A pastor in a moment of searing honesty lamented that we have been endowed with “sex drives that virtually impel us to break rules God laid down.” The Bible’s moral standards regarding sex seem starkly at odds with sexual reality. Theologically it can be explained by original sin. Corrupted by the Fall, sexual desire becomes lust. We are enslaved by concupiscence, the “rebellion” of “vicious desires,” in Augustine’s words. Yet we are to “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom 13:14). (Paul reluctantly endorses marriage for those who “cannot exercise self-control” lest they “be aflame with passion” [1 Cor 7:9].)

Nature has its own imperatives. Sex is a natural appetite. Francis Bennion puts it bluntly: “The male…is programmed instantly to fecundate every woman within his grasp. From puberty onward, his testicles produce nonstop the fluid called semen. His body is designed to void this fluid at frequent intervals.” Frustration of this instinct is deleterious to psychological well-being. (He even advocates the use of “erotic Samaritans” to achieve sexual release.) The pursuit of sexual gratification “is honesty to human nature.” This leads to his conclusion that “the Judaeo-Christian rules on sex are bad, since they arise from a stance that negates and dismisses the natural sexuality of human beings.” Sexual repression, according to Wilhelm Reich, is “the insoluble contradiction between between instinctual drive and moralistic compulsion.”

Those “Judaeo-Christian rules on sex” that are so “bad” are nonetheless deeply embedded into my values. Values that conflict with the appetites that propel my behavior. I am unable to solve the conflict within me between sexual demands and moralistic inhibitions. Apparently I’m not alone. One psychologist observes that religious believers may actually have higher incidences of problematic sexual behavior. No wonder Karl Barth wrote, “As God’s creatures, we are possibly nowhere so much on our own as in respect of our sexuality.”

“Eros is a great and dangerous god.”

Camille Paglia

Recent Christian reflection on sexuality, in an attempt to disown its Augustinian heritage, has reimagined “sex as gift.” In one document, my denomination states that “human sexuality was created good for the purposes of expressing love and generating life, for mutual companionship and pleasure.” Seen within the context of “original blessing,” sex is a participation in divine creation.

But what about “sex as curse”? Ethicist Christine Gudorf, who has affirmed the positive potentialities of sexual pleasure, warns that in an overly beneficent conception of sex “the power of sexuality is denied along with the demons long understood as animating sexuality.” Some years ago, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. commissioned a study to articulate a contemporary approach to human sexuality. The resulting document asserted “the basic goodness of sexuality,” emphasized “justice-love” as the primary ethical criterion, and endorsed an interpretation of the Bible informed by one’s experience as a sexual being. Feminist critic Camille Paglia tore it to shreds. With “its view of human nature naive and sentimental,” the study “reduces the complexities and mysteries of eroticism to a clumsy, outmoded social-welfare ideology.” Informed more by sexual liberalism than scripture or the Reformed tradition (Paglia archly notes that there’s nary a mention of the commandment forbidding adultery), the paper denies “the dark drama of sex” with its “eternal perversities.” The report’s appeals to “intimacy and interpersonal communication” blithely neglects the possibility that eroticism “may in fact be most itself” denuded of intimacy. “The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.” It ultimately descends into self-parody. “‘Eros,’ says the report’s glossary, is ‘a zest for life.’ Is this a soap commercial? Eros, like Dionysus, is a great and dangerous god.” Paglia, a self-described “lapsed Catholic of wavering sexual orientation,” has more insight into our vexing sexual predicament than the putative heirs of John Calvin.

Daemonic Sexuality

For me, sex is experienced as a burden, not as a “gift.” “Sex is daemonic,” Paglia writes, subject to those lower spirits that resist the mastery of reason. In my religious formation, sexuality was subordinated to the higher ends of marriage and procreation. I pledged to order my sexual expression accordingly. But my personal experience of sex is that it is untamed and untamable, compelling the untrammeled satiation of desire. Once I could no longer maintain my pledge to purity, I was in thrall to the erotic impulse.

I just read a review of a new biography of Thomas Merton, whose work I have long admired. The Trappist monk late in life fell for a young student nurse and found himself unable to keep his vows. Merton wrote of her, “I keep remembering her body, her nakedness…. [we] drank our wine and read poems and talked of ourselves and mostly made love.” “He wanted the best of both worlds,” the reviewer writes, “as a holy preacher and a covert sinner.”

Still, I can’t escape a nagging sense of shame. A clinical psychologist who has written on the intersection of sex and Christian life advocates a “sex positive Gospel” as a means of reducing sexual shame. Augustine is probably closer to the mark when he observes that a “natural sense of shame” accompanies the sexual act, an act that we are biologically programmed to engage in. Such is the inherent conflict of eros.