Sex and Sanctity

Trigger Warning: This Gets Spicy

I recently returned to the Desert Fathers after a long absence. It was a trajectory that drew me back into a very simple-hearted faith. I had an insight into the reality of God’s providence in my life, over and against all theological speculation; I felt where God had been with me even in my failures, bringing great good out of them. I stepped back from my usual reading into the simpler things that some part of me knows are close to the “one thing needful” — the Psalms, St John of Kronstadt’s My Life In Christ, the Discourses of Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, and then back to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

If you don’t know these, they’re the record, treasured by Orthodox and Catholic monastics and layfolk for nearly 2,000 years, of the brief teachings, in word and deed, of the first ascetics who fled Christianity’s “success” in the third and fourth centuries and went to live in the wilderness. The age of martyrdom was over, and the Spirit inspired men and women to find a new way of living out the Gospel’s impossibly radical demands in solitude and spiritual warfare in the remote deserts of Egypt and Syria. You must read them to get a taste of them; it might revise your whole opinion of what Christianity is.

Some call these sayings Christian koans, but they are not that; they are too saturated in Christian caritas. By turns, they shock with revulsion and with the recognition of undeniable truth manifested in a superhuman love that reveals precisely what it ought to mean to be human — what we have sunk beneath. They convict, they offend, they set the heart on fire. Perhaps they are the most direct existential evidence of the perfect continuity between the Gospel and the ancient church. And since they remain the foundation of Orthodox monasticism and piety, a concentrated expression of the fragrance that permeates the whole of Orthodox spiritual life, they are evidence (to the one whose heart is open to it) that the Orthodox Church lives in direct spiritual continuity with the Gospel and the desert. This evidence precedes and exceeds all doctrinal disputation and in a way renders it irrelevant. There is a golden thread connecting the Gospel, the Desert Fathers, the saints of Russia’s “northern Thebaid,” the triumph of the New Martyrs, and the teaching of contemporary saints.

OK, that was my encomium to the Desert Fathers and to all the ascetic saints of Orthodoxy. (See, I am not just a hater: I love my Church.) Now comes the difficult part.

I want to be as honest and straightforward as I can be.

As I started to assemble a reading list for myself, I remembered St John Cassian, the man who more than any other transmitted desert spirituality and monastic life to the west (he was born more than a century before St Benedict). In browsing his Institutes, I came upon the (in)famous sixth chapter, which the bashful Victorian editors of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series declined to translate. A sample:

When the thought of the feminine sex first creeps up on our mind through the subtle suggestions of the crafty demon, beginning with the recollection of our mother, sisters, relatives or of certain pious women, we should hasten to drive it out of our inner being. If we were to linger over it, the tempter might take the occasion to make us gradually think of other women and so introduce evil thoughts. That is why we must carefully remember this precept: “Guard your heart with all vigilance.” We should observe according to God’s chief commandment the deadly head of the serpent. It is the principle of evil thoughts, by which the devil tries to creep into our soul. Nor should we negligently allow the rest of his body to penetrate into our heart, that is, by assenting to temptation. If allowed in, it will doubtless destroy the captive mind with its virulent bite.

(What follows is a transparent expression of my visceral reaction to this world of ascetic “piety.” I suspect that many ascetics would have expressed themselves in similar terms if they were honest about their reactions to sex, but few — Tertullian was one, perhaps — would be so straightforward.)

I despair of specifying all the ways in which I find this teaching so profoundly, monstrously perverted (later, St John spends some time discussing how often a monk might have a nocturnal emission without its indicating something amiss in his spiritual life — apparently two months is a good heuristic). I find it so in itself, though really, it’s none of my business and not my concern (except inasmuch as this culture of renunciation still seems to bear such evil fruit in the life of the Church, particularly since the Church is literally ruled by monastics — bishops in the Orthodox Church are monks). It’s a conversation monastics are having with each other about the difficulties of the strange way they’ve chosen to live. It feels like a technical discussion about spaceflight being carried on by professional astronauts, except much less heroic and interesting.

Sex is problematic. Everyone can agree.