We
have made some surface observations about Mr Abraham Hamilton’s claim that the
family was the first institution ordained by God, prior to the Church,
prophets, etc. We will try to go into a
little more detail now, looking at what some of the great and holy teachers of
the Church have said about this, focusing primarily on St John Chrysostom.
The
first Holy Father we will quote however is St Athanasius the Great (+373) of
Alexandria in Africa. What he says poses
a tremendous problem for Mr Hamilton’s theory:
The original intention of
God was for us to generate not by marriage and corruption. But the transgression of the commandment
introduced marriage on account of the lawless act of Adam, that is, the
rejection of the law given him by God.
Therefore all of those born of Adam are “conceived in iniquities,”
having fallen under the condemnation of the forefather.
--Quoted in Archpriest
Josiah Trenham, Marriage and Virginity According to St. John Chrysostom,
St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2013, p. 69
Marriage
and family as we know them, in other words, did not exist until after the
Fall. But some sort of institutions
surely existed prior to that event, or else disorder would have reigned over
God’s creation. What were they then?
Church
Before
the Fall, man existed in a state of holiness, kindred with the angels. This state is life in the Church. Fr Josiah writes of it:
In describing the
essential human condition in Paradise, Chrysostom sets forth an anthropology
that is normative for all of his commentary on the topic of virginity. At its core, his anthropology posits that
Adam was designed and crafted by God to be a terrestrial angel. Man is an unusual type of angel, but an angel
nonetheless. In solidarity with the
bodiless hosts, mankind in Paradise was in communion with God through the Holy
Spirit. Man moved in the energies of God
and radiated the light of the Godhead in a manner brighter than the noonday
sun. In Eden, man worshipped God in
union with the angels. The devil’s envy
was especially incensed by the fact that Adam lived an angel in a body. . . .
Man possessed a life in no way inferior to the angels, but enjoyed in
the body the angelic “immunity from suffering”.
--Ibid., pgs. 86-7
In
this worship of God, Adam’s role as priest of the creation, as mediator between
the visible and invisible worlds (Ibid., p. 87, note 17), is present, as he
offers the creation to God in thanksgiving and receives it back with God’s
blessing. This is tied in with his role
as king, which we will now look at.
King
Fr
Josiah says,
According to St. John, God
created man as the pinnacle of the physical universe and as a king with the
divine commission to rule, as a sort of vice-regent, over all the created
realm. “The human being is the creature
more important than all other visible beings, and for this being all the others
were produced—sky, earth, sea, sun, moon, stars, the reptiles, the cattle, all
the brute beasts.” Man served as the
vital link between the vast angelic realms and the sensible universe. Man labored in Paradise without sweat and
served as the conduit of divine grace to the material world. The divine life flowed into him, nurturing
him, and radiating from him to the entire cosmos [part of the priestly
office-W.G.]. “For humanity alone and
for no other reason did He create everything, intending a little later to place
them like some king and ruler over other things created by Him.” . . .
God Himself bids all
creatures to come under man’s authority and guardianship. While numerous explanations had been
proffered by earlier Church Fathers of the nature of the image of God in man,
Chrysostom taught that man’s divinely delegated control or rule
of creation is the whole sum of meaning found in the description of man as
God’s “image [a teaching echoed by St Basil the Great (+379) and other Holy
Fathers: Ibid, p. 94, note 59; and On
the Human Condition, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005, pgs. 36-7-W.G].” . . .
In the beginning the beasts were in “fear” and “trembling,” and
responded to man’s directions. . . .
--Fr Josiah, Marriage
and Virginity, pgs. 92-4
Prophet
Connected
with man’s interaction with the animals is the prophetic office:
In his pristine state of
illumination, Adam lived under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
much as did the later prophets who directly received the word of God. This prophetic nature is evident in Adam’s extensive
knowledge, which Chrysostom highlights in his commentary on the opening
chapters of the book of Genesis. Though
God Himself had administered some type of divine anesthesia to Adam in order to
preserve him from any pain associated with the removal of one of his ribs to
fashion Eve, Adam was fully aware of the mode of her creation from his
side. Chrysostom suggests that Adam’s
exclamation that Eve was now “bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh” makes
manifest that Adam lived in the inspiration of the Spirit, Who revealed to him
things that he could not possibly have known through his own experience. Adam demonstrated knowledge of an incredible
magnitude, evidencing that he was under the influence of prophetic grace and
the inspiration of instruction by the Holy Spirit. Adam saw “everything through the eyes of the
Spirit”. It was a sign of God’s great
care for Adam that He honored him with prophecy.
By creation God also
endowed Adam with magnificent intelligence and unspeakable wisdom. This intelligence was demonstrated when God
brought before Adam all of the animals for naming. Whatever name Adam gave the animal, that was
its name. This act of naming
demonstrated not only Adam’s “unrivaled authority” and “lordly dominance” over
the animal kingdom, but also his exceeding intellect.
--Ibid., pgs. 96-7
. . . an intellect as we have just seen that
was enlightened directly by the Holy Ghost.
Earthly
Family
We
have seen now that in Paradise there was a Church, and a priest, king, and
prophet. But nowhere have we seen
marriage and the family. When do these
appear? As was said at the beginning,
they have their origin with the Fall:
Marriage, as we commonly understand
it in our fallen condition, is a God-given concession to man’s weakness. It is a divine indulgence to man in his
fallen condition, and thus had no relevance in Paradise. Therefore, St. John is careful neither to
exalt it unduly (since it is for fallen man) nor to denigrate it (since it has
a divine origin). However, just as there
exists a paradisal virginity, so there exists a paradisal union of man and
woman; and just as the substance of paradisal virginity differs greatly from
that which exists outside of Paradise, the same may be said of the union of man
and woman. Chrysostom uses the word
“marriage” with reference to “earthly marriage,” and does not employ the word
when he is describing the union of man and woman in Christ in Paradise, and in
the coming Kingdom. The paradisal condition of Adam and Eve is a mysterious
union of the first man with his unique and co-equal helpmate, divinely provided
to him for conversation, consolation, and to “share the same being.” Eve was formed from the rib of “her
man.” Their union did not involve the
many aspects of earthly marriage commonly associated with that state in the
fallen age.
When God had completed
creating the entire cosmos, He fashioned man, for whom He had made
everything. When man lived in Paradise
“there was no need for marriage.”
Chrysostom is clear that in Paradise mankind lived “as in heaven” and
was without marriage. In fact, all of
the classical by-products of marriage extolled through the ages in all great
civilizations, such as large populations, developed cities, crafts, homes,
etc., did not exist in Paradise, and yet this in no way diminished the
happiness of that original state. These
extolled realities are superfluous and ought not to be greatly valued by man as
in any way belonging to the essence of true happiness.
What then is the origin of
earthly marriage? Marriage itself is the
offspring of death, and is a mortal and slavish garment. Since mortality and slavery did not exist in
Paradise, marriage did not exist. St.
John carries the thought of St. Paul further.
St. Paul explained that where there is sin, there is death. St. John carries this further by stating,
“Where death is, there is marriage”. The
pattern is as follows: sin » death »
marriage. Each of the main components of
marriage—such as sexual intercourse, conception, labor, and childbirth—is a
form of corruption.
--Ibid., pgs. 99-101
To
help us better understand why St John says what he does about earthly marriage,
it is well to look at the nature of mankind’s sexuality before and after the
Fall:
The essence of virginity
is not primarily a physical state.
Physical virginity is an outworking of virginity of soul, and how this
physical virginity is maintained in Paradise and outside Paradise are really
quite different matters. Paradisal
virginity is a state of being likened to the angels in which our first
ancestors were created. It was a state
of undefiled and unceasing communion with God. Paradisal man had silence ruling all
within. His soul pursued no other
activity but continual communion with God.
He enjoyed an unspeakable depth of true pleasure. He reveled in a heavenly contemplation
without cares. In this virginal ethos man
lived and moved physically, with a physicality free of carnality. Man had a body, but this body (unlike ours)
was clothed in light and overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Man’s body was light, free from the
necessities of fallen nature and carnal drives and impulses. St. John does not envision Adam and Eve as
even contemplating the act of sexual intercourse (let alone performing
it). It is clear, then, that if we are
to understand what Chrysostom means when he speaks of virginity in Paradise, we
must be prepared to define virginity in non-sexual terms. We cannot simply use popular contemporary
concepts and project them back in time and space into the Garden. Chrysostom’s understanding of essential
virginity is bound up intimately with his fundamental anthropology.
--Ibid., pgs. 112-3
There
is no way around the conclusion: Earthly
marriage and family were not first nor normative in God’s creative works. They are the result of the Fall. The Church, priest, prophet, and king all
preceded them in the Garden. And the
more Mr Hamilton, Mrs Meeke Addison, and others continue to push this
innovation of theirs, the more they will mimic some of the Gnostic sects: They insisted on mandatory virginity (ibid.,
pgs. 23-4), while the Hamiltonians will inevitably come to insist on mandatory
marriage.
Earthly
marriage and family are very valuable.
But praising a thing too much will lead to harm just as surely as
praising it too little. We must keep our
respect for the family balanced, as St John Chrysostom and the other Holy
Fathers of the Church have. And we do
that by honoring virginity, bodily and ghostly, the virginity exemplified by St
John the Baptist, the Most Pure Mother of God, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself,
and the thousands upon thousands of monks and nuns who have lived the angelic
monastic life in imitation of them.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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