which is spiritually unthinkable to contradict. Dogmatic theology, when it confronts the questions of the present, must constantly re-create dogmas afresh so that the dark coals of traditional formulas are transformed into the illuminating jewels of true faith. In such a presentation of the speculative problems of theology the philosophical and historical methods go hand in hand. The historical method, for its part, leads back to the speculative faith of the Fathers.

The method thus begins with the established witness of the Church in Scripture and Tradition, and only then confronts the questions of the age.

Florovsky affirmed this methodology in a 1963 letter to Dobbie Bateman. Florovsky tells of a student in his Patristic seminar admitting that the seminar students “enjoy immensely the reading of the Fathers.” But they wanted to know what kind of authority the Fathers possess. According

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to Florovsky’s account, the quite revealing conversation continued as follows:

Are we supposed to accept from them even that in which they obviously were “situation-conditioned” and probably inaccurate, inadequate, and even wrong? My answer was obviously, No. Not only because, as it is persistently urged, only the consensus patrum is binding—and, as to myself, I do not like this phrase. The “authority” of the Fathers is not a dictatus papae. They are guides and witnesses, no more. Their vision is “of authority,” not necessarily their words. By studying the Fathers we are compelled to face the problems, and then we can follow them but creatively, not in the mood of repetition. I mentioned this already in the brief preface to my Eastern Fathers of the IVth Century, and provoked a fiery indignation of the late Dom Clément Lialine. So many in our time are still looking for authoritative answers, even before they have encountered any problem. I am fortunate to have in my seminars students who are studying fathers because they are interested in creative theology, and not just in history or archaeology.

So again, we first study the Fathers. And not just their words, for we must acquire their vision by immersing ourselves in their writings. In short, we must acquire the “mind of the Fathers.” Only then can we face the problems, whatever they may be, in our age. Furthermore, we address the problems by following the Fathers creatively, not by merely parroting their texts. This is the heart of Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis.

But one final point, needs to be made. Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis is commonly presented in opposition to Russian religious philosophy. This is simply not true. A revision of this common narrative leads us to our main point in discussing Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis as a new theological mission. Fr. Matthew Baker articulates this connection best:

the full significance of Florovsky’s later formulation of “neo-patristic synthesis” cannot be divorced from the historical context of Idealism and Russian religious philosophy whose metaphysics he had sought to oppose. Just as the Slavophiles had begun to search for a new religious synthesis to overcome Western problematics in philosophy and culture,

Florovsky himself also had early on designated Germany as “the ‘heart’ and the ‘capital’ of world culture” constituted by the “Romano-Germanic world.” In the crisis of German Idealism, he perceived not “only a German affair,” but “a world event,” “a revolutionary change in the whole of European history,” which required a response from Orthodox thought. Thus, Florovsky’s call for a return to the Fathers and a neo-patristic synthesis must not be seen merely as a program for the renewal and restoration of Orthodox thought, nor simply as a new turn in the Russian philosophical search alone, but simultaneously also an attempt at an Orthodox response to the problematics of Western modernity.

Baker later concludes: United with the new Russian religious thinkers such as Soloviev and Bulgakov in their concern for a complete religious-philosophical synthesis, though in disagreement as to philosophical sources and principles, Florovsky’s defense of the “traditional synthesis” accents particularly the “speculative” value of the Fathers’ theology in response to philosophical problems, and the need for the dogmatician to search out the specific questions which lie behind the patristic answers. Together with the dogma which is its source and summit, the historic theology of the Fathers constitutes in essence an integral Christian philosophy.

But the Fathers who successfully create a religious-philosophical synthesis, according to Florovsky,

are more than merely theologians. They are teachers, “teachers of the Church,” doctors Ecclesiae, oi didiaskoloi tes oikoumenes. In catholic transfiguration, personality receives strength and power to express the life and consciousness of the whole. And this not as an impersonal medium, but in creative and heroic action. We must not say: “Every one in the Church attains the level of catholicity,” but “every one can, and must, and is called to attain it.” Not always and not by everyone is it attained. In the Church we call those who have attained it Doctors and Fathers, because from them we hear not only their personal profession, but also the testimony of the Church; they speak to us from its catholic completeness, from the completeness of a life full of grace. This “catholic mentality” constitutes the incomparable methodological value or authority of patristic writings.

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While not everyone attains such catholicity, the fact that Florovsky suggests they can and must, indicates the possibility of new Fathers in every age. Indeed, that is precisely what he argued for in his lecture on St. Gregory Palamas for the 600th anniversary of his death. Florovsky criticized both East and West for being influenced by a Protestant historiography of decay: “it doesn’t make much difference if we restrict the normative authority of the Church to one century, or to five, or to eight. There should be no restriction at all.” He concludes, “The Church is still fully authoritative as she has been in the ages past, since the Spirit of Truth quickens her now no less effectively as in ancient times.”

In contrast to such Holy Fathers, Florovsky critiques Soloviev and Khomiakov for beginning with modern philosophical categories. Their system, he argues “was an attempt to re-shape afresh the dogmas of Christian belief and Tradition in the categories of modern philosophy …” In contrast to this sort of system, which he notes was taken up by Soloviev’s successors (i.e., Florensky and Bulgakov),

one should oppose another: the task of theology lies not so much in translating the Tradition of faith into contemporary language, into the terms of the most recent philosophy, but lies rather in discovering in the ancient patristic tradition the perennial principles of Christian philosophy; this task lies not in controlling dogma by means of contemporary philosophy but rather in re-shaping philosophy on the experience of faith itself so that the experience of faith would become the source and measure of philosophical views. The weakest side of Soloviev and his school was precisely this misuse of the speculative process which can enchain, and often even deform, Tradition and the experience of faith.

We have now moved from considering the questions confronted by the early Christian Fathers, to which their dogmatic definitions were addressed, to the contemporary confrontation with questions of our own age, which will require yet another “recreation of those dogmas.” Florovsky encapsulates his neo-patristic synthesis at the end of Ways, noting both its creative and catholic

dimension, as well as the inherent dangers if not implemented correctly:

One can hardly gauge the fullness of the Church by the standards of Kant, Lotze, Bergson, or Schelling; there is something tragicomical in the very idea. What is necessary is not a recasting of dogmatic formulas from an archaic idiom into a modern one, but rather a creative return to this “archaic” experience, in order to once more relive its thought and reinclude it into the unbroken fabric of catholic fullness. All earlier attempts at such “recasting” or transcribing unfailingly resulted in “betrayal”—i.e., reinterpretation in terms known to be inadequate.

In Florovsky’s address at the opening of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in 1949, he discussed the Russian impulse for renewal that occurred, first with the publication of the Philokalia by St. Paisy, then with the translation of the Bible directed by Filaret of Moscow, and then in the return of Russian “philosophers to the Church and their attempt to re-interpret precisely the Patristic tradition in modern terms, to restate the teaching of the Church as a complete philosophy of life.” He went on to describe this effort in positive terms, unlike what we would expect from the way such Russian philosophers are typically pitted against Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis:

It was a noble endeavor, and a daring and courageous one. There is no need to conceal all the dangers of this venture or the failures of those who run the risk. Unfortunately, this reinterpretation was unnecessarily linked with the adoption of German idealistic philosophy, of Hegel, Schelling, and Baader, and very much of unhealthy mysticism has crept into the schemes constructed by Vladimir Soloviev, the late Father Sergius Boulgakov, Father Paul Florensky, and perhaps most of all the late Nicolas Berdiaev. There is no need to endorse their findings and speculations. But it is high time to walk in their steps.

It is not insignificant that Florovsky used his now-famous, but widely misunderstood, expression “neo-patristic synthesis” in this address, while praising his one-time confessor Fr. Sergius

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Bulgakov, who had been so controversial for his sophiological speculations. Nor is the title of the address insignificant: “The Legacy and the Task of Orthodoxy Theology.” Fr. Matthew Baker perfectly summarizes Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis with this lecture title. Theological synthesis for Florovsky, is

both a historically given legacy from the past (the synthesis or syntheses already achieved by acknowledged Fathers, which remain determinative precisely as a continued reference-point for the present)

and a historical task laid upon the Church in response to contemporary needs and problems in every age (the synthesis to be achieved by the “Fathers” of the present epoch).

Florovsky’s clarified neo-patristic synthesis IS the answer to the key questions of our secular age. And as he suggested in that same 1949 address to the seminary he would go on to academically shape in such significant ways, our goal must be, in Florovsky’s words:

to show and to prove that a modern man can and must persist in his loyalty to the traditional faith and to the Church of the Fathers without compromising his freedom of thought and without betraying the needs or requests of the contemporary world.

NEO-PATRISTIC SYNTHESIS An Ascetic & Philokalic Endeavor


If we approach the Fathers through the Philokalia, we enter the world of the Fathers from a particular direction, so to speak. We do not, at first, encounter the great preachers, or the great thinkers; we may later advance to them, but they are not the first we meet on the way of the Philokalia. We meet first those who have lived the Christian life with an uncompromising directness, we meet those who devoted their lives to prayer and communion with God.

~Andrew Louth

FLOROVSKY’S patrologies include a significant section dedicated to asceticism, sufficiently significant to merit its own volume in the fourteen volumes of Florovsky’s Collected Works. And as Andrew Louth notes, Florovsky’s “conception of patristics has a breadth that would have been unusual at the time he delivered the [St. Sergius patristic] lectures: monasticism and asceticism are for him theological topics, not just phenomena belonging to church history.” The long opening portion of these lectures is dedicated to defending asceticism through a survey of the “ascetic ideal” in the New Testament, all as a critique of the Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren, particularly against his work Agape and Eros.

Florovsky begins his argument with Christ: “When our Lord was about to begin His ministry, He went into the desert. Our Lord had options, but He selected—or rather, ‘was lead by the Spirit,’ into the desert. . . . And there—in the desert—our Lord engages in spiritual combat, for He ‘fasted forty days and forty nights.’” Florovsky concludes his opening argument by declaring that “We are to follow our Lord in every way possible. ‘To go into the desert’ is ‘to follow’ our Lord.” He goes on to reflect on the desert:

When St. Antony goes into the desert, he is “following” the example of our Lord—indeed, he is “following” our Lord. This in no way diminishes

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the unique, salvific work of our Lord, this in no way makes of our Lord God, the God-Man, a mere example. But in addition to His redemptive work, which could be accomplished only by our Lord, our Lord taught and set examples. And by “following” our Lord into the desert, St. Antony was entering a terrain already targeted and stamped by our Lord as a specific place for spiritual warfare. There is both specificity and “type” in the “desert.” In those geographical regions where there are no deserts, there are places which are similar to or approach that type of place symbolized by the “desert.” It is that type of place which allows the human heart solace, isolation. It is the type of place which puts the human heart in a state of aloneness, a state in which to meditate, to pray, to fast, to reflect upon one’s inner existence and one’s relationship to ultimate reality—God. And more. It is a place where spiritual reality is intensified, a place where spiritual life can intensify and simultaneously where the opposing forces to spiritual life can become more dominant. It is the terrain of a battlefield but a spiritual one. And it is our Lord, not St. Antony, who has set the precedent.

In addition to Florovsky’s recognition of the reality of unseen spiritual warfare, we see here Florovsky’s emphasis on freedom, both in the God-Man, who chose to engage in spiritual combat—“Our Lord had options, but He selected” —and in humans, like all of us, who must choose to follow the precedent set by Christ. For Florovsky, this freedom is connected to his view of history.

Rowan Williams notes that Florovsky’s “emphasis on historical creativity, history as a pattern of free acts, leads naturally to a critique of all theologies that undervalue the historical Jesus: for Florovsky, the category of podvig (roughly equivalent to ‘achievement,’ even ‘exploit,’ and common in speaking of ascetic saints) is central to understanding Christ, as in understanding all human actions.” Williams concludes that Jesus’ death must be His own free act; His “whole existence must be the triumph of freedom in the world if we are to be liberated for proper historical action.” This is precisely what creates the disagreement between Florovsky and Nygren. Nygren “identifies any participation of man in his

salvation, any movement of human will and soul toward God, as a pagan distortion of Agape, as ‘Eros.’” And it is this theological view that leads to Nygren’s “rejection of monasticism and other forms of asceticism and spirituality so familiar to the Christian Church from its inception.” In sharp contrast, Florovsky believes that “in freely creating man, God willed to give man an inner spiritual freedom.” He further explains:

In no sense is this a Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian position. The balanced synergistic doctrine of the early and Eastern Church, a doctrine misunderstood and undermined by Latin Christianity in general from St. Augustine on—although there was always opposition to this in the Latin Church—always understood that God initiates, accompanies, and completes everything in the process of salvation. What it always rejected—both spontaneously and intellectually—is the idea of irresistible grace, the idea that man has no participating role in his salvation.

This same tension plays out between Florovsky and Karl Barth. For Barth, “Willing, achieving, creative, sovereign man as such cannot be considered as a participator in God’s work.” But for Florovsky, man must freely respond to God’s call. Listen to Florovsky’s remark while guest lecturing at one of Barth’s seminars in 1931:

Revelation is always a Word addressed to man, a summons and an appeal to man. . . . The highest objectivity in the hearing and understanding of Revelation is achieved through the greatest exertion of the creative personality, through spiritual growth, through the transfiguration of the personality, which overcomes in itself “the wisdom of flesh,” ascending to “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). From man it is not self-abnegation which is demanded but a victorious forward movement, not a self-destruction but a rebirth or transformation, indeed a theosis. Without man Revelation would be impossible—because no one would be there to hear and God would then not speak. And God created man so that man would hear His words, receive them, and grown in them and through them become a participator of

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“eternal life.” The Fall of man did not alter the original intention of God. Man has not lost completely the capacity of hearing God and praising Him.

Man not only has a participating role in salvation, but his “creative personality” must hear and understand God’s Revelation by means of the “greatest exertion”! George Williams echoes Rowan Williams, noting that Florovsky uses the distinctive phrase “ascetic achievement” (podvig) to express his emphasis on human freedom: “Freedom within man’s creatureliness is compounded of faith, love, grace, decision, and strenuousness. The model of the free man is the prophet, the Virgin, the martyr, the ascetic, and the saint.”

Florovsky also applied this concept of podvig to the scholar. For Florovsky, scholarship could also be an “ascetic achievement.” Describing the Russian Aleksandr V. Gorskii (1812-1875), Florovsky says: “His personal example was a testimony and a reminder that scholarship is an exploit [podvig] and a service.” He describes the work of theologians engaging in philosophy in a similar manner: “the Fathers of the Church made a great effort [podvig] to create a new system capable of giving a translation of faith into rational terms.” Consider the biblical and patristic translation work of Philaret of Moscow, or the translations and writings of the ascetic Fathers in the Philokalia by St. Nikodimos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth (as well as St. Theophan the Recluse, after them), who viewed their scholarly work as a missionary and ascetic endeavor. Their work was not only a podvig in and of itself, but it was conducted with a desire to inspire a podvig among its readers, which would lead to unceasing prayer. According to Kallistos Ware,

they looked upon this patristic heritage not as an archaeological survival from the distant past, but as a living guide for contemporary Christians. In editing the Fathers, they had such a practical purpose in view. It was their hope that the Philokalia and other such publications would not simply gather dust on the bookshelves of scholarly specialists, but would be read by the laity as well as by monastics and clergy. As the two editors stated on the title page of the Philokalia, the book

is intended “for the general benefit of the Orthodox.” In his introduction Nikodimos maintains that St. Paul’s injunction, “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), is addressed not merely to hermits in caves and on mountain tops but to married Christians with responsibilities to family, to farmers, merchants, and lawyers, even to kings and courtiers living in palaces.

Great saints such as St Nikodimos and St. Makarios, or the many heroes in Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology who helped restore a patristic style to Russian theology, all participated in and advocated what Andrew Louth has described as a “philokalic style, or tenor, of theology.” Louth describes it in this way:

It seems likely that it was in response to his encounter with the Dobrotolubiye [Philokalia]that the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky came to speak of the Fathers as bearing “testimony as eyewitnesses” and speaking of “a country they have been to.” A sense of the patristic tradition as our inheritance as Christians seems to me central to the Philokalia, and in several ways: objectively, there is a sense of who the Fathers are, and the inclusion of St. Maximos and St. Gregory Palamas, in particular, makes it clear that the great patristic witnesses revered by us Orthodox—the great hierarchs and universal teachers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, Sts. Athanasios and Cyril of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa, celebrated by the Church, together with St. Maximos, in the latter part of January (with St. Photios not far away)—are prominent in this their native land, but remembered alongside ascetics and mystics who live out the theology they proclaimed; but subjectively there is the sense of the Fathers as precisely our fathers (and in principle) mothers, those to whom we owe our faith, those who have nurtured us in the Faith. Furthermore, we participate in this tradition not just by learning (though learning is important, as St. Nikodimos’s example makes clear, but by praying, by living out the theology we discern and proclaim. The Philokalia—as both text and life—initiates us into a participation in the divine life, the divine energies, by … a process of purification, illumination, and perfection. That terminology, that process, is also applied by the Fathers to the activation and practice of the

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spiritual senses, the ways in which we perceive by feeling, sensing, the movement of the Holy Spirit, in ourselves, in others, in the world. What we are seeing here is something that goes beyond reading and understanding and is more like participation and assimilation.

It is precisely this type of “philokalic style, or tenor of theology” to which Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis calls us to return and to creatively revive in our own age. However, as Louth indicates, this does not mean a rejection of learning. For it was only through the scholarly work of St. Nikodimos, St. Makarios, and others that this philokalic tenor could be revived. And it is precisely such a philocalic tenor, achieved through podvig, that is required of theologians today, especially those engaged in any attempt at a neo-patristic synthesis.

VERONICA


Our venerable mother among the saints, they say your name must be a fiction, a folk etymology But I ask you by name: receive this prayer and swiftly aid me in my quiet calamity, you who bear a name of incompatible tensions: a name of Latin in fact; but an Image of the Greek. I, too, stand in the midst of tensions, a soul-rending incompatibility I am without identity, exposed, unable to answer the daily charges against me. I live in a world of Veritas (more often, virtuality) a world where outside demands must meet on outside terms. Facts like bricks and asphalt wall me in from all directions. Yet from within I live a spacious certainty, a city of light and living things, with icon-lined and tree-lined streets, a city of my heart’s longing and her Home.

Yet I feel now a breaking. I feel I cannot survive the torture of this tension I feel the eyes of judges keeping count of all my thoughts, all my decision. I have two Native Lands, two Choices. And though I love the Greek, I must also love (not merely tolerate) the Latin. I must be heroic in both worlds; I am watched from both. For the sake of others, I would sacrifice my first love for the second. But secretly this sacrifice would be for my relief, and not for others’ benefit.

So what I ask, dear Mother, is your strength and consolation. I see you stand so patiently in your Icon, holding the life-drenched cloth: stained with mucus, blood, hair and skin—stained in short, with suffering: the Latin: clean white linen, and the Greek: the vivisection. My temptation is to wash the cloth, and to collect and preserve the blood in some other good container —wouldn’t these decisions, in some way be proper and commendable? This way, the cloth could be used again, could be active, and the blood preserved, contained in holy stillness?

But silently you hold the cloth. Patiently and mildly as if the ruining of human thought and labor weren’t already grief enough, as if the dripping blood and mucus weren’t already a terror of human violence. I know. I know. I wish to know: how the cloth and blood are now fused that this meeting of geometry and chaos was planned before the weaving of time. The plan and labor of human effort has no higher use than to be stained by the Human Blood of God. Without the Cloth, the Face could not be revealed Without the Face, the Cloth would have no eternal Use—this Use it dearly longs for.

Help me, dear mother. I have the task but not the strength to be both the Latin and the Greek, to be matter yet spirit, labor yet stillness, to live my exile gladly, all the while longing for the living country of my native land.

Amen.

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The Philokalia 4 volumes (of projected 5) compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth; translated from the Greek and edited by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware The Philokalia is a collection of texts written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by thirty-six spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition. Compiled by Sts. Nikodemos and Makarios of Mt. Athos and published in 1782, with other versions and variations published thereafter (e.g., Slavonic, Russian, Romanian, and Finnish), The Philokalia has had an influence far greater than that of any book other than the Bible in the recent history of the Orthodox Church. In the Introduction (which is essential to read before entering into the text itself) Metropolitan Kallistos Ware poses the question of what determined the choice of texts contained in The Philokalia, and offers the following explanation: “‘Philokalia’ itself means love of the beautiful, the exalted, the excellent, understood as the transcendent source of life and the revelation of Truth. It is through such love that, as the subtitle of the original edition puts it, ‘the intellect is purified, illumined, and made perfect.’” As such, “The Philokalia is an itinerary through the labyrinth of time, a silent way of love and gnosis through the deserts and emptinesses of life, especially of modern life, a vivifying and fadeless presence…”

Volume One contains the earliest writings of the entire corpus, including selections from Isaiah the Solitary, Evagrios Ponticus, St. John Cassian (this selection includes one of the earliest descriptions of the “Eight Vices,” which evolved in Western spirituality into the Seven Deadly Sins), St. Mark the Ascetic (a text of special note: On Those who Think that They Are Made Righteous by Works), St. Hesychios the Priest, St. Neilos the Ascetic, St. Diadochos of Photiki (St. Nikodemos claimed that his On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination reveals “the deepest secrets of the virtue of prayer”) and St. John of Karpathos.

378 pp. paper $19.95

Volume Two is dominated by a selection from the writings of St. Maximos the Confessor, whose theological and spiritual depth and precision is increasingly recognized among contemporary theologians, both within and without the Orthodox tradition. Included are his Four Hundred Texts on Love, Two Hundred Texts on Theology Written for Thalassios, and On the Lord’s Prayer. The aforementioned Thalassios is represented here by a short work, On Love, Self Control, and Life in Accordance with the Intellect. This volume also contains A Discourse on Abba Philimon (late sixth century), the earliest text to mention the Jesus Prayer in its standard form, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

414 pp. paper $21.00

Volume Three presents to us St. Philotheos of Sinai, Ilias the Presbyter, a spiritual predecessor of St. Gregory Palamas, St. Peter of Damaskos (eleventh century), whose Treasury of Divine Knowledge occupies more space in The Philokalia than any other writer save

Maximos, and St. Symeon Metaphrastis’ Paraphrase of the Homilies of St. Makarios of Egypt. Its themes of unseen warfare in the human heart, of synergeia or co-operation between divine grace and human will, and the possibility of conscious assurance of the indwelling grace of the Holy Spirit, foreshadow the spirituality of St. Symeon the New Theologian.

379 pp. paper $19.00

Volume Four begins with the writings of St. Symeon “the New Theologian” (this title placing him in the select company of St. John the Evangelist and St. Gregory Nazianzen), specifically his One Hundred Fifty Three Practical and Theological Texts. Next come three treatises from St. Symeon’s disciple and biographer, Nikitas Stithatos. This volume culminates with “the two Gregories” of the fourteenth century: St. Gregory of Sinai and St. Gregory Palamas, who together (though “in the flesh” independently) articulated and defended the validity of the experience of those who through unceasing prayer and stillness (hesychia) saw the uncreated light of the Godhead. St. Gregory Palamas’ important One Hundred Fifty Chapters and Declaration of the Holy Mountain in Defense of Those who Devoutly Practice a Life of Stillness are presented here.

457 pp. paper $21.00

MAKE A TRIP to PERUSE the SHELVES of BOOKS at EIGHTH DAY BOOKS in WICHITA, KS

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the ESSAYS

“To sift the meaning is the glory of kings” (Pr. 25:2). For they are kings who have learned how to rule over and judge their bodies, that is, the promptings of the flesh. ~St. Gregory the Great

THE HATRED OF PURITY

Frederica Mathewes-Green A. D. 2018

BACK IN my college days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was a hippie and a spiritual seeker. The range of spiritual options on campus was broad, and I sampled a bit of everything: Ananda Marga Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation. I say I was a “seeker,” but that’s not exactly right; I didn’t expect to reach a destination. I was, more accurately, a spiritual explorer, always traveling toward a new horizon.

There’s something about that era that I don’t understand, though. My friends and I savored all the more-esoteric religions, but for some reason we hated Christianity. We ridiculed it automatically, reflexively. The Jesus Freak movement had arrived on campus and, when I ran into newly born-again students, I enjoyed trying to shake their faith. I’d tell them that the myth of a dying-and-rising god isn’t unique to Christianity, but appears in religions around the world. I savored any opportunity for unsettling them and sowing doubts.

Christianity roused in us a kind of malicious delight, though I don’t know why. Somebody donated stacks of the paperback New Testament, Good News for Modern Man, and they were placed in all the dorm lobbies. My friend George, at his dorm, tore them up. When bystanders objected, he said, “It’s a bad translation.” We thought this was hilarious—a witty bit of revolutionary theater.

And we felt, for some reason, that Christians deserved this kind treatment. We told each other that it would do them good. I don’t remember how hearing their faith mocked and insulted was supposed to help them. But something stirring inside made us want to embarrass or sadden them. Other religions didn’t stir up this zestful cruelty; only Christians roused this desire to wound and gloat. The hostility was so inexplicable, yet so intense, that you’d almost think it was related to some unseen spiritual battle.

We told each other that Christians deserved this treatment because they were stuffy and judgmental. But the Jesus Freaks on campus weren’t like that. They looked like our fellow hippies, and were humble, cheerful, and generally amiable. We found that irritating. I would say, “There’s something wrong with those Christians. They’re too clean.”

I THINK what was bugging me was their purity. There’s something about purity that attracts the malicious delight of those who don’t share it. Even when purity is just minding its own business, it still makes for an irresistible target.

The appreciation of purity hasn’t increased over the intervening decades; on the contrary, it seems like everything has been sexualized. If it’s not specifically sexualized, it’s crude. I stopped shopping for greeting cards some years ago (I just make my own), because it seemed like every one I picked up was organized around a fart joke. I stopped going out to see new movies, because gross-out scenes are so likely to suddenly jump out. When this coarsening began, a couple of decades ago, it seemed flatly juvenile, as if everything was being marketed at 13-year-old boys. In time, that passed. I don’t mean the crudity; what passed was the sense that it was juvenile. Now it’s marketed at everybody.

Perhaps the biggest factor in this general decline is the overwhelming amount of porn now available. Pastors like my husband are all too aware of the way pornography destroys marriages, friendships, families—in short, destroys people. It is addictive, of course; it’s designed to be. It is cumulative, of course, and when addicts become inured to shocking images, they are hit with something more shocking still. The overall trend is toward increasing degrees of violence.

When author Martin Amis was researching an article about the porn industry some years ago, he had to watch some sample videos. He later commented that, during that time, “I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I’d like it.” Porn targets, he said, the “near-infinite chaos of human desire,” and if you unknowingly

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harbor some sexual demon, “sooner or later porn will identify it” and bid it come forth.

Given all the varieties of sexual upheaval today, critics tend to focus on gay marriage, saying that it destroys traditional marriage. But in terms of sheer numbers, porn is overwhelmingly more destructive. Also, in terms of sheer numbers, men are much more likely than women to be enslaved by it. But that doesn’t mean they alone suffer its effects.

When I’m out with my little granddaughters, I’m aware that nearly any man we pass could have terrible images burned into his brain. That’s the world they will have to live in. When they’re a little older, they may unknowingly date such men. They may unknowingly marry one. (Remember, the next step is violence.) All their lives, my granddaughters will be walking through a porn-saturated community.

But that considers only the impact on them. What about the effect on the men themselves? What is it like to feel that your mind is no longer under your control, that you can no longer stop the rushing thoughts that repulse and frighten you?

Yet it’s so easy to begin. At the University of Maryland a few years ago, two student groups, Christian and atheist, held a debate. At one point the pastor made a reference to porn, and suddenly the room was filled with hooting and applause. I was shocked; I guess I’m just naïve. I didn’t know this was something young men are proud of. But that brief reference to porn got the most enthusiastic audience response of the evening.

THAT BRINGS us back to the question of why purity would be hated. Those who continue to think, quaintly, that it is beautiful and worthy of honor are no threat to anybody’s freedom; their private opinion doesn’t matter to anyone else. We are at a rare (perhaps unique) moment in history, in which everyone is free to seek any kind of sex they want. The old moral standards are long gone, and the prudes and scolds who guarded them have disappeared. Yet there’s still a craving to find someone to cast in that role, some disapproving square to shock. It’s not really rebellion if no one’s trying to stop you.

That’s why people who do see the beauty in sexual purity, who try to practice it and encourage others, can find themselves unexpectedly cast as the bad guy in a stranger’s drama. No wonder those who value purity tend to do so quietly, keeping their beliefs within the context of home, church, and community. Purity has become a deeply unpopular opinion, fit only for religious oddballs.

And yet, in other contexts, we all value purity. Don’t we want purity to be top priority at the local dairy? On a stroll through Whole Foods, how many times do you see the word “Pure” on packaging? Dozens of magazines have “Pure” in their title, apparently believing that it sells magazines. About the only thing our fractured nation agrees on is the necessity of guarding nature’s purity.

Everyone understands the beauty of purity in other contexts. So why is sexual purity the exception? Why does it elicit a zesty, flavorful hate, and a desire to wound and sadden those who love it?

Oddly enough, in the Orthodox Church we hold up as an example—literally, on our iconostases —a man who was killed for denouncing sexual impurity. In his icon, St. John the Baptist stands on a desert landscape, with a bowl at his feet displaying his severed head. A scroll tumbles open from his hand:

O Word of God, See what they suffer, Those who censure the faults of the ungodly; Unable to bear rebuke, Behold, Herod has cut off my head, O Savior.

King Herod was “unable to bear rebuke” for marrying his brother’s wife; St. John was unable to stop rebuking. We know how that story ends for St. John. But for King Herod nothing changed. He had not found St. John’s words persuasive, and continued in marriage with Herodias till his death.

Might anything persuade people to honor sexual purity, if they don’t instinctively sense its value? Persuasive words are hard to find, and even attempting to find them makes us look like

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tasty targets. Meanwhile, the world keeps advertising the availability of everything they desire. What could ever change this situation?

Well, to take a very long view, there’s the fact that it’s false advertising. Wanting sex is not the same thing as having it. Every year, a fresh batch of 20-year-olds rolls off the conveyor belt, and every year everyone else looks a year older. Time is relentless. Attractiveness is fleeting. The two-faced world maintains a simultaneous barrage of ads for snacky, fatty foods, which may be irresistibly comforting in the wake of rejection, but make the physique even less competitive.

Some years ago I noticed that there was a word that, if I said it during a speech, the audience would freeze. The word is “loneliness.” Having no obligations to anyone means no one has any obligations to you, and the possible repercussions grow more terrible with each accumulating year. Sexual liberation has set us free, like an astronaut who cuts through his lifeline. Those annoying prudes and scolds of earlier days represented, not their own whims, but their community’s consensus on the bounds of acceptable behavior. The price of being in a community is reckoning with those expectations. The price of not being in a community is despair.

It’s a very long view, and in the short term we’re not likely to be any more successful than St. John was. Even attempting to present the beauty of sexual purity will likely attract only that mysterious cruelty. But we can continue to exhort and encourage each other, and try our best not to let the team down. We can also be very selective about the material we allow into our minds, because it’s very hard to get it out again. There’s no better advice than this:

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Phil. 4:8)

THE ASCETICS OF AUTHENTICITY

Ben T. Davis A. D. 2019

SEVERAL years ago I completed an endurance event known as an Ironman. For twelve hours I endured deep, strenuous pain as I swam 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles, and ran a marathon—26.2 miles. By the time I crossed the finish line I had traversed 140.6 grueling miles in 98-degree heat, battling an unceasing 25-mile-per-hour cross-wind. Since then I have been asked: “Why did you do it?” The only answer I have been able to muster is this: I wanted to be authentic.

Authenticity is difficult to define. Broadly speaking we can say that authenticity is the modern notion that one is free to be the person one wants to be according to one’s desires and moral ideals. It involves being true to oneself and realizing the fullness of one’s personal capacities. For me, completing an Ironman was a significant way to express my freedom and stretch my capacities. I wanted to live on my own terms; I thought completing an Ironman was an authentic act of my self-expression.

With a measure of wisdom, I can now say I learned an important lesson in that time of my life that remains with me still: authenticity takes practice. To be the person I sincerely want to be, I have to submit myself to an arduous process of training, discipline, and self-denial. To be authentic I have to be ascetic.

Asceticism has little purchase in our culture. For moderns, it is associated with obscure religious practices or self-punishment. But this common view betrays an ignorance of asceticism that should be overcome by closer investigation.

Behind the word “asceticism” we find the Greek word askein, which means “to exercise” or “to train.” For ancient Greeks, askein was characteristic of athletes who endured rigorous training in order to participate in competition. Eventually the word became canonical among Greek philosophers who broadened its use to

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include the training of one’s intellect. The soul, like the body, needed to be trained for a particular set of skills that prepared one for the good life. Asceticism, then, was the liberating force that freed the athlete as well as the philosopher to discover an authentic way of being human.

Today, however, the nature of this relationship has changed. The muscular discipline that once made authenticity a component of virtue is reduced to lazy self-infatuation. Authenticity no longer requires ascetic practice, in other words; it only requires a will to act. In some instances, the endless pursuit of authenticity is a prison—an “iron cage,” as Max Weber put it—that modernity has constructed to confine the good life to immediate gratification.

The Christian tradition gives us an alternative vision of reality. In baptism a particular identity is conferred that is essentially one of discipline, sacrifice, and radical charity. In turn, Christians are reoriented to an authentic way of being in the world. Separated at the birth of modernity, authenticity and asceticism are reunited again in the Christian faith.

The baptized life, as David Jasper calls it, is an “ascetic reversal” (The Sacred Body, p. 34). John’s Gospel tells us, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12:25). Baptism begins a journey marked by cruciform participation in Christ’s kenotic life. In Christ, Christians experience a beautiful death. Paradoxically, out of death they participate in Christ’s resurrection life, which is characterized by joy, shalom, and beatitude.

Christianity cultivates an ascetics of authenticity that takes one out of the iron cage of self-obsession and sets one’s feet in a “broad place” (Ps. 18:19) of delight and self-donation. This “broad place” is where idols are transformed into icons; humans become intimations of the sacred.

A poignant passage from Georges Bernanos’ novel The Diary of a Country Priest reveals the beauty of such an authentic life. In a moment of reflection on the true nature of prayer, the young priest says,

Scientists can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgment, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners in their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity! (Da Capo Press, 2002, p. 104)

Through asceticism and solidarity, this fellowship of suffering pilgrims becomes an authentic witness to the life-giving power of Christ’s resurrection.

Early in the Church’s history some Christians went into the desert to test the strength of their baptized identity. In his article on “Asceticism as Healing Art,” David Fagerberg tells us these desert Christians “wanted to see what it would take to order a life to God” (churchlife.nd.edu). In time they found the desert to be a healing place for their wounded souls. Seeking wisdom, others went to them asking for “a word” on which they could build their life. In reply they received stories focused on particular healing practices the monks had tried. As Fagerberg observes: “One put more emphasis on fasting; another on Scripture reading and vigils; all of them emphasized prayer, and all of them agreed that since charity is the goal, an opportunity to practice charity should trump whatever asceticism you have scheduled for that afternoon” (ibid.). Over time, rich liturgical and theological traditions developed from the lives and practices of these desert monks. The desert became a sacred space where one could wage war against the devil with the sword of prayer and in turn be refreshed by deep communion with God.

St. Maximus the Confessor (590-662), an erudite monk who helped refine the ascetic tradition, might be considered the Ironman of the Christian life. He embodies the ascetics of authenticity for he knew the only way to be authentically human—that is, to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ—is through self-abnegation. For Maximus, theosis requires kenosis.

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In his first Century on Theology and the Incarnation, Maximus writes: “Baptized in Christ through the Spirit we receive the first incorruption according to the flesh. Keeping the original incorruption spotless by giving ourselves to good works and by dying to our own will, we await the final incorruption bestowed by Christ in the Spirit.” Baptism is the touchstone of the authentic Christian life. Living into the glory of our baptism, however, requires a recalibration of the will. Recalibration comes through slow, graced, ascetic practices such as fasting, silence, rigorous prayer, charity, and ingesting the Scriptures. The strength found in these practices is not instantaneous; each practice is like a muscle that is slowly transformed over time. Muscles cannot grow stronger unless they learn to work under pressure. The same is true of the soul. It gets stronger as it meets resistance.

But to put it this way risks missing Maximus’s larger vision of creation. In Maximus’s theology, Christians are a grand choir in the magnificent cathedral of creation, participating in the divine liturgy of the cosmos. The form of their participation is mimetic: Christians imitate the angelic hosts of heaven in their praise and adoration of the Holy Trinity. It is also communal: Christians don’t just imitate the angels; they also join them and the whole company of heaven as they sing an eternal hymn of thanksgiving. Out of this cosmic vision comes the ascetic virtues necessary for our participation, the highest of which is theologia, communion with God in contemplative prayer.

St. Maximus is a well-traveled guide for people who are seeking to live authentically in modernity. His cosmic liturgy offers us a thicker vision of reality that is therapeutic for our restive souls. But in Maximus’s vision, we do not escape the desert. There is no theosis without kenosis. In order to see the beauty of Christ we must embrace the horrific ugliness of his Cross—which itself possesses a haunting beauty. “For,” as St. Paul says, “if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we will certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His” (Rom. 6:5).

In The Ascetic Life, a deep meditation on the meaning of the ascetics of authenticity, St. Maximus speaks about continuous devotion to God:

It is impossible for a mind to devote itself perfectly to God, except it should possess these three virtues: love, self-mastery, and prayer. Love tames anger; self-mastery quenches concupiscence; prayer withdraws the mind from all thoughts and presents it, stripped, to God Himself. These are the three virtues that comprise all the virtues; without these the mind cannot devote itself to God. (Ancient Christian Writers, No. 21, p.114)

That the reorientation of our souls to the will of God requires more discipline, sacrifice, and strength of endurance than any feat of human accomplishment says something remarkable about the Christian life. To cultivate the virtues Maximus speaks of will be the most difficult task of our lives, to be sure. But the telos to which all our labors point is worth more than any treasure we can imagine. At the end of that journey we gain the wisdom of knowing that the ascetics of authenticity is only possible Coram Deo.

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GOD IS AGAPE & EROS Pope Benedict XVI’s Message for

Our Mad Nietzschean World

Matthew Umbarger A. D. 2019

167. To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame—and something precious.

168. Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

CHRISTIAN mysticism is dependent upon some familiarity with eros, defined by Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est as “that love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.” But for eros to function healthily, it has to be allied to the more profound, self-giving love of agape. The cultural forces of puritanism on the one hand and of libertinism on the other have been struggling for many generations now to completely divorce these loves from one another.

You and I live in a Nietzschean world, friend, and from an opposing, Chestertonian perspective, that means that we live in a mad world. Because we Christians remain largely ignorant of the Nietzschean forces at work in our culture, we find ourselves pre-occupied with the symptomatic grass fires smoldering at arm’s length, unaware of their philosophical source: the blazing inferno encroaching closer and closer to our cultural homes. In matter of fact, to a great degree, the madness has infected us as well.

I have known (and if I want to be honest, I have been) the sort of Christian targeted in the two statements made above: ashamed of intimacy and afraid of eros; attempting to defeat it rather than redeem it. There were plenty of well-meaning but misguided Puritans in my early spiritual formation. I remember, for instance, a camp counselor who warned us of the evils of

secular music and film, including the sex-infused lyrics on the radio. An impressionable thirteen-year-old boy, I nodded in agreement and rededicated my life to Christian contemporary music. I surrendered all.

But I now realize that most of my peers did not. Not long after that week of camp, most of my peers fell prey to the Nietzschean account of Christianity’s corruption of eros. The Church was a spoilsport that didn’t want them to have fun. Lessons in youth group about the mysterious “red line” in dating that we were forbidden to cross only strengthened this impression. By the time we were in college, most of us who had remained in the Church (and many of us did!) were just as sexually experimental as our unchurched friends, and the result was shame over the precious intimacies that we had experienced. Eros was poisoned and degraded for us. All that remained was our deeply prized vice.

It is no great surprise that Nietzsche’s accusation of eros-poisoning against Christianity is couched in a work that opens by calling into question our very capability to actually know Truth. Madness! But this madness is a major tributary to the relativism that so defines our culture today. When the inaccessibility of Truth itself is deemed axiomatic, all can be redefined according to our personal whims, including our selves and the forces we find at work in those selves. That encompasses love in all its forms.

One of those forms is eros. It never appears under that name in the New Testament (perhaps because at that time the pagan culture surrounding the early Church had imbued it with so many false notions that any attempt to use the term for a holy purpose would have been liable to create confusion). But it does appear in the text of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament.

There are, of course, the “usual suspects” associated with this Greek root in the Septuagint. Many of the prophets use the plural of erastos and erastes as denominators for Israel’s illicit lovers. Ezekiel couples (no pun intended) erastes and erastos with another word for sexual activity that has no positive connotations at all: porneia. That

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these words occur in the plural underlines the promiscuous nature of these false religious and political relationships in violation to the exclusive covenant relationship with Israel’s God.

But there are also positive images of eros in the Septuagint. Esther 2:17, in the only literalistic use of the root in the Bible, employs the verbal form to tell us that King Ahasuerus loved Esther. And it is this erotic love that results in their marriage, and consequently, the salvation of the Jewish people.

The two most positive occurrences of the eros root appear in the wisdom literature. In Proverbs 4:6 the narrator instructs his son to love his instruction. In the greater context of this book, I think that it is likely that the teacher’s instruction is meant to be analogous, if not identical, to Lady Wisdom, the unifying figure of the work. In any case, in the next place that we find the verbal form of eros in the wisdom literature, the author is explicitly professing his love for Lady Wisdom. “I loved her and sought her from my youth, and I desired to take her for my bride, and I became enamored of her beauty” (Wisdom 8:2, RSVCE). The word in italics is erastes, literally, “a lover.”

Meditating on passages such as John 1:1 and 1 Corinthians 1:24, the early Church Fathers came to identify Lady Wisdom as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who would come to be hypostatically united with the humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the mystery of the Incarnation. Taking this into account shows what a remarkable text Wisdom 8:2 really is. For in this Old Testament passage the language of erotic love is applied to unmediated union with God’s Word. In other words, the erotic element transforms a straightforward contemplation of God’s wisdom into a mystical text. In fact, a few verses down, in verse 4, Wisdom Herself is granted the title “initiate in the knowledge of God.” The word translated “initiate” by the RSVCE is mystis, i.e., “mystic.”

Of course, the language of eros is not foreign to mystical texts. There is a striking example in the fifth chapter of Julian of Norwich’s Showings. “But what the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover truly are to me I cannot tell, for until I am

substantially made one with Him I may never have full rest nor true bliss; that is to say, until I be so fastened to Him that there stands absolutely nothing between my God and me” (my translation). It is amazing to me to discover that there is a precedent for such provocative language in biblical texts that were composed before the Christian era.

Reflecting on this, authentic spiritual experience will be greatly impoverished if it is forced to expunge eroticism from its mystical vocabulary. (This is only one reason why young Christians need to be introduced to the right sort of secular love songs instead of being force-fed second-rate Christian rock and hip-hop). Pope Benedict XVI recognizes the power of eros to beckon us heavenward, acknowledging that it provides a “certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns” (Deus Caritas Est 4). But the converse is true, as well: human erotic relationships that are forced to bear the burden of mystical encounter will inevitably wear down; we will leave each old flame to look for a new one, attempting to rekindle something we remember as a distant memory. It will never be possible to assuage that spiritual nostalgia with new romantic encounters, because what we are haunted with is not anything we have yet personally experienced in this life. We want the intimacy with the Lover of Our Souls that was lost when we were expelled from the Garden.

I have to conclude that the Christianity Nietschze accuses of poisoning eros is not the Christianity of the mystics, but of the half-Gnostic Puritans, who were equally suspicious of bodily sensations and mystical encounters with God. Unfortunately, there are huge swathes of Christians for whom Nietschze’s charge proves damning. Ironically, the sort of Christian who might prove to be easy prey for Nietschze is exactly the sort of Christian that has been wearing himself out against the erotic impulses in his life. Mystics will be largely unaffected, because what Nietschze says, for them personally, has very little basis in reality.

We live in a mad, Nietschzean world. It is Nietschzean in two respects. First of all, we have

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to admit that Nietschze’s portrayal of puritanical Christianity is in many respects well-deserved; there has been undoubtedly an attempt to poison eros by a good many well-meaning Christians. But the rest of the world, perhaps the majority of it, is Nietschzean in that it has adopted his aggressive stance towards the Church and its teachings on human sexuality. Ultimately, the “liberated” eros of this Nietschzean world will cave in upon itself and degrade into vice just as surely as the poisoned eros of puritanical Christianity. The irony is that for eros to flourish, it has to be subject to careful discipline. Once again, Pope Benedict XVI provides wise counsel in what is, ultimately, a genuinely positive assessment of romantic love: “eros tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing” (ibid., 5).

In the same encyclical, based on a passage from Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names, Pope Benedict XVI demonstrates that God’s love is characterized not only by the self-donative love we generally associate with Him, agape, but with the seeking, desiring love of eros. Because both loves have their source in God, both come to humankind as gift, and participating in each of them is in reality a participation in God’s being.

And, though this is not explicitly said in his masterful encyclical, I think the ultimate message for our mad, Nietschzean world is this: for eros to be the exquisite gift that it is meant to be, it must always be embedded in agape. The two go together; they are not opposed. Without agape, eros becomes the pleasure-obsessed hedonist flitting from one tryst to another, always seeking a new and more ultimate, though ultimately transitory experience. Agape tames eros, and makes it a genuine expression of faithfully willing the good of the other, of authentic love. And this is why the Suffering Christ is not only an image of agape, but also of eros, as the powerful icon of Christ the Bridegroom states so eloquently.

I conclude with a bit of frivolity. In the B-52s’ overtly erotic Love Shack, Fred Schneider tells us about his car, “as big as a whale,” headed to the

“Love Shack.” I have begun to think about the driver of this car. Eros is a lot of fun, and you obviously want him along for the ride, but only a madman would give him the keys. Agape will get us to our destination safely. Authentic, biblical, orthodox Christianity insists that both eros and agape come on this journey with us. It is madness to choose one in opposition to the other.

DEUS CARITAS EST God Is Love

Pope Benedict XVI A. D. 2005

GOD IS love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn. 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.”

We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Saint John’s Gospel describes that event in these words: “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should … have eternal life” (3:16). In acknowledging the centrality of love, Christian faith has retained the core of Israel’s faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth. The pious Jew prayed daily the words of the Book of Deuteronomy which expressed the heart of his existence: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

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EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS FOR SPIRITUAL TRAINING

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and with all your soul and with all your might” (6:4-5). Jesus united into a single precept this commandment of love for God and the commandment of love for neighbor found in the Book of Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself ” (cf. Mk. 12:29-31). Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn. 4:10), love is now no longer a mere “command”; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us. . . .

5. [T]here is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence. Yet the way to attain this goal is not simply by submitting to instinct. Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or “poisoning” eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur.

This is due first and foremost to the fact that man is a being made up of body and soul. Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness. The epicure Gassendi used to offer Descartes the humorous greeting: “O Soul!” And Descartes would reply: “O Flesh!” Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love—eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur.

Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex,” has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary,

he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness. Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise “in ecstasy” towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification, and healing.

6. Concretely, what does this path of ascent and purification entail? How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book well known to the mystics. According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love. In this context it is highly instructive to note that in the course of the book two different Hebrew words are used to indicate “love.” First there is the word dodim, a plural form suggesting a love that is still insecure, indeterminate, and searching. This comes to be replaced by the word ahabà, which the Greek version of the Old Testament translates with the similar-sounding agape, which becomes the typical expression for the biblical notion of love. By contrast with an indeterminate, “searching” love, this word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the

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good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.

It is part of love’s growth towards higher levels and inward purification that it now seeks to become definitive, and it does so in a twofold sense: both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being “for ever.” Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy,” not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk. 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt. 10:39; 16:25; Mk. 8:35; Lk. 9:24; Jn. 12:25). In these words, Jesus portrays His own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of His own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, He also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

7. By their own inner logic, these initial, somewhat philosophical reflections on the essence of love have now brought us to the threshold of biblical faith. We began by asking whether the different, or even opposed, meanings of the word “love” point to some profound underlying unity, or whether on the contrary they must remain unconnected, one alongside the other. More significantly, though, we questioned whether the message of love proclaimed to us by the Bible and the Church’s Tradition has some points of contact with the common human experience of love, or whether it is opposed to that experience. This in turn led us to consider two fundamental words: eros, as a term to indicate “worldly” love and agape, referring to love grounded in and shaped by faith. The two notions are often contrasted as “ascending” love and “descending” love. There are other, similar classifications, such

as the distinction between possessive love and oblative love (amor concupiscentiae – amor benevolentiae), to which is sometimes also added love that seeks its own advantage.

In philosophical and theological debate, these distinctions have often been radicalized to the point of establishing a clear antithesis between them: descending, oblative love—agape—would be typically Christian, while on the other hand ascending, possessive or covetous love—eros—would be typical of non-Christian, and particularly Greek culture. Were this antithesis to be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life. Yet eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn. 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn. 19:34).

In the account of Jacob’s ladder, the Fathers of the Church saw this inseparable connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received, symbolized in various ways. In that biblical passage we read how the Patriarch Jacob saw in a dream, above the stone which was

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A CATALOG OF BOOK REVIEWS & ESSAYS

his pillow, a ladder reaching up to heaven, on which the angels of God were ascending and descending (cf. Gn. 28:12; Jn. 1:51). A particularly striking interpretation of this vision is presented by Pope Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Rule. He tells us that the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation. Only in this way will he be able to take upon himself the needs of others and make them his own: “per pietatis viscera in se infirmitatem caeterorum transferat.” Saint Gregory speaks in this context of Saint Paul, who was borne aloft to the most exalted mysteries of God, and hence, having descended once more, he was able to become all things to all men (cf. 2 Cor. 12:2-4; 1 Cor. 9:22). He also points to the example of Moses, who entered the tabernacle time and again, remaining in dialogue with God, so that when he emerged he could be at the service of his people. “Within [the tent] he is borne aloft through contemplation, while without he is completely engaged in helping those who suffer: intus in contemplationem rapitur, foris infirmantium negotiis urgetur.”

8. …Fundamentally, “love” is a single reality, but with different dimensions; at different times, one or other dimension may emerge more clearly. Yet when the two dimensions are totally cut off from one another, the result is a caricature or at least an impoverished form of love. And we have also seen, synthetically, that biblical faith does not set up a parallel universe, or one opposed to that primordial human phenomenon which is love, but rather accepts the whole man; it intervenes in his search for love in order to purify it and to reveal new dimensions of it. This newness of biblical faith is shown chiefly in two elements which deserve to be highlighted: the image of God and the image of man.

9. First, the world of the Bible presents us with a new image of God. In surrounding cultures, the image of God and of the gods ultimately remained unclear and contradictory. In the development of biblical faith, however, the content of the prayer fundamental to Israel, the Shema, became increasingly clear and unequivocal: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Dt. 6:4). There is only one God, the Creator of heaven

and earth, who is thus the God of all. Two facts are significant about this statement: all other gods are not God, and the universe in which we live has its source in God and was created by Him. Certainly, the notion of creation is found elsewhere, yet only here does it become absolutely clear that it is not one god among many, but the one true God Himself who is the source of all that exists; the whole world comes into existence by the power of His creative Word. Consequently, His creation is dear to Him, for it was willed by Him and “made” by Him. The second important element now emerges: this God loves man. The divine power that Aristotle at the height of Greek philosophy sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire and of love—and as the object of love this divinity moves the world—but in itself it lacks nothing and does not love: it is solely the object of love. The one God in whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: among all the nations He chooses Israel and loves her—but He does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God loves, and His love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape.

The Prophets, particularly Hosea and Ezekiel, described God’s passion for His people using boldly erotic images. God’s relationship with Israel is described using the metaphors of betrothal and marriage; idolatry is thus adultery and prostitution. Here we find a specific reference—as we have seen—to the fertility cults and their abuse of eros, but also a description of the relationship of fidelity between Israel and her God. The history of the love-relationship between God and Israel consists, at the deepest level, in the fact that He gives her the Torah, thereby opening Israel’s eyes to man’s true nature and showing her the path leading to true humanism. It consists in the fact that man, through a life of fidelity to the one God, comes to experience himself as loved by God, and discovers joy in truth and in righteousness—a joy in God which becomes his essential happiness: “Whom do I have in heaven but You? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides You … for me it is good to be near God” (Ps. 73:25, 28).

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10. We have seen that God’s eros for man is also totally agape. This is not only because it is bestowed in a completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit, but also because it is love which forgives. Hosea above all shows us that this agape dimension of God’s love for man goes far beyond the aspect of gratuity. Israel has committed “adultery” and has broken the covenant; God should judge and repudiate her. It is precisely at this point that God is revealed to be God and not man: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! … My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst” (Hos. 11:8-9). God’s passionate love for His people—for humanity—is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against Himself, His love against His justice. Here Christians can see a dim prefigurement of the mystery of the Cross: so great is God’s love for man that by becoming man He follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.

The philosophical dimension to be noted in this biblical vision, and its importance from the standpoint of the history of religions, lies in the fact that on the one hand we find ourselves before a strictly metaphysical image of God: God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love. Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape. We can thus see how the reception of the Song of Songs in the canon of sacred Scripture was soon explained by the idea that these love songs ultimately describe God’s relation to man and man’s relation to God. Thus the Song of Songs became, both in Christian and Jewish literature, a source of mystical knowledge and experience, an expression of the essence of biblical faith: that man can indeed enter into union with God—his primordial aspiration. But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both

God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one. As Saint Paul says: “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him” (1 Cor. 6:17).

11. The first novelty of biblical faith consists, as we have seen, in its image of God. The second, essentially connected to this, is found in the image of man. The biblical account of creation speaks of the solitude of Adam, the first man, and God’s decision to give him a helper. Of all other creatures, not one is capable of being the helper that man needs, even though he has assigned a name to all the wild beasts and birds and thus made them fully a part of his life. So God forms woman from the rib of man. Now Adam finds the helper that he needed: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gn. 2:23). Here one might detect hints of ideas that are also found, for example, in the myth mentioned by Plato, according to which man was originally spherical, because he was complete in himself and self-sufficient. But as a punishment for pride, he was split in two by Zeus, so that now he longs for his other half, striving with all his being to possess it and thus regain his integrity. While the biblical narrative does not speak of punishment, the idea is certainly present that man is somehow incomplete, driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make him whole, the idea that only in communion with the opposite sex can he become “complete.” The biblical account thus concludes with a prophecy about Adam: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh” (Gn. 2:24).

Two aspects of this are important. First, eros is somehow rooted in man’s very nature; Adam is a seeker, who “abandons his mother and father” in order to find woman; only together do the two represent complete humanity and become “one flesh.” The second aspect is equally important. From the standpoint of creation, eros directs man towards marriage, to a bond which is unique and definitive; thus, and only thus, does it fulfill its deepest purpose. Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa. God’s way of

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loving becomes the measure of human love. This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.

NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF PATRIARCHY


HOW MIGHT Christians think about the difficult and divisive topic of patriarchy?

In current political and cultural discussions, patriarchy is purely negative. The word is used (without precision) as a category for defining and dismissing any form of social organization in which men are systematically given positions of authority. To label a society or organization “patriarchal” is, in current terms, to condemn and reject that society or organization as oppressive, ignorant, and resistant to progress.

This understanding of patriarchy is consistent with the general appraisal of maleness in our media, a portrayal which we might describe from its two extremes. On one hand, we are told explicitly that masculinity is an illness linked to extreme aggression and violence. On the other hand, men—especially fathers—are portrayed in media as ignorant, immature or ridiculous. These twin evils, we could call them “toxic masculinity” and “sentimental ineptitude,” are presented to us simultaneously. Fearing male power, we entertain ourselves with images of powerless men.

Everyone who participates in American culture accepts and believes these two poles of the rejection of the male to some degree. We are so saturated with statistics and stereotypes which reinforce a negative image of maleness that even Christians and others who would consider themselves traditional in their views are affected.

In some sense, we can sympathize with the culture. Maleness is certainly more associated with aggression and violence than femaleness. Sexual assault in the workplace is (statistically) perpetrated by men. Men, especially young men, are associated with school shootings and gang violence. Christians should concede these facts. Where we differ, then, is on where we locate the cause of violence. Culture blames patriarchy. Christians should blame the failure of patriarchy.

We face a difficult task in attempting to recover something of the traditional understanding of masculinity and maleness. As an aid to this recovery, we could begin by articulating as clearly as we can among ourselves what is and what is not genuine patriarchy. Perhaps the negative definition is needed first.

We can state immediately that patriarchy is not a conspiracy of men united for the purpose of exploiting and oppressing women. Patriarchy is not an organization dedicated to concentrating all social power in the hands of men. Patriarchy is not a relic of outdated modes of thought. We acknowledge that oppression certainly happened, and does happen, at various times and places. We also acknowledge that while human beings can be generally violent toward one another, male violence has the potential to be far more devastating.

However, we also assert that oppression and violence are not inherently patriarchal. From a traditional point of view, violence breaks out when patriarchy collapses. A system that perpetuates male dominance at the expense of women and children is anti-patriarchal. Anti-patriarchal because it would be composed, not of spiritually healthy men, but of materially greedy men who were more concerned for their own comfort than for the nurture and protection of their families—and, by extension, the health of their whole culture. From this perspective, many cries of “down with patriarchy!” might be amended “down with false patriarchy!” or, if we dare, replaced with “bring back genuine patriarchy!”

So what is true and authentic Patriarchy? A comprehensive definition would take several

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essays, but for the purpose of a good beginning, we could start here:

Patriarchy is a form of governance within a society which regulates and channels masculine energy toward the creative, the sustaining, and the sacred.

More could be added or explained. But taking each phrase of this definition singly we might imagine the conversation reestablished (at least, among Christians) on more positive and pragmatic ground.

Patriarchy is a form of governance. Patriarchy does, in fact, involve rulership and stewardship. It implies structures, roles, and ranks in order to govern effectively. It may or may not involve hereditary offices. It may or may not have roles reserved exclusively for men. Monarchy, for instance, is a patriarchal institution, but women may rule.

Patriarchy operates within a society. A purely patriarchal society is not possible. Thus it may be most accurate to speak of ‘the patriarchal element’ of a culture, rather than to speak of ‘patriarchal culture’. Patriarchy is never the culture itself. This is because cultures that can sustain themselves for centuries must have creative roles for both men and women. Within a society, the patriarchy might be compared to the skeleton of a body. The skeleton gives the body structure through rigidity, but muscles provide movement and organs provide health.

Patriarchy regulates and channels masculine energy. What we see in the world around us—from terrorism to road rage—is acknowledged to be the result of particularly male aggression. Patriarchy is a system in which men regulate other men and keep them accountable to certain standards of behavior. Again, because male violence can be destructive on a mass scale, it is mature males who must guide and correct immature males. No amount of classroom-style education or sitcom-style entertainment will curb male energy if it becomes unstable in a society.

Patriarchy strives for the creative, the sustaining, and the sacred. As far as we know, the most successful and stable cultures have been patriarchal. A survey of sustainable, art-and-literature-producing

societies throughout history demonstrates the success of patriarchy within those societies. Civilizations that have great longevity—China, India, Persia, Greece—all have embedded patriarchal structures. These are also the societies in which the ideas of the sacred and transcendent have found their richest expressions.

With our definition still in mind, let us be clear. Patriarchy is still a human institution. It fails because it is fallible, and it is abused because it is effective. We might even ask if patriarchy is necessary. Are there other sustainable cultural norms? Can we have society without patriarchy?

Patriarchy is not necessary, and there are and have been non-patriarchal societies. What complicates the question, however, is that, if we are honest, we have to admit that what we call “culture” is precisely the result of a supportive patriarchy within a society. This is not because only men produce culture; it is because the contribution men make has the potential to be highly creative or highly destructive. Genuine patriarchy encourages foresight and creativity and discourages immediacy and consumerism. When male creativity flourishes to a high degree and female creativity is not impeded by cultural instability, then a culture blooms with art, literature, music, poetry, and science. Healthy children are born and healthy minds are educated and maintained.

We do not know and can’t foresee all the consequences of completely removing patriarchy where patriarchy was once established. But it does appear that the dissolution of patriarchy leads to the situation we face today in American society. Ironically, we seem to be crying “down with the patriarchy” long after true patriarchy is gone or decayed beyond recognition; and we are in danger of inventing patriarchy where there is none in order to feel that we have achieved some measure of control over the encroaching chaos.

It may be too late to ask the world around us to accept or even consider the idea of a genuine patriarchy. The word is firmly encrusted with hate and contempt for history, religion, family, authority—in short, all that which is genuinely human in our past, good and ill. If we are to

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A MERE CHRISTIAN GATHERING

guess what will replace these things, we must wonder if it will be some kind of post-human, post-cultural monstrosity.

Meanwhile, whatever is lovely, whatever is pure, whatever is genuinely patriarchal, whatever is truly feminine, whatever is in your garden, whatever is cultured and gendered and lives free from the oppression of technology—think on these things.

CHRISTIANITY & SEX

Christopher Dawson A. D. 1930

WESTERN civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests. Underneath the self-conscious activity of the ruling classes the daily life of the majority of men went on unchanged. The statesmen of the past would no more have thought of altering the fundamental social and moral relations than of interfering with the course of the seasons. But on the contrary the change which is actually taking place in the modern world leaves no aspect of social life or moral life unaffected. Civilization is being uprooted from its foundations in nature and tradition is being reconstituted in a new organization which is as artificial and mechanical as a modern factory.

In Western Europe, however, the traditions of the older culture, although greatly weakened, are still strong enough to prevent the full development

of this process. It is in the outlying territories of our civilization, in Russia on the one hand, and in North America on the other, that its success has been greatest and that its results can be most easily studied. In Russia the change is being carried through consciously and deliberately by the power of the government in the face of the passive resistance of a society which still rests largely on the foundations of a primitive peasant culture. In America, on the other hand, it is the unfettered development of the new economic forces which has produced the change, and public opinion and social authority still attempt to preserve as far as possible the moral and social traditions of the older culture. But in spite of this important difference, there is a curious similarity between the two societies. In both cases there is the same cult of the machine and the same tendency to subordinate every other side of human life to economic activity. In both the individual is subjected to a ruthless pressure which produces a standardized type of mass civilization. And finally we see in both societies the breaking down of the family as a fixed social unit and the rise of a new type of morality, based upon the complete emancipation of sexual relations from the old social restrictions. Although America has not gone so far as Russia, where marriage is now a purely voluntary arrangement terminable on the demand of either party, it has rendered divorce exceedingly easy. . . .

Of all the symptoms of change that I have mentioned this breakdown of the traditional morality is undoubtedly the most important, for it involves a profound biological change in the life of society. A society can undergo a considerable transformation of its economic conditions and yet preserve its vital continuity, but if a fundamental social unit like the family loses its coherence and takes on a new form this continuity is destroyed and a new social organism comes into existence. This is not always recognized by the advocates of the new morality. . . .

The European society of the past, like every other strong and healthy society, has always rested on the foundation of marriage. It is, however, incompatible with the complete mechanization of

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social life which is the characteristic feature of the new type of civilization. For if the primary social unit is a natural biological group which is defended by the strongest moral and religious sanctions, society can never become sheer mechanism, nor can the economic organization of the state absorb the whole life of the citizen. If, on the other hand, marriage is transformed into a temporary arrangement for the satisfaction of the sexual impulse and for mutual companionship, which is not intended to create a permanent social unit, it is clear that the family loses its social and economic importance and that the state will take its place as the guardian and educator of the children. Society will no longer consist of a number of organisms, each of which possess a limited autonomy, but will be one vast unity which controls the whole life of the individual citizen from the cradle to the grave.

Hence it is easy to understand the reasons for the hostility of the Communist, and even of the milder type of socialist, represented by Mr. Bernard Shaw, to the traditional code of sexual morality and to the old form of marriage, since the destruction of these is an indispensible condition for the realization of their social ideals. But this does not altogether explain the strength of the modern attack on marriage and morals. The ordinary follower of the new ethics is not necessarily an admirer of the ideals of social mechanization and mass civilization. He or she is often just the reverse—an individualist and a rebel who is in revolt against every kind of social discipline and external compulsion. He seeks not mechanism but freedom, and his hostility to marriage springs from a romantic idealization of sex and a desire to free his emotional life from all social constraints. The intellectual propaganda against the traditional morality which is so evident in England today is, in fact, the tail-end of the great liberal assault on authority and social tradition which had its origins in the eighteenth century. In Catholic countries the moral aspects of the liberal revolt were evident from the beginning. The Encyclopedists attacked the moral code of Christianity even more fiercely than its theological doctrines, and all the stock arguments of the modern English sex reformers

are to be found stated in their most incisive and paradoxical form in the writings of Diderot, La Mettrie, and their friends. In Protestant lands, however, and above all in England and America, the revolt against tradition did not extend to moral principles. Indeed, the leaders of “advanced thought” and particularly the feminists were usually persons of exceptionally strict traditional morality, while the Victorian agnostics professed an unbounded admiration for the ethical ideals of the religion which they combated on intellectual grounds.

Today all this is changed. The attack on tradition has shifted to the sphere of morals, and men no longer believe that it is possible to throw over the religious doctrines of Christianity, and yet preserve the moral and social traditions of European civilization intact. Consequently our civilization is now faced with a definite issue. We have to choose between two contradictory ideals—on the one hand, that of the traditional Christian morality which finds its most complete expression in Catholicism—on the other, the ideal of a purely hedonist morality, which involves unrestricted freedom in sexual relations and the reorganization of marriage and the family. . . .

The Church maintains the original and inalienable rights of the family against the claims of the modern state to override them. Leo XIII writes: “No human law can abolish the natural and original right of marriage, ordained by God’s authority from the beginning. . . . Hence we have the Family, the society of a man’s house, a society limited in number, but no less a true society anterior to every kind of state and nation, invested with rights and duties of its own totally independent of the civil community” (Rerum Novarum, 1891).

Hence, as Leo XIII pointed out elsewhere, in his encyclical on marriage (Arcanum Divinum, 1880), the alteration by the state of the fundamental laws that govern marriage and family life will ultimately lead to the ruin of society itself. No doubt the state will gain in power and prestige as the family declines, but state and society are not identical. In fact the state is often most omnipotent and universal in its claims at the moment when society is dying, as we see in the last age of the

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Roman Empire. As the vital energy of society declined, the machinery of bureaucratic administration grew more vast and more complicated, until the wretched provincial was often glad to abandon his household and take refuge in the desert or among the barbarians in order to escape from the intolerable pressure exercised by the ubiquitous agents of the bureaucracy.

At the present day we have reason to ask ourselves whether modern civilization is not threatened with a similar danger owing to the absorption of the whole of human life in the artificial order of bureaucracy and industrialism. The introduction of the new moral code would remove the last obstacle to the complete mechanization of society and lead to the final supersession of the independent family by the state. No amount of governmental organization can supply the place of the natural reserves of vitality on which social health depends. If the Catholic theory of society is true, the supersession of the family means not progress, but the death of society, the end of our age and the passing of European civilization. . . .

The institution of the family inevitably creates a vital tension which is creative as well as painful. For human culture is not instinctive. It has to be conquered by a continuous moral effort, which involves the repression of natural instinct and the subordination and sacrifice of the individual impulse to the social purpose. It is the fundamental error of the modern hedonist to believe that man can abandon moral effort and throw off every repression and spiritual discipline and yet preserve all the achievements of culture. It is the lesson of history that the higher the achievement of a culture the greater is the moral effort and the stricter is the social discipline that it demands. The old type of matrilinear society, though it is by no means devoid of moral discipline, involves considerably less repression and is consistent with a much laxer standard of sexual behavior than is usual in patriarchal societies. But at the same time it is not capable of any high cultural achievement or of adapting itself to changed circumstances. It

remains bound to its elaborate and cumbrous mechanism of tribal custom.

The patriarchal family on the other hand makes much greater demands on human nature. It requires chastity and self-sacrifice on the part of the wife and obedience and discipline on the part of the children, while even the father himself has to assume a heavy burden of responsibility and submit his personal feelings to the interests of the family tradition. But for these very reasons the patriarchal family is a much more efficient organ of cultural life. It is no longer limited to its primary sexual and reproductive functions. It becomes the dynamic principle of society and the source of social continuity. Hence too it acquires a distinctively religious character, which was absent in matrilinear societies, and which is now expressed in the worship of family hearth or the sacred fire and the ceremonies of the ancestral cult. The fundamental idea in marriage is no longer the satisfaction of the sexual appetite, but, as Plato says: “the need that every man feels of clinging to the eternal life of nature by leaving behind him children’s children who may minister to the gods in his stead” (Laws, 773F).

This religious exaltation of the family profoundly affects men’s attitude to marriage and the sexual aspects of life in general. It is not limited, as is often supposed, to the idealization of the possessive male as father and head of the household; it equally transforms the conception of womanhood. It was the patriarchal family which created those spiritual ideals of motherhood and virginity which have had so deep an influence on the moral development of culture. No doubt the deification of womanhood through the worship of the Mother Goddess had its origin in the ancient matrilinear societies. But the primitive Mother Goddess is a barbaric and formidable deity who embodies the ruthless fecundity of nature, and her rites are usually marked by licentiousness and cruelty. It was the patriarchal culture which transformed this sinister goddess into the gracious figures of Demeter and Persephone and Aphrodite, and which created those higher types of divine virginity which we

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see in Athene, the giver of good counsel, and Artemis, the guardian of youth.

The patriarchal society was in fact the creator of those moral ideas which have entered so deeply into the texture of civilization that they have become a part of our thought. Not only the names of piety and chastity, honor and modesty, but the values for which they stand are derived from this source, so that even where the patriarchal family has passed away we are still dependent on the moral tradition that it created. Consequently, we find that the existing world civilizations from Europe to China are all founded on the tradition of the patriarchal family. It is to this that they owed the social strength which enabled them to prevail over the old cultures of matrilinear type which, alike in Europe and in Western Asia, in China and in India, had preceded the coming of the great classical cultures. Moreover, the stability of the latter has proved to be closely dependent on the preservation of the patriarchal ideal. A civilization like that of China, in which the patriarchal family remained the cornerstone of society and the foundation of religion and ethics, has preserved its cultural traditions for more than 2,000 years without losing its vitality. In the classical cultures of the Mediterranean world, however, this was not the case. Here the patriarchal family failed to adapt itself to the urban conditions of the Hellenistic civilization, and consequently the whole culture lost its stability. Conditions of life both in the Greek city-state and in the Roman Empire favored the man without a family who could devote his whole energies to the duties and pleasures of public life. Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes. This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the Empire, where the citizen class even in the provinces was extraordinarily sterile and was recruited not by natural increase, but by the constant introduction

of alien elements, above all from the servile class. Thus the ancient world lost its roots in the family and in the land and became prematurely withered.

The reconstitution of Western civilization was due to the coming of Christianity and the reestablishment of the family on a new basis. Though the Christian ideal of the family owes much to the patriarchal tradition which finds such a complete expression in the Old Testament, it was in several respects a new creation that differed essentially from anything that had previously existed. While the patriarchal family in its original form was an aristocratic institution which was the privilege of a ruling race or a patrician class, the Christian family was common to every class, even to the slaves. Still more important was the fact that the Church insisted for the first time on the mutual and bilateral character of sexual obligations. The husband belonged to the wife as exclusively as the wife to the husband. This rendered marriage a more personal and individual relation than it had been under the patriarchal system. The family was no longer a subsidiary member of a larger unity—the kindred or gens. It was an autonomous self-contained unit which owed nothing to any power outside of itself.

It is precisely this character of exclusiveness and strict mutual obligation which is the chief ground of objection among the modern critics of Christian morality. But, whatever may be thought of it, there can be no doubt that the resultant type of monogamous and indissoluble marriage has been the foundation of European society and has conditioned the whole development of our civilization. No doubt it involves a very severe effort of repression and discipline, but its upholders would maintain that it has rendered possible an achievement which could never have been equaled under the laxer conditions of polygamous or matrilinear societies. There is no historical justification for Bertrand Russell’s belief that the Christian attitude to marriage has had a brutalizing effect on sexual relations and has degraded the position of women below even the level of ancient civilization: on the contrary, women have always had a wider share in social

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RETURNING TO THE SOURCES FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY

life and a greater influence on civilization in Europe than was the case in Hellenic or oriental society. And this is in part due to those very ideals of asceticism and chastity which Bertrand Russell regards as the source of all our troubles. For in a Catholic civilization the patriarchal ideal is counterbalanced by the ideal of virginity. The family for all its importance does not control the whole existence of its members. The spiritual side of life belongs to a spiritual society in which all authority is reserved to a celibate class. Thus in one of the most important aspects of life the sexual relation is transcended, and husband and wife stand on an equal footing. I believe that this is the chief reason why the feminine element has achieved fuller expression in Catholic culture and why, even at the present day, the feminine revolt against the restrictions of family life is so much less marked in Catholic society than elsewhere.

In Protestant Europe, on the other hand, the Reformation, by abandoning the ideal of virginity and by the destruction of monasticism and of independent authority of the Church, accentuated the masculine element in the family. The Puritan spirit, nourished on the traditions of the Old Testament, created a new patriarchalism and made the family the religious as well as the social basis of society. Civilization lost its communal and public character and became private and domestic. And yet, by a curious freak of historical development, it was this Puritan and patriarchal society which gave birth to the new economic order which now threatens to destroy the family. Industrialism grew up, not in the continental centers of urban culture, but in the most remote districts of rural England, in the homes of nonconformist weavers and ironworkers. The new industrial society was entirely destitute of the communal spirit and of the civic traditions which had marked the ancient and the medieval city. It existed simply for the production of wealth and left every other side of life to private initiative. Although the old rural culture, based on the household as an independent economic unit, was passing away forever, the strict ethos of the Puritan family continued to rule men’s lives.

This explains the anomalies of the Victorian period both in England and America. It was essentially an age of transition. Society had already entered on a phase of intense urban industrialism, while still remaining faithful to the patriarchal ideals of the old Puritan tradition. Both Puritan morality and industrial mass economy were excessive and one-sided developments, and when the two were brought together in one society they inevitably produced an impossible situation.

The problem that faces us today is, therefore, not so much the result of an intellectual revolt against the traditional Christian morality; it is due to the inherent contradictions of an abnormal state of culture. The natural tendency, which is even more clearly visible in American than in England, is for the Puritan tradition to be abandoned and for society to give itself up passively to the machinery of modern cosmopolitan life. But this is no solution. It leads merely to the breaking down of the old structure of society and the loss of the traditional moral standards without creating anything which can take their place. As in the decline of the ancient world, the family is steadily losing its form and its social significance, and the state absorbs more and more of the life of its members. The home is no longer a center of social activity; it has become merely a sleeping place for a number of independent wage earners. The functions which were formerly fulfilled by the head of the family are now being taken over by the state, which educates the children and takes responsibility for their maintenance and health. Consequently the father no longer holds a vital position in the family: as Mr. Bertrand Russell says, he is often a comparative stranger to his children who know him only as “that man who comes for weekends.” Moreover the reaction against the restrictions of family life, which in the ancient world was confined to the males of the citizen class, is today common to every class and to both sexes. To the modern girl marriage and motherhood appear not as the conditions of a wider life, as they did to her grandmother, but as involving the sacrifice of her independence and the abandonment of her career.

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The only remaining safeguards of family life in modern urban civilization are its social prestige and the sanctions of moral and religious tradition. Marriage is still the only form of sexual union which is openly tolerated by society, and the ordinary man and woman are usually ready to sacrifice their personal convenience rather than to risk social ostracism. But if we accept the principles of the new morality, this last safeguard will be destroyed and the forces of dissolution will be allowed to operate unchecked. It is true that Mr. Russell, at least, is willing to leave us the institution of marriage, on condition that it is strictly demoralized and no longer makes any demands on continence. But it is obvious that these conditions reduce marriage to a very subordinate position. It is no longer the exclusive or even the normal form of sexual relations; it is entirely limited to the rearing of children. For, as Mr. Russell is never tired of pointing out, the use of contraceptives has made sexual intercourse independent of parenthood, and the marriage of the future will be confined to those who seek parenthood for its own sake rather than as the natural fulfillment of sexual love. But under these circumstances who will trouble to marry? Marriage will lose all attractions for the young and the pleasure-loving and the poor and the ambitious. The energy of youth will be devoted to contraceptive love and only when men and women have become prosperous and middle-aged will they think seriously of settling down to rear a strictly limited family. . . .

The true alternative to social suicide is not sexual communism, but the restoration of the family. . . . When the age of transition has passed, if our civilization has survived the crisis, the family will no longer be left to sink or swim in the economic current, it will be re-established not as an economic unit, but in its higher function as the primary organ of social life and the guardian of cultural tradition. The more we realize that the prosperity of society depends not on economic production but on the quality of the population, the greater will be the importance of the family which is the only true guardian of the race…

There is a Catholic solution. The concrete reality of sex, which is too strong for the abstract

laws of reason, can be met only by the equally objective reality of spirit. Although sex cannot be rationalized, it can be spiritualized, for man finds in religion a force which is capable of taking possession of the will no less completely than physical passion. Of course the very idea of spiritual reality is today generally rejected. The rationalist regards it as a metaphysical delusion, while to Mr. Lawrence it is itself the offspring of rationalism, an abstraction of “the white mind.” To the religious mind, however, spiritual reality is not an ideal or a metaphysical abstraction, it is a living Being—Deus fortis vivus. And even those who refuse all objective validity to this belief, cannot deny its tremendous psychological potency, for experience shows that it is the one power in the world that is stronger than self-interest and sensuality, and that it is capable of transforming human nature and altering the course of history. The real danger of religion is not that it is too weak or too abstract to affect human conduct, but rather that it is so absolute and uncompromising that nature may become crushed and overwhelmed:

oppressa gravi sub religione Quae caput a coeli regionibus ostendebat Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.

[crushed under heavy Religion which was displaying its head from the regions of the sky lowering with a horrible force over mortals. ~Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, I.63-65] This is no imaginary danger. We have in

Buddhism the example of a great world religion which has founded itself on the radical denial of life and which regards birth and sexual desire as unmitigated evils. Nor is this attitude peculiar to Buddhism. It was equally characteristic of the Gnostic and Manichaean movements which were the most dangerous rivals of early Christianity and it affected the Christian mind itself through the apocryphal Gospels and Acts, and many other subterranean channels.

Nevertheless this tendency never captured the Church. She insisted from the first that “marriage is honorable in all and the marriage bed undefiled.” Although Catholicism conquered the world by its

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ideals of virginity and martyrdom, it never denied the good of marriage or the good life. If the asceticism of the monks of the desert appears to us purely negative and hostile to life, we must remember that it was only by a complete break with the old world—by going out into the wilderness and making a fresh start—that it was possible to realize the independence and autonomy of Christian ideals. Above all sex had to be rescued from the degradation and vulgarization that had overtaken it in the decadence of Graeco-Roman society, and this could only be accomplished by a drastic process of discipline and purgation. Catholicism stood for the existence of absolute spiritual values in a disillusioned and hopeless world, and consequently it had to assert these values by the sacrifice of every lesser good, not only the good of marriage, but the good of life itself. The essentially positive character of the Christian ideal could only be completely realized when the struggle with the pagan world was over, and consequently it is in the lives of saints such as Francis of Assisi and Philip Neri rather than St. Anthony or St. Symeon Stylites that we may find the fullest expression of Christian asceticism—an asceticism which is fundamentally humane and friendly to life. It involves a heroic sacrifice of the natural life of sex and of the family to the service of God and the Christian people, but it is in no sense a denial of the values that it has transcended.

Moreover Catholicism is not content simply to accept marriage as a natural good: from the first it has regarded marriage as possessing a positive spiritual value and significance—as a means of supernatural grace. This sacramental view of marriage finds its basis in the celebrated passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians which compares the union of man and woman in marriage to the union of Christ and the Church—a passage which is strangely ignored by Mr. Russell when he declares that St. Paul never “suggests that there may be any positive good in marriage or that affection between man and wife may be a beautiful and desirable thing.” In fact, it is precisely in the mystery of love that St. Paul finds the meaning of marriage. It is not merely a physical union of bodies under the blind compulsion

of instinctive desire, nor is it an abstract moral union of wills. It is the physical expression or incarnation of a spiritual union in which the sexual act has become the vehicle of a higher creative purpose. It is for this reason that marriage is regarded by the Church as a type and a sacramental participation of the central mystery of the Faith—the marriage of God and Man in the Incarnation. As humanity is saved and deified by Christ, so the natural functions of sex and reproduction are spiritualized by the sacrament of marriage.

At first sight this doctrine may seem infinitely removed from the realities of life and of little assistance to the practical moralist. But if we once renounce the vain attempt to rationalize sexual life, we must be prepared to find in sex a mysterious element which is akin to the ultimate mysteries of life. The religious significance of sex has always been felt by man. Primitive religion regarded it as the supreme cosmic mystery, the source of the life and fruitfulness of the earth; while the higher religions also made it the basis of their view of life whether in a pessimistic sense, as in Buddhism, or, as in China, in the metaphysical idea of a rhythmic order pervading the life of the universe. Christianity went a step further by attributing a positive spiritual significance to sex and thus gave to Western civilization a higher ideal of love and marriage than any other culture has known. If these characteristically European ideals are to survive, it is essential to preserve a spiritual basis for sexual life. Romanticism attempted to accomplish this by making a religion of sex and exalting passion itself into the place of a spiritual ideal, but in doing so, it lost its hold alike on spiritual principles and physical realities. The true way of spiritualizing sex is not to idealize our emotions and to hide physical appetite under a cloud of sentiment, but rather to bring our sexual life into relation with a more universal reality. The romantic idealization of passion and the rationalist attempt to reduce love to the satisfaction of physical desire alike fail to create that permanent basis of sexual life which can only be found in a spiritual order which transcends the appetites and the self-will of the individual. It is only when a man

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accepts marriage as something greater than himself, a sacred obligation to which he must conform himself, that he is able to realize all its spiritual and social possibilities.

Hence the restoration of the religious view of marriage, which is the Catholic ideal, is the most important of all the conditions for a solution of our present difficulties. Its importance cannot be measured by practical considerations, for it means the reintroduction of a spiritual principle into the vital center of human life.

Western civilization today is threatened with the loss of its freedom and its humanity. It is in danger of substituting dead mechanism for living culture. Hedonism cannot help, nor yet rationalism. It can be saved only by a renewal of life. And this is impossible without love, for love is the source of life, both physically and spiritually. But if physical desire is separated from its spiritual principle and made an end in itself, it ceases to be love and it no longer gives life. It degenerates into sterile lust. It is only when it is spiritualized by faith that it becomes vivifying love and participates in the mystery of creation. Love requires faith, as life requires love. The loss of faith ultimately means not merely moral disorder and suffering, but the loss of social vitality and the decay of physical life.

*Christopher Dawson, Christianity and Sex (London: Faber & Faber, 1930).

SAME-SEX EROTICISM A Scriptural Perspective

Edith M. Humphrey A. D. 2003

A FAITHFUL reading of scripture is crucial to understanding the issue before us. Scripture is, of course, key to the thinking of the Christian. While

we are first of all people of Christ, we are also people of the Book. It is most particularly in the Bible that the supreme glory of our Lord is shown so that the Church can together know the One who is the Truth, and therefore worship together.

To read scripture as it is meant to be read, we begin with an understanding of its character. It is not a static deposit of precepts to be mined, but a vibrant collection of books by which the Church is taught, and by which she is identified. The story of scripture can be understood in five great acts: Act 1 tells us about a creator God; Act 2 speaks of his good creation gone askew by death, corruption and sin; Act 3 presents the call of the nation Israel to be a light to the world; Act 4 shows how that calling was fulfilled in a surprising and crucial way in the coming, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus the Christ; Act 5, in which we find ourselves, describes the ongoing life and healing mission of the Church through the Holy Spirit in this world. We await the finale of this drama, but are given, in the Scriptures, wonderful intimations of God’s purposes for His people and the entire cosmos.

The Bible came to us in human words, particular to time and place. Some have used this human element to detract from the Bible’s authority, and to leash or neutralize its words on difficult subjects. Far be this from us! Rather, we discern in the Bible’s many forms—narrative, law, gospel, psalm, epistle, apocalypse—God’s coming to be with us, for us and in us. Let us learn this story intimately, so that we can repeat it with human lips to others, and so that we can play our authentic part in it. This “we” factor is essential! The scripture implies, and indeed states explicitly, that the Word is heard not privately, but by the whole community, past and present. When we as today’s faith community recognize, understand, and pass on what has been revealed, we are using the God-given faculty of reason. Our experience and reason are not actual “authorities” as we understand scripture or decide about present concerns. Instead, experience (especially the common experience of the Church) is our context, the place where we receive God’s love and wisdom; reason is a “tool” or means of interpreting what

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we hear. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and steeped in the written Word of God, we measure the helpfulness of current ideas against a long established understanding of God, the world, and humanity, to see if they stand up to the test.

As members of Christ’s Body, we are ourselves actors in a divinely conceived drama. While our “lines” are not wholly prescribed for us, our role is not to improvise with abandon, mindless of the story line. In reading the scriptures together, and by honoring the “actors” who have gone before us, we keep within our memories and hearts the central, major “part” in the drama—God’s part! As those who have received the Spirit, we will want to share in the mind of Christ, understanding the word personally, but not autonomously or individualistically. The Church has, from the beginning, struggled over difficult matters. Her reflection and solemn decisions about ethical and theological matters should be acknowledged as carrying authority for us younger brothers and sisters in the same family. Together with God’s whole Church, past and present, we are called to discern God’s voice and will, in humility and in confidence that the Holy Spirit was active, is active, and will be active in our midst.

The human authors of the scriptures, moved by the Divine Author, wrote in particular historical contexts. But this fact should not be used as a pretext for bypassing explicit teaching or perspectives which our age finds difficult. Rather, in each case, we are to read all the pertinent texts carefully. Even where we conclude that a passage is particular to a moment in the history of God’s people (e.g. prohibition of pork, or head coverings for women), we must respect the underlying theological or ethical truths. Some commands have an enduring claim (e.g. the command not to murder) because they are essentially linked to what has been revealed in the salvation story about the world, our nature, and the nature of God. A faithful reading of scriptures thus means that we seek to understand how the passages that we are reading, and the questions that we are presently asking, fit into the great forgiving, healing, and life-giving drama that has been initiated by God himself.

How do the scriptures speak of human sexuality? We take our cue from the Lord Jesus, who answered questions about human relations by going back to the creation narrative. There we learn that our created sexual differences are key to our identity as human beings. The solemn declaration of Genesis 1:27 stresses both difference and unity: “So God created adam in his image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.” Sexual distinctions and complementarity are part of God’s good—very good! (cf. Gn. 1:31)—creation, though sexuality, along with other facets of human life, has been deeply affected by sin. So powerful is this communion of male and female that the Bible treats marriage as a mirror of God’s love for His people. This understanding of marriage is accentuated in the New Testament, where it is celebrated as an icon of Christ’s mysterious love for the Church. Another surprise in the N.T. is that celibacy comes to be honored there as a faithful way of celebrating God’s goodness. Marriage is a wonderful echo of God’s communion with us; celibacy stands as a potent reminder that here not all our needs can be met by another human being, that we are designed for something more than this age. In Matthew 19 and Mark 10, Jesus affirms both celibacy and monogamous marriage—“What God has joined together let no one put asunder.” Our generation has already seen an assault on God’s order by the tragic prevalence of divorce in the Church. It would seem that the tumultuous call for us to “bless” so-called same-sex “unions” is a new way of “putting asunder” what God has joined! Jesus, asked about marriage by his Jewish contemporaries, had no need to speak explicitly about homoeroticism (this had not entered their minds!). The Genesis creation account to which He refers speaks clearly about God’s intent for human partnership between male and female.

What Jesus did not need to explicitly address is certainly addressed by His apostle, St. Paul, who lived and worked in a Gentile context. Like Jesus, St. Paul teaches that there are two Christian lifestyles—marriage is so honorable that a godly partner may hope to influence an unbelieving

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spouse; singleness is a special gift to the community of the Church. Throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul shows how our most intimate inter-relationships may become part of God’s medicine. However, neither an unlawful heterosexual relationship (such as incest) nor a same-sex union can ultimately fulfill this role. Paul speaks about “freedom” in the area of food, but never suggests that incest or other types of sexual immorality could be an authentic expression of freedom in Christ. This is because marriage, by its very character, requires faithful complementarity, not the intimacy of same types nor casual intimacy. In Christ, our sexuality, expressed in a monogamous physical union, or expressed chastely by single persons in means other than those that are erotic, becomes a powerful factor in helping us to be healed, and to grow up into what we are meant to be. Amidst current assumptions that sexuality is for the purpose of self-gratification, the Church is called to signal to the world an entirely different attitude. Paul was scandalized that the Corinthians were allowing a member of their church to engage in incest (1 Cor. 5). We have our own scandal today, and need again to hear Paul’s words—“Do not be deceived!”

Frequently pro-gay lobbies in the Church speak about same-sex eroticism as if the Bible has little to say regarding it, and as if the biblical writers were naïve. They refer to, say, the institution of slavery, and suggest that we have moved beyond the limited understanding of the early Church. These arguments betray an arrogance with regards to the Biblical text, and miss the mark. To begin with, homoerotic behavior is not analogous to slavery, nor even to the ministry of women in the Church, for that matter. Though some portions of the epistles deal with slavery as a given in the ancient world, 1 Timothy 1:10 lists slave-trading as a vice, and Paul invites slaves to take freedom when they can. What the scriptures have to say about women in ministry is, in my view, complex, but to link this debate with the homosexuality issue is a “category confusion.” As my colleague Robert Gagnon has put it “being a woman is not a condition directly linked to sinful behavior, as is homoerotic desire” (Robert Gagnon, Homosexuality and the Bible).

Nor were the biblical writers ignorant of homoeroticism, though they did not express the phenomenon in the psychological language of our day. Indeed, in St. Paul’s time, there were some who celebrated homoerotic relations as a good thing. Some prominent Gentiles thought and acted this way, but neither the Hebrew people nor the early Christians agreed. The Bible speaks with one voice about homoerotic activity—from the story of Sodom, to the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus, to the lists of dark behaviors in the epistles, the word is, “Don’t!” The biblical writers adopt a decisive counter-cultural stand against an activity that Greek and Roman poets valorized. It makes little difference whether such sexual behavior is directed by nature, by nurture, or by a combination of these two. St. Paul himself is well aware of the compulsive nature of sin, and puts forth the gospel as God’s means of dealing with enslaved expressions of sinfulness as well as sins that are deliberately chosen. Jesus Christ is the center of healing as well as of acquittal, our Physician as well as our gracious Judge. To say that the apostle would change his mind if he knew the “findings” of psychological sciences regarding homosexuality is to ignore that the Bible understands well our brokenness and our inclination to destructive behavior.

Both the Lord Jesus and St. Paul, then, describe erotic expression as something blessed by God uniquely within the institution of a faithful marriage. Jesus makes clear that “from the beginning … God made them male and female” and so defines marriage for our confused age as the union of two differently gendered human beings. In Romans 1:18-32, the apostle Paul also hearkens back to the creation story (and to the story of the Fall). Here Paul presents us with a progression: lack of honor and thanksgiving to God has led to ignorance and idolatry, which has led to lustful hearts, which has led to the degradation of the body. The most foundational example of this degradation is homoeroticism (including lesbianism), because this presents a primal breach in the “male and female” humanity that God declared to be very good. Homoeroticism, then, is pictured as symptomatic of the first

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rebellion against God. It, along with other symptoms such as covetousness, murder, strife, gossip, deceit, disloyalty and pride, show that human beings have, together, turned away from the God of glory.

Notice that Paul is not talking here about individual persons who have homoerotic desires, but of the phenomenon itself, which is an indicator of our fallen human nature. Together, the human family has turned away from the Creator, refusing to give thanks. We bear, as a race, the wounds of those who will not rejoice in what God has made, and in who we are. Homoerotic activity, because of its character against nature does not affirm God’s created order as given to us—that is, He has made us “male and female.” So, in homoerotic action, as in other wrong paths, we show that humanity has forgotten the true God of creation. It seems that the first sin of Adam and Eve was neither pride nor simple disobedience, but lack of gratitude! The result is ignorance, idolatry, degradation of body and mind, and finally the confusion of evil for good—“they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them” (1 Cor. 1:32). In the Corinthian letters, St. Paul singles out sexual immorality as a sin that can affect the whole person, and urges his hearers to flee from it (1 Cor. 6:18). He also details both active and passive homoerotic activity in a list of vices which the Corinthians once practiced before their turn to Christ, and which they must now eschew (1 Cor. 6:9-11).

Some recent commentators, through special pleading, seek to reinterpret or to limit St. Paul’s use of two terms for homosexual agents—those who are malakoi, and those who are arsenokoitai. The latter term arsenokoitai is a word found only in Paul, but clearly a compound derived from the old Greek Leviticus (Lev. 20:13) which speaks of “those who lie with a male as with a female.” The term malakoi is less technical, and means literally “soft ones”; it is found in other Greek documents to refer to those exhibiting various types of sexual indulgence, but often refers explicitly to the passive partner in a homoerotic relationship. Those in doubt should research for themselves the more general cultural use of this term, as documented in, for example, the standard Greek dictionaries. Careful and non-biased studies of these words

show that Paul’s meaning is all-too-clear. He uses these words to refer to homoerotic behavior in general, not simply to “boy prostitution” or “forced” relations, or “homosexual activity between naturally heterosexual partners,” as some want to argue.

In line with the New Testament, early Christian communities retained this same view regarding sexual immorality, including same-sex erotic activity. Right up to the mid-twentieth century, Christian theologians including Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Karl Barth have understood homoerotic behavior as a sign of the disruption of the good created order, and as a sin which calls for repentance, restoration, and healing. Sometimes, of course, leaders in the Church have fallen prey to self-justification, and have vilified those engaging in same-sex sin as worse than those indulging in other sins. The New Testament is quick to correct us if we are self-righteous, without softening its words against homoerotic behavior itself. “And such,” said St. Paul, “were some of you. But you have been washed.” (Please let me add a quick word on what “healing” might entail—for some, it may well mean reorientation, and we have friends who have testified to this; for others, celibacy will be the path of healing, offering a path of witness to many who think that sexual expression is a necessity for a fulfilled life. I am profoundly grateful to my brothers and sisters in Christ who struggle with same-sex desire but witness in their lives to the sufficiency of Christ; they remind me that we cannot yet imagine all that God has in store for us, and that His grace is sufficient to meet us in our brokenness. Nor will He leave us there—we await “temples” that will take up into glory these “tents” in which we now dwell.)

Thus we can summarize the Church’s faithful reading of the Scripture in this way: those struggling with homoeroticism are to be included in the community of faith, along with the rest of us sinners. God’s grace is extended to all. However, anyone who joins the household of God should know that it is a place of transformation, discipline, and learning—not a place to be falsely comforted or indulged. Christ’s Body is to be truly inclusive, extending to all her members the benefits of

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membership, including confession, repentance, forgiveness, and healing. Jesus’ gospel remains: Repent, for the rule of God is at hand!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who learned the depth of God’s grace in a dark time, speaks powerfully to us about ethics, reality, and truth: “If one is to say how a thing really is, i.e., if one is to speak truthfully, one’s gaze and one’s thought must be directed towards the way in which the real exists in God and through God and for God” (Ethics, ET 1955, p. 365). Bonhoeffer thus sends us back to Romans 1 and further back to Genesis 1-3, that we might see God’s world, the creation, and human sexuality as they really are. God’s creation is good, though flawed: His purpose is to redeem, heal, and glorify it.

But there are some who will not see it this way. Instead they want us to put skewed human experience in place of Jesus, Paul, and the historic Church, and to declare that we have transcended the clear voice of Scripture on this issue. In place of the communion of saints and the teaching of the apostles they put a new gospel of so-called inclusivity, and tell us to bless what needs to be healed. What would it mean for the Anglican communion to acknowledge a person involved in same-sex eroticism as a godly example? What would it mean to bless same-sex erotic arrangements? It would be to declare that these so-called “unions” are in themselves pictures or icons of God’s love, to say that they display the salvation story, to rejoice that they are glorified or taken up into God’s own actions and being. It would be to declare that they have a significant and fruitful part in creation, and that they are symbols of the in-breaking and coming rule of God, in which the Church now shares and in which we will eventually participate fully. It would be to “speak a good word” about this sort of relationship, explicitly declaring it to be a condition in which the way of the cross and the way of new life come together. Precisely here, the Church would be saying, you can see the love of God in human form, and the glory of humanity. It would be to name God as the one who blesses an act for which in fact repentance is required. So we would replace God with an idol, and so we would rend

the Church. What will the Church do when it prays against itself ? A house divided cannot stand.

The prophet Jeremiah knew a day like ours:

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. Thus says the Lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, “We will not walk in it.” How can you say, “We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us,” when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie? The wise shall be put to shame, and taken; since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is there in them? They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? ~Jeremiah 6:14-16; 8:8-22

“You therefore, beloved, beware that you are not carried away with the error of the lawless and lose your own stability…Rather be attentive to the word as to a lamp shining in a dark place” (2 Pet. 3:17; 1:19).

*Originally presented September 22, 2003, to the National Evangelical Anglican Conference in Britain

THEOPHANY 2019 45

THE PEN, THE PIPE & THE PINT

THE MYSTERY OF LOVE

Alexander Schmemann A. D. 1963

“This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the Church” ~Ephesians 5:32

IN THE Orthodox Church matrimony is a sacrament. It may be asked why, of the many “states” of human life, in the great variety of man’s vocations, only this “state” has been singled out and understood as a sacrament? Indeed, if it is simply a divine sanction of marriage, the bestowing of spiritual help to the married couple, a blessing for the procreation of children—all this does not make it radically different from any other act for which we need help and guidance, sanction and blessing. For a “sacrament” implies necessarily the idea of transformation, refers to the ultimate event of Christ’s death and resurrection, and is always a sacrament of the Kingdom. In a way, of course, the whole life of the Church can be termed sacramental, for it is always the manifestation in time of the “new time.” Yet in a more precise way the Church calls sacraments those decisive acts of its life in which this transforming grace is confirmed as being given, in which the Church through a liturgical act identifies itself with and becomes the very form of that Gift. But how is marriage related to the Kingdom which is to come? How is it related to the cross, the death, and the resurrection of Christ? What, in other words, makes it a sacrament?

Even to raise these questions seems impossible within the whole “modern” approach to marriage, and this includes, often enough, the “Christian” approach. In the numberless “manuals of marital happiness,” in the alarming trend to make the minister a specialist in clinical sexology, in all cozy definitions of a Christian family which approve a moderate use of sex (which can be an “enriching experience”) and emphasize responsibility, savings, and Sunday School—in all this there is, indeed, no room for sacrament. We do not remember today that marriage is, as everything else in “this

world,” a fallen and distorted marriage, and that it need not to be blessed and “solemnized”—after a rehearsal and with the help of the photographer—but restored. This restoration, furthermore, is in Christ and this means in His life, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven, in the Pentecostal inauguration of the “new eon,” in the Church as the sacrament of all this. Needless to say, this restoration infinitely transcends the idea of the “Christian family” and gives marriage cosmic and universal dimensions.

Here is the whole point. As long as we visualize marriage as the concern of those alone who are being married, as something that happens to them and not to the whole Church, and, therefore, to the world itself, we shall never understand the truly sacramental meaning of marriage: the great mystery to which St. Paul refers when he says, “But I speak concerning Christ and the Church.” We must understand that the real theme, “content,” and object of this sacrament is not “family,” but love. Family as such, family in itself, can be a demonic distortion of love—and there are harsh words about it in the Gospel: “A man’s foes shall be those of his own household” (Mt. 10:36). In this sense the sacrament of matrimony is wider than family. It is the sacrament of divine love, as the all-embracing mystery of being itself, and it is for this reason that it concerns the whole Church, and—through the Church—the whole world.

Perhaps the Orthodox vision of this sacrament will be better understood if we begin not with matrimony as such, and not with an abstract “theology of love,” but with the one who has always stood at the very heart of the Church’s life as the purest expression of human love and response to God—Mary, the Mother of Jesus. It is significant that whereas in the West Mary is plainly the Virgin, a being almost totally different from us in her absolute and celestial purity and freedom from all carnal pollution, in the East she is always referred to and glorified as Theotokos, the Mother of God, and virtually all icons depict her with the Child in her arms. There exist, in other words, two emphases in mariology, which, although they do not necessarily exclude one another, lead to two different visions of Mary’s

46 SYNAXIS 6.1


d

place in the Church. And the difference between them must be kept in mind if we want to understand the experience of the veneration of Mary which has always been that of the Orthodox Church. We hope to show that this is not so much a specific “cult of Mary,” as a light, a joy, proper to the whole life of the Church. In her, says an Orthodox hymn, “all creation rejoices.”

But what is this joy about? Why, in her own words, shall “all generations call me blessed?” Because in her love and obedience, in her faith and humility, she accepted to be what from all eternity all creation was meant and created to be: the temple of the Holy Spirit, the humanity of God. She accepted to give her body and blood—that is, her whole life—to be the body and blood of the Son of God, to be mother in the fullest and deepest sense of this world, giving her life to the Other and fulfilling her life in Him. She accepted the only true nature of each creature and all creation: to place the meaning and, therefore, the fulfillment of her life in God.

In accepting this nature she fulfilled the womanhood of creation. This word will seem strange to many. In our time the Church, following the modern trend toward the “equality of the sexes,” uses only one-half of the Christian revelation about man and woman, the one which affirms that in Christ there is neither “male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). The other half is ascribed again to an antiquated worldview. In fact, however, all our attempts to find the “place of woman” in society (or in the Church) instead of exalting her, belittle woman, for they imply too often a denial of her specific vocation as woman.

Yet is it not significant that the relation between God and the world, between God and Israel, His chosen people, and finally between God and the cosmos restored in the Church, is expressed in the Bible in terms of marital union and love? This is a double analogy. On the one hand we understand God’s love for the world and Christ’s love for the Church because we have the experience of marital love, but on the other hand marital love has its roots, its depth and real fulfillment in the great mystery of Christ and His Church: “But I speak concerning Christ and the Church.” The

Church is the Bride of Christ (“…for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” ~2 Cor. 11:2). This means that the world—which finds its restoration and fulfillment in the Church—is the bride of God and that in sin this fundamental relationship has been broken, distorted. And it is in Mary—the Woman, the Virgin, the Mother—in her response to God, that the Church has its living and personal beginning.

This response is total obedience in love; not obedience and love, but the wholeness of the one as the totality of the other. Obedience, taken in itself, is not a “virtue”; it is blind submission and there is no light in blindness. Only love for God, the absolute object of all love, frees obedience from blindness and makes it the joyful acceptance of that alone which is worthy of being accepted. But love without obedience to God is “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16), it is the love claimed by Don Juan, which ultimately destroys him. Only obedience to God, the only Lord of Creation, gives love its true direction, makes it fully love.

True obedience is thus true love for God, the true response of Creation to its Creator. Humanity is fully humanity when it is this response to God, when it becomes the movement of total self-giving and obedience to Him. But in the “natural” world the bearer of this obedient love, of this love as response, is the woman. The man proposes, the woman accepts. This acceptance is not passivity, blind submission, because it is love, and love is always active. It gives life to the proposal of man, fulfills it as life, yet it becomes fully love and fully life only when it is fully acceptance and response. This is why the whole creation, the whole Church—and not only women—find the expression of their response and obedience to God in Mary the Woman, and rejoice in her. She stands for all of us, because only when we accept, respond in love and obedience—only when we accept the essential womanhood of creation—do we become ourselves true men and women; only then can we indeed transcend our limitations as “males” and “females.” For man can be truly man—that is, the king of creation, the priest and minister of God’s creativity

THEOPHANY 2019 47


and initiative—only when he does not posit himself as the “owner” of creation and submits himself—in obedience and love—to its nature as the bride of God in response and acceptance. And woman ceases to be just a ‘female’ when, totally and unconditionally accepting the life of the Other as her own life, giving herself totally to the Other, she becomes the very expression, the very fruit, the very joy, the very beauty, the very gift of our response to God, the one whom, in the words of the Song of Songs, the king will bring into his chambers, saying: “Thou are all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee” (Sg. 4:7).

Tradition calls Mary the new Eve. She did what the first Eve failed to do. Eve failed to be a woman. She took the initiative. She “proposed,” and she became “female”—the instrument of procreation, “ruled over” by man. She made herself, and also the man whose “eve” she was, the slaves of her “femininity” and the whole of life a dark war of sexes in which “possession” is in fact the violent and desperate desire to kill the shameful lust that never dies. But Mary “took no initiative.” In love and obedience she expected the initiative of the Other. And when it came, she accepted it, not blindly—for she asked “how shall this be?”—but with the whole lucidity, simplicity, and joy of love. The light of an eternal spring comes to us when on the day of annunciation we hear the decisive: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38). This is indeed the whole creation, all of humanity, and each one of us recognizing the words that express our ultimate nature and being, our acceptance to be the bride of God, our betrothal to the One who from all eternity loved us.

Mary is the Virgin. But this virginity is not a negation, nor a mere absence; it is the fullness and the wholeness of love itself. It is the totality of her self-giving to God, and thus the very expression, the very quality of her love. For love is the thirst and hunger for wholeness, totality, fulfillment—for virginity, in the ultimate meaning of this word. At the end the Church will be presented to Christ as a “chaste virgin” (2 Cor. 11:2). For virginity is the goal of all genuine love—not as absence of “sex,” but as its complete fulfillment in love; of

this fulfillment in “this world” sex is the paradoxical, the tragic affirmation and denial. The Orthodox Church, by celebrating the seemingly “nonscriptural” feasts of Mary’s nativity and of her presentation in the temple reveals, in fact, a real faithfulness to the Bible, for the meaning of these feasts lies precisely in their recognition of the Virgin Mary as the goal and the fulfillment of the whole history of salvation, of that history of love and obedience, of response and expectation. She is the true daughter of the Old Testament, its last and most beautiful flower. The Orthodox Church rejects the dogma of the Immaculate Conception precisely because it makes Mary a miraculous “break” in this long and patient growth of love and expectation, of this “hunger for the living God” which fills the Old Testament. She is the gift of the world to God, as is so beautifully said in a hymn of the nativity:

Each of Thy creatures brings thanksgiving unto Thee;

The angels offer the sun, The heavens its star, The wise men their gifts, The shepherds their marveling… And we—the Virgin Mother.

And yet it is God alone who fulfills and crowns this obedience, acceptance, and love. “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. For with God nothing shall be impossible” (Lk. 1:35-37). He alone reveals as Virgin the one who brought to Him the totality of human love.

Mary is the Mother. Motherhood is the fulfillment of womanhood because it is the fulfillment of love as obedience and response. It is by giving herself that love gives life, becomes the source of life. One does not love in order to have children. Love needs no justification; it is not because it gives life that love is good: it is because it is good that it gives life. The joyful mystery of Mary’s motherhood is thus not opposed to the mystery of her virginity. It is the same mystery. She is not mother “in spite” of her virginity. She reveals the fullness of motherhood because her virginity is the fullness of love.

48 SYNAXIS 6.1


She is the Mother of Christ. She is the fullness of love accepting the coming of God to us—giving life to Him, who is the Life of the world. And the whole creation rejoices in her, because it recognizes through her that the end and fulfillment of all life, of all love is to accept Christ, to give Him life in ourselves. And there should be no fear that this joy about Mary takes anything from Christ, diminishes in any way the glory due to Him and Him alone. For what we find in her and what constitutes the joy of the Church is precisely the fullness of our adoration of Christ, of acceptance and love for Him. Really, here is not “cult of Mary,” yet in Mary the “cult” of the Church becomes a movement of joy and thanksgiving, of acceptance and obedience—the wedding of the Holy Spirit, which makes it the only complete joy on earth.

We can now return to the sacrament of matrimony. We can now understand that its true meaning is not that it merely gives a religious “sanction” to marriage and family life, reinforces with supernatural grace the natural family virtues. Its meaning is that by taking the “natural” marriage into “the great mystery of Christ and the Church,” the sacrament of matrimony gives marriage a new meaning; it transforms, in fact, not only marriage as such but all human love.

It is worth mentioning that the early Church apparently did not know of any separate marriage service. The “fulfillment” of marriage by two Christians was their partaking together of the Eucharist. As every aspect of life was gathered into the Eucharist, so matrimony received its seal by inclusion into this central act of the community. And this means that, since marriage has always had sociological and legal dimensions, these were simply accepted by the Church. Yet, like the whole “natural” life of man, marriage had to be taken into the Church, that is, judged, redeemed and transformed in the sacrament of the Kingdom. Only later did the Church receive also the “civil” authority to perform a rite of marriage. This meant, however, together with the recognition of the Church as the “celebrant” of matrimony, a first step in a progressive “desacramentalization.”

An obvious sign of this was the divorce of matrimony from the Eucharist.

All this explains why even today the Orthodox rite of matrimony consists of two distinct services: the betrothal and the crowning. The betrothal is performed not inside the Church, but in the vestibule. It is the Christian form of the “natural” marriage. It is the blessing of the rings by the priest and their exchange by the bridal pair. Yet from the very beginning this natural marriage is given its true perspective and direction: “O Lord our God,” says the priest, “who hast espoused the Church as a pure Virgin from among the Gentiles, bless this Betrothal, and unite and maintain these Thy servants in peace and oneness of mind.”

For the Christian, natural does not mean either self-sufficient—a “nice little family”—or merely insufficient, and to be, therefore strengthened and completed by the addition of the “supernatural.” The natural man thirsts and hungers for fulfillment and redemption. This thirst and hunger is the vestibule of the Kingdom: both beginning and exile.

Then, having blessed the natural marriage, the priest takes the bridal pair in a solemn procession into the church. This is the true form of the sacrament, for it does not merely symbolize, but indeed is the entrance of marriage into the Church, which is the entrance of the world into the “world to come,” the procession of the people of God—in Christ—into the Kingdom. The rite of crowning is but a later—although a beautiful and beautifully meaningful—expression of the reality of this entrance.

“O Lord and God, crown them with glory and honor!” says the priest after he has put crowns on the heads of the bridal pair. This is, first, the glory and honor of man as king of creation: “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue and have dominion…” (Gn. 1:25). Each family is indeed a kingdom, a little church, and therefore a sacrament of and a way to the Kingdom. Somewhere, even if it is only in a single room, every man at some point in his life has his own small kingdom. It may be hell, and a place of betrayal, or it may not. Behind each window there is a little world going on. How

THEOPHANY 2019 49


evident this becomes when one is riding on a train at night and passing innumerable lighted windows: behind each one of them the fullness of life is a “given possibility,” a promise, a vision. This is what the marriage crowns express: that here is the beginning of a small kingdom which can be something like the true Kingdom. The chance will be lost, perhaps even in one night; but at this moment it is still an open possibility. Yet even when it has been lost, and lost again a thousand times, still if two people stay together, they are in a real sense king and queen to each other. And after forty odd years, Adam can still turn and see Eve standing beside him, in a unity with himself which in some small way at least proclaims the love of God’s Kingdom. In movies and magazines the “icon” of marriage is always a youthful couple. But once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence, enjoying the pale light, the last warmth of the season. In silence: all words had been said, all passion exhausted, all storms at peace. The whole life was behind—yet all of it was now present, in the silence, in this light, in this warmth, in this silent unity of hands. Present—and ready for eternity, ripe for joy. This to me remains the vision of marriage, of its heavenly beauty.

Then secondly, the glory and the honor is that of the martyr’s crown. For the way to the Kingdom is the martyria—bearing witness to

Christ. And this means crucifixion and suffering. A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not “die to itself ” that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of “adjustment” or “mental cruelty.” It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God. This is expressed in the sentiment that one would “do anything” for his family, even steal. The family has here ceased to be for the glory of God; it has ceased to be a sacramental entrance into His presence. It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadow. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it. In a Christian marriage, in fact, three are married; and the united loyalty of the two toward the third, who is God, keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God. Yet it is the presence of God which is the death of marriage as something only “natural.” It is the cross of Christ that brings the self-sufficiency of nature to its end. But “by the cross joy (and not ‘happiness’!) entered the whole world.” Its presence is thus the real joy of marriage. It is the joyful certitude that the marriage vow, in the perspective of the eternal Kingdom, is not taken “until death parts,” but until death unites us completely.

50 SYNAXIS 6.1


The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus Read chapter 18 of this manual, '”On Insensitivity,” and experience honest terror; or chapter 28, “On Prayer,” and be reminded how limited and solitary our conception of prayer is, when we come across the following: “Prayer is by nature a dialog and a union of man with God. Its effect is to hold the world together ... prayer is the mother and daughter of tears...” The work of the seventh-century abbot of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai, The Ladder is probably the single most important text in the spiritual literature of Eastern Christendom. Read in monastic refectories and churches every year during Lent, The Ladder is a text of utmost seriousness and earnestness. Psychological subterfuge and self-delusion are surgically stripped away, leaving the reader two choices: run away or repent. Introduction by Bishop Kallistos Ware.

274 pp. cloth, third revised Holy Transfiguration edition, $42.50 301 pp. paper, Classics of Western Spirituality edition with introduction by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, $26.95

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Hence the third and final meaning of the crowns: they are the crowns of the Kingdom, of that ultimate Reality of which everything in “this world”—whose fashion passeth away—everything has now become a sacramental sign and anticipation. “Receive their crowns in Thy Kingdom,” says the priest, as he removes them from the heads of the newlyweds, and this means: make this marriage a growth in that perfected love of which God alone is the end and fullness.

The common cup given to the couple after the crowning is explained today as a symbol of “common life,” and nothing shows better the “descaramentalization” of marriage, its reduction to a “natural happiness.” In the past this was communion, the partaking of the Eucharist, the ultimate seal of the fulfillment of marriage in Christ. Christ is to be the very essence of life together. He is the wine of the new life of the children of God, and communion in it will proclaim how, by getting older and older in this world, we are growing younger and younger in the life which has no evening.

As the wedding service is completed, the bride and bridegroom join hands and follow the priest in a procession around the table. As in baptism, this procession in a circle signifies the eternal journey which has begun; marriage will be a procession hand in hand, a continuation of that which has started here, not always joyful, but always capable of being referred to and filled with joy.

*For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminar Press, 1973), 81-91. Reprinted in 2018 with a new foreword by Dr. Edith M. Humphrey.

THE EXSTASIE

John Donne A. D. 1633

WHERE, like a pillow on a bed A pregnant bank swell’d up to rest

The violet’s reclining head, Sat we two, one another’s best.

Our hands were firmly cemented With a fast balm, which thence did spring;

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string;

So to’intergraft our hands, as yet Was all the means to make us one,

And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation.

As ‘twixt two equal armies fate Suspends uncertain victory,

Our souls (which to advance their state Were gone out) hung ‘twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there, We like sepulchral statues lay;

All day, the same our postures were, And we said nothing, all the day.

If any, so by love refin’d That he soul’s language understood,

And by good love were grown all mind, Within convenient distance stood,

He (though he knew not which soul spake, Because both meant, both spake the same)

Might thence a new concoction take And part far purer than he came.

This ecstasy doth unperplex, We said, and tell us what we love;

We see by this it was not sex, We see we saw not what did move;

But as all several souls contain Mixture of things, they know not what,

Love these mix’d souls doth mix again And makes both one, each this and that.

A single violet transplant, The strength, the colour, and the size,

(All which before was poor and scant) Redoubles still, and multiplies.

When love with one another so Interinanimates two souls,

That abler soul, which thence doth flow, Defects of loneliness controls.

THEOPHANY 2019 51


d

We then, who are this new soul, know Of what we are compos’d and made,

For th’ atomies of which we grow Are souls, whom no change can invade.

But oh alas, so long, so far, Our bodies why do we forbear?

They’are ours, though they’are not we; we are The intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus Did us, to us, at first convey,

Yielded their senses’ force to us, Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man heaven’s influence works not so, But that it first imprints the air;

So soul into the soul may flow, Though it to body first repair.

As our blood labors to beget Spirits, as like souls as it can,

Because such fingers need to knit That subtle knot which makes us man,

So must pure lovers’ souls descend T’ affections, and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great prince in prison lies.

To’our bodies turn we then, that so Weak men on love reveal’d may look;

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we, Have heard this dialogue of one,

Let him still mark us, he shall see Small change, when we’are to bodies gone.

52 SYNAXIS 6.1


In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader edited by Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov Jakiim How to introduce Paul Evdokimov? Associated with the “Russian Religious Renaissance” of the first half of the twentieth century, his compatriots include Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, Afanasiev, Berdyaev, St. Silouan, and St. Tikhon; and other pivotal twentieth-century figures crossed the beautiful path of his expansive and searching mind: Simone Weil, Camus, Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, Jung, Dostoevsky, Merton. Steeped in the history of the Church, conversant with mystery and brilliantly honest, his thought has been described as “liturgical existentialism” without the angst. His own terminology is preferable as one drinks in these representative writings: “A Christian community, if it truly is this, buries itself as a splinter in the body of the world” (which often includes the Church herself). His words pierce, stir, heal, and sing to us. Convinced of “God’s insistence on the impossible,” driven by the “instinct of Orthodoxy” and the “creative path of Tradition” Evdokimov delves into the nature of the Church, her social responsibilities, the eruptive power of holiness, the “absurd” love of God, the charisms of women, eschatology, and much more. His openness to seeing “Christ in all things” invites us to acknowledge: yes, here too Christ speaks!

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Ages of the Spiritual Life by Paul Evdokimov Anyone who takes at all seriously historic Christian spirituality—which is at its core monastic spirituality—must sooner or later confront the question: “How can the ascetical life be lived in the world?” How can the rigor of The Ladder of Divine Ascent be taken up by those in secular society, perhaps in the community of marriage? A priest friend recently proposed a winsome answer, essentially saying that Climacus’ instruction was like a melody that had to be transposed into a new key, for a different instrument than that for which it had originally been written. Ages of the Spiritual Life is exactly that transposition, an approach to the classic themes of ascetic spirituality—poverty, chastity, obedience, discernment, silence, vigilance, humility—that renders them in terms accessible to any Christian, without subtracting anything from their demands or their promise. Evdokimov’s pregnant, aphoristic prose should be read slowly and meditatively, with due attention to the amazing way in which scripture is used to interpret scripture, or patristic citation, or even modern philosophical query, and these mutually to enlighten the scripture in turn. Fully faithful to Orthodox teaching yet respectfully cognizant of the unique insights and dangerous tendencies of the modern temper, Evdokimov offers a living, poetic insight into the verities and mysteries of the human condition in the light of Christ.

263 pp. paper $22.00

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the REVIEWS

When husband and wife are united in marriage, they are no longer seen as something earthly, but as the image of God Himself. ~St. John Chrysostom

CHRISTIANITY & EROS REVISITED

Making Love as Sacramental Act

Hans Boersma A. D. 2018

FIRST THINGS recently published a piece I wrote titled “Eight Theses on Sex.” In the first thesis, I suggested that sexual union is a sacrament of union with Christ. I took my cue from Saint Paul’s statement in Ephesians 5 that the one-flesh relationship between husband and wife is a profound mystery that refers to Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31–32). Viewing sexual union as sacramental in character opens the way for treating erotic desire, love, and marital life in a uniquely Christian perspective. This approach implies that sexual union is far more than just a biological act that exists for purely horizontal ends—say, for the purpose of pleasure or having children. Treating the sex act as a sacramental act takes it (as well as the erotic desire in which it is grounded) beyond its purely this-worldly, natural being. Even the sex act (or, perhaps I should say, especially the sex act) isn’t a purely natural act. Inasmuch as it is sacramental in character, it is intimately linked to the otherworldly, heavenly reality of Christ. The earthly act of lovemaking participates in the heavenly realm of love; or, we could say, the love of the triune God becomes sacramentally present in the sexual act. (For my understanding of the created order as sacramental in character, see Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, 2011, pp. 19–39.) By making love, husband and wife thus bear witness to the intimacy between heaven and earth, the union between Christ and His Church. The couple reveal something of the love of God Himself because their act of lovemaking makes present the kingdom of God.

My friends at the Eighth Day Institute recently recommended to me Philip Sherrard’s 1976 book Christianity and Eros: Essays on the Theme of Sexual Love, and in this short essay I want to offer some

reflections on the sacramentality of the sex act in light of Sherrard’s book. Let me begin by saying: I was not disappointed—it’s a great read. Sherrard was a twentieth-century Orthodox thinker who drank deeply from the wells of patristic and contemporary Orthodox thought, who was deeply suspicious of the separation between nature and the supernatural that he thought has bedevilled Western (and especially modern) thought, and who recognized that in order to combat today’s social and cultural problems we must turn to the resources of the Christian Platonist tradition. In short, Sherrard was a sacramental thinker—someone who believed that ordinary things in life aren’t as ordinary as they seem. Sherrard’s definition of a sacrament makes this clear: “A sacrament is the revelation of divine life to the creature that participates in it. It is the revelation of divine life within and through the creature” (CE 75). Well-said!

For Sherrard, then, sexual love is sacramental. That’s one of the main threads (perhaps the main one) that runs through the book. The “sexual energy” that flows between two people from the opposite sex comes from God: “It is the radiating, magnetizing, vibratory current which courses through the whole living fabric of human life,” which is “divine in origin,” and which “is polarized in the sexual character of human and other life,” “polarized into male and female, active and passive” (CE 77). This sexual energy is sacramental in character, not because it leads to offspring; rather, claims Sherrard, it “derives its sacramental quality from the fact that its own origin is divine and its own nature is sacred” (CE 77). These are powerful words—Sherrard points us beyond a merely natural, this-worldly understanding of sexual love and of marriage. For Sherrard, sexual love is erotic in character, and eroticism is not something to avoid but rather to celebrate as divine in origin and sacramental in character.

And yet, is Sherrard sacramental enough? Is his affirmation of eros and sexual desire sufficiently robust? Does he provide a theological antidote to the late modern crisis in sexual morality? Unfortunately the answer is negative on each count. The reason becomes clear when we ask:

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what exactly is it that Sherrard thinks is sacramental in character? The answer is most emphatically not: the physical sex act. Sherrard has a deeply ambivalent, even negative view of “making love” (an expression he dislikes; CE 1). He is highly critical of the Western tradition’s focus on the genital act. This fixation has treated the sex act as the consummation of the marriage sacrament (because it is the sex act that leads to procreation), and the result is a “hopelessly idealized” view of sexual intercourse (CE 29). For Sherrard—and here he selectively draws from Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Vladimir Soloviov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Nikolai Berdyaev—the sex act is “at best an imperfect and all too often a most crude and inhuman form of sexual communion between man and woman” (CE 29). The sex act has to do with our animal nature. Sherrard seems comfortable with the position of Berdyaev and others, which treats animal sexuality and genital intercourse as opposed to sexual love (CE 64–65). (Sherrard does subject Soloviov, Merezhkovsky, and Berdyaev to some critique [CE 70–71], but he has deeply imbibed their thought, and he himself sharply distinguishes between physical intercourse and sexual love, treating only the latter as sacramental.) The sex act is the result of our fallen condition; it is emphatically not sacramental in character. In short, Sherrard regards “sexual energy” as sacramental, but intercourse as a negative expression of our animality. On Sherrard’s understanding, the sex act is not about sexual love.

This sharp separation between sexual love and the sex act (with only the former being sacramental in character) is a problem, I think. But before I go there, let me reiterate that there’s much in Sherrard’s approach that’s deeply attractive. I have long been convinced that Saint Gregory of Nyssa is on to something when he links the sex act with animal passions (though it’s not clear to me why Sherrard applauds this in Nyssen and chastises Augustine for it). Eros is an ambivalent attraction—and sexual desire and sexual intercourse inevitably contain a self-directed element. The contemporary celebration of erotic desire and of sexual (i.e., genital) expression is

mired in self-delusion: it ignores the obvious harm caused by untrammelled self-expression and is oblivious to the self-directed aspect that is an inescapable part of our erotic expressions. The Church Fathers rightly remind us that physical desire, sexual union, and even having children are not ultimate. They are merely penultimate to the ultimate satisfaction we obtain in the vision of God.

I love it, therefore, that Sherrard consistently reminds us that this world is not our home; we should primarily be focused, not on the world but on the kingdom to come. “Christianity,” Sherrard rightly insists, “is concerned with the transfiguration of the world,” so that “there must be a basic—and on one level tragic—conflict between participation in the kingdom ‘not of this world’ and the biological continuation of the human race in this world …” (CE 24). Sherrard has a point, therefore, when he cautions against treating procreation as the purpose of marriage. It is one of its aims (something Sherrard could be much more forthcoming about!), but not the most ultimate one. The ultimate aim of marriage is life with God—beatific vision and deification (CE 15). Sexual love aims at a supernatural end.

Moreover, Sherrard is exactly right in pointing out that not every sexual expression, and not every marriage, is equally true to its calling—not equally sacramental, one could say. Participation comes in varying degrees—and so does sacramentality. Though the language of ‘degrees’ is mine (not Sherrard’s), it is clear that Sherrard thinks of the sacramental character of sexual love as often being underdeveloped, and only sometimes (“rarely,” he asserts) coming into full bloom. Sherrard even claims—and here I must part ways with him—that it is only when a couple’s love and complementarity reach beyond the physical, emotional, and intellectual to the spiritual that marriage becomes sacramental. Sherrard isn’t convinced a marriage is (fully) sacramental simply by virtue of a contract, a sex act, or even the presence of children. Only when a man and a woman are joined “in their spiritual natures” does marriage become a sacramental reality (CE 90). As long as there’s no genuine reciprocity and

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polarity on the higher levels, “the full chord of the sacrament” has not been struck (CE 92).

Sherrard’s sharp distinction between physical desire and the sex act, on the one hand, and what he terms “sexual love,” on the other hand, leads to problems. It never quite becomes clear to me what exactly the spiritual, erotic (but definitely non-physical) “sexual love” between male and female looks like. Sherrard does not explain how this spiritual, sexual attraction between male and female functions. What need is there to use the word ‘sexual’ for a union that reaches beyond the physical, emotional, and intellectual complementarity of male and female? (Unlike Sherrard, Gregory of Nyssa never uses the language of human beings—or God—being bi-sexual or androgynous. For Gregory, both God himself and human beings as they are meant to be ‘in Christ’ are non-sexual. Human beings leave their gendered and sexual characteristics behind.) Sherrard never speaks positively about physical attraction or about the sex act. Nor does he refer to the product, children, in a positive way. The reason is clear. If only “sexual love” is sacramental, then the physical sex act (and whatever results from it) falls under deep suspicion. It’s hard to discern sacramental redemption in any of this.

Sherrard aims to recover a sacramental ontology. Unfortunately, he does not push it far as he should—namely, to include the physical sex act. As a result, he runs the real danger of being co-opted by modernity. Sherrard writes appreciatively of changes in more recent Catholic thought on sexuality and argues that “the most positive sign” of a deepened Christian approach to marriage “is evident in the attempt to separate the purpose of marriage from procreation, or at least to give the relational and unitive aspects of marriage priority over its procreational aspects” (CE 37). Really? Why this artificial separation of procreation from sex? Can we not treat both procreation and the relational aspect of marriage as sacramentally participating in the kingdom to come? And if everything in marriage centers on the relational aspect (so that marriage really isn’t truly sacramental until the spouses attain full spiritual unity), what prevents them from divorcing when the relation

doesn’t seem to work out or if they don’t truly end up sharing at a spiritual level? Sherrard is remarkably cavalier about the marriage covenant itself and about linking marriage to children.

Sacramentality goes all the way down: it includes physical, erotic desire, the marriage covenant, physical intercourse, and the gift of children. If it’s true that sacramentality comes in degrees, then God is sacramentally present in all of this. Sherrard certainly is right in wanting to recover eros as an integral element of a sacramental ontology. But by separating the sex act from sexual love, he fails to acknowledge that all of God’s good creation participates sacramentally in his eternal, heavenly purpose for us. Fair enough, spiritual union is of a higher kind than physical union. But even way down in the hierarchy of being, we can discern something of the creator’s intentions for us. Lovemaking, too, is sacramental participation in the love of God.

THE MYSTERIES OF ATTRACTION

Christopher Lasch A. D. 1993

THE AUTHOR of a number of admirable books, not a few of which deal with the emerging ideal of romantic love in early modern art and literature, Jean H. Hagstrum, has surpassed himself in Esteem Enlivened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare (1992), which ranges over more than ten centuries (amply fulfilling the promise of its subtitle) in search of a usable past—an “available heritage concerning the loving couple.” To some extent he has also reversed himself, since he now seeks to correct the impression left by his earlier studies, that romantic love came to be associated with marriage only in the modern world. His new book contests this widely accepted

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interpretation, which Hagstrum attributes to the belated discovery that “love and marriage do not always go together like a horse and carriage.” Ever since this disconcerting fact “dawned on us disillusioned moderns … it has been a continuing scholarly preoccupation to discover just when romantic love came into Western culture.” The prevailing consensus—that it came relatively late (in the cruder version of this thesis, only with the “rise of the middle class”)—issues decidedly bedraggled, if not altogether demolished, from this determined assault.

Hagstrum does not deny that many authors, both classical and Christian, took a disparaging view of marriage, emphasizing the wife’s subordination, the dangerous power of female sexuality, and the incompatibility of sexual passion with the mundane ends marriage was meant to serve. Xenophon spoke for a longstanding tradition in the ancient world when he defined the purpose of marriage as legitimate offspring and the maintenance of the household economy. In the Christian world, an equally strong tradition viewed marriage as an acceptable but hardly exalted alternative to sexual promiscuity, morally much inferior to virginity. Sexual passion had its champions, of course, but it was thought unsuitable for man and wife. In ancient Greece, it was associated with love between men and boys; in the Middle Ages, with adulterous love between men and women. Hagstrum’s thesis is not impaired by the recognition that married love had very little place in the dominant tradition of Western patriarchy.

His claim, though it is supported by an imposing structure of erudition, is more modest: that a counter-tradition, already present in Homer’s account of the homecoming that concludes the Odyssey, encouraged a “softening of male power in patriarchy,” hedged in that power with “civilizing limitations,” idealized marriage as the union of desire and esteem, and held up sexual equality as the precondition of erotic friendship. Hagstrum thinks this “vision of marital love,” in a culture that has long been supposed to be without it, owed a good deal to the influence of women, which made itself felt, even in works written by

men, in the insight that eros could be a “force for civility” as well as disruption. From the beginning, it would seem, the West was able to imagine that marriage might rest on sexual attraction and mutual respect, instead of on the sexual subordination that was taken as the norm elsewhere in the world.

Imagination was often at odds with practice, to be sure, but we should not therefore conclude that married love was to be found only in works of art. A play like Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hagstrum argues, would have meant nothing to its audience “had not the oikos [Greek household] been a place much desired by both men and women.” That wives could resort to a sexual strike as a form of political protest implied, in the words Hagstrum borrows from Sir Kenneth Dover, that “the marital relationship was much more important in people’s actual lives than we would have inferred simply from our knowledge of the law.”

The “erotic ideal”—the union of esteem and sexual desire—deserves to be considered “one of the great achievements of Western culture,” according to Hagstrum. “But that union did not come easily,” he adds. “Esteem had to be divorced from an all-male contest, and sexuality from the stigma of sin or excess.” The first of these developments could have occurred only in a culture willing to countenance the possibility that women (and more particularly wives) were good for something besides reproduction and household labor. As for the second, it received support from the tradition of Christian naturalism, as Hagstrum calls it—the refusal to condemn matter as evil or to equate salvation with a disembodied spirituality—which tempered the fear of sexuality that was also present (even dominant) in Christianity. The central importance of the Incarnation, in Christian doctrine, always stood in the way of Platonizing and Gnosticizing influences that might otherwise have aligned Christianity with those religions that aspire to Nirvana, the extinction of desire. In Christianity as well as Judaism, the love of God was often evoked with an abundance of sexual imagery, the effect of which was not only to displace or sublimate sexual desire but also to give it a certain legitimacy.

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A VISION FOR CLASSICAL, CATECHETICAL & ECUMENICAL EDUCATION

Hagstrum’s open and unapologetic admiration for Western achievements, it hardly needs to be said, goes against current grain. A man of irenic temper, Hagstrum prefers to emphasize his obligations to other scholars rather than his objections to their work; so it is left mostly to a reviewer to point out that his own work takes issue not merely with prevailing interpretations of the history of love but, at a deeper level, with the whole trend of recent scholarship in the humanities. Although he is clearly sympathetic to feminism, he does not subscribe to the kind of feminism that sees nothing in history except the eternal oppression of women and swallows up all distinctions, all cultural variations, in the one all-encompassing, undifferentiated, monolithic category of “patriarchy.” Hagstrum’s work likewise stands firmly opposed to the cynicism (which runs through so much of the revisionist scholarship on the Renaissance, for example) that seeks to reduce every expression of idealism to the self-interested pursuit of power. Far more worldly than those who aspire to cosmopolitan status by importing their ideas from Paris, he is undismayed by the gap between ideals and reality, often taken to signify the irrelevance of ideals, because he recognizes their power to criticize and even alter reality. His book deals with “our literary and artistic heritage,” not with “historical reality as such,” but he does not make the current assumption that art has no connection with reality at all or, alternately, that reality represents nothing more than the “social construction” of artists and critics. He rejects the notion that literary works never refer to anything beyond themselves and that it is pointless, therefore, to expect moral instruction from a work of art.

When he refers to art and literature as our “heritage,” Hagstrum reduces to a single word everything that distinguishes him from current fashion. He sees the past as a source of moral wisdom, not just as a record of follies presumably outgrown in our more enlightened (if disillusioned) age. He believes in the “ethical imagination,” the exercise of which demands that “we respond correctly and historically when we weigh alternatives, suspend easy belief, and project the dynamics of a work of art into a future that reaches

out to our own situation.” This procedure carries the danger of reading the past too much in the light of present concerns, and Hagstrum does not always avoid it. There are times when his view of history takes on a Whiggish tinge, as when he congratulates Boccaccio for writing stories that are “modern in feeling,” deplores the way in which medieval conventions continued, during the Renaissance, to act as a “dragging, traditional chain on … progress,” or complains that The Tempest (almost alone among Shakespeare’s plays in upholding a very orthodox, unimaginative view of marriage) “does not put Shakespeare on the frontier of the emergent.” An insistently moralizing criticism, as is well known, can interfere with our willingness to take imaginative works on their own terms. Thus Hagstrum misses the satiric intent behind Boccaccio’s depiction of the conventional marriage between ill-assorted couples and makes him out to be a reformer instead, the author of an “attack” on the institution of arranged marriage. Admirers of Boccaccio’s artistry are likely to be put off by Hagstrum’s observation that the Decameron, notwithstanding its “modern” feeling, “falls short of [upholding] a satisfying ethical norm.” Yet this ethical interrogation of a text, even if the norm in question is too much defined by the “emergent,” is vastly preferable to a style of criticism that reflects ethical judgment as completely beside the point.

Hagstrum’s literary history of romantic love, because it seeks ethical guidance from the past and not just a better understanding of our ancestor’s foibles, amounts also to a defense of romantic love, written with a heartbreaking awareness that lifelong marriage no longer serves as the standard to which erotic practice ought to aspire. Not only marriage but romantic love itself has fallen out of favor. Love at first sight, we are told again and again, provides a shaky basis for marriage. Shared hobbies and tastes, a mutual commitment to compromise, and a willingness to admit that things never stay the same are more likely to endure when passion cools. Lovers should not demand too much of each other. They must allow for the possibility that one of them will probably outgrow the other. To expect fidelity,

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permanence, undying attachment is to court disappointment. Friendship, homosexual or heterosexual, seems more reliable to us than love, just because it is less demanding and intense. Friendship easily coexists with sex (these days, at least with safe sex) but not with eros, the “decoration of sexual impulse by art and thought.” We like our sexual impulse unadorned, put securely in its place among the “facts of life.”

Sex with us is a science, while art and thought have turned to other themes, including the inevitable misunderstandings between men and women, their essential incompatibility, the instability of all attachments, and the unreliability of everything in the world except sharp, small, immediate, and more or less interchangeable pleasures.

Even the “joy of sex” is now shadowed by AIDS. The sense of sexuality as a dangerous, dark, and unpredictable presence in human life—all the more so in its “decorated” forms—has returned to us in full force. The idea that anything so disruptive could lead to lasting relationships—that eros could be a stabilizing, let alone a civilizing influence—strikes us as a consummate piece of mystification. One hears talk, more wistful than ironic, about the wisdom of arranged marriages—all in all, it is said, a better solution than romance to the intractable problem of male-female union.

To explain the twentieth-century revulsion against romantic love lies beyond the scope of Hagstrum’s enterprise, already ambitious enough without this added burden. The hint of an explanation, however, lies in his very formulation of the romantic ideal. The elaboration of the sexual impulse in works of art, he observes, makes us “understand that the passion aroused early and mysteriously carries over into a calm and fruitful married life.” Elsewhere he speaks of the “notion that suddenly and mysteriously induced erotic love … brings long satisfactions to the couple and also to most of those who witness its formation and wish it well.” It is precisely the belief that a “sudden, overwhelming attraction” establishes “unshakable bonds” that the modern mind (or is it the postmodern mind?) finds so shocking. The assertion that this process operates

“mysteriously,” far from reassuring us, seems to clinch the case against romantic love. We dislike mystery. We crave what we can control—even if the price we pay for control is drastic shrinkage of our imaginative and emotional horizon.

*Originally published in Commonweal (26 February 1993): 22-24. Review of Esteem Enlivened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare by Jean H. Hagstrum. Reprinted in Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage and Feminism, edited by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 32-38.

THEOSIS & EROS, CELIBACY & MARRIAGE

Adam Cooper & Carl E. Olson A. D. 2014

DR. ADAM G. Cooper recently corresponded with Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, about his newest books—Naturally Human, Supernaturally God: Deification in Pre-conciliar Catholicism and Holy Eros: A Liturgical Theology of the Body—and his research into salvation, liturgy, theosis, the meaning of the body, and the crucial relationship between celibacy and marriage.

CWR: At first glance, these two books might appear to be about two rather different topics: soteriology and liturgy. But would it be accurate to say that each, in its own way, focus on shared topics, including the nature of man, the purpose of existence, and the end (or End) to which each of us is oriented?

Dr. Cooper: Yes, that’s a fair observation. Much of my writing has tended to revolve around theological anthropology in one shape or another. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it revolves around Christology, from

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which a good deal of my thinking about what it means to be human and bodily emerges.

CWR: Naturally Human, Supernaturally God is rather unique in that it takes a topic—deification—usually discussed from a biblical perspective or a patristic foundation, and examines it in the writings of three great twentieth-century Catholic theologians: Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Karl Rahner, S.J., and Henri de Lubac, S.J. How did you first become interested in the topic of deification? And how did you end up writing about Garrigou-Lagrange, Rahner, and de Lubac and their theological work about deification?

Dr. Cooper: My interest in deification goes way back to the first year of my Lutheran seminary education, where I had the chance to read Irenaeus and Origen for a research paper. I was struck by the centrality of this idea in their respective works. At that time quite a bit of work was also being done by the Finnish Lutherans on deification in Luther’s theology, so I was able to draw some tenuous links.

Several years later I found myself studying deification and the body in the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor. To master Maximus on this topic one needs to master the whole Greek patristic tradition. Soon after becoming Catholic, I realized how much I stood in need of orientation in twentieth-century Catholic theology. So I chose a theme I already knew well from the Fathers—deification—and set out to discover whether and how it had featured in pre-Vatican II Catholic theology. It turned out to be a really worthwhile project.

CWR: What are some of the common points of emphasis among the three theologians? And in what ways did they differ? Why is it important to study both the points of agreement and of disagreement?

Dr. Cooper: All three theologians locate the heart and center of human meaning and fulfillment in Christ, the incarnate God. That may come as a surprise to some who think that Garrigou-Lagrange is too neo-scholastic or that Rahner is too modern. I didn’t know what I

would find. I just knew the three figures represented very different streams or traditions in contemporary Catholic theology.

What surprised me was this convergence, revolving around human deification in Christ. Perhaps I am naïve, but it seems to me that here is at least one way towards healing and overcoming some of the many unnecessary polarities that afflict the post-Vatican Catholic Church, as well as offering a fruitful point of dialogue with other ecclesial traditions.

CWR: You acknowledge that you think de Lubac’s thinking and writing about deification, while controversial in some ways, is the best of the three. Why?

Dr. Cooper: Maybe because of my own formation in biblical and patristic theology, de Lubac speaks a language that is most familiar to me, and that rings true from what I know of authentic Christian tradition, spread over space and history.

He also speaks what I would call a more universal Christian language, one that is not narrowly bound by the categories of Neo-scholastic or Transcendental philosophy. That may sound subjective, but I think de Lubac’s theology has also been more clearly corroborated by magisterial teaching in the last forty years or so.

CWR: Another shared theme of these two books is what you describe as the “cruciform humility” of Christ and those who share in His divine life. What is the place and role of the cross in what you call “holy eros” and the “liturgical theology of the body?”

Dr. Cooper: The cross to me is everything. It’s the defining center of God and human history. Failure to come to grips with what happened there in our Lord’s bleeding and broken body results in a vague, abstract, evanescent theology entirely lacking power to change lives.

A theology of the cross does not simply mean that the cross is important. It requires the paradoxical reversal of all worldly perspectives, and the discovery of life in death, power in weakness, honor in humility, salvation in judgment.

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Christianity proclaims a glorious salvation, but it is not found in this life except under the veil of blood, tears, humility, and surrender to death.

CWR: How can the theology of the body equip Catholics to better understand and participate in Liturgy? What misunderstandings about worship and adoration can be countered by a deeper comprehension of the sign and symbolism of the human body?

Dr. Cooper: Christian faith is not first of all a mental event. It is born in the body, and shaped by what we do with and in the body. Our bodies furthermore are not just neutral, mute instruments, but already inscribed with meaning and purpose, already indicating something about the shape of human and spiritual fulfillment. In the Liturgy, which is nothing less than the body language of Christ in the world, all these dynamics come together.

The Church in worship is a living, breathing body. Its communion with God is physically mediated. Sensitivity to the meaning of our own bodies, especially what John Paul II called the body’s “nuptial” dimension, as well as to the “physicality” of the Church’s Liturgy, goes a long way towards strengthening effective participation in and understanding of Christian worship.

CWR: Celibacy has often been presented as a discipline with an ancient heritage. But what are the theological roots and meanings of celibacy? And how can they help us to better understand marriage and the nuptial relationship?

Dr. Cooper: Our Lord is a virgin. So is His Mother. In His virginal conception and incarnate virginal life “nature is innovated afresh” (to use a phrase of Maximus the Confessor). This means that in Christ’s bodily virginity, which even now is enclosed within the Trinitarian communion, something new enters the sphere of salvation history, revealing and effectively realizing a new and more ultimate meaning for marriage and sexuality.

According to the Creator’s plan marriage is not just a means for human reproduction. Rather it bears a paradigmatic status, directing us toward

our ultimate end in the marriage of the Lamb and the Bride. In a hidden yet real way sacramental marriages already participate in the redemptive grace of this Christ/Church union. But celibacy for the sake of the kingdom more manifestly embodies and anticipates the ultimacy of heavenly fulfillment. In their lives and teaching both Jesus and Paul subordinate marriage to discipleship and the kingdom.

Marriage thus needs the witness of celibacy to prevent it from appearing as god, as ultimate. Celibacy on the other hand needs marriage to indicate its relational, nuptial meaning and erotic trajectory.

CWR: There is currently a strong push in Western culture to erase or dismiss the differences between men and women, as well as to redefine marriage. How can the theology of the body and a better understanding of the nuptial nature of Christ’s relationship with the Church help the Church in defending and lauding that which is truly masculine and feminine, as well as presenting the nature of authentic marriage?

Dr. Cooper: Every true union presupposes difference. This is true at the level of the Trinitarian communion, the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures, the union of Christ and the Church, and the union of human persons in marriage. Bodily, sexual difference iconically signals this fact. We can ignore it, but we cannot erase it.

This is why proposals to redefine marriage in generic, non-sexually specific terms, amount in fact to an anthropological devolution. With this anthropological genericism goes a more or less subtle eradication of the iconic nature and function of human sexuality, its symbolic capacity to disclose divine mysteries. The body and sexuality lose their inherent, divinely-inscribed meaning and transparency. They instead become playthings, pure instruments, subject to the arbitrary manipulations of human will.

CWR: You conclude Holy Eros with a short chapter on the “prophetism” of the body. In what way does the use of our bodies—in marriage, in

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worship, and so forth—give witness to divine truths and realities?

Dr. Cooper: The holy prophets of Israel were more than just mouthpieces or disinterested conduits for the powerful divine word. This word gripped them and took hold of them. It burned inside them, it weighed constantly upon their hearts, it overturned their lives and histories. Above all this word effectively enacted the realities of which it spoke.

In marriage, and most poignantly in conjugal union, the bodies of the spouses function similarly. Their bodies do not just communicate information, but effectively enact new realities. The language of the body in marriage is, like the language of the prophets, a performative language, an effective word-deed. This of course implies the possibility of falsification. The language of the body can be falsified. The body can be used to tell sexual lies.

For the prophets, fidelity to the word of God was paramount. On it turned the wellbeing of Israel and the history of the world. For spouses, and indeed for all, fidelity to the God-inscribed language of the body is no optional extra, a useful possibility worthy of consideration. On it turns the wellbeing of God’s people, and the future of society.

*Originally published at www.catholicworldreport.com, Oct. 2, 2014

FIGURAL READING A Disruptive Christian Practice

Fr. Geoffrey R. Boyle A. D. 2018

EPHRAIM Radner’s recent book, Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures, is about divine providence and the Christian life formed under the word of God. The cover image—The Ancient of Days by William Blake—beautifully illustrates what Radner does with his words: setting all things within the hand of God. This is a book about history and hermeneutics, how the Lord draws us into Himself through the text of Scripture as His own, creative and redemptive voice.

It is not an easy book. Radner’s grasp of philosophy—both ancient and modern—can overwhelm. At his fingertips are just as easily the Anglican Divines, medieval Rabbinic interpretation, and modern Pentecostalism. He goes in depth with Wycliffe and Bernard of Clairvaux, Origen and Augustine, even showing his familiarity with somewhat obscure Lutherans like Matthias Flacius Illyricus and Salomon Glassius. The intellectual breadth is vast and its critical depth is incredibly careful. Radner, a well-loved professor at Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto, is a true renaissance scholar, recognizing that life doesn’t exist in clearly defined and easily separated categories; neither does Scripture.

Challenging though it is, this book is for the Church. His goal is “to locate figural reading as a kind of common sense, if disruptive, Christian practice” (113). Ultimately, he writes as a preacher; and it’s with a mind toward his experience on the African mission field that he brings his task to bear on the everyday Christian.

Figural reading, he says, was simply the natural, common sense reading up until the 16th century. It’s a reading that draws from the whole canon of Scripture, natural to the notion of Scriptura Scripturae interpres (Scripture interprets Scripture). Ultimately, God speaks through His Word. Such a reading receives the “everything” of God’s act

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in creation, which he clearly identifies as Christ the Word (7). It presumes a unity of the Scriptural, two-Testament witness, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and the self-disclosure of God’s action upon humanity for the sake of drawing man into the life of God—“into the text where God’s word, in all his creative omnipotence, does its work of self-giving and conformation” (263). He lays out not so much a method, as a discussion of the character and nature of Scripture, as well as the chronological complexity encountered while attempting to describe the historical meaning of the text.

Radner seeks to enlarge our reception of Scripture—not as an object, but as subject, an agent that does what it says. What it says and does, Radner argues, is “essentially Christological. It will always show Christ, express Christ, reflect Christ, or lead to Christ” (280). And this because, “somehow,” the Word and the words are “the same.” (That’s my favorite part of the book!)

Radner concludes with an appendix of four figural sermons: Aelfric of Eynsham on Palm Sunday (10th century); John Donne’s Sermon XIII on John 8:15, “I judge no man” (17th century); John Jasper on Exodus 15:3, “The Lord is a man of war” (19th century); and one of Radner’s own on the Good Samaritan.

This book is one of the best recent contributions to the character of Scripture and how we might best engage the Word through preaching and hearing, receiving and being formed thereby.

*An earlier version of this review first appeared at www.ctsfw.edu

SOLOMON’S EROTIC IMAGINATION

Scott Cairns A. D. 1998

Oh, give me the kisses of your mouth, For your love is more delightful than wine. Your name is like finest oil— Therefore do maidens love you. Draw me after you, let us run! The king has brought me to his chambers. Let us delight and rejoice in your love, Savoring it more than wine— Like new wine. . . . ~The Song of Songs 1:2-4

To what purpose is the extravagant beauty of the body? To what purpose the lush accompaniment of two bodies drawn into a single contemplation? Solomon, our greatest poet and our king, could not for all his wisdom come to final understanding—for which we are grateful both to Solomon and to the Lord—but came instead to chance elaboration cast in song.

The woman (consider her form and consider what to Solomon would have seemed her implicit willingness) stood before him only once, and, because she was unaccustomed to such attention and because he was stunned into uncharacteristic humility, she stood before him only briefly before she retrieved her robe from where it lay at her feet, slipped back into it, and, promising to return when she was feeling a little braver, exited the tent.

Such modest exposure may not seem much, but for Solomon it proved plenty. And subsequently all of creation—the labor of bees, spice-scented evergreens, the heartrending, frolicking leap of twin dear—spun into serving a manner of expression whose sole outcome was to utter its own insufficiency. For though his song exceeds all

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songs in addressing the beauty of the woman, it falls silent at its conclusion, as it must, having offered only another manner of poverty in lieu of the woman, which it could not touch.

*Originally published in Recovered Body (New York: George Braziller, 1998). Reprinted by Eighth Day Press.

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Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life selected, adapted, and translated by Scott Cairns Not your conventional anthology of spiritual writings. The poet, convinced that “the originals were all poetry, though they were not all verse,” has chosen to render them all verse, thus magnifying the inner meaning of texts venerated for centuries. Nor is the selection itself conventional. Sure, some of the writers you would expect: St. Paul, Augustine, Francis and Clare, Lady Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux. But Cairns’ gift to the reader is to bring to light relatively unknown writers like Melito of Sardis or Syncletica of Alexandria, Isaac the Syrian and Angela of Foligno, Nicephorus the Hesychast and Nil Sorsky. Likewise, he exposes the pervasive poetic beauty of writers often only considered theologians: Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasios, Ephraim the Syrian, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzos, Gregory of Nyssa, Denys the Areopagite, and more. Those who have encountered Scott Cairns’ poetry will recognize in these “translations” some of his distinctive phrases, and cadences, those who haven’t will quite possibly be intrigued enough to do so. But anyone attending this collection will be introduced to or reminded of a multitude, vastly diverse in time and place, bearing common witness to the relentless and ecstatic love of God and the real possibility of our participation in it.

142 pp. paper $21.95

Short Trip to the Edge: A Pilgrimage to Prayer by Scott Cairns; revised second edition Whether according to the publisher’s plan or a coincidence timed from above, Short Trip arrived, so appropriately, on the first day of Great Lent. And like children at Christmas, we couldn’t wait to open it. Scott Cairns, poet, teacher, and friend, offers the hard-won fruit of his own inner and outer journeys—among them several to the revered center of Orthodox monasticism, Athos—so that we might catch a glimpse of authentic prayer; that seeing we might desire it, and desiring someday become it. Advice is always given in the voice, confessional and humorously self-effacing, of one who considers himself the reader’s fellow-pilgrim. It is as far removed as imaginable from sentimental or sham pieties, avoiding easy judgment or premature adulation of the monks and pilgrims encountered, instead revealing a winsome luminosity visible in their very fragile humanity. As in the best of memoir, the author’s self-disclosure is as much an encounter with the place and persons of his pilgrimage as with himself.

256 pp. paper $16.99

The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned To It by St. Theophan the Recluse A Russian spiritual director and father to many during his life, St. Theophan is now becoming the same to a new generation through English translation. The Spiritual Life is a new translation of a work originally titled, A Study in the Science of the Soul. It is made up of Theophan’s letters of direction to a young woman as she becomes serious about seeking God. He ranges widely from the theoretical (the nature of the body, its relationship with the intellect, soul, and spirit) to the very practical (“Get a notebook!” “Stand a day.”) Incorporated in all of his work is a faithfulness to the ascetic and spiritual teachings of the Orthodox tradition, adapted to the needs of layperson “in the world.”

320 pp. paper $24.95

MAKE A TRIP to PERUSE the SHELVES of BOOKS at EIGHTH DAY BOOKS in WICHITA, KS



the INKLINGS and friends

All human loves become Christian only when the little rivulets of our many affections, desires, passions, and utopias converge into the burning torrent of the love of God.

~Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

MARRIAGE & THE MODERN MIND

G. K. Chesterton A.D. 1932

I HAVE been requested to write something about Marriage and the Modern Mind. It would perhaps be more appropriate to write about Marriage and the Modern Absence of Mind. In much of their current conduct, those who call themselves “modern” seem to have abandoned the use of reason; they have sunk back into their own subconsciousness, perhaps under the influence of the psychology now most fashionable in the drawing-room; and it is an understatement to say that they act more automatically than the animals. Wives and husbands seem to leave home more in the manner of somnambulists.

If anybody thinks I exaggerate the mindlessness of modern comment on this matter, I am content to refer him to the inscription under a large photograph of a languishing lady, in the newspaper now before me. It states that the lady has covered herself with glory as the inventor of “Companionate Divorce.” It goes on to state, in her own words, that she will marry her husband again if he asks her again; and that she has been living with him ever since she was divorced from him. If mortal muddle-headedness can go deeper than that, in this vale of tears, I should like to see it. The newspaper picture and paragraph I can actually see; and stupidity so stupendous as that has never been known in human history before. The first thing to say about marriage and the modern mind, therefore, is that it is natural enough that people with no mind should want to have no marriage.

But there is another simple yet curious illustration of modern stupidity in the matter. And that is that, while I have known thousands of people arguing about marriage, sometimes furiously against it, sometimes rather feebly in favor of it, I have never known any one of the disputants begin by asking what marriage is. They nibble at it with negative criticism; they

chip pieces off it and exhibit them as specimens, called “hard cases”; they treat every example of the rule as an exception to the rule; but they never look at the rule. They never ask, even in the name of history or human curiosity, what the thing is, or why it is, or why the overwhelming mass of mankind believes that it must be. Let us begin with the alphabet, as one does with infants.

Marriage, humanly considered, rests upon a fact of human nature, which we may call a fact of natural history. All the higher animals require much longer parental protection than do the lower; the baby elephant is a baby much longer than the baby jellyfish. But even beyond this natural tutelage, man needs something quite unique in nature. Man alone needs education. I know that animals train their young in particular tricks; as cats teach kittens to catch mice. But this is a very limited and rudimentary education. It is what the hustling millionaires call Business Education; that is, it is not education at all. Even at that, I doubt whether any pupil presenting himself for Matriculation or entrance into Standard VI, would now be accepted if flaunting the stubborn boast of a capacity to catch mice. Education is a complex and many-sided culture to meet a complex and many-sided world; and the animals, especially the lower animals, do not require it. It is said that the herring lays thousands of eggs in a day. But, though evidently untouched by the stunt of Birth-Control, in other ways the herring is highly modern. The mother herring has no need to remember her own children, and certainly therefore, no need to remember her own mate. But then the duties of a young herring, just entering upon life, are very simple and largely instinctive; they come, like a modern religion, from within. A herring does not have to be taught to take a bath; for he never takes anything else. He does not have to be trained to take off a hat to a lady herring, for he never puts on a hat, or any other Puritanical disguise to hamper the Greek grace of his movements. Consequently his father and mother have no common task or responsibility; and they can safely model their union upon the boldest and most advanced of the new novels and plays. Doubtless the female herring does say to the male

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herring, “True marriage must be free from the dogmas of priests; it must be a thing of one exquisite moment.” Doubtless the male herring does say to the female herring, “When Love has died in the heart, Marriage is a mockery in the home.”

This philosophy, common among the lower forms of life, is obviously of no use among the higher. This way of talking, however suitable for herrings, or even for rats and rabbits, who are said to be so prolific, does not meet the case of the creature endowed with reason. The young of the human species, if they are to reach the hill possibilities of the human culture, so various, so laborious, so elaborate, must be under the protection of responsible persons through very long periods of mental and moral growth. I know there are some who grow merely impatient and irrational at this point; and say they could do just as well without education. But they lie; for they could not even express that opinion, if they had not laboriously learnt one particular language in which to talk nonsense. The moment we have realized this, we understand why the relations of the sexes normally remain static; and in most cases, permanent. For though, taking this argument alone, there would be a case for the father and mother parting when the children were mature, the number of people who at the age of fifty really wish to bolt with the typist or be abducted by the chauffeur is less than is now frequently supposed.

Well, even if the family held together as long as that, it would be better than nothing; but in fact even such belated divorce is based on bad psychology. All the modern license is based on bad psychology; because it is based on the latest psychology. And that is like knowing the last proposition in Euclid without knowing the first. It is the first elements of psychology that the people called “modern” do not know. One of the things they cannot comprehend is the thing called “atmosphere”; as they show by shrieking with derision when anybody demands “a religious atmosphere” in the schools. The atmosphere of something safe and settled can only exist where people see it in the future as well as in the past.

Children know exactly what is meant by having really come home; and the happier of them keep something of the feeling as they grow up. But they cannot keep the feeling for ten minutes, if there is an assumption that Papa is only waiting for Tommy’s twenty-first birthday to carry the typist off to Trouville; or that the chauffeur actually has the car at the door, that Mrs. Brown may go off the moment Miss Brown has “come out.”

That is, in practical experience, the basic idea of marriage; that the founding of a family must be on a firm foundation; that the rearing of the immature must be protected by something patient and enduring. It is the common conclusion of all mankind; and all common sense is on its side. A small minority of what may be called the idle Intelligentsia have, just recently and in our corner of the world, criticized this idea of Marriage in the name of what they call the Modern Mind. The first obvious or apparent question is how they deal with the practical problem of children. The first apparent answer is that they do not deal with it at all.

At best, they propose to get rid of babies, or the problem of babies, in one of three typically modern ways. One is to say that there shall be no babies. This suggestion may be addressed to the individual; but it is addressed to every individual. Another is that the father should instantly send the babies, especially if they are boys, to a distant and inaccessible school, with bounds like a prison, that the babies may become men, in a manner that is considered impossible in the society of their own father. But this is rapidly ceasing to be a Modern method; and even the Moderns have found that it is rather behind the times. The third way, which is unimpeachably Modern, is to imitate Rousseau, who left his baby on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital. It is true that, among the Moderns, it is generally nothing so human or traditional as the Foundling Hospital. The baby is to be left on the doorstep of the State Department for Education and Universal Social Adjustment. In short, these people mean, with various degrees of vagueness, that the place of the Family can now be taken by the State.

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The difficulty of the first method, and so far, of the second and third, is that they may be carried out. The suggestion is made to everybody in the hope that it will not be accepted by everybody; it is offered to all in the hope that it may not be accepted by all. If nobody has any children, everybody can still be satisfied by Birth-Control methods and justified by Birth-Control arguments. Even the reformers do not want this; but they cannot offer any objection to any individual—or every individual. In somewhat the same way, Rousseau may act as an individual and not as a social philosopher; but he could not prevent all the other individuals acting as individuals. And if all the babies born in the world were left on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital, the Hospital, and the doorstep, would have to be considerably enlarged. Now something like this is what has really happened, in the vague and drifting centralization of our time. The Hospital has been enlarged into the School and then into the State; not the guardian of some abnormal children, but the guardian of all normal children. Modern mothers and fathers, of the emancipated sort, could not do their quick-change acts of bewildering divorce and scattered polygamy, if they did not believe in a big benevolent Grandmother, who could ultimately take over ten million children by very grandmotherly legislation.

This modern notion about the State is a delusion. It is not founded on the history of real States, but entirely on reading about unreal or ideal States, like the Utopias of Mr. Wells. The real State, though a necessary human combination, always has been and always will be, far too large, loose, clumsy, indirect and even insecure, to be the “home” of the human young who are to be trained in the human tradition. If mankind had not been organized into families, it would never have had the organic power to be organized into commonwealths. Human culture is handed down in the customs of countless households; it is the only way in which human culture can remain human. The households are right to confess a common loyalty or federation under some king or republic. But the king cannot be the nurse in every nursery; or even the government become

the governess in every schoolroom. Look at the real story of States, modern as well as ancient, and you will see a dissolving view of distant and uncontrollable things, making up most of the politics of the earth. Take the most populous center. China is now called a Republic. In consequence it is ruled by five contending armies and is much less settled than when it was an Empire. What has preserved China has been its domestic religion. South America, like all Latin lands, is full of domestic graces and gaieties; but it is governed by a series of revolutions. We ourselves may be governed by a Dictator; or by a General Strike; or by a banker living in New York. Government grows more elusive every day. But the traditions of humanity support humanity; and the central one is this tradition of Marriage. And the essential of it is that a free man and a free woman choose to found on earth the only voluntary state; the only state which creates and which loves its citizens. So long as these real responsible beings stand together, they can survive all the vast changes, deadlocks and disappointments which make up mere political history. But if they fail each other, it is as certain as death that “the State” will fail them.

*Originally published in Sidelights on New London and New Yorker and Other Essays (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932).

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ROMANTIC THEOLOGY

Charles Williams A. D. 1924

THEOLOGY, which is the science of God, is generally divided into various classes: Dogmatic, Moral, Pastoral, Ascetic, Mystical. But there is a side of it which is concerned with so definite an experience and such exact intellectual deductions that it may be convenient to regard it as a class in itself; more especially as it has, on the whole, been rather neglected by experts in other divisions, and left to the poets and artists. The name given to this side of the science might well be Romantic Theology. This term does not imply, as will inevitably at first be thought, a theology based merely on fantasy and dream, and concerning itself only with illogical sentimentalities. It is a theology as exact as any other kind, but having for cause and subject those experiences of man which, anyhow in discussions of art, are generally termed “Romantic.” The chief of these is romantic love; that is, sexual love between a man and a woman, freely given, freely accepted, and appearing to its partakers one of the most important experiences in life—a love which demands the attention of the intellect and the spirit for its understanding and its service. That there are other human experiences of this same far-reaching nature is undeniable—nature and friendship are perhaps the chief, and these will be touched on in the last section of this essay. But this book is concerned almost entirely to make some attempt to formulate, for the help of students, the principles of Romantic Theology as applicable to romantic love; and it does not profess to do more than sketch the outlines of the subject. The excuse for its existence is that, though a good deal has been written on the subject, especially by the great love poets, the author does not know of any book which attempts to make a beginning of it as a scientific theological study. That a similar formulation may exist, somewhere in the vast mass of Christian theology, is only too probable, but if so, it does not appear to be particularly

well-known at the present day, and the present essay may therefore fall into the hands of some student of the subject who is, like the author, unacquainted with its predecessor. To students who do not accept the doctrine of the Incarnation, the suggestions made will probably appear fanciful; it is at any rate certain, as a compensation, that to no Christian can they appear as anything but natural and probable, even if in the end they should have to be, for one cause or another, rejected. In a sense, of course, any such study as the present is negligible, as all intellectual formulation of spiritual experience, and all schematization of it, is negligible. There are lovers, as there are saints, in all ages, who not only do not know but do not care to know, anything of the work of the mind, and they are sometimes the greatest lovers and saints. No knowledge of Dogmatic Theology is a substitute for a saving faith; nor of Moral Theology for the formation of the habit of moral obedience; nor of Mystical Theology for the practice of communion with God. Nor is any theoretical doctrine in Romantic Theology the satisfactory equivalent for its practice. But theory may be a help to practice, and even sometimes an incentive to it. Romantic Theology is no more than a basis, but the possibility of its sometimes being that is a reason for its formulation.

Since Romantic Theology is a part of Christian Theology it will be understood that this essay is written entirely from the point of view of an orthodox Christian. The Rites and dogmas of Christianity, as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, are assumed on the one side, as romantic love is assumed on the other. Intellectually, such a position implicitly assumes that the theologies of other religions are mistaken, but it is not, of course, denied that romantic lovers in any part or any age of the world have achieved their proper end under whatever creed they professed. The present business is merely the formulation of Christian theology; not a denial or correction of others.

But if this side of the book is limited, the other is universal. Love, as previously defined, is a normal human thing, although its development and progress must be modified and defined by

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the particular habits, social and religious, of its environment. It is, in another sense than that of the Vincentian canon, held semper et ubique et ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all; shortened from “What is always, what is everywhere, what is by all people believed.”]. It has been part of the work of Christianity in the world to make men aware of the spiritual significance of certain natural experiences. This has been attempted with sacrifice, it has been attempted with death; it has been attempted very little with romantic love. Yet any human energy that can be so described is capable of being assumed into sacramental and transcendental heights—such is the teaching of the Incarnation. Thus the distance between an ordinary meal and that nourishment which is communicated in the Eucharist should lessen, as it were, until perhaps to the devout soul every meal is an actual Eucharist in the theological sense. Nor would such a progress involve any invasion of the order of the Church, for it would be an additional and free grace of God. But much theology has been spent upon this sacrament, whereas comparatively little has been written upon the other sacrament of marriage. In general, the Church has confined herself to exhorting the newly married pair to observe their moral duties and their ecclesiastical, and to repudiating divorce more or less strenuously. And yet the universality, the intensity, and (one might almost say) the necessity of love, might have suggested it as a subject for the most profound consideration. Such consideration the Church may yet find it possible to give, and that will be the Age of Romantic Theology. It has been prevented from doing so in the past by various causes. For example, during the earliest stage of the Church her expectation of the immediate return of Christ distracted her mind from a subject which implied children and the continuance of the world. Again, her inevitable concentration upon another world, her existence, so to speak, in that world and merely partial appearance in this, tends to cause her to neglect the affairs of this world; and by consequence to regard with suspicion any sacrament accompanied by and indeed consisting of human delight. The Church has always, not unnaturally, been haunted by a Manicheanism

which, driven out by dogma, has returned as a vaguer but pervading influence. This added to that necessary asceticism which is the prelude to the profounder depths of mystical life has resulted in an attitude towards marriage that seems to regard it, though officially calling it a sacrament, as in effect nothing much more than a matter of morals. Probably this attitude has been strengthened by the celibacy of the clergy, so long and so widely maintained. It would be demanding too much of the theologians, for most of them have been clerics, to expect them to be sensitive to the meaning and graces of a sacrament from which they have been debarred. In this only of the sacraments are the priesthood not merely unessential in times of necessity, but almost unimportant at any time. Compelled by the Mind of the Church to perform the ecclesiastical ceremony of marriage whenever it is demanded, they find the same Mind declaring that the celebrants of the sacrament are, always and everywhere, the two lovers; that the ecclesiastical ceremony, though of the bene esse, is not of the esse, of it; and that in consequence the priest, though a witness terrestrial and celestial, whose presence it would be the highest insolence not to invite, is hardly more. The position is novel, and the result not amazing.

That the result, the neglect by theology of marriage as a sacrament, is undoubted could be shown by many quotations [Williams intended to add them but this never happened].

These then are the official utterances, or rather the utterances of the officials of the Church, which is not quite the same thing. They are concerned largely with such moral matters as divorce and birth-control and so forth, a side of the subject with which this essay does not concern itself (except incidentally, so far as divorce is concerned, in a few tentative suggestions). And yet something may be gathered from the attitude which the Church has taken up on those matters, little as its officials (with few and lovely exceptions) seem to understand it. To them in some way divorce and birth-control seem to have existed in no relation to marriage: awful laws of the Absolute. It is the old error of substituting the very proper negation of certain means for the assertion of the

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end which is to be attained, not by those means. In marriage, as everywhere else, the Church is concerned with the regeneration of man. This regeneration, which will probably take aeons before it can be dimly foreseen, is not to be brought about by an evasion of the problem. Now divorce and birth-control are both, in effect, evasions of the problem. It is the man and the marriage that is the problem. If you dissolve the marriage, if you artificially dissolve the connection between intercourse and birth, you may (with the happiest temporal results) evade the problem, but you have not solved it. It is, on the part of the Church, an instinctive grasp of this fact that has made her cling almost with passion to the problem; and has made her look such an obstinate fool to everyone else. She may, in a sense, fail to solve the problem; humanly speaking, she has often failed, but she will not deny or evade it. There is no solution except some sort of regeneration, of transmutation, what you will; and the awful eyes that are fixed on eternity see this, though the “No, no, no” of her outcry sounds more like the voice of a peevish child or an hysterical woman.

Such is the present ecclesiastical position. But its unsatisfactory nature is accentuated by the present secular position; chiefly, by the flood of sex literature which has drowned the modern world. Our poetry, our fiction, our drama, our journalism, are full of it, from Shakespeare and Marlowe (who invented it) to the middle page of any morning paper. It may be rightly argued that with great literature, say Antony and Cleopatra, one is concerned with poetry and not with sex. But though this is true of it all separately from Tamburlaine to The Ring and the Book or Emblems of Love, it remains also true that the continual choice of romantic love as a subject has the effect of constantly directing the attention of the mind to romantic love: a constancy of attention which is very bad for an unprincipled mind, and not too good for a principled.

Nor has this concentration of literature upon it been any too good for romantic love itself. There is in love, as in religion, a hypocrisy, or at any rate a foolish optimism, which is exceedingly like the truth but is not the truth. It is no doubt true, as

the Lady Julian of Norwich saw, that in the providence of God, all things are well even at this present moment, “all things are most well” (Sixteen Revelations, 1393); but this is very different from a well-to-do tradesman’s assurance that everything’s for the best. So in love it is most certain that the lovers are manifest to each other’s eyes in their original perfection; but this is not the same thing as the rather silly convention of romance that only a pretended criticism of the beloved should be allowed a place. The romantic mind must, if it is to be justified, work within the bounds of realism; as indeed love itself does, for of all proverbs that which declares that “Love is blind” is surely the most foolish. Love can only see the next world by virtue of that eyesight which sees and is not afraid to see the flaws in this; all other vision is blindness, all other faith superstition.

That it can go on, this mush of sentimentality, this glowing romance, is to be doubted. Three things can happen—perhaps one, perhaps all, will. First, there may be a reaction; we may pass off on to some other subject. It is to be hoped we shall. Second, we may proceed, with Mr. D. H. Lawrence, over the edge of humanity, into some very real but rather awful mysticism, a mysticism already adumbrated by Rossetti and Swinburne. Thirdly, Theology may take the marsh in hand and try to drain it. In such a work this book tries, perhaps vainly, to handle a spade. But it does so, not with any wish to sentimentalize still further an over-sentimentalized age; but with the hope of canalizing our emotions, leaving the rest of the land dry for the purposes of cultivation of other crops, and establishing a means of transport by which such vessels as choose may proceed more effectively to their end.

*Written in pencil in 1924, publication was rejected both times Williams submitted it. But a typed version (probably by Williams’ sister) was given to Williams’ friend John Pellow. Alice M. Hadfield was allowed to photocopy it and published it in 2005: Outlines of Romantic Theology (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2005). Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

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THE EROTIC HERO

W. H. Auden A. D. 1948

THE TWO great modern erotic myths, which have no parallels in Greek literature, are the myth of Tristan and Isolde, or the World Well Lost for Love, and the countermyth of Don Juan, the seducer.

The Tristan-Isolde situation is this: both possess heroic arete in the epic sense; he is the bravest warrior, she is the most beautiful woman; both are of noble birth. They cannot marry each other because she is already the wife of his king and friend, nevertheless they fall in love. In some versions they accidentally drink a love potion but the effect of this is not really to make them fall in love but rather to make them realize that they already have and to accept the fact as predestined and irrevocable. Their relation is not “platonic” in the conventional sense, but the barriers of marriage and circumstances give them few opportunities for going to bed together, and on each occasion they can never be certain that it will not be the last. The love they feel for each other is religiously absolute, i.e., each is the other’s ultimate good so that not only is sexual infidelity inconceivable, but all other relations to other people and the world cease to have any significance. Yet, though their relation is the only value that exists for them, it is a torment, because their sexual desire is only the symbolic expression of their real passion, which is the yearning of two souls to merge and become one, a consummation which is impossible so long as they have bodies, so that their ultimate goal is to die in each other’s arms.

Don Juan, on the other hand, is not an epic hero; ideally, his external appearance is that of the man who nobody notices is there because he is so utterly commonplace, for it is important to the myth that he, the man of heroic will and achievement, should look to the outward eye like a member of the chorus.

If Don Juan is either handsome or ugly, then the woman will have feelings about him before he

sets to work, and the seduction will not be absolute, i.e., a pure triumph of his will. For that, it is essential that his victim should have no feelings of her own towards him, until he chooses to arouse them. Vice versa, what is essential for him about her is not her appearance but simply her membership in the class Woman; the ugly and the old are as good as the beautiful and the young. The Tristan-Isolde myth is un-Greek because no Greek could conceive of attributing absolute value to another individual, he could only think in comparative terms, this one is more beautiful than that one, this one has done greater deeds than that one, etc. The Don Juan myth is un-Greek, as Kierkegaard has pointed out, not because he sleeps with a number of women, but because he keeps a list of them.

A Greek could understand seducing a girl because one found her attractive and then deserting her because one met a more attractive girl and forgot the first one; but he could not have understood doing so for an arithmetical reason, because one had resolved to be the first lover of every woman in the world, and she happened to be the next integer in this infinite series.

Tristan and Isolde are tormented because they are compelled to count up to two when they long to be able only to count up to one; Don Juan is in torment because, however great the number of his seductions, it still remains a finite number and he cannot rest until he has counted up to infinity.

The great enemy of both is time: Tristan and Isolde dread it because it threatens change, and they wish the moment of intense feeling to remain unchanged forever, hence the love potion and the irremovable obstacle in the situation which serve as defense against change; Don Juan dreads it because it threatens repetition and he wishes each moment to be absolutely novel, hence his insistence that for each of his victims it must be her first sexual experience and that he only sleep with her once.

Both myths are dependent upon Christianity, i.e., they could only have been invented by a society which has been taught to believe a) that every individual is of unique and eternal value to God irrespective of his or her social importance

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in the world, b) that dedication of the self to God is an act of free-choice, an absolute commitment irrespective of feeling, made with infinite passion, and c) that one must neither allow oneself to be ruled by the temporal moment nor attempt to transcend it but make oneself responsible for it, turning time into history.

Both myths are diseases of the Christian imagination and while they have inspired a great body of beautiful literature, their influence upon human conduct, particularly in their frivolous watered-down modern versions, which gloss over the fact that both the romantic couple and the solitary seducer are intensely unhappy, has been almost wholly bad. Whenever a married couple divorces because having ceased to be a divine image to each other, they cannot endure the thought of having to love a real person no better than themselves, they are acting under the spell of the Tristan myth. Whenever a man says to himself, “I must be getting old. I haven’t had sex for a week. What would my friends say if they knew,” he is re-enacting the myth of Don Juan. It is significant also—it might interest Plato though it would probably not surprise him—that the instances in real life which conform most closely to the original pattern of both myths are not, in either case, heterosexual; the Tristan and Isolde one actually meets are a lesbian couple, the Don Juan a pederast.

*Introduction to The Portable Greek Reader (New York: Viking Press, 1948). Reprinted in Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Random House, year?), 23-25.

GOING TO CHURCH

Coventry Patmore A. D. 1891

1 I woke at three; for I was bid To breakfast with the Dean at nine,And thence to Church. My curtain slid, I found the dawning Sunday fine,And could not rest, so rose. The air Was dark and sharp; the roosted birds Cheep’d, “Here am I, Sweet; are you there?” On Avon’s misty flats the herds Expected, comfortless, the day, Which slowly fired the clouds above;The cock scream’d, somewhere far away; In sleep the matrimonial doveWas crooning; no wind waked the wood, Nor moved the midnight river-damps,Nor thrill’d the poplar; quiet stood The chestnut with its thousand lamps;The moon shone yet, but weak and drear, And seem’d to watch, with bated breath,The landscape, all made sharp and clear By stillness, as a face by death.

2 My pray’rs for her being done, I took Occasion by the quiet hourTo find and know, by Rule and Book, The rights of love’s beloved power.

3 Fronting the question without ruth, Nor ignorant that, evermore, If men will stoop to kiss the Truth, She lifts them higher than before,I, from above, such light required As now should once for all destroy The folly which at times desired A sanction for so great a joy.

4 Thenceforth, and through that pray’r, I trod A path with no suspicions dim.

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I loved her in the name of God, And for the ray she was of Him; I ought to admire much more, not less Her beauty was a godly grace; The mystery of loveliness, Which made an altar of her face, Was not of the flesh, though that was fair, But a most pure and living lightWithout a name, by which the rare And virtuous spirit flamed to sight. If oft, in love, effect lack’d cause And cause effect, ’twere vain to soarReasons to seek for that which was Reason itself, or something more. My joy was no idolatry Upon the ends of the vile earth bent,For when I loved her most then I Most yearn’d for more divine content. That other doubt, which, like a ghost, In the brain’s darkness haunted me,Was thus resolved: Him loved I most, But her I loved most sensibly. Lastly, my giddiest hope allow’d No selfish thought, or earthly smirch; And forth I went, in peace, and proud To take my passion into Church;Grateful and glad to think that all Such doubts would seem entirely vain To her whose nature’s lighter fall Made no divorce of heart from brain.

5 I found them, with exactest grace And fresh as Spring, for Spring attired;

And by the radiance in her face I saw she felt she was admired; And, through the common luck of love, A moment’s fortunate delay, To fit the little lilac glove, Gave me her arm; and I and they (They true to this and every hour, As if attended on by Time),Enter’d the Church while yet the tower Was noisy with the finish’d chime.

6 Her soft voice, singularly heard Beside me, in her chant, withstoodThe roar of voices, like a bird Sole warbling in a windy wood; And, when we knelt, she seem’d to be An angel teaching me to pray; And all through the high Liturgy My spirit rejoiced without allay, Being, for once, borne clearly above All banks and bars of ignorance, By this bright spring-tide of pure love, And floated in a free expanse,Whence it could see from side to side, The obscurity from every partWinnow’d away and purified By the vibrations of my heart.

*The Angel in the House, Book I, Canto X, Preludes (Cassell & Company, 1891).

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The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante by Charles Williams One of the most ambitious and unique interpretations of Dante ever written. Williams tackles the power of the image and the way in which images are integral to our relationship with God and others. Particularly, he examines romantic love as a “method of process towards the inGodding of man” as well as the images of community, poetry, and human learning. Beatrice, according to Williams, is Dante’s way of knowing. “Wherever any love is,” he writes, “and some kind of love in every man and woman there must be—there is either affirmation or rejection of the image in one or other form. If there is rejection—of that Way there are many records. Of the affirmation, for all its greater commonness, there are fewer records.” For Williams, Dante inhabits the latter.

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the FATHERS

Love is outside of all creatures, then again it is also with all things; it is fire, it is dazzling light, it becomes a cloud of light, it becomes itself as a sun. And so as a fire it warms my soul, and inflames my heart, and excites it to desire, and to love, love of the Creator. ~St Symeon the New Theologian

FIRST HOMILY ON THE SONG OF SONGS

Origen A. D. Third Century

AS WE HAVE learned from Moses that some places are not merely holy, but holy of holies (cf. Ex. 30:10, Lev. 10:17), and that certain days are not Sabbaths simply, but are sabbaths of Sabbaths: so now we are taught further by the pen of Solomon that there are songs which are not merely songs, but Songs of Songs. Blessed too is he who enters holy places, but far more blest the man who enters the holy of holies! Blessed is he who observes the sabbaths, but more blest he who keeps sabbaths of sabbaths! Blessed likewise is he who understands songs and sings them—of course nobody sings except on festal days—but much more blest is he who sings the Songs of Songs! And as the man who enters holy places still needs much to make him able to enter the holy of holies, and as he who keeps the sabbath which was ordained by God for the people still requires many things before he can keep the sabbath of sabbaths: so also is it hard to find a man competent to scale the heights of the Songs of Songs even though he has traversed all the songs in Scripture.

You must come out of Egypt and, when the land of Egypt lies behind you, you must cross the Red Sea if you are to sing the first song, saying: “Let us sing to the Lord, for He is gloriously magnified” (Canticle of Moses, Ex. 15:1-21). But though you have uttered the first song, you are still a long way from the Song of Songs. Pursue your spiritual journey through the wilderness, until you come to “the well which the kings dug” (Song of the Well, Num. 21:17f.), so that there you may sing the second song. After that, come to the threshold of the holy land, that standing on the bank of Jordan you may sing the song of Moses, saying: “Hear, O heaven, and I will speak, and let the earth give ear to the words of my mouth” (Dt. 32:1-43)! Again, you must fight under Joshua and possess the holy land as

your inheritance; and a bee must prophesy for you and judge you—Deborah, you understand, means “bee”—in order that you may take that song also on your lips, which is found in the Book of Judges (Jdg. 5). Mount up thence to the Book of Kings, and come to the song of David, when he fled “out of the hand of all his enemies and out of the hand of Saul, and said, “The Lord is my stay and my strength and my refuge and my savior” (2 Kg. 22). You must go on next to Isaiah, so that with him you may say: “I will sing to the Beloved the song of my vineyard” (Is. 5:1-7).

And when you have been through all the songs, then set your course for greater heights, so that as a fair soul with her Spouse you may sing the Song of Songs too. I am not sure how many persons are concerned in it; but, as far as God has shown me in answer to your prayers, I seem to find four characters—the Husband and the Bride; along with the Bride, her maidens; and with the Bridegroom, a band of intimate companions. Some things are spoken by the Bride, others by the Bridegroom; sometimes too the maidens speak; so also do the Bridegroom’s friends. It is fitting indeed that at a wedding the bride should be accompanied by a bevy of maidens and the bridegroom by a company of youths. You must not look further than those who are saved by the preaching of the Gospel. By the Bridegroom understand Christ, and by the Bride the Church “without spot or wrinkle,” of whom it is written: “that He might present her to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:27). In the maidens who are with the Bride you must recognize those who, although they are faithful, do not come under the foregoing description, yet are regarded nonetheless as having in some sense obtained salvation—in short, they are the souls of believers. And in the men with the Bridegroom you must see the angels and those who have “come unto the perfect man” (Eph. 4:13). We have thus four groups: the two individuals, the Bridegroom and the Bride; two choirs answering each other—the Bride singing with her maidens, and the Bridegroom with His companions. When

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you have grasped this, listen to the Song of Songs and make haste to understand it and to join with the Bride in saying what she says, so that you may hear also what she heard. And, if you are unable to join the Bride in her words, then, so that you may hear the things that are said to her, make haste at least to join the Bridegroom’s companions. And if they also are beyond you, then be with the maidens who stay in the Bride’s retinue and share her pleasures.

These are the characters in this book, which is at once a drama and a marriage-song. And it is from this book that the heathen appropriated the epithalamium, and here is the source of this type of poem; for it is obviously a marriage-song that we have in the Song of Songs. The Bride prays first and, even as she prays, forthwith is heard. She sees the Bridegroom present; she sees the maidens gathered in her train. Then the Bridegroom answers her; and, after He has spoken, while He is still suffering for her salvation, the companions reply that “until the Bridegroom recline at His table” (Sg. 1:12) and rise from His Passion, they are going to make the Bride some ornaments.

*The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, tr. R. P. Lawson (New York: The Newman Press, 1956), 266-68.

EXPOSITION OF THE SONG OF SONGS

St. Gregory the Great A. D. Sixth Century

WHEN THE human race was thrust out from the joys of paradise and had embarked upon the pilgrimage of this present life, it became blind of heart, lacking in spiritual insight. Had the divine voice spoken to this blind heart, saying, “Seek God” or “Love God”—as the Law has spoken to

it—the heart once and for all sent into exile would not have grasped what it heard because of its slack indifference. For that reason the divine Word speaks to the dull and lukewarm soul and, concerning those things which the soul knows, it secretly inspires a love of which it knows nothing.

For allegory supplies the soul separated far from God with a kind of mechanism by which it is raised to God. By means of dark sayings in whose words a person can understand something of his own, he can understand what is not his to understand, and by earthly words he can be raised above the earth. Therefore, through means which are not alien to our way of understanding, that which is beyond our understanding can be known. By that which we do know—out of such are allegories made—divine meanings are clothed and through our understanding of external speech we are brought to an inner understanding.

Thus it is that in this book, called the Song of Songs, we find the words of a bodily love: so that the soul, its numbness caressed into warmth by familiar words, through the words of a lower love is excited to a higher. For in this book are described kisses, breasts, cheeks, limbs; and this holy language is not to be held in ridicule because of these words. Rather we are provoked to reflect on the mercy of God; for by His naming of the parts of the body by which He calls us to love we must be made aware of how wonderfully and mercifully He works in us; for He goes so far as to use the language of our shameful loves in order to set our heart on fire with a holy love. Thus in humbling Himself by the manner of His speech He raises us in understanding; we learn, from the words of this lower love, with what intensity we must burn with love of God.

But we must be subtle enough to grasp this, lest when we hear the words of this external love we become fixed in the things of sense, and the instrument, which is given to lift us up, should instead weigh us down. We must seek out the more interior meaning in these bodily, exterior words, and though speaking of the body, ourselves be taken, as it were, out of the body. We must come to this sacred marriage-feast of bride

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and bridegroom dressed in a wedding gown, that is with the understanding which comes from interior charity; this is necessary: for unless we come clothed in this wedding gown, this worthy understanding of charity, we will be cast out from the wedding-feast into the darkness outside—that is, into the blindness of ignorance (Mt. 22:1-14). Through these words of passing desire we must cross to the safe ground of invulnerability. The words and meanings of sacred Scripture are related as colors and objects are in a picture: and it would be particularly stupid were a person so to attend to the colors of a picture as to ignore what the picture depicts. For if we give ear to the words which are the external utterance and ignore the meaning, this is like attending only to the colors while ignoring the thing painted. It is written that “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). For the letter hides the spirit just as the chaff conceals the wheat. But it is beasts of burden who feed on the chaff; humans feed on the wheat. Using human reason, therefore, a person discards the chaff of beasts and hurries to eat the wheat of the spirit. To this end, therefore, it serves a purpose that the mysteries of the letter should be concealed under wraps because the wisdom which has to be worked for is all the better to taste. For this reason it is written: “The wise hide their knowledge” (Prov. 10:14), because, of course, the spiritual meaning is hidden under the cover of the letter. Hence it is said again in the same book: “To conceal His word, this is the glory of God” (Prov. 25:2). For God is the more gloriously revealed to the mind who seeks Him the more He is sought with insight and interiority—as will be seen. But could it be that we are not to try to uncover what God hides in mysteries? Indeed we ought; for the text goes on: “to sift the meaning is the glory of kings” (Prov. 25:2). For they are kings who have learned how to rule over and judge their bodies, that is, the promptings of the flesh. Consequently the glory of kings is to discern meaning; for it is the glory of those who live well to discern the secrets of God’s commands. Therefore, on hearing the words of human discourse we must, as one might say, become more than human

beings; for if otherwise we hear what is said in a human way we will not be able to sense the divine character of what we ought to hear. Paul wished his disciples to be no longer “men” when he said to them: “Since there are jealousies and wranglings among you, are you not men?” (1 Cor. 3:3-4). And the Lord considered His disciples not to be any longer mere humans when He asked: “Who do men say the Son of Man is?” (Mt. 16:13). When they answered Him in the words of human beings, he insisted: “But you, who do you say I am?” (Mt. 16:15). For when He first said “men” and then added “but you,” He was making a kind of distinction between “men” and “disciples”: that is by inspiring them to things divine, He made them more than men. The Apostle says: “For anyone who is in Christ there is a new creation, the old creation has gone” (2 Cor. 5:17). And we know that at our resurrection the body will be so united to the spirit that everything which was of changeable desire will be taken up into the power of the spirit. Therefore, the person who seeks God ought daily to imitate His resurrection: so that, just as there will then be nothing changeable in the body, so now He has nothing changeable in the heart; so that in the inner man there may be a new creature, he should trample down anything suggestive of the old man and seek out in the words of the old only that power of the new.

For Sacred Scripture is like a mountain, and the Lord comes from that mountain to bring understanding into our hearts. It is about this mountain that it is said through the prophet: “God is coming from Lebanon and the Holy One from the mountain thick with cloud” (Hab. 3:3). This mountain is thick with meanings and enshrouded with allegories. But it should be understood that if we are to hasten up the mountain when the voice of the Lord calls, we are instructed first to wash our clothes and be cleansed of every stain of the flesh. To be sure it is written that if wild beasts set foot on the mountain they will be stoned (Heb. 12:20). Wild beasts touch the mountain when they approach the heavenly heights of sacred Scripture while yet given over to irrational desires and fail to

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understand it as they should, but irrationally twist it to a fleshly interpretation. For if anything which is without wit or is slow of wit is seen on this mountain, it is killed by harsh judgments—which are like stones. For this mountain is on fire: meaning, of course, sacred Scripture which He fills with the spirit, and He inflames it with the fire of love. Hence it is written: “Your promise is tried in the fire” (Ps. 118:140, LXX). Hence, too, those who were traveling on a journey heard the words of God and said: “Were not our hearts burning within us when He explained the Scriptures to us?” (Lk. 24:32). Hence again it is said through Moses: “In his right hand the law is on fire” (Deut. 33:2). On the left hand of God we find the wicked; they may not pass to the right hand. On the right hand are the chosen ones of God, who are set apart from those on the left. So on God’s right hand the law is on fire: because in the hearts of the chosen, who are to be placed on the right hand, the divine commands are burning, aflame with the fervor of love. Hence this flame burns off all the external rust of age so that He may offer our minds as a holocaust in the contemplation of God. . . .

It should also be noted that sometimes in sacred Scripture the Lord calls Himself “Master,” sometimes “Father,” sometimes “Bridegroom.” When He wishes to be feared, He calls Himself “Master”; when He wishes to be honored, “Father”; when He wishes to be loved, “Bridegroom.” He says through the prophet: “If I am indeed master, where is my honor? If I am indeed father, where is my respect?” (Mal. 1:6). And again He says: “I will betroth you to myself . . . with integrity and justice” (Hos. 2:19-20). Or, most clearly of all: “I have remembered the day of your betrothal in the desert” (Jer. 2:21). Of course there is no before and after in God: but because He wishes first to be feared so that He may be honored and then to be honored so that the love of Him is attained, He also calls Himself “Master” on account of the fear, “Father” on account of the honor, and “Bridegroom” on account of the love. Thus, through fear we may come to honor and through honoring Him to love. Therefore, as honor is

more worthy than fear He is more pleased to be called “Father” and “Master”; and as love is dearer to Him than honor, so God is more pleased to be called “Bridegroom” than “Father.” Thus, in this book, the Lord and the Church are not called respectively, “Master” and “Servant,” but “Bridegroom” and “Bride”; so that He may be served not only in fear, nor only in reverence, but also in love and by the exterior words an inner affection may be stirred.

When He calls Himself “Master,” He shows that we are created; when He calls Himself “Father,” that we are adopted children; when He calls Himself “Bridegroom,” that we are betrothed. It is a greater thing to be betrothed to God than to be created and adopted by Him. In this book, where He is described as “Bridegroom,” something more sublime is suggested, since what is indicated is a treaty of marriage. And this language is frequently recalled in the New Testament (because the consummated marriage of word and flesh and of Christ with the Church is celebrated). And so John says, when the Lord is approaching: “He who has the bride is a bridegroom” (Jn. 3:29). And the Lord Himself says, “The attendants of the Bridegroom do not fast while the Bridegroom is still with them” (Mt. 9:15). And so it is told of the Church: “I have espoused you to Christ so as to give you away as a chaste virgin to this one husband” (2 Cor. 11:2). And again: “so as to make her glorious, without stain or wrinkle” (Eph. 5:27). And again, in the Apocalypse of John: “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9). And finally, in the same book, “I saw the bride, newly wed, coming down from heaven” (Rev. 21:2).

It is not unrelated that, with its especially mystical character, this book is placed third in order among the works of Solomon. The ancient fathers spoke of three orders of life: the moral, the natural, and the contemplative—which the Greeks called the ethical, the physical, and the theoretical. In Proverbs the moral life is referred to, where it is said: “Listen, my sons, to the wisdom [I offer] and pay attention to my [words of] prudence” (Prov. 4:1). Ecclesiastes refers to the

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natural life in which all things are seen as tending towards their end, when it says: “Vanity of vanities and all is vanity” (Ecc. 1:2). But in the Song of Songs the contemplative life is given voice, for in them is expressed a longing for the coming of the Lord and for the sight of Him in person, as when in the words of the Bridegroom it is said: “I have come from Lebanon, I have come” (Sg. 4:8). The lives of the three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, represent these orders. Abraham received the moral life by his obedience; Isaac represents the natural life by his digging of the well—for to dig wells to the depths is to examine diligently by natural reason all the things of this world below. But Jacob achieved the contemplative life because he witnessed angels ascending and descending. However, since natural reasoning does not lead to perfection without the observations of the moral life, Ecclesiastes is rightly placed after Proverbs. And because the highest contemplation is not achieved unless things lying here below are first despised, the Song of Songs are rightly placed in order after Ecclesiastes. For the first thing to do is establish virtue; thereafter, to come to see all things which are present as though they were absent; and in the third place, to look with a pure heart upon those things which are above and within. Out of the rungs of these books he therefore makes a sort of ladder reaching up to the contemplation of God; so that while as a first step we carry out well the honest and worthy tasks of this world, next we despise even these honest and worthy tasks, and finally at the top we gaze upon the very intimate things of God. Thus, in general terms, in this work the Church speaks of its expectation of the coming of the Lord so that in turn individually each soul may look forward to the indwelling of God in his heart, as if awaiting the arrival of the Bridegroom in the bedchamber.

*Tr. Denys Turner in Eros & Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 217-24.

HOMILY ONE Song of Songs 1:1-4

St. Gregory of Nyssa A. D. Fourth Century

YOU WHO in accordance with the counsel of Paul have “taken off ” the old humanity with its deeds and lusts like a filthy garment (Col. 3:9) and have clothed yourselves by purity of life in the lightsome raiment of the Lord, raiment such as He revealed in His transfiguration on the mountain (cf. Mk. 9:2-3), or, rather, you who have “put on” our Lord Jesus Christ Himself (Gal. 3:27) together with His holy garb and with Him have been transfigured for impassibility and the life divine: hear the mysteries of the Song of Songs. Enter the inviolate bridal chamber dressed in the white robes of pure and undefiled thoughts. If any bear a passionate and carnal habit of mind and lack that garment of conscience that is proper dress for the divine wedding feast, let such persons not be imprisoned by their own thoughts and drag the undefiled words of the Bridegroom and Bride down to the level of brutish, irrational passions; let them not because of these passions be constrained by indecent imaginings and get cast out of the bright cheer of the wedding chamber, exchanging gnashing of teeth and tears for the joy within the bridal chamber (Mt. 22:10-13).

I testify thus as one who is about to treat the mystical vision contained in the Song of Songs. For by what is written there, the soul is in a certain manner led as a bride toward an incorporeal and spiritual and undefiled marriage with God. For He “who wills all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth” (1 Tim. 2:4) manifests in this work the blessed and most perfect way of salvation—I mean that which comes through love. . . .

Let us then come within the holy of holies, that is, the Song of Songs. For we are taught by this superlative form of expression that there is a superabundant concentration of holiness within the holy of holies, and in the same way the

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exalted Word promises to teach us mysteries of mysteries by the agency of the Song of Songs. For although there are many songs within the divinely inspired teaching, through which—from the great David and Isaiah and Moses and many others—we are instructed in noble thoughts about God, from this title we learn that the mystery contained in the Song of Songs transcends these songs of the saints by as much as they stand apart from the songs of profane wisdom. Human nature can neither discover nor entertain anything greater than this for purposes of understanding. This is why, moreover, the most intense of pleasurable activities (I mean the passion of erotic love) is set as a figure at the very fore of the guidance that the teachings give: so that by this we may learn that it is necessary for the soul, fixing itself steadily on the inaccessible beauty of the divine nature, to love that beauty as much as the body has a bent for what is akin to it and to turn passion into impassibility, so that when every bodily disposition has been quelled, our mind within us may boil with love, but only in the Spirit, because it is heated by that “fire” that the Lord came to “cast upon the earth.”

But of these things—how those who hear the mystic words should dispose their souls—enough has been said. It is surely time to set out, by discernment of the text, the divine sayings of the Song of Songs themselves. And first of all let us understand the force of the inscription, for it does not seem to me an idle thing that the book is attributed to Solomon starting with its very title; rather, this attribution aims to dispose the reader’s mind to take in something great and divine through the words of the text. The testimony given about Solomon fills everyone with an unequaled sense of awe before his wisdom, and for this reason mention of his name is made straightaway in the preamble, so that readers may have hope of receiving from this book something great and worthy of Solomon’s repute. . . .

By these prefatory materials let the Word teach us this one thing: it is not any longer human beings who are brought to the shrine of the mysteries of this book. They have been changed in nature into something more divine by

the Lord’s instruction—just as the Word testifies to His disciples that they surpassed the human condition. He said, “Who do human beings say that I am? . . . Who do you say that I am?” (Mt. 16:13-15)—and the distinction He thus made in their regard separated them out from human beings. For truly the person who employs words of the sort contained in the Song of Songs, whose obvious sense refers to fleshly pleasures, not in order to sink down into a sordid sense but by them to be led to the philosophy that concerns things divine and to pure thoughts, gives evidence that he is no longer a human being, that his nature is no longer mingled with flesh and blood (Mt. 16:7). Having by impassibility become equal to the angels, he exhibits the hoped-for life of resurrection to the saints. For after the resurrection, the body, transmuted into incorruptibility, is knit together with the person’s soul, but the passions that now afflict us through the flesh do not rise up together with those bodies, and a certain peaceable state will succeed our present life. The “mind of the flesh” (Rom. 8:6-7) will no longer be at variance with the soul or “fight against the law of the intellect” (Rom. 7:23) by means of the internal battle of our passionate motions and lead the weakened soul a captive to sin. On the contrary, in that state our nature will be purified of all such things, and there will be one mind in both parts (I mean the flesh and the spirit), because every corporeal disposition has disappeared from our nature. In just the same way, by this book the Word enjoins his hearers, even though we live in the flesh, not to turn toward the flesh in our thoughts but to look only to the soul and to apply the language of love, pure and undefiled, to that Good that transcends all understanding (Phil. 4:7), that Good that alone is truly pleasant and desirable and lovable and whose enjoyment is the ever-available opportunity of a yet nobler desiring because by participation in good things it stretches and expands our longing.

The bride Moses kissed the Bridegroom in the same way as the virgin in the Song who says, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” and through the face-to-face converse accorded

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him by God (as the Scripture testifies [cf. Num. 12:8]), he became more intensely desirous of such kisses after these theophanies, praying to see the Object of his yearning, as if he had never glimpsed Him. In the same way, all of the others in whom the divine desire was deeply lodged never ceased from desire; everything that came to them from God for the enjoyment of the Object of yearning they made into the material and fuel for a more ardent desire. And just as now the soul that is joined to God is not satiated by her enjoyment of Him, so too the more abundantly she is filled up with His beauty, the more vehemently her longings abound. For since the words of the Bridegroom are “spirit and life” (Jn. 6:63) and everyone who is joined to the Spirit becomes spirit (1 Cor. 6:17), while everyone who is attached to life “passes from death to life” (Jn. 5:24), according to the Lord’s word, it follows that the virgin soul longs to approach the fount of the spiritual life. And that fount is the mouth of the Bridegroom whence “the words of eternal life” (Jn. 6:68) as they gush forth fill the mouth that is drawn to it, just as the prophet does when drawing spirit through his mouth (cf. Ps. 118:131, LXX). Since, then, it is necessary for the one who draws drink from the fount to fix mouth to mouth and the fount is the Lord who says, “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink” (Jn. 7:37), it follows that the soul, thirsty as she is, wills to bring her own mouth to the mouth that pours out life, saying, “Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth.”

… Now the treasure house is named “heart,” and from it the breasts acquire their abundance of the divine milk on which, “according to the proportion of faith” (Rom. 12:6), the soul feeds as it draws in grace. That is why it says, Your breasts are better than wine, by breasts hinting, because of their location, at the heart. For someone who conceives of the heart as the hidden and ineffable Power of the Godhead will surely not be mistaken, and one may reasonably interpret breasts as the beneficent activities of the divine Power on our behalf. Through them God suckles the life of each individual, bestowing the food that is appropriate to each of those who receive it.

Thus the sequel of the virgin’s request in the prologue says: “Your breasts are better than wine, and the fragrance of your perfumed ointments is better than all spices.” What these words convey as we have understood them is no slight or contemptible idea. For we immediately learn by these statements—that is, from the fact that the milk of the divine breasts is superior by comparison with the wine that brings us gladness (cf. Ps. 103:15)—that all human wisdom and knowledge of reality as well as every power of discernment and direct apprehension are incapable, in a comparison, of matching the simpler fare of the divine teachings. For what flows from the breasts is milk, and milk is the food of babes. Wine, however, because of its vigor and warmth, becomes the enjoyment of the more mature. Nevertheless, that which is mature and perfect in the non-Christian wisdom is a slighter thing than the most childish teaching of the divine Word. Hence the divine breasts are better than human wine.

And the “fragrance” of the divinely “perfumed ointments” is lovelier than any sweet scent among the “spices.” This seems to me to point to the following thought. The “spices” we take to be virtues, such as wisdom, temperance, justice, courage, prudence, and the like, and each different individual assumes a different scent as he is dabbed with them in accord with his own power and choice. One has within himself the fragrance that comes from temperance or wisdom; another, that which comes from justice or courage or some other quality that is reckoned among the virtues; and yet another, the scent that comes from the mingling of all these “spices.” Nevertheless, none of these can be compared with that absolute virtue of which the prophet Habakkuk asserts that it encloses the heavens when he says, “His virtue veiled the heavens” (Hab. 3:3). This is Wisdom herself and Justice itself and Truth herself and all things severally. Therefore she says, “The fragrance of your perfumed ointments possesses a grace that is incomparable to the spices known to us.”

Once again, in what comes next, the soul, the Bride, touches on a higher philosophy. When she

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says “Your name is a perfumed ointment emptied out,” she makes it manifest that the divine power is inaccessible and incapable of being contained by human thought processes, for to me it seems that by this statement there is conveyed something like the following: that the Nature that has no boundaries cannot be accurately comprehended by means of the connotations of words. On the contrary, all the power of concepts and all the significance of words and names, even if they seem to have about them something grand and worthy of the Divine, cannot attain the nature of the Real itself. On the contrary, it is as if by certain traces and hints that our reason guesses at the Invisible; by way of some analogy based on things it has comprehended, it forms a conjecture about the Incomprehensible. For whatever name we may think up, she says, to make the scent of the Godhead known, the meaning of the things we say does not refer to the perfume itself. Rather does our theological vocabulary refer to a slight remnant of the vapor of the divine fragrance. In the case of vessels from which perfumed ointment is emptied out, the ointment itself that has been emptied out is not known for what it is in its own nature. We make a guess about the perfume that has been emptied out on the basis of some faint quality of the vapor that has been left behind in the vessel.

Here, then, is what we learn from the words: the perfumed ointment of the Godhead, whatever it may be in its own essence, is beyond every name and every thought, but the marvels discerned in each name and thought provide matter for our theological naming. By their help we name God wise, powerful, good, holy, blessed and eternal, and judge and savior and the like. And all these refer to some slight trace of the divine perfume that the whole creation imitates within itself, after the manner of a jar for unguents, by the wonders that are seen in it.

“That is why,” she says, “young maidens have loved you, they have drawn you.” She speaks about the source of praiseworthy desire and of the disposition to love. For who is there without desire for such a Beauty, if only he has an eye capable of gazing upon its splendor? And while

the beauty so discerned is great, that which such perception images and hints at is a thousandfold greater. But just as erotic love of the material order does not affect those who are still young (for childhood has no place for this passion) and one cannot see extremely old people afflicted in this way, so too in the case of the divine Beauty one still a child, “tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14), and the elderly person who has aged and is approaching dissolution are both unmoved by this desire. For such people are not touched by the invisible Beauty, but only a soul of the sort that has passed through the condition of childhood and has arrived at the height of spiritual maturity without receiving any “spot or wrinkle or any such thing”—the soul that is neither imperceptive by reason of youth nor weakened by old age. This soul our text calls a “young maiden,” and she is faithful to “the first and great commandment” of the law. With her whole heart and strength she loves that Beauty whose description and form and explanation the human mind fails to discover. “Young maidens” of this sort, then, who have made increase by the practice of the virtues and have already participated in the mysteries of the inner divine chamber as their youthfulness prescribes, love and delight in the beauty of the Bridegroom and through love turn to themselves. For this Bridegroom returns the love of those who love Him. Speaking in the person of Wisdom He says, “I love those who love Me” (Prov. 8:17), and then, “With those who love Me I share what I possess” (and He is her possession), “and I will fill their treasure houses with good things” (Prov. 8:21). Hence the souls draw to themselves the longing for the incorruptible Bridegroom, “going after the Lord God,” as it is written (cf. Hos. 11:10).

Now what awakens their love is the sweet scent of the perfume, toward which, as they run unceasingly, they stretch themselves out for what lies ahead, forgetting what lies behind (cf. Phil. 3:13). Hence it says: “We will run after you, toward the fragrance of your perfumed ointments.” But it is those who do not yet possess the fullness of virtue and are still immature who

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promise that they will pursue the goal toward which the fragrance of the perfumes points them (for it says, “We will run . . . toward the fragrance of your perfumed ointments”); the more perfect soul, on the other hand, who has more eagerly “been stretched out toward what lies ahead,” already attains the goal for the sake of which the course is run and is reckoned worthy of the goods that the treasure house contains—which is why she for her part says, “The king brought me into his treasure house.” For the soul that has desired to touch the Good with the tips of her lips and has laid hold on the Beautiful just to the extent that the strength of her prayer indicates (she prayed, one might say, to be made worthy of a kiss through the illumination of the Word), this same soul, empowered by its success in slipping through to the interior of what thought cannot articulate, cries out her request that her running not be confined to the outer courts of the Good but that by the firstfruits of the Spirit (cf. Rom. 8:23)—of which she was made worthy by the first gift of grace, that is, by a kiss—she may come to the inner shrine of paradise and search “the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10) and, like the great Paul, see (as he says) invisible things and hear unspeakable words (cf. 2 Cor. 12:2-4).

The following expression unveils in the Word the dispensation of the Church. Those who were first made disciples by grace and became “eyewitnesses . . . of the Word” (Lk. 1:2) did not keep the Good to themselves. Rather did they work the same grace, by transmission, in those who were their companions. That is why the young women say to the Bride—who because she came face to face with the Word was the first to be filled with good things and to be adjudged worthy of hidden mysteries—“Let us rejoice and be glad in you” (for we share the joy of your exultation); and, “As you love the breasts of the Word more than wine, so too let us imitate you and love your breasts, through which you give ‘babes in Christ’ milk to drink, more than the wine that human beings make.” And in order that we may be perfectly clear about the matter, the sense of what we are saying is this: John, who rested on the Lord’s bosom, loved the breasts of

the Word, and having brought his own heart, as if it were a sponge, up to the fount of life, he was filled, by an indescribable transmission, with the mysteries lodged in the Lord’s heart, and he offers to us the teat that has been filled up by the Word. He fills us up with the things lodged within him by the fount of Goodness as, in a loud voice, he proclaims the eternal Word. For this reason it is fitting that we too turn to him and say “Let us love your breasts more than wine,” if indeed we have become the sort of people who are youthful, neither immature in heart and mind because of childishness yoked with vanity nor yet shriveled up and wrinkled by sin in an old age that issues in destruction. And the reason why we love the flowing milk of your teaching is that “Righteousness has loved you.” For this is the disciple whom Jesus loved. And Jesus is righteousness. This saying adorns the Lord with a name more lovely and more worthy of God than that accorded by the prophet David. For David says, “Righteous is the Lord God” (Ps. 91:16), and he in turns names him “Righteousness,” by which everything that is crooked is again made straight. But for us may everything “crooked be … made straight, and the rough ways … smooth” (Is. 40:4) by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,

To whom be glory to the ages of ages.

Amen.

*Homilies on the Song of Songs, tr. Richard A. Norris Jr. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 15-45.

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A COMPENDIUM ON THE SONG OF SONGS

Alcuin of York A. D. Eighth Century

1. MAY HE kiss me with the kiss of his mouth (Sg. 1:1). The Synagogue longs for God to be made flesh and runs to meet his arrival with holy clarity. Her voice rings out for the first time in a song of love; at that time the holy prophets had over and again shown her how she should live and had revealed the coming of the one who, “like a bridegroom coming forth from his marriage bed” (Ps. 18:6), brings a new blessing to the world; but then, the time for prophecy being past, she began to desire the presence of her King and Savior Himself, and said: “May He kiss me with the kiss of His mouth”; that is, may He not for ever appoint angels, not always prophets for my instruction, may He Himself come at last, who has for so long been promised, may the light of His presence shine upon me and, like a person offering a kiss, may He speak comfortingly to me in words of His mouth: may He not, that is to say, scorn to enlighten me as I question Him about the way of salvation. We read that this was brought to fulfillment in the Gospel: “The disciples came to Jesus as He sat on the mount, and opening His mouth He taught them saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:1). Therefore it says: “May He kiss me with the Kiss of His mouth”—may He delight me with the touch of His presence, He whom I have heard so often promised by the prophets.

2. For your breasts are more delightful than wine (Sg. 1:1). The sweetness of the Gospels’ teaching is preferable to the sour taste of the Law. “Wine” is the tartness of the knowledge which the Law gives. Milk denotes a simple Gospel faith. Hence Paul says: “I have given you milk to drink” (1 Cor. 3:2) and milk is food. The breasts of the Bridegroom are more delightful than wine for those to whom a simple Gospel faith has given new life by water and the Spirit and they also lead through an open

door to heavenly life: even prolonged observance of the Law was not able to do that, as the Apostle makes plain when he says: “the Law can bring nothing to perfection” (Heb. 7:19). The breasts are to be understood as referring to the teachers who give us the milk of knowledge to drink.

3. More fragrant than the finest oils (Sg. 1:2). Therefore the Holy Spirit is compared to ointments, because just as ointment heals a wound, so the Holy Spirit puts vices to flight, nurses souls and heals them. The ointments with which the prophets and priests of the Law were anointed were good, but better are those by which the Apostles and their successors were anointed visibly. Paul speaks of them as “we whom God has anointed and whom God has marked with a sign” (2 Cor. 1:21). And John: “May the anointing, which you have received from him, remain with you” (1 Jn. 2:21). “Your name is oil poured out.” This gives the explanation: for it is no strange thing if the members give off the perfume of this ointment when He Himself took His name from “ointment.” For “Christ” comes from “chrism”; that is, “one anointed with oil,” and this name is given to all the faithful by the Holy Spirit in baptism. And so Peter speaks of “how God has anointed him by the Holy Spirit and by power” (Acts 10:38). And in the Psalms we find: “God has anointed you with the oil of gladness before all your companions” (Ps. 44:7). This oil, the text says, is not dispensed in drops, but “poured out”; for God does not give him the Spirit in measured amounts, for he is full of the Holy Spirit. “Therefore the maidens have loved you,” they being the souls of the elect who have been made new by baptism.

4. Draw me after you (Sg. 1:3). The Synagogue first asked for God to come and then for the kiss of peace to be given her; now, knowing that He has come, knowing that He has returned to the heavens, she desires to follow Him there. But since she cannot achieve this by her own powers, she begs Him to draw her to Him with whom she desires to be. “Draw me after You”; that is, because without You we can do nothing, we pray as we run towards You that You will strengthen us, with the strong arm of Your protection. For

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to run, or at least to finish the course, is beyond our powers, unless we run with Your guidance and help. So says Paul: I have worked harder than all these, though it was not I, rather the grace of Christ (1 Cor. 15:10). “Together we will run in the aroma of Your ointments.” This means that working together with You and enriched by the gifts of the Holy Spirit we hurry to our place in the heavenly Jerusalem, following You in Your ascent into heaven. “The King has brought me into His chambers,” that is, into the eternal joys of the heavenly fatherland. The chambers of the eternal King are the joys of the heavenly fatherland and the Church has been brought into them by faith, to be brought more fully into them in their reality. “We will rejoice and be glad in You, mindful of Your breasts which surpass wine.” It is not of ourselves, but in You that we recall how in all things the grace of faith is superior to the Law, which is to say, we do not extol ourselves for what we have received, but whenever we do anything well we rejoice in Your mercy and remember with what compassion You restore us, and how You have been pleased to moderate the strictness of the Law by the grace of the Gospel faith. “The righteous love You.” No one but the righteous love You; and no one who does not love You is righteous.

5. I am black but beautiful, daughters of Jerusalem (Sg. 1:4). I am black because of the onslaughts of persecution, but beautiful in adornment of virtues. That is, I seem black in the eyes of the tormentors, but before God I shine with the dazzling raiment of virtue. “Like the tents of Kedar, like Solomon’s hides.” Kedar was the son of Ishmael, which means “darkness.” The Church says that she is black like Kedar, because she is so darkened by the attacks of the unbelievers as to have been made an enemy of the whole world. Solomon, by name and in his life, was the peacemaker, and he made tents for himself out of the hides of dead animals; so does the Lord create the Church from those same animals by putting to death in her the desires of the flesh; thus is the Church like Solomon’s hides.

6. Do not gaze upon me because I am swarthy, it is the sun which has burned me (Sg. 1:5). This means, do not wonder if I am ugly before men, for it is the heat of much persecution—or else it is the love of Christ—which has burned me. “My mother’s sons have fought against me, they put me in charge of the vineyards, but my own vineyards I have not kept.” The bitterness of persecution by the children of the Synagogue caused me to neglect the vineyard which is Jerusalem, but I am the guardian of many vineyards, that is churches, throughout the globe. The Synagogue is the mother of the early Church, for it was foretold by the prophet: “Zion, you will be called the city, and the mother of cities” (Zech. 8:3).

7. Show me, you whom my soul loves, where you feed, where you lie down at noon, lest I should begin to wander after the flocks of your companions (Sg. 1:6). Show me, my shepherd, whom I love with all my soul, in whom is my strength and my rest, lest, confused by the fury of temptation, I should find myself looking for where the companions gather, that is, the heretics.

8. If you do not know yourself, O most beautiful among women, go out, depart, to the tracks of the flocks (Sg. 1:7): if, being in the grip of this kind of temptation, you do not know yourself to be betrothed to me, leave my company and take your lead from the behavior of those who have lost their way. “And feed my kids by the tents of the shepherds,” that is, give nourishment to those lost ones who, because they have followed the teachings of foolish masters, will be made to stand on the left hand.

9. I have compared you, my love, to my team of horses, harnessed to Pharaoh’s chariots (Sg. 1:8). Just as I have set free the former people from their terror of Egypt, so you, my bride, if you will trust me, will I free from the hands of your persecutors.

*Tr. Denys Turner in Eros & Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 259-62.

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HOMILY TWO Song of Songs 2:4-7

Origen A. D. Third Century

BRING YE me into the house of wine (Sg. 2:4). The Bridegroom stood without, and was received by the Bride; that is to say, He reposed between her breasts. The many maidens are not such as to deserve to have the Bridegroom as their guest; to the multitude that is without He speaks in parables. How much I fear lest perhaps we ourselves should be these many maidens!

“Bring ye me into the house of wine.” Why do I stay so long outside? “Behold, I stand at the gate and knock; if any man shall . . . open to me, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).

“Bring ye me in.” And now the Divine Word says the same; see, it is Christ who says: “Bring ye me in.” He speaks to you catechumens also: “Bring ye me in.”—not only “into the house,” but “into the house of wine!” Let your soul be filled with the wine of gladness, the wine of the Holy Spirit, and so bring the Bridegroom, the Word, Wisdom, and Truth, into your house. For “bring ye me into the house of wine” can be said also to those who are not yet perfect.

Set ye in order charity in me (Sg. 2:4). It is a graceful phrase—“Set ye in order, . . .” For truly the charity of many is in a state of disorder; they accord the second place in their loving to that which ought to have the first, and to that which should come second they give the first, and the thing that it behooves them to rank fourth in their affection they put third, and the rightful third again comes fourth. But the charity of the saints has been set in order.

To understand what is spoken here, “Set ye in order charity in me,” I want to unfold some examples. The Divine Word wants you to love father, son, daughter. The Divine Word wants you to love Christ, and it does not tell you not to love your children, nor does it tell you that you should not be united in love with those who gave

you birth. But what does it tell you? It tells you: “You must not have a love that is disordered. You must not love your father and your mother first and Me afterwards; you must not be possessed by love of son and daughter more than by love of Me. ‘He that loveth father and mother more than Me is not worthy of Me’ (Matt. 10:37). He that loveth son and daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.”

Examine your consciences concerning your affection for your father, mother, brother; consider what manner of love you bear the Word of God and Jesus, and you will realize forthwith that you love son and daughter more than the Word, and have more affection for your parents than for Christ. Which among us, do you think, has progressed so far as to have chief and first of all his loves that of the Word of God, and to put his children in the second place? After this fashion you must love your wife also. “For no man ever hated his own flesh”; but he loves her as his flesh; “they two,” it is said, “shall be two”—not in one spirit, but—“shall be two in one flesh” (Eph. 5:29, 31). Love God too, but love Him not as flesh and blood but as Spirit; for “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (Eph. 6:12, 1 Cor. 6:17).

Charity is set in order, therefore, in the perfect. But to the end that there may be order also in our loves for one another, after our love for God we are commanded to love first our parents, then our children, and thirdly members of our household. But if there is a bad son and a good retainer, let the domestic take the son’s place in our love. And so it shall come to pass that the charity of the saints is set in order.

Our Teacher and Lord, moreover, in laying down commands in the Gospel about charity added something special to every man’s love, and gave understanding of the order to those who can hear the Scripture, saying, “Set ye in order charity in me.” “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with they whole soul and with thy whole strength and with thy whole mind. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ” (Mt. 22:37, 39). He does not say that thou shalt love God as thyself, that a neighbor shall be loved with the whole heart, with the whole soul, with the whole strength, with

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A VISION FOR CLASSICAL, CATECHETICAL & ECUMENICAL EDUCATION

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the whole mind. Again, He said: “Love your enemies” (Mt. 5:44), and did not add “with the whole heart.” The Divine Word is not disordered, He does not command impossibilities, and He does not say “Love your enemies as yourselves,” but only, “Love your enemies.” It is enough for them that we love them and do not hate them; but a neighbor is to be loved “as thyself,” and God “with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with thy whole mind and with thy whole strength.”

If you have understood these things, and have carried out what you have understood, you have done the thing that is commanded in the Bridegroom’s saying: “Bring ye me into the house of wine; set ye in order charity in me.” Which among us, think you, is a man of ordered charity?

Strengthen me with perfumes (Sg. 2:5). One of the translators put “with blossoms.” It is the Bride who is speaking now. “Compass me with apples.” With what apples? “As the apple among the timbers of the wood, so is my Nephew among the sons.” Therefore “compass me with apples, for I have been wounded by love.”

How beautiful, how fitting it is to receive a wound from Love! One person receives the dart of fleshly love, another is wounded by earthly desire; but do you lay bare your members and offer yourself to the “chosen dart,” the lovely dart; for God is the archer indeed. Hear what the Scripture says of this same dart; or rather, that you may marvel even more, hear what the dart Himself says: “He hath made me as a chosen arrow, and in His quiver He hath kept me. And He said to me: ‘It is a great thing for Thee to be called my servant’” (Is. 49:2f.). Understand what the arrow says and in what manner He is chosen by the Lord. How blessed is it to be wounded by this dart! Those men who talked together, saying to each other: “Was not our heart burning within us in the way, whilst He opened to us the Scriptures?” (Lk. 24:32) had been wounded by this dart. If anyone is wounded by our discourse, if any is wounded by the teaching of the Divine Scripture, and can say, “I have been wounded by love,” perhaps he follows both the former and the latter. But why do I say “perhaps”? I offer a clear explanation.

His left hand is under my head, and His right hand will embrace me (Sg. 2:6). The Word of God has both a left and a right; Wisdom, though it is multifold in respect of the different subjects to be understood, is one in substance. Solomon himself taught about the left and right hands of Wisdom, saying: “For length and years of life are in her right hand, and in her left riches and glory” (Prov. 3:16). “His left hand,” therefore, “is under my head,” that He may cause me to rest, that the Bridegroom’s arm may be my pillow and the chief seat of the soul recline upon the Word of God.

“His left hand is under my head.” It is not expedient for you to have pillows upon which mourning follows. It is written in Ezekiel: “Woe to them that sew pillows under every elbow!” (Ez. 13:18). Do not sew pillows, do not seek elsewhere for rest for your head; have the Bridegroom’s left hand under your head and say: “His left hand is under my head.” When you have that, all the things His left hand holds will be bestowed on you; you will say with truth: “In His left hand are riches and glory.”

“And His right hand will embrace me.” Let the right hand of the Bridegroom embrace the whole of you. “Length indeed and years of life are in His right hand; and for that reason thou shalt have long live and many days upon the good land that the Lord thy God will give thee” (cf. Ex. 20:13).

I have entreated you, ye daughters of Jerusalem, among the powers and forces of the field (Sg. 2:7).What does the Bride entreat of the daughters of Jerusalem? “Whether ye have raised and roused up love (Sg. 2:7). How long, O daughters of Jerusalem, O maidens, sleeps there in you the love that does not sleep in me, because I have received the wound of love?” But in you, who are many, and are also daughters of Jerusalem and maidens, the love of the Bridegroom sleeps. “I have entreated you,” therefore, “O ye daughters of Jerusalem, whether ye have raised,” and not only raised, but also “roused up” the love that is in you. When the Maker of the universe created you, He sowed in your hearts the seeds of love. But now, as it is said elsewhere: “Justice has gone to sleep in her,” so now is love asleep in you, according to that further saying: The Bridegroom

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“rested as a lion, and as a lion’s whelp” (cf. Is. 1:21, Num. 24:9).

In unbelievers and in those who are of doubtful heart, the Divine Word is still asleep; but He is wakeful in the saints. He sleeps in those who are driven by storms; but He is roused by the voice of those who desire the Bridegroom to awake and save them. When He awakes, calm supervenes forthwith; the mountainous waves immediately subside, the adverse winds are rebuked, the madness of the waters falls silent. But, when He sleeps, then there is storm and death and despair (Mt. 8:23ff.)

“I entreat you, therefore, ye daughters of Jerusalem, among the powers and forces of the field.” Of what field? Surely of that of which the smell is of a plentiful field which the Lord hath blessed (Gn. 27:27).

*The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, tr. R. P. Lawson (New York: The Newman Press, 1956), 294-99.

THEOLOGY OF THE BODY On the Song of Songs

Pope St. John Paul II A. D. 1984

I WOULD like to conclude the topic of human love in the divine plan with some considerations especially about the teaching of Humanae Vitae, premising some reflections on the Song of Songs.

The theme of marital love which unites man and woman in a certain sense connects this part of the Bible with the whole tradition of the “great analogy.” Through the writings of the prophets, this flows into the New Testament and especially into Ephesians (cf. Eph. 5:21-33).

The Song of Songs has become the object of many exegetical studies, commentaries and

hypotheses. With regard to its content, apparently “profane,” the positions are varied. On the one hand its reading has often been discouraged, and on the other it has been the source from which the greatest mystical writers have drawn. The verses of the Song of Songs have been inserted into the Church’s Liturgy. Although the analysis of the text of this book obliges us to situate its content outside the sphere of the great prophetic analogy, it is not possible to detach it from the reality of the original sacrament. It is not possible to reread it except along the lines of what is written in the first chapters of Genesis, as a testimony of the beginning—that beginning which Christ referred to in His decisive conversation with the Pharisees (cf. Mt. 19:4). The Song of Songs is certainly found in the wake of that sacrament in which, through the language of the body, the visible sign of man and woman’s participation in the covenant of grace and love offered by God to man is constituted. The Song of Songs demonstrates the richness of this language, whose first expression is already found in Genesis 2:23-25.

Indeed, the first verses of the Song of Songs lead us immediately into the atmosphere of the whole poem, in which the groom and the bride seem to move in the circle traced by the irradiation of love. The words, movements, and gestures of the spouses correspond to the interior movement of their hearts. It is possible to understand the language of the body only through the prism of this movement. In that language there comes to pass that discovery which the first man expressed in front of her who had been created as “a helper like himself ” (Gn. 2:20, 23). As the biblical text reports, she had been taken from one of his ribs (“rib” seems to also indicate the heart).

This discovery … in the Song of Songs is invested with all the richness of the language of human love. What was expressed in the second chapter of Genesis (vv. 23-25) in just a few simple and essential words, is developed here in a full dialogue, or rather in a duet, in which the groom’s words are interwoven with the bride’s and they complement each other. On seeing the woman created by God, man’s first words express

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wonder and admiration, even more, the sense of fascination (cf. Gn. 2:23). A similar fascination—which is wonder and admiration—runs in fuller form through the verses of the Song of Songs. It runs in a peaceful and homogeneous wave from the beginning to the end of the poem.

Even a summary analysis of the text of the Song of Songs allows the language of the body to be heard expressing itself in that mutual fascination. The point of departure as well as the point of arrival for this fascination—mutual wonder and admiration—are in fact the bride’s femininity and the groom’s masculinity, in the direct experience of their visibility. The words of love uttered by both of them are therefore concentrated on the body, not only because in itself it constitutes the source of the mutual fascination. But it is also, and above all, because on the body there lingers directly and immediately that attraction toward the other person, toward the other “I”—female or male—which in the interior impulse of the heart generates love.

In addition, love unleashes a special experience of the beautiful, which focuses on what is visible, but at the same time involves the entire person. The experience of beauty gave rise to mutual satisfaction.

“O most beautiful among women …” (Sg. 1:8), the groom says, and the bride’s words echo back to him: “I am dark—but lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem” (Sg. 1:5). The words of the spellbound man are repeated continually. They return in all five stanzas of the poem, and they are echoed in similar expressions of the bride’s.

It is a question here of metaphors that may surprise us today. Many of them were borrowed from the life of shepherds; others seem to indicate the royal status of the groom. The analysis of that poetic language is left to the experts. The very fact of adopting the metaphor shows how much, in our case, the language of the body seeks support and corroboration in the whole visible world. This is without doubt a language that is reread at one and the same time with the heart and with the eyes of the groom, in the act of special concentration on the whole female “I” of the bride. This “I” speaks to him through every

feminine trait, giving rise to that state of mind that can be defined as fascination, enchantment. This female “I” is expressed almost without words. Nevertheless, the language of the body, expressed wordlessly, finds a rich echo in the groom’s words, in his speaking that is full of poetic transport and metaphors, which attest to the experience of beauty, a love of satisfaction. If the metaphors in the Song of Songs seek analogy for this beauty in the various things of the visible world (in this world which is the groom’s “own world”), at the same time they seem to indicate the insufficiency of each of these things in particular. “You are all-beautiful, my beloved, and there is no blemish in you” (Sg. 4:7). The groom ends his song with this saying, leaving all the metaphors, in order to address himself to that sole one through which the language of the body seems to express what is more proper to femininity and the whole of the person. . . .

…The truth about love, proclaimed by the Song of Songs, cannot be separated from the language of the body. The truth about love enables the same language of the body to be reread in truth. This is also the truth about the progressive approach of the spouses which increases through love. The nearness means also the initiation into the mystery of the person, without, however, implying its violation (cf. Sg. 1:13-14, 16).

The truth about the increasing nearness of the spouses through love is developed in the subjective dimension “of the heart,” of affection and sentiment. This dimension allows one to discover in itself the other as a gift and, in a certain sense, to “taste it” in itself (cf. Sg. 2:3-6).

Through this nearness the groom more fully lives the experience of that gift which on the part of the female “I” is united with the spousal expression and meaning of the body. The man’s words (cf. Sg. 7:1-8) do not only contain a poetic description of his beloved, of her feminine beauty on which his senses dwell, but they speak of the gift and the self-giving of the person.

The bride knows that the groom’s longing is for her and she goes to meet him with the quickness of the gift of herself (cf. Sg. 7:9-13) because the love that unites them is at one and

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the same time of a spiritual and a sensual nature. It is also on the basis of this love that the rereading of the significance of the body in the truth comes to pass, since the man and woman must together constitute that sign of the mutual gift of self, which puts the seal on their whole life.

In the Song of Songs the language of the body becomes a part of the single process of the mutual attraction of the man and woman. This attraction is expressed in the frequent refrains that speak of the search that is full of nostalgia, of affectionate solicitude (cf. Sg. 2:7) and of the spouses’ mutual rediscovery (cf. Sg. 5:2). This brings them joy and calm, and seems to lead them to a continual search. One has the impression that in meeting each other, in reaching each other, in experiencing one’s nearness, they ceaselessly continued to tend toward something. They yield to the call of something that dominates the content of the moment and surpasses the limits of the eros, limits that are reread in the words of the mutual language of the body (cf. Sg. 1:7-8; 2:17). This search has its interior dimension: “the heart is awake” even in sleep. This aspiration, born of love on the basis of the language of the body, is a search for integral beauty, for purity that is free of all stain. It is a search for perfection that contains, I would say, the synthesis of human beauty, beauty of soul and body.

In the Song of Songs the human eros reveals the countenance of love ever in search and, as it were, never satisfied. The echo of this restlessness runs through the strophes of the poem:

I opened to my lover—but my lover had departed, gone.

I sought him but I did not find him; I called to him but he did not answer me (Sg. 5:6). I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, if you find

my lover— What shall you tell him? That I am faint with love

(Sg. 5:8).

So then some strophes of the Song of Songs present the eros as the form of human love in which the energies of desire are at work. In them, the awareness or the subjective certainty of the mutual, faithful, and exclusive belonging is rooted. At the same time, however, many other strophes

of the poem lead us to reflect on the cause of the search and the restlessness that accompanies the awareness of belonging to each other. Is this restlessness also part of the nature of the eros? If it were, this restlessness would indicate also the need for self-control. The truth about love is expressed in the awareness of mutual belonging, the fruit of the aspiration and search for each other, and in the need for the aspiration and the search, the outcome of mutual belonging.

This interior necessity, this dynamic of love indirectly reveals the near impossibility of one person’s being appropriated and mastered by the other. The person is someone who surpasses all measures of appropriation and domination, of possession and gratification, which emerge from the same language of the body. If the groom and the bride reread this language in the full truth about the person and about love, they arrive at the ever deeper conviction that the fullness of their belonging constitutes that mutual gift in which love is revealed as “stern as death,” that is, it goes to the furthest limits of the language of the body in order to exceed them. The truth about interior love and the truth about the mutual gift in a certain sense continually call the groom and the bride—through the means of expressing the mutual belonging, and even by breaking away from those means—to arrive at what constitutes the very nucleus of the gift from person to person.

Following the paths of the words marked out by the strophes of the Song of Songs, it seems that we are therefore approaching the dimension in which the eros seeks to be integrated, through still another truth about love. Centuries later, in the light of the death and resurrection of Christ, Paul of Tarsus will proclaim this truth in the words of First Corinthians:

Love is patient; love is kind. Love is not jealous; it does not put on airs; it is not

snobbish. Love is never rude; it is not self-seeking; it is not

prone to anger; neither does it brood over injuries. Love does not rejoice in what is wrong but rejoices

with the truth.

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There is no limit to love’s forbearance, to its trust, its hope,

its power to endure. Love never fails. ~1 Cor. 13:4-8

Is the truth about love, expressed in the strophes of the Song of Songs, confirmed in the light of these words of Paul? In the Song of Songs we read, as an example of love, that its “jealousy” is “relentless as the nether world” (Sg. 8:6). In the Pauline letter we read that “love is not jealous.” What relationship do both of these expressions about love have? What relationship does the love that is “stern as death,” according to the Song of Songs, have with the love that “never fails,” according to the Pauline letter? We will not multiply these questions; we will not open the comparative analysis. Nevertheless, it seems that love opens up before us here in two perspectives. It is as though that in which the human eros closes its horizon is still opened, through Paul’s words, to another horizon of love that speaks another language, the love that seems to emerge from another dimension of the person, and which calls, invites, to another communion. This love has been called agape and agape brings the eros to completion by purifying it.

*The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997), 368-70, 373-5.

ON CHARITY

St. Maximus the Confessor A. D. Seventh Century

1. Charity is a good disposition of the soul, according to which one prefers no creature to the knowledge of God. It is impossible to attain a lasting possession of this charity if one has any attachments to earthly things.

2. Charity springs from the calm of detachment, detachment from hope in God, hope from patience and long-suffering; and these from all-embracing self-mastery; self-mastery from fear of God, fear of God from faith in the Lord.

3. He that has faith in the Lord fears punishment; he that fears punishment masters his passions; he that masters his passions endures hardships with patience; he that endures hardships with patience will have hope in God; hope in God separates the mind from every earthly attachment; the mind thus separated will have charity towards God.

4. He who loves God prefers knowledge of Him to all things made by Him; and by desire ceaselessly devotes himself to it.

5. If all things have been made by God and for God, He is nobler than all the things made by Him; he who deserts God, the incomparably nobler, and devotes himself to inferior things shows that he prefers before God the things made by Him.

6. He who has his mind fixed upon charity for God scorns all visible things and even his body as something alien.

7. If the soul is nobler than the body and God incomparably nobler than the world He made, he that prefers body to soul and the world to God who made it differs in no way from idolaters.

8. He that turns his mind from charity and constant attention towards God and binds it over to some sensible thing—this is the one that prefers body to soul and created things to God their Maker.

9. If the life of the mind is the illumination of knowledge; and this springs from charity towards God—beautifully it is said: Nothing is greater than divine charity.

10. When the mind by the burning love of its charity for God is out of itself, then it has no feeling at all for itself nor for any creatures. For, illumined by the divine and infinite light, it has no feeling for anything that is made by Him, as the eye of the senses has no perception of the stars when the sun is risen.

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11. All the virtues help the mind towards the burning of divine love; more than all, pure prayer. For by this winging its way to God, the mind gets outside all things.

12. When through charity the mind is ravished by divine knowledge, and, outside of creatures, has a feeling of the divine infinity, then, as divine Isaiah explains, shocked into a sense of its own lowliness, it says with conviction the words of the prophet: “Woe is me, because I am struck at heart, because, being man and having unclean lips, I live in the midst of a people with unclean lips and the king the Lord of Sabaoth I have seen with my eyes” (Is. 6:5).

13. He that loves God cannot help loving also every man as himself, even though the passions of those not yet purified disgust him. So then as he sees their conversion and betterment, he rejoices with a boundless and unspeakable joy.

14. Impure is the impassioned soul, filled with notions of cupidity and hate.

15. Who sees a trace of hate in his own heart, for any fault soever, towards any man soever, is quite alien from charity towards God; because charity towards God in no way suffers hate towards man.

16. He that loves me, saith the Lord, will keep my commandments; and “this is my commandment that you love one another” (Jn. 14:15, 15:12). He therefore who does not love his neighbor does not keep the commandment. Nor is he that does not keep the commandment able to love the Lord.

17. Happy the man who is able to love all men equally.

18. Happy the man who is attached to no corruptible or transitory thing.

19. Happy the mind that has gone beyond all things and delights unceasingly in the divine beauty.

20. He that takes forethought for the flesh in its lusts and, because of transitory things, bears

grudges against his neighbor—such a man worships the creature instead of the Creator.

21. He that keeps his body apart from pleasure and disease has it as a fellow helper in the service of better things.

22. He that flees all worldly desires places himself above every worldly grief.

23. He that loves God most certainly also loves his neighbor. Such a man cannot keep money, but, God-like, distributes it, giving to each one in need.

24. He that in imitation of God does almsdeeds knows no difference between evil and good, just and unjust, in regard to the needs of the body, but distributes equally to all according to their need, even though for his good intentions he prefers the virtuous to the bad.

25. God, who is by nature good and without passion, loves all alike as His handiwork; yet the virtuous He glorifies as one who for his good will is made intimate with Himself, while, because of His goodness, He shows mercy on the bad, with chastisements in this world to convert him. So also he, who by good will is good and without passion, loves all men alike—the virtuous because of his nature and that fellow feeling which causes him to show mercy upon him as upon one without sense and wandering in darkness.

*The Four Centuries on Charity, tr. Polycarp Sherwood (New York: Newman Press, 1955), 137-40.

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HYMN 16

St. Symeon the New Theologian A. D. Eleventh Century

OH WHAT is the reality that is hidden from every created essence,

and what is the rational light that is not seen by anyone,

and what is this abundant wealth, which no one in the world

has the strength to find entirely or to fully possess?

For it is inapprehensible to everyone, uncontainable by the world,

and it is most desirable above the whole world,

and it is yearned for, as much as God prevails above the whole

of visible reality, which He has prepared.

This is why I am wounded by His love (Sg. 2:5),

insofar as He is not seen by me, I melt away in my senses,

and groaning, I burn in my mind and heart.

I walk about, and I burn, seeking here and there,

and nowhere do I find the lover of my soul (Sg. 5-6).

And I often look around to see the one I desire,

and He, as though invisible, is wholly unseen by me (Mk. 5:32).

But when I begin to mourn like one in despair, then

He is seen by me and He looks at me, He Who looks upon all things.

Amazed, I am astonished at the shapeliness of His beauty,

and how the Creator stooped down when He opened the heavens

and displayed His unspeakable and strange glory to me.

Who therefore shall also come closer to Him?

Or how shall one be carried up to the immeasurable heights?

When I consider this, He Himself was found within me,

flashing forth within my wretched heart,

illuminating me from all directions with immortal radiance,

shining upon all my members with His rays,

folding His entire self around me He tenderly kisses all of me.

He gives His whole self to me, the unworthy,

and I take my fill of His love and beauty,

and I am filled full of divine pleasure and sweetness.

I partake of the light, and I participate in the glory,

and He illuminates my face like that of the one I yearned for (Mt. 17:2),

and all my members become bearers of light.

Then finally I become more beautiful than the beautiful,

I am richer than the rich, and more powerful

than all the powerful, greater than kings,

and much more honorable than all visible creation,

not only more honorable than the earth, and everyone on earth, but even more than

heaven and everyone in heaven, for I have the Creator of all things

to Whom is fitting glory and honor now and forever (1 Tim. 1:17). Amen.

*Divine Eros: Hymns of Saint Symeon the New Theologian (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010), 91-93.

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the TRADITION

The prize in the contest of men is shown by him who has trained himself by the discharge of the duties of marriage; by him, I say, who in the midst of solicitude for his family shows himself Inseparable from the love of God. ~St Clement of Alexandria

SONG OF SONGS 1:1-7

Solomon Ancient

The Bride Confesses Her Love 1. The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s. 2. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy breasts are better than wine. 3. And the smell of thine ointments is better than all spices: thy name is ointment poured forth; therefore do the young maidens love thee.

The Friends 4. They have drawn thee: we will run after thee, for the smell of thine ointments: the king has brought me into closet: let us rejoice and be glad in thee; we will love thy breasts more than wine: righteousness loves thee.

The Bride 5. I am black, but beautiful, ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. 6. Look not upon me, because I am dark, because the sun has looked unfavorably upon me: my mother's sons strove with me; they made me keeper in the vineyards; I have not kept my own vineyard. 7. Tell me, thou whom my soul loves, where thou tendest thy flock, where thou causest them to rest at noon, lest I become as one that is veiled by the flocks of thy companions.

*Brenton Septuagint Translation

THE SACRAMENT OF HOLY MATRIMONY

Orthodox Christian Services Ancient

The Betrothal Service Priest: Have you, Name, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to wife this woman, Name, whom you see here before you?

Bridegroom: I have. Priest: Have you, Name, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to husband this man, Name, whom you see here before you?

Bride: I have. The Priest takes up one of the candles which have been placed on the Analogion, lights it and gives it to the Bridegroom, making before him the sign of the Cross as he does so; and having done the same for the Bride, he begins: Blessed is our God always: now and ever, and unto ages of ages. . . .

Choir: Lord, have mercy.

Priest: For the servant of God, Name, and for the handmaid of God, Name, who now plight each other their troth, and for their salvation, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir: Lord, have mercy. Priest: That He will send down upon them perfect and peaceful love, and His help, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir: Lord, have mercy. Priest: That He will preserve them in oneness of mind, and in steadfastness of faith, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir: Lord, have mercy. Priest: That He will bless them with a blameless life, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir: Lord, have mercy. Priest: That the Lord our God will grant unto them an honorable marriage, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir: Lord, have mercy. . . .

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Priest: O eternal God, who hast brought into unity those who were sundered, and hast ordained for them an indissoluble bond of love; who didst bless Isaac and Rebecca, and didst make them heirs of Thy promise: Bless also these Thy servants, guiding them unto every good work. For Thou art a merciful God, who lovest mankind, and unto Thee we ascribe glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages. . . . O Lord our God, who hast espoused the Church as a pure Virgin from among the Gentiles: Bless this Betrothal, and unite and preserve these Thy servants in peace and oneness of mind. For unto Thee are due all glory, honor and worship, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Choir: Amen.

Then the Priest takes the Ring of the Bride, and Blesses the Groom, making with it the sign of the Cross over him thrice, touching the head of the Bride with it each time, and saying: The servant of God, Name, is betrothed to the handmaid of God, Name. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Priest then places the Ring on the fourth finger of the right hand of the Groom. Then the Priest takes the Ring of the Groom, and Blesses the Bride, making with it the sign of the Cross over her thrice, touching the head of the Groom with it each time; and saying: The handmaid of God, Name, is betrothed to the servant of God, Name. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Priest places the Ring on the fourth finger of the right hand of the Bride. The bridal pair then exchange the rings; meanwhile the Priest says the following prayer: Let us pray to the Lord.


Priest: O Lord our God, bless the betrothal of these Thy servants, Name and Name, and confirm the word which they have spoken. Establish them in the holy union which is from Thee. For Thou, in the beginning, didst make them male and female, and by Thee is the woman joined unto the man as a helpmeet. Wherefore, O Lord our God, who

hast sent forth Thy truth upon Thine inheritance, and Thy covenant unto Thy servants our fathers, even Thine elect, from generation to generation: Look Thou upon Thy servant, Name, and upon Thy handmaid, Name, and establish their betrothal in faith and in oneness of mind, in truth and in love. And, O Lord our God, do Thou now bless this putting-on of rings with Thy heavenly benediction: and let Thine Angel go before them all the days of their life: For Thou are He who blesseth and sanctifieth all things, and unto Thee do we ascribe glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Choir: Amen.

The Marriage Service The Priest shall take the censer and cense round about the Analogion, and the bridal pair, and all present, while the following hymn is being sung: Blessed are all they that fear the Lord: and walk in His ways.

Choir: Glory to Thee, our God; glory to Thee.

Priest: Thou shalt eat of the fruit of thy labors: O blessed art thou, and happy shalt thou be.


Priest: Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house: thy children like a newly-planted olive-orchard round about thy table.


Priest: Lo, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord: the Lord in Zion shall so bless thee, that thou shalt see the good things of Jerusalem all the days of thy life.


Priest: Yea, that thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace upon Israel.

Choir: Glory to Thee, our God; glory to Thee…

Priest: For the servants of God, Name and Name, who are now being united to each other in the community of marriage, and for their salvation, let us pray to the Lord.


Priest: That He will bless this marriage, as He blessed that in Cana of Galilee, let us pray to the Lord.


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Priest: That He will make them glad with the sight of sons and daughters, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir: Lord, have mercy. . . .

Priest: Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, the Priest of mystical and pure marriage, and the Ordainer of the law of the marriage of the body, the Preserver of immortality, and the Provider of good things; do Thou, the same Master, who in the beginning didst make man and set him to be a King over Thy creation, and didst say: It is not good for man to be alone on the earth; let Us make a helpmeet for him; and didst fashion Woman, which when Adam beheld, he said: This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman; for this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and the twain shall be one flesh; and those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. Do Thou now also, O Master, our Lord and our God, send down Thy heavenly grace upon these Thy servants, Name and Name; and grant that this Thy handmaid may, in all things, be pleasing unto her husband; and that this Thy servant may love and cherish his wife; that they may live according to Thy will. Bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Abraham and Sarah. Bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Isaac and Rebecca. Bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Joachim and Anna. Bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Zacharias and Elizabeth. Preserve them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst preserve Noah in the Ark. Preserve them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst preserve the three Holy Children from the fire. And let that gladness come upon them which the blessed Helena had when she found the precious Cross. Remember them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst remember Thy Forty Holy Martyrs, sending down upon them crowns from heaven. Remember them, O Lord our God, and the parents who have nurtured them, for the prayers of parents make firm the foundations of houses. Remember, O Lord our God, Thy servants the attendants of the bridal pair, who share in this joy. Remember, O Lord our God, Thy servant Name and Thy handmaid Name, and bless them.

Grant them fair children, and concord of soul and body; exalt them like the cedars of Lebanon, like a luxuriant vine, that, having sufficiency in all things they may abound in every good work that is good and acceptable unto Thee. And let them behold their children’s children round about their table, like a newly-planted olive orchard, that, obtaining favor in Thy sight, they may shine like the stars of heaven, in Thee, our Lord and God: for unto Thee are due all glory, honor, and worship: to the Father, who is from everlasting, and to the Son, and to the Life-giving Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Choir: Amen.

Priest: O holy God, who didst create man out of the dust and didst fashion his wife and join her unto him as a helpmeet, for it seemed good to Thy majesty that man should not be alone upon the earth: Do Thou, the same Lord, extend Thy hand from Thy holy dwelling-place, and join this Thy servant Name, and this Thy handmaid Name, for by Thee is the husband united unto the wife. Unite them in one mind and one flesh, and grant unto them fair children for education in Thy faith and fear: for Thine is the majesty, and Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Choir: Amen.

The Crowning The Priest takes up one of the wedding crowns and makes it the sign of the Cross, thrice, over the head of the Bridegroom, and touches the head of the Bride each time, saying: The servant of God, Name, is crowned unto the handmaid of God Name. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Choir: Amen.

The Priest places the Bridegroom’s crown upon his head, where the Bridegroom’s attendant is, and takes up the other crown and makes with it the sign of the Cross, thrive, over the head of the Bride, and touches the head of the Bridegroom with it each time, saying: The handmaid of God, Name, is crowned unto the servant of God Name.

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Choir: Amen.

The Priest takes the Bridegroom’s crown in his right hand, and the Bride’s crown in his left, and exchanges them thrice, saying: O Lord our God, crown them with glory and with honor.

The Apostle Priest: Let us attend!

Reader: (Prokeimenon:) Thou hast set upon their heads crowns of precious stones; they asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest it them.

(Verse:): For Thou wilt give them Thy blessing forever and ever. Thou wilt make them to rejoice with gladness through Thy presence.

Priest: Wisdom! Reader: The Lesson from the Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to the Ephesians.

Priest: Let us attend! While the Apostle is being read, the Priest censes round about the Holy Altar, the sanctuary, and all present, in the accustomed manner.

Reader: Brethren, Give thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church: and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it; that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church: for we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and

shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. Nevertheless let everyone of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

Priest: Peace be to thee that readest. Choir: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

The Gospel The people stand; the Priest comes before the Altar, facing the people, with the Gospel Book on the lectern before him, and says aloud: Wisdom! Attend! Let us hear the Holy Gospel. Peace be to all.

Choir: And to thy spirit.

Priest: The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to St. John.

Choir: Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee.

Priest: Let us attend! And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there: and both Jesus was called, and his disciples to the marriage. And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. And there were set there six water pots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew); the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and His disciples believed on Him.

Choir: Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee…

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Priest (quietly): O Lord our God, who in Thy saving providence didst vouchsafe by Thy presence in Cana of Galilee to declare marriage honorable: Do Thou, the same Lord, now also maintain in peace and concord Thy servants Name and Name, and grant them to lead an upright and blameless life even unto a ripe old age, walking in Thy commandments with a pure heart.

Priest (aloud): For Thou art a merciful God who lovest mankind, and unto Thee we ascribe glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Choir: Amen. . . .

The Common Cup Priest: O God, who hast created all things by Thy might and hast made fast the round world, and adornest the crown of all things which Thou hast made: Bless now, with Thy spiritual blessing, this Common Cup, which Thou dost give to those who are now united in community of marriage: for blessed is Thy name, and glorified is Thy kingdom, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Choir: Amen.

The Priest gives the newly-wedded pair to drink of the Cup, thrice each in turn, in token of their common life together. When they have partaken, the Bridegroom takes the Bride’s right hand in his left, and followed by their attendants, they walk three times around the Analogion, the Priest preceding them and censing as he goes. Meanwhile, the following hymns are sung: O Isaiah, dance thy joy; for a Virgin was with child and hath borne a son, Emmanuel, both God and man: and Orient is His name; whom magnifying we call the Virgin blessed.

Ye holy martyrs, who fought the good fight and have received your crowns: entreat ye the Lord that He will have mercy on our souls.

Glory to Thee, O Christ our God: the Apostle’s boast, the Martyr’s joy, whose preaching was the consubstantial Trinity.

Then the Priest removes their crowns saying: Be thou exalted, O bridegroom, like unto Abraham; and be thou blessed, like unto Isaac; and do thou

multiply like unto Jacob, walking in peace, and keeping the commandments of God in righteousness.

And thou, O Bride: Be thou exalted like unto Sarah; and exult thou like unto Rebecca; and do thou multiply unto Rachel; and rejoice thou in thy husband, fulfilling the conditions of the law: for so is it well-pleasing unto God. . . . O God, our God, who didst come to Cana of Galilee, and didst bless there the marriage feast: Bless also, these Thy servants, who through Thy good providence are now united together in wedlock. Bless their goings and their comings in: replenish their life with good things: receive their crowns into Thy kingdom, preserving them spotless, blameless, and without reproach, unto ages of ages. Amen.

The Priest then bestows the Nuptial Blessing upon the newly-married pair, saying: May the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the all-holy, consubstantial and life-giving Trinity, one Godhead, and one Kingdom, bless you; and grant unto you length of days, fair children, prosperity of life, and faith: and fill you with abundance of all earthly good things, and make you worthy to obtain the blessings of the promise; through the prayers of the holy Theotokos, and of all the Saints. Amen.

The newly-married pair kiss the Cross and each other, and the Priest says the Dismissal Payer: May He who by His presence at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee did declare marriage to be an honorable estate, Christ our true God; through the prayers of his all-holy Mother; of the holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostles; of the holy, God-crowned Kings and Saints-equal-to-the-Apostles Constantine and Helena: of the holy great Martyr Procopius, and of all the Saints, have mercy upon you and save you: forasmuch as He is good, and loveth mankind.

Choir: Amen. . . .

The Removal of the Marriage Crowns On the eighth day after the wedding, or shortly thereafter, the bridal pair return to the Church at the proper time, and with their attendants come to stand before the Holy Doors; the Priest gives them lighted candles to hold, and places the wedding crowns upon their heads, saying: O Lord our God, who hast blessed the crown of

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the year, and permittest these crowns to be laid upon those who are united to one another by the law of marriage, thereby granting unto them a reward for continence; for they are pure who are united in the marriage which Thou hast made lawful: Do Thou bless also in the removal of these crowns those who have been united to one another, and preserve their union indissoluble; that they may evermore give thanks unto Thine all-holy Name, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Choir: Amen. . . .

Priest: Bow your heads unto the Lord. Choir: To Thee, O Lord.

Priest: These Thy servants having come together in concord, O Lord, and having accomplished the compact of marriage, as at Cana of Galilee, and contracted the pledges thereof, ascribe glory unto Thee: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Choir: Amen.

When the Priest has removed the crowns and taken the candles from the bridal pair, he blesses them with the hand cross and dismisses them with the following prayer; they kiss the cross and return to their places in the Church: May He who by His presence at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee did declare marriage to be an honorable estate, Christ our true God: through the prayers of his all-holy Mother; of the holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostles; of the holy, God-crowned Kings and Saints-equal-to-the-Apostles Constantine and Helena: of the holy great Martyr Procopius, and of all the Saints, have mercy upon you and save you: forasmuch as He is good, and loveth mankind.

Choir: Amen.

*Service Book of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church according to the use of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, 11th edition (New York: Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, 2002), 166-82.

LIFE OF ST. MARY OF EGYPT

St. Sophronius of Jerusalem A. D. Seventh Century

“IT IS GOOD to hide the secret of a king, but it is glorious to reveal and preach the works of God” (Tobit 12.7). So said the Archangel Raphael to Tobit when he performed the wonderful healing of his blindness. Actually, not to keep the secret of a king is perilous and a terrible risk, but to be silent about the works of God is a great loss for the soul. And I, in writing the life of St. Mary of Egypt, am afraid to hide the works of God by silence. Remembering the misfortune threatened to the servant who hid his God-given talent in the earth (Mat. 25.18-25), I am bound to pass on the holy account that has reached me. And let no one think that I have had the audacity to write untruth or doubt this great marvel—may I never lie about holy things! If there do happen to be people who, after reading this record, do not believe it, may the Lord have mercy on them because, reflecting on the weakness of human nature, they consider impossible these wonderful things accomplished by holy people. But now we must begin to tell this most amazing story, which has taken place in our generation.

There was a certain elder in one of the monasteries of Palestine, a priest of the holy life and speech, whose name was Zosimas. He had been through the whole course of the ascetic life and in everything he adhered to the rule once given to him by his tutors as regard spiritual labors. He had also added a good deal himself whilst laboring to subject his flesh to the will of the spirit. And he had not failed in his aim. He was so renowned for his spiritual life that many came to him from neighboring monasteries and some even from afar. While doing all this, he never ceased to study the Divine Scriptures. Whether resting, standing, working or eating food (if the scraps he nibbled could be called food), he incessantly and constantly had a single aim: always to sing of God, and to practice the teaching of the Divine Scriptures. After training as an ascetic

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till he reached the age of 53, he began to be tormented with the thought that he was perfect in everything and needed no instruction from anyone, saying to himself mentally, “Is there a monk on earth who can be of use to me and show me a kind of asceticism that I have not accomplished? Is there a man to be found in the desert who has surpassed me?”

Thus thought the elder, when suddenly an angel appeared to him and said: “Zosimas, valiantly have you struggled, as far as this is within the power of man, valiantly have you gone through the ascetic course. But there is no man who has attained perfection. Before you lie unknown struggles greater than those you have already accomplished. That you may know how many other ways lead to salvation, leave your native land like the renowned patriarch Abraham and go to the monastery by the River Jordan.”

Zosimas did as he was told … and went to the River Jordan. . . . [During Lent] Zosimas … went far, far into the desert with a secret hope of finding some father who might be living there and who might be able to satisfy his thirst and longing… He had already walked for 20 days and when the 6th hour came he stopped and, turning to the East, he began to sing the sixth Hour and recite the customary prayers. He used to break his journey thus at fixed hours of the day to rest a little, to chant psalms standing, and to pray on bent knees.

And as he sang thus without turning his eyes from the heavens, he suddenly saw to the right of the hillock on which he stood the semblance of a human body. At first he was confused thinking he beheld a vision of the devil. But, having guarded himself with the sign of the Cross and banished all fear, he turned his gaze in that direction and in truth saw some form gliding southwards. It was naked, the skin dark as if burned up by the heat of the sun; the hair on its head was white as a fleece, and not long, falling just below its neck. Zosimas was so overjoyed at beholding a human form that he ran after it in pursuit, but the form fled from him. He followed. At length, when he was near enough to be heard, he shouted: “Why do you run from an old man and a sinner? Slave of the True God, wait for me, whoever you are, in God’s name.”

“Forgive me for God’s sake, but I cannot turn towards you and show you my face, Abba Zosimas. For I am a woman and naked as you see with the uncovered shame of my body. But if you would like to fulfill one wish of a sinful woman, throw me your cloak so that I can cover my body and can turn to you and ask for your blessing.”

Here terror seized Zosimas, for he heard that she called him by name. He realized that she could not have done so without knowing anything of him if she had not had the power of spiritual insight.

He at once did as he was asked. He took off his old, tattered cloak and threw it to her, turning away as he did so. She picked it up and was able to cover at least a part of her body. Then she turned to Zosimas and said: “Why did you wish, Abba Zosimas, to see a sinful woman? What do you wish to hear or learn from me, you who have not shrunk from such great struggles?”

Zosimas threw himself on the ground and asked for her blessing. She likewise bowed down before him. And thus they lay on the ground prostrate asking for each other’s blessing. And one word alone could be heard from both: “Bless me!” After a long while the woman said to Zosimas: “Abba Zosimas, it is you who must give blessing and pray. You are dignified by the order of priesthood and for many years you have been standing before the holy altar and offering the sacrifice of the Divine Mysteries.”

This flung Zosimas into even greater terror. At length with tears he said to her: “O mother, filled with the spirit, by your mode of life it is evident that you live with God and have died to the world. The Grace granted to you is apparent—for you have called me by name and recognized that I am a priest, though you have never seen me before. Grace is recognized not by one’s orders, but by gifts of the Spirit, so give me your blessing for God’s sake, for I need your prayers.”

Then giving way before the wish of the elder the woman said: “Blessed is God Who cares for the salvation of men and their souls.”

Zosimas answered: “Amen.” And both rose to their feet. Then the woman

asked the elder: “Why have you come, man of God, to me who am so sinful? Why do you wish

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to see a woman naked and devoid of every virtue? Though I know one thing—the Grace of the Holy Spirit has brought you to render me a service in time. Tell me, father, how are the Christian peoples living? And the kings? How is the Church guided?”

Zosimas said: “By your prayers, mother, Christ has granted lasting peace to all. But fulfill the unworthy petition of an old man and pray for the whole world and for me who am a sinner, so that my wanderings in the desert may not be fruitless.”

She answered: “You who are a priest, Abba Zosimas, it is you who must pray for me and for all—for this is your calling. But as we must all be obedient, I will gladly do what you ask.”

And with these words she turned to the East, and raising her eyes to heaven and stretching out her hands, she began to pray in a whisper. Zosimas could not understand anything that she said in her prayers. Meanwhile he stood, according to his own word, all in a flutter, looking at the ground without saying a word. And he swore, calling God to witness, that when he thought that her prayer was very long, he took his eyes off the ground and saw that she was raised about a forearm’s distance from the ground and stood praying in the air. When he saw this, even greater terror seized him and he fell on the ground weeping and repeating many times, “Lord have mercy.”

And whilst lying prostrate on the ground he was tempted by a thought: Is it not a spirit, and perhaps her prayer is hypocrisy. But at the very same moment the woman turned around, raised the elder from the ground and said: “Why do thoughts confuse you, Abba, and tempt you about me, as if I were a spirit and a deceiver in prayer? Know, holy father, that I am only a sinful woman, though I am guarded by Holy baptism. And I am no spirit but earth and ashes, and flesh alone.”

And with these words she guarded herself with the sign of the Cross on her forehead, eyes, mouth, and breast, saying: “May God defend us from the evil one and from his designs, for fierce is his struggle against us.”

Hearing and seeing this, the elder fell to the ground and, embracing her feet, he said with tears: “I beg you, by the Name of Christ our God, Who was born of a Virgin, for Whose sake

you have stripped yourself, for Whose sake you have exhausted your flesh, do not hide from your slave, who you are and whence and how you came into this desert. Tell me everything so the marvelous works of God may become known. A hidden wisdom and a secret treasure—what profit is there in them? Tell me all, I implore you. . . .

“My native land, holy father, was Egypt. Already during the lifetime of my parents, when I was twelve years old, I renounced their love and went to Alexandria. I am ashamed to recall how there I at first ruined my maidenhood and then unrestrainedly and insatiably gave myself up to sensuality. It is more becoming to speak of this briefly, so that you may just know my passion and my lechery. For about seventeen years, forgive me, I lived like that. I was like a fire of public debauch…

That is how I lived. Then one summer I saw a large crowd of Libyans and Egyptians running towards the sea. I asked one of them, “Where are these men hurrying to?” He replied, “They are all going to Jerusalem for the Exaltation of the Precious and Lifegiving Cross, which takes place in a few days.” I said to him, “Will they take me with them if I wish to go?” “No one will hinder you if you have money to pay for the journey and for food.” And I said to him, ”I have no money, neither have I food. But I shall go with them and shall go aboard. And they shall feed me, whether they want to or not. I have a body—they shall take it instead of pay for the journey.” I was suddenly filled with a desire to go, Abba, to have more lovers who could satisfy my passion. I told you, Abba Zosimas, not to force me to tell you of my disgrace. God is my witness, I am afraid of defiling you and the very air with my words.”

Zosimas, weeping, replied to her: “Speak on for God’s sake, mother, speak and do not break the thread of such an edifying tale.”

…Seeing my readiness to be shameless, they readily took me aboard the boat. Those who were expected came also, and we set sail at once.

How shall I relate to you what happened after this? Whose tongue can tell, whose ears can take in all that took place on the boat during that voyage! And to all this I frequently forced those miserable youths even against their own will.

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There is no mentionable or unmentionable depravity of which I was not their teacher. I am amazed, Abba, how the sea stood our licentiousness, how the earth did not open its jaws, and how it was that hell did not swallow me alive, when I had entangled in my net so many souls. But I think God was seeking my repentance. For He does not desire the death of a sinner but magnanimously awaits his return to Him. At last we arrived in Jerusalem. I spent the days before the festival in the town, living the same kind of life, perhaps even worse…

The holy day of the Exaltation of the Cross dawned while I was still flying about—hunting for youths. At daybreak I saw that everyone was hurrying to the church, so I ran with the rest. When the hour for the holy elevation approached, I was trying to make my way in with the crowd which was struggling to get through the church doors. I at last squeezed through with great difficulty almost to the entrance of the temple, from which the lifegiving Tree of the Cross was being shown to the people. But when I trod on the doorstep which everyone passed, I was stopped by some force which prevented my entering. Meanwhile I was brushed aside by the crowd and found myself standing alone in the porch. Thinking that this had happened because of my woman’s weakness, I again began to work my way into the crowd, trying to elbow myself forward. But in vain I struggled. Again my feet trod on the doorstep over which others were entering the church without encountering any obstacle. I alone seemed to remain unaccepted by the church. It was as if there was a detachment of soldiers standing there to oppose my entrance. Once again I was excluded by the same mighty force and again I stood in the porch.

Having repeated my attempt three or four times, at last I felt exhausted and had no more strength to push and to be pushed, so I went aside and stood in a corner of the porch. And only then with great difficulty it began to dawn on me, and I began to understand the reason why I was prevented from being admitted to see the life-giving Cross. The word of salvation gently touched the eyes of my heart and revealed to me that it was my unclean life which barred the entrance to me. I began to weep and lament and beat my breast,

and to sigh from the depths of my heart. And so I stood weeping when I saw above me the icon of the most holy Mother of God. And turning to her my bodily and spiritual eyes I said: “O Lady, Mother of God, who gave birth in the flesh to God the Word, I know that it is no honor or praise to thee when one so impure and depraved as I look up to thy icon, O ever-virgin, who didst keep thy body and soul in purity. Rightly do I inspire hatred and disgust before thy virginal purity. But I have heard that God Who was born of thee became man on purpose to call sinners to repentance. Then help me, for I have no other help. Order the entrance of the church to be opened to me. Allow me to see the venerable Tree on which He Who was born of thee suffered in the flesh and on which He shed His holy Blood for the redemption of sinners and for me, unworthy as I am. Be my faithful witness before thy son that I will never again defile my body by the impurity of fornication, but as soon as I have seen the Tree of the Cross I will renounce the world and its temptations and will go wherever thou wilt lead me.”

Thus I spoke and as if acquiring some hope in firm faith and feeling some confidence in the mercy of the Mother of God, I left the place where I stood praying. And I went again and mingled with the crowd that was pushing its way into the temple. And no one seemed to thwart me, no one hindered my entering the church. I was possessed with trembling, and was almost in delirium. Having got as far as the doors which I could not reach before—as if the same force which had hindered me cleared the way for me—I now entered without difficulty and found myself within the holy place. And so it was I saw the lifegiving Cross. I saw too the Mysteries of God and how the Lord accepts repentance. Throwing myself on the ground, I worshipped that holy earth and kissed it with trembling. Then I came out of the church and went to her who had promised to be my security, to the place where I had sealed my vow. And bending my knees before the Virgin Mother of God, I addressed to her such words as these: “O loving Lady, thou hast shown me thy great love for all men. Glory to God Who receives the repentance of sinners through thee. What more can I recollect

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or say, I who am so sinful? It is time for me, O Lady to fulfill my vow, according to thy witness. Now lead me by the hand along the path of repentance!” And at these words I heard a voice from on high: “If you cross the Jordan you will find glorious rest.”

…With these words I left the porch of the church and set off on my journey. . . .

Zosimas asked her: “How many years have gone by since you began to live in this desert?”

She replied: “Forty-seven years have already gone by, I think, since I left the holy city.”

…Zosimas said: “Do not hide from me anything; speak to me without concealing anything.”

And she said to him: “Believe me, Abba, seventeen years I passed in this desert fighting wild beasts—mad desires and passions… But when evil desires entered me I reminded myself of the vow which I had made, when going into the desert. In my thoughts I returned to the icon of the Mother of God which had received me and to her I cried in prayer. I implored her to chase away the thoughts to which my miserable soul was succumbing. And after weeping for long and beating my breast I used to see light at last which seemed to shine on me from everywhere. And after the violent storm, lasting calm descended. . . .

Thus concluding her tale she bowed down before him. And with tears the elder exclaimed: “Blessed is God Who creates the great and wondrous, the glorious and marvelous without end. Blessed is God Who has shown me how He rewards those who fear Him. Truly, O Lord, Thou dost not forsake those who seek Thee!”

… [The following year], placing some of the most pure Body and Blood into a small chalice and putting some grains and dates and lentils soaked in water into a small basket, he departed for the desert and reached the banks of the Jordan and sat down to wait for the saint. He waited for a long while and then began to doubt. Then raising his eyes to heaven, he began to pray: “Grant me, O Lord, to behold that which Thou hast allowed me to behold once. Do not let me depart in vain.” And then another thought struck him: “And what if she does come? There is no boat; how will she cross the Jordan to come to me who am so unworthy?”

And as he was pondering thus he saw the holy woman appear and stand on the other side of the river. Zosimas got up rejoicing and glorifying and thanking God. And again the thought came to him that she could not cross the Jordan. Then he saw that she made the sign of the Cross over the waters of the Jordan (and the night was a moonlit one, as he related afterwards) and then she at once stepped on to the waters and began walking across the surface towards him. And when he wanted to prostrate himself, she cried to him while still walking on the water: “What are you doing, Abba, you are a priest and carrying the divine Gifts!”

He obeyed her and on reaching the shore she said to the elder: “Bless, father, bless me!”

He answered her trembling, for a state of confusion had overcome him at the sight of the miracle: “Truly God did not lie when He promised that when we purify ourselves we shall be like Him. Glory to Thee, Christ our God, Who has shown me through this Thy slave how far away I stand from perfection.”

Here the woman asked him to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. He began, she finished the prayer and according to the custom of that time gave him the kiss of peace. Having partaken of the Holy Mysteries, she raised her hands to heaven and sighed with tears in her eyes, exclaiming: “Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, O Lord, according to Thy word; for my eyes have seen Thy salvation.”

…And when another year had passed, he again went into the desert. He reached the same spot but could see no sign of anyone. So raising his eyes to heaven as before, he prayed: “Show me, O Lord, Thy pure treasure, which Thou hast concealed in the desert. Show me, I pray Thee, the angel in the flesh, of which the world is not worthy.”

Then on the opposite bank of the river, her face turned towards the rising sun, he saw the saint lying dead. Her hands were crossed according to custom and her face was turned to the East. Running up he shed tears over the saint’s feet and kissed them, not daring to touch anything else.

For a long time he wept. Then reciting the appointed psalms, he said the burial prayers and thought to himself: “Must I bury the body of a

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THE PEN, THE PIPE & THE PINT

saint?” And then he saw words traced on the ground by her head: “Abba Zosimas, bury on this spot the body of humble Mary. Return to dust that which is dust and pray to the Lord for me, who departed in the month of Fermoutin of Egypt, called April by the Romans, on the first day, on the very night of our Lord’s Passion, after having partaken of the Divine Mysteries.”

Reading this the elder was glad to know the saint’s name… Then Zosimas thought: “It is time to do as she wished. But how am I to dig a grave with nothing in my hands?” …Lifting up his eyes he saw a big lion standing close to the saint’s body and licking her feet. At the sight of the lion he trembled with fear… But guarding himself with the sign of the cross, the thought came to him that the power of the one lying there would protect him and keep him unharmed. Meanwhile the lion drew near, expressing affection by every movement.

Zosimas said to the lion: “The Great One ordered that her body was to be buried. But I am old and have not the strength to dig the grave …can you carry out the work with your claws? Then we can commit to the earth the mortal temple of the saint.”

While he was still speaking the lion with his front paws began to dig a hole deep enough to bury the body.

Again the elder washed the feet of the saint with his tears and calling on her to pray for all, covered the body with earth in the presence of the lion. It was as it had been, naked and uncovered by anything but the tattered cloak which had been given to her by Zosimas and with which Mary, turning away, had managed to cover part of her body. Then both departed. The lion went off into the depth of the desert like a lamb, while Zosimas returned to the monastery glorifying and blessing Christ our Lord. And on reaching the monastery he told all the brothers about everything, and all marveled on hearing of God’s miracles. And with fear and love they kept the memory of the saint.

…Saint Zosimas died in the same monastery, almost attaining the age of a hundred, and passed to eternal life. The monks kept this story … and passed it on by word of mouth to one another.

But I, Sophronius, as soon as I heard it, wrote it down. As far as I could, I have recorded everything, putting truth above all else. May God Who works amazing miracles and generously bestows gifts on those who turn to Him with faith, reward those who seek light for themselves in this story, who hear, read, and are zealous to write it, and may He grant them the lot of blessed Mary together with all who at different times have pleased God by their pious thoughts and labors.

And let us also give glory to God, the eternal King, that He may grant us too His mercy in the day of judgment for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord, to Whom belongs all glory, honor, dominion and adoration with the Eternal Father and the Most Holy and Life-giving Spirit, now and always, and through all ages. Amen.

THE SYNODICAL LETTER Christological Profession

St. Sophronius of Jerusalem A.D. 634

1. I BELIEVE also concerning this, most holy One, that God the Word, the only-begotten Son of the Father, the One who before all ages and times was begotten impassibly from the same God and Father, having compassion and benevolent pity for our human fall, with free will and by the intent of the Father who begat Him and with the joint and divine consent of the Spirit, although not separated from the bosom of the One who begat Him, descended to us wretched ones. Indeed, just as He is of the same intent as the Father and the Spirit, so too is He of infinite essence. Admitting in no way of a circumscribed nature or, as we do, of a change of place, knowing how to effect divine activity in accordance with His nature, He enters a womb innocent of marriage, radiant with the

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purity of virginity, that is, of Mary, holy and bright and of godly mind and free of every taint, whether in body or soul or thought. The fleshless One becomes flesh; the One who in conformity with the divine essence is without shape as far as form and frame are concerned takes on our shape; and the bodiless One is embodied as we are; and the One revealed as always God in truth becomes a human being; and the One who is in the bosom of the eternal Father is disclosed in the womb of His mother’s belly; and the timeless One receives a beginning in time. He became all of these things not in illusion, as it seems to the frenzied Manichaeans and Valentinians; but in truth and in fact, having emptied Himself completely, by a will that was both His Father’s and His own, He assumed our human substance completely; I mean flesh consubstantial with ours and an intellectual soul of the same stock as our souls, and a mind comparable to our mind. In these things He is and is recognized as a human being, and He became in truth a human being from the very point of His conception in the all-holy Virgin. He wished to be reckoned as a human being, so that He might cleanse like with like and rescue kin by kin, and illuminate the cognate by cognate. This is why the holy Virgin was taken and sanctified in both body and soul, and thus assisted in the incarnation of the Creator because she was pure and undefiled … 3. And so from the undefiled and virgin blood of the all-holy and undefiled Virgin Mary the Word became truly flesh and truly a human being, even being carried in the virginal womb and fulfilling the nine months’ period of gestation. Just as in all natural respects which do not involve sin, He was like us human beings and not despising our mean estate, so subject to passion, God was born in a human body, so too He was in a frame that possessed an intellectual and incorporeal soul, a frame which He Himself, in Himself and no other, animated with an intellectual spirit. And He preserved His mother as a virgin and showed that she was properly and in truth Theotokos, even if the frenzied Nestorius is shattered by this and his army which fights God is in tears, and laments and mourns and is torn to pieces again with him.

4. I say this because it was God who was born of a virgin, the holy Theotokos Mary, and accepted on our account a second birth in time after His first eternal birth, which was a natural and ineffable birth from the Father, even though He was born in the flesh, on account of His likeness to us fleshly beings. Whole is the God who is hymned, whole is the same who appeared as a human being; perfect is the same God who is acknowledged and perfect is the same human being who is revealed… 12. Being born like us, He was fed with milk, and grew, and went through the bodily developments which the years bring, until He reached mature human stature, and accepted our hunger and thirst, and incurred the fatigue of journeys like us. He likewise performed the activity of walking like us, accomplished in human fashion, and advancing in accord with human essence, gave proof of His human nature. For this reason He also went from place to place as we do, since He had become truly a human being and possessed our nature without diminution and was restrained by bodily limitation, and bore an appearance corresponding to ours. The form of His appearance was bodily, that is, belonging to a body, in accordance with which He was conceived and molded in the womb, and which He preserved for always and will preserve for endless ages. 13. This is why when He was hungry He was fed, this is why when He was thirsty he was given drink and drank as a human being, this is why as a child He was carried as He rested in the Virgin’s arms and reposed on His mother’s bosom, this is why when He was tired He sat down, and when He needed sleep He slept, even so He felt pain when hit, and when whipped He suffered, and underwent bodily pain when His hands and feet were pierced on the cross. For when He wished He gave His human nature the occasion to activate and suffer what was proper to it, lest His far-famed incarnation be judged some kind of illusion and a hollow spectacle. For He did not take these things upon Himself against His will or under necessity, although He did submit to them in a natural and human manner, and did and performed them with human movements: perish the abominable

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idea! For it was God who endured suffering these things in the flesh and saved us with His own sufferings and through them awarded us freedom from passions. But sometimes the same One decided to suffer and operate and act in a human fashion, and resolved to help those who were watching, on whose account He had in truth become a human being and not when natural and fleshly movements wished to be moved naturally to activity, or godless conspirators strove with consummate daring to accomplish their plots. For He put on a body that was passible and mortal and corruptible and subject to our natural and blameless passions, and He permitted it to suffer and do what corresponded to its own nature until His resurrection from the dead. There He brought our passibility and mortality and corruptibility to an end and bestowed on us freedom from them. 14. Thus in this way He exhibited the humble and human things voluntarily and at the same time naturally, remaining God in the midst of them nonetheless. . . . And having become a human being, He submitted to these human elements voluntarily and not through tyranny or necessity, as sometimes happens to us even against our will, but at the precise time and to the extent that He wished, and He Himself consented to yield both to those things which brought the sufferings and to the sufferings themselves, which were effected in accordance with nature. Contrast the divine and luminous and loftiest actions, on the other hand, and those clearly surpassing our mean estate, namely the miraculous and the extraordinary and the emanation of wondrous deeds, such as:

the conception without seed, the leaping of John in the womb, the uncorruptive birth, the undefiled virginity which was intact before

birth and during the birth and after the birth, the heavenly message given to the shepherds, the drawing of the Magi moved by a star, and the

bearing of gifts which came with it and the adoration,

the knowledge of learning by one who had not studied (“For how is it,” they said, “that He has learning when He has not studied?”…),

the changing of water into wine,

the invigoration of the sick, the restoration of sight to the blind, the straightening out of the deformed, the bracing of the paralytics, the straight course of the lame, the resplendent cleansing of the lepers, the prompt satisfying of the hungry, the blinding of the persecutors, the stilling of the winds, the calm subduing of the sea, the bodily walking on the waters, the expulsion of the unclean spirits, the sudden stirring up of the elements, the darkening of the sun over all the world, the spontaneous opening of the tombs, the rising from the dead after three days, the never-ending dissolution of corruption, the unceasing destruction of death, the unimpeded exit, under guard, from the stone

and the sealed tomb, the unchecked entry through the locked doors, the wholly astonishing ascension in the body from

earth into heaven,

and all deeds comparable to these which surpass the nature of speech and the power of voice and are more than superior to all human understanding. All of these, accomplished beyond human reason and nature, are confessedly signs of the divine essence and nature of God the Word, even if they are effected through the flesh and the body and are not achieved apart form the flesh endowed with a rational soul. 15. We shall not as a consequence of these considerations conjecture that God the Word is fleshless, or teach that He is without body, because He performed deeds superior to the body. Indeed, the Word truly became incarnate and … took a body and is acknowledged as one Son, He who brings forth every activity from Himself, both divine and human, both humble and exceedingly great, earthly and heavenly, fleshly and incorporeal, visible and invisible, …

*Pauline Allen, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy: The Synodical Letter, Texts, Translations, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 85-91, 105-111.

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the ECUMENICAL

WORD

The reconstitution of Western civilization was due to the coming of Christianity and the reestablishment of the family on a new basis. ~Christopher Dawson

THOUGHTS AFTER LAMBETH Ecumenism & Cultural Renewal

T. S Eliot A.D. 1931

Christianity as the Difficult Way of Discipline & Asceticism IN THE section on Youth, we may find some wise and true sayings, if we have the patience to look for them. “The best of the younger generation in every section of the community,” we are told, “and in every country of the world, are not seeking a religion that is watered down or robbed of the severity of its demands, but a religion that will not only give them a sure basis and an ultimate sanction for morals, but also a power to persevere in reaching out after the ideal which in their heart of hearts they recognize as the finest and best.” I wish that this might have been said in fewer words, but the meaning is sound, and cannot be repeated too often. There is no good in making Christianity easy and pleasant; “Youth,” or the better part of it, is more likely to come to a difficult religion than to an easy one. For some, the intellectual way of approach must be emphasized; there is need of a more intellectual laity. For them and for others, the way of discipline and asceticism must be emphasized; for even the humblest Christian layman can and must live what, in the modern world, is comparatively an ascetic life. Discipline of the emotions is even rarer, and in the modern world still more difficult, than discipline of the mind; some eminent lay preachers of “discipline” are men who know only the latter. Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions as these that should be impressed upon the young—who differ from the young of other times merely in having a different middle-aged generation behind them. You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult: difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions. . . .

Ecumenism as a Scheme for Complete Reunion I DO NOT imagine for a moment that the “conversations” of the Church of England with the Free Churches will bear any fruit whatever in our time; and I rather hope they will not; for any fruit of this harvest would be unripe and bitter fruit, untimely nipped. But at the same time I cannot cat-call with those who accuse the Church of facing-both-ways, and making one profession to the innocent Levantines and Swedes, and another to the implacable Methodists. It would be very poor statesmanship indeed to envisage any reunion which should not fall ultimately within a scheme for complete reunion; and in spite of mirth, “reunion all round” is the only ideal tenable. To the Methodists, certainly, the Church of England owes a heavy responsibility, somewhat similar to that of the Church of Rome towards ourselves; and it would be almost effrontery for Anglican bishops to seek an alliance with Upsala and Constantinople without seeking some way of repatriating those descended from men who would (I am sure) never have left the Church of England had it been in the eighteenth century what it is now in the second quarter of the twentieth. In such difficult negotiations the Church is quite properly and conscientiously facing-both-ways: which only goes to show that the Church of England is at the present juncture the one church upon which the duty of working towards reunion most devolves. There are possible risks, which have been seized upon as actualities when they have been merely potentialities; the risk of feeling more orthodox when transacting with the Eastern and Baltic Churches, and more Evangelical when transacting with the Non-conformists. But I do not believe that the bishops have, according to the Report, conceded to the Nonconformists in England anything that the Eastern authorities could reasonably abhor. On the contrary, the attitude of eminent dissenters, in their objections still more than in their approval, seems to me to indicate that the bishops have stopped at the right point. The points of difference with the other orthodox churches are simple and direct, and in a near way of being settled. It is easier to agree with a man who

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differs from you in blood but less in faith, than to agree with one who is of your own blood but less in faith, than to agree with one who is of your own blood but has different ideas: because the irrelevant differences between those of the same blood are less superable than the relevant differences between those of different blood. The problems of dissent between Anglicans and Free Churchmen are (we might just as well admit it) much more complicated than the problem between the Anglicans and the Swedish. Our doctrinal difficulties with Free Churchmen are complicated by divisions social, local and political; by traditions of prejudice on both sides; and it is likely that several generations must pass before the problems of theology and hierarchy can be fairly detached and faced. The Lambeth Conference of 1930 has accomplished in this direction this much: that it has determined the limits beyond which the Church cannot go on commending itself to Free Churchmen; further concession would be abandonment of the Church itself, and mere incorporation, as possibly the most important member, in a loose federation of autonomous sects without stability and without significance. . . .

Redeem the Time & Preserve the Faith in a Dark Age THE CONFERENCE of 1930 has marked an important state in the direction toward Reunion. It has affirmed, beyond previous conferences, the Catholicity of the Church, and in spite of defects and dubious statements in detail, the Report will have strengthened the Church both within and without. It has made clearer the limits beyond which the Church cannot go towards meeting Nonconformity, and the extent to which it is prepared to go to meet the Eastern and Baltic Churches. This advance is of no small importance in a world which will obviously divide itself more and more sharply into Christians and non-Christians. The Universal Church is today, it seems to me, more definitely set against the World than at any time since pagan Rome. I do not mean that Christianity, in spite of certain local appearances, is not, and cannot be within measurable time, “official.” The World is trying

the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.

*Excerpted from original publication by Faber & Faber, 1931 (Criterion Miscellany #30). Reprinted in Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932).

LISTEN & TRANSLATE Two Gifts to Ecumenism

W. H. Auden A.D. 1964

WE ARE created animals gifted with intelligence, that is to say, we cannot be content merely to experience but must seek to make sense of it, to know what is its cause and significance, to find the truth behind the brute fact. Though some individuals have greater intelligence and curiosity than others, the nature of intelligence is identical in every individual. It is impossible for something to be true for one mind and false for another. That is to say, if two of us disagree, either one of us is right or both of us are wrong.

In our relation to one another as intelligent beings, seeking a truth to which we shall both be compelled to assent, We is not the collective singular We of tradition, but a plural signifying a You-and-I united by a common love for the truth. In relation to each other we are protestants; in relation to the truth we are catholics. I must be prepared to doubt the truth of every statement you make, but I must have unquestioning faith in your intellectual integrity. . . .

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Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other’s good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth. Intellectual debate is only possible between those who are equal in learning and intelligence. Preferably they should have no audience, but if they do have one, it should be an audience of their peers. Otherwise, the desire for applause, the wish, not to arrive at the truth but to vanquish one’s opponent, becomes irresistible. Never were the fatal effects of publicity in debate so obvious as in the sixteenth century. As Professor C. S. Lewis has written:

The process whereby “faith and works” became a stock gag in the commercial theatre is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation. The theological questions really at issue have no significance except on a certain level, a high level, of the spiritual life; they could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure. Under these conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant assertions without compromising other elements of the Christian faith. In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant, and therefore attracted the fatal attention of both government and the mob. It was as if men were set to conduct a metaphysical argument at a fair, in competition or (worse still) forced collaboration with the cheapjacks and roundabouts, under the eyes of an armed and vigilant police force who frequently changed sides. Each party increasingly misunderstood the other and triumphed in refuting positions which their opponents did not hold: Protestants misrepresenting Romans as Pelagians or Romans misrepresenting Protestants as Antinomians.

… Even among the most ignorant, there can be very few Protestants today who still think that Rome is the Scarlet Woman, or Catholics who think, like the officer Goethe met in Italy, that Protestants are allowed to marry their sisters. And

among the more thoughtful, there can be few, no matter what church they belong to, who do not regard the series of events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whereby the Western Church became divided into Catholics and Protestants with capital letters, hating and despising each other, as a spiritual tragedy for which all parties concerned must bear some of the blame. Looking back, there seems no rational reason why the habits of reading the Bible and family prayers from which Protestants have obviously derived so much strength and refreshment could not have been added to the sacramental habits from which Catholics have, as obviously, derived so much, instead of both parties regarding them as incompatible. There seems no rational reason why a return to St. Paul and St. Augustine could not have rescued theology from its sterile debate between Realism and Nominalism without leading to Calvinism and, as a defense reaction, to the adoption by Rome, understandably but still, to my mind, mistakenly, of Thomism as the official Catholic philosophy. But history, of course, is not rational nor repeatable. (For me the most mysterious aspect of the whole affair is not theological or political but cultural. Why was it that the peoples and nations who became Protestant were precisely those who, before Christ was born, had been least influenced by the culture of pagan Rome?)

That Protestant and Catholic no longer regard each other as monsters is a reason for thanking God, but also a reason to be ashamed of ourselves that we, as Christians, have contributed so little to this more charitable atmosphere. If we have learned that it is wicked to inflict secular penalties on heresy, to keep people in the faith by terror, we have learned it from skeptical rationalists who felt, like Earl Halifax, that “Most men’s anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady they neither of them care for.” Even after the burnings stopped, the religious minority, Catholic or Protestant, still continued to suffer sufficient civil disabilities to ensure that to a great extent religious boundaries would coincide with state boundaries and prevent the average Protestant and Catholic from ever meeting. Defoe says that

112 SYNAXIS 6.1




in the England of his time “there were a hundred thousand fellows ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse,” and the situation in Catholic countries can have been no better. Again, the campaign to make the secular authorities grant equal rights to all citizens, irrespective of their religious beliefs, was certainly not headed by Christians. Even when equality in law had been granted, class barriers remained which have only begun to disappear in my own lifetime. Among the English middle classes, thanks to the existence of old Catholic families whose social status was unimpeachable, it might be eccentric or immoral to be a Catholic, but it was not infra dig like being a Dissenter. When I was young, for an Anglican to “go over to Rome” was rather like having an illegitimate baby, an unfortunate event but something which can happen in the best families. But for an Anglican to become a Baptist would have been unthinkable: Baptists were persons who came to the back door, not the front. Once again, the part played by Christians in fighting against social injustice and snobbery has not been a conspicuous one. Lastly, whether we desire it or not, we are being brought closer together by simply physical fear. There are large areas of the globe where it is now a serious worldly disadvantage, and sometimes dangerous, to be a Christian of any kind, and these areas may very well increase.

When all fleshly and worldly circumstances favor a greater mutual understanding, any failure of charity on our part becomes all the more inexcusable. As I write, it is but a few days to Pentecost, the Ecumenical Feast, in which the Pope has proclaimed an Ecumenical Year. As a preliminary we might start by thanking each other, and the modern secular culture against which we both inveigh, for the competition. It is good for a Protestant minister and Catholic priest to know that there is a church of another persuasion round the corner and a movie-house across the way from them both, to know that they cannot hold their flocks simply because there is no other place of worship to attend, or because not attending some place of worship will incur

social disapproval. I have observed how much more vital, liturgically, both Catholic and Protestant services become in countries with religiously mixed populations than in countries which are overwhelmingly one or the other. Then, after this exchange of compliments, we might reread together the second chapter of Acts. The gift of tongues: is it not equally a gift of ears? It is just as miraculous that those in the parts of Libya about Cyrene and strangers from Rome should be able to listen to Galileans, as that Galileans should be able to speak to them. The Curse of Babel is not the diversity of human tongues—diversity is essential for life—but the pride of each of us which makes us think that those who make different verbal noises from our own are incapable of human speech so that discourse with them is out of the questions, a pride which, since the speech of no two persons is identical—language is not algebra—must inevitably lead to the conclusion that the gift of human speech is reserved for oneself alone. It is due to this curse that, as Sir William Osler said, “Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.” That we may learn first how to listen and then how to translate are the two gifts of which we stand most urgently in need and for which we should most fervently pray at this time.

*Introduction to The Protestant Mystics, ed. Anne Freemantle (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964). Reprinted in Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Random House, Year?), 51-53, 76-78.

GLORY BE

TO THE FATHER,

TO THE SON

AND TO THE HOLY SPIRIT

FOR ALL THINGS.

AMEN.

INKLINGS OKTOBERFEST

THEOPHANY 2019 113


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