TGSAConferencePaper.pdf

Sanfilippo / TGSA Conference 1

“Knowledge as Power: Some Reflections on Sexuality, Gender, and Tradition” Giacomo Sanfilippo TGSA Graduate Students Conference March 17, 2017 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I offer the following reflections from the perspective of one Orthodox Christian. I belong to the Church known to some of you by the exonym “Eastern” Orthodox to distinguish us from the other exonym, “Oriental” Orthodox. Hereinafter I refer to my Church simply as the Orthodox Church. While the title and general topic of my presentation remain as announced in the program, the actual content took on a life of its own once I started to write. This isn’t the paper that I had envisioned when I submitted my abstract. I had thought to share with you some of the details of my research into sexuality, gender, and tradition, and the sense of inner empowerment that this knowledge has given me to carry on in the face of formidable opposition; but instead, I’m going to speak more generally on the way of approach that one might employ to work through the complex questions of sexuality and gender within the parameters of Orthodox tradition. I say “way of approach” rather than “methodology” in order to underscore the fact that Orthodox theology—more experiential than theoretical, more mystical than scientific—tends not to lend itself terribly well to a neatly systematic or scholastic formulation. I have two hopes in making this presentation: first, that each of you finds my paper to be a useful contribution to the ongoing ecumenical conversation here at TST, in which I feel humbled to take part; and second, that those of you struggling through the same questions as I, within the boundaries of one or another more traditional church, might see here possibilities for a way forward in your own reflections on sexuality and gender.

Sanfilippo / TGSA Conference 2

Postmodern insights on questions of epistemology serve to interrogate the degree, and even the existence, of “objectivity” in our quest for knowledge: if, in some sense, the answers at which we arrive are determined by the questions that we ask, we are confronted by the necessary corollary that a different set of questions will very likely produce a different set of answers on the same topic. This is said to be demonstrably true as much for the so-called “empirical” sciences as for the vast spectrum of inquiry that falls under the rubric of “the humanities.” This latter category includes, of course, the academic study of theology. Allow me to give you an example from my own field of study: On the question of same-sex desire in human and social life, and whether it has a place in ecclesial life, the response of episcopal synods, individual bishops, and prominent pastors and theologians in the Orthodox Church has been predictably and uniformly negative: to the specific question, “Can two persons of the same gender have sex with each other,” Orthodox tradition seems to reply with a resounding “No!” Yet if we reframe the question—if we shift our attention away from an almost voyeuristic obsession with the techniques of sexual performativity, and we ask, instead, “Can two persons of the same gender share a monogamous, spiritually and emotionally unitive bond of love that presupposes some form of bodily expression,” the scales begin to fall from our eyes as we slowly and laboriously uncover, deep within the very heart of Orthodox tradition, answers that border on the astonishing. To establish the general framework for my theological “way of approach” to sexuality and gender, I would like us to take several minutes to reimagine together the very theme of this conference, “Knowledge and Power in Theological Education,” but in reverse order: theology, power, and knowledge.

Sanfilippo / TGSA Conference 3

First, “theology” – In the Orthodox Church we often like to remind ourselves of Evagrius’ definition of the theologian as one who prays; not, I submit, as one who recites prayers, or who asks for God’s help in his or her theological studies—as important as these kinds of prayer are—but rather, the theologian as one baptized into Christ, anointed with the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, nourished with the precious and holy body and blood of our Lord, God, and Saviour Jesus Christ, and transfigured by uncreated grace into a flame of prayer burning ceaselessly before the presence of God in one’s own heart. One need not be particularly pious to become an academic theologue, but the words of a true theologian flow like a stream of lifegiving water from the purity of his or her heart. St. Maximus the Confessor speaks for all of the Fathers when he writes of theology as the utmost pinnacle of spiritual ascent accessible to us mortals here on earth, from which a human person deified by divine grace “theologizes,” or “speaks about God,” not from an academic course he has taken, not from a dissertation she has researched, but from his or her mystical vision of the God who dwells in unapproachable light, from the depths of his or her experience of communion with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Second, “power” – Nearly thirty-five years after Michel Foucault’s death, we continue to reside in a Foucauldian era in which we speak of power almost invariably as a mechanism of oppression, subjection, and any range of compulsory normativities. In his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault draws a direct correlation between knowledge and power, and argues that the modern classroom and the modern prison serve a cognate function in Western society. In the summation of one his commentators, Vanessa Sasson, both prison and classroom constitute “a realm in which an authority figure exercises control over a large group of individuals, perpetually screening, evaluating, and examining them, normalizing them as they

Sanfilippo / TGSA Conference 4

internalize the power structure to which they are subservient.” Yet Foucault himself objects to an exclusively negative valuation of power: he writes in Discipline and Punish, “In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him [or her] belong to this production.” Twenty years later Judith Butler, in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, further develops this thread when she foregrounds the inescapable paradox that power produces—discursively and interpellatively, in one and the same movement, in one and the same person—the subject as actor and acted upon, as one with agency and one under subjection. From this counterintuitive insight there’s not so great a leap, in my mind, to the Gospel’s vision of how “subject formation” is activated discursively and interpellatively by power: “But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” By virtue of this power given to us who receive Him, who believe in Him, there can be no talk in His Church of “marginal identities,” for “as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ…and we are all one in Christ Jesus.” And third, “knowledge” – Is the knowledge for which we strive in theological studies ἐπιστήμη—epistemic knowledge, “scientific” knowledge broadly construed—or is it γνῶσις, gnostic knowledge? The noun ἐπιστήμη derives from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, to know in the sense of “to acquire information about something.” Γνῶσις, on the other hand, represents the kind of knowledge that God is said to have, as well as humans: from the verb γινώσκω, which can mean to know in a higher, esoteric sense; to know someone instead of something; to know even in the sense of the bodily union of erotic intimacy. It comes down, I believe, to the most fundamental of all questions for us: Do we study and teach theology to accumulate and impart facts and ideas

Sanfilippo / TGSA Conference 5

about God? To provide religious cover for a worthwhile social or political project? Or do we seek simply to know God, and to help others to know Him, and in so doing become mystically one with Him, and mystically one with one another in Him, insofar as humanly possible through our God-given receptivity to divine grace? “Be still,” the Lord says to us through the mouth of the psalmist, “and know that I am God.” In my favourite line from the Blessed Augustine we read: “The thought of Thee stirs [man] so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises Thee, because Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in Thee.” And again from the psalmist: “O God, Thou art my God, I seek Thee; my soul thirsts for Thee, my flesh faints for Thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is.” The 20th-century St. Silouan the Athonite wrote: “My soul yearns after the Lord, and I seek Him in tears. How could I do other than seek Thee, for Thou didst first seek and find me…and my soul fell to loving Thee.” With these considerations in mind I would like to propose that we envision “knowledge and power in theological education” as first and foremost the knowledge of the heavenly God as Father, granted to us in our unworthiness through the power to become His children, that out of the depths of His paternal love for us and the poverty of our filial love for Him, we—even we!— may be accounted worthy to speak some small word of beauty and holiness and truth to one another, to our brothers and sisters in Christ, to the Church, to our students and professors and colleagues, and to the world around us which so hungers and thirsts for Him and for His tenderhearted compassion. Yet in no way do I wish to deprecate the importance of a theological education in the academic sense. What I have sought to do here, rather, is to place things in their proper order; to emphasize the nature of our theological task—even in the academy—as a spiritual endeavour

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above all else—I would go so far as to say an ascetical endeavour in the broader meaning of that term; and to suggest that whatever epistemic knowledge of theology we gain through our studies and our research can, and should, and must serve the higher purpose of knowing God, of entering into and deepening our communion with Him, and with one another in Him, indeed with the whole created cosmos in Him. In this way we who are made according to His image, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to acquire His likeness, come gradually to know the indelible beauty of our own inner selves. Without being so foolish as to claim any measure of success, in my own theological work in sexuality and gender I strive to hold fast to all that I have set forth in my foregoing comments. What does this look like, practically speaking? 1. While I remain fully committed to the advancement of the social and political well-being of queer people in all their diversity, my theological approach engages only tangentially with secular discourses of human rights or with the full inclusion of queer people in the consumerist circuits of neoliberal capitalism. Theologically, I am much less concerned with who has the legal obligation to bake a wedding cake for whom, or who has the legal right to use which washroom—and I say this as the enormously proud and fully supportive father of an activist transgender son—and I am much more interested in questions of how sexual and gender “non-normativity” reflects the image of God; of how a person of same-sex orientation or transgender identity acquires, through a lifetime of spiritual struggle in the bosom of our Mother the Church, the likeness of God, as every Orthodox Christian must do; of how a person of transgender identity or same-sex orientation—infinitely precious in the sight of God, infinitely beloved of Him— “becomes God” through the lifelong process of deification in the Holy Spirit.

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2. I’m not doing “gay theology,” I’m not doing “queer theology,” and I’m most emphatically not “queering” Orthodox theology. I’m not doing “liberal theology” or “conservative theology.” Gay—queer—homosexual—heterosexual—transgender— cisgender—intersex—black—white—brown—liberal—conservative—these represent socially constructed descriptors of our fragmented humanity in all its fallenness. Why would we situate the criterion of truth outside of the Church—however each of us conceives “the Church”—who is herself said to be the pillar and ground of truth; who is herself said to be as inseparable from Christ, and He from her, as a bride from her husband, as a human body from its head; who is herself said to have the mind of Christ? I strive to do Orthodox theology, plain and simple. Of course, it remains to the Orthodox Church herself—who, in the totality of her ecclesiological structure as the people of God, functions as her own magisterium—to discern whether I have done theology rightly, purely, truthfully…and this, probably long after I have been spiritually and emotionally burnt at the stake many times over, and long after I have departed this life. And lastly… 3. I avoid the anachronistic transposition of heavily laden cultural, political, and social constructs to a time and space where they have no meaning. Theologically, I find it not helpful at all to call David and Jonathan, or Christ and John, or Sergius and Bacchus, “gay lovers.” Lest you think I’m being dismissive of the identitarian constructs that many of us genuinely feel that we need in order to navigate the realities of social and political life, I would find it equally incongruous to call Adam and Eve, or Abraham and Sarah, or Aquila and Priscilla, a “straight couple.” The special vocation of the Orthodox Christian same-sex couple consists not in reimagining the love of David and Jonathan, Christ and

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John, or Sergius and Bacchus in the image and likeness of our fallenness, but rather in opening ourselves and our love to being recreated in the image and likeness of their holiness. In the Orthodox Church we look to Christ and to His saints not so much for validation of what we already are, as for a revelation, an epiphany, of what we can become by grace, for as we read in 1 John, “…we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone having this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” In a mysterious paradox almost beyond my impoverished ability to express, I find what we in the Orthodox Church call Holy Tradition, and the knowledge of it that we can gain both epistemically and gnostically, academically and ecclesially, to be profoundly liberating, not constraining, empowering, not disabling, on both a spiritual and intellectual level. Experienced by the whole body of the Church as the life-giving breath of the Holy Spirit from age to age, Holy Tradition produces neither mere copyists lacking thoughts of our own, nor an inflexible adherence to dead traditionalism. It demarcates the terrain, as it were, of our theological creativity, yet without stifling it. Holy Tradition is a vital dynamic, a living charism through which the Spirit transforms our minds and hearts into a site of communion with the mind and heart of the God-man, Jesus Christ. Holy Tradition thus guarantees in every time and place the continuity of the Church’s faith once for all delivered to the saints. Thank you.