It is entirely fitting that the first revelation of the consubstantiality, the unity, of human nature, in the Bible should be in terms of marriage: ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,’ says the man when God brings the woman before him. And Genesis adds this comment on what marriage actually entails: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh,’ words that Christ was to repeat in the Gospel. Thus the love of the man and woman is original, paradisal, established in its glory before sin was even thought of: ‘And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed’ (Genesis 2.23-25). Paradise is the home of the couple, not the monk.
The condition of banishment has profoundly affected the relationship between man and woman. They have been swept along in the impersonal rush of eros, painfully seeking each other, finding each other for a moment, only to lose each other again; or never meeting at all.
Paul Evdomikov, in his invaluable meditation on human love, takes the question God addressed to Adam in paradise, when paradise was already lost- ‘Where are you?’- and applies it symbolically to man and woman. Throughout the course of history, he writes, man and woman call to each other, ‘Where are you?’, being attracted and repelled in succession. Maryse Choisy has spoken of the ‘war of the sexes’, which is a subject in itself. Society has not always been patriarchal; man has not always dominated woman. Matriarchy has existed in history and prehistory, surviving till the 18th century in certain districts of France where society was seminomadic. Polyandry was practised in Tibet until modern times, actually being considered a safe method of birth control. Thinking as we do of the feminine as belonging more to the vegetable world, which accumulates energy, and the masculine to the animal world, which expends it, we sense, not so much the domination of one side by the other, as a complex interplay of forces pulling this way and that. In many ancient traditions, and more recently in tantrism, which arose in India when patriarchy was at its height, the approach to the divine was by way of symbolism that was both cosmic and feminine (not only Mother Earth, but Mother God) and there was a feminine priesthood.
It is in the mystical union between Christ and the Church that the Christian seeks the reconciliation of man and woman, of masculine and feminine, of eros and the person. Christianity, although at times distorted by the surrounding culture, has always asserted the transcendence of the person; insisted that the man and the woman, since they are persons, are much more than equals; they are each of absolute worth. That is what St Paul meant when he wrote that, in Christ, ‘there is neither male nor female’ (Galatians 3.28).
Seen from this point of view, true marriage, which is not sociological but sacramental – ‘a great mystery’, according to the Apostle- can be no threat, as we have said, to true chastity.
At the first Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, there was some suggestion that marriage was incompatible with the priesthood because sexual relations are a cause of impurity. It must be strongly emphasized that, from the beginnings of Christianity, this had never been seen as a problem. The Apostle Peter himself was married, and Clement of Alexandria, quoting an ancient source, describes the married love of the Apostle and his wife as reaching its fulfilment at the moment of martyrdom. At the end of his life St Paul, who tended towards monasticism, and had chosen to remain celibate in expectation of the Lord’s imminent return, was asked to decide the organization of the communities which he had founded; he said only that the bishop (the word then denoted the equivalent of the modern priest as well as bishop) should be ‘the husband of one wife’. This requirement was not moral, but mystical; for in the early Church, as in the Orthodox Church today, a remarried widower could not be admitted to the priesthood. The faithfulness of the priest to one woman only, even beyond death, was the necessary reflection of the absolute faithfulness of God.
In reaction to the pansexualism of some pagan cults, a dualist, fundamentally Manichean, outlook became widespread, and at the same time there was a revival of an Old Testament distinction between pure and impure; meanwhile the priesthood had evolved into a clerical caste. These all combined to raise the question, at the Council of Nicaea, of the purity, or otherwise, of marriage. It was a famous Egyptian monk, Paphnutius, speaking from experience of ascetic chastity, who forcibly reminded the Council that marriage is chaste, and therefore perfectly consistent with the exercise of the priesthood.
In the Tradition of the undivided Church, the distinction between the monastic and married states did not at all coincide with that between priests and laity. It was quite normal for laymen to seek fulfilment in celibacy. Down to Carolingian times, monks in the West were almost all laymen, and in the East, with a few exceptions, it remains true today. There are even monastic communities without a priest at all; one has to come in for the Eucharist on feasts and Sundays, and the rest of the time the monks sing the offices as lay people, with a few special rules, are entitled to do. Just as a layman can be called to celibacy, a married man can equally well be called to the priesthood, which is quite usual in the East. We can well understand that a priest might remain celibate, after the example of St Paul, in order to be more available for his apostolic work. It is evidence of love’s inventiveness.
And here we see a characteristic feature of the Eastern experience of priesthood: the business of the Church is to choose the best people to be priests, whether they are celibate or married. The essential thing is to avoid opposition; celibacy is not the preserve of the clergy, for the laity also have the right to commit themselves wholeheartedly; nor is it easy to see how marriage, since it is a sacrament, and all the sacraments are like so many rays from the one Eucharistic sun, could be incompatible with the sacrament of Holy Order. Perhaps this seems such an intractable problem in the Catholic Church not only because of long historical conditioning but also because the atmosphere of the world in which it finds itself is unfavourable to any spiritual discipline; true chastity cannot be conceived of as attractive to all. The result is that the Church has come to view the monastic way of life as superior. Meanwhile, clean counter to this, the delirious pursuit of fulfillment through sexual ‘freedom’ plays havoc with some of the clergy, many of whom, still, are all the more vulnerable for having been ‘set apart’ much too young, in accordance with an individualistic and sentimental understanding of ‘vocation’, with the result that they experience the crisis of adolescence in their forties or fifties.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
