Marriage as Sacrament and Way

Evdokimov’s Le Sacrement de l’amour (1962) argues that the heart of Christian marriage is neither the contract of consent nor the act of consummation nor the begetting of children, but the union of love itself, which the Church crowns and consecrates; that the couple is an icon of the Trinity and of Christ and the Church; and that marriage is not a concession to weakness but a way of holiness structurally parallel to the monastic one — indeed its interiorization.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Book

Le Sacrement de l’amour: Le mystère conjugal à la lumière de la tradition orthodoxe was published in Paris in 1962 and translated into English by Anthony P. Gythiel and Victoria Steadman as The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985). It had a predecessor: an earlier and shorter treatment, Le Mariage, sacrement de l’amour, appeared in 1944, in the middle of the war (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” listing Le Mariage, sacrement de l’amour (1944) among his works). The 1962 book is the mature form.

Its structure follows the argument: a chapter of theological anthropology; then marriage set beside the monastic state; then the royal priesthood of believers; then love and the sacrament of love; then sexuality and nuptial chastity (the book’s contents as described in the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press edition). That ordering is itself the thesis in miniature. Marriage is treated after anthropology and alongside monasticism, and its treatment culminates not in family ethics but in a doctrine of chastity.

The Matter of the Sacrament

Evdokimov’s most-quoted contention is about what makes marriage a sacrament. Western canonical theology had long located the essence of marriage in the consent of the parties, with consummation perfecting it, and had given procreation the primary end. Evdokimov, arguing from the Byzantine rite and the Eastern tradition, contends that for the Orthodox Church the heart of the matter is the love union itself: not consent, not consummation, not procreation, but the communion of two persons which the Church receives, blesses and crowns (this is the settled summary of his position in the secondary literature; see Plekon, “The Sacrament of Love: Paul Evdokimov on Marriage,” in Dedon and Trostyanskiy, eds., Love, Marriage and Family in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2013, 25–39). Hence the title: marriage is the sacrament of love, and love is not a precondition or a fruit of the sacrament but its very matter, as bread and wine are the matter of the Eucharist.

The liturgical evidence he leans on is the shape of the Orthodox rite itself. The Byzantine marriage service contains no exchange of vows and no declaration of consent as its sacramental core; its centre is the crowning — the priest sets crowns on the heads of bride and groom, with the words “The servant of God is crowned unto the servant of God,” and the prayers ask that they be crowned with glory and honour. The crowns are simultaneously the crowns of a king and queen (the couple as sovereigns of the little kingdom that is their household), the crowns of festival joy, and the crowns of martyrdom — for the tradition reads them as the wreath of the witness who gives his life. Evdokimov takes all three senses seriously and refuses to soften the third: marriage is a crowning that includes a dying (Evdokimov, Le Sacrement de l’amour, 1962; see The Holy Mysteries for the rite).

The Icon of the Trinity

The theological warrant Evdokimov gives for taking the couple so seriously is trinitarian. “For Paul Evdokimov, the conjugal union of man and woman in marriage is an image of God in Trinity: a relationship of persons united in love, thus realizing their one nature” (the standard summary of his position in the secondary literature on Orthodox marriage theology). The human being is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27), and God is not a solitary monad but a communion of Persons; therefore the image of God in humanity is not fully carried by the individual but by persons-in-communion. Marriage is the primary and most intense form of that communion available in creation.

He joins to this the Pauline and patristic reading that the tradition confesses: the marriage of a man and a woman is a “great mystery,” spoken “concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32), and St. John Chrysostom’s homilies had already called marriage a mysterious icon of the Church. Evdokimov echoes Chrysostom explicitly on this point (the connection is noted in the secondary literature on his marriage theology; for Chrysostom’s own treatment see St. John Chrysostom).

[Disputed: whether the trinitarian analogy for marriage is legitimate. (a) Evdokimov's position — that since the divine image in humanity is personal-communal, the couple images the Trinity — is shared in substance by a broad current of twentieth-century personalist theology, Orthodox and otherwise. (b) The objection — that the Fathers overwhelmingly located the image of God in the individual soul or in humanity as such rather than in the sexual pair, that St. Gregory of Nyssa in *On the Making of Man* explicitly distinguishes the image from the division into male and female, and that a social analogy of the Trinity read off human relationships risks projecting creaturely relations into God — is a serious one and is pressed by patristic scholars and by critics of "social trinitarianism" generally. This collection reports the position and the objection and adjudicates neither. See [The Holy Trinity](../../orthodoxy/01-foundations/holy-trinity.md) and [Theological Anthropology](../../orthodoxy/01-foundations/theological-anthropology.md).]

Marriage and the Monastic State

The chapter that sets marriage beside monasticism is the hinge between this section and 04 — Interiorized Monasticism. Evdokimov’s claim is that the two are not competitors on a ladder but two forms of one thing.

The tradition he is arguing with had often treated them as ranked. Much patristic and later writing on marriage is defensive — marriage is good, but virginity is better; marriage is permitted, but the higher way is the cell. Evdokimov does not deny the honour of virginity, and he is careful never to disparage the monastic state, from which he draws his whole spiritual doctrine. What he denies is that marriage is a concession. His formula is that marriage interiorizes the monastic state: the couple takes up, within the conditions of shared life, exactly the renunciations the monk takes up in the cell — poverty (nothing is mine), chastity (the other is not an instrument), obedience (my will is not final) — and the ascetic content is the same (Evdokimov, Le Sacrement de l’amour, 1962, on marriage and the monastic state; Les Âges de la vie spirituelle, 1964; see The Three Vows and the Royal Priesthood of the Laity).

There is a converse, and Evdokimov states it: the monk is not “unmarried” in the negative sense but is married to Christ, and the language of the bridal chamber runs through the ascetic literature from the Song of Songs through Gregory of Nyssa and Symeon the New Theologian. Both states are nuptial. One is nuptial with a human person and through that person toward God; the other is nuptial with God directly. Neither is a failure of the other.

The Fall and the Healing of the Pair

Evdokimov is not a romantic about actual marriages, and the point is often missed. His anthropology is frankly fallen: since the Fall, the relation of man and woman is disordered — marked by domination, by the reduction of the other to an object of need, by the war of the sexes — and no natural goodwill repairs it. Only Christ, he argues, can reconcile man and woman and bring about the harmony of eros and the person; the sacrament of marriage exists because the relation needs healing, not merely blessing (this is the recurring summary of his position: “since the Fall, only Christ can truly reconcile man and woman and bring about the harmony of Eros and the person”). The sacrament “regulates the communion between man and wife in all its sacramental fullness.”

This is why he insists on the martyrs’ crowns. A marriage is a place where two fallen people are handed to each other for the purpose of being changed, and the change is painful. Evdokimov, twice married and once widowed, having watched his first wife die of cancer while he wrote a thesis on the problem of evil, was not sentimental about what he was describing (see The Student Years and the Dostoevsky Thesis).

Reception

The Sacrament of Love is the least contested of Evdokimov’s major books and among the most influential. It stands with Fr. John Meyendorff’s Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective (SVS Press, 1970) as one of the two twentieth-century Orthodox treatments in English that shaped a generation’s pastoral practice (see Fr. John Meyendorff); it has been drawn on in Roman Catholic theology of marriage; and Michael Plekon’s essay on it in the Sophia Studies volume treats it as Evdokimov’s most durable achievement (Plekon, “The Sacrament of Love: Paul Evdokimov on Marriage,” 2013). The Cambridge volume Christianity and Family Law gives Evdokimov a chapter of his own, which is an unusual honour for an Orthodox lay theologian in a comparative-law collection (Plekon, “Paul Evdokimov,” in Witte and Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 363–380).

References

Evdokimov, Paul. Le Mariage, sacrement de l’amour. 1944. (The earlier and shorter treatment.)
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. (Anthropology; marriage and the monastic state; the royal priesthood of believers; love and the sacrament of love; sexuality and nuptial chastity.)
Evdokimov, Paul. Les Âges de la vie spirituelle. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964.
Eastern Christian Books. “Paul Evdokimov and Olivier Clement.” May 2011. (The Sacrament of Love as the most profound treatment of marriage the reviewer had encountered.)
Meyendorff, John. Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1970.
Plekon, Michael. “The Sacrament of Love: Paul Evdokimov on Marriage.” In T. G. Dedon and S. Trostyanskiy, eds., Love, Marriage and Family in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition (Sophia Studies in Orthodox Theology 7). New York: Theotokos Press / Sophia Institute, 2013, 25–39.
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.
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Bibliography, including Le Mariage, sacrement de l’amour, 1944.)
Scripture: Genesis 1:26–27 (the image of God, male and female); Ephesians 5:22–33 (the great mystery, of Christ and the Church).