An Imaginary Dialogue

Inspired in part by Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations of the Greeks and Romans and in part by the cheesy old 1970s TV show Meeting of the Minds, I imagined this conversation with Protobresbyter Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory as a way of facilitating, even if only in my mind, a dialogue I’d like to have with a respected churchman. The first speech below, which appears in italic, is taken from The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983. All the rest I made up.

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Father Alexander Schmemann: Why do all arguments condemning homosexuality consistently seem weak, as weak as the obvious (to me) impossibility of ordaining women? Is it not because everything that is evident in religion cannot be proven, since the evidence is rooted in “bright knowledge,” in communion with the “mind of Christ”? And proofs, in order to be proofs, must operate in a dark knowledge, in the logic of this world. According to logic, this world is always stronger, since this world fashioned logic to justify itself. Christ tells us about sin. Without Christ, sin is only a problem, which this world is solving, and the solution is always liberal, tolerant, positive, loving…The horror of contemporary Christianity consists of accepting this logic and in measuring faith by its laws.

Dave O’Neal: With respect, Father Alexander, a clear and unambiguous line can’t be drawn between “bright knowledge” and the dark knowledge you associate with the logic of this world. We rely on both. And though, as you say, everything that is evident in religion cannot be proven, we don’t conversely reject what’s “proven” as though it were irrelevant, and as though every detail of the bright knowlege you refer to is in every case clear and unambiguous.

FAS: Je vous demande pardon–do I know you?

DO: We never met, though I know you through your books, and your spirit was of course still quite strong at St. Vladimir’s Seminary when I began studying there in 1985.

FAS: I see. It is true that none of us can individually trust his (or her, as I understand you now say) intuition about the mind of Christ, as this is something discovered by all of us together with the Holy Spirit, but our whole Tradition is a record of that mutual discovery. To the extent that our Tradition is an expression of the mind of Christ, it is, of course, unchangeable. And I take the traditional understanding of sexual behaviors to be a part of the bright knowledge expressed in that unchangeable Tradition.

DO: But don’t you agree that there’s a problem with discerning the difference between what is holy Tradition and what is simply the comfortable inertia of “that’s the way things have always been done”?

FAS: Most certainly. Tradition can only be understood as a dynamic process. A process of our interaction with the Holy Spirit toward the discovery of and expression of truth. Yet I would take issues of sexual morality, as expressed in the canons, and, yes, in this case, as expressed in “that’s the way it’s always been done” to express the mind of the Church. We can examine it, but, I don’t believe we will change the way things have always been in that regard.

DO: But, Father, it’s incorrect to say that “the way things have always been” hasn’t changed very significantly indeed in the history of the Church when it comes to the sexual aspects of morality. For example, it’s now often asserted that marriage has always been a union between one man and one woman, but that “fact” is shown to be untrue as soon as you read the Bible. Marriage seems to have been polygamous for a very long time, and the forefathers and patriarchs we most esteem were all polygamists.

FAS: Yes, yet in the Church marriage has always been heterosexual and monogamous.

DO: Yes, but marriage is an excellent example of how untrue the idea that “things have always been a certain way” is. Modern marriage between one man and one woman bears little resemblance to the institution the fathers knew and, eventually, affirmed the sacramental nature of. Marriage in the ancient world was a legal agreement between two families, concerned primarily with the transfer of property and legitimacy of children. Husbands and wives generally had little or no say about whom they married, and, outside the institution of monasticism, remaining single was seldom a choice. These marriages bear little resemblance to the modern partnership of a man and woman who have sought each other out with the idea that their union is the result of love and compatibility. Such a marriage, up until the last few centuries, might have been regarded as selfish or foolish, and the process of “dating” that led to marriage would just not have been possible.

FAS: All well and good, but I don’t understand how this applies to homosexuality.

DO: It applies in that it shows how our attitudes toward sexuality change. It bears witness to the fact that “things have always been that way,” is seldom if ever true.

FAS: I am afraid you will find absolutely no support for the acceptance of homosexuality in the Bible, the Fathers, or any aspect of the tradition. You will find the opposite. And I believe the reason for that is that these sources bear witness of the mind of Christ on the issue.

DO: Nor will I likely find in the Fathers an argument against slavery. I’ll also find the fathers to be generally of one mind on the intellectual and spiritual inferiority of women. Our views have evolved. I believe that evolution is ultimately the process of our interaction with the Holy Spirit. The Church wasn’t born with every bit of knowledge perfectly articulated. The two examples above are cases where the evolution in knowledge doesn’t challenge the existing order, so the new knowledge “fits,” and we can even behave as though there was no evolution: that we’ve always decried the enslavement of one person by another, or that we’ve always understood women to be ordinarily intelligent beings in their own right. Neither of those things are true, but we’re able to behave as though the are, because neither of those new revelations of knowledge challenges the status quo.

In reference to the Bible, Fathers, and other aspects of our tradition: none of them cancels out or causes us to devalue or ignore our own experience. When our own experience comes up against any aspect of the Church’s tradition, it must be prayerfully examined, I would say. And our modern experience of homosexuality (whether it’s strictly a modern phenomenon or not) is an aspect of our experience that cries out for consideration in the face of the church’s teaching. No one who’s been made aware of the phenomenon of gay teen suicides, for example, can in compassion avoid reexamining the Church’s teaching in that regard.

FAS: But surely nature itself tells us that homosexual acts are abhorrent. The very idea of sexual intercourse between two men turns my stomach.

DO: Visceral reactions can’t be taken as signs of the will of God. You surely don’t take personal reactions–even on the part of a large segment of the populace–to be an indicator of the will of God? A large majority of Americans found “interracial” marriage abhorrent until the last half of the twentieth century.

FAS: I suggest that you and those like you who question the Church’s traditional teaching, are deluding yourselves in an effort to justify your own behavior, constructing convoluted arguments to “prove” you are right, when the truth is actually quite simply otherwise.

DO: That’s a possibility anyone who aspires to truth, as we both do, must always hold before himself, praying to God that he may be brought to the place of seeing his error and repenting for it. But I suggest that you and those who refuse to accept the possibility of dialogue on issues of sexuality may be doing so not out of conviction about the church’s teaching, but out of fear of upsetting the status quo. Reconsiderations of sexuality are a challenge to the comfortable way things are. They could cause the Church to look very different, and the working out of things would be guaranteed to be messy. But I would say that the truth we see in Christ compels us to respond to the suffering we see gay people experiencing and to endure the mess. It’s part of that ongoing process by which we experience communion in the mind of Christ. That communion is the source of the bright knowledge you spoke of, which is not some mysterious transmission we can’t understand, but which will stand up to the “dark knowledge” of this world, unchallenged by it.

FAS: Я не знаю что еще сказать! But then, it is unfair for you to have this dialogue with me, putting words in my mouth, when I’m already asleep in our Lord more than a quarter-century. You should be having this discussion with priests and theologians of your own time, living now, many of whom were my students and spiritual children.

DO: But they tend to refuse the dialogue, Father, being often dug into a position that says the dialogue cannot occur. And those open to the ideas and challenges I’ve expressed here, who consider the reassessment of sexuality to be critically important before God, are too often unwilling to conduct the discussion publicly–which allows those who say the dialogue can’t happen to go unchallenged.

FAS: I see. That is a difficult situation indeed. Though I personally may disagree with you, I can say that the life in Christ should have nothing to do with fear. Those who behave as though the Truth we experience in Christ is threatened by…..well, by anything, need to adjust their view.

DO: On that point, you and I can wholeheartedly agree.

FAS: Thank you.

DO: May your memory be eternal!