by Mario Mieli
On the other hand, as Serge Hutin writes, ‘everything in the Divine Comedy is constructed in such a way as to conceal from the profane the true convictions of the author: Christian esotericism and the doctrine of the Fedeli d’Amore, whose initiation rites and esoteric practices are made known in the poem …’
The Divine Comedy, a work that is Catholic in appearance, […] thus constitutes a summa – for those in a position to read it – of Christian Hermetism. Dante and his friends belonged to a secret society, that of the Fedeli d’Amore, linked undoubtedly with the Rosicrucians, and the immortal masterpiece of the great Italian poet is an exposition, veiled but sufficiently explicit, of the secret doctrine of this templar confraternity whose members directed their amorous poetry to a ‘Lady’, in reality the symbol of the order and its secret doctrines, the symbol of esoteric Christianity par excellence.58
‘Could I have kept the fire off’: the fire, therefore, perhaps represents not only the persecution of homosexuality, but also the proof through which the occult is revealed, where one goes beyond ‘normal’ perception (that of everyday hell). Access to magic is symbolized in this passage by fire, which is also the essential initiation phase of hermaphrodism. Thus the ‘journey into madness’ is experienced in part as a passage through the flames, as a direct confrontation with the terrifying Dharmapala, a farewell to the repetition compulsion and an escape from the unhappy routine of everyday life, assuming risk and rising to a higher dimension of existence (the foundation of the burning feeling being a dream of love for the Buddha). Like Freud and Ferenczi, we come to see homosexuality as the principal cause and ‘agency’ of so-called ‘paranoid delirium’.59 The choice of fire is also a pact with the Devil, who is ready to meet you as soon as you are ready; you cannot avoid enjoying a real homosexual friendship with him, if for no other reason than because the Devil is androgynous or gynandrous, or better, assumes every form, and can make his appearance as a fascinating queen or an Australian woman. To ‘sell one’s soul to the Devil’ means, among other things, to discover and acknowledge one’s own anima or animus in the Jungian sense.
Behind the repression of homosexuality lurks a sense of homosexuality as a bridge to the unknown (or perhaps, to that which we know already without knowing). Still today, too many people are afraid of actually crossing to the other side. The revolutionary gay movement proposes this great adventure to everyone. Reformist homosexuals, on the other hand, think that it is possible to camp en masse on the bridge itself, obstructing passage to those who wish to go further.
In any case, it will only be possible to go beyond when homosexual desire is completely liberated. And beyond this gay totality, there is everything else: ‘Paradise’ waits for you …
Notes on Platonic Eros and on Homosexuality within Religion
‘I would maintain that there can be no greater benefit for a boy than to have a worthy lover from his earliest youth,
nor for a lover than to have a worthy object for his attention.’
– Plato60
That importance, which Freud brought to light, of sublimated homosexuality as the guarantor of social cohesion (albeit always threatened), also recalls the utopian legislation envisaged in Plato’s Republic. The supreme power there is ascribed to the philosophers; but the Symposium teaches that the true philosopher is also the ‘perfect lover’;61 the Platonic theory of love is predominantly pederastic, and the perfect experience of pederasty is described as ultimately free from the ‘vulgar’ gratification inherent in the sexual realm. This notwithstanding, a passage in the Phaedrus ultimately concedes that the said philosopher, as ‘ideal lover’, may indeed lie with his beloved.62 And even leaving the Phaedrus aside, it is not possible to reduce the entire notion of Eros contained in the Symposium to the words of Socrates alone: a dialogue cannot be mutilated, sending the dialectic on its merry way. In reality, Plato presents the amorous and sensual passion of the young and intoxicated Alcibiades as ultimately fine, just as he does the sublime erotic elevation of Diotima-Socrates and the words of Phaedrus and Pausanius; and the primordial myth of the three sexes espoused by Aristophanes – androgynous, masculine and feminine – is again a Platonic one.
The Republic, the Symposium and the Phaedrus are all dialogues recognised by modern criticism as being roughly contemporary with each other. In them the doctrine of love and its affinity with philosophy is developed and refined: in reading them, we can thus conclude that for Plato, the ideal society must adhere to philosophical pederasty, and the ideal eroticism corresponds to a form of pederasty that is essentially sublimated. It is only in his later work, the Laws, that Plato explicitly condemns homosexual practice: ‘homosexual intercourse and lesbianism seem to be unnatural crimes of the first rank’, and ‘suppressing sodomy entirely’.63
In actual fact, the Platonic conception of sublimated homosexuality is in a certain sense already a symptom of the decadence of the Greek pederastic tradition. In the second half of the fifth century BCE, according to Carlo Diano,
[homosexuality] became a subject of debate, not so much ethical as philosophical and political. Because the ‘gilded youth’ who had found in the ‘wisdom’ of the Sophists a new form of aretè, and who in both politics and life were pro-Spartan, had made this their distinctive badge, the common people, who had their voice in comedy, condemned it and ridiculed it mercilessly. One significant fact was the varied ways in which the assassination of Hipparchus and the expulsion of the Pisistratides was presented. In the democratic tradition, Harmodius and Aristogiton were only champions of freedom, and the love that bound them was passed over in silence; in the aristocratic tradition they were champions of freedom, but as such heroes both of eros and arete.64
This ‘populist’ and heterosexual ideology, which Diano accepted, prevented him from pursuing his research any deeper. It was enough for him to judge aristocracy and oligarchy as evil, and homosexuality still worse, for him to deduce quite naturally that democracy could not but be contrary to homosexuality. This is just one of those ‘clear’ conclusions to which deep-rooted anti-gay prejudice leads our dear professors.
On the other hand, the assertion of democracy and the anti-homosexual taboo in Athens was accompanied by the negation of the Dionysian spirit, which up till then had been characteristic of Greek antiquity, and the gradual crystallisation, in philosophy, of the opposition of subject and object, of spirit and matter, that subsequently marked Western thought through the centuries up to our own time. Yet this philosophical contradiction reflects social fracture and sexual alienation. Masculine thought entered the neurotic and dichotomous phase that distinguishes it still today. It is only from a bourgeois point of view, according to which the present world market of democratic states appears as the best of all possible worlds, that the establishment of (slave-owning) democracy in Athens presents itself as a positive achievement (and from which the rejection of homosexuality can be derived). In his adulation of the democratic and anti-homosexual ‘people’, Diano reveals his own spirit as a slave of capital.
Historical research by revolutionary homosexuals has not yet managed – as far as I know – to show the real motivations that provoked the decline of the Greek homosexual tradition in the second half of the fifth century. At all events, the Platonic doctrine of Eros is not as Diano claims ‘the negation or at least the superseding of a barbaric custom and a perversion of nature’. Plato was rather a theorist whose thought reflected the gradual imposition of the anti-homosexual taboo in antiquity, and the incipient collapse of the ancient Greek political system.
On the other hand, the inherent question of the importance of sublimation in the Platonic doctrine of love is fairly controversial and complex: this is one of the reasons why it seems useful to me to distinguish, following certain French scholars, amour platonicien and from that amour platonique so distorted by the meaning attributed to it in that vague common conception.65 It is true moreover that the concept of sublimation, as posed in the psychoanalytic context, is a poor f
it with interpretations of a philosophical theory that so long predates our own day. Abstaining from sexual relations does not, for the perfect Platonic lover, mean rejecting the beloved as an ‘object’ of his erotic desire, denying the presence and the forces of the ‘rebellious horse of the soul’; whereas when we talk in everyday terms about sublimation in a relationship between persons of the same sex, we almost always mean a process strictly bound to the repression of homosexual desire, which does not directly surface in consciousness.
The pre-existential eschatology of the Phaedrus66 illustrates the reasons by which, in the Platonic utopia, only the philosophers are predestined to rule: they alone dispose of the true Eros and the spiritual impulse to attain, by means of anamnesis, the Ideas. Their souls are the only ones that, prior to the fall and incarnation, are able to pass beyond the vault of the heavens to follow in the wake of the gods. They alone are able to contemplate the Good, the Beautiful, Justice, Temperance and Science. They alone, in this earthly life, can recall in love the pure perception of the Beautiful and can in public life renew the ideal virtues.
According to Hans Jürgen Krahl, there is an important connection between idealism and the primacy of male homoeroticism in Platonic thought. In fact – and in the light of the deep separation (chorismos) between form and matter that characterised Plato’s doctrine – ‘form, the purest unity, is the determining masculine moment; this determining force is the autonomous good. Matter is the undetermined moment that must in this way be determined; it is non-being which, like a position of feminine dependence, derives from the bad.’ And again:
To love women is shameful. The sexual act is restricted to procreation. True love is that of equal for equal, and pederastic homosexual love inspired by Eros originates in the sphere of pure identity. The bottomless chorismos – which in Nietzschean terms is ascribed a moral valuation – has torn the pleasure principle away from the act of procreation. This latter has become a mere restriction on reality and thus does not have a true essence.67
Krahl’s interpretation seems to me in certain respects speculative, in others idealistic, from the moment where in his attempt to reveal the homoerotic substratum of Platonic idealism, he has recourse to a reduction of homosexuality to the Idea, and of the Idea to homosexuality, which is not a Platonic conception. For Plato, homoeroticism is more of a mediation between matter and the Idea, given that – for him – the pure contemplation of the Beautiful proceeds from the immediate attraction towards beautiful (male) bodily forms. The Beautiful cannot be reduced to the intuition of the Beautiful present in homoerotic desire: it is one thing to fall in love with a single beautiful person, quite another to love Beauty for itself. ‘Between the two situations there is a whole hierarchy of possible states, through which the soul has to pass in its ascent, by way of steps that are always more universal, from love for the particular caducity of the earthly to that for the eternity of the ideal’ (Guido Calogero). And the chorismos between immediate homoerotic desire and the pure perception of the Beautiful is in reality founded on a whole series of dialectical, practical and concrete mediations – as shown by Diotima’s speech – and on a profusion of that supra-rational ‘mystic spirit’ which makes Plato’s work beautiful as well as supremely intelligent.
In any case, if Krahl had taken it in the rear, if he had tried real desire for men, he would probably have interpreted ‘the determining masculine moment’ in a less formal fashion, and noticed that the ‘pure identity’ between men is sunk in the bowels of matter, and hovers as an irresistible, sensual lure between one and others. On this basis, he might have understood that Platonic idealism, beyond its partial rejection of heterosexuality, is also founded on an inhibition of carnal homosexual desire, which – as I noted – is finally condemned explicitly in the Laws. In separating matter and form, the work of Plato reflects a certain separation of Eros from the body, and from the male body just as from the female. It is not homosexuality, therefore, on which Plato’s idealism rests, but rather the rejection of homosexuality. Even so, this rejection is not blind sublimation: it is in the face and the body of the beloved that the philosopher receives the imprint of the Beautiful, the trace (‘phantasm’) of the god pursued from the soul’s first embodiment. For Plato, however, the trace of the Beautiful is lost in unrestrained sensual satisfaction, in which one exhausts a love. We will need to explain what historical motives induced Plato to establish an incompatibility between carnal love and the philosopher’s access to ideal virtue, the Beautiful in itself.
In the patriarchal society of ancient Greece (in particular Crete, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Calcide in Eubea, and Attica), the anti-homosexual taboo was unknown, and the subordination of women determined the privileged, often sacral, assertion of homosexual love between equals. With Plato and his age, actual homosexuality entered a crisis. There remained however – and here Krahl is right – the judgement of superiority attributed to emotional and intellectual (but not sexual) relations between men. Athenian democracy proved to be less homosexual, but certainly not less masculinist.
According to Krahl, a better disposition towards heterosexuality is encountered in all those dialectical thinkers intent – as against Plato – on establishing a real mediation between form and matter. However,
the decisive reception of the Platonic chorismos came with the Pauline reinterpretation of the homosexual Jesus. Flesh is sinful matter that has rejected God, the pure identity of the Trinity. The act of procreation is a rigid duty. Paul banished that sphere of identity, of same-sex love, into which Plato had transposed the pleasure principle. Homosexuality is love of God, of Jesus – of the Word become flesh – hence the monastic life, a pure and ascetic pleasure. Such a sensuality, directed towards the abstract beyond and radically modified in its function, transforms any erotic element in Europe into a neurotic one (paralysed homosexuality).68
Religion, as a universal obsessional neurosis of humanity, also results in large part from the sublimation of homosexual desire. In the words of Wilhelm Reich: ‘Clinical experience shows incontestably that religious sentiments result from inhibited sexuality, that the source of mystical excitation is to be sought in inhibited sexual excitation’.69 Like the obsessional neurosis of children, wrote Freud, religion ‘arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father’.70 The dissolution of the complete Oedipus complex involves both an identification with the father and an identification with the mother. The first serves as a substitute for the libidinal cathexis towards the paternal object; the second as a substitute for the libidinal cathexis directed towards the mother:
The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way united with each other. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego.71
And Freud goes on to argue:
It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved.72
Both love and fear of God are the neurotic result of a love for the parents that is censored by the incest taboo and the taboo against homosexuality, the result of a sensual love for those closest that is reduced to agape, caritas. The gap between Eros and agape is filled with the presence of God, whose laws condemn the love of the flesh. In reality, however, it is the condemnation of carnal love for the parents that helps lay the foundations for belief in God, by establishing within us, through identification with the parental sexual ‘objects’ which have had to be renounced, a severe censor, a Lord, an ego ideal, whose ‘voice’ repeats the commands and duties of the parents. ‘The self-judgement which declares that the ego falls short of its ideal produces the religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his longing’.73
But the forced renunci
ation of the parental ‘objects’ also means a severe repression of homosexuality. The boy’s desire for the father, and the girl’s for the mother, are neurotically transformed into the worship of God. Desire is so strongly present, and at the same time burdened by so imperious a taboo, that it ends up covering its object with the absolute veil of an illusion: divinity. God is transcendent, among other reasons, because the father will not go to bed with his son. The repression of Oedipal desire is so radical that it fills the whole of life with a terror of the unknown, and this repressed content emerges only at the risk of being snarled back by the Cerberus of repression: primus in orbe deus fecit timor.74
It may well be unnecessary to emphasise that these ideas on religion cannot claim to provide an exhaustive key to the vastness of the subject involved. It is enough to indicate the other angles from which the question has been approached in philosophy, by Kierkegaard, Feuerbach and Marx among others. Then we can refer to the interpretation of psychoanalytic anthropology that sees ‘the primal scene’ and its traumatic infantile introjection as the principal factor in establishing belief in gods and demons (Róheim), or again to the very different bearing of religious themes in so-called ‘madness’ (Schreber, to take only a particularly famous case), and so on.
And yet it is precisely the religious experience of ‘schizophrenia’, which has very little in common with institutionalised neurotic religion and with customary or ‘adopted’ faith, that displays the sublime and fundamental nexus existing between (homo)eroticism and that which lies behind the veil of Maya, across the bridge. While the patriarchal religion of transcendence is based among other things upon the sublimation of homosexual desire, the magical experience of the hidden and normally unconscious universe, the journey to that other place which is here, the ‘know thyself’, passes necessarily by way of manifest homosexuality.
