The End and Means of Orthodox Christian Anthropology

A review of Renewing Gender: An Orthodox Perspective by Jean-Claude Larchet (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2025)

Orthodox Christian anthropology of sex and family (closely related to cosmology, soteriology, and apologetic and moral theology) has long been a concern for me as an Orthodox teacher and scholar in the liberal arts at a secular university. So I rejoice to find that Holy Trinity Seminary Press has published the English translation of this very helpful book by Dr Jean-Claude Larchet. It provides a great reinforcement for those of us in the trenches of resisting false “queer ideology” in American education. It follows an earlier related publication of the Press that I had co-edited (with Prof. David Ford and Priest Prof. Alexander Webster), Healing Humanity: Confronting Our Moral Crisis (2020), based on a conference at the seminary.

Larchet’s book includes the best concise summary of Orthodox views on this topic I’ve seen in the chapter, “The Creation of Man and Woman in the Image of God” (pp. 57-72). But the topic of the whole book is urgent because a monolithic Western ideology of sex and family forms the basis for attacks on traditional Christianity (and other traditional cultures) worldwide. We as Orthodox Christians face a wave of cultural neocolonialism on this topic in today’s online world, one which would attack the transmission of our tradition across generations.

That said, Larchet’s book nonetheless has met criticism from “friendly fire” that I consider to be unfair at its core, although not without a rhetorical point. First, though, unworthily I would like to summarize five key points to Orthodox Christian teaching on sex that Larchet’s book helps explicate in a helpful and needed way for educators and parents (and indeed also young people) on the front line of the attack by “queer theology” on Christian tradition:

1. We cannot identify with our passions. This means that we cannot essentialize our passions. A Pride Parade is not just vice in its title. Pride is a sin, and a Humility Parade would be a contradiction in terms.

2. Our identity is not essential except in that it is relational with Christ. The late Orthodox poet Donald Sheehan noted an underlying theme in Dostoevsky’s fiction that is applicable: As human beings we are to empty ourselves in Christ, not assert ourselves.

3. What St Maximus called the “mean” (average) of our anthropology is how we exist in this fallen world as male or female. The division into male and female was in anticipation of the fall, to meet needs to reproduce and for spiritually edifying companionship. Our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ noted that, “from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Mark 10:6-9) Such spiritual unity is indicated in the Russian term sobornost as a gloss on the “catholic” nature of the Church. The restorative unity of male and female can be experienced in the Church in marriage between a man and a woman or in the spiritual marriage of a monastic community with Christ, and of the whole Church with Him.

4. What St Maximus called the “extreme” of Man (the beginning and the end) meant how we were originally created to be, and how we will God willing turn out (Gen. 1:26, and, as the Apostle Paul noted, there being neither male nor female in Christ in Gal. 3:28). Thus, our Lord said in the Resurrection we will not be married or given in marriage. This is also symbolized in a living and embodied way in how Christ is the Bridegroom, and the Church is the Bride—the community of the Church as a whole, in which the individuals are male or female. Marriage comes to symbolize in the Book of Revelation the integral intimacy of the relation of God and Man, in which, as St Maximus notes, the division between male and female will be overcome, even if aspects of male and female continue in a mystery, as with Christ and the Theotokos, as Larchet also notes.

5. “Natural law” as it relates to sex in Orthodoxy is dynamic, and the working out of salvation in grace. It can include both the “means and the end” of St Maximus in a mystery of God’s “tender mercies” (Psalm 50). This is only resolvable in the Church as the Body of Christ, within which lies the unity of marriage in the world and monastic community with Christ. The late Orthodox bioethicist Herman Engelhardt wrote:

Natural law is, after all, the spark of God’s love in our nature, not the biological state of affairs we find in broken nature. Natural law is not an objective external constraint, but the will of the living God experienced in our conscience…. Traditional Christians recognize the reference environment for humans to be Eden, and the goal of all adaptation to be the pursuit of holiness.

Engelhardt based the above description of natural law on a statement by St. Basil of Caesarea that referenced “the spark of divine love latent within you.” This is different from the legalistic rigidity of the Catholic sense of natural law. The latter historically failed to stem the rise of “queer theology” in the West, and in fact arguably in its rationalistic approach unintentionally contributed to that rise. Now queer ideology aggressively threatens even Orthodox lands, fueling cultural and even arguably military conflict.

This all reminds me of what my friend Prof. Seraphim Bruce Foltz described of his students converting to Orthodoxy: Arguing with them about issues such as same-sex marriage was fruitless and distanced them from conversion. But once they engaged with the beauty of Orthodoxy, their views would evolve to be in accord with Orthodox tradition. Larchet’s book helps this “beautiful struggle’ of Orthodox asceticism, whether in the world or in monasticism, by laying groundwork for the mystery of Orthodox anthropology in terms helpful for modern apologetics.

The Orthodox view of natural law regarding man and woman relates to one of the many English meanings of logos, “principle.” The logoi of the Logos in Creation, as St Maximus described them, articulate the uncreated energies of grace, and as such help shape the “means and the end” of being male and female in human experience. Manliness in this “means and end” as Larchet points out is the standard of virtue for men and women. Women saints and ascetics are described as manly in our saints’ lives not in a secular “queer” sense, but in recognition of the relation of virtue to grace in Orthodoxy. The English word virtue in its etymology accordingly has the meaning of true manliness, whether for men or women.

Protodeacon Brian Patrick Mitchell, a friend, has widely circulated a critique of Larchet’s book as un-Orthodox, a view ultimately based in the acceptance by Larchet (as by Orthodox tradition) of St Maximus’ teaching, to which Protodeacon Patrick objects. Mitchell argues with characteristic eloquence, erudition, and boldness, that while Orthodox Christians for thirteen centuries have respectfully accepted St Maximus’s un-Orthodox teaching as Orthodox, he now has the correct answer. This lies, he argues, in his own theory of the “arche” behind gender, to my mind a more essentialist view, but with helpful insights. However, his departure from St Maximus arguably involves what he claims to be a flaw of Larchet’s work, by potentially playing into the hand of those who would essentialize sexual identities in new forms.

This is of course not his intent, and, to be fair, Mitchell’s concerns with Larchet’s language evidencing at points a “moderate feminism” have a point. But this is more a rhetorical issue in my view: Larchet writes as an intellectual (even if Orthodox) in a secular French milieu, with apologetics in mind. That critique by Mitchell is secondary to the above-mentioned central difference between him and Larchet, and in my view not a harmful issue overall. In the deeper context, Larchet’s approach can even be taken as less a slippery slope to modernism than, perhaps surprisingly, Mitchell’s, in terms of respect for tradition.

All of us Orthodox academics and intellectuals today face a “we know better than the Church Fathers because we have the advantage of modern academic study” temptation. We see this in the Fordham Orthodox Study Center’s promotion of viewpoints on LGBTQ issues, off-angle from Orthodox tradition yet with links to scholars associated with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and in similar projects such as The Wheel and doings of the so-called Orthodox Theological Society of America, and even in some popular exegetical efforts in the moderate Ancient Faith milieu. Mitchell’s writings unlike those of the so-called Fordhamites attempt to support traditional Orthodox Christian anthropology and morals.

Yet while, as he notes, advocates of secular and heretical “queer theology” seek to co-opt St Maximus’ writings on sex, this does not negate the saint’s work. Cultural Marxists for example have long sought to co-opt traditional Christian teachings, as have Tolstoyan pacifists, Deists, Unitarians, Christian Scientists, ecumenists, “Wokeness,” etc. They are wrong in doing so because they seek to separate Christian teaching from the Church. This does not overthrow the traditions themselves. Such demonic fads come and go, but “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against our Lord’s Church.

It is not that Orthodoxy regards saints as infallible. But respect for our tradition should merit extreme caution and respectful rhetoric in critiques of writings of the Fathers by unworthy sinners such as myself, whatever our secular degrees. Academic dissection should not obscure helpful resources in the tradition for those struggling with real-world debate, such as the Larchet book. In the same way, publication of the book by Holy Trinity Seminary Press, from a bastion of Orthodoxy, should require respect, even if remaining open to critique. To headline Larchet’s book as un-Orthodox, feminist, and Origenist (thus effectively heretical) is to my mind to participate in more of a 21st-century American conservative mode of rhetoric than traditional Orthodox apologetics in the modern world (and I say that as someone characterizable as an American conservative from my public writings in venues such as The Federalist). There is a difference between conservative and traditional in this sense. The former, while often having an affinity to Orthodox culture, can be, like Catholic natural law, more rationalistic than the experiential value of mystery in traditional Orthodoxy.

Bishop Luke (Murianka) of Syracuse, Abbot of Holy Trinity Monastery and Rector of Holy Trinity Seminary, has outlined how a traditional Orthodox view of the mystery inherent in the topic of marriage should avoid any worldly sense of sexual passion as salvific. His instruction remains very helpful to read in tandem with Larchet’s book: “New Age, Orthodox Philosophy, and Marriage”.

From my own scholarly overview of literature on the topic, for what it is worth, and my sinful experience of our tradition while working as a professor at a secular university while also an Orthodox priest, this book by Larchet is a valuable resource for all of us Orthodox Christians resisting demonic secular gender ideology, whether on campuses or at home. It stands firmly on Orthodox tradition. To describe it primarily as feminist in focus is a misunderstanding of its helpful core apologetics. We need all the right help we can get in this area of cultural struggle today, although ultimately of course we need and must ask God’s help most of all.

Fr. Paul Siewers is a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and an associate professor of history at Bucknell University. His review originally appeared in Orthodox Life and is republished here with the editor's gracious permission.

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