This article focuses on carnal love and chastity in Christian marriage. ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, a well-known novella written by L.N. Tolstoy, exploded the intellectual life of Russian society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. According to Tolstoy, his purpose was to assert the idea of Christian marriage impossibility as it presupposes carnal love between spouses which is not acceptable from the point of view of the Christian understanding of human destiny, being incompatible with chastity, one of the basic values and virtues of a Christian. But, surprisingly, the story of Pozdnyshev, the main character of the novella, is a sincere and deep confession that leaves no doubt that the relationships between the sexes, as well as love and marriage, not only can, but has to be Christian. The tragedy and existential impasse of the novella’s writer and its main character, as well as many representatives of the intelligentsia in the ‘golden age’ of the Russian culture, lay in the cultural-historical, moral, ethical, philosophical, ritual (but – non-ontological) perception of the Gospel, orthodox worldview, and the role of Church Sacraments in the life of a person and society, in one of which – the Sacrament of Marriage – a gracious opportunity is given to the supernatural transformation of spouses’ love and their physical connection into one of the components of their relationship, like-mindedness, unanimity, metaphysical unity, when two people become one person. The probability that two kindred souls will meet each other, being an immanently infinitely small value, increases to a real possibility in the transcendental dimension and understanding – and those are two open paths of our free choice.
Дмитрий Алексеевич Гусев (Fri,) studied this question.