Note to Pope Francis: sex is more than just sex

Pope Francis is boldly liberalizing Catholic teaching on sexual matters. Or so it is commonly believed.

Whether it is just or unjust, accurate or inaccurate—and perhaps my note will turn out to be less a reminder to the pontiff than to those who hear and read him inaccurately—Pope Francis is enthusiastically applauded by a broad and admiring audience for bringing the Roman Catholic Church up to date on matters of sexuality, primarily by putting them into a proper perspective. In earlier ages of the Christian Church, both East and West, its canons and its teachings always understood human sexuality as having a very powerful effect upon the human soul, and hence much deserving of pastoral counsel to safeguard its salutary employment. Now, however, this view has become unfashionable and many believe the Pope is helping the Church to finally realize (as the nineties’ refrain echoed, from the dismissal of Bill Clinton’s amorous adventures to the glib laugh-line on Sex and the City) that sex is “just sex,” not really a big deal at all, and certainly nowhere near the center of the moral or spiritual life.

But what if, to the contrary, this view—reflected in the title of the 1998 gay-oriented film, Relax… It’s Just Sex—is profoundly mistaken? (And of course, if sex is just sex, what’s so important about ‘coming out’?) Rather, I believe that this source of the most ancient and enduring prohibitions and exhortations is psychologically, morally, and spiritually a very “big deal” indeed. And if this is the case, then the ascendancy of sexual laissez-faire in the West—from the glib and ubiquitous employment of internet porn among young people, to the hook-up culture that serves as its less disembodied corollary, to the perceived imperative to normalize carte blanche every conceivable mode of sexual activity— is likely to have powerful and unforeseeable consequences.

It was not, after all, some wizened ascetic, but the great critic of asceticism, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote: “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.” And his older contemporary, Søren Kierkegaard, from the time of his first publication, made sexuality and the erotic central to his understanding of the human condition, with the first half of Either/Or focusing upon the erotic, the aesthetic pleasures of seduction, and the question of “the aesthetic validity of marriage.” Both figures anticipated the appraisal of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement concerning the inestimable importance of libido. Nor is this merely a modern view, as witnessed by Plato’s preoccupation with eros and sexuality not only in the two dialogues devoted to these topics, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, but in many of his other writings. The quintessentially modern Marquis de Sade, whose deliberately outrageous writings invariably return to ethical and political matters, and who was elected to the revolutionary Convention nationale, argued stridently that the liberation of humanity cannot be complete until all sexual norms are systematically subverted, a task that requires not placid atheism but systematic blasphemy to level all hierarchies—thereby positing sexual libertinism as the sine qua non of human freedom. Modern neuroscience, for its part, has shown the far-reaching effects on body and soul of sexually related hormones and biochemicals.

But perhaps the most significant evidence that sex, and the erotic in general, is centrally important to human existence comes from Jewish and Christian scriptures and theologians. The unabashedly erotic and often overtly sexual “Song of Songs” has long been understood as an allegory of the relation between God and his people. And throughout the Old Testament, idolatry (the pursuit of many gods) is linked to prostitution and infidelity (the pursuit of many sexual partners) and even called “spiritual fornication.” (Wisdom: XIV: 12) In the New Testament, and in the liturgies that explicate it, the relation between Christ and the Church is seen as analogous to that between bride and bridegroom, with more than a few references to the bridal chamber where the marriage is consummated. But if there are absolutely no norms for the wedding night, let alone what precedes or follows it, what does this imply for our relation to the divine? This theme is discussed with great eloquence by the Byzantine philosopher and theologian, St Maximus the Confessor, embraced by both Catholic and Orthodox confessions. For Maximus, in the words of contemporary Greek theologian Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, God “is both eros and the object of eros,” for “as eros He moves toward man, and as the object of eros He attracts to Himself those receptive to His eros.” And in the words of Maximus himself: “God stimulates and allures in order to bring about an erotic union in the Spirit; that is to say, He is the go-between in this union, the one who brings the parties together, in order that He may be desired and loved by His creatures.”

All of this has been obscured in the West, in no small part due to the fundamentally misguided work Eros and Agape by the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren. This book argued that eros is a pagan and selfish kind of love, in contrast to the purified, properly Protestant love the author believes is called agapē. And of course, given this belief, sexuality would not necessarily possess any spiritual dimensions, apart from its conformity to certain seemingly arbitrary, externally imposed regulations. But the Early Church never made that distinction, saw the two modes of love as interwoven and interrelated, and embraced eros as not only central to the spiritual life, but situated at its very heart. And if this is the case, disordered sexuality would have profound implications for our relation to God and one another, just as was understood in the ancient Jewish perception of a link between infidelity and idolatry, with the latter not uncommonly entailing sexual licentiousness and (as with the worship of Moloch or Baal) the ritual sacrifice of children.

Within a secular milieu that takes the belief in God as holding no more than marginal appeal—as no longer a “living options,” in the words of William James—the link between sexual eros, religious eros, and the inner core of the human person will seem like a curious remnant of an archaic past, while even Nietzsche’s reference to “spirit” (Geist) will seem merely retrograde. But if there is a deity who resembles the God portrayed in the Jewish and Christian traditions, and moreover if the life of the spirit is what is most essential about the human condition, then sex is not just sex at all, but a matter of great importance, a mirror for understanding our relation to the other, a decisive clue to unlocking the cipher of who we each are, a powerful force for good or for evil, i.e. a “very big deal” indeed.

Featured image credit: Bed, by Nik Lanús. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.