I read Jennifer Finney Boylan’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, “Is My Marriage Gay?” In “her” (Boylan was born a male and voluntarily underwent the procedure that changes a man into a woman) essay, she explains how transsexuals further complicate the question of gay marriage with considerations that stretch the law beyond what it can handle. She illustrates this point with a quotation from a lawyer in a 1999 case in San Antonio that ruled that marriage could only take place between people who have different chromosomes. If a gay marriage includes a transsexual, San Antonio law would permit it because the transgendered spouse still has the chromosomes of his or her original sex. The lawyer draws out the absurdity of these piecemeal solutions by positing how his client, a transsexual who recently lost a spouse, would experience dramatic changes to both her marriage status and legal gender if she moved from one location to another:
 

Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property,  she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut,  she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male. (qtd. in Boylan)
 

Boylan offers this quotation in her attempt to argue that it is not the “sometimes unanswerable questions of gender and identity” that matter, but “the love a family has.” By basing her conclusion on an ill-defined love, she hopes to reach out to The New York Times readers by touching their sympathies for a marriage based on love, an assumption that runs deep in our contemporary understanding of marriage.
    But what kind of love? Certainly, Orthodox Christians also believe in a marriage based on love, but it is foremost each spouse’s love for Christ that binds husband and wife together. Although Boylan’s lifestyle and marriage are far from Christian, her argument aims to reach anyone, Christian or otherwise, who accepts that marriage is defined by “the love a family has.” Christians, then, would do well to be able to understand the historical importance of marriage in the Church in order to both identify such appeals and be able to offer a response to them. A historical understanding of marriage as a sacramental mystery can also reveal the shortcomings of marriage solely regulated by the state. In a May 31, 2004 article in The New Yorker, American fiction writer Adam Haslett identified our historical moment as one in which “The state is being asked not only to distribute benefits equally but to legitimate gay people’s love and affection for their partners” (79). Understanding what marriage has been for Orthodox Christians of the past can help Orthodox Christians of the present articulate a coherent and detailed definition of marriage that draws from historical precedents, thereby allowing them to offer a concise and comprehensible apology for Orthodox marriage in the midst of a society that aspires to lead while simultaneously blindly following entrenched and unexamined assumptions rooted in heresy.
    It is first important to recognize that many Church heresies led to attacks against the mystery of marriage. Whereas the sacrament as we presently receive it developed over time, the Church, taking its cue from Christ’s first miracle at the wedding in Cana, always honored marriage. Christ’s presence and his miracle were a blessing bestowed not only on the married couple (The Holy Apostle Simon the Zealot and his bride) but also on marriage as a pathway to salvation. Christ demonstrated that when the bride and groom are married, He is present. The first extra-Biblical reference to Church weddings occurs in St. Ireneus of Lyon’s letter to St. Polycarp of Smyrna, dated to the early second century. Other Fathers  throughout the second, third, and fourth centuries reinforce what St. John Chrysostom, writing in the fourth century, emphasizes when he writes: “when Christ is present at a wedding, He brings cheerfulness, pleasure, moderation, modesty, sobriety, and health” (80). The Church has recognized His presence at weddings from its earliest days by bestowing His blessing on newlyweds through the local bishop or priest signing the couple and praying over them. Archimandrite Vassilios Bakoyannis, in Marriage: A Spiritual Arena, gives further testimony to the antiquity of this custom:

This is what was taking place in the first Christian Church. Couples would go to church and receive a “blessing” from the bishop or priest. Witnesses to this were St. Ignatius the God Bearer (107 A.D.) , Tertullian (240 A.D.) , St. Ambrose (397 A.D.) , and others. (28-29)

Bakoyannis later clarifies that this blessing took place within the Divine Liturgy. Later, the marriage was moved to immediately before the Liturgy:

The sacrifice of Christ was always at the center of the liturgy. However, from the fourth century on, although the wedding ceremony was linked to the Divine Liturgy, it did not take place during the Liturgy. First the wedding took place, and then the Divine Liturgy followed in order for the newly weds to receive Holy Communion.  (31)

The thought given to the placement of the wedding in relation to the sacrament of Communion in the ancient Church underscores how Christ’s Church has imitated its Creator by                 blessing marriage from its inception. St. Paul emphasizes Christ’s approval of marriage by identifying any who would make general statements “Forbidding to marry” as “seducing             spirits” teaching the “doctrines of devils” (I Tim. 4:1-3).
    The Church’s recognition of marriage, first in Christ’s presence in Cana and then through St. Paul’s endorsement of marriage, did not go unchallenged by heretics prone to zealotry. The first such attack came from some of the Gnostic sects who believed that only some men had the divine spark kindled within them. Marcion of Pontus (d. ~160) typifies this kind of attack because he subscribed to a strict dualism that regarded all matter as evil, created by the Old Testament god—the Demiurge—who is not the God of the New Testament. This view led to disgust with procreation and, therefore, marriage; we can see this in the Marcionites, who believed that marriage perpetuated the evil work of the Demiurge. It was against this abhorrence of marriage that St. Clement of Alexandria asserted the goodness of marriage. The fourth century Church supported the third-century assertions of Clement, both in the First Ecumenical Council, where St. Paphnutius declared “marriage and married intercourse are of themselves honorable and undefiled [Heb. 13:4]; that the Church ought not to be injured by an extreme severity, for all could not live in absolute continency” and in the Synod Gangra, whose first canon reads “Anathema to him who reproaches marriage” (qtd. in Bakoyannis 36). Bakoyannis recounts:

Whoever abhors relations between man and woman is subject to a heavy penance from the Church because this person disdains her blessing. If this person is a cleric, he is                     defrocked. If he is of the laity, he is excommunicated (according to 51st canon of the Holy Apostles).  (36)

The Church, then, universally affirmed the goodness of marriage.
    Some heretics accepted first marriages, but rejected second marriages. The Montanists were one such group. Their general attitude toward marriage was disproving, but they absolutely forbade second marriages, even though this was not consistent with the Church’s practice, as we can read in St. Paul’s counsel to widows: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I.  But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (I Cor. 7:8-9). The Montanists, instead, wanted to improve upon St. Paul’s teaching. Tertullian (~160-225), who eventually embraced the Montanist heresy, supports their inflexibility on this matter by presuming to interpret the Holy Spirit:
 

Christ abolished the commandment of Moses [. . .] why then should not the Paraclete have cancelled the indulgence granted by Paul? [. . .] let weakness of the flesh bring its reign to an     end with the coming of the Paraclete. The New Law abolished divorce [. . .] the New Prophecy abolished second marriage. (Bettenson 132)

Of course, like all heresies, in diverging from the standard of Christ’s Church, Tertullian’s opinion fails to provide a means by which the truth as revealed by the Holy Spirit can be discerned from the utterances of false prophets. No less authorities than Christ Himself, St. Paul, and St. John the Theologian, warn believers about such false prophets. Why stop with second marriage? Why not prohibit first marriages? If the New Prophecy abolishes what Tertullian terms “indulgences” granted by St. Paul, should Christians return to strict observance of the Mosaic law against which St. Paul strove with St. James and St. Peter as an “indulgence” to his Gentile flock? The degree to which Tertullian’s position is untenable becomes evident: if accepted, it would have actually weakened the Church by making it more susceptible to false prophets who contradict Scripture by claiming to speak the will of the Holy Spirit.
    But claiming to speak for the Holy Spirit is precisely what is at stake in many Gnostic heresies. The Montanists divided the Body of Christ into the pneumatikoi (the spiritual ones) and the psychikoi (the soulish, or worldly, ones). This distinction is perpetuated in later writers like St. Clement who wrote volumes aimed at members of each of these groups: Paedogogus for the psychikoi and Stromateis for the pneumatikoi. However, a familiarity with the present day mystery of marriage can quickly expose the falseness of this view. If some Christians are carnal and to be treated differently from the “spiritual ones” who understand the secret teaching of Christ, why does the marriage service itself, in a remarkable expression of faith and trust in the newly married couple, have the Church pray that the Lord will bless the married couple with the same blessing that He bestowed upon the most venerable and holy of the Old Testament Patriarchs?
 

Bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Isaac and Rebecca; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Jacob and all the patriarchs; bless them, O Lord our God, as     Thou didst bless Joseph and Asenanth; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Moses and Zipporah; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Joachim and Anna; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Zacharias and Elizabeth.  (Great Book of Needs 167)
 

The Church calls upon the betrothed the same blessing as that bestowed on the Patriarchs, even that of “Thy servant Abraham” and Sara, whom the Lord made “the father of many nations” (Great Book of Needs 165-66).  Abraham and Sarah: Abraham, the father of Hebrew nation and the very model of Christian faith for St. Paul. The Church calls upon the betrothed the same blessing as that of Zacharias and Elizabeth, who bore the child about whom Christ Himself would say “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist” (Matt. 11:11). Finally, the Church calls upon the betrothed the same blessing as Joachim and Anna, who gave birth to the Theotokos, the sole woman in all history found worthy to bear Christ the God Man. And this passage is not the only time in the marriage service that the Church situates the newlyweds within the context of the greatest spiritual figures of Scripture. In both the betrothal service and throughout the crowning, the Church invokes the Lord’s blessing upon the couple in a manner similar to those blessings received by the Patriarchs, Prophets, and devout faithful of both the Old and New Testament. These prayers acknowledge that the newly married couple is a part of God’s Divine plan as much as any of the saints. John Chryssavgis describes the matrimonial prayers as “a genealogical outline that aims at emphasizing the purpose of human life, which is the crowning in the kingdom of God and the realization of God’s presence among us. There is a constant leap from the historical to the eschatological, from the fallen creation to the New City of Jerusalem” (32-33). There is, however, no distinction between psychikoi and pneumatikoi. Neither is there a separate “spiritual” wedding service and a “soulish” one. The prayers of the wedding sacrament, by asserting that all are part of the Divine plan, are as strong a denunciation as possible of the Gnostic heresy that some have the divine spark of the Holy Spirit and some do not.
    The challenge to today’s Orthodox Christian understanding of marriage, however, is not coming from those who challenge marriage as a mystery. Rather, it comes from those who look to the state, rather than the Church, to define marriage. Those who would do so understand marriage exclusively in legal terms, recognizing the benefits of common ownership of property, the legal right to represent one’s spouse, and the ability to file taxes jointly. Those who would defend a strictly legal understanding of marriage risk losing the primacy of the sacramental understanding of marriage—marriage as a mystery in the Church. The Church, of course, is not threatened by such politics and it is tempting to say “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21). However, when making a defense of the mystery of marriage, it is useful for the Orthodox Christian to understand the historical developments that contributed to our contemporary shift away from the Christian understanding of marriage. Importantly, such a study can unearth heretical notions that not only contribute to the contemporary secular understanding of marriage but can infect the Orthodox understanding of marriage as mystery.
    As a Christian mystery, marriage has never been properly understood as a means of satisfying romantic love. St. John Chrysostom identifies two principal purposes for marriage:

These are the two purposes for which marriage was instituted: to make us chaste, and to make us parents. Of these two, the reason of chastity takes precedence. When desire began,  then marriage also began. It sets a limit to desire by teaching us to keep to one wife.  (85)
 

Haslett notes that the contemporary, romantic understanding of marriage developed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation:
 

It was during the Reformation, with the emergence of the early Protestant idea of ‘companionate marriage,’ that the emotional bond between husband and wife came to be seen as an end in itself [. . .]. Today, needlessly to say, the most respectable reason you can give for getting married is that you have fallen in love. We have managed to create an ideal of matrimony that combines both lifetime companionship and the less stable but more intoxicating pleasures of romantic ardor.  (76)
 

In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont probes deeper into this shift that has taken place in how marriage is understood. In romantic marriage, the only possible basis on which it can rest is individual choice. This means, actually, that the success of any given marriage depends upon an individual notion of the nature of happiness, which at best may be assumed to be identical in the minds of both parties. (290)
How this state of affairs can lead to our contemporary arguments for gay marriage is clear:
 

When you add the contraceptive and reproductive technologies that have separated sex from procreation, what you have is a model of heterosexual marriage that is grounded in and almost entirely sustained on individual preference. This is a historically peculiar state of affairs, one that would be alien to our ancestors and to most traditional cultures today. And it makes the push for gay marriage inevitable.  (Haslett 78)
 

This notion of romantic love for which homosexuals are now seeking legal sanction is the desire for an experience that transcends the dullness of daily routine: “passion is everywhere treated as an experience, something that will alter my life and enrich it with the unexpected, with thrilling chances, and with enjoyment ever more violent and gratifying” (de Rougemont 292). This passion derives from what de Rougemont calls “a capacity for boredom which is almost morbid” (291).

    Romantic love, then, can be properly regarded as an attempt to flee a terribly unexciting life. Whereas this may not be difficult for the twenty-first century reader to imagine, impregnated as he or she may be with images of daring do and passionate love conveyed to us through film, television, romantic ballads, the Internet, and pulp fiction, one must ask from whence the sixteenth-century Protestant inherited this notion of “companionate” marriage?
    Reaching back much farther than Haslett in his analysis of the development of marriage based on romantic love, de Rougemont connects the notion not so much with the Protestant Reformation but with the development of courtly love in the south of France in the twelfth century (de Rougemont 76). Reacting to the arranged marriages of the aristocracy, the troubadours sang ballads and wrote poems that celebrated romantic love outside of marriage. In fact, in the courtly romance genre, it was impossible for romantic love to flourish within marriage. Romantic love needed an obstacle—such as the double censure against infidelity from both society and Catholicism—for it to flourish. Romantic passion is born in the desire for the unattainable object. The presence of an obstacle to the consummation of romantic love is so essential that in the archetypal courtly romance of Tristan and Iseult, when Tristan and Iseult (who is married to Tristan’s lord, King Mark) finally flee to the wilderness for three years, they live together chastely: when the barrier is removed and the romance is finally attainable, the romance atrophies; later, the romance returns when the lovers are again separated. The fictions of courtly romances implanted expectations for an exhilarating, mystical, and passionate love in the courts of southern France; as the courtly romances migrated from court-to-court across Europe, so too did the expectations for romantic love. Beginning as an aristocratic indulgence in the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter, Marie de Champagne, the idea of romantic love was popularized and vulgarized until the Protestants about whom Haslett writes were able to combine it with the traditional Christian marriage.
    Except, of course, that the notion of courtly love is a mythology that is fundamentally incompatible with Christian marriage. Classically, Romantic love flourishes when the object of desire is unobtainable. St. Paul, on the other hand, instructs Christian spouses never to withhold marital relations from each other. The spouse is not to be unobtainable but to be readily available. St. John Chrysostom comments: “’The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband’ (I Cor 7:3). And what are conjugal rights? First, it means that the wife has no power over her own body, but she is her husband’s slave—and also his ruler” (26). In the Christian understanding, marriage is predicated on self-mastery. A Christian masters his appetites and then surrenders his body to his spouse out of this self-controlænot from the lack thereof; one cannot, after all, surrender to the spouse what one does not have. In the romantic understanding of marriage, one surrenders to passion. In surrendering to passion, a man becomes passive, willing himself to be defeated by the passion: “But really a man becomes free only when he has attained self-mastery, whereas a man of passion seeks instead to be defeated, to lose all self-control, to be beside himself and in ecstasy” (de Rougemont 293). There is a hint of this kind of ecstatic loss of self-control in the very phrase, “to fall in love.”
    When romantic love becomes the basis for the love between husband and wife, the seeds of divorce are sown. Any love that flourishes before obstacles but diminishes when satisfied will undermine a marriage, turning it into suffering in the midst of what will be perceived as complacency. Herein de Rougemont identifies the source of the divorce rate that soared in the twentieth century:

passion wrecks the very notion of marriage at a time when there is being attempted the feat of trying to ground marriage in values elaborated by the morals of passion [de Rougemont’s emphasis]. Of course it would be going too far to suggest that a majority of people today are prey to Tristan’s frenzy. Few are capable of the thirst that would cause them to drink the        love-potion, still fewer are being elected to succumb to the archetypal anguish. But they are all, or nearly all, dreaming about it.  (298)

If this is what the lovers in the world are dreaming about, about what are Orthodox Christian spouses dreaming?
    St. John Chrysostom clearly delineated two purposes for the Orthodox marriage: the preservation of chastity and the creation and rearing of children. There is, however, an additional purpose. We should understand that this purpose takes primacy above the preservation of chastity just as St. John declares that the preservation of chastity takes primacy over procreation. That purpose is the mutual accountability before God that comes through a shared spiritual life. We can presume that this purpose takes precedence over the others because just as some who marry cannot have children, thereby making the preservation of chastity the greater purpose for marriage (Chrysostom 86), a very few married couples voluntarily choose to live as brother and sister. Therefore, sharing the spiritual life, which is an indispensable part of marriage, would seem to be even more important than forestalling lust. We have St. John of Krondstadt and his matushka, Elisabeth, as twentieth-century examples in this regard. In “Marriage: The Great Sacrament,” Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra writes that “marriage can contribute to our spiritual life.” He elaborates on how this happens:
 

In marriage, it seems that two people come together. However it’s not two but three. The man marries the woman, and the woman marries the man, but the two together also marry Christ. So three take part in the mystery, and three remain together in life [. . .]. In Latin, the word "mystery" was rendered by the word sacramentum, which means an oath. And marriage is an oath, a pact, a joining together, a bond, as we have said. It is a permanent bond with Christ.
 

The proper meaning of Archimandrite Aimilianos’s words becomes clear when one has an understanding of the theological deliberations of the fifth-century Church: Christ is of one nature (homoousios) with the Father in His divinity and, at the same time, of one nature (homoousios) with humanity. St. John Chrysostom himself acknowledges this when he writes:

Christ was born from our matter, just as Eve was fashioned from Adam’s flesh. Paul [. . .] speak[s] of flesh and bones, for the Lord has exalted our material substance by partaking of it Himself [. . .] We are truly members of Christ because through Him we were created, and we are truly members of His flesh because we are recreated by partaking His mysteries.  (50-51)

When we partake of the mysteries, we unite with Christ’s energies. Since husband and wife become one through marriage, when one grows closer to Christ, both grow closer to Christ. Fr. Aimilianos says as much when he defines the sacrament of marriage as “a bridge leading us from earth to heaven:”
 

And so marriage is a road: its starts out from the earth and ends in heaven. It is a joining together, a bond with Christ, who assures us that he will lead us to heaven, to be with him always. Marriage is a bridge leading us from earth to heaven. It is as if the sacrament is saying: Above and beyond love, above and beyond your husband, your wife, above the everyday events, remember that you are destined for heaven, that you have set out on a road which will take you there without fail.
 

    The dogma of the Holy Trinity, then, complements the theology of marriage. Conversely, the doctrine of romantic love as born in the courts of southern France in the twelfth century –
 within a few decades of the Great Schism of 1054 A.D. that removed Roman Catholics from the protective grace of Christ’s Church – is associated with a complement heresy: The Docetist heresy of the French Cathars of the twelfth century. de Rougemont associates the troubadours with the Cathars. Whereas such an association might appear contradictory at first because the Cathars practiced chastity whereas the troubadours celebrated the surrender to passion, de Rougemont argues that the courtly romances were originally “highly elaborate” symbolic allegories for the chaste life (87). Relatively quickly, however, they became appreciated for their denotative rather their connotative meaning. Thus a rhetoric of surrendering to the passions develops from a heresy that was, essentially, a Neoplatonic denial of matter as evil, not unlike that of the Marcionites:
 

The Dualist Christ, like that of the Gnostics and of Manes, was not really incarnated; but he took the appearance of a man. Such is the great Docetist heresy (‘Docetist’, from the Greek [.     . .] [for] apparition) which, from Marcion to our own day, expresses our quite ‘natural’ refusal to countenance the scandal of a Man-God. The Cathars therefore rejected the dogma of the     Incarnation, and a fortiori its Roman translation in the sacrament of the mass. They replaced it with a supper of brotherhood which symbolized purely spiritual events. They also                 rejected baptism by water, and recognized only baptism by the consolatory Spirit.  (de Rougemont 73)
 

Like the Montanist heretics, the Cathars divided their church into two groups: the perfecti and the imperfecti (de Rougemont 75). The perfecti alone received the full Cathar doctrine but were not permitted to marry. The imperfecti “were allowed to marry and to go on living in a world which the Pure condemned” (75).
    It is not surprising that a heresy that rejected the Incarnation of Christ and, as a logical consequence of this denial, rejected the sacramental life of the Church (for the sacrament of Communion represents anew the Incarnation of Christ in matter every time the Divine Liturgy is performed) would reject the sacrament marriage. Furthermore, it would only stand to reason that a body of literature such as that of courtly romance, however distantly removed from Docetism in its popular form, produced an image of love that is non-sacramental in character: love waxes precisely because it is not fulfilled and when fulfilled, wanes. Compare this to the Church’s teaching about Its mysteries: we grow closer to Christ by partaking of Communion, not being denied It. Similarly, we grow closer to Christ through the shared spiritual life of the mystery of matrimony, not living liminally, forever in anticipation but never fulfilled.
    Our fulfillment comes through the sacramental experience of union with Christ through marriage wherein “both humanity and God act. This cooperation (of synergy) is the underlying significance of the great ‘mysterion’ of marriage” (Chryssavgis 35). This is not a legal understanding of marriage any more than it is a sexual, romantic, or moral understanding of marriage. This is a sacramental understanding of marriage: marriage as mystery that unites us to Christ. As such, it is entirely foreign to the world’s understanding of marriage, about which we hear so much debate and strife. Haslett notes that “A state-sponsored, lifelong, intimate relationship—or the prospect of it—now carries a heavy and often unbearable responsibility for personal happiness” (80). When the goal of marriage becomes “the goal of self-fulfillment,” the prospect of fulfilling that goal can become almost as terrifying as failing to do so (80). For that fulfillment, inevitably, will settle into boredom that itself must be transcended through passion. As long as the root cause of discontent remains undiagnosed, the same treatment will be applied again and again. We can see this phenomenon in the multiple divorcee who treats spouses as stepping stones on the path to some indefinite bliss. However, and this is crucial, we must recognize this temptation within ourselves, pluck the beam from our own eye, and embrace a historical, Orthodox vision of the mystery of marriage as a bridge from earth to heaven.
 

Works Cited

Aimilianos. “Marriage: The Great Sacrament.” The Church at Prayer: The Mystical Liturgy of the Heart. Ormylia, Greece: The Holy Convent of the Annunciation, 2005. 111-125. Orthodox Christian Information Center. 25 May 2009. < http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/
praxis/marriage.aspx >.

Bakoyannis, Archimandrite Vassilios. Marriage: A Spiritual Arena. Trans. Konstantine D. Papathanides. Athens: Orthodox Book Centre, 2005.

Bettenson, Henry, trans. and ed. The Early Christian Fathers. London: Oxford UP, 1956.

Boylan, Jennifer Finney. “Is My Marriage Gay?” The New York Times 12 May 2009: A23.

Chrysostom, St. John. On Marriage and Family Life. Trans. Catharine P. Roth and David Anderson. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary P, 1997.

Chryssavgis, John. Love, Sexuality and the Sacrament of Marriage. Brookline, Massachusetts: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998.

de Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957.

The Great Book of Needs, Volume I: The Holy Mysteries.  Trans. St. Tikhon’s Monastery.  South Canaan, Pennsylvania: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1998.

Haslett, Adam. “Love Supreme: Gay Nuptials and the Making of Modern Marriage.” The New Yorker 31 May 2004: 76-80.