Eros, Chastity, and the Nuptial Mystery

The second half of Le Sacrement de l’amour takes up what most treatments of marriage avoid: sexuality itself. Evdokimov refuses both the puritan and the permissive account. Eros is not a concession to be regulated but a created energy to be healed and integrated; chastity is not abstinence but integrity — the wholeness of a person who loves without consuming; and the nuptial mystery has an eschatological horizon, since the couple is oriented not only to each other but to the Kingdom.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Problem He Is Solving

Evdokimov writes against two positions at once, and it is worth naming them, because his own is easy to mistake for either.

The first is the residual puritanism he found in much Christian writing on marriage — a tradition that permits sexuality on condition that it be justified by procreation, treats desire itself as a defect, and consequently makes married Christians feel that their most intimate life is at best tolerated. Evdokimov regarded this as sub-Christian and, more precisely, as a failure of the doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Word assumed a human body, the body is not the problem.

The second is the modern reduction he saw around him in postwar France — sexuality detached from person, from fidelity and from the sacred, and made a matter of technique, appetite and self-expression. He had read Freud and he had read Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949); he was not writing in ignorance of the arguments (on his engagement with Freud, Jung and de Beauvoir, see Plekon, “Paul Evdokimov,” in Witte and Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law, Cambridge, 2017, 363–380, which lists them among his influences).

Between these he places a third account: that eros is a real and good created energy, disordered by the Fall, healed by Christ, and integrated by chastity into the love of a person.

Eros Redeemed, Not Tolerated

Evdokimov’s key claim is that the relation of eros to the person is a problem of harmony, and that only Christ resolves it. In his account, since the Fall the erotic energy tends to detach itself from the person and to run on its own — to seek the sensation rather than the beloved, to reduce a person to a means. That is the specific damage sin does to sexuality; it is not the existence of desire but its depersonalization. The redemption of eros is therefore its re-personalization: desire reattached to the whole person of the other, in a bond that neither of the two can revoke. The standard summary of his position captures it: since the Fall, only Christ can truly reconcile man and woman and bring about “the harmony of Eros and the person” (secondary summaries of Le Sacrement de l’amour; Evdokimov, Le Sacrement de l’amour, 1962, chapters on love and on sexuality and nuptial chastity).

This is why he insists that the sacrament is a healing and not merely a licence. What the Church does at the crowning is not to give permission for what would otherwise be forbidden; it is to take a wounded human relation into Christ so that it can become what it was made to be.

Evdokimov also refuses to make procreation the justifying end. Children are a gift and a blessing of marriage; but if the sacrament’s matter is the love-union itself, then the union does not require justification by its fruit (see Marriage as Sacrament and Way). [Disputed: whether Evdokimov's demotion of procreation from a "primary end" of marriage to a gift and fruit of it is faithful to the tradition. (a) Evdokimov's position, and that of much modern Orthodox theology including Fr. John Meyendorff's *Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective* (1970), is that the Eastern rite and the Eastern fathers never adopted the ends-of-marriage schema of Western scholasticism, and that the union is the sacrament. (b) The objection, pressed from more traditional quarters and from Roman Catholic natural-law theology, is that this severs sexuality from its natural ordering and opens the way to a contraceptive mentality the Fathers would not have recognized. Orthodox practice on contraception remains genuinely unsettled and jurisdictionally varied; this collection does not resolve it. See [Bioethics and Contemporary Questions](../../orthodoxy/12-church-and-world/bioethics-and-contemporary-questions.md).]

Nuptial Chastity

The concept that carries the most weight in this part of the book is chastity (chasteté), and Evdokimov uses it in a sense that has almost dropped out of modern English. Chastity for him is not primarily continence and is certainly not frigidity. It is integrity: the condition of a person who is whole, undivided, not fragmented among appetites, and therefore capable of loving another as a person rather than consuming him or her as an object.

So understood, chastity is required of the married as much as of the celibate, and within marriage as much as outside it. A marriage can be unchaste. The relevant question is not whether there is sexual activity but whether there is a person on the other side of it. Evdokimov ties this directly to the vow-schema of interiorized monasticism: chastity is the second of the three vows, transposed into married life not as abstinence but as fidelity and reverence (Evdokimov, Le Sacrement de l’amour, 1962, on sexuality and nuptial chastity; “Le monachisme intériorisé,” in Le millénaire du Mont Athos, tome I, 1963; see The Three Vows and the Royal Priesthood of the Laity).

The ascetic tradition supplies him with the underlying anthropology. The Philokalia‘s teaching on the passions is not that desire is evil but that the passions are natural powers turned in the wrong direction, to be redirected rather than extinguished; apatheia in the fathers is not numbness but freedom from being driven. Evdokimov’s nuptial chastity is that doctrine applied to the marriage bed (see The Philokalia).

The Nuptial Mystery and the Kingdom

The book’s subtitle is Le mystère conjugal — the nuptial mystery — and the phrase points beyond the couple. Three eschatological themes recur.

First, the couple is not closed. A marriage turned entirely inward on itself — the égoïsme à deux — is for Evdokimov a corruption, not a fulfilment. The domestic church exists in order to open: to children, to guests, to the poor, to the Church. This is the theological form of what he was practising in the CIMADE hostels (see The Hostels and the Work of Welcome).

Second, the marriage is oriented to the Kingdom, and the Lord’s saying that in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage (Matthew 22:30) is not, for Evdokimov, the abolition of the bond but its transfiguration: what passes is the biological and social institution; what remains is the communion of persons, which is what the sacrament actually consecrated. This allows him to take seriously both the Orthodox Church’s reluctance to bless remarriage lightly and its refusal to treat marriage as a merely temporal contract.

Third, and most characteristically, the whole nuptial theme is for Evdokimov a way of speaking about God’s relation to creation. The Scriptures end with a wedding (Revelation 19:7–9, 21:2, 9); the prophets speak of God as the bridegroom of Israel (Hosea 2:19–20; Isaiah 62:5); the Song of Songs was read by the Fathers as the love of Christ and the soul, and of Christ and the Church. Human marriage is not a metaphor borrowed to illuminate this; it is a real participation in it. The couple is a small enacted parable of what God is doing with the world — which is why Evdokimov can title the book the sacrament of love without embarrassment.

The Anthropological Sting in the Tail

One thing must be flagged here rather than deferred. Evdokimov’s account of the couple rests on a strong doctrine of the difference between the masculine and the feminine — a difference he takes to be ontological and charismatic, not merely biological or cultural. The harmony of the couple, on his account, is the harmony of two irreducibly different modes of being human, each carrying its own charisms. Everything in this section presupposes that anthropology, which is set out in 06 — Woman and the Salvation of the World, and which is the single most contested element in his work. A reader who finds the anthropology unpersuasive will have to decide how much of the marriage theology survives it — a question addressed in 08 — The Critique.

References

Evdokimov, Paul. Le Sacrement de l’amour: Le mystère conjugal à la lumière de la tradition orthodoxe. Paris: Éditions de l’Épi, 1962. English: 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. (Love and the sacrament of love; sexuality and nuptial chastity; the harmony of eros and the person.)
Evdokimov, Paul. “Le monachisme intériorisé.” In Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–1963: Études et mélanges, tome I. Chevetogne, 1963.
Meyendorff, John. Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1970. (The parallel Orthodox account of the sacrament and its ends.)
Plekon, Michael. “Paul Evdokimov.” In John Witte, Jr. and Gary S. Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 363–380. (Evdokimov’s engagement with Freud, Jung and Simone de Beauvoir.)
Plekon, Michael. “The Sacrament of Love: Paul Evdokimov on Marriage.” In Dedon and Trostyanskiy, eds., Love, Marriage and Family in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Theotokos Press / Sophia Institute, 2013, 25–39.
Scripture: Hosea 2:19–20; Isaiah 62:5; Song of Songs; Matthew 22:30; Ephesians 5:22–33; Revelation 19:7–9, 21:2, 21:9.