Presentation

Marriage as a Discipline of Sanctification
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Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.
Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

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Theologians deploy nuptial metaphors to suggest how God joins human beings into community with God by initiating them into that mystery. Among Catholics, Thomas Aquinas describes the incarnation as a coniunctio, or marriage, of God and the human being. Karl Barth writes that “Because the election of God is real, there is such a thing as love and marriage”:20 that is, he derives love and marriage as secondary, analogous forms of God’s love for God’s people. From the Syriac tradition we have already seen the passionate poetry of Jacob of Serugh. The Russian theologian Paul Evdokimov devotes an entire book to interpreting Christianity by what you might call a “nuptial hermeneutics.” He seeks to rescue marriage from what he calls two functionalisms, whether controlling lust (Protestant) or procreating children (Catholic), in order to save it for participation in the divine life, not by Christian tantra, but by the ascetic heightening of desire for goods still more desirable, the pearl of great price.. Marriage and monasticism make for Evdokimov two forms of the same discipline, whereby Christians give themselves over to one or more others—either a spouse or a monastic community—from whom they cannot easily escape. In Eastern Orthodoxy, as some of you know, the couple being married are “crowned”: these are the crowns of martyrdom. Like all asceticism, this is a high-risk endeavor to make them better people.21

Jeffrey Stout has explained how Christianity gives social meaning to natural bodies:

What is it, then, for a Christian to be sanctified?... [I]t is to be taken up by means of God’s grace into the inner life of God, into the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with one another. When speaking of this, most of the Church’s analogies have to do with bodies. God the Father, maker of heaven and earth, creates the bodies we have by nature, the natural bodies we are. But [God] also incorporates us into social bodies, which then transform what our natural bodies mean, by making them represent something socially.22

What does God or the Church cause bodies socially to mean? That, as Stout sees it, depends on the multiple levels of communities that incorporate those bodies. The ascetic commitment of both monogamy or monasticism “incorporates a person into a series of communities: first, the community with one’s marital partner [or fellow monastics]; second, the community of Christ’s body, the Church; and third, the community of interpersonal love and joyous beholding that constitutes God’s inner Trinitarian life.”

Sexuality, in short, is for sanctification, that is, for God. It is to be a means (and not only a means) by which God catches human beings up into the community of God’s Spirit and the identity of God’s child.23 In that case, too, the “means” reduces to no mere functionalism, but itself already participates in the end: in community, in joy, in growth in virtue.24 Monogamy and monasticism are just two ways of donating the body to represent in society, and to practice by asceticism, features of the triune life in which God initiates, responds to, and celebrates love, a wedding feast in which God invites human beings to take part. At a wedding the partners represent the love of two, while the congregation participates in the rejoicing of a third, caught up into the office of the Spirit in the trinitarian life. Weddings analogize the Trinity, for “the kingdom of heaven is like a wedding feast.” In a marital or monastic community, the parties commit themselves to practicing faith, hope, and charity in a form of life that will require plenty of exercise.

Human beings participate in those multiple communities—the Trinity, the Church, and the domestic church, or marriage bond—by giving their bodies over to the community as communicative signs. Many gay and lesbian people already practice something like that donation of the body to be publicly known. They call it coming out. According to Catholic moral theologian David McCarthy:

The communicative acts of coming out . . . come through surrender to an interpretive community. Coming out is opening one’s life to be told by others. This exposure is the source of dread and panic in coming out. It is also the outcome of a desire to be known, a desire for wholeness and a promise of unity of oneself and the world. Coming out articulates the sign-giving character of human, bodily life.

For the church, a similar statement of identity and desire is at stake when the members of the body come out with their sexual commitments. Marriage and the celibate life write the body into the story of redemption. Both are communicative, sexual acts. They are means by which the story of redemption is written through human lives, as signs of God’s reconciliation, a reconciliation of the body. Coming out is a wager, opening the body to a language of redemption, opening a way for the body’s agency not only in the movement of desire but in the donation of one’s agency as an interpretive sign.

A nuptial hermeneutics, it goes almost without saying, requires embodiment. Embodiment, in turn, requires diversity. The Holy Spirit characteristically rests on bodies: the body of Christ in Jesus, the church, the sacraments, and the saints.25 As the Spirit forms human bodies into the body of Christ, she gathers the diverse, and diversifies the corporate, making members of one body. At creation, too, Christians see the Holy Spirit gathering and diversifying as she hovers over the waters. Suppose “be fruitful and multiply” belongs with “let the earth put forth vegetation” and “Let the waters bring forth swarms” and “let the earth bring forth everything that creeps upon the ground” (Genesis 1:26, 1:11, 1:20, 1:24): In all those cases, the earth and the waters bring forth things different from themselves, not just more dirt and more water. In all those cases, they bring forth multiply different kinds of things. One might almost translate, “Be fruitful and diversify.”26 Indeed Christian thinkers had to fight against the notion that the diversity of creatures and persons resulted from the Fall rather than from God. In Aquinas, a manifold of creatures fills the earth, so that God’s creation will show no gaps:

The distinction and multiplicity of things is from the intention of the first agent, who is God. For [God] brought things into being to communicate [God’s] goodness to creatures, and to be represented by them. And since [God’s] goodness could not be adequately represented by any creature alone, [God] produced creatures many and diverse, so that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness could be supplied by another. For the goodness which in God is simple and uniform is in creatures multiply and distributively.27

Maximus the Confessor makes the argument from christology. Created distinction displays a good not only of creation, but a backwards-effect of the incarnation. Human diversity especially shows how individual logoi participate in the Logos:

If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that what exists was brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul’s imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and turns his questing eye with understanding towards the intelligible model (logos) according to which things have been made, would he not know that the one Logos is many logoi? This is evident in the incomparable differences among created things. For each is unmistakeably unique in itself and its identity remains distinct [“without confusion,” using the Chalcedonian word asungchutos] in relation to other things. He will also know that the many logoi are the one Logos to whom all things are related and who exists in himself without confusion, the essential and individually distinctive God, the Logos of God the Father.28

Creatures require the diversity that the Spirit rejoices to evoke. Multiplication lies always in God’s hand, so that the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, the fruit of the virgin’s womb, the diversity of the natural world, and God’s husbandry alongside (para) nature in grafting the wild olive onto the domestic does not overturn nature but parallels, diversifies, and celebrates it.29 The Spirit’s transformation of the elements of a sacrament just makes a special case of the Spirit’s rule over all of God’s creation.

But what kind of diversity or otherness does the Spirit evoke? Or what kind of logoi participate in the Logos? Serious majority opinion in earlier ages hardly regarded the sort of diversity represented by sexual minorities as the work of the Spirit or the logoi in the Logos. Yet it is not at all clear that such a determination follows. Conservatives will suppose that by referring to the diversity of creation I am begging the question. And yet, if the earth is to bring forth not according to its kind, more dirt, but creatures different from dirt and from each other; and if bodily differences among creatures are to manifest a plenum in which God leaves no niche unfilled; then the burden of proof lies on the other side, and weighs heavily, to show that one of God’s existing things somehow cannot do its part in communicating and exhibiting God’s goodness.

What controls such diversity? Conservatives and liberals would agree that the Holy Spirit would evoke only a holy diversity, ordered to the good, bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit, faith, hope, and charity. Since no human beings practice faith, hope, and charity on their own, but only in community, it is hard to argue for leaving lesbian and gay people out of social arrangements that alone train those virtues. In the words of Gregory of Nazianzus from which Maximus develops his theory of logoi in the Logos, God intends individual human limitations for our good. So too then the limitations pointed out against same-sex couples, or for that matter against cross-sex couples: Their “very limitations are a form of training” in sharing the good. The trick is to turn manifold created limits (as between those who can bear children and who can adopt them) toward the appreciation of others, so that the human being “in the future age when graced with divinization . . . will affectionately love and cleave to the logoi,… or rather, that one will love God’s own self, in whom the logoi of beautiful things are securely grounded.”30 Differences are meant to make us yearn for and love one another as beautiful. “The life of the Christian community has as its rationale—it not invariably its practical reality—the task of teaching us to so order our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy.”31

Specifically, the Spirit illuminates the goods she sanctifies, so that human beings may come, over time, to recognize them. Properly formed members of the community can discern the Spirit at work, because they can recognize characters in stories by narration. What controls the diversity worked by the Spirit? Particular narratives with moral content enabling community members to recognize her at work.

In the signal narrative of blessing diversity, God promises Abraham that by him all the nations of the earth will become blessings to one another (Genesis 18:18). The promise to Abraham interprets “otherness” as primarily moral, in the sense that God makes the other the one that sanctifies, God identifies otherness as intended for blessing.32 Under conditions of sin, otherness can lead to curse rather than blessing, to hostility rather than hospitality; certainly there has been enough cursing and hostility to go around in the sexuality debates. But God created otherness for blessing and hospitality. So the Eucharist turns the story of a violently hostile dealing of death into a hospitably blessing granting of life: You can’t take my body, Jesus says: I give it to you.

In the best traditional Christian exegesis, human otherness reflects Trinitarian otherness. Human beings image God by loving one another (1 John 4:7-12). So interpreters as different as Augustine, Calvin, and the Orthodox take the three visitors to Abraham in Genesis 18 as the persons of the Trinity. There the blessing of otherness fosters hospitality and thanksgiving, so that Christians see eucharistic overtones. The hospitality of Abraham, like the Eucharist, anticipates the eschatalogical feast, the wedding of the Lamb, where human beings take part in the Trinitarian life. Three persons in communion, one who blesses, one who receives blessing, and one who delights in their mutual blessing, the Trinity both grounds and draws in created distinctions.33

In concrete liturgical practices like the Eucharist, human participation in the trinitarian life does not bypass but involves the body. For large sectors of multiple Christian traditions, blessing does not float overhead but brings sanctification through particular practices of asceticism, a discipline or training through which lesser goods serve greater ones. This is no bizarre, antiquated Christian weirdness, but something in which American society already deeply if sometimes mistakenly invests: dieting and working out at the gym also discipline the body for spiritual benefits. Indeed, they do so for the greatest of these, love. Surely there are more effective disciplines than those.

Sanctification, to reflect trinitarian holiness, must involve community. It does not happen alone. It involves commitments to a community from which one can’t easily escape, whether monastic, nuptial, or congregational. Even hermits and solitaries tend to follow the liturgy, the community’s prayer. The solitude of the first hermit, Anthony the Great, brought him the gift of sociality, drawing people to him, because his “heart had achieved total transparency to others.”34 Symeon the Stylite retreated from society to the top of a pillar—which drew a church around him with him on his pillar at the crossing.35

But sanctification is a community matter also in traditions not thought of as particularly ascetic. So Karl Barth interprets the creation of the human being in the image of God as Mitmenschlichkeit, co-humanity.36 The Catholic tradition after Aquinas tends to interpret sanctification with metaphors of Aristotelian friendship, in which the purpose of friends is to make one better.37 In multiple Christian traditions, sanctification necessarily involves others.

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20. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1, 318. (return)

21. Evdokimov, Sacrament of Love, pp. 16-43. For this use of Evdokimov, cf. Sexuality and the Christian Body, pp. 67-86. (return)

22. Jeffrey Stout, “How Charity Transcends the Culture Wars: Eugene Rogers and Others on Same-Sex Marriage,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003): 169-80; here, 173-74. (return)

23. Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” in Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., ed., Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 309-21; here, 317. (return)

24. Contrary to reviewers who have supposed that any means must be a means only. (return)

25. For more on this topic, see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). (return)

26. These two sentences come from “Nature with Water and the Spirit,” p. 99, and depend on Sergei. Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 65-66; the exegesis can stand even without the conceptual context. (return)

27. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I. 47.1. For commentary see recently Willis Jenkins, “Biodiversity and Salvation: Thomistic Roots for Environmental Ethics,” Journal of Religion 83 (2003): 401-420. (return)

28. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7: On the Beginning and End of Rational Creatures, in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), pp. 45-74; here, p. 54. Greek, PG 91:1068D-1101C. For commentary see Polycarp Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua of Saint Maximus the Confessor and His Refutation of Origenism,Studia Anselmiana 36 (Rome: Herder, 1955), pp. 155-80. (return)

29. This sentence comes from “With Water and the Spirit,” pp. 99-100. Among human beings, this diversity does not yield a common vocation for gay and lesbian people as a group, but one that demands discernment by each person if it is not to be washed out. So John of the Cross counsels the discernment of loves, if recent research is correct; see Christopher Hinkle, “A Delicate Knowledge: Epistemology, Homosexuality, and St. John of the Cross,” Modern Theology 17 (2001): 427-440; here, p. 436; for a critique of more prescriptive readings of John, see Sarah Coakley, “Traditions of Spiritual Guidance” in her Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 40-54. The vocation to sanctification, even on Catholic accounts, depends on individual discernment, so that it does not follow that homosexually oriented Catholics ipso facto have a call to priestly or religious celibacy. (return)

30. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, pp. 59-60, pronouns modified. (return)

31. Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” p. 312. (return)

32. Kendall Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 25-54. (return)

33. I owe this way of putting the matter to a similar formulation in Soulen. (return)

34. Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 225-6, citing Athanasius, Life of Anthony 67. (return)

35. Susan Harvey, “The Stylite’s Liturgy: Ritual and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 523-39. (return)

36. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III, part-vol. 4 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961). (return)

37. Nichomachean Ethics IX.12, 1172a11-14, John 15:15. (return)