Thanks for the interesting dialog Dr. Kentigern & Pdn Brian.

Dr. Kentigern, could you expand on your use of the term “essential” in this sentence:

“From my sense of St. Maximus, he views male and female as essential to human being but also not essential to human being, and that is a mystery in Christ.”

As Christians we of course live a paradoxical faith, but generally when a claim to a paradox or mystery is made, I view it with a “is this Revealed” hermeneutic. My reading of St. Maximus is more limited than either of you but my sense is that because of his time and place, the opportunities and limitations of the neoplatonic milieu in which he lived and wrote, that we moderns are apt to get lost in the intricacies (not saying anything that either of you don’t know). I suppose if St. Maximus really proposed the above paradox (in a way that this crude one sentence form can hold), then I will just say I am terribly disappointed in him 😉

Pdn. Mitchell, I am sorry to see you enter the academic arena. It is likely to reduce both the value and truth of what you write.

The mystery of male and female has many dimensions but it is really not that difficult to grasp. There is a divine/cosmic dimension which seems to have existed prior to our creation. It is an integral part of our divinely ordained stewardship of the visible creation.

There is a created dimension that is not utterly binary since we were created male and female and then separated.

It is physical and not physical. It operates as both energy and physical efforts to unite and reproduce. It is sacramental and easily turned to desecration.

Our expulsion from the Garden seems to have have made both participating in and appreciating the natural synergy between male and female difficult and perilous in part because it played a significant role in that expulsion. That synergy is fulfilled and healed in the Incarnation and our union with Christ though.

It is fundamentally a kenotic inter-relationship. In our state of sin, it easily gets twisted into lust and selfish desire. We are not sexual beings. We are Theophilic beings who have a sexual element to our nature.

Part of the problem is we have too many acedemics and ideologs postulating too many theories.

Mysteries are not penetrated through disembodied analysis or ideological ramblings which modern academics have become. Mysteries are penetrated or rather revealed through participation.

I am just a simple guy in fly-over country who thought it important to find out what Jesus Christ expects of me as a Christian man. I began that quest in Ft. Worth, Tx in June of 1976. It is ongoing and an impetus to repentance often.

I have no advanced degrees nor the Chrism of the priesthood. I have been ridiculed by some here for that lack. Yet, that has been good. I will say that I know as least as much about the subject as anyone here and I am less encumbered by expectations.

I can say nothing new nor definitive. I can only say that the most disturbed men are still men even though they deny it. That is the crux of the problem. Men are not well ordered.

Simply, we seek our own satisfaction at the expense of women and children, family and society rather than offering up to God our lives in daily effort and thanksgiving. I am the worst. I know but I do not do.

Sorry ladies, but men who are well ordered set the standard and the benchmark for the male-female interelatedness and whether it is fruitful or destructive. We have failed, I have failed.

God forgive me a sinner.

Well Fr. Dn., I think this discussion is going downhill fast and we’d be better off in prayer and studying the Fathers, at least I know that’s true for me. You’ve coined in academic writing a new Orthodox term, archy, both theological and anthropological apparently, in order to clarify or correct a Church Father and describe the All Holy Trinity. I think that’s problematic.

There is a mystery to these issues that invites humility in any kind of academic discussion and also eludes linear scholasticism. Such discussion cannot substitute for the experiential noetic life of the Church. Unworthily I can’t claim to have any definitive word on these issues at all, except to offer attempts for apologetics in our current cultural moment, trying to be true to Holy Tradition and also open to correction and dialogue in our Tradition. From my sense of St. Maximus, he views male and female as essential to human being but also not essential to human being, and that is a mystery in Christ. I’m not sure that you agree or whether you view heterosexual attraction as essential to human being in Orthodoxy, but such terminology seems to me to confuse an aspect of modernity with our Tradition. I genuinely do wish you well in doctoral work. I think we are in agreement overall with the teachings of the Church on marriage, ascetic struggle, embodied sex, and morals and in many basic concerns. Christ is Risen!

We seem to be arguing at cross-purposes. I’m aiming for clarity; you prefer vagueness and ambiguity, which I think unhelpful and pretentious. Instead of defending what you have written, you talk around the issue dropping names along the way, as if they all support what you say.

I wonder why you keep citing Ambigua 67 without mentioning Ambigua 41. The former tells us nothing without the latter, and the latter, as you know, is highly problematic, so problematic that scholars cannot agree on what it means, so problematic that the Church has ignored it until very recently. Can Maximus really mean that the first step toward the reconciliation of all things is the eradication of male and female such that all difference of sex and gender disappears? How can that possibly be reconciled with Orthodox tradition, which obliges us to practice the distinction of male and female in so many ways (e.g., no priestesses)? Surely, some say, Maximus must mean something less, but others take him at his word, saying male and female must go and so must heterosexuality, which they dismiss as “nothing but a particular brand of temptation to sin.” (Michael Hannon in First Things, mentioned in my Touchstone article)

These are dangerous ideas you are popularizing, made all the more dangerous by your vagueness and ambiguity, which confuse the faithful and embolden and empower the errant, who are free to use your words as they will.

I don’t at all dismiss the body as integral with the soul to human being in Orthodoxy. Part of what we’re working toward here is wording and definition for current catechesis and apologetics in English in accord with Holy Tradition I think, and I appreciate very much Fr. Dn. Patrick’s care and work in this. But I think the use of modern terminology of categories such as heterosexual in identification with our anthropology is not so helpful. St. Maximus in Ambigua 67 writes of human beings as both male or female and as neither male nor female, drawing on Scripture and in line I think with Orthodox Holy Tradition, citing Gen. :26 and Gal. 3:28 on the one hand, and Gen. 1:27 on the other. Igumen Damascene Christensen has noted (p. 203 of Genesis, Creation, and Early Man) that at the time of the bodily resurrection “human beings will bear some kind of ‘imprint’ of maleness or femaleness,” noting Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Most Holy Theotokos beyond death “still in some sense man and woman.” But he cautions that given the lack of elaboration on this in our Tradition, “one should be careful not to try to define this point too precisely.” Both those ultimate examples are of course also of incarnational virgin chastity, which does not fit any modern secular categories. The Soviet state upheld materialistic heterosexuality but against Christian anthropology, and likewise in the West we saw popular “icons” (or anti-icons) of materialistic heterosexuality emerge (such as Hugh Hefner etc.) as the sexual revolution developed and then morphed into other sexualities. Modern categories of sexual identity do have a relation I think to Roman Catholic natural law as it emerged, in a kind of sexlessness, and Fr. Andrew Louth has written about changing ideas in the Western Christian idea of the body that I think express that (in his article “The Body in Western Catholic Christianity”). Without emphasis on theosis and uncreated energies, and with the filioque and scholasticism, there emerged more a sense of the body as the individual possession as it were of an interiorized individuality or personhood, rather than of the body as being more part of a cosmic interconnectedness, or so I poorly try to paraphrase Fr. Louth. At any rate, I would agree wth Fr. Dn. Patrick that the modern secular sense of sexual categories tends toward gnosticism because they tend to center on a certain sense of individual personhood rather than on an incarnational connectedness with Christ in the Church. Where I think we differ in emphasis and articulation is in whether or not today heterosexuality as a category or term fits with that modern secularism and is or is not helpful in Orthodox catechesis and apologetics as a result. These points are discussed further and with citations unworthily in my article in the Glory and Honor book linked above, but it is a very imperfect and ongoing work for sure. Lord have mercy.

Stankovich, you write:

Peter San Filippo was an “alumnus cum laude of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary” and a deposed Orthodox priest certainly is germane to the discussion because it was symptomatic of a dramatic change, characteristic of a psychotic disorder. (Emphasis by Fr. Jacobse.)

How could you possibly know this? By reading accounts on the internet? Whether true or not, it is highly unethical for you, as a licensed counselor, to make such an assertion about Peter J. Sanfilippo (Giacomo Sanfilippo). This is strike two. The first is when you repeated confidential information (you say it is well known — maybe it is, maybe it isn’t — but that still does not give you license to repeat it), and the second is proffering a psychological evaluation of a man with whom you had no professional interaction (if you did, you would be subject to professional censure).

I disagree strongly with Sanfilippo’s assertions but I’ll defend him against the Google inspired evaluations you are proffering on my blog. There will be no strike three. Consider this your CEASE AND DESIST order.

What I wrote on the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy website was:

“One’s identity is ultimately a relationship with God, and God does not relate to us as blank slates. He creates each of us to be the particular person specified by the various logoi of our being, which determine both what we began as and what we are to become. Our part is to assume the tropoi designated by our logoi—the way of being consistent with God’s intent for us.”

My complaint about the article above is that it appears to dismiss the body—and with it the distinction of male and female—as an essential component of human being. Queer theorists like that idea because it frees them from the onerous binary of male and female. Some Christians also like the idea because it relieves them of having to say that there is something wrong with people who don’t behave as male or female: They can limit themselves to saying that some forms of sexual intercourse are allowed and others are not.

This idea that mankind is essentially sexless has already been fleshed out more fully by Roman Catholic writers in First Things. In fact, I cite such an article in this article of mine: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=28-01-031-f

For anyone interested, here is a link to another article of mine, setting forth the shamelessly novel concept of “archy,” which isn’t really that novel and which fits very well with the Church’s traditional respect for male and female: http://www.brianpatrickmitchell.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Problem-with-Hierarchy.pdf

Once again, your swinging your hammer. Your “amused” yet you seem understand that this essay was published by “Public Orthodoxy” and is in fact what many many secularized Orthodox believe. Your myopic vision of the import of these facts is yours – not ours.

The man himself, his mental illness and the failure of the institutions, systems, and those around him are not the issue as you erroneously assert.

No, I don’t have a “theoretical” vantage of mental disease – but again, that is not the issue.

M. Stankovich is so deft at deflecting and avoiding any moral evaluation of the facts, defaulting instead to his narrow secular clinical verbiage. Yet, despite his attempts, he let his bias slip through: “I am somewhat amused at the notion of the imposition of a profoundly mentally disordered man as a diabolical agent of darkness, missioned to reconstitute the Orthodox teachings about homosexuality – a modern day Chauncey Gardnier. The Emperor has no clothes.”

So you’re saying that as of 2015 when Peter J. SanFilippo (Giacomo Sanfilippo) wrote his heretical thesis advocating for the normalization of homosexuality and sodomy using “Orthodox Theology” and his recent Conjugal Friendship article on “Public orthodoxy” he was still “profoundly mentally disordered”? Because logically, if he’s not, then his intentional distortions, twists and attacks on the moral teaching of the Orthodox Church and intentional preaching of depravity and perversion as “normal” is not just sinful, but exemplify the work of a “diabolical agent of darkness,” as you said. Your words, not mine!

Interesting that you’re amused Michael, but to the rest of us who see and understand these diabolical and dangerous assaults on the Church teaching from depraved and darkened minds, this is DEADLY serious.

A Bed Undefiled: Foundations for an Orthodox Theology and Spirituality of Same-Sex Love (2015)
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/75512

Abstract (summary):
The present thesis explores possibilities for a more affirmative Orthodox theological and pastoral response to sexual diversity in human nature. Despite numerous modern articulations of an Orthodox theology of erotic love, and a more general emphasis on the radical otherness of the human person, no contemporary Orthodox author of note makes any allowance for same-sex love known to me.

Yet the greatly revered priest, theologian, and martyr, Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), establishes a solid traditional foundation for men to form a lifelong, monogamous, sacramental union which bears essentially no difference from the spiritual content and unitive function of the marital bond between a man and a woman.

His essay, “Friendship,” serves as an interpretive lens through which to discern a subtextual thread running through multiple layers of Holy Tradition, bearing eloquent testimony to the inherent receptivity of same-sex love to transfiguration through the collaborative action of human asceticism and divine grace.

. . .[I]t is ‘queer’ in the sense of sensual but ascetic monogamy, union of different biological sexes, reproductiveness in commitment to transgenerationality, living embodied iconography of Scriptural typology involving Christ and His Church, and in its shaping of a ‘little church’ and ‘little kingdom’ of the household in resistant to materialistic society.”

Academics play with models.

Orthodox theologians fast, pray and practice hesychasm, acquiring noetic sensibilities and nepsis. They recount the faith of the Church Fathers.

Occasionally these two sets overlap but it is rare. I’m not sure there is any point to the academic conversation apart from Orthodox theology and one can recognize the taste of this theology when one reads, for example, Vladimir Lossky or St. John of Kronstadt, as well as the older Church Fathers.

Let the dead bury their dead.

I strongly suspect that since most commentators approach these situations from the purely “theoretical” vantage, and have never experienced major mental illness face-to-face, over an extended period of time, and been responsible for the literal care of another human being, it is probably pointless to pursue a “clinical” discussion. Given the reality of the situation, I am somewhat amused at the notion of the imposition of a profoundly mentally disordered man as a diabolical agent of darkness, missioned to reconstitute the Orthodox teachings about homosexuality – a modern day Chauncey Gardnier. The Emperor has no clothes.

Finally, I was at the university medical center yesterday observing fMRI’s in an astonishing new scanner, as part of a research project. My “overemphasis” on disease is apparently juxtaposed with your medieval understanding of the nature of mental illness. And why is that statement significant? I honestly believe, and I honestly conceive that it is possible that a priest could exhibit the identical symptoms that I have described from 1998 and still not receive the appropriate help; and still someone could say, “a good man does not abandon his wife and children.”

As Fr. Dn. Patrick put it in a similar comment thread on the Heterodoxy and Orthodoxy thread, “One’s identity is ultimately a relationship with God,” which is the basis for my comments here. In the book on Marriage that I co-edited, which is linked above, my article (the basis for this piece) treats these issues at greater length (for those who can wade through it–my apologies that the prose is dense as it was aimed to be an encouragement to those Orthodox Christians in the middle of such academic discourse as students or academics). It includes a section on natural law, based on the work of Dr. Herman Engelhardt, which is helpful to this discussion (pp. 362-66). There is a distinction between the Orthodox sense of natural law, based in our theology of the Holy Trinity and of the uncreated energies, and the sense of natural law that has developed in the West. The latter tends to emphasize essential identity, ultimately encouraging individualism and individual sexual identities, in the context of Western notions of social justice. The Orthodox view is different, and informs a distinct sense of human nature.

Fr. Dn. Patrick and I have begun discussing our mutual approaches, which overlap but differ in emphasis and terminology, and on which we both see dangers in getting “out of bounds.” At the same time we want to avoid “friendly fire,” as fellow Orthodox Christians with similar concerns :).

My criticism of his approach has been that in my view he seems to be under-emphasizing the whole of St. Maximos the Confessor’s approach to these issues in seeking to correct or clarify the Confessor through Fr. Dn.’s “new concept” of “archy,” also being developed in his doctoral projects.

Regardless of emphasis and developing terminology, in all these discussions it may be productive to think in effect of both a cataphatic and and an apophatic approach to human nature in a sense: Apophatically human nature is a mystery, made in the image of God, in Christ, and thus relational; and also in the likeness of God, which emerges in the synergy of His grace (uncreated energies) and ascetic struggle in the Church. Cataphatically we can know man made male and female in the Incarnation and in Creation (even though fallen).

I think that Metropolitan Hierotheos’ writings on problems of “personalism” indicate issues with an overly cataphatic approach: An emphasis on the essence of human nature can lead to a kind of essentializing of human will, rather than the experience of the human being as made in God’s image, in Christ, who is Person. Likewise an over-emphasis on the essence of being male and female can lead to getting off track (as some Orthodox writers have) on emphasizing the “eternal male” and “eternal female,” sometimes leading into Jungian psychology and tantric sex and Sophianism etc.

So while I think Fr. Dn. Patrick’s emphasis can go “out of bounds” as he does mine, I also acknowledge that an over-emphasis on the apophatic aspects of anthropology can lead to co-option by various secular materialisms as well without discernment. And so hopefully we can work out a dialogue that will be helpful to both of us and perhaps share that in future.

There are as we know so many riches in Church Tradition to help us. Just as an example from one source, St. Maximus as noted writes in his Ambigua about the extreme and the mean of man in the image of God, and of man as male and female (Genesis 1:26, Genesis 1:27, and St. Paul’s writing about neither male nor female in Christ, with the middle citation in the Confessor’s view as the mean and the others as extremes). St. Maximus’ writings about logos and tropos can also be a help here, as well about the relation of logoi to the divine energies.

Discernment and balance within the whole of Holy Tradition and the noetic life of the Church and her saints is really needed to prevent these conversations from getting merely esoteric or even harmful. But the need for prayerful apologetics and catechesis on these issues for both the faithful and our neighbors in society (and especially with our younger people in mind) is very apparent.

A good man does not abandon his wife and children. A faithful man does not engage in homosexual activity, divorce his wife and engage in sodomy with other men. A good husband and priest does not disappear and leave “his family unsupported, devastated, and on welfare.” A good man does not preach darkness, perversion, and delusion as “truth and wisdom.” A faithful man does not attack the Orthodox Church, purposely confuse the young, and lead others astray and into perversion and sin, all the while working to destroy the Church.

I am interested in what you would have us do M. Stankovich. On the one hand, your absolutely right that it is our Christian duty to love the man. On the other hand, his is a public and philosophical effort to convince the Faithful (really, anyone who would listen) of soul destroying doctrine. Are you saying that we should put this aside and look for “virtue” in…what, exactly? Are you suggesting we simply ignore it and his enablers at “Public Orthodoxy”?

You accuse John P. of simplicity (i.e. … most certainly not simply the polemic) yet I perceive you also suggesting a simplicity. You seem to believe the communal relationship between Peter and the Church flows only one way. He and his sin is something we are to bear as his brothers in this life, yet we too are engaged in spiritual warfare. The Body of Christ can not simply ignore the disease – we can’t simply look the other way when Peter’s sin is a active, diabolical attempt to peel off members of the Body into a false belief and life about our sexuality and how it relates to our salvation.

I have observed you make these sorts of arguments and defenses of men for a number of years now. You are unbalanced. Perhaps it is the overemphasis of the “disease” model that you are trained in. It has become the hammer with which all you see is nails. Yes, it is part of the Tradition and we certainly do conceive of the Church as a hospital, etc. Still, perhaps this also has its limitations and we need to sometimes (often, really) think of the many other analogy’s given to us in Scripture/Tradition (e.g. the warfare/soldier model).

Yes Peter “deserves” our prayers, but John P. did not heap “scorn” on him. He stated that Peter is public advocate for homosexualism and is actively working to undermine the Faith. This is absolutely true. Your citation of St. John is off the mark – St. John in no way would have us ignoring the damage caused by “faults and defects” when they actively harming us or the Body of Christ. Perhaps you will refrain from your false accusations of scorn long enough to see that this, though somehow I doubt it…