Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

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СКАЧАТЬ movement” concerned to bring about a “renewed sacred space,” and Perrin argues that Jesus “and his followers self-consciously functioned as proleptic priests within that quest” (Jesus the Priest, 8; see also the summaries offered on 280–83). See also Barber, “The New Temple.”

      55. Staniloae, The Experience of God, 150.

      56. Bennett, Water Is Thicker Than Blood, 23.

      57. Hsu, Singles at the Crossroads, 46–47.

      58. Bennett argues that “[w]e, as members of the Household of God, should not imagine ourselves as separate either from being married or from being single, and we must live as both, in our lives as members of Christ’s body” (Water Is Thicker Than Blood, 128). I agree that Paul teaches that, given the need to focus on the coming of Christ in glory—given that “the form of this world is passing away”—“those who have wives” should “live as though they had none” (1 Cor 7:29, 31). But Paul does not mean this in a literal sense, since he has just stated, for example, that “[t]he husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband” (1 Cor 7:3). I do not see how married people could imagine themselves as not “separate . . . from being single,” or how a married person could actually live both as “single” and as “married.” After all, married people are in fact married, not single.

      59. John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, §45.

      60. Bennett, Water Is Thicker Than Blood, 128–29 (emphasis added). See also Otten, “Augustine on Marriage, Monasticism, and the Community of the Church.”

      61. Evdokimov, The Sacrament of Love, 73. Evdokimov delivers a rather stringent critique of Augustine and Western theologies of marriage, although he does not appear conversant with medieval (or later) adaptations of Augustine’s approach, as for example Thomas Aquinas’s. Evdokimov states, “One can see that the spring itself is muddied. Before preparing a theology from initial Biblical truths, one begins with the Fall and locks everything into the physiological, and it is from the outset that marriage appears unbalanced, marked with the wound of guilt. From this negative and prohibitive aspect, an obsession with the sexual will inevitably spring forth” (The Sacrament of Love, 25). But it seems to me that even if the Fathers (West and East) significantly overdid their critique of marital sexual intercourse, they were correct in identifying something distorted in the powerful human sexual drive (even, potentially, as it exists in marriage). Our highly pornographic culture has only confirmed their concerns.

      62. Staniloae, The Sanctifying Mysteries, 176. Staniloae’s teleological vision differs from a historicist teleology that accords no value to natures or the created order. Oliver O’Donovan well describes the latter perspective: “The heart of historicism can be expressed in the thesis that all teleology is historical teleology. The concept of an ‘end’, it is held, is essentially a concept of development in time. Nothing can have a ‘point’, unless it is a historical point; there is no point in the regularities of nature as such. What we took to be natural orderings-to-serve and orderings-to-flourish within the regularities of nature are in fact something quite different: they are orderings-to-transformation, and so break out altogether from nature’s order. The natural exists only to be superseded: everything within it serves only a supernatural end, the end of history. That may be conceived as the kingdom of heaven; it may be conceived as the communist paradise; or (as especially in liberal historicism) it may be simply an undefined term of self-justifying change, receding infinitely like the horizon as we approach it. But in each case natural order and natural meanings are understood only as moments in the historical process. They are to be dissolved and reconstituted by that process, and their value lies not in any integrity of their own but in being raw material for transformation” (Resurrection and Moral Order, 58–59). Liberal moral theology grounds itself in such purely historicist teleology; and O’Donovan’s reply is instructive: “We cannot object to the idea that history should be taken seriously. A Christian response to historicism will wish to make precisely the opposite point: when history is made the categorical matrix for all meaning and value, it cannot then be taken seriously as history” (Resurrection and Moral Order, 60). As O’Donovan goes on to say, “Creation is the given totality of order which forms the presupposition of historical existence. . . . Because created order is given, because it is secure, we dare to be certain that God will vindicate it in history” (Resurrection and Moral Order, 60–61).

      63. Staniloae, The Sanctifying Mysteries, 177. Staniloae adds, “The wife is the human being who is closest to her husband, and vice versa, and they are thus because they complement and complete one another. In his wife the husband possesses humanity in the highest possible degree of intimacy that can be reached with him, and the same is true of the wife with her husband. They are revealed completely the one to the other within a state of total sincerity; each is to the other as another ‘I,’ while remaining nevertheless a ‘thou’ who is necessary to the spouse if he or she is to reveal himself or herself. Each forgets the self, making himself or herself the ‘I’ of the other. . . . Thus each of the two spouses brings into reality the state for which he or she is yearning and realizes himself or herself as person in reciprocal communion. But this realization only comes about when their bodily love is penetrated by and submerged in a spiritual love” (The Sanctifying Mysteries, 178). Staniloae later comments with valuable realism that “prayer is offered on behalf of those who marry so that they may receive the grace of God for many purposes: the grace to be able to control the tendency to exclusively seek the satisfaction of the desires of the flesh, for this degrades each member of the couple to the status of an object of the other’s selfish passion; the grace to be able to curb any other type of selfishness or infidelity of one spouse in his or her relations with the other; the grace to strengthen the patient endurance of each when confronted with the limitations of the other; the grace to strengthen the will of each spouse to be of help to the other so that their love in Christ may grow deeper, something that is not possible unless the selfishness of each is brought under control; and finally, the grace of having children, which in itself is identical with the curbing of every kind of selfishness and with the progress of the couple toward the fullness of communion” (The Sanctifying Mysteries, 190). By contrast, see the heartbreaking work of Perel, The State of Affairs.

      64. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 81.

      65. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 85.

      66. Ratzinger [Benedict XVI], “The Sign of the Woman,” 69. See also Schindler, “Liturgy and the Integrity of Cosmic Order,” 306 (criticizing the theological perspective of Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J.): “what is risked in the idea of a partnership that is not innerly qualified by ‘handmaidenship’ is a slip into a kind of ontological ‘pelagianism’ that removes the Other-centeredness that lies at the core of, and accords the original and abiding meaning to, the creature’s rightful self-centeredness.”

      67. Von Balthasar, “The Marian Mold of the Church,” 140.

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