Sanctuary

“The sexual act itself, which is performed with such lust, seeks privacy.”

Augustine of Hippo

In the private sanctuary of her modest incall apartment, my shadow self is unveiled. Years of sexual self-denial couldn’t sublimate it. A lust for flesh burns within me. In this space my identities as a divinity school student and a church minister are obscured. As I take off my clothes, I discard my public persona. Now is not the time to be pious and proper.

Sex is a way to temporarily assume identities I’m incapable of inhabiting in real life. My parishioners can’t see my erotic shadow. I’m expected to be a model of virtue. I keep my pleasures secret. Only in this clandestine space can the shadow emerge. The desire for religion doesn’t obviate the desire for sex.

“Dionysus is a dangerous god, radically foreign to the order deployed by the world according to the logos.”

Anne Dufourmantelle

Bent over her bed, I admire the curvature of her buttocks. This temptress, as Oscar Wilde put it, represents all the sins I formerly never had the courage to commit. Now I can’t resist. As I penetrate her, I surrender any pretense to sanctity. My natural reserve melts away in the meeting of flesh. My pelvis rocks back and forth as I thrust in-and-out of her, propelled by instinct. I can feel my balls swaying. The intensity of this deep pleasure of the flesh overwhelms my cognitive faculties. In my will’s inability to control my sexual arousal, I have given myself over to lust. “In sexual intercourse man becomes like a brute animal,” Aquinas observed. My bestial grunts and moans indicate that I have forsaken the way of the spirit for the works of the flesh. I’m scarcely recognizable to myself. The creaking of the bed, our copulatory vocalizations, the sound of our skin slapping together — these are the elements of our sexual liturgy. In the rhythm and flow of sex, I escape the constraints placed upon me by my religion. Sex has an anarchistic power that shatters all restraints. It is an act of radical abandonment.

In this carnal union our fundamental identities as man and woman find their fullest expression. Julius Evola wrote, “Flesh and sex are the tools for an ecstatic approximation of the achievement of unity.” They have metaphysical significance. But that shouldn’t obscure the raw reality of our fucking. Henry Miller wrote, “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”

“That’s real sex that is, real passion: where you abandon all your boringly sensible thoughts, and all that tediously responsible side of yourself, as you give yourself to what you know really matters more, deep in the core of you: frantic sex.”

Fiona Thrust

We go at it harder and faster. Drenched in sweat, I drive deeper inside her. My fingers press into her flesh. Right now it’s all about the fuck. The rawness of sex punctures all pretense. In The Republic, Socrates asks, “Do you know of greater or keener pleasure than that associated with Aphrodite?” This “raging frenzy,” as Plato puts it elsewhere, consumes me. A primeval force has been unleashed, and I am helpless to tame it. Schopenhauer located the essence of the “will to live” in the “ecstasy of the act of copulation.” When I first had sex, I thought the novelty of the experience would quell my youthful curiosity. Having “gotten it out of my system,” I could return to a life of purity. Instead, the more I fucked, the more I needed to fuck. I pursued theological studies and entered ministry thinking it would curb my lust. My lust only intensified. “The person, made for sex or needing it, devoted to it, marked by it,” Andrea Dworkin wrote, “is a person incarnated restless and wild in the world and defined by fucking: fucking as vocation or compulsion or as an unfulfilled desire not gratified by anything social or conventional or conforming.”

“And all around me in my fornication echoed applauding cries, ‘Well done! Well done!'”

Augustine, Confessions

“No language has been invented to describe that supreme moment of existence” (Liam O’Flaherty). My body begins to convulse. It is exquisite agony. That ineffable moment of jouissance. “The quivering, the quick devouring fire more rapid than lightning” (Rousseau). My sexual apostasy is complete.

Then it is all over. All the tension and the lust and the ecstasy dissipates. Ennui sets in. There is little to be said between us. She pulls up her panties. I get dressed in preparation for that evening’s Bible class, leaving behind my sexual persona. I can only anticipate my next pilgrimage to, in Henry Miller’s words, “the Land of Fuck.”