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.

If you’re trying to be celibate, it’s problematic because you want it and you’re not letting yourself have it. This is actually an extremely simple problem. Not easy, but simple.

If you’re married, it’s potentially problematic for a whole host of other, far more complicated and difficult reasons — perhaps because you want to have sex with people other than your partner or your partner wants to have sex with other people than you (or both); perhaps because you have “impermissible” or troubling sexual fantasies of various kinds; perhaps because you and your partner have mismatched sex drives; perhaps because neither of you wants sex with the other enough; perhaps because you want it but circumstances (work, health, children) make it difficult; perhaps because you have practical or psychological reasons to fear childbirth and child-rearing.

If you’re not married or otherwise partnered, it’s problematic even if you don’t have moral qualms about casual sex, because you very likely want more of it than you can get, or want it with people who don’t reciprocate your desire, or want sex within a committed relationship and for one reason or another can’t make one happen.

Sex is very literally a hot mess. I always laugh at the celibates who imagine that the only problems come from the fact that we non-celibates want sex too much. Believe me, I want to tell them, the problems for married people are generally much more about not wanting it enough. But this is a symptom of the entire issue that I want to bring to light here. This touches on the global way in which religion and spiritual life are presented to us by a Church whose piety and praxis have been wholly formed by celibates.

When it comes to teaching on sex — and I mean specifically teaching on sex, not on marriage — the teachers held up by the Church as the normative guides to spiritual life, the ones who are supposed to instruct us in what it means to “work out our salvation,” have nothing positive to say. Why? Because all of them are celibates, that is, because all of them have chosen a particular strategy with regard to the character of sex as a “hot mess” — they’ve renounced it. What a gloriously simple solution! All the complexity is gone with that No. All the work is gone, apart from a perpetual, lifelong effort to subdue and sublimate, a perpetual, singular struggle with a secret temptation.

Do I find that effort impressive? I do not. In an adult, I find it autistic and lazy. It is “impressive” in the way a man-child’s collection of Star Wars memorabilia is impressive. “Astounding — you’ve succeeded in a pointless task that required a yearslong, unflagging effort not to feel the direct and indirect self-harm you’ve inflicted by your avoidance of real life.”

Is it indeed pointless, this lifelong rejection of sex? Well, in itself, what is the point, please tell me? Whatever inward achievements of soul might occur, they’ve occurred at the cost of cutting off communion of the most fundamental kind with other human beings and the world. In itself, what is the point — what does it achieve? There is no way to answer this except to claim that sex in itself is an evil and an imperfection. Now certainly as I said quite clearly above, sex is surrounded with all kinds of complications and dreadful difficulties. So is agriculture. So is painting and writing poetry. So is childrearing. So is architecture, so is actual conflict resolution, so is urban planning. So is the entire actual life of human beings in the world.

We are surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses” who, whatever their protestations, whatever the post hoc theology, pursued a way of life whose fundamental strategy was avoidance and rejection of sex, and whose whole praxis surrounding sex consists of managing an imperious drive which they refused. They were generally obsessed with sex far more than non-celibates. It is the perpetual unspoken secret subtext of the life-way that they offer. And they invite us to share it — by proposing all sorts of ways in which we worldlings too might share in their silent self-torment: even if not absolutely, since we do indulge from time to time, then at least partially. They cast their veil over our hearts. We accept them as spiritual teachers, and they become not the servants of our joy but the masters of our self-doubt.

Now: if only I could simply remove this part of their teaching and praxis, and take the rest! If only I could listen, for example, to their teaching on humility… but wait a moment. In the Discourses of Dorotheos of Gaza, the saint tells us that

Before anything else we need humility: a being ready to listen whenever a word is spoken to us, and to say, “I submit.”

Here, the same ascetic simplification is at work that is at work in the complete renunciation of sex. Rather than participate in a generative, fruitful, delightful, painful, confusing, confounding, infinitely complex and infinitely rich reality that demands our utmost attention and discernment and constant, laborious learning — that is, rather than participate in dialogue and relationship with other human beings — we are to hear, and submit. The saint’s solution to the vast, thoroughly intractable reality of relationship is to find a way to make ourselves not exist.

What cowardice, masquerading as virtue!

How can I take this submission as a rule in a world where I have jobs to do — jobs, by the way, that I believe God gave me, and that I embrace joyfully? What would it mean to “submit” when a word is spoken to me (screamed at me?) by a child having a tantrum, or by a subordinate who is shirking the work he needs to do for the team to reach its goals, or by a soldier whose carelessness is putting the platoon in mortal danger? Or, for that matter, to submit when the world — including perhaps members of my own family — wants to pull me away from an artistic endeavor to which the depth of my soul calls me, so that I can sweat my life away in manual labor?

Follow this problem out through the entire self-effacing “morality” that is proposed to us by the monastic asceticism that has sexual renunciation as its root and its “glory.” It is a morality that solves every problem of real-life aspiration, difficulty, and responsibility by counseling that we cease to exist. I think this is an autistic way of understanding the Lord’s saying that we should take up our Cross, that we should lay down our life for our brother, that we should lose our life in order to find it in Him. It represents a kind of adolescent narcissism and a refusal of human maturity.

In the end, it is predicated on fear and despair: I can’t do it, so I won’t try. The heroic and human attitude is, I may not be able to do it, but I will die trying.

This, by the way, is love greater than fear. A love that ventures, instead of refusing everything that seems impossible (such as grappling with the hot mess of sex rather than escaping it by refusing it completely) and hiding away in self-effacement — a self-effacement that so often ends up being just a thin layer on top of resentment, and a resentment that often ends up silently becoming a self-justification for genuinely evil and perverse acts.

An even deeper problem is that this entire issue cuts into the very reverence I have for the Church itself. I’ve written a great deal about the love I have for the saints, and how this love is the first tie that binds me to the Church. Well: this cloud of witnesses is almost entirely comprised of monks and nuns. Early on, and in terrible times under the yokes of Islam and godless Communism, it was also comprised of martyrs, and scattered here and there are some pious kings and queens, a few warriors, and, thanks be to God, a small handful of normal layfolk. But in general, the instinct that is inculcated in all situations of theological doubt is, Find a holy ascetic saint, see what they said on this matter, and trust it.

Listen: it’s better than trusting someone just because they can spin an eloquent and convincing theological yarn, which is the alternative that seems to be most common. But the trouble is that once I have seen the rotten root of ascetic piety — the spiritual escapism that dresses itself up in a false and deceptive podvig — the Church’s whole system of counsel comes into question.

“What then shall I do?”

“Abba, give me a word!”

How I wish the shelves of normative Orthodox teaching were taken up with the treasured sayings of men and women who lived in the world, who built businesses, who led armies, who made paintings and sculptures and symphonies and great monuments, who raised families, who learned skills and crafts, who asserted themselves boldly for the sake of the common good, who delighted in the pleasures of life, who laughed and ate and drank heartily, who traveled and marveled at the depths of nature and of human history, who were passionate lovers, whose thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, who wept and dreamed — who engaged not in the ascetic effort of self-abnegation but in an Orphic podvig drawing inspiration up from the mysterious, fathomless depths of their hearts where they are in dialogue with the Living God.

But the Church will not present them to me. The Church will not sing them. The Church will not offer their icons to me to venerate.

So I am left to find them for myself.

Give me Goethe, and Nietzsche, and Rilke, and Beethoven. Give me Beowulf and Roland and Aragorn and Elrond and Gandalf, Ilya Muromets and Dobrynya Nikitich; Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Baudelaire and Rabelais and Montaigne; Blake, Whitman, Joyce, Lawrence, Milosz; Bukharev, Berdyaev, Sergius Bulgakov, Florensky; Mahler, Wagner, Stravinsky, Rakhmaninov, Satie; Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Marc Chagall, Magritte, Renoir; Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Péguy; Alexander, Joan of Arc, Lincoln, Lee, Washington, De Gaulle; Marco Polo, Shackleton, Magellan, Ibn Battuta; Ben Franklin and Robert Owen; Edison, Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell; Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Marie Curie; Einstein and Bohr and Bohm; Florence Nightingale and William Wilberforce.

Give me a menologion of the saints of the world! And give me determination to find the holiness in each of them, in spite of whatever hot mess may surround it.