By Mother Mary and Bishop Kallistos Ware
We can apply this approach also to the question of abstinence from sexual relations. It has long been the Church’s teaching that during seasons of fasting married couples should try to live as brother and sister, but this does not at all signify that sexual relations within marriage are in themselves sinful. On the contrary, the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete – in which, more than anywhere else in the Triodion, we find summed up the significance of Lent states without the least ambiguity: Marriage is honorable, and the marriage-bed undefiled. For on both Christ has given His blessing, eating in the flesh at the wedding in Cana, Turning water into wine and revealing His first miracle. 27
The abstinence of married couples, then, has as its aim not the suppression but the purification of sexuality. Such abstinence, practiced ‘with mutual consent for a time’, has always the positive aim, ‘that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer’ (1 Cor. 7: 5). Self-restraint, so far from indicating a dualist depreciation of the body, serves on the contrary to confer upon the sexual side of marriage a spiritual dimension which might otherwise be absent.
To guard against a dualist misinterpretation of the fast, the Triodion speaks repeatedly about the inherent goodness of the material creation. In the last of the services that it contains, Vespers for Holy Saturday, the sequence of fifteen Old Testament Lessons opens with the first words of Genesis, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth… : all created things are God’s handiwork and as such are ‘very good’. Every part of this divine creation, so the Triodion insists, joins in giving praise to the Maker:
The hosts of heaven give Him glory;
Before Him tremble cherubim and seraphim;
Let everything that has breath and all creation
Praise Him, bless Him, and exalt Him above all for ever.
O Thou who coverest Thy high places with the waters,
Who settest the sand as a bound to the sea and upholdest all things:
The sun sings Thy praises, the moon gives Thee glory,
Every creature offers a hymn to Thee,
His Author and Creator, forever.
Let all the trees of the forest dance and sing. . . .
Let the mountains and all the hills
Break forth into great rejoicing at the mercy of God,
And let the trees of the forest clap their hands. 28
This affirmative attitude towards the material world is founded not only on the doctrine of creation but also on the doctrine of Christ. Again and again in the Triodion, the true physical reality of Christ’s human nature is underlined. How, then, can the human body be evil, if God Himself has in His own person assumed and divinized the body? As we state at Matins on the first Sunday in Lent, the Sunday of Orthodoxy:
Thou hast not appeared to us, O loving Lord, merely in outward semblance,
As say the followers of Mani, who are enemies of God,
But in the full and true reality of the flesh. 29
Because Christ took a true material body, so the hymns for the Sunday of Orthodoxy make clear, it is possible and, indeed, essential to depict His person in the holy icons, using material wood and paint:
The uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed,
Taking flesh from thee, O Theotokos,
And He has restored the sullied image to its ancient glory,
Pilling it with the divine beauty.
This our salvation we confess in deed and word,
And we depict it in the holy icons. 30
This assertion of the spirit-bearing potentialities of the material creation is a constant theme during the season of Lent. On the first Sunday of the Great Fast, we are reminded of the physical nature of Christ’s Incarnation, of the material reality of the holy icons, and of the visible, aesthetic beauty of the Church. On the second Sunday we keep the memory of St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1 359), who taught that all creation is permeated by the energies of God, and that even in the present life this divine glory can be perceived through man’s physical eyes, provided that his body has been rendered spiritual by God’s grace. On the third Sunday we venerate the material wood of the Cross; on the sixth Sunday we bless material branches of palms; on Wednesday in Holy Week we are signed with material oil in the sacrament of Anointing; on Holy Thursday we recall how at the Last Supper Christ blessed material bread and wine, transforming them into His Body and Blood.
Those who fast, so far from repudiating material things, are on the contrary assisting in their redemption. They are fulfilling the vocation assigned to the ‘sons of God’ by St. Paul: ‘The created universe waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. . . . The creation will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail until now’ (Rom. 8:19-22). By means of our Lenten abstinence, we seek with God’s help to exercise this calling as priests of the creation, restoring all things to their primal splendor. Ascetic self-discipline, then, signifies a rejection of the world, only in so far as it is corrupted by the fall; of the body, only in so far as it is dominated by sinful passions. Lust excludes love: so long as we lust after other persons or other things, we cannot truly love them. By delivering us from lust, the fast renders us capable of genuine love. No longer ruled by the selfish desire to grasp and to exploit, we begin to see the world with the eyes of Adam in Paradise. Our self-denial is the path that leads to our self-affirmation; it is our means of entry into the cosmic liturgy whereby all things visible and invisible ascribe glory to their Creator.
~Mother Mary & Kallistos Ware, THE MEANING OF THE GREAT FAST: The True Nature of Fasting, Website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (GOA), http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith9199.
27 Canticle Nine, troparion 12.
28 The Great Canon, Canticle Eight, irmos; Compline for Holy Thursday; Matins for the Sunday of the Cross; Matins for Palm Sunday.
29 The Persian Mani (c. 216-76), founder of Manichaeism, advocated an uncompromising dualism. He considered that there is no salvation for man’s body or for the rest of the material creation; the particles of light imprisoned in man are to be released through strict asceticism, including vegetarianism.
