Tag: eros

Eros in Conflict

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.

Darkness of Eros

Of the ancient gods, Eros was the most powerful and most elusive. Not even Zeus could resist Eros. The ancient Greeks believed Eros is a dark, amoral, dangerous power that undermines human volition. The arrows shot from Eros’ bow tear into the righteous flesh and obliterate rules, propriety, and conventions, compelling us to yield to the exigency of raw desire.

“Eros is the tragic god.”

Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros

Augustine associated original sin and the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden with sexuality. Sexual desire — concupiscence, the “lust of the flesh — was the proof of and penalty for Eve’s inability to resist temptation. “The sexual desire [libido] of our disobedient members arose in those first human beings as a result of the sin of disobedience,” Augustine wrote, “…and because a shameless movement [impudens motus] resisted the rule of their will, they covered their shameful members.” All eros became dark.

For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is in my flesh. (Rom 7:18)

The sexual impulse, erupting from the depths of the human psyche and more powerful than other sensual temptations, eludes the control of reason and the will. Any sex that was driven by passion was the foul, unclean and wicked manifestation of disobedience to God’s will. “Sex, Augustine believed, was a shameful, sordid business,” writes James A. Brundage, as attested to by the very private nature of the sexual act. Even brothels, Augustine observed, preserved secluded spaces for whores to ply their trade. Sex is encased in darkness. “The shame of sex resulted from the ritual pollution that accompanied all sexual activity,” Brundage notes, finding its physical source in the genitals themselves. The intrinsic sinfulness of carnal desire in a fallen world, according to Augustine, makes life a perpetual struggle against the lusts of the flesh. This is reflected in the Calvinist doctrine of ”total depravity” in which sex can never escape the taint of sin.

If Augustine was the theologian of sexual pessimism, Kant was its metaphysician. Sexual desire was by its nature objectifying, reducing a person to a means of satisfying one’s sexual appetite. “Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as the other person is possessed, and the appetite sated, they are thrown away as one throws away a lemon that is sucked dry” (Lectures on Ethics 27: 384). To yield to sexual desire is to objectify oneself, sinking to the level of animals. Kant concludes, “In this act a human being makes himself into a thing.” Bernard Baumrim observes that “sexual interaction is essentially manipulative—physically, psychologically, emotionally, and even intellectually.”

Ayn Rand saw sex (as she saw everything else) as devoid of any altruistic impulses whatsoever: “[S]ex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment — just try to think of performing it as an act of selfless charity!” (So much for the “mercy fuck.”) It is an act of “self-exaltation” that exposes our sentimental illusions. “Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.”

“Cruelty is natural.”

Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom

Feminist critic Camille Paglia finds that eroticism is dark and irrational, fraught with anxiety, aggression and violence. “Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts.” Sexual liberation is a “modern delusion.” She agrees with Freud that the sexual instinct is amoral and egotistical. Sadomasochism is not an aberration but instead makes explicit what is implicit in sexuality. “The sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex.” Sexuality is neither nurturing nor affectionate but comprised of “hostility and aggression.” It finds its preeminent literary expression in the works of the Marquis de Sade. “For Sade, sex is violence.” Nature in its chthonic depths inescapably emerges in sexual passion. In sex, we surrender to “the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze.” It escapes logical analysis. “Sex cannot be understood.” Love is no more than a “perverse fascination.” Sexuality in its “dark, unconsoling mysteries” overwhelms reason and volition so that “the element of free will in sex and emotion is slight.” Sexual freedom is an oxymoron. “In sex, compulsion and ancient Necessity rule.” We are captives to the barbarism of lust. When it comes to sex, guilt is inescapable. “[S]ex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture.” Paglia concludes that “a perfectly humane eroticism may be impossible” for sex “is a descent to the nether realms.” Doggy style may be the paradigmatic sexual position since it “represents the animality and impersonality of sex-experience.” Sex ultimately evades attempts to establish moral boundaries around it. “Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop.” She applauds pornography for its unsentimental portrait of sex. “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality stripped of its romantic veneer.”

The sexual act itself is violent. Some radical feminists have interpreted the act of penetration as an inherent act of dominance. Luce Irigarary defines heterosexual intercourse as a “violation.” When the penis forces apart the labia, a woman’s bodily integrity is compromised. They’re on to something. The phallus indeed penetrates, conquers, dominates, takes possession of the woman. Andrea Dworkin flatly declared, “Fucking is the means by which the male colonizes the female.” Freud noted that the act of sexual intercourse bears a striking resemblance to violent struggle, marked by raw physicality, sweating, grunting, vigorous thrusting, bodily penetration. The aggression in sex is part of its thrill. Women have internalized this dynamic, as evidenced by female erotic literature and women’s sexual fantasies which prominently feature the theme of being taken by force. Richard Tristman concurs, saying, “All sexual relations involve relations of dominance.” Orgasm itself can be understood as a burst of violence, “a kind of fury” in Sade’s words.

Schopenhauer believed the sexual urge was a manifestation of the Will-to-live, a futile drive to ensure immortality through procreation. “The sexual impulse is the most vehement of all craving, the desire of desires, the concentration of all our willing.” In denying this, we delude ourselves. The illusion of pleasure dissipates when confronted with mortality, bringing misery. Eros cannot exist without Thanatos, according to Freud. Sex brings death in that the other person is possessed or annihilated in the sexual act. Death casts its shadow over sex because sexual pleasure is tinged with the knowledge that such pleasure will permanently cease at death. La petite mort. 

Does the fact that most sexual activity transpires at night have any significance? “Throughout the whole world it is at night, above all, that men and women unite,” Julius Evola observed. We copulate under the cover of darkness, as if to hide our transgressions.

And transgression, according to the Gnostic, is our only option. As identified by Murray S. Davis, the Gnostic concurs that sex is dirty and dangerous, so our only recourse is to succumb to the depravity. Prohibition only heightens the allure of sex. Resistance is futile. In this respect, Sade is a prophet.