Reflections on Marriage

Few issues are as explosive in our society as those involving gender, sexuality and marriage. The Orthodox Christian addresses these issues within the framework of the Church’s self- understanding as the Bride of Christ. Whether the issue at hand is gender identity, sexual freedom or roles, or homosexual marriage, the answer lies in the great mystery: Christ and the Church.
The peoples of the ancient world frequently allowed sexual promiscuity, indulged in gender-bending, and thought nothing of homosexual behavior. Israel, however, stood alone in rejecting these practices. The reason for this lies in God’s revelation of Himself as being radically distinct from His creation. Later, in Christ, the true nature of marriage was revealed as a way of unity with one another and with God.

The world was created ex nihilo—out of nothing. Between the being of God and the being of the world there is an irreducible gulf. The world is not God, has never been God, and will never be God. The fact that God has united creation to Himself in the Incarnation in no way destroys the distinction between the Uncreated and the created. In Christ we participate in the uncreated grace of God, becoming by that grace what He is by nature, yet we never cease being creatures; our created nature is never transformed into the divine nature.

This difference between God and the world is expressed iconically by the disexuality of human nature. In the Divine Scriptures, God is always represented by the male and creation by expressed in marriage... the female. God is the Bridegroom, and the world—or more precisely, the Church, which is the world recreated in Christ—is the Bride.1 God could have created human beings as a single sex with an asexual reproductive system. He could have created human beings as bisexual. However, He chose to make human nature disexual: So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them (Genesis 1:27). The difference between the male and female reflects the difference between the uncreated God and the created world.

The unity between God and creation is expressed iconically by the Mystery of Marriage, which existed from the very moment of man’s creation. The male images forth God and the female the world. This iconic relationship is expressed in marriage in the proper relationship between husband and wife. This is not a declaration of male superiority. While the husband is the head of the household, this is a position of responsibility and self-sacrifice, and it is relational, communal, not fiat. The wife subjugates her will to the husband, and the husband subjugates his will to the good of the family. In this way the egoism of both partners is overcome. Both learn to live in and with and for the other, experiencing in this life a foretaste of the eternal Trinitarian communion.

At the Fall, man subverted the divine order of creation. By eating of the fruit, man, as creation, tried to usurp God’s place, thereby being the first in a long line to attempt to subvert the disexuality of human nature and its iconic expression of creation’s relation and difference to God. Marriage, as God created it, was also a victim.

Let’s look more closely at these two iconic images and their distortions.

The inherent disexuality of human nature and its iconic relationship to Christ and the Church explains the Church’s attitude toward homosexual desire and marriage. Notice the context in which St. Paul addresses this issue:

‘Who changed the truth of God into the lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, Who is blessed forever. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet’ (Romans 1:25-27).

For St. Paul, homosexual desire is not only a result of the Fall, it is actually paradigmatic of the Fall, much in the same way that marriage is paradigmatic of Christ’s saving relationship to the Church. It is clear, therefore, that the Church cannot bless homosexual activity or same-sex marriage. Human sexuality can be rightly expressed only in Holy Matrimony between a man and a woman, or in celibacy.

In Christ the true nature of marriage is revealed; marriage, as an experience of communion with God and with one’s spouse, is an end in and of itself. To understand this, however, we must first understand the nature and purpose of man’s sexual drive.

Among the natural faculties or energies of man is the erotic power, the power of sexual desire. In the animal kingdom this desire guarantees the survival of the species. In human beings, however, this desire is related directly to the realization of the image of God within us. Archimandrite George writes:

‘But what—more than anything else— manifests the imprint of God on the human soul is the power of desire (eros) within the soul...and the impetus which a sanctified eros lends the soul in its movement towards its divine archetype. The Saints, especially Maximus the Confessor and Dionysius the Areopagite, understand this power of eroticism as not referring simply to human sexual desire. To put it better, the sexual urge is an expression of that natural yearning which is implanted within us by our Creator, and leads us toward Him’ (The Eros of Repentance, pp. 2-3).

Thus, according to the Holy Fathers, our sexual desire is but a manifestation of the deeper desire of the soul for union with God. The Song of Songs is an erotic poem that was accepted into the canon of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures precisely because human eros is fundamentally a thirst for the divine. The human soul longs to say of her God: My Beloved is mine, and I am His (Song of Songs 2:16).

When man fell, his natural energies became corrupted. We do not experience sexuality as God created it, but as a passion that rules our life. We are so used to this situation that we have come to consider our deviancies as normal.

Sexual passion is one of the primary expressions of fallen man’s egoism. Sex becomes a tool by which we gain dominance over others. Through the eyes of lust, others cease to be personal subjects—bearers of the divine image— and become objects of our inordinate desires. We perceive ourselves, individually, to be the center of the universe. All others exist in order to fulfill our desires.

It is significant that before the Fall Adam and Eve had no knowledge of their nakedness: And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Genesis 2:25). It was not until their transgression that they realized they had no clothes. What happened? They ceased to look upon one another with that purity of vision with which they were originally created. The other became an object of lust.

Our sexual drive was given to us by God and is good by nature; it is the misuse of that desire that is sinful. There are two ways whereby our erotic energies are sanctified and returned to their proper state: celibacy and marriage. A purpose of Christian marriage is to focus our sexual energies on one person as long as we live. We should not think of marriage as the ‘legalization’ of a desire that is otherwise sinful. Rather, we must understand the positive, transformative power of marriage. What is more, that relationship is suppose to uphold the iconic expression of our disexuality—the dual realities of our difference from God and of our unity with God.

It has been said in recent times that man is not naturally either monogamous nor heterosexual. This, of course, is a misuse of the term natural. What we often consider ‘natural’ is the state of fallen or sub-nature. Indeed, it is difficult for fallen man to be monogamous, and sometimes to be heterosexual. Through the Mystery of Holy Matrimony, however, divine grace is given to the couple that their marriage may be a means of returning to what is truly natural and in accord with God’s purpose for our creation. Marriage, then, is an iconic transformation of our sexual desires.

More than this, though: marriage is an iconic transformation of our relationship with God. The order that was subverted at the Fall is re-ordered in our lives. A pure marriage reinstitutes the relationships between male and female and between man and God as they were before the Fall. The couple now iconically images both the distinction between God and His creation, and the communion creation can have with its God and Creator. This ‘iconic’ role is not pretty imagery to whitewash our ‘Christian’ concept of gender relations. Man’s desire, his eros, is now directed back toward God, where it is meant to be pointing.

All that has been said thus far is merely an analytical description of the Church’s biblical understanding of marriage: in terms of Creation, Fall, sexuality and Salvation. I readily admit its shortcomings. The Mystery of Marriage is most truly communicated in living it out before God and one another. Our daily attempts to overcome self-will, to tame our passions, to love one another as Christ has loved us—these are the means of our powerfully redirecting our eros; these are the ways men and women heal the relationship creation has with its Creator; these are the deep and significant assertions of our creatureliness and yet of our communion with God and with one another.
- Fr. Matthew

 1. God, of course, is neither male nor female; He is beyond all such created concepts. Nevertheless, He has given us certain images and concepts whereby we have come to know Him. Though these concepts can never fully describe or define the indescribable God, we are nonetheless bound by them.