SEX, THEOLOGY AND LOVE
Jerry Harkins

In an analysis of the pedophilia crisis currently tormenting the Catholic Church, an earlier essay traced the root of the problem to what it claimed is the church’s historic misogyny. All the Abrahamic religions share this sad trait but it has special resonance in Christianity where it seems particularly reprehensible and hypocritical in that it denies Jesus’ gospel of love. The church has always had a problem with love, sexual or otherwise: an all-loving God is an all-forgiving God who does not need the church as an intermediary. More importantly, an all-loving God needs not only to love but to be loved by his or her creation. Without it, God is diminished. Thus, Mary’s claim in Luke 1:46, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Her creator is made greater by his creation. Human love—between husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighbors—is a metaphor for both God’s love and God’s need for love. An all-loving God does not reject any human love but rather rejoices in all love including the love between gay couples. That same all-loving God is the author of sexual love which is a remarkable tool in the service of many ends between lovers. This, of course, is not the God recognized by the Catholic Church or most other western religions.

The markers of love are abstract but certainly include mutuality, sensitivity and commitment. In its fear of irrelevance, however, the church chooses to reduce them to simple rules, doctrines and commandments, thereby ignoring both human nature and the nature of the relationship between God and his creatures. The result is a long list of prohibitions and almost no discussion of what it means to love God and one’s neighbors. Instead, Christians are given detailed catechetical formulas based on the teaching that sexual attraction is almost always morally disordered. Deriving their logic from the most primitive of creation myths, the theologians placed the blame not on the psychopathic proclivities of their God, but on the sexual appetites of women which are seen as divine punishment for the leading of Adam into sin.

The beliefs of the fathers and doctors of the church and their followers in the modern world are absurd on their face. The guardians of tradition know or suspect this but they are afraid to change the teaching. This is not the first time they have been baffled by change and it is important to understand why they are so chained to and by tradition.

If you grew up Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era, you may think that the church has changed radically in your lifetime: the watering down of confession which is now “reconciliation,” the grudging toleration of mixed marriages and meat on Friday, the slightly enhanced role of women and girls in the church and a host of other things great and small, sublime and ridiculous, generous and picayune. The church though remains rigidly dogmatic, convinced that only it controls the keys to heaven even though it no longer overtly preaches that outside itself there is no salvation. (1) Without a shred of evidence, experience or rationality, it clings to the doctrine of papal infallibility enunciated by Pius IX. True, the present Pope, in his former role as chief guardian of doctrine, found refuge in a slightly less foolish category, that of “definitive” teachings. It appears that a Catholic must conform his or her conscience to such teachings or risk eternal damnation, but at least no claim is made that the teachings are actually divinely certified. However one regards these changes they clearly represent the church and the Roman pontiff making modest accommodations to the modern world. As you might expect, there is a community of Catholic “traditionalists” who vehemently take issue with Vatican II and all its spawn. They rant against girls serving as altar “boys,” the mass said in any language but Latin and, more interestingly, against what they see as John Paul II’s “capitulation” to science in the matter of evolution. There is a web site where you can report priests who are liturgically deviant and there are lay cannon lawyers who bring “criminal” charges in church courts against politicians who are deemed doctrinally deviant. (2) There are schismatic movements to the right and left of Rome although they pose less threat to Catholicism than they do to Anglicanism which is truly torn between its liberals and its conservatives. If the Anglican center cannot hold because the controversy involves highly salient issues, the Catholic center is less vulnerable because it is a marshmallow. There is enough give in contemporary Vatican doctrine to accommodate all who are willing to be accommodated. This takes the form of ambiguity and deception.

In 1633, the Holy Inquisition convicted Galileo of being “vehemently suspect of heresy” in that he taught the earth moves around the sun instead of the orthodox view to the contrary. Between 1718 and 1835, it gradually backed off this nonsense by permitting the publication of texts promoting heliocentricity, but as late as 1990, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, commenting on criticisms of the church’s position, said, “It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views.” In 1981, the Vatican had undertaken another examination of the case and, in 1992, Pope John Paul II said:

Thus the new science, with its methods and the freedom of research which they implied, obliged theologians to examine their own criteria of scriptural interpretation. Most of them did not know how to do so. Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him. ‘If Scripture cannot err’, he wrote to Benedetto Castelli, ‘certain of its interpreters and commentators can and do so in many ways.’

This seems very close to acknowledging that Galileo was right but John Paul could not bring himself to say so explicitly for the simple reason that the astronomer had been convicted of heresy which Thomas Aquinas defines as adherence to tenets declared false by the Divine teaching authority of the Church. (3) The verdict had been approved by the Pope. Can a doctrine—heliocentricity—deemed heretical by one Pope be declared true by another? Of course it can but doing so is embarrassing and possibly misleading to those not trained in the subtleties of papal authority.

A similar combination of ignorance and fear of change pervades the more recent history of the church’s encounter with evolution. For seventy years, it was favorably disposed toward Darwin. Unlike its fundamentalist brethren, the Catholic church had only modest difficulties with the notion that life, at least physical life, evolved from lower to higher organisms including human beings. Such a process did not seem incompatible with the idea of an omnipotent God who was the “prime mover.” Major opposition came only when scientists such as the Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller began to promote the idea that evolution can proceed through genetic mutations induced by random encounters between genes and cosmic radiation. In other words, evolution can be accidental. Randomness seemed entirely too capricious, too opposed to the notion of an omniscient God who directed the future of everything. As it turned out, there is no doubt that random mutations do occur and can change the course of evolution but this is exceedingly rare. Almost all mutations are harmful and are, therefore, selected against. Even as Neo-Darwinism brought forth more important and less controversial agents and processes, the church continued to perseverate on its horror of randomness. Then, on October 23, 1996, Pope John Paul II published a formal statement endorsing the theory of evolution "...as more than just a hypothesis." Not, perhaps, an enthusiastic embrace but still too much for Christoph Schönborn, the conservative Archbishop of Vienna, who bemoaned its “misinterpretation.” In an op ed piece he wrote for The New York Times, His Eminence allowed, “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.”

In his first pronouncement on the subject, Pope Benedict XVI returned to the same theme. The universe, he wrote is an “intelligent project.” He quoted Saint Basil the Great to the effect that, “…fooled by the atheism they carry inside themselves [they] imagine a universe free of direction and order as if at the mercy of chance.” Basil (329-379) is one of the early Church’s greatest theologians, so much so that Rome tends to forget he was regarded as an Arian heretic for much of his career. Benedict seems to be referring to what is known as his First Homily, entitled “In the Beginning…” (4) Basil wrote:

You will finally discover that the world was not conceived by chance and without reason, but for an useful end and for the great advantage of all beings, since it is really the school where reasonable souls exercise themselves, the training ground where they learn to know God; since by the sight of visible and sensible things the mind is led, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible things. "For," as the Apostle says, "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."

In other words, design itself has the purpose of leading us from the world of our senses to a contemplation of the divine. Early in Summa Theologica, Aquinas takes up a similar theme as his fifth proof of the existence of God from unaided reason. He argues that inanimate objects act for a purpose but, since they lack intelligence, that purpose can only arise from the will of their designer. It may be hard to imagine a stone acting at all, never mind purposefully, but both Thomas and Basil are invoking what some contemporary fundamentalists call “intelligent design.”

Evolution and intelligent design are not inherently contradictory. But evolution and Genesis are. The creation story cannot be literally true. It is nothing more than a brilliant myth devised by bronze age sages. Like all creation myths, it seeks to anchor its people in what seems like an indifferent cosmos. It teaches that we are created in the image of the creator but have fallen from an ideal state because we sought to become gods ourselves. But the church struggles with the idea of the bible as myth and metaphor because it sees uncertainty as its enemy. Change itself is the evil if you believe that Truth is absolute and cannot change. Which brings us back to the point of this essay. Anything that challenges the teaching power of the church is seen as threatening to the whole fabric of religion. The church fears being caught up in error even on trivial issues because the threat of error erodes its claim to the keys of heaven and thus its power on earth. Science deals with evolving truth. It revels in the identification of error. It rejects the notion of eternal verities. The church, on the other hand, is imprisoned by them.

In the case of love and sex, theology is driven exclusively by the primitive theories about reproduction and property rights held by biblical tribes in the millennia before Christ. It is uninformed by biology and psychology and it cannot be so informed without grave risk to the power or even the relevance of the hierarchs. Thus, the church substitutes doctrine for love as the covenant between God and humanity to guarantee its own position as intermediary. It was, therefore, with considerable interest that I read the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est—God Is Love. (5) Once again, critics of the church are confronted by a brilliant Pope. He is more logical and less abrasive than his predecessor and so far he has avoided the distortions of history—what Gary Wills calls the “structures of deceit”—that have long characterized papal pronouncements on controversial subjects.

The new encyclical is a far reaching, thoughtful meditation on love but what attracted me was a relatively minor point that bears on the theology of that subject. It is the distinction the Pope makes at the outset between eros and agape, the former defined primarily as carnal love and the latter a more embracing spiritual virtue. (6) He begins by responding to the charge that the church set out to destroy eros. Yes, he says, it has sometimes seemed to be true. However, what it has actually opposed is the distortion of eros which occurs when passion overwhelms reason. He says, “The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary…” I would take issue with the last sentence. Eros even in its ecstatic state would seem to heighten our awareness and appreciation of all heavenly and earthly things. But that is not the central point. What really seems to exercise the Pope is the “divinization” of eros, a process of shrouding its lustful expressions under a mantle of divine inspiration or worship perhaps in order to justify it. He writes, “…this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it.” He refers the reader to the temple prostitutes common to many religions and to the Bacchanalian orgies celebrated in several cultures both of which he implies are undignified and inhuman. Fair enough as long as he understands that he is referring to the most extreme, most distorted expression of a morally good attraction created by God. In fact, to some believers, eros is divine and should be seen as a metaphor for the passionate love that God engages in with his creation.

Benedict makes a very similar point. “Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” (7) The “pinnacle of our existence” refers to heaven and the “fleeting pleasure” is apparently the ordinary sex drive leading to climax. For the Pope, “true eros” is eros purified and disciplined. This is not yet agape but it is more than animal lust. It is not the use of unconsummated erotic foreplay to achieve Buddhist enlightenment although it may be akin to the Hindu or left-handed version of Tantric sex which does allow for climax. Whatever it is, “…it tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.” Okay, eros is a powerful metaphor for divine love but only when it has been purified. The process seems to involve a gradual rebalancing of the eros-agape equation so that eros should lead to the realization of the true nature of love in which the lovers seek first the happiness of each other. There are, no doubt, other ways to encourage this evolution, including the ministry of non-sexual love to which priests are called. Might it be that other forms of eros outside conventional marriage might lead toward a similar pinnacle?

This “purification” business is refined asceticism, remote from the experience of ordinary people and, I think, from the descriptions of eros given by Saints Augustine and Jerome. It is also remote from the church’s traditional teaching. For more than 1,500 years, the church has sought to circumscribe the experience of eros and to “purify” it according to an eccentric understanding of virginity, chastity and celibacy. The church thought it had to combat an either/or choice: true eros or ecstatic debauchery. It greatly feared the latter because, as the Pope says, that is a (competing) form of religion, “…which represents a powerful temptation against monotheistic faith.” A credible threat to monotheism is not obvious but more important is the alleged competition between ecstatic sex and religion, especially if that competition is defined as between joy and the fear of hell.

To me the argument is a strawman. I do not feel compelled to choose between sexuality and religion any more than I have to choose between chocolate ice cream and a Beethoven symphony. Sex and faith are different in kind. I can make separate and independent decisions on each and each exists for me on a broad spectrum. The church, however, is caught on the horns of a dilemma. In this as in many things it sees the truth as the moth sees the flame. It is irresistibly attracted but it cannot consummate that attraction for fear of its own immolation. Benedict’s encyclical is a small but progressive hint that the church needs to rethink its longstanding teachings about sex and love. And, contrary to the traditionalists’ insistence on the permanence and immutability of truth, it would not be the first time a basic doctrine underwent significant revision.

Ever since it emerged from the catacombs, the Catholic church has tried to micromanage the sex lives of its adherents. (8) It has generally regarded sex as the punishment for the original sin of Adam and Eve. It is an upside-down kind of punishment which tempts with great pleasure but leads inevitably to hell. Until quite recently, theologians were convinced that, in the garden of Eden, sex did not involve lust or pleasure. Many of its best thinkers taught that it is always sinful except between married people in the service of procreation with no deliberate enjoyment. At the beginning of the third millennium, its fundamental position is that “…it is necessary that each and every marriage act remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life. ” (9) After that the logic becomes murky. The church believes this necessary openness to procreation derives from, “…the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.” (10) This would suggest that there cannot be procreation without unitivity and vice versa, both of which propositions are absurd. Still, such an “inseparable connection” is central to the church’s current position, so crucial that Paul VI emphasized that it—the inseparability—was “established by God.” Pope John Paul II addressed the same issue in 1984. His prose is even more opaque than Paul’s but this is a fair paraphrase:

Since [by its very nature] the marriage act [simultaneously] unites husband and wife in the closest intimacy and makes them capable of generating new life, then it follows that the human person must [recognize both functions] and also the inseparable connection between them. (11)

The emphasis on the “unitive” significance of sex is a recent development although the idea itself is said to trace back to Eden and God’s observation that “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.” (12) Saint Augustine hints that marriage promotes the goal of mutual support and love but he still contrives to believe that sex, for any purpose other than procreation, and with any pleasure beyond what is minimally essential, is sinful. Many medieval theologians were convinced that sex is so tainted that children born out of wedlock are forever doomed, but Jerome seems to have thought that even legitimate children, especially females, were damned unless they remained virgins. Saint Peter Damian taught that sexual intercourse under any circumstance and for any reason inside or outside marriage is inherently sinful. By the twelfth century, several commentators were talking about what is now called the “unitive” function of sex. Some such as Hugh of St. Victor were quite eloquent on the subject but all remained cautious. Hugh thought married couples were well advised to moderation and conjugal chastity in the service of procreation. It is not clear what “conjugal chastity” means but it probably refers to sex with no or little pleasure.

The notion that sex tends to bring people together is obvious enough. But the two functions—unitive and procreative—are quite different. There is a great deal of sexual attraction in the world that is unconsummated and a great deal of sex that does not unify couples. The church does understand that blameless sex can occur between married lovers who, for one reason or another, cannot, do not or do not want to conceive (as long as they do not employ “unnatural” contraceptive means). This concession implies that the two functions are logically and biologically independent. I would argue that this renders them morally independent also. Once the unitive and procreative ends of sex can be separated, the church’s entire teaching collapses.

Human sex is complex and is as much a mental as a genital process. Contraception allows partners to respond more effectively to this complexity and in this sense the church’s teaching on contraception is immoral. It condemns out of hand an action that has many good results including the prevention of serious diseases and the spacing of children. The fact that the church permits what it considers “natural” contraception is hypocritical in that Vatican Roulette is nothing more than a feeble effort to separate the unitive and procreative functions of sex. A hierarch who believes that careful monitoring of a woman’s estrous cycle is “natural” is only betraying his lack of experience and understanding.

Ultimately, all this theology is simplistic and the church relies as it always has on its teaching authority and the fear of hell. Even before Humanae Vitae, Paul VI fell back on the last argument of fools and kings: because I say so. He wrote, “…sons of the Church may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law…spouses should be aware that they cannot proceed arbitrarily, but must always be governed according to a conscience dutifully conformed to the divine law itself, and should be submissive toward the Church's teaching office” What divine law? The one the Holy Spirit whispers in the ear of the Pope.

In 1864, Blessed Pope Pius IX issued his “Syllabus of Errors,” a compendium of eighty “propositions”—ideas—prevalent in the modern world which were said to be both wrong and evil. It may have been the most radically reactionary document ever published up to that time. It condemned among many other things democratic government, separation of church and state, opposition to the Vatican’s temporal power or its use of force, and freedom of religion. Forty-three years later, Saint Pope Pius X added sixty-five more propositions and said anyone who defended any one of them would be excommunicated. Today, some of these Popes’ complaints seem obscure but the general thrust of these documents is clear: they are meant to promote the view that the world was a better place before the Renaissance and the Reformation. This would be laughable if so many lives were not adversely affected. A healthy embrace of sexual pleasure promotes both family and societal values, attenuates life’s vicissitudes and liberates the human spirit from existential alienation. The traditional teaching of the church is, in this respect, constricted and obscene. It is simply not true that everything outside the church’s extremely stringent sexual morality is libertine.

The root of the problem is the church’s obsession with what it loosely calls “modernism” and its insistence on swimming against the tide of history. The psalmist tells us, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and exalt in it.” These are the times the Lord has made, let us not reject them.

Notes

1. The doctrine that “Outside the church there is no salvation” was stated in the papal bull Unam Sanctam by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302. It was effectively nullified by both Vatican II and Pope Paul VI in the resolution of the case of Leonard J. Feeney, SJ. Father Feeney (1897-1978) had argued that either Unam Sanctam was valid dogma (which he believed to be the case) or the Pope was not infallible. He was excommunicated in 1953 but reconciled in 1972 without having to recant his beliefs.

2. Those interested in exploring these issues might want to begin by going to the website patrickpollock.com. Mr. Pollock, a 28-year old who lists theology as one of his hobbies has a list of 101 heresies committed by Pope Benedict XVI cross-referenced to the sources of the infallible truth. Number 93 claims that the Pope has lent support to the heretical doctrine of evolution. In another section, he presents his proposal to develop a “Strategic Offense Initiative” which seems to be a first strike version of Star Wars. Mr. Pollock is by no means the most extreme traditionalist. The prolific Robert Sangenis (catholicintl.com) goes him one better insisting on six days of 24 hours for creation. He also tells us that the earth does not rotate on its axis but rather all of the stars circle the earth every 24 hours. Thus, Coperncus’ theory was heretical and the condemnation of Galileo was correct. And these examples do not begin to give the flavor of the end-of-days folks.

3. Thomas’s teaching on heresy (Part II, Section 11) is not without its own ambiguity but it seems clear enough that one who does not believe that Saint Patrick led the snakes out of Ireland is not a heretic. Heresy is generally thought to deal with important, defined doctrines of faith. Still, the church had Joan of Arc burned at the stake for the heresy of cross-dressing.

4. Basil wrote a series of meditations on the Gospel of St. John of which this is the first. It explicates the first verse, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and God was the Word.” Basil is referring to Paul’s epistle to the Romans 1:20, which, in a more comprehensible translation, reads, “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Paul, in turn, is paraphrasing Psalm 19: 1-2: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. / Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” Finally, as noted, Thomas Aquinas uses a similar argument as his fifth proof of the existence of God.

5. I have used the English translation published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Deus caritas est can also be rendered “Love is God,” a formulation Benedict did not intend but which I prefer. Nor would I distinguish between kinds of love because to me agape includes eros as well as the love of three oranges. One of the saddest things of the post Vatican II era is how the concept of agape has been debased by New Age Catholics.

6. Agape is a difficult word to define. The oldest use of it, in Homer, refers to brotherly love but it has evolved to mean charity—not in the Latin sense of love, but more in as what English speakers think of, alms-giving. Post Vatican II Catholics took over the word to refer to the communal meal which is the Eucharist. Pope Benedict has the broadest meaning of all—the virtue of good feeling among people of good will. Eros, of course, means passion in the sense of sexual desire.

7. The idea that sexual love is a metaphor for God’s love, while very much a minority position, is, nonetheless, quite ancient. In our own times, its most eloquent expounder is the priest/philosopher/novelist Andrew M. Greeley. The admirable Father Greeley manages to be simultaneously a humanist, a mystic and an empiricist but on this subject he often seems to be grasping at straws.

8. What is true of the Catholic church is generally true of the entire Christian enterprise. In the Protestant world, there are sects that are both more conservative and more liberal on specific issues but all consider sexuality a domain of special religious concern. Sexual ethics, of course, is an important subject but few clergy members have the training or experience to expound on it in anything like a definitive fashion.

9. Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, Chapter 11.

10. Ibid., Chapter 12.

11. Pope John Paul II, “Morality of Marriage Act Determined by Nature of the Act and of the Subjects,” General Audience Of 11 July 1984.

12. Genesis 2:18. This is, at best, a weak reed on which to hang a heavy doctrine. There is no evidence that Adam and Eve enjoyed sex in the garden. On the contrary, it seems God invented sex to punish them for their transgression. He tells Eve, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over you (Genesis 3:16).

13. Pope Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, Part II, Chapter 1, Paragraphs 50 and 51, December 7, 1965. This document is the pastoral constitution adopted by Vatican II and is widely regarded as liberal in tone. A careful reading of II:1 suggests that it does in fact leave substantial wiggle room on the matter of birth control. Pope Paul then convened a special commission of lay people and experts who recommended that the ban on “artificial” birth control be lifted. Humanae Vitae was a thorough going rejection of that advice.