Marriage and Monasticism: Eros in Orthodox Christian Thought

MARRIAGE AND MONASTICISM

by Vladimir Moss, in "Eros in Orthodox Christian Thought" Source: http://www.romanitas.ru/eng/EROS.htm

Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely hind, a graceful doe. Let her affection fill you at all times with delight, be infatuated always with her love…

Proverbs 5.18-19.

 

It is good for a man not to touch a woman.

I Corinthians 7.1.

 

     Are you not yet married to the flesh? Fear not this consecration; you are pure even after marriage. I will take the risk of that. I will join you in marriage. I will dress the bride. We do not dishonour marriage because we give a higher honour to virginity. I will imitate Christ, the pure Bridegroom and Leader of the Bride, as He both worked a miracle at a wedding, and honours marriage with His Presence.

St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration on Holy Baptism, 18.

 

The Definition of Marriage

 

     The Neo-Manichaeans argue that marriage involving physical union is less truly marriage than a purely spiritual union. Thus G.I. Benevich and A.M. Shufrin first quote St. Gregory of Nyssa: “One must love God with all one’s heart and all one’s soul and strength, and all one’s feeling, and one’s neighbour one must love as oneself, and one’s wife – if she has a pure soul as Christ loves the Church, and if she is more passionate, as one’s body”.[344] Then they point to the subtle difference in the form of love recommended for a passionate wife and a not-so-passionate wife, and draw the conclusion that for a passionate wife sexual relations are permitted (perhaps even recommended), whereas for a non-passionate wife the marriage is to be virginal (as, it is supposed, was Gregory’s marriage with his wife Theosebeia). Both kinds of marriage, they argue, are lawful and in the image of the marriage of Christ and the Church; but only the virginal marriage is not only in the image, but also in the likeness.[345]

 

     If by “virginal marriage” these authors meant the marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise, or of Christ and the Virgin at the Annunciation, then we would not only agree that the first marriage is a perfect likeness of the marriage of Christ and the Church, but also that the second is the marriage of Christ and the Church. However, if, as seems more likely, they mean that ordinary human marriages in which there is no physical union are higher than those in which it exists, then we demur. Such Platonic “marriages” may be admirable in themselves, evincing a high level of sublimation and true love; but insofar as they do not involve a physical element, they are not in fact marriages according to the Lord’s own definition of marriage as the union of two in one flesh. For the Lord does not say: “they are no longer two, but one spirit”, but: “they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matthew 19.5). And the priest in the marriage service prays that the union will be in both spirit and flesh: “Join them in one mind; crown them into one flesh”. Thus if we seek to define the difference between marriage and other unions between human beings, we are forced to return to that which the Gospel places, without any false shame, in the forefront: marriage is the union of two human beings of different sexes into one flesh, into one physical unit.[346]

 

     It follows that we must exclude the view that would see in sexual union an at best unnecessary and at worse sinful element in the marriage bond. Marriage is not marriage if it is not a physical union “into one flesh”, according to the words of the Lord Himself. This conception of marriage, writes S.V. Troitsky, “was included into the official canonical collections of the East. The Eclogue of the year 740 defines marriage as the union of two people in one flesh, in one substance. Together with the Eclogue, this definition entered into the Slavonic Kormchaia Kniga. Balsamon defines marriage as ‘the union of husband and wife into one substance, into one man with [almost] one soul, but in two hypostases”.[347] To the Neo-Manichaeans it may seem that the definition of marriage as a one-flesh union is the clearest proof of its lowliness, even its sinfulness. However, it is precisely because marriage is a one-flesh union that divorce, adultery and fornication are seen as the truly sinful phenomena that they are, insofar as they tear apart that physical union which God Himself put together.

 

     Let us look more closely at the difference between marriage and fornication. Clearly not every one-flesh union between a man and a woman constitutes a marriage. Thus St. Basil the Great writes that not only is fornication “not marriage, but is not even the beginning of marriage.”[348] More generally, St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the words: “It is by the Lord that a man is matched with a woman” (Proverbs 19.14), writes: “He means that God made marriage, and not that it is He that joins together every man that comes to be with a woman. For we see many that come to be with one another for evil, even by the law of marriage, and this we should not ascribe to God”.[349] Again, Fr. Sergius Shukin writes: “Let us recall the words of the Savior to the Samaritan woman: ‘Thou hast well said, ‘I have no husband;’ for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband’ (John 4.17-18). This shows that from a spiritual viewpoint, not every marriage is a Christian marriage; it becomes Christian only when it has been entered into for the goals defined and established by God.”[350]

 

     The words of Fr. Sergius need to be qualified here: since the Samaritan woman was not, at the time of this conversation, a Christian, and did not even belong to the Old Testament People of God, the distinction made here by the Lord was not between Christian and non-Christian marriage, but between marriage and fornication. By implication, His words appear to admit the possibility of true marriage among the Gentiles.[351] Consequently, there is a real difference, recognized by God, between a lawful union in one flesh, which He calls marriage, and an unlawful union, which we call fornication.[352]

 

     In what does this difference consist? St. John Chrysostom writes: “When we speak of marriage we do not mean carnal union – on that basis, fornication would also be marriage. Marriage consists in the fact that the married woman contents herself with a single husband; this is what distinguishes the courtesan from the free and wise woman. When a woman contents herself during her life with a single husband, this union merits the name of marriage. But if she opens her house not to one man only, but to several bridegrooms, I do not dare to call this behaviour fornication, but I will say of this woman that she is very far behind the woman who has known only one husband. The latter has in effect heard the word of the Lord: ‘For that a man will leave his father and his mother and will cleave to his wife, and they will be two in one flesh’; she has cleaved to her husband as if he was really her flesh and she has not forgotten the master who has been given her once and for all; the other woman has considered neither her first husband nor the second marriage as her own flesh; the first has been dispossessed by the second who is in his turn dispossessed by the first; she would not be able to preserve a faithful memory of her first husband while attaching herself after him to another; as for the second, she will not look at him with the appropriate tenderness, since a part of her thought is distributed in favour of the one who has gone. The consequence?… Both of them, the first as well as the second, are frustrated of the esteem and affection which a wife owes to her husband.”[353]

 

     “Marriage consists in the fact that the married woman contents herself with a single husband”. Clearly this constancy is a necessary part of true marriage. But is it sufficient? Is it not possible for a man and a woman to live together permanently, “forsaking all other”, but outside lawful wedlock? Is not the rite of marriage also a necessary element? And if so, what kind of rite?

 

Troitsky’s Thesis

 

     One answer to this series of questions is provided by the canonist S.V. Troitsky, who concludes, on the basis of his study of Roman and Byzantine law, that no religious rite is necessary to conclude a true Christian marriage. As I shall argue later, such a conclusion does not take into account several important facts and is unacceptable from a Christian point of view. However, let us hear his argument first: “From the sovereign character of the family Roman law drew the conclusion that it was not the state that made a marriage a marriage, and not a religious organization, but exclusively the marrying parties themselves, their mutual love, their will, their agreement. Nuptiae solo affectu fiunt, nuptiae consensu contrahentium fiunt, consensus facit nuptias – such was the basic position of Roman and Byzantine, ecclesiastical and civil law in the first 8 centuries of Christian history. Moreover, in more ancient times the religious form of marriage, confarreatio, was necessary not to make marriage valid, but for manus, that is, for the acquisition by the husband of authority over the wife.

 

     “But if marriage is concluded by the marrying parties themselves, then in what does the task of the State in relation to marriage consist? Only in verifying its existence for itself, only in registering the marriage, to the extent that this was necessary for the resolution of various questions of family and inheritance law. And Roman law left it to the will of the marrying parties to choose any form of marriage they liked, contenting itself with the minimum for its own verification.

 

     “In ancient Rome there existed a view with regard to marriage that was the opposite of our own. We have a presumption that those living together are not married. In our time a married couple must itself prove with documents, witnesses, etc., that it is in lawful wedlock. In Rome, by contrast, the presumption was that those living together were married.

 

     “Every permanent sexual relationship of a fully entitled man and woman was seen as a marriage. ‘We must see living together with a free woman as marriage, and not concubinage,’ writes the noted Roman jurist Modestinus. Therefore it was not the marrying parties that had to prove that they were in wedlock, but a third interested party had to prove that there existed some kind of impediment which did not allow one to see this living together as marriage. To put it more briefly, onus probandi lay not on the spouses, but on the third parties. Only when there was a basis for thinking that it was in the family or property interests of the parties to present a temporary relationship as marriage was the question of the formal criteria of marriage raised. But even in this case Roman law contented itself with the minimum. For this it was sufficient, for example, to show that there had been de facto living together for a year, the testimonies of witnesses that the parties had indeed agreed to marry or to call each other Mr. and Mrs., that some kind of marital rite had been performed, the presentation of documents with regard to the dowry, etc. In a word, speaking in legal terms, in Rome the participation of the State in the conclusion of a marriage did not have a constitutive, but only a declarative character.

 

     “Byzantine legislation adopted the same point of view until the end of the 9th century. The constitution of the Emperors Theodosius and Valentinian in 428 says that for the validity of marriage neither a wedding feast is necessary, nor documents on a dowry, nor any festivity, since no law hindered the marriage of fully entitled people. Marriage acquired validity by means of agreement and the testimony of witnesses. Although Justinian, in his novella 74 of December, 537, prescribed that middle-class people should go to church to conclude their marriage, this demand was based on considerations, not of a religious, but only of an economic character, which is indicated by the fact that the very separation of this class of people was in accordance with their property census. And indeed, Justinian demanded that middle-class people should go to church not in order to be crowned, but only in order to draw up a document on marriage in front of an ecclesiastical lawyer and three or four clergy as witnesses. But even this formality did not last long, and on December 11, 542, novella 117 (ch. 4) freed even middle-class people from this obligation. Only upper-class people (illustres et senatores), again for reasons having to do with property, had to write documents on the dowry, while the lower classes were not obliged to write any documents at all. In the same novella 74 (chapter 5), Justinian gave the significance of an optional form of marriage, not to crowning, but to the oath ‘to take as my wife’ while touching the Bible. Only in a legislative collection of the 8th century, more precisely: in the collection of 741 of the iconoclast emperors Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus known as the Eclogue, was a blessing as a juridical form of concluding a marriage mentioned for the first time. But even here a blessing is not an obligatory form for the conclusion of a marriage, but only one of four forms of marriage, the choice of which depends on external circumstances and the will of the marrying parties; in other words, here a Church blessing is only an optional form of marriage, and even then not always, but only in case of necessity, and it is precisely the Eclogue that prescribes that marriage must be concluded by means of the drawing up of a document of a definite form, and when, as a consequence of the poverty of the spouses, it is impossible to draw up the document, the marriage can be concluded either through the agreement of the parents, or through a Church blessing, or through the witness of friends (Eclogue, II, 1,3,8). It is exactly the same with crowning; it is an optional form of marriage, say also the later laws of the Byzantine emperors – the Prochiron of 878 (IV, 6,14,17,27), the Epanagoge of 886 (XVI, 1) and the collection known as Blastaris’ Syntagma of 1335 (G., 2, translation of Ilyinsky, p. 103). ‘Marriage,’ we read in Blastaris, ‘is concluded by means of a blessing, or crowning, or an agreement’.

 

     “That is how the ancient Church, too, looked on the form of marriage. The basic source of the Church’s teaching on marriage, the Bible, does not say that the institution of marriage arose some time later as something established by the State or the Church. Here we find another teaching on marriage. Neither the Church nor the State is the source of marriage. On the contrary: marriage is the source of both the Church and the State. Marriage precedes all the social and religious organizations. It was established already in Paradise, it was established by God Himself. God brings the woman to Adam, and Adam himself proclaims his marital union independently of any earthly authority, even the authority of parents (Genesis 2.24; cf. Matthew 19.6). Thus the first marriage was concluded ‘by the mercy of God’. In the first marriage the husband and wife are the bearers of the highest earthly authority, they are sovereigns to whom the whole of the rest of the world is subject (Genesis 1.28). The family is the first form of the Church, it is the ‘little Church’, as Chrysostom calls it, and at the same time it is the source also of the State as an organization of power, since according to the Bible the basis of every authority of man over man is to be found in the words of God on the authority of the husband over the wife: ‘he will be your lord’ (Genesis 3.16). Thus the family is not only a little Church, but also a little State. And if that is so, then the relationship of the family with the Church and the State must have a character of equality, the character of international and inter-Church relations. Therefore the performers of marriage are considered in the sources of the Church’s teaching to be the spouses themselves, and the participation of a representative of authority, whether of the Church or of the State, is not an essential element of marriage, is not a condition of its validity. In the whole Bible, both in the Old and in the New Testaments, we do not find a single word on any kind of obligatory form of marriage, although here we do find many prescriptions of a ritual character. The relationship of the Church and the State to marriage is expressed not in its conclusion, but only in its verification, in its recognition as an already accomplished fact. Just as the recognition of authority in a State on the part of another State does not give this authority new rights, but is only the condition of normal relations between these States, so the participation of a representative of society, whether of the Church or of the State, is the condition of normal relations between them and the new family.

 

     “Therefore the relationship of the Church to marriage was one of recognition. This idea is well expressed in the Gospel account of the marriage in Cana of Galilee (John 1.1-11). Reference is sometimes made to this account as a proof of the teaching that the accomplisher of marriage is the priest. In fact, the Gospel account is not in agreement with this point of view. The Gospel makes no mention whatsoever of the participation of Christ in the rite of the conclusion of the marriage. Christ came with His apostles as a guest; he was invited to the wedding feast. But participation in the wedding feast was, generally speaking, an expression of the recognition of marriage on the part of society, and the presence of Christ and the apostles had the significance of a recognition of the Old Testament institution of marriage on the part of the new Church.

 

     “This is also how the ancient Christian Church herself looked on the form of marriage. Her teaching on the form of marriage coincides with the teaching of the Bible and Roman law. Therefore the ancient Christians, who did not permit the slightest compromise with the State pagan religion and preferred a martyr’s death to participation in the smallest pagan rite, entered into marriage in the time of the persecutions and later in exactly the same way as the other citizens of the Roman State. ‘They, that is, the Christians, conclude marriage in the same way as everyone,’ says an ancient Christian writer of the 2nd century in the Epistle to Diognetus (V, 6). ‘Each of us recognizes as his wife the woman whom he took in accordance with the laws published by you (i.e. the pagans),’ says Athenagoras in his Apology (33, P.G. 6:965) submitted to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (166-177). St. Ambrose of Milan says that Christians take wives ‘in accordance with the tablets’, that is, in accordance with the Roman laws of the 12 tablets (On the Institution of Virginity, 6; P.L. 16:316). Chrysostom says definitively: ‘Marriage is concluded in no other way than by agreement according to the laws’ (Homily 56 on Genesis, 29; P.G. 54:488). The first canon of the Council of Laodicea demands that marriage should be concluded only ‘freely and lawfully’, that is, in accordance with the Roman laws. The ancient Church completely assimilated the basic teaching of Roman marital law, that marriage is concluded by the spouses themselves, that consensus facit nuptias. This teaching is found among the most authoritative representatives of Church teaching both in the East and in the West, for example, in John Chrysostom, Balsamon, Ambrose of Milan, Blessed Augustine, Isidore, Pope Nicholas I, and others.

 

     “Finally, we find the same teaching in the official collections of Byzantine law which have been adopted by the Orthodox Church.”[354]

 

The Role of the Church

 

     And yet for many centuries now, in both East and West, a marriage between Christians that has not been performed by a priest in Church has been considered invalid. So why did the change take place, if it did indeed take place? Or perhaps Troitsky is overlooking certain points…

 

     Thus he asserts that Christ’s presence at Cana signified no more than His recognition of the validity of Old Testament marriage.[355] And yet the tradition of the Church, as we have seen, sees more in it than that: not a recognition merely, but a blessing, the addition of a Divine element that was not there before, the changing of the watery element of pre-Christian marriage into the soberly intoxicating element of Christian marriage. Moreover, it is going beyond the evidence to suppose that Christ was merely a passive spectator at the marriage. We are told that He and His apostles were “invited”, which implies a certain desire for His presence on the part of the spouses, a desire which must have been the stronger in that the bridegroom was himself an apostle, St. Simon the Zealot. In response to this active desire on the part of man for the participation of God, is it likely that God would not respond, would refuse to play any active role Himself?

 

     This was certainly not the view of, for example, St. Gregory the Theologian, who says to those preparing to be baptised: “Are you not yet married in the flesh? Fear not this consecration; you are pure even after marriage. I will take the risk of that. I will join you in marriage. I will lead in the bride. We do not dishonour marriage because we give a higher honour to virginity. I will imitate Christ, the pure Bridegroom and Leader of the Bride, as He both worked a miracle at a wedding, and honours marriage with His Presence.”[356]

 

     This passage, as well as attributing an active role to Christ as “Leader of the Bride”, attributes an analogous role to the Christian priest. Just as God led Eve to Adam in Paradise, thereby making them man and wife, so does every Christian priest at every Christian marriage. That it is God Who is the initiator and consecrator of true marriage is confirmed by other patristic writings, some of which are quoted by Troitsky himself. Thus Tertullian writes: “Marriage takes place when God unites two into one flesh”.[357] And St. John Chrysostom writes: “God unites you with your wife”.[358] As it is expressed in a Novella of Emperor Alexis I, those being married “receive God”, Who “walks amidst those being united”.[359] Again, Metropolitan Cyprian of Kiev (1376-1406) writes in his service book that “husband and wife are united by Thee [God]”.[360]

 

     Troitsky asserts that the early Church did no more than recognize the validity of marriages performed according to Roman law. And yet the very earliest witness we have to the early Church’s practice implies rather more than that. Thus St. Ignatius the Godbearer writes: “It is right for men and women who marry to be united with the knowledge of the bishop (meta gnwmhV tou Episkopou), that the marriage may be according to the Lord and not according to lust".[361] This shows that “marriage as a sacramental action has an apostolic origin, or, as Stavrinos indicates, ‘marriage from the beginning was sanctified by the Church, being accomplished by her prayers and blessing’”.[362]

 

     It may be that in the early Christian centuries there was no specific rite of marriage carried out in the Church apart from the blessing of the bishop, and that Christians continued to be married according to the non-Christian procedures of the pagan Roman empire. But this is in no way implies that the Church was merely a passive spectator, any more than Christ was a passive spectator at Cana. If the marriage had to be “in the Lord”, in the words of the Apostle Paul (I Corinthians 7.39), and “with the knowledge of the bishop”, as St. Ignatius says, then it is clear that some Episcopal screening was carried out beforehand to ensure that the marriage would not be contrary to the Church’s ethical and canonical norms. Moreover, the Church then added her own seal and blessing to the marriage performed outside her walls, if only by communicating the married couple as a couple in the Body and Blood of Christ. [363] For, as St. Symeon of Thessalonica writes, “Holy Communion is… the end of every rite and the seal of every divine mystery”.[364]

 

     Do the early sources betray any embryonic elements of a specifically Christian rite of marriage? Some have seen a marital blessing in the following remark of Clement of Alexandria: “On whom does the presbyter lay his hand? Whom does he bless? Not the woman decked out, but another’s hair [i.e. a wig], and through it another head.”[365] Less ambiguous are the words of Tertullian: “[The happy marriage is the one that] the Church joins, which the offering [oblatio, i.e. the Eucharist] strengthens, which the blessing [benedictio] seals, which the angels proclaim and which the heavenly Father confirms”.[366] “Secret unions [occultae conjunctiones], that is, ones that have not been professed beforehand in the Church, are judged to be equivalent to fornication and adultery”.[367]

 

     As Troitsky himself points out, both the Byzantine Church and the State characterized secret unions (laqrogamia) as fornication.[368] This is enough in itself to refute his suggestion (which is in agreement with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, but not of the Orthodox) that marriage is concluded by the spouses themselves. For marriage is a public event with public consequences, and as such has to be sealed by society as a whole – which, for a Christian, must include the society of the Church.

 

     The Church in her wisdom did not reject the secular rite of the Roman state, but vetted who should participate in it beforehand and sealed it afterwards through her own grace-filled rites, which included, as a minimum, the Divine Liturgy insofar as the latter is, in the words of St. Symeon of Thessalonica, “the end of every rite and divine mystery”.[369]

 

     This fact becomes more and more indisputable as we turn from the pre-Nicene to the post-Nicene sources. Thus St. Basil the Great calls marriage “a yoke through a blessing”.[370] Again, St. Gregory the Theologian asks Olympiada to forgive him for not being present at her wedding, but says that in spirit he, as a priest, places the right hands of the couple on each other and both in the hand of God.[371] Again, St. Timothy of Alexandria in his 11th canon answers a question relating to a priest being invited to perform a wedding by “making an offering [prosjoran]”. Again, Synesius of Ptolemais, a married bishop of the early 5th century, tells us that he took his wife from the hand of Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria.[372] Again, St. Augustine calls marriage, not simply a marital bond, but an “indissoluble sacrament”.[373]

 

     From the above examples it is clear that “in the first years of Christianity the dominant position was held by political marriage with the thought that it was recognized by the Roman State, but the Church blessed the faithful newly weds in parallel with some form of priestly act.”[374]

 

     The essential independence of the Church from the State in this matter is indicated by the controversy between Popes Callistus and Hippolytus in the mid-third century concerning the permissibility of free-born women Christians marrying their slaves. This was forbidden by Roman law, but allowed by Pope Callistus.[375]

 

     Troitsky claims that the 38th, 40th and 42nd Canons of St. Basil the Great prove that “if the parties started to live together before marriage, their fornication is turned into marriage of itself, without any rite, immediately the external obstacles are removed”.[376] However, a closer examination of the text of the canons proves only that a marriage has to be public and approved by parents or masters (in the case of slaves) in order to be valid. It says nothing about the presence or absence of a rite.

 

     One way of looking at the matter is to see the civil marriage for Christians as not so much a marriage, as a betrothal, and the Christian rite (even if, at the beginning, that consisted in little more than the blessing of the bishop and participation in the Eucharist) as the marriage itself. This is the approach adopted by P. Kuzmenko: "In Christianity marriage has been blessed since apostolic times. Tertullian, the church writer of the third century, says: 'How can we represent the happiness of Marriage, which is approved by the Church, sanctified by her prayers and blessed by God!'

 

     "In antiquity the rite of marriage was preceded by betrothal, which was a civil act and was performed in accordance with local customs and decrees, insofar - it goes without saying - as this was possible for Christians. Betrothal was performed triumphantly in the presence of many witnesses who ratified the marriage agreement. The latter was an official document defining the property and legal relations of the spouses. Betrothal was accompanied by a rite of the joining together of the hands of the bride and bridegroom. Moreover, the bridegroom gave the bride a ring of iron, silver or gold, depending on his wealth. Clement, bishop of Alexandria, says: 'The man must give the woman a golden ring, not for her external adornment, but so as to place a seal on the household, which from this time passes into her control and is entrusted to her care.'…

 

     "Towards the 10th and 11th centuries betrothal lost its civil significance, and this rite was performed in the church, accompanied by the corresponding prayers. But for a long time yet betrothal was performed separately from crowning and was united with the service of Mattins. Finally the rite of betrothal received its unique form towards the 17th century.

 

     "In antiquity the rite of marriage crowning itself was performed by a special prayer, by the bishop's blessing and by the laying on of hands in the church during the Liturgy. A witness to the fact that marriage crowning was introduced in antiquity into the rite of the Liturgy is the presence of a series of corresponding elements in both contemporary rites: the opening exclamation, 'Blessed is the Kingdom...', the litany of peace, the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel, the extended litany, the exclamation: 'And vouchsafe us, O Master...', the singing of 'Our Father' and, finally the drinking from a common chalice. All these elements were evidently taken from the rite of the Liturgy and are similar to the Eucharist (the sacrament of Communion)."[377]

 

     Thus just as betrothal was not yet marriage, so a State union was not yet a Christian marriage. The Church made the State’s marriage Christian by modifying the State’s ceremonies and adding her own blessing. Thus as D.S. Bailey writes, "the nuptials of the faithful continued to take place with the formalities customary at the time. The traditional ceremonies were not modified, save for the omission of non-essentials which were either unedifying in themselves or redolent of pagan superstition, and the substitution of the Eucharist and the benediction for the sacrifice and other accompanying religious observances. Hence the Church Orders contain no Christian marriage rite, nor is there any reference to one in the literature of the period, while the ancient sacramentaries merely give the prayers of the nuptial Mass and the blessing…

 

     “Marriage, then, among Christians and pagans alike, was effected by the successive ceremonies of sponsalia or desponsatio (the betrothal) and nuptiae (the wedding), both of which the Church adapted to the use of the faithful by the introduction of certain modifications which did not, however, change the basic structure or purpose of these rites. What was the character of the resultant union – especially as regards its permanence or impermanence? According to Roman law, marriage was simply a contractual relationship established by consent and voicable like any other contract – in this instance, by a mere revocation of the consent, either by mutual agreement (divortium ex consensus) of by unilateral action (repudium)… For the Church, however, there was another law than that of the State – a law for whose authority the Fathers pointed to Scripture and to the teaching of Christ…"[378]

 

     Concerning the rite of crowning, which became the central element of the rite of marriage, as opposed to betrothal, Fr. John Meyendorff writes: "Since the fourth century a specific solemnization of the sacrament is mentioned by Eastern Christian writers: a rite of 'crowning', performed during the Eucharistic Liturgy. According to St. John Chrysostom, the crowns symbolized victory over 'passions'... From a letter of St. Theodore the Studite (+826) we learn that crowning was accompanied by a brief prayer read 'before the whole people' at the Sunday Liturgy, by the bishop or the priest. The text of the prayer, given by St. Theodore, is the following: 'Thyself, O Master, send down Thy hand from Thy holy dwelling place and unite these Thy servant and Thy handmaid. And give to those whom Thou unitest harmony of minds; crown them into one flesh; make their marriage honourable; keep their bed undefiled; deign to make their common life blameless' (Letters I, 22, P.G. 99, col. 973). The liturgical books of the same period (such as the famous Codex Barberini) contain several short prayers similar to that quoted by St. Theodore. These prayers are all meant to be read during the Liturgy. "[379]

 

     From early in the tenth century, the rite of crowning began to be separated from the Liturgy. First Emperor Leo VI made it compulsory to be married in Church by crowning.[380] This created the problem of how Christians who for one reason or another were not considered worthy of receiving Communion were to be married. If marriage was to remain as an integral part of the Liturgy and be sealed by Communion, they could not be married. But then they might fall into fornication. In order to avoid this, the Church separated marriage from the Liturgy, but introduced the common cup of wine into the rite as a reminder of the former link with the Liturgy. “From the 12th century, we have two cups, the eucharistic and the ‘common’, from which those who were unworthy to commune drank.”[381]

 

     In the 15th century St. Symeon of Thessalonica sums up the teaching of the Church on the nature of a true marriage: "(the priest) takes the holy chalice with the Presanctified Gifts and exclaims: 'The Presanctified Holy things for the Holy'. And all respond: 'One is Holy, One is Lord', because the Lord alone is the sanctification, the peace and the union of His servants who are being married. The priest then gives Communion to the bridal pair, if they are worthy. Indeed, they must be ready to receive Communion, so that their crowning be a worthy one and their marriage valid. For Holy Communion is the perfection of every sacrament and the seal of every mystery. And the Church is right in preparing the Divine Gifts for the redemption and blessing of the bridal pair; for Christ Himself, Who gave us these Gifts and Who is the Gifts, came to the marriage (in Cana of Galilee) to bring to it peaceful union and control. So that those who get married must be worthy of Holy Communion; they must be united before God in a church, which is the House of God, because they are children of God, in a church where God is sacramentally present in the Gifts, where He is being offered to us, and where He is seen in the midst of us. After that the priest also gives them to drink from the common cup, and the hymn 'I will take the cup of salvation' is sung because of the Most Holy Gifts and as a sign of the joy which comes from divine union, and because the joy of the bridal pair comes from the peace and concord which they have received. But to those who are not worthy of communion - for example, those who are being married for a second time, and others - the Divine Gifts are not given, but only the common cup, as a partial sanctification, as a sign of good fellowship and unity with God's blessing".[382]

 

     It follows that the idea that there can be Christian marriage outside the Church is mistaken. It is true that for non-Christians there can be marriage outside the Church – that is, a sexual union that is not counted as fornication. Even there, certain criteria must be met: the free consent of the spouses, conformity to the laws of the State, public recognition by parents or guardians. But for a Christian more is required: the seal of the Church, which is conferred by, at a minimum, the blessing of the priest and communion as couple in the Body and Blood of Christ. The failure to remember that marriage of the man and woman in Christ is accomplished through marriage in the Church of Christ, and that the bride and bridegroom are “crowned into one flesh”, as the marriage rite puts it, in and through the flesh of Christ, leads to a diminished consciousness of the real significance of marriage, and hence a greater tolerance of sexual sin in general.

 

     When the Bolsheviks introduced civil marriage with divorce-on-demand for one rouble into Russia (Commissar Alexandra Kollontai, Lenin’s lover, said that sexual relations had no more significance than drinking a glass of water), the Russian Orthodox Church resisted this innovation fiercely, insisting that civil marriage was not enough for a Christian.

 

     The leader of the Russian Church at the time was New Hieromartyr Tikhon. Before he became Patriarch, when he was still Archbishop in America, he wrote: "In order to be acceptable in the eyes of God, marriage must be entered into 'only in the Lord' (I Corinthians 7.39), the blessing of the Church must be invoked upon it, through which it will become a sacrament, in which the married couple will be given grace that will make their bond holy and high, unto the likeness of the bond between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5.23-32), which will help them in the fulfilment of their mutual duties. Sometimes, as in this country, for instance, Church marriage is deemed unnecessary. But if without the help of God we can accomplish no perfect and true good (John 15.5), if all our satisfaction is from God (II Corinthians 3.5), if God produces in us good desires and acts (Philippians 2.14), then how is it that the grace of God is unnecessary for husband and wife in order to fulfil their lofty duties honourably? No, a true Orthodox Christian could not be satisfied with civil marriage alone, without the Church marriage. Such a marriage will remain without the supreme Christian sanction, as the grace of God is attracted only towards that marriage which was blessed by the Church, this treasury of grace. As to civil marriage, it places no creative religious and moral principles, no spiritual power of God's grace, at the basis of matrimony and for its safety, but merely legal liabilities, which are not sufficient for moral perfection."[383]

 

Remarriage and Divorce

 

     Troitsky’s thesis that the Church simply accepted the State’s definition of marriage without more ado would appear to have stronger evidence in the case of second marriages, insofar as these did not involve the participation of the Church at the beginning, being, in St. Theodore the Studite’s words, “civil”.[384] However, insofar as the twice-married couple was then admitted to the Eucharist, we cannot assert that the Church had no part to play in those marriages; for, as we have seen, admission of a couple to communion constitutes a seal on the marriage, its sanctification, and not simply a recognition that the couple are already married. Later, the Church introduced a rite for second marriages, though without crowning and with a penance of two years without communion.[385]

 

     As with marriage in general, so in relation to divorce and remarriage, the Church did not simply adopt the State’s legislation without question, but modified and strengthened it. The State allowed divorce freely: the Church allowed it only in the case of adultery. The State allowed remarriage: the Church also allowed it, but emphasised the superiority of first marriage over second or third marriages[386], and forbade fourth marriages[387]. Christ permits divorce for one reason only – adultery, because adultery destroys the one-flesh union that is marriage, creating another-flesh union not blessed by God. Correspondingly, “whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 19.9).

 

     Although the Church has admitted other reasons besides adultery, they all relate to this primary reason in that they all make the one-flesh union de facto impossible.[388]

 

     Tertullian, however, went further, forbidding not only divorce, but also second marriages precisely because, in his opinion, they violate the one-flesh union.[389] The Church did not follow him in this, considering the death of the first spouse to constitute ipso facto the end of the one-flesh union with that spouse.[390]

 

     While placing first marriages above second marriages, the Church followed the Apostle Paul in allowing second marriages (I Timothy 5.14; Romans 7.1-3), provided that they are “in the Lord” (I Corinthians 7.39), by which is meant, according to St. Basil the Great, that the spouses enter into them not for the sake of pleasure but in order to have each other’s spiritual help in passing through life.[391] Even the rigorist St. Ambrose of Milan admitted second marriages, while seeing them as impediments for the priesthood: “A man who has married again, though he commits no sin and is not polluted thereby, is disqualified for the prerogative of the episcopacy.”[392]

 

     As regards the remarriage of divorcees, the Western Church tended to adopt a more rigorist approach than the Eastern, forbidding it even for the innocent party. But the Eastern Church, while forbidding the remarriage of the guilty party, was condescending in relation to the innocent party.[393]

 

     Thus St. Epiphanius of Cyprus writes: “He who cannot keep continence after the death of his first wife, or who has separated from his wife for a valid motive, such as fornication, adultery, or another misdeed, if he takes another wife, or if the wife takes another husband, the divine word does not condemn him nor exclude him from the Church or the life; but she tolerates it rather on account of his weakness.”[394]   

 

     The strict discipline of the Church in relation to remarriage and divorce by no means proceeds from the principle of hatred of the flesh, as modern liberal critics charge, but rather from its opposite: a profound understanding of the importance of the flesh in general, and of the sexual union of man and woman in particular. Axiomatic is the principle that sexual union is not simply a physiological act with no important moral consequences, but the creation of an ontologically new human unit. And if that unit is united with the Body of Christ, its significance, and the sinfulness of the destruction of that unit, is even greater.

 

     The Lord forbade divorce, saying: “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matthew 19.6), because it destroys this new unit, which was created, not by man, but by God. For marriage is indeed, not procreation only, but creation, the creation of one new being out of two; for “they two shall be one flesh, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh' (Matthew 19.6). As Holy New Hieromartyr Gregory (Lebedev) writes:, that is, the people have ceased to exist separately even in the physical sense. They have become one physical body, 'one flesh'. That is what the fulfilment of the will of God has done... It has not only completed and broadened their souls in a mutual intermingling, it has changed their physical nature and out of two physical existences it has made one whole existence. That is the mystery of marriage. Having explained it, the Lord concludes with a mild reproach to the Pharisees: ‘Well, what do you want? What are you asking about? How, after this, can a man leave his wife? That would be unnatural! In marriage we have a natural completion of life! But you want Me to approve of the destruction of this life?! And in marriage we have a creative act, an act of God, Who creates one life… How can you want Me to destroy life created by God? This is unnatural… Don’t think of encroaching on marriage! What God has joined together, let man not put asunder.”[395]

 

Mixed Marriages

 

     Marriage, as we have noted, existed before the coming of Christ, and not only among the Jews, but also among the pagan Gentiles. But in the Church of Christ it is raised to a higher level, not only than marriage in the Fall, but even than marriage in Paradise. Why? First, because marriage in the Church is, deliberately and explicitly, an imitation of the marriage between Christ and the Church (which it obviously could not be so intentionally before the Incarnation of Christ), and partakes of the grace of that higher and mystical marriage to the extent that this imitation is a true likeness. And secondly, because the Christian husband and wife, before becoming one flesh with each other, are each already one flesh with Christ in the Eucharist, so that the likeness of the lower mystery to the higher mystery is not a likeness between an archetype and type of different natures (as in icons of Christ and the saints), but of the same nature.

 

     The body of a Christian is holy because it is united to the Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Therefore it cannot be united with a body that is not also Spirit-bearing. This fact increases the intimacy and depth of the union of the Christian husband and wife and makes a betrayal of that union through fornication or adultery a greater sin; for in committing fornication, a husband not only unites his and his wife’s body with the body of another[396], but unites the Body of Christ with the body of another. This point was made with particular force by the Apostle Paul: “Ye know that your bodies are members of Christ, do ye not? Having taken up then the members of Christ, shall I make them members of a harlot? May it not be! Or know ye not that he that is joined to the harlot is one body? For ‘the two,’ saith He, ‘shall be into one flesh’. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin whatsoever a man might do is outside the body, but he who committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. Or know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit Who is in you, Whom ye have from God, and yet are not your own? For ye were bought with a price; glorify then God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (I Corinthians 6.15-20).

 

     For, as Bishop Theophan writes: “He who should be one with Christ is torn away from Christ and becomes one with a harlot, and this is in accordance with the law of the original institution of marriage. Marriage is a Divine institution blessed by God, and those who cleave to each other in it become one body in Christ. But the harlot serves Satan, and therefore he who cleaves to her becomes one body with her in Satan. That fornication is the service of Satan is evident also from the fact that it darkens not only the body, but also the soul of the fornicator, drives away from his Angel Guardian and tears him away from the Lord, for it is impossible for a darkened and evil-smelling one to be united with the Lord”.[397]

 

     It follows that Christians can only marry other Christians, and not schismatics or heretics (and still less pagans or atheists) who do not belong to the Body of Christ and do not possess the Holy Spirit. As the holy canons declare: “Let no Orthodox man be allowed to contract a marriage with a heretical woman, nor moreover let any Orthodox woman be married to a heretical man. But if it should be discovered that any such thing is done by any one of the Christians, no matter who, let the marriage be deemed void, and let the lawless marriage be dissolved.”[398]

 

     And if this seems excessively harsh (especially by comparison with today’s excessively lenient practice), let us recall that even in the Old Testament the lawgiver Ezra, with the consent of the leaders of Israel, dissolved all marriages of Israelites with pagans (Ezra 10).

 

     Similar reasoning underlies the prohibition on the faithful receiving communion in heretical churches. Since the mystery of the Eucharist is a marital mystery, it is forbidden to the faithful to communicate anywhere else than in the Church of Christ. Thus the Apostle Paul says: “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of demons. Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy?” (I Corinthians 10.21-22).

 

     Jealousy is the natural response of a lover at the sight of his beloved’s adultery, and adultery was what St. John the Almsgiver considered receiving communion from heretics to be: “Another thing the blessed man taught and insisted upon with all was never on any occasion whatsoever to associate with heretics and, above all, never to take the Holy Communion with them, ‘even if’, the blessed man said, ‘you remain without communicating all your life, if through stress of circumstances you cannot find a community of the Catholic Church. For if, having legally married a wife in this world of the flesh, we are forbidden by God and by the laws to desert her and be united to another woman, even though we have to spend a long time separated from her in a distant country, and shall incur punishment if we violate our vows, how then shall we, who have been joined to God through the Orthodox Faith and the Catholic Church – as the apostle says: ‘I espoused you to one husband that I might present you as a pure virgin to Christ’ (II Corinthians 11.2) – how shall we escape from sharing in that punishment which in the world to come awaits heretics, if we defile the Orthodox and holy Faith by adulterous communion with heretics?’”[399]

 

      There are other weighty reasons for forbidding mixed marriages. In the first place, a couple who do not share the same faith are not united in that which is most important in life. They may be united in body and soul, but not in spirit. This will lead to quarrels and possibly the tearing away of the believing spouse from the true faith for the sake of peace with his unbelieving spouse.

 

     St. Ambrose compares mixed marriages to the disastrous marriage of Samson and Delilah. For: ”how can love be suited if faith be different? Therefore, beware, Christian, to give your daughter to a Gentile [i.e. a pagan] or to a Jew. Because, I say, the Gentile woman, the Jewess, the foreigner, viz. do not take a wife who is a heretic, or any stranger to your Faith. The grace of purity is the first faith of marriage. If she worships idols whose adulteries are proclaimed, if she denies Christ, Who is the Teacher and Rewarder of chastity, how can she love chastity? Even if she is a Christian, this does not suffice unless ye are both consecrated by the Sacrament of Baptism. Ye must rise together for worship, and God is to be entreated by joint prayers. Another sign of purity is added if ye believe that the marriage which has fallen to your lot was given to you by your God. Hence, Solomon, too, says, ‘A wife is suited to a man by God’ (Proverbs 19.14).”[400]

 

     Tertullian lists all the disadvantages of being married to an unbelieving husband, especially the difficulty of avoiding taking part in pagan festivals.[401] And then he lists the joys of a marriage between believers: “Where can we find sufficient words to tell the happiness of that marriage which the Church cements, and the offering confirms, and the blessing signs and seal, news of which the angels carry back [to heaven], which the Father takes as ratified? For even on earth children do not rightly and lawfully wed without their fathers’ consent. What kind of yoke is that of two believers, partakers of one hope, one desire, one discipline, one and the same service? Both are brethren, both fellow-servants, there is no difference of spirit or flesh between them; they are truly ‘two in one flesh’. Where the flesh is one, there is the spirit too. Together they pray, together prostrated, together fast; mutually teaching, mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining. They are equally to be found in the Church of God, equally at the banquet of God, equally in straits, in persecutions, in refreshments. Neither hides anything from the other; neither shuns the other; neither is troublesome to the other. They freely visit the sick and relieve the needy. They give alms without fearing reprisals; they offer sacrifices without scruples; the sign of the cross is not made stealthily, greetings without trembling, blessings without muteness. They sing psalms and hymns together, and challenge each other who will chant better to the Lord. Such things Christ sees and hears with joy. To these He sends His own peace. Where two are, there is He Himself in their midst. Where He is, there the evil one is not.”[402]

 

     Mixed marriages were forbidden even in the Old Testament. The downfall of Samson and Solomon were attributed to their foreign wives. And Nehemiah said: “I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab; and half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah, but the language of each people. And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, ‘You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves. Did not Solomon king of Israel sin on account of such women? Among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel; nevertheless foreign women made even him to sin. Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?” (Nehemiah 13.23-37).

 

     The Apostle Paul allows an exception to this rule for couples who were married before becoming Christian. In such a case, when one of the spouses becomes Christian while the other remains outside the Church, the marriage is not dissolved. “For the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner desires to separate, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. For God has called us to peace. For do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or you, husband, do you know whether you will save your wife?” (I Corinthians 7.14-16). As Bishop Theophan comments, “in this union according to love and agreement, the purity of the Christian side is not destroyed; on the contrary, by its influence it can assist the conversion to Christianity of the pagan husband or pagan wife, and still more the children born in this marriage.”[403]

 

     In this way the Church strives to preserve existing unions, only forbidding and dissolving those unions which involve a retrograde step away from Christ for the believing partner, exposing him or her to the danger of apostasy.

 

The Purposes of Marriage

 

     From the above it will be clear that marriage has two aspects: its mystical and iconic aspect, which relates both to the original marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise and to that of Christ and the Church in eternity, and a more practical aspect relating to the struggle of the spouses to fulfil the commandments of God in the conditions of the fall.

 

     If we consider marriage only from its more practical aspect, then its purposes can be stated as: the prevention of fornication and the procreation of children. Of these two purposes the first is the more important, as is explicitly stated by the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 7, and reiterated by the apostle’s most faithful interpreter, St. John Chrysostom, who writes: “As for the procreation of children, marriage does not absolutely enjoin it. That responds rather to this word of God in Genesis: ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth’ (1.28). The proof of this is the large number of marriages which cannot have children. That is why the first reason for marriage is to regulate lust, and especially now that the human race has filled the whole earth.”[404]

 

     However, chastity and procreation are the particular purposes of marriage in the fall: they do not exclude the higher purpose of marriage, which consists in the creation of a likeness of the love of Christ and the Church and, if a child is included in the type, of the Holy Trinity. In fact, the chastity that marriage in its more practical aspect produces enables it to fulfill its nature in its mystical aspect, by “releasing”, as it were, the erotic power that is in man in his unfallen state and directing it towards its Archetype. For a love that is purely carnal, with no grace coming down from above and no striving upwards from below, loses its iconic properties. It is like a Catholic picture of the Madonna rather than an Orthodox icon of the Mother of God: what we see is a fallen, earthly woman rather than the Queen of heaven.

 

     Marriage is both an end in itself in the same way that an icon is an end in itself – a thing of beauty mirroring Eternal Beauty, – and one of the paths whereby the spouses can attain to a closer union with Eternal Beauty Himself. We all know that no husband measures up to the infinite patience and self-sacrificial love of Christ for the Church, just as no wife measures up to the infinite humility and obedience of the Church towards Christ, as exemplified most perfectly in the All-holy Virgin Mary. But the grace of marriage and the struggles of the married life are a path whereby he can attain to truly Christian love. This grace is therefore like a seed dropped in the fallen nature of man which, as it grows, drives out the works of the flesh, “which are… adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, heresies…, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife”, and establishes in their place the fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5.19,20,22-23). As St. Gregory the Theologian writes, the spouses in a true marriage are “wholly united in the flesh, concordant in spirit, sharpening in each other by love a like spur to piety…”[405]

 

     So the purposes of marriage in the fall for each individual spouse are broader than simply the control of lust or the reproduction of the human race. By carrying out the laws of marriage as a whole, and not only those concerning sexual relations, the spouses both save themselves and spur each other on to salvation. And then, as each spouse comes closer to perfection in and through marriage, the higher purpose of marriage, which was ordained before and independently of the fall, is also fulfilled: the creation of a true icon of the love of Christ and the Church.

 

     Married love can literally save a spouse. Thus the wife of Monk-Martyr Timothy of Esphigmenou had been abducted by a Moslem after apostasising from the Faith. “The good heart of Triantaphylos [the future Monk Timothy] was overcome by bitter sorrow on seeing the perdition of his wife who for the sake of temporary and ephemeral happiness was depriving herself of that which is eternal.

 

     “Finding relief from his sorrow only in prayer, he began to pray ardently to the All-Highest Creator, beseeching Him to turn back the one who had perished to the light of true knowledge. But at the same time, he was afraid for his daughters lest the same lot befall them as had their mother. For this reason he sent them to his relations, asking them to help these unfortunate ones.

 

     “The grief over the loss of his beloved wife weighed heavily on poor Triantaphylos and he decided, come what may, to wrest her from the grasp of the devil. Besides sincere prayer, he secretly admonished her through others to abandon the Moslem faith, warning her of the eternal punishment her apostasy would bring. This sincere prayer, offered up from the fullness of his heart, was heard by the Heavenly Creator Who in His great mercy placed a good thought in the mind of the apostate woman so that she soon felt a repulsion towards Islam. Having come to her senses, she bitterly repented of her fall and resolved to accept the Christian faith again.

 

     “But knowing that it would be difficult to escape by her own efforts from the clutches of her captor, she suggested to Triantaphylos that he pretend to accept the Moslem faith and then by legal process demand her back from her captor; it was impossible for her to be freed from the harem in any other way. Then, when she would be liberated, they would leave the world: he could become a monk on the Holy Mountain of Athos, where he could beseech God and ask forgiveness for his involuntary fall; she could go to a convent where, like him, she could heal her wounds through repentance.

 

     “In order to regain his perishing wife and upon hearing her request, Triantaphylos decided to fulfil her wish, imitating in this case the Apostle Paul who, for the sake of the salvation of the brethren, himself desired to be separated from Christ. Thus placing his hope in God, he went to the tribunal where he declared his desire to accept the Moslem religion, but only on condition that his wife be returned to him. Triantaphylos’ wish was promptly granted. He was joined to the faith of the Moslems and, having received circumcision, was given back his wife. Thereafter, although Triantaphylos appeared to follow the Moslem law, with his wife he secretly confessed the Christian faith and fulfilled all the Church rituals. No matter how much they tried to keep this secret, the Turks nevertheless suspected them of betrayal and began to keep a very close watch on them. In the meantime, Triantaphylos realized that it would be impossible for them to remain among the Moslems any longer and entrusted his daughters to relatives. After bidding farewell to them, he secretly set off with his wife to the city of Enos, and from there to Cedonia where he left her in a convent. He himself went to the Holy Mountain”, from where he later set out on the feat of martyrdom for Christ…[406]

 

     Now only a churlish person would wish to deny that the love of St. Timothy was both conjugal and of a very high spiritual order, of the kind of which the Lord said: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13). Moreover, it was a love precisely in the image of Christ’s love for the Church, as conjugal love is supposed to be: its goal was certainly no passing pleasure or joy, but the eternal salvation of the beloved. And the cost was the highest possible: the possible loss of his eternal soul. Just as Christ, taking upon Himself the sins of the whole world and identifying Himself completely with apostate Israel, said: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27.46), so did St. Timothy take upon himself the sin of apostasy of his wife and feel the weight of God’s abandonment of the apostate.

 

     And if it be objected that the real significance of the story lies in the fact that St. Timothy was led by God’s Providence out of the lower state of marriage to the higher state of monasticism and, eventually, martyrdom, we reply: “Yes indeed. But if God’s Providence led St. Timothy from marriage to monasticism, was there nothing on his own side that led him in that direction? In fact, was it not precisely the exact fulfilment of the law of marriage that led him upwards and beyond marriage to monasticism and martyrdom?”

 

     A similar example is provided by the Lives of the Right-believing Prince Peter, in monasticism David, and Prince Febronia, in monasticism Euphrosyne, wonder-workers of Murom. As we read: “The right-believing Prince Peter was the second son of Prince Yury Vladimirovich of Murom. He ascended the throne of Murom in 1203. Several years before this St. Peter fell ill with leprosy, from which nobody was able to heal him. In a dream vision it was revealed to the prince that the pious daughter of a bee-keeper, the virgin Febronia, could heal him. She was a peasant woman of the village of Laskovaia in Ryazan region. St. Peter sent his men to the village.

 

     “When the prince saw St. Febronia, he so fell in love with her for her piety, wisdom and kindness that he gave a vow to marry her after he was healed. St. Febronia healed the prince. The grateful prince was united with her in marriage, although the Murom nobility opposed this. They said: ‘Either let him dismiss his wife, who has insulted the noble women by her origin, or let him leave Murom.’ The prince firmly remembered the words of the Lord: ‘What God has put together, let not man put asunder. He who dismisses his wife and marries another is an adulterer.’ For that reason, faithful to his duty as a Christian spouse, the prince agreed to renounce his princedom. They sailed away from his native city in a boat on the river Oka. The prince remained with few means of subsistence, and sorrowful thoughts involuntarily began to assail him. But the clever princess supported and comforted him: ‘Sorrow not, prince, the merciful God will not abandon us in poverty.’ In Murom quarrels and arguments quickly appeared, seekers of power took to their swords and many of the nobles were killed. The Murom boyars were forced to ask Prince Peter and Princess Febronia to return to Murom. Thus did the prince, faithful to his duty, triumph over his enemies.

 

     “In Murom Prince Peter’s rule was righteous, but without severe strictness, merciful, but without weakness. The clever and pious princess helped her husband with counsels and works of charity. Both lived according to the commandments of the Lord, they loved everyone, but they did not love pride or unrighteous avarice, they gave refuge to strangers, relieved the lot of the unfortunate, venerated the monastic and priestly ranks, protecting them from need.

 

     “Once while the princess was sailing along the river in a boat she ordered a nobleman, who had been captivated by her beauty and was looking at her with evil thoughts, to take up some water from each side of the boat and swallow it. When he had fulfilled her will, she asked: ‘Do you find any difference between the one and the other water?’ ‘None,’ replied the nobleman. The saint then said: ‘The nature of women is exactly identical. In vain do you abandon your wife and think of another.’

 

     “The holy spouses died at the same day and hour on June 25, 1228, having accepted the schema before that with the names David and Euphrosyne. The bodies of the saints, in accordance with their will, were placed in one grave.

 

     “Sts. Peter and Febronia are a model of Christian married life. By their prayers they bring heavenly blessings on those who are entering the married life.”[407]

 

Marriage and Monasticism

 

     Tradition records that the bridegroom at the marriage in Cana was the holy Apostle Simon the Zealot. After the marriage, it is said, Simon was so struck by the miracle of turning the water into wine that he immediately left his bride and followed Christ. Thus did God's blessing of an earthly marriage lead to its eclipse, as it were, by the glory of the Heavenly Bridegroom, the earthly icon being left behind in the zeal for its Heavenly Archetype.[408]

 

     Such transformations of the marital home into a monastery are common in the Lives of the Saints.[409] They point, in spite of all that has been said about the essential goodness, indeed glory, of Christian marriage - which goodness is enshrined, not only in the Holy Scriptures, but also in the Sacred Canons of the Church,[410] - to a certain tension between this teaching and the teaching that there is a better way, that of virginity or monasticism, which requires, if not a Manichean despising of marriage and its pleasures, at any rate a fleeing from them as if from something defiling.[411]

 

     Thus on the one hand: "marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled" (Hebrews 13.4). But on the other: "These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins" (Revelation 14.4). On the one hand, Christ blessed the marriage at Cana in Galilee by His presence. On the other hand, he exhorted those who could receive it to become eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake (Matthew 19.12).

 

     It would be easy, following the critical methodology of western scholarship, to remove this paradox by ascribing it to textual corruption or foreign influences (pagan Greek philosophy is usually the favoured candidate). However, this is not the method of Orthodox Christian hermeneutics. It would be the height of arrogance to consider our theology purer than that of the Holy Scriptures, or our philosophizing more acute than that of the Holy Fathers. When an apparent contradiction appears, we do not, in the manner of the heretics, take this as an excuse for picking and choosing those parts of Divine Revelation which we like best while discarding the rest, but rather as the sign of the presence of a mystery, and an invitation to search deeper into the meaning of it with the help of the Holy Spirit.

 

     We may therefore begin our investigation by examining St. Paul's explanation of why virginity is preferable to marriage: "I would have you without care. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. There is a difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your own profit, not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is comely, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction" (I Corinthians 7.32-35).

 

     The delicacy, lack of fanaticism and inspired common sense of this explanation is striking. Sexuality comes into it not at all. Virginity is preferable to marriage, not because it involves no sex, but because it involves less distraction from the "one thing necessary" (Luke 10.42) for salvation, less of all those cares and tribulations and "trouble in the flesh" (I Corinthians 7.28) that are an inescapable part of married life and which cool the ardour of the spirit in its ascent to God. Especially interesting is the reference to the necessity of pleasing one's wife. It was Adam's fear of offending his wife that led to his fall in Eden...

 

     Similarly St. Gregory Palamas, in asserting the superiority of virginity, emphasises, not sexual relations, but the ties imposed on a married woman by all her relatives: “If one considers the body’s indignation and insubordination towards virtue, or better said, its rebellious nature which we carry around, why then should we agree to increase the obstacles towards virtue, by bonding with many and otherwise diverse bodies? How can she acquire freedom, towards which she vowed to aspire, by being connected with natural ties of husband and children and all blood relatives? How can she serve the Lord free of anxieties, when she has undertaken concerns about so many people? How can she acquire quietude when she is occupied with such a multitude of people?… Cleansing can also be accomplished by those who live in marriage, but with utmost difficulty.”[412]

 

     Virginity is not preferable to marriage because it involves less sex, for it in fact it involves more, in the sense of a greater struggle with sexual thoughts and fantasies. Paradoxically, therefore, it is marriage that is preferable to virginity from the point of view of sexual distraction - "it is better to marry than to burn" (I Corinthians 7.9). Virginity reveals its superiority only in the context of the Christian life taken as a whole; for at the price of a sharper and more difficult struggle with sexual temptation (victory over which brings a greater reward), the virgin can devote herself more single-mindedly to the service of God alone, "that she may be holy both in body and in spirit" (I Corinthians 7.34).

 

     St. Gregory Palamas compares the two callings as follows: “’You shall not be unchaste’ (Exodus 20.14), lest instead of being united to Christ you become united to a prostitute, severing yourself from the Divine Body, forfeiting the Divine inheritance and throwing yourself into hell. According to the law (cf. Leviticus 21.9), a daughter of a priest caught whoring is to be burnt, for she dishonours her father; how much more, then, does the person who defiles the Body of Christ deserve endless chastisement. If you are capable of it, embrace the path of virginity, so that you may become wholly God’s and may cleave to Him with perfect love, all your life devoting yourself undistractedly to the Lord and to what belongs to Him, and in this way anticipating the life to come and living as an angel of God on earth. For the angels are characterised by virginity and if you cleave to virginity you emulate them with your body, in so far as this is possible. Or, rather, prior to them you emulate the Father Who in virginity begot the Son before all ages, and also the virginal Son Who in the beginning came forth from the virginal Father by way of generation, and in these latter times was born in the flesh of a virginal Mother; you likewise emulate the Holy Spirit Who ineffably proceeds from the Father alone, not by way of generation, but by procession. Hence if you practise true chastity in soul and body you emulate God and are joined to Him in imperishable wedlock, embellishing every sensation, word and thought with virginal beauty.

 

     “If, however, you do not choose to live in virginity and have not promised God that you will do this, God’s law allows you to marry one woman and to live with her alone and to hold her in holiness as your own wife (cf. I Thessalonians 4.4), abstaining entirely from other women. You can totally abstain from them if you shun untimely meetings with them, do not indulge in lewd words and stories and, as far as you can, avoid looking at them with the eyes of both body and soul, training yourself not to gaze overmuch upon the beauty of their faces. For ‘whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ (Matthew 5.28), and in this way he is impure before Christ Who sees his heart; and the nest step is that he commits shameless acts with his body also. But why do I speak of fornication and adultery and other natural abominations? For by looking overfondly on the beauty of bodies a person is dragged down unrestrainedly into lascivious acts contrary to all nature. Thus, if you cut away from yourself the bitter roots, you will not reap the deadly harvest but, on the contrary, you will gather the fruits of chastity and the holiness which it confers, and without which ‘no one will see the Lord’ (Hebrews 12.14).”[413]

 

     Further insight into this question is provided by Archbishop Theophanes of Poltava, who was asked the following question: "Why do I always have the impression that a girl or woman - a Church person, of course - is moving away from the Lord when she marries? More than once I have seen wives or mothers for whom all the things of God would not have been of merely secondary importance. But in this respect they all became worse after getting married."

 

     Archbishop Theophanes replied: "It is necessary, first of all, to establish the correct understanding of marriage in principle, and then to examine the question from a practical point of view. There are two extreme viewpoints with regard to this question that are in principle incorrect: both that which considers marriage to be an evil and that which completely abolishes the difference in inner merit between marriage and virginity. The first extreme is seen in many mystical sects, the second is a generally accepted opinion in the Protestant West, from where it has succeeded in penetrating Orthodox literature also. According to the latter viewpoint, both the married and the virginal ways of life are simply defined as individual characteristics of a man, and nothing special or exalted is seen in the virginal way by comparison with the married state. In his time Blessed Jerome thoroughly refuted this viewpoint in his work: Two books Against Jovinian. While the positive teaching of the Church was beautifully expressed by St. Seraphim in his words: 'Marriage is a good, but virginity is a better than good good!' True Christian marriage is the union of the souls of those being married that is sanctified by the grace of God. It gives them happiness and serves as the foundation of the Christian family, that 'house church'. That is what it is in principle; but unfortunately it is not like that in our time for the most part. The general decline in Christian life has wounded marriage, too. Generally speaking, people in recent times have forgotten that the grace of God is communicated in the sacrament of marriage. One must always remember this grace, stir it up and live in its spirit. Then the love of the man for the woman and of the woman for the man will be pure, deep and a source of happiness for them. For this love, too, is a blessed gift of God. Only people do not know how to make use of this gift in a fitting manner! And it is for this simple reason, that they forget the grace of God! 'The first thing in the spiritual life,' says St. Macarius the Great, 'is love for God, and the second - love for one's neighbour. When we apply ourselves to the first and great task, then the second, being lesser, follows after the first and great task. But without the first the second cannot be pure. For can he who does not love God with all his soul and all his heart apply himself correctly and without flattery to love for his brothers?' That which has been said about love in general applies also to married love. Of all the kinds of earthly love it is the strongest and for that reason it is represented in Holy Scripture as an image of the ideal love of the human soul for God: 'The Song of Songs,' says Blessed Jerome, 'is a nuptial song of spiritual wedlock,' that is, of the union of the human soul with God. However, with the blessedness of the virgins nothing can be compared, neither in heaven nor on earth..."[414]

 

     True virginity is the fulfilling of the first and greatest commandment, to love God with all one's soul and mind and heart and strength. It is a burning love of God so strong that there can be no thought of a human bride or bridegroom. For such a thought would indeed be a defilement for one who has dedicated himself exclusively to the Heavenly Bridegroom. Thus the path of this mystery lies in the renunciation of everything that can in any way distract from the love of God. For as an eagle in its flight to the sun can be kept on earth by even the smallest impediment on its talons, so the flight of Christians to the Sun of Righteousness can be impeded by even the most innocent of affections - which can then become in a real sense idols. That is why the Prophets Elijah and Jeremiah, the greatest denouncers of idolatry in the Old Testament, - which sin is always depicted under the image of adultery (cf. Jeremiah 3; Hosea 4) - were also the only virgins; while another great prophet, Ezekiel, had to suffer the pain of the death of his beloved before he could enter upon the most difficult part of his mission (Ezekiel 24.16). As for "the greatest of those born of women" (Matthew 11.11), St. John the Baptist, that "burning and shining light" (John 5.35) who compelled the admiration even of the Pharisees and who prepared the way of the Lord in the spirit of Elijah, he, too, was a virgin. Of him the Church chants: "Having embraced chastity and temperance, he possessed them by nature, while he fled contrary to nature, fighting against nature".[415]

 

     In a similar way, true marriage is the fulfilment of the second commandment, to love one's neighbour as oneself. For in loving his wife, a man is loving his neighbour as himself, in that "he that loveth his wife loveth himself" (Ephesians 5.28). Moreover, it is a training ground for those virtues that will enable him to love all men, and even his enemies, as himself.

 

     The idea that marriage is in any way incompatible with true Christian love is contrary to the Holy Scriptures. Who showed more love for man than the God-seer Moses, who was willing to sacrifice his own salvation for that of the People of Israel? - and he was a married man. To whom was entrusted a greater authority and a weightier burden in the service of the Church than the Apostle Peter? - and he, as St. John Climacus points out, "had a mother-in-law".[416] Therefore, says St. Gregory the Theologian to those preparing to be baptised: “Are you not yet married to the flesh? Fear not this consecration; you are pure even after marriage. I will take the risk of that. I will join you in marriage. I will dress the bride. We do not dishonour marriage because we give a higher honour to virginity. I will imitate Christ, the pure Bridegroom and Leader of the Bride, as He both worked a miracle at a wedding, and honours marriage with His Presence.”[417]

 

     For fallen man, marriage is a virtual necessity; and even in Christ it is the best path for most to the goal of chastity. However, Christ by His Coming and Example has opened up another path to the same end - that of monasticism. Christ, writes Vladimir Lossky, “… for the redemption of ‘eros’, opens two paths…: the path of Christian marriage and the path of monasticism”.[418] Monasticism is the more direct, more arduous way to the summit; and to reach it by this path brings a special reward. True monastics attain in this life to the condition of the life to come, in which "they neither marry nor are given in marriage... for they are equal to the angels" (Luke 20.35, 36). Marriage is the longer, less direct route to the same summit, with many stops on the way and with the consequent danger of becoming distracted by the scenery along the way. That is why St. Paul says: "I would that all men were even as myself [i.e. virgins]... But every man hath his proper charisma, one after this manner, and another after that" (I Corinthians 7.7).

 

     It is in this contrast that we can perhaps find the solution to the paradox of marriage: that it can be both "on account of fornication" (I Corinthians 7.2) and "not on account of fornication" (Tobit 8.7), both "honourable in all" (Hebrews 13.4) and defiling for some (Revelation 14.4).

 

      First it is necessary to establish that the aim of marriage is identical to that of monasticism: namely, the purification and redirection of eros, or chastity[419], a pure heart, without which no one can either see God or truly love his neighbour. But for some one way will be preferable, for others - the other.  For the few, the more direct assault on the fallen passions is the path chosen for them by Divine Providence. These are they who earn their reward "in the burden and heat of the day" (Matthew 20.12), without seeking a respite in the shady cool of marriage. Some have even chosen this path at the outset of married life, as we have seen, living as brother and sister with their wives. Others come to it later, after the death of their spouse. Many of the greatest saints, such as Spyridon of Cyprus and John the Almsgiver, Juliana of Lazarevo and Theodora of Sihla, Metrophanes of Voronezh and Innocent of Moscow, and many of the holy kings and queens, have trodden this path to the Kingdom.[420]

 

     However, for most people this more direct approach is too difficult and dangerous (because of the danger of falling into fornication, or for other reasons). That is why God has blessed marriage, not only as an end, the restoration of the fallen unity of Adam and Eve in Paradise, but also as a means, to avoid fornication, to provide children, and to provide an arena of struggle and self-perfection parallel to the still more testing arena of monasticism. For those called by God to this path, the measured rhythm of coming together and abstinence in sexual relations (I Corinthians 7.5), combined with all the trials and tribulations, the responsibilities and obediences of married life, is the best means to the attainment of chastity. For, in New Hieromartyr Gregory’s words, marriage “completes and broadens [the spouses’] souls in a mutual intermingling”.[421]

 

     Archbishop Ambrose (von Sivers) writes: “Abstinence and virginity are the other side of the medal from marriage, for abstinence (monasticism) with virginity and living together in marriage are counterbalancing forms of human wedlock: in the first case, with abstinence, of the soul of man with God; in the second, with the union of husband and wife in one flesh, also with God. The relationship of Christianity to the one and the other is simple: ‘We do not introduce enmity between virginity and marriage – on the contrary, we respect both the one and the other as mutually beneficial. Virginity is glorious, but true virginity, because there is a difference in virginities: some virgins dozed and fell asleep, while others kept vigil (Matthew 25.1-13). Marriage is also worthy of praise, but faithful and honourable marriage, insofar as many have kept its purity, and many have not’.[422] In other words, virginity (+abstinence) and marriage are two paths in one sacrament, where in the first case it is performed with one who is alone (monacoV), and in the second – with a couple (husband and wife). More exactly, the one and the other are two aspects of one Sacrament, both of which were realised at the same time in human history in only one person – the All Holy and Most Pure Mother of God and Virgin Mary.”[423]

 

     Although the parallel drawn here is somewhat forced, it is true that in the Church every Christian is married to God, either as a celibate or in union with his wife. But not only are marriage and monasticism compatible in this way: "the many-coloured wisdom of God" (Ephesians 3.10) has placed them in a relationship of mutual dependence, each order gaining in humility from contemplating the feats of the other. Thus the married man will ponder deeply on the fact that the vast majority of non-martyr saints have been monastics. Beholding their feasts of self-denial, he will remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is won by those who take up the cross and deny themselves, doing violence to their fallen nature (Matthew 10.38, 11.12). If he has read something about the true monk's inner life, even if he cannot understand it from experience, he will nevertheless realise that, quite apart from his external struggle, the monk suffers from such assaults of the flesh and the devil as he, the married man, can hardly conceive. This will make him less inclined to compliment himself on his purely external and pharisaic fulfilment of some of the commandments, remembering that "unless your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5.20). He will realise that, even when his life is peaceful, this is probably because the passions are still dormant in him, for he has never really entered into battle with them. Finally, he may come to realise that, if he is to fulfil his won vocation in the world, he, too, must become something of a monk - internally, at any rate. For there is no other way than that of the Cross, and that, as St. John Chrysostom points out, the commandments are the same for monks and laymen with the single exception of the prohibition to marry for the former.

 

     The monk, on the other hand, having turned his back on Egypt for ever, will nevertheless admire those who remain pure amid its fleshpots, fulfilling the commandments while encumbered with wives, children, possessions, cares, honours and responsibilities. For, as St. John Chrysostom says, "it is possible to surpass all others in virtue by becoming good husbands and wives".[424] If he is beginning to pride himself on his asceticism, he will have cause to humble himself on beholding the "crowned icon" of a truly Christian marriage. He will remember the words of one of the greatest of his own order, St. Macarius the Great, who, on being shown the lives of two married Christian women who, as God had revealed to him, were his equals in virtue, said: "In truth there is neither virgin nor married, neither monk nor secular. But God seeks only the intention of each, and gives the Spirit of life to all."[425]

 

     Understood in this way, there is no opposition between the two charismata; for they both fulfil the commandments, and in both the grace is given of a pure, chaste and single-minded fidelity. Only monasticism must be accorded the higher place. For there is no limit to the love of God, which is higher than the love of man; whereas the love of man is good only so long as it is less than, and subordinated to, the love of God. For, as St. Barsanuphius of Optina says, “a woman… wants to love her bridegroom with a passionate love and remain devoted with all her soul to Christ, but these are incompatible. In love for one’s bridegroom there is, of course, no sin; but if love for him is stronger than love for God, it will distance her from Christ. The Lord Himself said, ‘No man can serve two masters’ (Matthew 6.24). To work only for Christ, people go to a monastery…”[426]

 

     Again, if, as St. Macarius the Great says, it is impossible to love one's neighbour with a pure heart unless one has first come to love God, it follows that married people must first master the art of monastic self-discipline if they are to achieve a perfect union with each other. For, as Vladimir Lossky writes, "our fallen condition always endures, demanding for the accomplishing of our human vocation not only the integrating chastity of marriage but also, and perhaps primarily, the sublimating chastity of monachism."[427] This "sublimating chastity of monachism" is necessary even for the married because, as St. Maximus says, "it is impossible for those who have not first cloven singlemindedly to God to harmonise with each other in their mutual tendencies."[428] Thus it would appear to be necessary to attain intrapersonal unity within the monad, the unmarried man or woman, before interpersonal unity can be attained within the dyad, the married couple.

 

     In practice, however, while marriage can lead to monasticism later, the reverse is impossible. For the love of God, while compatible with the love of neighbour, is incompatible with those forms of it which require a return to the world; and while marriage and the raising of children necessarily involve some immersion in the world, the monk has vowed to renounce the world forever. The true monk has chosen “the good part” (Luke 10.42), which will not be taken from him. Having set his hand to the plough, he will not turn back (Luke 9.62). Having climbed the heights of dispassion, far from the Sodom and Gomorrah of the world, he will not want to return to Zoar (Genesis 19.30), that refuge from sin that nevertheless overlooks Sodom and is close enough to smell its stench…[429]

 

     In any case, the specific kind of interpersonal union that is marriage will not take place in the resurrection (Matthew 22.30); for then, intra-personal union having been achieved by all, all will also be united inter-personally in the Body of Christ, the only form of interpersonal union that will endure forever. This is not to say that husbands and wives on earth will not be united in the heavens, only that there union will no longer be a marital one. For the union “up there will be closer, the union of soul with soul, much more delightful and more noble.”[430]

 

Lourié’s Thesis

 

     This view of the relationship between marriage and monasticism has been challenged by Hieromonk Gregory Lourié. His major thesis, as we have seen, is that abstention from sexual relations is a necessary condition of the life of grace, the life of the New Testament, whereas the married state belongs to the Law, to the Old Testament. Thus a married Christian must necessarily abstain from relations with his wife (whether with her permission or without) in order to “pass from the life of the Old Testament to that of the New”.[431] True, “it is necessary to call those who cannot ‘accommodate’ this to Christian marriage – there is no argument about that; only to a marriage that is Christian, and not to fornication under a crown (blud pod ventsom)”.[432] However, for Lourié any expression of sexual desire, even in marriage, is sinful, is fornication; so that a sinless marriage, for him, can only be a virginal marriage. “Fornication is fornication, even if it is committed with one’s lawful wife”.[433]

 

     A variant of this heresy, whose appearance was prophesied by the Apostle Paul (I Timothy 4.3), was rebutted by Clement of Alexandria: “There are some who say outright that marriage is fornication and teach that it was introduced by the devil. They proudly say that they are imitating the Lord Who neither married nor had any possession in this world, boasting that they understand the Gospel better than anyone else. The Scripture says to them: ‘God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble’ (James 4.6; I Peter 5.5­). Further, they do not know the reason why the Lord did not marry. In the first place He had His own Bride, the Church; and in the next place He was no ordinary man that He should also be in need of some helpmeet after the flesh. Nor was it necessary for Him to beget children, since He abides eternally and was born the only Son of God.”[434]

 

     Through his teaching on marriage, Lourié also introduces an ecclesiological heresy, a fundamental distortion of the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments. Membership of the New Testament is open to all those who believe correctly in Christ and belong to His Church, whether they live in marriage, widowhood, or monasticism. Certainly, monks and virgins, if they are good monks and wise virgins, live a more perfect life from the Christian point of view than married people. But they do not for that reason constitute a special class of “New Testament Christians”, as opposed to the “second-class”, “Old Testament” Christians of the married state. As St. Paul made abundantly clear in his words against the Judaizing Christians, there is no such thing as an “Old Testament Christian”, and any attempt to mix the Old Testament Law with New Testament grace is subjected by him to anathema (Galatians 1.8-9).

 

     Lourié tries to justify his innovative understanding of the difference between the Old and the New Testaments by the following argument: “Being ‘in the grace of Christ’ does not depend on the time in which a person lives – before or after the Coming of Christ in the flesh. For the Orthodox Church Tradition there is nothing exotic in this thought. It is sufficiently obvious – otherwise the Church of the New and the Old Testaments would not constitute one Church, that is, the Body of Christ, and it would be necessary to make a sharp distinction in ecclesiastical veneration between the saints of the Old Testament time and those of the New Testament (of which distinction, it goes without saying, there is no mention). If the righteous of the Old Testament receive ‘perfection not without us’ (Hebrews 11.40), then, all the more, we receive it ‘not without them’.”[435]

 

     True; and yet before the Coming of Christ in the flesh all the righteous of the Old Testament went to hades (cf. Genesis 37.35), and were saved only by His descent into hades after the Crucifixion. Clearly, the Coming of Christ brought something absolutely vital which was not available to even the holiest men of the Old Testament, but which is available to those who partake of the sacraments of the New Testament Church - that is, the grace of redemption, the forgiveness of sins and the communication of a new, unfallen human nature. Through the sacraments of Baptism, Chrismation and the Body and Blood of Christ, the Holy Spirit not only works through the saints, as He worked through the Prophets of the Old Testament, but works in them as a constituent part of their new nature, redeemed from corruption and death.

 

     For “before holy baptism,” writes St. Diadochus of Photike, “grace encourages the soul towards good from the outside, while Satan lurks in its depths, trying to block all the intellect’s ways of approach to the divine. But from the moment we are reborn through baptism,” which can only take place in the New Testament Church, “the demon is outside, grace is within.”[436]

 

     As Blessed Theophylact writes, “Those who lived under the Law also had the Spirit, but they had Him in images and shadows, whereas now we can say that Truth Himself has descended essentially to the disciples… He comforts the apostles when He says that the world cannot receive Him, but this excellent gift will be given to you and He will remain ‘with you’, and, what is more, will abide ‘in you’. For the words ‘with you’ point to an external help from nearby, but ‘in you’ – to a more internal dwelling and strengthening.”[437]

 

     In this sense, “he who is least in the Kingdom of heaven”, that is, in the New Testament Church, “is greater than” John the Baptist or any of the Old Testament righteous (Matthew 11.11), not because he is intrinsically greater than John the Baptist (who can be greater than John the Baptist?) but because he possesses in himself, in his very body and blood, that Holiness that was not in any of the Old Testament righteous during their earthly lives. For, as Vladimir Lossky writes, “it is only through the [New Testament] Church that the holiness of the Old Testament can receive its fulfilment… in a perfection which was inaccessible to humanity before Christ.”[438]

 

     Lourié’s working out of this thesis is paradoxical, for he ascribes the grace of the New Testament to several Old Testament saints, such as Abraham, Moses and David, who, since they were married (and in fact had several wives and/or mistresses in some cases), should, by Lourié’s own criteria, be deprived of New Testament status; whereas New Testament Christians who have only one wife and partake of all the sacraments of the New Testament Church are relegated to the status of the Old Testament for no other reason that that they did not free themselves in time from what are, in Fr. Gregory’s opinion, the defiling pleasures of marriage!

 

     The Lives of the Saints do not support Lourié’s thesis. Consider the Life of St. Thomais of Alexandria, who was killed for refusing to submit to the lecherous advances of her father-in-law. As far as we know, she led a normal married life with her husband, and exhibited no special gifts or exploits. And yet St. Daniel of Skete recommended that monks suffering from sexual temptations should pray to her for relief, which would appear to indicate that her virtue lay precisely in her refusal to succumb to sexual sin. Her martyrdom did not “remove sexual sin”, but was the culmination of her successful struggle against sexual sin![439] This shows that she was not only a saint in spite of the supposedly defiling pleasures of marriage, but because of her resistance to unlawful passions, which virtue enables her to give help to monks to this day!

 

     Lourié degrades the sacrament of marriage by refusing to see in it any specific charisma that would raise it above the simple satisfaction of carnal desire, and by insisting that the act that constitutes marriage, the union in one flesh, inescapably involves sin insofar as it involves pleasure. For “pleasure… from sexual relations is recognised as the sign of illness, the inevitable result of which is physical death…”[440] Marriage is “good” only in a negative way, in that, by permitting a little sin, it avoids the commiting of a greater sin, like a safety valve letting off steam or a doctor administering controlled doses of heroin to a drug addict.

 

     We have already discussed the subject of pleasure and desire. Certainly, the cycle of pleasure and pain was introduced into our nature as a result of the fall. But just as nobody would be so mad as to assert that the suffering of pain is a sin, but only the excessive fear of pain, so pleasure is not sinful in itself, but only the enslavement to pleasure. As for desire, according to St. John Chrysostom, “desire is not sin”, but only its overflowing its lawful boundaries[441], a position supported by St. John of Damascus[442].

     In order to justify his position, Lourié is forced to give a completely unnatural interpretation to St. Paul’s words: “He who marries should be as though he were unmarried” (I Corinthians 7.29), as though this meant that he should not have sexual relations with his wife. But the correct interpretation is provided by Clement of Alexandria: “He should consider his marriage inseparable from his love of the Lord. His affection for his wife should be subordinate to that of the Lord.”[443]

     Lourié misinterprets in a similar direction the apostle’s words to married couples: “Deprive not each other [of sexual relations] except by agreement for a season, in order that ye may have more leisure for prayer” (I Corinthians 7.5). He argues that “in both of Chrysostom’s interpretations of Paul, ‘Do not deprive’ has turned out to be only a form of ‘Deprive’ for tender ears”.[444]

     Amazing! So the saint really meant the exact opposite of what he actually said! But what does Chrysostom in fact say? “‘Let not the wife,’ says he, ‘exercise continence, if the husband be unwilling; nor yet the husband without the wife's consent.’ Why so? Because great evils spring from this sort of continence. For adulteries and fornications and the ruin of families have often arisen from it. For if when men have their own wives they commit fornication, much more if yon defraud them of this consolation. And well says he, ‘Defraud not’, ‘fraud’ here, and ‘debt’ above, that he might show the strictness of the right of dominion in question. For that one should practise continence against the will of the other is ‘defrauding’; but not so, with the other's consent: any more than I count myself defrauded, if after persuading me you take away any thing of mine. Since only he defrauds who takes against another's will and by force. A thing which many women do, working sin rather than righteousness, and thereby becoming accountable for the husband's uncleanness, and rending all asunder. Whereas they should value concord above all things, since this is more important than all beside.

     “We will, if you please, consider it with a view to actual cases. Thus, suppose a wife and husband, and let the wife be continent, without consent of her husband; well then, if hereupon he commit fornication, or though abstaining from fornication fret and grow restless and be heated and quarrel and give all kind of trouble to his wife; where is all the gain of the fasting and the continence, a breach being made in love? There is none. For what strange reproaches, how much trouble, how great a war must of course arise! since when in an house man and wife are at variance, the house will be no better off than a ship in a storm when the master is upon ill terms with the man at the head. Wherefore he saith, ‘Defraud not one another, unless it be by consent for a season, that ye may give yourselves unto prayer.’ It is prayer with unusual earnestness which he here means. For if he is forbidding those who have intercourse with one another to pray, how could ‘pray without ceasing’ (I Thessalonians 5.17) have any place? It is possible then to live with a wife and yet give heed unto prayer. But by continence prayer is made more perfect. For he did not say merely, ‘That ye may pray’; but, ‘That ye may give yourselves unto it’; because this thing [intercourse] produces only listlessness in prayer, not uncleanness”.[445]

    There is no support for Lourié’s interpretation of Chrysostom here. The saint not only insists that “do not deprive” does mean what it says. He also says that the exhortation to abstain from intercourse for periods is not because intercourse is unclean, nor because it makes the command to pray without ceasing impossible to fulfil, but because abstinence enables prayer to be more intense. True, he adds that their coming together again is “because of your incontinence”. But the resumption of intercourse is not itself incontinence, but a rather a remedy against incontinence, and therefore not evil in any way.

     Since St. John Chrysostom’s homilies consistently expound a quite different approach to marriage and sexuality from Lourié’s, he is constantly employed in trying to “reinterpret”, i.e. distort the holy Father. Thus when the saint writes: “Use marriage temperately, and you will be the first in the Kingdom of heaven and be counted worthy of all its blessings”[446], Lourié argues that “temperately” means “virginally”, insofar as “the meaning and aim of Christian marriage… does not differ in any way from the celibate life”.[447]

 

     But what does the saint in fact say? “It is possible, very possible, also for those who have wives to be virtuous, if they wish. How? If they, while having wives, shall be as though they had them not, if they will not rejoice in acquisitions, if they will use the world as if not using it (I Corinthians 7.29-31). But if some have found marriage an obstacle, let them know that it is not marriage that serves as an obstacle, but self-indulgence ill-using marriage, just as wine does not produce drunkenness, but evil self-indulgence and its intemperate use. Use marriage in a temperate way, and you will be the first in the Heavenly Kingdom and will taste all its blessings, which may we all be worthy of through the grace and love for man of our Lord Jesus Christ…”[448]

 

     The critical comparison here is between wine and sexual relations. Just as it is possible to drink wine sparingly without getting drunk, so it is possible to have sexual relations in marriage “in a temperate manner”, without it serving as an impediment to the spiritual life. Complete abstinence from sexual relations is definitely not indicated. If it were, then the saint would have said that one must not drink wine even in small quantities because even the smallest consumption leads to drunkenness. But the whole point of the comparison is that in wine-drinking, as in marital relations, small, “measured” use is not harmful, and even sometimes beneficial. (Did not Christ change water into wine at the marriage in Cana? And is it not true that wine is prescribed at Church feasts because it is then that the people should rejoice, and “wine maketh glad the heart of man” (Psalm 103.17)?[449]) So there is no evidence that St. John meant here by “temperance” “complete abstinence”.

 

     Lourié’s provocative phrase “fornication under a crown” further undermines the traditional teaching on marriage, for it obscures the essential difference between marriage and fornication, namely, the fact that in marriage sexual union is with “one’s own flesh”, whereas in fornication it is with “strange flesh”, that is, flesh that is not one’s own through the sacrament of marriage. It is true, of course, that it is possible to sin sexually within the bounds of lawful marriage. But to call this “fornication” is a dangerously misleading misuse of language. It is an attempt to create an association between the deadly sin of fornication and the lawful pleasures of an undefiled marriage-bed. For, according to Lourié, sexual union even within marriage is “the satisfaction of lust, albeit in a limited degree”[450], and therefore ipso facto sinful. In this opinion, he comes very close to the opinion of Tertullian in his later period, when he had become a Montanist heretic: “What is the thing that takes place in all men and women to produce marriage and fornication? Commixture of the flesh, of course; the concupiscence whereof the Lord put on the same footing with fornication. ‘Then,’ says [someone], ‘are you this time destroying first – that is, single – marriage, too?’ And not without reason, inasmuch as it, too, consists of that which is the essence of fornication.”[451]

 

     And yet, as we have seen, the Scriptures and the Fathers distinguish the evil passion of lust that is manifest in fornication and adultery from the innocent passion of sexual love that we see in lawful marriage.

 

Three Test-Cases

 

     Let us consider three test-cases. First, in the Life of St. Wulfhilda of Barking, we read that for eighteen years before the conception of Wulfhilda, her pious parents, who had already had several children, had been living as brother and sister so as to give themselves up more completely to prayer and fasting. “One night, however, an angel appeared to each of them separately three times, and told them that they should come together so as to beget a daughter who would become a bride of Christ. The next morning they told each other the vision, and discovered that it had been identical for the two of them. So they accepted it as having come from God. Thus was the saint conceived and born…”[452]

 

     This is a difficult case to explain according to Lourié’s schema. For clearly here God called two people living the life of grace to return to the life of the law, in Lourié’s terms. They returned to “the satisfaction of the passion of lust, albeit to a limited degree” – for, of course, even if the purpose of the act, as here, is solely child-bearing, it is physiologically impossible (unless we are talking about a rape, which is out of the question here) to accomplish this purpose without the experience of pleasure, which Lourié says is sinful and leads to death. But would God ever call anyone to satisfy a sinful lust? Or to return from the life of grace to the life of the law? Of course not! The only conclusion must be, therefore, that sexual relations in a Christian marriage do not impede the life of grace.

 

     In this case, we might expect Lourié to avail himself of Blessed Augustine’s argument, that sexual relations in marriage are “covered” by the aim of childbearing.[453] But Lourié is keen to avoid any association with westernism or Augustinianism, and accepts the patristic argument that childbearing is less important now that the Messiah has been born. However, the fact remains that his position on marriage and sexuality is close, not so much to that of Blessed Augustine (who respects marriage more than Lourié) [454], as to earlier and later heretical Latin doctrines (those of Tertullian and the Roman Catholic Church).

 

     A second test-case: the mother of the writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Maria Fyodorovna Dostoyevsky, who wrote to her husband: “My present pregnancy is the seventh tight bond to be tied by our mutual love, a love that on my part is pure, holy, chaste and passionate, unchanged from the day of our marriage… No one sees my love, no one understands my feelings, people regard me with base suspicion, whereas my love is my life. Meanwhile, time and the years go by; my face grows all wrinkled and yellow, natural cheerfulness turns into melancholy – that is my sad fate, that is the reward for my chaste, passionate love…” Evidently, Dostoyevky’s mother saw no necessary conflict between chastity and passion in love. Nor did her son. [455]

 

     A third test-case: the holy Tsar-Martyr Nicholas and his spouse, the Tsaritsa-Martyr Alexandra. Anyone who has read the diaries of these saints will know that their love was far from platonic, and by no means without passion. And yet nobody has suggested that their love for each other, being “fallen”, was an impediment to their holiness.

 

     On the contrary, as Fr. Sergius Furmanov writes, “The family of the Tsar was an icon of the family… The holy royal couple, who constructed their family happiness on a love that was in no way darkened in the course of 24 years of marriage, shows the path to young people, that they may with prayer to God for help seek for partners in life.”[456] There can be no doubt that the royal couple were willing, if necessity demanded, to give up the married life that brought them so much consolation and strength (the Tsar even offered, after the birth of the Tsarevich, to become a monk and then patriarch). And God Who knows all things knew of this willingness of theirs. And yet He did not require this sacrifice of them; such a sacrifice was not pleasing to Him. Their path to holiness lay in and through marriage. He loved her as Christ loved the Church, and he loved his nation as a father loves his children; while she was a “help like” him in everything…

 

Stars differing in glory

 

     That which is less than the ideal, or the lesser ideal, is not necessarily sinful: this obvious, but often neglected fact needs to be emphasised especially in this context. Just as “one star differs from another in glory” (I Corinthians 15.41) without any of the stars being anything but full of light, so one condition of the Christian life can differ from another in glory without either being sinful or in any way not pleasing to God. Monasticism is higher than marriage because it involves the greater struggle, less distraction and greater concentration on the highest, most beautiful Object of desire – God Himself.

 

     However, that which is higher in general and in principle is not necessarily better for each individual person. Since the pattern of men’s characters and fallenness is very varied, God devises very varied paths for the overcoming of that fallenness, and different charismata for different men. For one man, monasticism would lead to salvation, while marriage would lead to damnation. For another man the reverse is true: if he became a monk, no matter how hard he tried, he would fail. For it is not only man’s will that matters but also God’s. And God’s choice for each individual cannot be defied, even for the best of motives, without sin and tragedy. Thus St. Martha, the mother of St. Symeon the Stylite, at first did not want to follow her parents’ will and marry. However, St. John the Baptist appeared to her and told her that it was the will of God that she marry. She married, became the mother of one of the Church’s greatest saints, and herself is numbered among the saints…[457]

 

     Again, we read in the biography of St. Seraphim of Sarov: “How many people came to him with questions about marriage, and sometimes about monasticism! And he solved their doubts and difficulties with such faith that it seemed as if the all-seeing eye of God were looking through him. Often he did not give the decision that was expected. Here are a few striking examples.

 

     “Once two ladies visited him. One was young and belonged to a merchant family; the other was middle-aged and of noble birth. The latter had a great desire for the monastic life, but her parents would not give her their blessing; the former did not even think of monasticism. But the Saint’s spiritual insight led him to give them advice which was just the opposite of their intentions. He firmly urged the noble lady to marry.

 

     “’Married life,’ he said to her, ‘is blessed by God Himself. It is only necessary for both parties to keep marital fidelity, love and peace. You will be happy in marriage. Monasticism is not the way for you. The monastic life is difficult; not everyone can endure it.

 

     “But the Saint told the younger woman to enter monasticism, and even told her the name of the Monastery where she would be saved. Both visitors were dissatisfied with the talk, and left the Elder disappointed. But subsequently everything turned out exactly as Father Seraphim foretold.

 

     “The thought of the blessedness of marriage the Saint often repeated to his visitors. Once a young man came to him and asked him to bless him to enter a Monastery. But the Saint, wishing to test his firmness and strengthen him in his good intention, spoke to him of marriage: ‘”Not all can receive this counsel” (Matthew 19.11), and the Lord does not compel them to do so. But,’ he added, ‘”all things are possible to him who believes” (Mark 9.23). Remain in the world, get married. Don’t forget conjugal intercourse and hospitality. Practise the virtues which will be remembered at the awful judgement of God, according to the Holy Gospel. “I was hungry, and you gave Me food. I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink. I was naked, and you clothed Me” (Matthew 25.35-36). Herein is your salvation! And also observe chastity. Remain continent on Wednesdays and Fridays, as well as on Sundays and all holidays. For not practising chastity on Wednesdays and Fridays children are born dead, and for not observing holidays and Sundays wives die in childbirth.

 

     “The young man returned home, but Father Seraphim’s advice kindled still more his desire for monasticism and a year and a half later he entered the Sarov Monastery.

 

     “Sometimes Father Seraphim unexpectedly linked the lives of people who had never met before. An officer came to ask for his blessing to marry. Father Seraphim told him that his bride was already there, at the hostel. This young lady also soon came for a blessing to marry some other man.

 

     “’No, your bridegroom is here, in Sarov,’ the Elder told her.

 

     “The young people became acquainted, and later both came to the Saint who gave them his blessing to marry. The marriage was an extremely happy one.”[458]

 

     “Without Me,” said the Lord, “you can do nothing” (John 15.5). Without the grace of God that is given to a man to be a monk (or married), he could make no progress. Of course, the man must also apply his own will. But the will of man alone is not enough. If God does not also will it, then no amount of striving will make him achieve success in the calling he has chosen. Fallen nature underlies and hinders all our efforts, whatever our calling.

 

     The struggle against sexual sin in thought, feeling and deed is a struggle that must be undertaken by all, whether they are in the monastic or the married state. It is not the case that all virgins or monastics necessarily sin less sexually than married people (let us remember that lusting only in one’s heart is adultery, according to the word of the Lord (Matthew 5.28)). Many married people have reached high levels of chastity and sanctity, while many foolish virgins have failed to enter the marriage-chamber of the Lamb.[459] Thus it is not the path to the end, but the end itself which matters in the long run. And that end is attainable by both.

 

     Having said that, it is still necessary to emphasis that virginity is not only higher than marriage: it is the only viewpoint from which marriage can be correctly evaluated, and the apparently contradictory scriptural texts on marriage understood. For whereas a perfect marriage is the end of most men’s dreams, “paradise on earth”, the ideal of virginity points to a still higher end – not paradise on earth, but the Kingdom of heaven. Although these two ends are not incompatible, and in fact have the same end in view, everyone, both the monk and the married, must love the Kingdom more than paradise on earth if he is not ultimately to be deprived of both the one and the other; he must be ready in his heart to reject all earthly delights, however lawful, for the Kingdom’s sake. For paradise on earth will not last, - at the very most for the duration of earthly life, - whereas the Kingdom of heaven endures for ever and ever. And in the end, those who will be counted worthy of salvation, both the monastics and the virgins, will be “like the angels, who always behold the face of the Father in heaven” (Matthew 18.11). For when the Supreme Object of desire is present, lesser objects are necessarily eclipsed, not because they are flawed or lacking in beauty, but simply because they are lesser. As St. Maximus the Confessor writes: “It is like the light from the stars. The stars do not shine in the day. When the greater and incomparable light of the sun appears, they are hidden and cannot be seen by the senses. With respect to God this is even more so, for God is infinite, and uncreated things cannot be compared to created things.” [460]

 

     That is why the holy Apostle Simon the Zealot, the bridegroom at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, abandoned not only the water of a fallen marriage, but even the wine of a marriage transformed and elevated to iconic status by Christ, for love of the Divine Bridegroom Himself…

Notes:

[334] St. Symeon the New Theologian writes: “since our generation in corruption came through the woman, Eve, so our spiritual generation and re-fashioning comes to be through the man, the second Adam, Who is God. Now, notice here that my words are exact: the seed of a man, mortal and corruptible, begets and gives birth through a woman to sons who are mortal and corruptible; the immortal and incorruptible Word of the immortal and incorruptible God, however, begets and gives birth to immortal and incorruptible children, after having first been born of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit.

     “According to this reasoning, therefore, the mother of God is the lady and Queen and mistress and mother of all the saints. The saints are all both her servants, since she is the mother of God, and her sons, because they partake of the all-pure flesh of her Son – here is a word worthy of belief, since the flesh of the Lord is the flesh of the Theotokos – and by communing in this same deified flesh of the Lord, we both confess and believe that we partake of life everlasting…

     “So this is the mystery of the marriages which the Father arranged for His only-begotten Son” – the marriage first of all with the Virgin at the Incarnation, and then with every member of the Church in the Eucharist.  (First Ethical Discourse, 10; op. cit., pp. 59-60).

[335] St. John Chrysostom, Baptismal Instructions, III, 18,19.

[336] Manzaridis, op. cit., pp. 52-53.

[337] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, 612 C, D.

[338] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, 585A.

[339] Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, 584D.

[340] Nicolas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, 36, London: S.P.C.K., 1966, p. 89.

[341] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Against the Heresies and on the Divine Temple, P.G. 155:512D.

[342] Troitsky, “Brak i Tserkov’” (“Marriage and the Church”), Russkoe Vozrozhdenie (Russian Regeneration), 1986 (III), № 35, pp. 7-8 (in Russian).

[343] St. Cyril of Alexandria, On John 17.21; quoted in Archbishop Ilarion Troitsky, Christianity or the Church? Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1971, p. 9. Italics mine (V.M.).

[344] St. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Opera, ed. H. Langerbeck, volume 6, p. 122.

[345] Benevich and Shufrin, “Besedy o pravoslavnom dogmaticheskom bogoslovii, beseda 3: O liubvi i obozhenii” (“Conversations on Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, conversation 3: On Love and Deification”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (Orthodox Way), 2002, pp. 131-143 (in Russian).

[346] Metropolitan Philaret’s Extensive Christian Catechism defines marriage thus: “Marriage is the mystery in which conjugal union is blessed, as the image of the spiritual union of Christ with the Church, and in which is asked the grace of a pure unity of soul, blessed child-bearing and the Christian upbringing of children.” This is a somewhat paradoxical definition, because while every element in it is essential, it leaves out the definitive element according to the Gospel: the union in one flesh.

[347] Troitsky, op. cit., p. 18. Balsamon’s text reads: “ena scedon omoyucon en dusi upostasesi”.

[348] St. Basil the Great, Canon 26. Cf. Canons 6, 60: “the fornications of nuns must not be counted as marriages, and in any case the unions must be broken”; for “she who has made a profession of virginity and then has gone back on her promise, must be under the same sentence as prescribed for adultery.”

[349] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Romans, 1.

[350] Shukin, “On Marriages with the Heterodox”, Orthodox Life, vol. 27, № 2, March-April, 1977, p. 29.

[351] According to Bailey, the Fathers accepted “even pagan unions as in principle indissoluble, though of a lower and less stable character than those of the faithful” (op. cit., p. 100). And Troitsky writes: “Did the Christians themselves see a sacrament in the marriage of Jews and pagans? We must give a positive answer to this question, since this is asserted by direct testimonies of ancient literature and the de facto attitude of the Christian Church in antiquity to the Jewish and pagan marriages. Clement of Alexandria sees no difference between Old Testament and New Testament marriages. ‘Since the Old Testament law is holy, marriage also is holy,’ he writes. And Old Testament marriage was a sacrament as being a type of Christ and the Church, of which the Apostle speaks [Miscellanies, III, 12; P.G. 8:1195]. ‘Marriage is an honourable affair both with us and with the pagans,’ writes Chrysostom [Homily on I Corinthians 12; P.G. 61:103], thereby relating the words of the apostle: ‘marriage is honour in all… also to pagan marriages. And St. Zeno of Verona tries to show that pagans have all the virtues of marriage, since he is perplexed about what he could teach them. ‘In truth,’ he adds ironically, ‘we conquer only in the fact that Christian women by virtue of their holiness marry more often, and even with pagans, which I cannot mention without great sorrow and sobs’ [Tractatus 4; P.G. 11:306]” (op. cit., p. 64).

     Alexis Khomiakov writes: “The Church considers marriage as a sacrament,l and yet admits married heathens into her community without re-marrying them. The conversion itself gives the sacramental quality to the preceding union without any repetition of the rite. This you must admit, unless you admit an impossibility, viz., that the sacrament of marriage was by itself complete in the lawful union of a heathen pair” (Third Letter to William Palmer, Living Orthodoxy, № 138, November-December, 2003, p. 24).

[352] Also, St. Basil the Great in his fourth canon, which defines a third marriage as “no longer to be called a marriage, but polygamy, or rather mitigated fornication”, writes: “Wherefore the Lord told the Samaritan woman who had had five husbands in succession, ‘and he whom thou now has is not thy husband’, as being no longer themselves worthy of being called husband or wife”.

[353] St. John Chrysostom, On Monogamy, II, 2.

[354] Troitsky, op. cit., pp. 174-181.

[355] He quotes the following texts in his favour: (i) “He brings a gift in order to honour the work” (St. John Chrysostom, Homily 4 on Isaiah 6.1; P.G. 56:246); (ii) “to confirm that He Himself established marriage (in Paradise)” (St. Augustine, On John, 9.2); (iii) “He is present here as one invited to the wedding feast, which took place already after the celebration of the marriage, and by His presence He witnesses that marriage concluded in accordance with the laws and customs of the Hebrew people is a true, God-pleasing marriage.” (Pavlov, 50-aia glava Kormchej Knigi (The 50th Chapter of the Rudder), Moscow, 1887, p. 58).

[356] St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration on Holy Baptism, 18.

[357] Tertullian, On Monogamy, 9.

[358] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 20 on Ephesians, 4; P.G. 62:135.

[359] Athenian Syntagma, V, 286-291; quoted in Trotsky, op. cit., p. 49.

[360] Troitsky, op. cit., pp. 49-50.

[361] St. Ignatius, To Polycarp, 5.

[362] I. Kogkoulis, Kh. Oikonomos, P. Skaltstis, O Gamos (Marriage), Thessalonica, 1996, p. 187 (in Greek).

[363] In a somewhat similar way, an emperor was proclaimed emperor for the first time outside the walls of the Church, but then received the blessing and anointing of the Church within them. “It is not in vain,” writes Pavel Kuzmenko, “that marriage crowning involves the laying of wreaths similar to royal crowns on the heads of the newly married. It symbolizes that the family is a small kingdom in the earthly sense and a small church in the spiritual sense” (Nashi Traditsii: Kreschenie, Venchanie, Pogrebenie, Posty (Our Traditions: Baptism, Crowning, Burial, Fasting), Moscow: Bukmen, 1996, p. 106 (in Russian).) During the coronation of the Russian Tsars, the bystanders were showered with gold and silver, symbolizing the betrothal of the Tsar with the State. See Fr. Nikita Chakorov (ed.), Tsarskie Koronatsii na Rusi (Royal Coronations in Rus’), Russian Orthodox Youth Committee, 1971, p. 22 (in Russian).

[364] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Against the Heresies and on the Divine Temple, P.G. 155:512D.

[365] Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, III, 11; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 188.

[366] Tertullian, To his Wife, II, 9; P.L. 1:1302A; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 189.

[367] Tertullian, On Chastity, 4; P.L. 2:1038-1039; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 189.

[368] References in Troitsky, op. cit., p. 182.

[369] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Peri tou timiou nomimou gamou (On Honourable and Lawful Marriage), P.G.155: 512D.

[370] St. Basil the Great, On the Hexaemeron, P.G. 29:160B; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 190.

[371] St. Gregory the Theologian, Letter 183, P.G. 37:313; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 190.

[372] Synesius, Letter 105, P.G. 66:1485A; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 190.

[373] St. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, I, 10, 11; P.L. 44: 419; Kogkoulis et al., op. cit. p. 191.

[374] Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 192.

[375] Bailey, op. cit., pp. 99-100.

[376] Troitsky, op. cit., p. 183.

[377] Kuzmenko, op. cit., pp. 113-114.

[378] Bailey, op. cit., pp. 74-75, 80-81.

[379] Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1970, pp. 27-29.

[380] Novella 89 (893). The text is in Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 98-99. Leo introduced this law because he himself wanted to marry a second time – but with crowning, which is forbidden for second marriages by the Church. So he made crowning compulsory by law for all kinds of marriages.

[381] Kogkoulis et al., op. cit., p. 48. The authors continue: “The common cup reminds [them] of the joy of the marriage in Cana and in general constitutes a symbolical act, so that the newly-weds should know that they are beginning their life with the prayer of the Church that they should live inseparably and should together share in all the good things and all the joys and sorrows which they will meet”.

[382] St. Symeon of Thessalonica, Against the Heresies and on the Divine Temple, 282, P.G. 155:512-3.

[383] Hieromartyr Tikhon, op. cit.

[384] Troitsky, op. cit., p. 184.

[385] Does this penance indicate that the second marriage is sinful? No; for the Apostle Paul counselled younger widows to marry, and he would hardly have counselled them to commit a sin. Also, St. Xenia of St. Petersburg (January 24) once counselled a just-widowed man to marry again. And even some of the saints, such as Theodore of Yaroslavl (September 19), appear to have entered into blessed second marriages. However, the text of the service does point to a certain lack of temperance in the spouses that makes this second marriage necessary for them; and for intemperance penitence is, of course, fitting.

[386] For second marriages a penance of one or two years without communion was applied (St. Basil the Great, Canon 4; St. Nicephorus the Confessor, Canon 2), and for third marriages – five years without communion (St. Nicephorus, op. cit.; Tome of Union of Constantinople, 920).

[387] Tome of Union of Constantinople, 920.

[388] Thus the Local Council of the Russian Church held in 1917-18 allowed ten other reasons for divorce, including apostasy, syphilis, madness and impotence. These were all, as Hieromonk Theodosius writes, “reasons that violated the sanctity of the marriage bond or that destroyed its moral or religious basis and, thus, effectively prevented the spouses from achieving the aim of marriage” (“Economy”, Living Orthodoxy, #121, January-February, 2000, p. 28). The Greek Church has a similar list (see A.M. Allchin, “The Sacrament of Marriage in Eastern Christianity”, in Marriage, Divorce and the Church, London: SPCK, 1971).

[389] Tertullian, On Monogamy, 4; P.L. 2:934.

[390] See Bailey, op. cit., pp. 88, 89-90, 90-92. Athenagoras, however, follows Tertullian in his rigorism. After calling a remarried divorcee an “adulteress”, he writes: “He who rids himself of his first wife, although she is dead, is an adulterer in a certain disguised manner” (Apology of the Christians, P.G. 6:968).

[391] St. Basil the Great, On Virginity; quoted in The Rudder, edited by D. Cummings, Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957, p. 821.

[392] St. Ambrose, Epistle 63, 63. The same saint considered a man could not be considered for the priesthood if his wife had been married twice, even if the first marriage was before her baptism: "And I have thought it well not to pass by this point, because many contend that having one wife is said of the time after Baptism; so that the fault whereby any obstacle would ensue would be washed away in baptism. And indeed all faults and sins are washed away; so that if anyone have polluted his body with very many whom he has bound to himself by no law of marriage, all the sins are forgiven him, but if any one have contracted a second marriage it is not done away; for sin, not law, is loosed by the laver, and as to baptism there is no sin but law. That then which has to do with the law is not remitted as though it were sin but is retained. And the Apostle has established a law, saying: "If any man be without reproach the husband of one wife." So then he who is without blame the husband of one wife comes within the rule for undertaking the priestly office; he, however who has married again has no guilt of pollution, but  is disqualified for the priestly prerogative..." (Quoted by Bishop Tikhon in “Re: [paradosis] Re: Formication and Adultery”, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com, December 19, 2003).

[393] Sixth Ecumenical Council, Canon 87.

[394] St. Epiphanius, Against Heresies, 69; P.G. 41:1024C-1025A; quoted in Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 45.

[395] Hieromartyr Gregory, Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, Moscow, 1991, p. 106 (in Russian). As Blessed Theophylact says, “since they have become one flesh, joined together by means of marital relations and physical affection, just as it is accursed to cut one’s own flesh, so is it accursed to separate husband and wife” (Explanation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press, 1992, p. 162).

[396] St. John Chrysostom says: “When you see a harlot tempting you, say, ‘My body is not mine, but my wife’s’” (Homily 19 on I Corinthians, P.G. 124:160A (col. 648)).

[397] Bishop Theophan, op. cit., p. 150.

[398] Sixth Ecumenical Council, Canon 72. Cf. 14th Canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council; 10th and 31st Canons of the Council of Laodicea; 58th rule of the Nomocanon. Although Peter the Great pressured the Russian Church into allowing marriages with Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Presbyterians (but not Molokans, Baptists and Stundists), the Church in her ukases of August 18, 1821 and February 28, 1858 reminded the faithful that such unions could not be allowed until the sectarians accepted Orthodoxy. See Bishop Nathaniel of Vienna, “On Marriage with the Heterodox”, Orthodox Life, vol. 44, № 3, May-June, 1994, pp. 42-45.

[399] Life of St. John the Almsgiver, in Elizabeth Dawes and Norman H. Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints, London: Mowbrays, 1977, p. 251.

[400] St. Ambrose, On Abraham, 84.

[401] Tertullian, To His Wife, 5,6.

[402] Tertullian, To His Wife, 8.

[403] Bishop Theophan, op. cit., p. 154. St. John Chrysostom writes: “If ‘he that is joined to an harlot is one body,’ it is quite clear that the woman also who is joined to an idolater is one body. True: it is one body. However, she does not become unclean, but the cleanness of the wife overcomes the uncleanness of the husband; and again, the cleanness of the believing husband overcomes the uncleanness of the unbelieving wife.

     “How then in this case is the uncleanness overcome, and therefore the intercourse allowed; while in the woman who prostitutes herself, the husband is not condemned in casting her out? Because here there is hope that the lost member may be saved through the marriage; but in the other case the marriage has already been dissolved; and there again both are corrupted; but here the fault is in one only of the two. I mean something like this: she that has been guilty of fornication is utterly abominable: if then ‘he that is joined to an harlot is one body,’ he also becomes abominable by having connection with an harlot; wherefore all the purity flits away. But in the case before us it is not so. But how? The idolater is unclean but the woman is not unclean. For if indeed she were a partner with him in that wherein he is unclean, I mean his impiety, she herself would also become unclean. But now the idolater is unclean in one way, and the wife holds communion with him in another wherein he is not unclean. For marriage and mixture of bodies is that wherein the communion consists.

     “…Again, in that case, after the fornication the husband is not a husband: but here, although the wife be an idolatress, the husband's rights are not destroyed. However, he does not simply recommend cohabitation with the unbeliever, but with the qualification that he wills it. Wherefore he said, ‘And he himself be content to dwell with her.’ For, tell me, what harm is there when the duties of piety remain unimpaired and there are good hopes about the unbeliever, that those already joined should so abide and not bring in occasions of unnecessary warfare? For the question now is not about those who have never yet come together, but about those who are already joined. He did not say, If any one wish to take an unbelieving wife, but, ‘If any one hath an unbelieving wife.’ Which means, If any after marrying or being married have received the word of godliness, and then the other party which had continued in unbelief still yearn for them to dwell together, let not the marriage be broken off. ‘For,’ he says, ‘the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the wife.’ So great is the superabundance of your purity.” (Homily 19 on I Corinthians).

[404] St. John Chrysostom, First Discourse on Marriage.

[405] St. Gregory the Theologian, In Praise of Virginity, 11.263-75, translated in Orthodox Life, November-December, 1981.

[406] ”The Life of St. Timothy of Esphigmenou”, Orthodox Life, vol. 26, № 6, November-December, 1976, pp. 2-3.

[407] Zhitia russkikh sviatykh (Lives of the Russian Saints), Tutaev, 2000, vol. I, pp. 694-695 (in Russian).

[408] Cf. St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, vol. IX (May), pp. 298-300; translated in Orthodox Life, vol. 32, № 3, May-June, 1982.

[409] Cf. St. Ammon of Egypt (Palladius, The Paradise of the Fathers, I, 8); SS. Andronicus and Athanasia (Menaion, October 9); a Christian in the diocese of St. Basil the Great (Menaion, January 1); Martyr Conon (Menaion, March 5); St. Alexis the Man of God (Menaion, March 17); Martyrs Chrysanthus and Daria (Menaion, March 19); Martyr Cecilia (Menaion, November 22); the chaste lovers of fourth-century Gaul (St. Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, I, 47); the twice-married St. Athanasia the Wonderworker (April 18); SS. Peter and Febronia of Murom (Russian Menaion, June 25); St. Martha, Mother of St. Symeon the Stylite (Menaion, July 4); St. Juliana of Lazarevo (Orthodox Life, vol. 47, № 1, January-February, 1997); St. John of Kronstadt (Orthodox Life, vol. 26, № 5, September-October, 1976); St. Elizabeth the New Martyr.

[410] Cf. Council of Gangra, canon 1; Sixth Ecumenical Council, canon 13.

[411] Origen writes: “To think that marital life leads to destruction is useful, since it elicits a striving for perfection” (On Jeremiah, 14.4, P.G. 16:508-509; quoted in Troitsky, op. cit., p. 94, note).

[412] St. Gregory Palamas, Treatise on the Spiritual Life, 4; Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Company, 1995, pp. 44, 43.

[413] St. Gregory Palamas, “A New Testament Decalogue”, 6, 7; The Philokalia, volume IV, pp. 328-329.

[414] Pis’ma Arkhiepiskopa Feofana Poltavskogo (The Letters of Archbishop Theophan of Poltava), Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1976, pp. 35-37 (in Russian).

[415] Menaion, June 24, The Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Vespers, Aposticha, Glory...

[416] St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, 67.

[417] St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration on Holy Baptism, 18.

[418] Lossky, Orthodox Theology, op. cit., p. 75.

[419] Cf. Chrestos Yannaras: “Marriage and virginity in Christ are two parallel ways towards the healing and restoration of affective desire” (Honest to Orthodoxy, Athens, 1967, p. 76).

[420] See Monk Moses of the Holy Mountain, Married Saints of the Church, Wildwood, Ca.: St. Xenia Skete, 1991.

[421] Hieromartyr Gregory, Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, Moscow, 1991, p. 106 (in Russian). Cf. Fr. Alexander Elchaninov: “Before marriage man hovers above life, observing it from without; only in marriage does he plunge into it, entering it through the personality of another. This delight in real knowledge and real life gives us a feeling of achieved plenitude and satisfaction which makes us richer and wiser” (in Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 88).

[422] St. Amphilochius of Iconium; in Fr. Gregory Diachenko, Uroki i primery khristianskoj zhizni (Lessons and Examples of Christian Life), St. Petersburg, 1900, p. 608 (in Russian).

[423] Archbishop Ambrose, “Brak: Tainstvo i Profanatsia” (“Marriage: Sacrament and Profanation”) (in Russian).

[424] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 7 on Hebrews, 4.

[425] St. Macarius, in Archimandrite (now Bishop) Kallistos Ware, "The Monk and the Married Christian: Some Comparisons in Early Monastic Sources", Eastern Churches Review, vol. VI, № 1, Spring, 1974, p. 80. Bishop Kallistos comments: "The Christian in the city, by virtue of his very involvement in worldly things, can attain a distinctive type of sanctity - of detachment, humility and inner simplicity - not accessible to the monk in the desert" (p. 82).

[426] Afanasyev, op. cit., p. 643.

[427] Lossky, Orthodox Theology, op. cit., p. 77.

[428] St. Maximus, Epistle 2, P.G. 91, 396D.

[429] Cf. St. Gregory the Great: “Since there are many who relinquish indeed the sins of the flesh, and yet, when placed in the state of wedlock, do not observe solely the claims of due intercourse, Lot went indeed out of Sodom, but yet did not at once reach the mountain heights; because a damnable life is already relinquished, but still the loftiness of conjugal continence is not thoroughly attained. But there is midway the city of Zoar, to save the weak fugitive; because when the married have intercourse with each other even incontinently, they still avoid lapse into sin, and are still saved through mercy. For they find as it were a little city, wherein to be protected from the fire; since this married life is not indeed marvellous for virtue, but yet is secure from punishment” (The Pastoral Rule, III, 27).

[430] St. John Chrysostom, To a Young Widow, 7.

[431] Lourié, op. cit., p. 118.

[432] Lourié, op. cit., p. 171.

[433] Lourié, op. cit., p. 19, note 32.

[434] Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies; in Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 82-83.

[435] Lourié, op. cit., p. 109.

[436] St. Diadochus, “On Spiritual Knowledge”, 76; in The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 279.

[437] Blessed Theophylact, Explanation of the Gospel of John, 14.16.

[438] Lossky, “Panagia”, In the Image and Likeness of God, London: Mowbrays, 1975, p. 201.

[439] “The Martyrdom of St. Thomais”, Orthodox Life, vol. 25, № 4, July-August, 1975, pp. 4-7. She is commemorated on April 14.

[440] Lourié, op. cit., p. 135.

[441] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 13 on Romans.

[442] St. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 13.

[443] Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies; in The One Who Knows God, p. 94. This is why it is in vain for Lourié to cite Luke 14.26: “If any man come to Me, and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sister, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple”. As Blessed Theophylact and other Fathers make clear, this “hatred” is in order only when the wife or other family member hinders the Christian from fulfilling the commandments of God. If they do not, then not only do family ties not hinder the life in Christ: whole families can attain the highest crowns as single units, as we see in the lives of SS. Joachim, Eustathius, Xenophon and Tsar-Martyr Nicholas.

[444] Lourié, op. cit., p. 146.

[445] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 19 on I Corinthians.

[446] St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews, VII, 4.

[447] Lourié, op. cit., p. 132.

[448] Cf. the same saint’s Homilies on Genesis, 21.18: “See once more another good man [Noah] with his wife and family achieving great satisfaction in God’s eyes and opting for the way of virtue in the sight of everyone, hindered in no way either by marriage or by family responsibilities.”

[449] As New Hieromartyr John (Steblin-Kamensky) writes, “the Christian is not a stranger to earthly joys. On the contrary, he appreciates them to a much higher degree than the unbeliever, because he believes that they have been given to him not by chance, and the joy of this or that experience of event in life is united in him with the spiritual experience of boundless gratitude to the One Who knows all our needs. The Christian is not a stranger to earthly joys, but does not make them the aim of his life; he does not fight against his neighbour for their sake, and does not seek them. Therefore he receives them ‘pure’, and they do not darken his spirit.” (in Igumen Damaskin (Orlovsky), Mucheniki, ispovedniki i podvizhniki blagochestia Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi XX stoletia (Martyrs, Confessors and Ascetics of Piety of the Russian Orthodox Church of the 20th Century), Tver: “Bulat”, 2000, vol. 4, p. 247.

[450] Lourié, op. cit., p. 117.

[451] Tertullian, An Exhortation to Chastity, 9.

[452] V. Moss, The Saints of Anglo-Saxon England, volume III, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1997, p. 7. A similar story is to be found in the Life  of St. Gerald of Aurillac (+909): “His father was so careful to conduct himself chastely in his marriage, that he frequently slept alone far from the marriage bed, as though for a time giving himself to prayer according to the apostle. He is said to have been warned in sleep on a certain night that he should know his wife, because he was to beget a son, and they say that it was announced to him that he should call his name Gerald, and that he would be a man of great virtue…” (in Thomas F.X. Noble and Thomas Head (eds.), Soldiers of Christ, London: Sheed & Ward, 1995, p. 298)

[453] However, St. Dionysius of Alexandria permits even older married people to have sexual relations at their discretion, when procreation cannot be their aim (Epistle to Bishop Basilides, canon 3).

[454] Even while St. Augustine does not approve of marital intercourse that is not for the sake of childbearing, he specifically rejects the view that this is “fornication under a crown” or any such thing: “The question is often asked whether this should be called marriage: when a male and female, neither of whom is married to anyone else, come together, not for the begetting of children, but by reason of incontinence, for the sake of sexual intercourse alone, there being between them this trust, that neither will he do it with any other woman, nor she with any other man. Perhaps this may, not without reason, be called marriage, if both parties have resolved [on faithfulness to each other] until the death of one of them, and if they do not try and avoid the begetting of children, although they have not come together for that reason.” (On the Good of Marriage, 5).

[455] Geir Kjetsaa writes that his letters to his much-beloved second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, maintain a high temperature of passion: “’It is not simply that I love you – I am still in love with you, you are the only mistress of my soul, and this after twelve years!’ She has also kept her power of attraction ‘in the most earthly sense’, for when a woman is thirty-two she is still in her full flower. Anna was doubtless of the opinion that her husband was apt to overdo things in this respect, and she was not above complaining a little about it to her female friends. But in his eyes sexuality was the fundamental condition for the relationship between man and woman. ‘You think perhaps that this is only one aspect of the matter, the coarsest one even. But there is nothing coarse about; everything else is dependent on it.’ There was also no need to worry that their letters were being read by strangers: ‘Let them envy us!’” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 321-322).

[456] Furmanov, Russkij Pastyr’ (Russian Pastor), 36, № 1, 2000, p. 34. Italics mine (V.M.).

[457] Menaion, July 4.

[458] Moore, op. cit., pp. 290-292.

[459] Thus Joachim and Anna, according to St. Gregory Palamas, “were exceptionally chaste, and that chastity, conceiving through prayer and asceticism, [became] the mother of virginity”, the Holy Virgin Mary (Homily 44, 5).

[460] St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 7, P.G. 91:1077A.