The Conception of the Mother of God

The Conception of the Most Holy Theotokos

One of the touching things about the Orthodox iconography of the Conception of the Mother of God is that it both portrays the intimacy of the parents of the Theotokos, Saints Joachim and Anna, in a frank and unapologetic way. They kiss, they look tenderly into each other’s eyes, they wrap their arms around each other, even their feet are stepping together as though they are dancing on a brightly-coloured carpet. And yet they do not occupy the centre of the icon itself. The focus of our ‘gaze’ as we look on this icon is lifted up away from that happy couple in their embrace toward the temple behind and beyond them. Situated behind Joachim and Anna are a male and a female figure, set against a rocky hill and a spray of green foliage respectively, which symbolise Adam (‘Earth’) and Eve (‘Life’), each reaching up toward Heaven, toward angels on either side.

For some reason, when I see this icon, my eyes are also drawn to the hands of Saints Joachim and Anna. Her left hand on his chest; his right hand on her arm; their other hands embracing each other about the shoulders. ‘Love your hands! Love them,’ writes Toni Morrison in Beloved. ‘Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, You!’ The hands of Saint Joachim and Saint Anna are not there merely to titillate each other, but to comfort and reassure. (The Protoevangelium of James has it, after all, that Joachim and Anna were never able to conceive a child for most of their lives – they were forbidden from offering at the Temple and treated as sinners by their own people prior to the Conception.) There is a deeply human vulnerability in this expression between the husband and wife, a total lack of reserve, that is seen in relatively few other Orthodox icons – one exception being the meeting of the Theotokos and Saint Elizabeth from the Gospel of St Luke.

The icon of the Conception of the Theotokos is therefore both a testament to the fact that the ordinary, commonplace erotic intimacy between husband and wife is wholly sanctified without need for apology or excuse, and a solemn reminder that the ends of erōs lie beyond itself. The ordinariness of the Holy Ancestors of God in this loving caress, highlights the Christian conviction that sexual gnōsis is not the reserve of a handful of tantric masters and their initiates, as in certain heresies and Dharmic sects, but instead that it is part-and-parcel of being a human soul with a body. Even so, the full vertical Platonic potential of the erotic impulse – its attempt to reach upwards toward a vision of the Divine through an inspiration bypassing the rational – is acknowledged and celebrated by the icon’s very setting. We in the Orthodox Church hold that it is through this very human act of love that Our All-Holy, Sublimely Pure, Most Blessed Lady, the Mother of God, entered the world. This icon of Joachim and Anna is therefore also a stern rebuke, both to the reflexive contortions of the various Gnostics past and present who see in sex only the grounds for shame, and to the current consumer anti-culture of de-contextualised, de-racinated, even de-fleshed fluid plastic sensualism that undergirds so much of our current cultural neuroses about the body.

The touchstone I keep returning to on this question – not wrongly, I don’t think – is the analysis of the ‘flight from feeling’ from social historian Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch talks about how we contemporary Americans both trivialise and overburden our sexual lives by unmooring them from their procreative teleology – by essentially making ourselves infertile and turning over our familial burdens to a bureaucratic state. He then touches both on the ‘spectre of impotence’ hovering over modern male psychology, and on the corresponding fear of insurmountable female sexual expectations that haunts a culture steeped in plastiform sensual imagery – all compounded by a backdrop of civilisational exhaustion. ‘The cult of intimacy,’ he writes, ‘conceals a growing despair of finding it.’

I first used this framework at first as an attempt to diagnose what then was only beginning to be called the ‘incel’ phenomenon. But these things are not unique to incels; they are common to all of us, men and women, who have suffered rejection, mockery, and an outcast status on account of real or perceived social-sexual inadequacy. Lasch certainly did not mean his diagnosis to be specific to any social cohort, but a systematic analysis of contemporary American culture, a technologically-driven ‘turn’ in the prehistoric battle of the sexes. Lasch had his pulse on a certain universal thirst for intimacy and fear of rejection. But the plastiform consumer culture heightens that erotic thirst by presenting our senses with facsimiles of it; while the aversion to child-bearing and -rearing fostered by a technocratic and bureaucratic culture ‘manages expectations’ about intimacy while putting it ever further out-of-reach for most people.

With all of this in mind, certainly Saint Joachim was no stranger to the ‘spectre of impotence’ and the rages of the involuntarily-childless. Impotence was the very same charge with which Rubim – another man – mocks him and drives him away from the Temple in the Protoevangelium of James. We can even see in Saint Joachim the beginnings of this ‘flight from feeling’. He ‘did not come into the presence of his wife’, but instead ‘retired to the desert, and there pitched his tent, and fasted forty days and forty nights’, leaving his wife at home alone to bewail her widowhood and childlessness. (Saint Anna no less than her husband is rejected, scorned, an outcast from the Temple on account of her ‘shut-up womb’, her barrenness; which makes the seeming-abandonment by her husband doubly cruel.) The Church has not been a stranger to these problems of sexual alienation even between married couples in healthier times, problems which penetrate down to the depths of the human heart.

What is interesting about the Protoevangelium story is that Joachim and Anna are brought back together by the promise of a baby. They re-achieve intimacy, even in a supposedly-barren old age, through the procreative telos – or at least, through the hope of it. The icon itself bears witness against the notion that sex can ever be fully divorced either from its primal roots in the quest for intimacy, or its final ends in the procreation of children, even where that is impossible or thought to be impossible. The emotional tensions between man and woman are not abolished here; we only have to look at the faces of the two saints in this icon, full of feeling, intent upon one another, to see that they are not. But those tensions are not without direction. The fruit, of course – is the Theotokos; and through her, the salvation of the world.

Today the bonds of barrenness are broken,
God has heard the prayers of Joachim and Anna.
He has promised them beyond all their hopes to bear the Maiden of God,
By whom the Uncircumscribed One was born as mortal Man;
He commanded an angel to cry to her:
“Rejoice, O full of grace,
The Lord is with you!”