(*)
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| Theotokos & archangel Gabriel |
This imagery is woven into the Biblical narrative of our salvation,
at least as it is related in the New Testament and preserved in the
teaching of the Orthodox Church. Christ is born of a woman, the Virgin
Mother of God (=Theotokos). And this portion of the story is not incidental to our
salvation. It is not a mere dramatic device to get the story rolling.
The story of Christ’s conception is of a piece with the whole account of
Jesus.
The story of the human fall from communion with God is a male and
female story – including the somewhat comical note of both Adam and Eve
seeking to pass the blame on to someone else. But, just as we are
created male and female, so we fall, male and female. And just as we
fall male and female, so the story of our salvation is told, male and
female.
Mary is the New or Second Eve, in the words of the Fathers. Christ is
not incarnate apart from her “yes.” Her self-emptying answer to the
angel, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to
your word,” is the New Testament counterpart to Eve’s disobedience. An
even greater role involves the very heart of her existence as woman. As
we say in the Creed, “He became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the
Virgin Mary.” The flesh, the whole of the human nature that is united
with the divine in Christ, is a gift from the Virgin. Christ’s humanity
is Mary’s gift, not a special creation within the womb.
Every woman who gives birth, gives of her humanity (just as every man
who is united to a woman gives of his humanity). To be human is to be
the gift of a man and a woman, through the mercy of God. In the case of
Christ, we confess that there is no human father. Christ is born of a
Virgin.
Our salvation, when the story is rightly told, is the work of God and
Man, the work of the God/Man Jesus Christ. As the Fathers repeatedly
said, “God became what we are that we might become what He is.” The
Orthodox account of Christianity is the story of a union: first
a union in the womb of Mary, but also a union on the Cross and a union
in the Resurrection and the Ascension. There is no genderless version of
the Christian gospel that is orthodox.
Tragically, the role of male and female has largely been removed in
contemporary versions of Christianity. In an overreaction to
Roman Catholicism, Protestant Christianity increasingly told the story
of our salvation with minimal reference to Mary. For many contemporary
Protestants, Mary’s womb is but a borrowed space, her role quite
secondary. Our salvation is related as a payment, a death that assuages
the wrath of God and allows God to see us as though we were righteous.
There is no union. Baptism becomes but a token symbol, the Eucharist a
mere memorial. The entire human story, that can only rightly be told
with reference to male and female, is transformed into a story of
contract and payment, a sexlessly neutral theological event.
This account of salvation provided the groundwork for the modern view
of humanity. Gender in the modern world is but a biological
inconvenience, something to be minimized if possible, reimagined when
necessary. What matters about human beings in the modern world is that
they produce and consume. We exist for the economy. Career trumps
child-bearing. Gender expectations and traditional roles are dismissed
as patriarchal nonsense that prevents people from fulfilling their
dreams and vocations.
This modern account of what it means to be human is deeply flawed. It
is driven by modern economics and makes being human into an
abstraction, divorced from reality. Our technology allows us to ignore
the realities of our biology – and thus to live make-believe lives. We
are able through technology to pretend that sexual intimacy is about
pleasure and self-fulfillment and not about procreation. Any account of
what it means to be human that requires the wide-spread intervention of
technology is simply delusional. It is a lie.
Orthodox priest in Mozambique reads the Gospel among the holy icons of Jesus Christ and Virgin Mary (from here)
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, procreation has been moved to the laboratory and artificial wombs. All human beings practice birth control and perceive sex as a purely recreational activity. Through a series of accidents, one of the characters is removed from this technological world and becomes pregnant. She sees this as tragic. What was once seen as science fiction has now come to resemble many aspects of our times. We are living in a fantasy novel.
The reality of the gendered account of the gospel is carried over
into the life of the Church. The Body of Christ, the Church itself, is
spoken of as the “Bride of Christ,” and its final union with Him at the
close of the age as the “Wedding Banquet.” The imagery of marriage (with
its implied conjugal union) is a primary way the Church speaks about
the human relationship with God. The relationship between a man and a
woman is not something incidental to our existence, a side-show for
pleasure, it is somehow of a piece with our complete destiny in God.
Every celebration of the Eucharist is a marriage feast, brought forth
from the Bridal Chamber.
The modern view of human beings is that we are autonomous centers of
consciousness whose choices and decisions bring about
self-actualization. Male and female have nothing to do with our
humanness in this view. Being human is about choice, decision-making,
freedom and autonomy. The givenness of gender is therefore an obstacle
to our fantasy existence. The lofty words of choice and freedom,
enshrined in the laws and philosophy of our land, are actually just
disguises for saying that we are producers and consumers.
When a human being’s ability to choose is impaired, we despair that
they have somehow lost their personhood. To produce and to shop are the
core of our being.
This modern account represents a wholesale attack on the true dignity
and worth of human beings. We become subservient to nothing more than
economic interests, a disguised way of saying “survival.” Survival is
the role of a beast, not a human being. “Man shall not live by bread
alone,” we are told.
Our salvation is a Divine/Human event. But to be Divine/Human, it
must be at least truly human. Humanity viewed as nothing more than a
survival strategy cannot be saved. “You cannot serve God and mammon.”
This directs our attention back to the truth of our existence. From
the beginning we have existed as male and female. That human beings
continue in existence is wholly dependent upon our being male and
female. There is no other way to be.
The most authoritative definition of male and female in the Tradition
is found in the work of St. Maximus the Confessor. He states that male
and female are “energies” of our human nature. That is a way of saying
that male and female are not something that exists on the level of choice – they are the very mode of our existence. Male and female are the normative expressions of our humanity.
We have become aware in modern culture, that not everyone experiences that
“mode” of existence in the same way. The reasons for this are complex.
There are certainly physical, genetic and environmental factors that
disrupt that normative expression. It must be remembered that all experience
of our humanity is, at present, tragic (tragic=fallen). There should be
no triumphalism for those whose experience is perceived as “normative.”
The Church grounds the sexual expression of our gendered mode of
existence in marriage and procreation. The wisdom of Scripture is not
rightly viewed as an uninformed, antiquated understanding of what it
means to be human. However broken male and female marriage has
been at different points of history, it remains foundational for
child-rearing and the well-being of society.
The grounding of our sexual existence in the confines of a life-long
union of man and woman is the foundation of human culture. It predates
any notion of government or the State. The many experiments with other
treatments of sexual existence have proven to be dysfunctional and
disastrous for the most fundamental tasks of our existence. If it is not
so in every instance, it is so in the aggregate. The commandments we
have in this regard are for our well-being.
The frustration of modern culture with the Christian tradition of
being human is with the limits it places on choice and freedom. We
demand that every choice we can imagine should be available for us to
realize. The Church fully and completely understands the nature of this
demand.
*****
(*)
Fr. Stephen is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, serving as Rector of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is also author of Everywhere Present and the Glory to God podcast series.Click
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