"The Sacrament of Love"
Olivier Clément
Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Corps de mort et de gloire: Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995
Author’s note: The title, a phrase from St. John Chrysostom, refers to a major work by Paul Evdokimov. [See The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel and Victoria Steadman (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985).]
Nowadays, many young people — and often the most demanding among them — say: We’re going to live together. Why should we get married legally or religiously? Why involve institutions in what is our private affair? And how can we commit to always living together when each of us will change, and life today is so long?
One might reply that legal marriage affirms a social reality (and the relationship of “cohabitation,” as it is now euphemistically termed, is no longer outside this scope). But more importantly, the sacrament of marriage, when consciously desired, is not about the Church as an institution but as a “mystery of life.” It is, properly speaking, something mystical. It only makes sense in faith in Christ and the Gospel, in the certainty that Christ’s actions, as described in the Gospels, continue within the Church (and this is precisely what the sacraments are), and that even today, Jesus can turn water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana.
We recall that episode (John 2:1–12), which is read in the Byzantine wedding liturgy. Between the hesitant God-man and the perhaps banal celebration of human love, it is Mary who serves as intermediary, with those “bowels of mercy,” in the sense of a womb, that Scripture attributes even to God. She is the one who secures the miracle. A nearly Dionysian miracle, for it allows already-merry guests to drink and drink again a wine beyond compare, to reach another kind of intoxication. Here, human love is elevated to mystical incandescence, and it is no accident that in the Orthodox rite the spouses drink from the same cup.
To approach young people with a moralizing discourse on sexuality, within a framework of “permitted” and “forbidden,” when they aren’t even sure they believe in God: this is not merely absurd, it is criminal. It may, in fact, create in them an enduring distance from God, Christ, and the Church. The first task is evangelization. One must — if possible, and without coercion, even if subtle — help them sense that we are not orphans, shivering in a senseless world, hoping for nothing more than the warm flesh of another, like a child nestling against its mother. This is what Dostoevsky suggested so brilliantly in Versilov’s dream,1 where we see men, finally “freed” from God but surrounded by the night, huddling together in desperation — evoking the crudely blasphemous slogan of May 1968, “Love one another on top of each other.” We must also help them sense eternity in the splendor and simplicity of life, as at Cana — or when Jesus had the crowds sit on the grass to feed them with bread and fish, or when he kindled a fire to grill fish and share it with his friends on the lake’s shore… Jesus welcomes, prefers, loves each person, and each as he is — to give him consistency and responsibility, just as he loved the wayward women: the Samaritan and the prostitute who bathed his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.
And indeed, returning to our young people: if their hearts turn, if they approach Christ and then the Church, not through sociological tradition but through a hunger for the Word and Eucharistic Presence, if they reach a certain spiritual maturity and intensity of life, then one may speak to them of chastity — that is, the integration of eros into tenderness — as a goal to be reached gradually, without dramatizing their momentary wanderings, without crystallizing the notion of sin around sexuality, while we remain indifferent to far graver deviations. Recall the three temptations Jesus overcame in the desert — temptations that still threaten us, and the clergy especially!
Yet there are also young people (and sometimes older ones) who know nothing of God as the source of life, nor of the Church as the threshold to His mystery, and who nevertheless love each other with passion, innocence, and genuine purity, where sexuality has no autonomy, whereas in others it can take on its most sordid form: porneia, as in those wounded by promiscuity, driven by a dull hatred, and yet duly married in church and city hall. True love, with something eternally adolescent, can be a privileged site of evangelization. It is often a spiritual experience “in the wild,” an intimation of unity in difference, a passionate desire that the other might exist — and exist beyond death — yes, that love be strong as death…
From there, perhaps we can speak to them of Christ’s victory over the void, and that our God, in His “immobile movement of love,” is the hidden source of all true encounter, the implicit place of every communion into which they enter. Perhaps then we can help these two people — young or not-so-young, often uncertain, sometimes still emotionally fragile (as a poet put it: “they don’t meet, they blend”) — to see each other differently, to free themselves from a too-fused bond, and to become truly responsible for each other, in hope, and perhaps already in the experience of resurrection in the glory of the body. Only if we can show the young (and the less young) the sacramentality of their love can we help them understand the sacrament of marriage. For the sacrament reveals, confirms, blesses, and opens onto non-death — the already-glimpsed mystery. If the Song of Songs is a hymn to love — both affectionate and erotic — symbolizing the union of God with His people, or of God with the soul, then human love, both loving and erotic, has something to do with God. For many, it remains one of the only mystical experiences they may have in this life.
In its wedding liturgy, the Orthodox Church reads a long passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians (5:21–33) that shocks modern ears: it speaks not of mutuality, but only says that the husband should love his wife and the wife reverence her husband. The social context of the time explains this apparent asymmetry. In a major port city like Ephesus, the man, working and roaming outside the home, was exposed to countless temptations; thus he is told to love his wife. The woman, who rarely left the house but ruled the household completely, tended to infantilize her husband when he returned — and so she is told to respect him! Yet elsewhere, the apostle asserts that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28), and that though woman came from man, man is born of woman, and both are equal and united in the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:11).
If the Orthodox Church retains this passage — which surely calls for interpretation (or perhaps an inclusive rewording) — it is because it unites, seamlessly, the mystery of human love with that of baptism, and more broadly, with the relationship of Christ and the Church: “This is a great mystery — but I speak concerning Christ and the Church” (v. 32), that immense bond between God and the earth.
That bond, that divine-human love, precedes ours, grounds it, and renews it. It is as though we live upon the surface of an infinite depth of love. “All great love,” said Paul Evdokimov, “is necessarily crucified.” But through this cross — this death to self for the sake of the other, this sacrificial acceptance (the word forgiveness may seem indecent) — the slag is burned away, the crust of habit and routine is shattered, and we let rise to the surface that inexhaustible depth which renews our poor, faltering tenderness. Sometimes a detail suffices — a facial expression, a verbal tic, the memory of a peaceful moment — to break open our heart and let us feel again that the other exists.
This is how fidelity becomes possible. The sacrament — that is, entry into the light of resurrection — helps me rediscover the other’s true face. It deepens in me, and stabilizes, the unique grace of having perceived the other as a revelation — the radiance of a secret sometimes hidden, sometimes revealed, always beyond; the more known, the more unknown. So in the other who changes, if I also love the change, if I refuse to imprison destiny, I glimpse the one who does not change. I glimpse his or her icon, vocation — as though God invites me to share in His eternal love for that person, in the call He has addressed to them from all eternity. Then the other exists for me not only in the time of death and discontinuity, but also in the resurrected time where one ripens as a strange fruit of immortality. To be faithful is to rediscover within oneself a revelation that no one else can receive.
Great, of course, are the difficulties. One cannot rest in feeling alone, forgetting will — or better, the act of faith, the given word — for neither partner is always “lovable” in the strong sense. There is an asceticism of the couple, just as in monastic life, and the goal of both is the same: to elevate the person beyond disordered nature, beyond impersonal sexuality, above all beyond the aggressive indifference of souls. That is why monasticism — if not dualistic, totalitarian, or humbly proud — can greatly aid those called to the path of human love.
Thus a man, a woman, a couple: they are built through many departures and returns, deserts where only the “committed faith” remains, and suddenly — renewed tenderness, love full of humor, more stable, more stripped down.
Sometimes, however, failure is irreparable, and the Orthodox Church acknowledges this (I know the Catholic position is different): there has been lasting porneia, as Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel — not merely adultery, but an objectification, a redefinition of sexuality, when a man and woman can embrace in indifference, even hatred, or thinking of someone else — a personal drift beyond repair. They have failed to respond to the “mystery” the Church offered them. Flesh becomes hell, the couple a place of mutual destruction. Orthodoxy does not accept divorce, but it can understand and forgive it. Discernment belongs to the spiritual father and bishop. Canonically, only the wronged spouse could remarry, but this rule has fallen into disuse, since blame is often impossible to measure. So former spouses are often readmitted to communion, and a second, even a third union may be blessed (though a fourth, says one Father of the Church, would be “fit for swine”) in a penitential rite.
From generation to generation, however, many couples have humbly lived the paradise blessing renewed by Jesus: the man and woman shall leave father and mother and “the two shall become one flesh.” So many homes have been, and are, places of peace and light, that “nucleus of love” that a child barely knows how to name.
In true love, there must be reverence and vow — one could almost say, in Italian, devozione. Reverence, because I know the other is not mine, and in this way I overcome what might remain of possessiveness in the erotic act. Each must hold within — and respect in the other — that inner monastic cell where the “one meets the One.” Faithful love requires this good distance.
Thus devozione: before God, to vow to live, even to die, so the other may exist. The vow’s demand, beyond shifting emotion, beyond zigzagging sentimentality. “I thought I could count on you.” “Of course. But that meant I’d always tell you the truth. And today the truth is I don’t love you anymore.” A familiar tragicomic dialogue. A little bad psychoanalysis will soon convince one that he (or she) is homosexual! Against this, the vow — its severity, perhaps for oneself — and ultimately, its fruitfulness: for true peace arises…
Then, desire and tenderness gradually align — to borrow the title of a beautiful book by Éric Fuchs.2 Neither flight from pleasure (Drewermann — though should we take him seriously? — recounts that in bourgeois Catholic Germany, women would say the rosary during “love-making”3), for our God is no sadist who delights in our deprivation of joy, nor pursuit of pleasure as drug, but a “liturgy of the body,” a festival of life, a shared radiance.
And this is the true chastity of human love. Not continence — though continence is sometimes useful, recommended by the Church during fasts, highlighting distance, prohibition, the disruption of habit — but, again, the integration of desire into a real encounter, inseparable from sexuality, so that, despite modern obsession, it becomes impossible to speak of “sexuality” in the usual sense. Each person learns that the other is in the image of God — and their love too, even in its bodily expression.
The child is not the goal or justification of love — love needs no justification — but is born of its superabundance. Rarely do a man and a woman who truly love each other not one day say: I want to have a child with you. The Gospel is not tender toward the family: “Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise up against their parents and cause them to be put to death” (Matthew 10:21). “I came not to bring peace but a sword… a man against his father, a daughter against her mother…” (Mt 10:35). And then, the erasure of the possessive pronoun — my father, my mother, my son, my daughter (Mt 10:37) — because true love, in Christ, is dispossessing. Jesus quotes Genesis on man and woman becoming “one flesh,” but omits “be fruitful and multiply.” Yet he is infinitely tender toward persons: he gives a widow back her son, a ruler his daughter; he lets little children come to him; he celebrates the joy of a woman who has just given birth. The evangelical revolution places, before all law, the person, and the communion of persons. Before even the family and lineage as they then existed in the Holy Land. “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt 12:50). It is in this light that the “sacrament of love” and the mystery of the child are to be understood.
A reference to Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2004).
Éric Fuchs, Le désir et la tendresse (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1979).
Eugen Drewermann, Fonctionnaires de Dieu: Psychogramme d’un idéal (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 459.