Souls and bodies, parents and children, spouses and monastics

Part 1: Introduction to a common pattern

On my previous post “A help meet, not a help against: Some notes against a dialectical approach to symbolism”, J.Z Schafer asked in the comments,

Do you have any thoughts on the relationship or anagogical complementarity between marriage and monasticism in this light? It seems in some places to be presented dialectically, but while the Church confesses virginity the higher mode, it also steadfastly retains the doctrine of the holiness of marriage, and the synergy and common telos of both paths. Any deeper insights?

I would say to this that everything a married person in the Church does externally through relationships with a spouse, children, and family at large, manifests outwardly an inward aspect of spiritual life concentrated on by monastics. Take for example the raising of a child.

Since the fall of Adam and Eve, a child comes into the world feet first, as it were, in that the development of the sensory body outpaces the development of the noetic soul. As with all breech births, this is a dangerous situation fraught with peril. As I described in my first post here, the body through the senses discerns between pleasure and pain, but the soul through the mind (the nous) discerns between eternal and ephemeral, between truth and falsehood. Children, bearing from the start the consequences of their foreparents’ sin, are much slower to develop the mental ability to discern between truth and falsehood than they are the body’s ability to discern between pain and pleasure — which they begin experiencing immediately. For this cause they need parenting, like, desperately.

The parents’ job is to supply noetic discernment for their children until they are ready to supply it for themselves. Until that time, the body’s instincts to pursue pleasure and avoid pain — which indeed are natural and play a vital role in the pedagogy of the soul — easily take over and undermine the soul’s preference to pursue the eternal and avoid the ephemeral. A child wants sweets now and demands to have them, but does not recognize the ephemeral nature of their pleasure, does not recognize that after the sugar rush comes the sugar crash, the disruption of sleep patterns, the disruption of routine and all the ensuing psychological turmoil. It’s essential for parents as a pledge of their love to show their children comfort and satiety as much as is within their means. When souls first hear that the law of God is sweeter than honey (cf. Ps. 18, 118), they have to be equipped with natural human experience to know what that means. But parents disciplining their children’s desires in order to keep them directed above the life of the senses is just as necessary. Children are not likely of their own to give thanks at mealtime; they have to be taught this by their parents giving thanks alongside them.

I don’t expect any of this to be revelatory, but I take pains to describe the process because this parent–child relationship is the same thing that goes on within every living person in how their soul and body relate with one another. A monastic engaged in asceticism, in how he or she relates to the desires of the flesh, is no different from a parent raising a child, except the relationship is concentrated within a single person. This is in part why in the Church it is regular for parents in the world to seek advice from monastic elders. A seasoned ascetic has knowledge of the patterns that parents need to raise their children. From years of disciplining the desires of their flesh — providing the flesh what it needs materially while prioritizing above all what it needs spiritually — such monastics have as though raised many children, each desire like a different child.

Such parenting of the body is a Christian calling common to all, but monastics experience a concentrated version of it, eliminating external distractions. When Paul advises that it is better not to marry, the reasons he gives merely concern practicalities (1 Cor. 7). To provide for a family and raise children inevitably binds a person to cares of the world which easily distract one from the patterns of virtuous living. But if those patterns are held onto, there is no additional distance to be traversed between a married person and Christ, relative to a monastic person and Christ. No ontological advantage to being a monastic exists; Paul is not greater than Peter (he who had a mother-in-law). The difference exists in the concentration on the patterns of virtue, which concentration is afforded a monastic to the exclusion of distractions, whereas the married person’s attachment to worldly cares disperse the attention necessarily. On account of this difference, a natural social hierarchy forms between the two modes of life, with bishops regularly being pulled from the monastic ranks as Church history develops, giving institutional form to the stratification.

As I said concerning Christian hierarchy in the original post, however, above and below do not necessarily correspond to better and worse. God becoming man tends to turn things inside out. A person called to married life who holds onto the patterns of virtue makes them manifest in a social setting — thus accomplishing a profound Christian mystery to which monastics themselves aspire. As Paul says about marriage between a man and woman, “I speak concerning Christ and the Church” (Eph. 5:32). When a monastic retreats to his or her cell for prayer, and the mind descends into the heart as a result of the uplift of the Spirit, it’s the pattern of the bride and Bridegroom that one is experiencing. It’s an image of marriage. External to nature, God marries the soul, and internal to nature, the mind marries the heart. The pattern repeats because we are being made sons of the Father, which means we too will father sons. For the God being worshiped is (together with the Spirit) the Father and the Son. They are named after the pattern of begetting. When married people in the Church look up to monastics (and they should), it is to nought else but the meaning of their very own path that they are aspiring.

I have more to write on this topic. As practically experienced, the parent–child relationship that exists between soul and body is not one-way. There are important facets of spiritual life in which the body is actually the parent of the soul, not the other way around. But as it’s the holiday season, the idea of keeping this post short and savory appeals to me, and maybe to my readers as well. I’ll plan to return to this train of thought and expand on it. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to explain what I mean when I draw the chiasmus of < α. Spirit \ β. soul \ χ. body / ο. soul / ω. Spirit >, and how it relates to both monastic praxis and the generations of a family.

Read Part 2 here.