We will return later to the question: Which factor possesses the decisive power so to unite physical sex with the spiritual personality that the exercise of sex involves no falling away from God? Exclusive insistence upon the function of sex for man in quantum animal and the reduction of the connection between sex and spirit to a purely utilitarian relationship is, most of all, to be reprobated when it is a consequence of the method that explains everything by biological categories. Indeed, we must reject all overemphasis of biological points of view and the phenomenon of life; such, for instance, as we find in the so-called vital philosophy and, more generally, as a form of Modernism, that sacrifice of eternal truth to the spirit of the age.
And, finally, we must point out once again that sex is a mystery, though not, of course, in the theological sense of the term. It is in the first place a mystery in its quality as a sphere of mysterious experience. Of that we shall speak more in detail later. But apart from or in addition to this it is also a mystery inasmuch as the act of marriage signifies the mysterious creation of a new human being. It is no chance that God has invested that act with this creative significance. As God’s love is the creative principle in the universe, so love is everywhere creation, and there is a profound significance in the nexus—at once symbol and reality—whereby from the creative act—in which two become one flesh from love and in love—the new human being proceeds. It was this thought that inspired the following prayer, taken from an old nuptial liturgy: “O Lord our God, Who didst create man pure and spotless and thereafter ordain that in the propagation of the human race one generation should be produced from another by the mystery of love.”6
Here also we can do justice to the significance of this mysterious process only if we take the union of love into full account. It is possible to gauge in its fullness and depth the sublimity of the connection between sex and the origin of a new human being, or to recognize all that is implied by the fact that it is no mere living thing, but a man, who comes into existence,7 if only we already understand the peculiar relationship that subsists between physical sex and wedded love.
Sex, however, is a mystery, even apart from the fact that it is the source from which a new human being proceeds. In its purely qualitative aspect also a mysterious character attaches, as we have already seen, to sex. That is sufficiently proved by its depth, centrality, and intimacy. In this domain man is faced at every turn by mystery. He surrenders himself after a unique fashion—encounters either the mystery of wedded love or the mystery of a terrible sin. Either the mysterious union of two human beings takes place in the sight of God (in conspectu Dei) or man flings himself away, surrenders his secret, delivers himself over to the flesh, desecrates and violates the secret of another, severs himself in a mysterious fashion from God. Mysterious, as the hallowed mystery whereby in marriage two become one flesh, is the abyss of sin to which the abuse of sex leads.
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1. Sigmund Freud’s thesis, on which the so-called psychoanalytic method is based, in spite of the valuable psychotherapeutic discoveries that it has produced, embodies a completely erroneous view of the structure of human personality, which betrays the influence of an exploded sensationalism. Its first radical error is that it regards the body and the physiological life as the “form” of the soul, not the spiritual soul as the “form” of life and the body. As sensationalism has always done, it constructs man from below, instead of recognizing in the spiritual center, made in the image of God, the formal actuating principle. A second error, equally fundamental, is the transformation of ultimate objective analogies between different spheres in the human person into real causal relations, as soon as sex is in any way concerned. As the sight of the bodily eye possesses a profound analogy with all forms of mental apperception in which the object faces me from a distance, and I enlighten it with the clear beam of the apperceiving consciousness, whereas the sense of touch with its immediate contact is the prototype of an entirely different group of mental relationships to an object—for instance, my becoming sensible of the benevolence and love; or, on the contrary, of the hatred and enmity borne to me—so also the domain of sex, and particularly the act of marriage, contains many elements that possess their analogues in the higher spiritual domain; for example, the elements of undivided application and complete surrender to the other partner, the element which may be characterized as an expansion or solution of strain, the element of ecstasy, and the element of self-disclosure and self-revelation. But this objective analogy of qualities is in itself no proof whatsoever of a real causal connection between an unreserved surrender which is purely spiritual and that comprised in the act of marriage. Still less does this analogy prove that all surrender, all expansion,all ecstasy, wherever found, are a sublimation of sex, a theory which not only substitutes a real connection for a qualitative analogy, but treats what is only the derivative and the copy as the original, indeed as the sole, reality. According to this view of the matter, the higher forms must be mere derivatives of the lower, nothing more than forms of sex veiled and decked out with fine feathers. This clearly is the logical result of that double mistake, as to the composition and structure of the human being, which thus avenges itself. On the other hand, it is certainly due to this qualitative analogy that sex can be the organic expression of a particular form of love and the field in which it finds fulfillment, though we must remember that here the analogy of qualities far exceeds these common formal elements. Nevertheless, when this function of the act of marriage is fulfilled, it constitutes immediately an entirely novel, real relationship between this love and physical sex, which, though bound up with the qualitative analogy, transcends it, but in which love is the point of departure, the actuating principle. On the other hand, in certain forms of sham love, where the parties are “in love” in the bad sense—cases of the kind which abound in erotic literature—there is actually a sublimation of the sex instinct. Unconsciously the true situation is dressed up, and behind the decoration the determining factor is sexual lust pure and simple. But this is no more true of genuine love than it is of art. Not all art, least of all genuine art, is a sublimation of the sex instinct because a certain type of erotic literature undoubtedly is. We are far from denying that suppressed sex can find its realization in a thousand and one other domains and assume a host of disguises. But these effects of repressed sex always bear the stamp of unhealthiness and aberration. We shall never find among them the forces and qualities which are vehicles of the highest values or are true to the norms of the spiritual life.
2. “The Church sees in married love the mutual attraction of the two sexes implanted by the Creator in human nature, and the foundation of and indispensable condition for the most intimate and the indissoluble community of life between human beings of different sex, and as such gives it her blessing.” Franz Walter, Der Leib und sein Recht in Christentum (The Body and Its Rights in Christianity) (Donauwörth, 1910), Part 1, chap. 2, iii, p. 154. Ibid., p. 155: “What is the sex relation worth without pure strong love?”
3. The fact that the act of marriage also possesses a significance for man in quantum homo—namely, the expression and fulfillment of wedded love—is of course no justification whatsoever for an artificial divorce of this purpose from the function of generation. On the contrary, both constituents have been so organically united by God that to disrupt this unity by breaking this mysterious and solemn bond between the different factors must be, on that account, if for no other reason, a frightful sacrilege.
4. The bond between wedded love and physical sex can, of course, be also regarded as a means to procreation. But from this point of view it is impossible to discover the significance of sex for man in quantum homo, or give an account of what constitutes the special intrinsic meaning of the bond. This, on the contrary, must be sought in the significance of sex as expression and fulfillment. The fact that, in a world divinely planned, factors in themselves distinct and displaying on occasion an independent significance are also related as means and e
nd, is no argument against the actual independence of their meanings. Indeed, the beauty of the functional harmony which prevails throughout the cosmos presupposes the independent significance of its diverse provinces, each with its distinctive raison d’etre. Otherwise the cosmos would be a barren machine.
5. As a consequence of the loose employment of the term “object” or “end” (Zweck) a relation such as exists between an experience and its expression or fulfillment is conceived as a relation of means and end, for no better reason than that the expression or fulfillment holds a subordinate position in respect of the experience which it fulfills. In reality, however, such a relationship is something totally different from the true relation of means and end, as becomes at once obvious when we consider the material character of the latter.
6. Cf. Fr. Athanasius Wintersig, Liturgie und Frauenseele (The Liturgy and the Soul of Woman), p. 89.
7. This is not affected by the fact that only in his body is man the product of union between the semen and ovum; the soul, on the contrary, is always God’s immediate creation. For it remains true that the parents procreate a human body destined for the most intimate union with an immortal soul, and from which it actually receives its “form” (anima forma corporis; the soul is the form of the body).
CHAPTER THREE
The Three Aspects of Sex
THE REMARKABLE FACT that one and the same function is the medium of the closest objective communion of two creatures and can be also the domain of fearful sin becomes more intelligible when we reflect that sex can present totally different qualities. Besides that quality, a blend of intimacy, centrality, mystery, and tenderness, which gives expression to a unique liberating surrender and unites in a fashion beyond words to describe, a peculiar fascination, alluring and intoxicating, can attach to sex. These two qualities are not inseparable, and, moreover, there is no intrinsic bond between them. On the contrary, up to a certain point they are mutually opposed. Sex possesses the tender, mysterious, ineffably uniting and intimate quality only when exercised as the expression of something more ultimate—namely, wedded love. As soon as sex is isolated and sought for its own sake its qualities are reversed. The depth, the seriousness, the mystery disappear, to make room for a fascinating, exciting, and befuddling charm which excludes anything beyond. Wherever sex is encountered in an unlawful form as a temptation there is heard this siren song of lust, with its honeyed poison. The sublime joy of ultimate surrender, touching, chaste, intimate, and mysterious, with which, under other circumstances, it is invested is completely absent. Sex is always extraordinary, but its characteristic extraordinariness assumes diametrically opposite forms. At one time it is awe-inspiring, mysterious, noble, chaste, and free; at another, illegitimate, intoxicating, and befogging. This becomes most evident if we consider the case when sex appears as not only specifically fascinating, but, as the domain of evil lust, addresses a diabolical appeal to man. No longer is there mystery, freedom, or tenderness; instead, we are in the presence of something sinister and oppressive; in an atmosphere where it is difficult to breathe. An entire world divides the extraordinariness of miracle from the twilight of magic, sinister and devilish. Both indeed are extraordinary, exceeding the scope of nature. But that which in the one case is bright, clear, awe-inspiring, illuminating, and holy, is in the other close, bemusing, eerie. So is it, mutatis mutandis, with sex. The quality of extraordinariness, which, of course, must now be understood in a purely natural sense, always attaches to sex so long as it is not directly misconceived. But what is in the one case mysterious is in the other uncanny; what in the one instance expands, in the other contracts. Sex possesses the former quality only so long as it functions as the pure expression of wedded love. The elements of intimacy, tenderness, and mystery, and the creation of a fundamental tie, which compose the true and divinely willed quality of sex, are accessible to him alone who beholds them in the closest union with wedded love and experiences them in a very special fashion as approved by God.1 For the joy and attraction are here the result of the unique union, the mutual contact in the sexual sphere, the most intimate mutual self-donation and self-revelation, and, moreover, the consciousness of a union willed by God—all factors that are operative only when sex is exercised on the basis of wedded love. When sex is thus experienced there is no seduction in it, but liberation, pathos, and solemn earnest. On the other hand, the opposite quality of sex, its seductive magic, is not necessarily destroyed by its organic union with love. It can, indeed, even creep into the sanctuary of marriage. But it is then a foreign element which contradicts the solemnity and tender sanctity of the wedded union. It distracts the attention from love. There is in it something irreverent and frivolous, degrading and corroding the soul. It is the tragedy of fallen man that the danger at least of this perversion is always present, the danger that sex should exercise over him this baser appeal. But to the degree in which the sublime aspect is present and is experienced by him the other vanishes. Even greater is the contrast between sex as the mystery of love and sex as the vehicle of diabolically evil lust. The mortal enchantment of evil lust is confined to sex when taken in isolation. It is the exact opposite of the quality that constitutes the joy and attraction of sex as the medium of the most profound union with another. The moment it sounds in a man’s ear he is deaf to the voice of love, his heart becomes cold; for deep within himself he hears something essentially incompatible with love. Obviously, sex only reveals its true nature when it manifests the glorious qualities of intimacy, mystery, seriousness, and union; when, in other words, it comes to us as the fulfillment of wedded love invested with the consciousness of God’s approval.2
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1. For a detailed treatment of this decisive factor see chapter 6, sec. a.
2. A typical example of the distinction between the two negative aspects of sex—befogging charm and diabolic seduction—is to be found in Wagner’s Parsifal. The flower girls represent the specific charm of sex when isolated; Kundry, on the other hand, its diabolic allurement.
CHAPTER FOUR
Impurity
HUMAN PURITY1 involves a distinctive attitude to the important domain of sex. According to the attitude which a man adopts to sex he is pure or impure. If, then, we ask in what does impurity consist, the reply is easy: it consists in the abuse of sex.
In this connection several factors must be distinguished. In the first place I fling myself away by giving up this personal secret to another with no intention of a real and final surrender to that person or of entering thus into a lasting external union with my partner. Where the foundation has not been laid by wedded love and the deliberate purpose of forming a permanent objective community of life, secure from arbitrary whim, the act, which represents a unique self-donation and effects an intimate union of the most fundamental nature, signifies a specific squandering of self, the betrayal of oneself and one’s partner. The evil (the negative value) involved in the disharmony between the objective character of the act and the intention with which it is performed is obvious. This negative value, which such a flinging away of self involves, assumes its grossest form when the sensual pleasure has become a completely independent aim and the act is performed solely for its own sake, with no deeper relation to the other party. That man has become “one flesh with a harlot.”
Besides this squandering of self, this betrayal of oneself and one’s partner, which may be described as a specific degradation of both, this abuse of sex always involves a second factor, a desecration. To perform the act which signifies the hallowed union of two human beings in one flesh and should be the expression and fulfillment of a lasting and indissoluble bond of love—and which effects the most perfect self-surrender to another, because it involves the mutual revelation of a secret, a self-revelation, that is to say, of the most intimate character—with a partner to whom we are not united by the sacred tie of matrimony is obviously a desecration of the most awful kind. As all desecration is specifically sinful—for example, the abuse of a human bein
g which I commit by treating him as a mere thing, thereby doing violence to his dignity as the image of God, the desecration of the Temple by the money-changers or of Holy Communion by receiving it from worldly motives—this particular desecration is also a sin. Moreover, this sinful desecration is not only committed by abuse of the act designed to express a lawful, profoundly solemn, and fundamental union of love, but is involved by every exercise of sex, whether with another or by oneself, apart from and in opposition to its lofty significance. As it is always a desecration to employ something destined for a sublime purpose in a fashion inconsistent with that noble object—as for instance to utter God’s name thoughtlessly or irreverently—so is it in this case.
But not only is every abuse of sex a desecration; it further involves a specific defilement. And this brings us to the third factor from which impurity derives its evil, and indeed to that which most of all determines its distinctive quality.
Both aspects which sex displays immediately when it is isolated and no longer “formed” from within by wedded love and the consciousness of God’s sanction—namely, the siren song of sensual attraction with its poisonous sweetness, and diabolic evil lust—display a peculiar power to corrode and defile the soul. The moment any man in his employment of sex “wills” one of these two aspects, and gives himself up to it, he incurs a mysterious defilement and separates himself in an altogether unique fashion from God. This quality, befogging, intoxicating, and infusing its poison into the very marrow of its victim, stands in peculiar contrast to the sphere of holiness, the home of liberation and sublimation, resplendent with the light of peace. And it further involves a specific opposition to the peculiar quality of expansive warmheartedness which belongs to pure love as such.
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