Soloviev’s reflections on the meaning of gender

– Why do people have different sexes? – He is asking a Russian thinker. It is generally claimed 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, including 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, many healthy and gifted children come from fairly ordinary families where physical turmoil was lacking. In the Old Testament, patriarchs’ marriages are 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 but of God’s will. Isaac is the son of profound 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 these activities were only to multiply humanity, then, as Soloviev thinks, the individual would live only for human society. In fact, it has value for each of us, above all, as human individuals. We need to reflect on the importance of sexual development for ourselves, for Christian perfection, and for the completeness of God’s image in man. According to Soloviev, bodily emotions, if natural, are a kind of harbinger of future spiritual perfection. Man and woman feel a unique attraction to each other. It is a kind of spontaneous, animalistic expression of the fundamental truth that they are people who complement each other. 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 relationship between man and woman develops only gradually. Two people feel subconsciously that they will not yet achieve this ideal. Nature did, however; he cannot give up. What some have not achieved, others will; there will be 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 yet happened in a spiritual connection. Where the ratio of man to woman has matured to spiritual perfection, the origin and birth of children are unnecessary and impossible. It is, as the author says, «the beginning of 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 and renunciation. Even in marriage, matter defies the spirit and can only be overcome in a crosswise manner. Soloviev illustrates this idea with a real-life example. The monk Clement Zaderhorn, whose biography was written by K. L. Leontiev, was the son of an evangelical pastor in Moscow. He attended the wedding ceremony at the Orthodox temple and saw the groom and the bride as the bride was crowned. The young Zaderhorn was extremely impressed by the anthem, which compared the crowns to those 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 by which 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 live in purity and sexual renunciation. There are undoubtedly many personal ideas in Soloviev’s reflections. However, a profoundly Christian and universal attitude is fundamental. 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.