Marriage as a Lifetime of Suffering - Glory to God for All Things
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https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2015/05/05/marriage-as-a-lifetime-of-suffering/
Reading between the lines, you might have gathered that I’m not terribly happy with the way St. Gregory approaches the topic of marriage. I generally don’t like to set myself in opposition to the Fathers. As I noted earlier, they have to be read in a their own context. And they are not read alone. They have to be balanced, for example, with the marriage rite itself (which trumps theologically). I can pull out rather horrendous quotes from one father or another (I know of one in St. Gregory the Theologian on a different topic that I’ll not mention). The Fathers are touchstones, as is the whole life of the Church. But they should not serve as a source for a new fundamentalism. We should not do to them what they did not do to themselves or one another. They argued with each other.
I do not say this to in any way undermine anyone’s confidence in the teaching of the Orthodox Church. But we are not in a competition with Protestants or Rome. We do not have to assert that we are "more right" than someone else, or the excellence of our sources or our authorities, etc. We are Orthodox. The One Church from the beginning. We are what we are and God preserves us. Sometimes we argue. Sometimes things are utterly clear and unchangeable. But not everything is always clear.
Fr. Thomas Hopko said repeatedly that there needed to be a word for our time on the subject of male and female. He didn’t say this so suggest that the Church change anything. Rather, he said that the present-day trials surrounding gender-related issues would be (and probably already are) as great a trial as the 4th century’s battle with Arianism. Nicaea said nothing new in refuting Arianism, but it had to say what the Church had always known in a new manner so that it could be clearly taught and understood. I think the same is true of gender.
A gender-related matter of the deepest import, of course, is marriage. The Church’s teaching is clear, and yet has to be stated in a way that rightly addresses the new misunderstandings that are rising around us. Monasticism has a part in this conversation as well.
I think that it is deeply problematic to describe the conjugal union as inherently sinful. It is only "sinful" in the sense that it participates in the life of death and corruption. But this is true of everything we do. Eating, sleeping, sweating, etc. There is a dangerous point at which the critique of the "post-lapsarian" world slips into Manichaeism, an inherent disdain for the material world. Though the Manichaean heresy was largely in the West, it had some kinship with certain Platonic strains. There was in Origen’s work, a theory of a "double-creation." That is, first, a spiritual or noetic creation (paradise), and then a fall into materiality. This is obviously heretical. But there are strains of it, greatly altered into an Orthodox form, in both St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus. This strain of thought can be troublesome and has to be handled with great care.
For myself, I prefer to teach on the goodness of marriage and that the "marriage bed is undefiled." Eating, as noted earlier, also participates in death and corruption, yet God has made it the means of our salvation. When we say that something exists by "economy," we should be careful not to mean that it is "second best." We are not in competition with a theoretical pre-lapsarian world. We live in the economy of grace where things that the enemy might mean to us for evil, the Lord means to us for good. Such is His mercy!