“Adelphopoiesis” on the Orthodox Wiki<\/a>, which offers a brief survey).<\/p>\nFr. Florensky’s 20th-century view of this early form of spiritual brotherhood stressed the spiritual brotherhood aspect and not any non-canonical sense of sexual incest in opposition to Church Tradition of the chaste nature of spiritual kinship lines. For him this was chaste brotherhood, and his life story shows his performativity of sex within Orthodox Tradition, contrary to implications in the article. Fr. Florensky’s whole explication of identity in his book is relational and not essentialist, in keeping with Orthodox Tradition. He rejects the Fichtean Western philosophical basis of identity, I=I, for a sense of mystical identity, in which A=Not-A. This articulates a traditional understanding of Orthodox marriage as well.<\/p>\n
Thus in some ways Orthodox anthropology is closer to today’s queer theory than to identity politics, though culturally and experientially it involves a very different experience from the ultimately atheistic grounds of both. Secular Western sexual theories today find their basis in anthropologies of atheistic socialist-communism, with their longstanding historical goal of subverting non-materialistic anthropologies of sex, evident in efforts of cultural genocide against Orthodox communities by both Nazism and Leninism, and in subtler but perhaps even more dangerous forms of neocolonial and neoliberal consumerism since.<\/p>\n
Orthodoxy can draw a limited typology for marriage from Foucault’s idea that pre-modern sexual behavior did not involve essentialized sexual identity. In this Orthodox anthropology draws on a sense of natural law in Orthodox theology that the bioethicist Dr. Herman Engelhardt describes as a transformative sparkle rather than a static matrix of identity, an energeia entis<\/em> rather than an analogia entis<\/em>. The mix of apophatic and cataphatic approaches to God in Orthodox Tradition includes a dynamic sense of identity being transformed neptically in theosis<\/em>, yet always also in an embodied way because of the Incarnation.<\/p>\nIn the Orthodox Tradition of marriage’s own playful yet ascetic performativity, such “queer Christianity” (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis), identity is relational and not essential. Marriage is a holy living symbol of the relational synergy of theosis<\/em>, involving both askesis<\/em> and koinonia<\/em> participating in the uncreated energies of God through the marriage of Christ and His Church. It 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. This is the Orthodox realization of queerness, which includes the Tradition’s expression of sustainability and social justice in the mystery of marriage and commitment to the transgenerationality of the Church and her incarnational otherworldliness in the world.<\/p>\nThe “Bill Nye Saves the World” show recently sought to celebrate the “queerness” of human sexuality in its fallen state by a cartoon showing scoops of different-colored ice cream learning to blend together in a bowl. Bill Nye, trained in engineering and not biology, in celebrating secular sexual materialisms did not address biological aspects of male and female sex and reproduction. Even so, the silly melding of the ice creams could in a very limited sense be transformed in the Orthodox context of embodied chastity into a type of non-essential sexuality and transfiguration of identity in the Body of Christ. Yet how much more beautiful is the Church’s mystery of marriage as iconographic performance, an incarnational participation in the God Who is Love and the Church’s Bridegroom, than Western secular-bourgeois “conjugal friendship” of all kinds reduced to slurping up melting ice cream.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Bucknell University and co-editor of Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage<\/em><\/a> (St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 2016), and author in it of “Mystagogical, Cosmological, and Counter-Cultural: Contemporary Orthodox Apologetics for Marriage” (university affiliation is given only for identification purposes; his views here are his own as an Orthodox Christian scholar).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The recent post in “Public Orthodoxy” on Conjugal Friendship claims to take a postmodern approach to sacramental conjugality in Orthodox Christianity but falls into ethnophyletic and gnostic heresies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1897],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14997"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14997"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15026,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14997\/revisions\/15026"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}