Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Corps de mort et de gloire: Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995.
The relationship between historical Christianity and eros has long been described as a conflict — often to the point of caricature. I have often emphasized the indispensable and salutary nature of this conflict.1 It was necessary to affirm, beyond biological determinism, the mystery of the person, and particularly of the woman, as a personal existence and not merely a reproductive vessel. This was the aim of early monasticism, which — much like the authors of the creation texts in Genesis — delivered decisive blows against elemental sorceries and the impersonal ecstasy of life.
However, everything was distorted by the spiritualism and dualism of waning antiquity (already in the second century, [St] Justin [Martyr] anxiously wondered what would become of the sexual organs in the resurrected body, viewing them in an almost mechanical way as mere tools of reproduction). A whole patriarchal context, then in full expansion, also played a role. In Byzantium, the woman, now “Christian,” was much less free and responsible than she had been in “pagan” Rome. Several Church Fathers saw in the creation of woman — forever guilty, moreover, of “original sin” — nothing more than a divine precaution in anticipation of the Fall, intended to ensure, through that Fall, the continuity of the human race. Little by little — there is no need here to trace every step — a hypocritical moralism took hold, and in our own century, the “flesh” has “liberated” itself with a kind of frenzy (whose presence is especially noticeable in the activism surrounding the struggle against AIDS). Advertising tirelessly exploits the female body (we have not yet reached the winged phalluses of the ancient Greeks, the street-corner Herms standing erect...).2 Across the long centuries of moralism, however, art preserved the mystery of the female body, and prostitution continued to shadow the “virtuous” societies of the Victorian type. The female body — saint or prostitute, saint and prostitute within the world of Christendom (one might revisit Léon Bloy) — could it be our last paradise? We admire the great monk — surely powerfully sexual — who preferred to share a meal with a wild beast rather than with a woman, but one might wonder whether the symbolism of the houri of paradise in Islam is not, in some sense, more profound (though alas, one sees little place for the woman herself in that Qur’anic paradise, where she is tightly controlled and subdued...). Historical Christendom, with its sometimes outrageously allegorical typology, lost the carnal sensibility of the Old Testament; the Pauline spiritualization of circumcision broke the bond that once united the sexual organ to the living God. Rozanov wrote:
Every thought concerning sex awakened in the Semite a thought of God, and immediately lost that cruel sensuality we know so well and, without negating itself, merged into the sensation of the divine (“it is here that the Lord took hold of me”). When Moses was returning to Egypt to liberate his people, “The Lord came upon him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah [Moses’ wife] took a flint, cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it, saying: You are bound to me by blood! And the Lord let him go.” (Ex. 4:24–26). She said “bound by blood” because of the circumcision.3
Today the conflict has become escalated to the point of absurdity. On the one hand, permissiveness reigns; the last taboos are collapsing — touching, for instance, on incest, bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality. On the other hand, Rome simultaneously condemns both abortion and contraceptive practices that would give women control over their fertility; it forbids young people from protecting themselves and their partners when they are not chaste and continent. I know I am exaggerating, and many legitimate nuances could rightly be raised in response. But this is how most people perceive things. To the point that “morality” and “sexuality” have come to be identified with each other! Only a minority of militants take such prescriptions seriously. Among the common people — widely so in Eastern Europe and the Third World — women, who for centuries have resisted in their own way, consider their sexuality strictly their own affair. They speak about it among themselves; they have their own poor and dangerous methods. They find it immodest — or rather incongruous (they laugh about it) — that a man (in the sense of a “male”) would interfere in such matters, even if he is the Pope. That doesn’t prevent them in the least from loving him, and rushing to the great gatherings where one might see him, perhaps touch him, and hear him say beautiful things.
As for permissiveness, that “sexual revolution” once so dear to Western intellectuals — AIDS has come as a brutal reminder that sex is not merely a game; that it can be tragic; that a mysterious link binds sexuality to death — a link which the old monks understood in their own way (not always rightly), in their striving to find immortality and to hasten the Parousia.4
Nonetheless, I prefer what Jesus says: “When a woman is in travail, she hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world” (St John 16:21).
Let us then try, however imperfectly, to draw out what is essential — beyond so many distortions — in the Christian message on this subject.
The mystery of love: Christianity has brought an end to the autonomy of sexuality. One can no longer say — when attempting to live as a Christian — that the body could be engaged in a sexual relationship without involving the person. Food merely passes through a person while nourishing them (though even eating and drinking must be done “to the glory of God,” 1 Corinthians 10:31). But sexuality implicates the person, whose form is inscribed in the matter of the world in order to transform it into a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). From a Christian point of view, sexuality must become a dimension of the person — a language of relationship between persons — such that the vastness of life becomes interior to their encounter, and thereby participates in the great divine blessing of the beginning, as Jesus recalls it: the wonderstruck face-to-face of man and woman becoming “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24; St Matthew 19:6). This unity, moreover, does not refer solely (though it certainly does also refer) to the union of bodies, but to the interweaving of two existences. Only very elderly spouses, when sexuality — or rather genitality — slips away from them, likely know what it truly means to “become one flesh.” As for the story of the rib, there is no need for an “inclusive” reading — generously American — to recall, along with Jewish mysticism,5 that it is not about a côte (rib), but a côté (side). Each side being equal to the other!
I will limit myself to a few remarks, which seem to me quite ordinary. The sudden attraction one feels (we sometimes still say that we “fall in love,” or more simply, that we desire someone, that we “want” him or her) has little to do with love. (Still, let us not exaggerate: the attraction David felt for Bathsheba, which led him to commit a crime, ultimately resulted in a lasting and fruitful bond.) Today, it has become common to act on this attraction sexually, without much delay. I do not see anything truly dramatic in this when it comes to young people who, increasingly, are giving — or seeking to give — this bond an emotional depth and a sense of duration.
The danger, if one slips into a kind of “Don Juanism” (which today can just as easily be feminine as masculine), is to remain imprisoned in oneself, in one’s narcissism (as with drug use), or caught in the grip of an image rising up from the depths of childhood — perhaps a search for the mother, perhaps a regressive longing for fusion... Not that sexuality is bad in itself. On the contrary: it is because it is fundamentally good — good as the participation of two persons in the Breath that sustains the world; because it is the most powerful, the most intense language two beings can speak to one another; because it makes them “one flesh” (so it is, Paul says, even in union with a prostitute) — that it matters that man and woman become worthy of this language. Often — though not always — in these “brief encounters,” we are not worthy of our sexuality; we use a language when we have little, or almost nothing, to say to one another.
“Sin” is not the mere transgression of a prohibition: the Gospel gives meaning, it shows the path of life — it does not impose a code of laws. “Sin” is rather that blind encounter, that ignorance of the other, precisely in the act that Scripture names knowledge; it is, perhaps, the transformation of the face into a body, when instead the body should become a face. One sometimes senses sin in the heartbreaking sadness of having lived something so important, without truly being able to live up to it. And even if there was consent, mutual respect, even a kind of tenderness — who knows whether a real, lasting feeling may not have awakened in one of the partners, whom the separation will wound deeply?
Everything seems so uncertain, however, that judgment becomes nearly impossible. The attraction of bodies can lead to a true encounter. The “ecstasy of life,” in which archaic religions sensed a spark of the divine (yes, I know the Bible condemns them), can, in this world of banality and dullness, open the way to mystery. A knight of life, of justice, of beauty — whether man or woman — sometimes experiences such disheartening solitude that a physical presence prevents him or her from falling into despair. No virtue is acquired in a single moment, and it can be no different for “chastity,” as we have defined it. In our time, truly loving — loving in a responsible way — requires great maturity. But can one even begin to express what it means to truly love?
No doubt, it is to discover and serve the other’s otherness. It is not necessarily “falling in love” or feeling an irresistible “attraction.” It often begins as a deep friendship: one feels at peace with the other, feels good, seen at one’s best, and senses in turn the best of the other — with the capacity, which is a unique grace, to help the other grow, to deepen, as one might one day help that person, in the childlike peace of aging bodies, to walk forward into old age, and into death. At the very origin of this love — so dazzling is the discovery of the other’s otherness — there may even occur a kind of temporary abolition of desire in the genital sense. A time of betrothal, even if the word is forgotten, even if it makes people smile: a time when one “gives one’s troth” (fiance) — one’s trust (confiance) — a time when one pledges one’s faith, as the old language so beautifully put it.
And when, both naturally and supernaturally, the incarnation of the encounter arrives, it is this intuition of the other’s otherness that makes it possible to unite eros and agapē, eros and tenderness — to be attentive to the other’s pleasure more than one’s own, so that pleasure becomes an exchange, a language beyond words, “the whole set of ceremonies that embody the other,” as Sartre said.6 Sexuality, pleasure — these very words are hollow in their questionable objectification. There remains only the encounter and the communion of two “living souls,” a communion to which the “ecstasy of life” lends, infinitely, a dimension both chthonic and celestial. In what is so ignobly called “possession” (of the woman by the man, of course), there must be a kind of dialogical dispossession — when “the soul envelops the body,” as Stendhal put it, a phrase noted by Nietzsche. It is a patient accord — sometimes difficult — of rhythms, especially for that kind of woman, intelligent and acutely sensitive, whom Raymond Abellio calls the “ultimate woman,” who knows fulfillment and peace only in exceptional, almost delirious circumstances. The “original woman,” on the other hand, as Abellio also says, experiences pleasure intensely and diffusely and, mothering in reverse, transforms the tormented man into an innocent child through the grace of her welcoming body.7
Without a doubt, two signs may be noted as marks of the awakening and strengthening of true love: the test of time, and the gift not of death, but of life.
To discover the other as a person is to discover them in their duration, not merely in the play of seduction or the erotic instant. It is to accept the other in their past — perhaps painfully — but with a respect that forbids jealousy; it is to listen to the story of their childhood, the confession of their wanderings, the sorrow and the joy of the slow affirmation of the self. And not only to assume their past, but to take responsibility for them in their future. To understand the other in their duration is also to become patient, whereas passion — or “the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins” — is necessarily impatient. The first years of life together are often marked by a fusion-like fervor, in which sometimes each partner, but more often only one, turns the other into a semi-idol. What then becomes important is not that the two become one (“Of two they are now but one,” said Chesterton, “but which one?”), but that the one becomes two — through the meeting of two vocations, each of which is unique.
The test of the gift of life. Idolatrous passion is closely tied to death; it longs for an impossible fusion and ends, ultimately, in a war between the sexes. Around the lovers, it exhausts the world and drives others away. Nothing matters except being with the one “you love,” attaining with him or her the erotic ecstasy. Tristan and Iseult leave behind them a trail of death and ruin. In Japan — where, at times, the explosive force of passion brutally tears through the social marginalization of women — cinema has richly explored this link between flesh and death.
In deep and enduring love, by contrast, each partner returns the world to the other in its original freshness. Each gives to the other not death, but life — helps the other to become himself or herself in their own form of service and creativity. This dimension of true love is inscribed in the mystery of life lived together and freely given, in the visitation of those little strangers who are our children, whom we must love and bring into the world spiritually (after having brought them into it physically) through a long, selfless service. For if the child, in order to develop, needs to be loved by both a father and a mother — one offering closeness, the other healthy distance; a father and a mother whose love he or she embodies — the child must, for his or her part, only “honor” them, to use the term of the Decalogue. One of the distortions of our time is the desire to establish a reciprocal love between child and parents: a kind of incestuous “bubble,” such that the child’s opening to others almost necessarily takes the form of revolt. The tenderness children receive — they will one day pour it out upon their own children, in the vast waterwheel of generations.
How can we not offer young parents, to help them face the bewilderment of our time, the beautiful poem by Supervielle:
Henceforth, in this newborn flesh
Our loving mystery will struggle.
After having taken our hearts by storm,
Love becomes the guest of a cradle,
And we remain, the two of us, watching
Our secret — so poorly, so well kept.8
And if, for one reason or another, a couple cannot have a child, many possibilities remain open to them: through adoption, through service, through shared creation — to welcome that unsettling and necessary “third” who breaks the solitude of two and multiplies love.
It should be added that it is important today to develop a theology of passionate love, just as the ascetics — confronted with cruder temptations — were able to develop a theology of lust (for passionate love cannot be reduced to lust). Once again, it is a poet — Pierre-Emmanuel — who, in his Livre de l’homme et de la femme, seems to me to have most clearly marked out this descent into hell, which may be tragically initiatory. “The cosmic passion of lovers who seek to become one so as to supplant the One” is both a semblance of paradise and a fall — a lost paradise. Passion is a usurpation of the absolute, “a mad desire to be everything for each other.” It reduces lovers “to their shared nothingness,” to an “autophagic nothingness,” the poet writes.9 This insight echoes a remark of Maurice Blondel, in the first version of L’Action, that in passion “we will the nothingness of an infinite will” — while recoiling in horror from it. Many lives, marked by sometimes deadly errors, would come to understand — by the light of a theological exploration of romantic passion — that they have been consecrated, perhaps precisely through this, to the search for the Absolute. This is something the truly spiritual know — and respect.
If perpetual “Don Juanism” belongs chiefly to the domain of psychoanalysis (despite its strange heroism as one grows older),10 there are also adults who, deeply wounded by abandonment while experiencing a genuine love, can no longer trust. They retreat into pleasure as into a drug, and multiply ephemeral, entangled affairs — driven by a quiet sense of revenge. Before passing judgment, let us recall the meeting between Christ and the Samaritan woman, who had had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband. It was to her that Jesus revealed the coming of worship “in spirit and in truth” (St John 4:23).
For example, in the first chapter, “Eros and Cosmos: Revolt or Assumption,” from The Eye of Fire, Fata Morgana, 1994.
These [the Greek Herms], themselves, are a secularized survival of a profoundly religious archaic symbolism — akin to the Hindu symbolism of the lingam.
Vasilii Rozanov, L’Apocalypse de notre temps, précédé de Esseulement, French trans., Paris: Gallimard, 1930, p. 36. English translation: Vasily Rozanov, The Apocalypse of Our Time, trans. Robert Payne, New York: Praeger, 1977.
Editor’s note: Today, when pharmacological intervention has turned AIDS into a manageable chronic condition rather than a death sentence, we might note that Clément’s point is underscored rather by the scorched-earth war between the sexes as experienced by young people; the rise of institutionally promoted gender dysphoria; the valorization of every conceivable sexual fetish (albeit largely as theoretical identities rather than real-life practices); the desolation of online “courtship”; and the general cultural retreat from old courtship patterns into social media preening and pornography.
And with Basil of Ancyra, cf De Vera Virginitatis Integritate, PG 30, 673D and 676B. [The treatise was historically transmitted under the name of St Basil the Great, but modern scholarship identifies the author as Basil of Ancyra.]
L’Être et le Néant, Paris, 1943, p. 459. [See Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).] Cf. Rozanov (op. cit., p. 34): “The goal toward which the ‘path of salvation in marriage’ must aim is precisely the morality of the skin, the innocence of the skin, the chastity of the skin...” Love transfigures the “garment of skin”; it no longer separates.
Raymond Abellio, La structure absolue: essai de phénoménologie génétique, Paris: Gallimard, 1965, pp. 401 ff.
Jules Supervielle, Naissances, Paris, 1951. English trans. Jules Supervielle, Naissances / Births, trans. Philip Cranston (Madrid: Scripta Humanistica, 1992).
Pierre-Emmanuel, Le livre de l’homme et de la femme: L’Autre, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980, p. VI-VII.
Gregorio Marañón, Don Juan et le donjuanisme, trans. from Spanish, Paris: Stock, 1958, 135ff.