by Fr. Maximos Davies
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2002/12/celibacy-in-context
An article sent to me by a friend in early May, 2021. I took these notes for discussion. Maximos Davies is an Australian who is a Ruthenian Catholic hieromonk of Holy Resurrection Monastery in California.
- For the Eastern Churches monasticism lives at the centre of Christian society
- It would be suicidal to abandon clerical celibacy in a way that implies celibacy is of no value
- Asceticism means to live at the same time on earth and in heaven
- In a mysterious way, our earthly life and the life we will have for eternity are one and the same
- “The darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining”, 1 John 2:8
- “Asceticism, as we have seen, is the recognition that everything we see and touch is mystically redolent with unseen and ineffable Divinity.”
- Food reveals the heavenly Feast, therefore the ascetic is freed from his animal appetite, “tastes only the spiritual promise that lies hidden inside earthly food”
- Therefore the ascetic fasts
- Similarly, possessions reveal the heavenly Kingdom, therefore gives alms
- Human relationships reveal divine love, therefore practises celibacy
- St. Gregory of Nyssa (a married man) from his On Virginity:
- “Whenever the husband looks at the beloved face, that moment the fear of separation accompanies the look …. Some day all this beauty will melt away and become as nothing, turned after all this show into noisome and unsightly bones, which wear no trace, no memorial, no remnant of that living bloom.”
- The tragedy of love and death is only overcome when two become three (cf. Three to get Married), and death is trampled by the resurrection
- We mustn’t divide the Church into separate lay (who can sometimes have sex) and clerical (who can never have sex) categories
- The difference is nowhere near so stark, the difference is merely of degree
- For the legalistic mind the difference is vast
- For the ascetical mind it is negligible
- Christian celibacy is marriage baptized
- Marriage is a kind of monasticism (cf. Justine Brown’s videos on St. Thomas More’s Utopia)
- Celibacy is seeing sexuality not as something merely animal or enjoyable, but as something mystical, something sacred
- Celibacy is a vocation for the whole Church, only secondarily is it for the individual
- A parish priest who marries are on the same continuum of asceticism as the monk, just different degrees
- “Each must rely on the other to supply that kind of holiness in the other’s own life that he cannot produce on his own. The Church needs both the holiness of marriage and the holiness of radical celibacy in equal measure.”
- Dangerous to have a morally lax laity and demand something entirely different from priests
- Gnostic, Albigensian!
- Celibacy loses its value when it is seen as the preserve of an elite (cf. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who takes on asceticism so that the people can enjoy their sin)
- “Priests accept celibacy because they lead a community that is as a whole committed to the ascetic discipline necessary to transfigure human sexuality into an experience of the divine. Celibacy is healthy when it is regarded as a common labour in which each Christian has a share.”
- The celibate, the ascetic, is open and yearns to encounter the mystery that lies beneath his sexualty
- If we are not trained to see Eternity in time, the Feast in food, then we will not see the Mystery in sex
- We need to be an ascetic in small things in order to be ascetical in big things
- “He who despises small things will fail little by little.” Sirach 9:1
- Cf. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Ch. 9, “Authority and the Adventurer”: “It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father’s garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day.”
- Priesthood in the Latin Church today compared to craggy remains of a ruined culture silhouetted against the sky
- Unless the supporting structure of mystical and ascetic tradition are restored, then these remaining towers too will fall
- “Until the laity accepts its baptismal vocation in all its radical other-worldliness—there is no hope that the clergy will find the strength to do so. Only a Church of mystics can realistically expect their clergy to be saints.”
Message to my friend:
Thanks a lot for sending me that article. The image towards the end of celibacy in the Latin Church like the craggy towers of a ruined culture silhouetted against the sky is really good. We need to restore the crumbled supporting structures. I like how he points out how un-Catholic it is to have two tiers of Christians, a loose laity and a perfect clergy. It actually makes us sound rather eerily like the Albigensians or the Manichaeans. It reminds me a bit too of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov. Apt that that figure was a Catholic priest!
But yeah, I really agree we need to recover monasticism as the heart of Christian society, and embrace that continuum of asceticism and mysticism that proceeds from it. We need to see how we are all labouring towards the same goal, with “diversities of graces, but the same Spirit”. St. Benedict and the monasteries built Western civilization up from the ashes of ancient Rome. Their dissolution and the loss of that tradition in the West seems proportionate to the advancement of modernity.
I’m a big fan of St. Thomas More. To me he has one foot in the Old World of monks and asceticism, and one in the New of learning and politics. He would go on to marry, but as a young man he spent three years living in community with the brothers of the London Charterhouse. Marriage and family life was a kind of monasticism, like how the article said that celibacy is marriage baptized. Not to mention of course his last year in the Tower of London. I think he belongs along with other greats like Augustine and John Henry Newman firmly in that category of saints who wanted to become monks but God had other plans.
Anyways, I feel I need to really contemplate that part of the article where he describes asceticism as living at the same time on earth and in heaven; where he says, food reveals the heavenly Feast, therefore ascetics fast; sex reveals divine love, therefore ascetics practise celibacy. So much there to think about!