"The Blast of Death's Incessant Motion"

"For Gregory [of Nyssa], the clock whose tick measured off most inexorably and most audibly the passing of tainted time was the clock of marriage. He saw human time as made up of so many consecutive attempts to block out the sight of the grave. Marriage, intercourse, and the raising of children were the most persistent, and the most highly valued of such expedients. It was precisely through the elemental power of the hopes inspired by marriage—and through the tearing grief associated with the dashing of those hopes through the deaths of spouses and children—that it was possible to take the full measure of the burden of anxiety that rested upon men and women, caught as they were in ‘the blast of death’s incessant motion’ (George Herbert).

"Hence the huge symbolic pressure that built up, in Gregory’s mind, around the issue of marriage and virginity. What was at stake, for him, in the virgin life, was not the repression of the sexual drive. That was only a means to a greater end—the withering away in the human heart of a sense of time placed there by the fear of death. This fear could be dissolved most effectively by dispensing with the one social institution that had been brought into existence expressly by the fear of death. Marriage conferred the validation of organized society on that fear. Married intercourse had been the ‘last outward stopping place’ of Adam and Eve in their sad exile from Paradise. It was by joining to have children that they had recognized, in themselves, the full extent of the terror of extinction. To abandon marriage was to face down death. It was to deliver no further hostages to death in the form of children. It was more than that: the abandonment of marriage implied that the soul had broken with the obsession with physical continuity that was the most distinctive trait of a humanity caught in ‘tainted’ time. In the heart of the continent person, the heavy tick of the clock of fallen time had fallen silent." – Peter Brown (The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, p.297-98)