Soloviev’s reflections on the meaning of gender

– Why do people have different sexes? – he is asking Russian thinker. It is generally claimed that to preserve the human race. However, Soloviev raised several objections to this generally accepted opinion.
 In the mortal body Lower organisms reproduce without sexual intercourse. Why should this method be necessary in the end
of higher organisms and for humans? The power and development of sexual attractiveness do not correspond to actual fertility and natural selection. How many times has it ended in a big one and passionate love by suicide! On the contrary, a lot of healthy and gifted children come from fairly ordinary families where physical turmoil was lacking. In the Old Testament, marriages of patriarchs are something sacred: the preservation of Abraham’s seed until the coming of the Messiah. That’s why he’s there, he often emphasizes that the offspring are not born of covetousness body, but of God’s will. Isaac is the son of great trust in God, it is taken at a time when sexual attraction (pores) has disappeared. Gn21, 1-2). Sex life permeates a person’s entire mental development. If all this were only to multiply humanity,
then it would happen, as Soloviev thinks, that the individual would live only for human society. In fact, it has each of us values above all in ourselves as a human person. We need to think about the importance of sexual development for ourselves, for Christian perfection, for the completeness of God’s image in man. According to Soloviev bodily, emotions, if natural, area kind of harbinger of future spiritual perfection. Man and the woman feels a unique attraction to herself. It is a kind of spontaneous, animalistic expression of the fundamental truth that they have people compliment. Real love is not yet love in the true sense of the word; it is only a hint. It needs to be transformed to turn into a friendship of spirit. The virtualization of the relationship between man and woman proceeds only with a gradual development. Two people feel subconscious that they will not yet achieve this ideal. Nature did, however he cannot give up. What some have not achieved, they must there will be other future generations. Sexual love is thus manifested in the physical intercourse from which children are born. It’s an expression of hope and at the same time, a manifestation of weakness. It hasn’t happened yet
to a spiritual connection. Where the ratio of man to woman
matured to spiritual perfection, the origin and birth of children is
unnecessary and impossible. It is, as the author says, «the beginning
a new age where life does not arise in time, but on the contrary, early life returns to materiality ». However, the transition from time to eternity takes place in Christianity in a strange way: by martyrdom, renunciation. Even in marriage, matter defies the spirit and does not overcome other than crosswise. Soloviev illuminates this idea with an example from reality. The monk Clement Zaderhorn, whose biography was written by K. L. Leontiev, was the son of an evangelical pastor in Moscow. He was present at the wedding ceremonies in the Orthodox temple and saw as a groom and the bride lays a crown on her head. The young Zaderhorn was extremely impressed by the singing of the anthem in which these the crowns are compared to the crowns of martyrs. He began to think deeply about the meaning of love until he finally entered a monastery. Marriage cannot be to satisfy an animal instinct. It’s a means to that the image of God in man has been restored. Those who fail to do so have hope in children. On the contrary, those who have already reached the goal,
they live in purity and sexual renunciation. There are undoubtedly many personal ideas in Soloviev’s thought considerations. However, profoundly Christian and universal is a fundamental attitude. They do not pit marriage and sexual abstinence against each other as two opposing directions. It’s more like the same path on which one is closer or farther from the goal.