The Language of Sex

"John Paul II and Wilhelm Reich Walk Into A Bar"

In what follows, my intent essentially is to alienate all my readers.

My religious readers will likely appreciate the first part and excoriate me for the second. My non-religious readers will be friendlier; they will skim the first part, and possibly enjoy the second, though they will wish it were said more simply. Shout out to the heretics of both parties who will read and think, “Interesting.”

Part One

In trying to articulate a sexual morality, both for the sake of offering counsel to others and for the sake of clarifying and strengthening my own convictions, I have often resorted to this metaphor: sex is a language with which we can either tell the truth, or lie.

There are high points in sexual experience as there are in the experience of language. Often we go through our days having functional linguistic interactions with other people, but then there are also the times when language, brought somehow into relief, standing out against surrounding world of apparently mere things, brought intimately within the fire of a heart, itself catches fire and, passing between us, can enflame the hearts of our hearers. It becomes, rather than an instrument of commerce, a transmission of wakefulness of spirit, of the mind’s and soul’s life. Sometimes it is the whole life of the writer that does this, when the writer can summon the ordinary light of words into a burning focal point. Sometimes it happens seemingly by grace in the words of an “ordinary” and unstudied person, under the pressure of enormous feeling, tragedy, overpowering love or care. In a way, the great treasures of oral literature, which I know mostly through the old English and Scottish ballad tradition, are this grace incarnate in the life of a people (my people).

I think when this happens, we tell the truth.

Perhaps I am naive, or revealing my philosophical ineptitude, but I can’t in the end conceive of truth as expressed in the word I speak as some mere correlation of thought and reality, in the mode of a card describing the species of the dead insect to which it is attached.

True words are words of fire that spread from heart to heart. If the logos is indeed the Logos, this is the fire that He has come to cast on the earth, that He would were already kindled. This is the fire that He had already begun to cast on the earth through the tongue of Adam when he gave Adam the gift, grace, and labor of naming the animals. We latter-day revert animists should reflect that Adam’s naming of “animals” really means his naming of everything, because everything is animate. And this “naming” means, not a mere placeholder in a linguistic game — it means offering the presence of the named a home, inviting the presence of the named not merely into being, but into life (and this is why the history of Israel really begins, in a certain sense, with Moses’ encounter with the Burning Bush where God names Himself).

This naming, this primordial telling, this primordial “Godspell,” “good word,” is really an action as radical as the creation itself, I might dare to say. God’s word gives being; man’s naming sets that being alight in the heart of the world.

None of the “things” had God’s own breath. This breath of life was given to man. Man’s vocation is to enkindle things with that fiery breath. Where the first Adam finally failed, the second Adam succeeded. This is Pentecost. This is why the Gospel is true, not finally because it contains factually correct propositions about physical and metaphysical reality, but because it is a gateway into the life of a world set aflame, that is, into true life. This is also why the Gospel word does indeed finally sit in judgment on Christian history and Christian community, indeed on the whole world (cf St John 12:48) — not, of course, in the way fundamentalists understand it, the fire of whose “truth” has been extinguished in a trivial facticity.

So this is the feeling of “truth” and “truth-telling” that I have in mind when I say that sex is a language in which we can either tell the truth, or lie. Because of course, the other great mystery of language happens in Genesis after the Logos has enlisted Adam in the fundamental human task, of naming (enlivening, revealing, kindling, presencing) the logoi of created things. That is, the Adversary uses language to lie, and teaches us to use language to lie. The naming of things that was given us as a way to be God’s co-workers in giving life to the world, becomes a dying and an intended transmission of death, that is, murder. See the direct connection:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it (St John 8:44).

In the enkindling moment of sex as truth-telling, we mean with our hearts the actions of our bodies. We “name” the beloved; we intend to transmit life. My Roman Catholic readers will immediately and joyfully seize on that last sentence for the purpose of upholding the traditional teaching against contraception, but this is not what I intend, nor will I go down that rabbit hole here. The transmission of life I intend here is not procreation. It is the most fundamental affirmation of the beloved, it is the overflowing of a heart that wills the beloved not merely to be but to live. And if it wills that the beloved live, it wills finally that the beloved live forever. It wills that the beloved possess not merely a passing life but an eternal life, not merely a moment of joy but the fullness of joy. In personalist terms, it affirms the value of the beloved, it is a sursum corda, it is the elevation of the Host. I trust that I am not far afield from the deep tradition to make sex very explicitly and directly Eucharistic in this way.

It follows from this, that if this is sex as truth-telling, much traditional sexual morality falls into place not as some alien nomos imposed on us from “above,” but as the manifest and obvious integrity of a reality that is open to the experience and reflection of every human being, believer or unbeliever. If we will the eternal life and eternal joy of the beloved, if this is the meaning of the word that we speak through and in sex (and I invite you to remember and reflect on your own greatest experiences of sexual ecstasy here, even if you may see them as lies or betrayals in hindsight), how could we be speaking truly unless the whole life environing this act were congruent with that will?

What does such a life look like? It looks to me like exclusivity, fidelity, devotion, all the patient and painstaking adjustments required for those; it looks like a death to self in so many ways — of course, the kind of death to self that is an entrance into life, not an entrance into destruction (St Matthew 16:25). But it does not have the pained feeling of “sacrifice” as that word has decayed in our usual speaking. It is a “sacrifice” in the literal etymology of the word, a making holy, a doing of the holy — the holy being above all (and in the end, only?) the reception and transmission of the Spirit of Life to the beloved. The life of sexual truth looks like marriage.

Now let me move on to the counterpoint, because I am concerned here to excavate my heart, indeed, to tell the truth, and I have said only half the truth.

So let’s talk about Wilhelm Reich for a moment.

---

Part Two

Reich’s early life was shaped by the dysfunction of his parents’ marriage. His violent, rigid, and authoritarian father would berate and abuse Reich’s mother for her alleged infidelities, whether he imagined these were actually consummated or merely contemplated. At the same time, Reich’s father (as Reich discovered when still quite young) struggled with promiscuous desires — indeed it seems that in the beginning at least, his accusations against his wife were pure projection. In the end, this dismal pattern of abuse and dishonesty culminated in the actual infidelity of Reich’s mother with his beloved tutor, the father’s discovery of this infidelity, and his mother’s subsequent suicide (though it is unclear whether this was an actual suicide, or death from complications after a botched abortion).

This childhood experience lay at the root of Reich’s lifelong effort to identify and heal the sexual repression that he came to believe lay at the root of so much (perhaps all) human misery — the repression that produced authoritarian, “armored” personalities and bodies and families and societies, that blocked human beings from the spontaneous and joyful experience of and engagement with incarnate life (“orgastic potency,” not limited of course to its genital expression). He referred to this negative transmission in his later writings, where psychoanalysis and radical social theory gave way to vitalist metaphysical speculation, as “the emotional plague.”

I can’t help but imagine the violence and repression of his turn-of-the-century central European, assimilating Jewish household, with its whole weight of half-rejected tradition and bourgeois status-seeking, and ask: what if his parents could have been honest with each other about their desires? Is it really true that the erotic desires we experience that overflow the banks of conventional sexual morality, as it is experienced and enacted in a coercive social code, are “lies”? Is it really true that the affirmation of the other and of the self that we experience in the entire life of erotic attraction — from its first revelation to its consummation, whether or not that ever occurs — must imply lifelong fidelity and exclusivity?

Let me attempt to express why it might not be. I will take the risk of some personal honesty here — not that this whole piece has not been intended to be honest.

First, something phenomenological. I experience the ebb and flow of vital enthusiasm in my life across all domains — practical, social, aesthetic, religious, intellectual — as being intimately linked with whatever might be my concurrent experience of the intensity of sexual eros. I have taken to referring to this as my “Matthew 5:28” problem. (I could get into a detailed linguistic exegesis of the verse in question, but first, I am more concerned with the verse as it is typically understood than with excavating some “original meaning”; and second, such excavations typically strike me as disingenuous, in much the same way that “historical Jesus” quests seem to end up reflecting the investigator’s own face from the bottom of the well, as Albert Schweitzer observed.)

A “problem,” as Hans Jonas observes, is “the collision between a comprehensive view and a particular fact.” The “comprehensive view” is the total mythical, religious, philosophical, and moral view of human sexuality (indeed, of cosmic and divine life as a whole) expressed in the first half of this essay. The “particular fact” is that when I permit the free flow of eros, eros violates the norms commended to me by the reflections above (and the norm apparently presented by Jesus in Matthew 5:28); and on the contrary, when I contain or restrict the free flow of eros, it is not merely eros in its limited dimension of appetitively experienced sexual aliveness that is contained — aliveness across the entire spectrum of my life is dulled, dampened, and turned off. I die a little. Or a lot.

Essentially, when I am open to sexual perception, interest, and desire across the board, I am more alive in every department of life, more engaged, more excited, more energetic, more perceptive, more hungry. When my sexual aliveness is dampened, I am less interested in being alive. I take this as a clue that the fundamental vital force, drawing no distinctions between spiritual and psychic and biophysical, is inescapably sexual in its roots, whatever else it may also be.

I love being aware of beautiful women for this reason. When my life is “lit,” I experience physical desire when I am aware of a beautiful woman, but I experience far more than physical desire; that desire is an index of the extent to which my psychospiritual organism is a sensitive receptor for a universal energy that then separates prismatically into creative power in a myriad of forms — as many as I can acquire the skill to express. It is raw fuel for life. When I write well, eros is the fuel. When I crush the free flow of eros, I crush my ability to write, to create, to love, to be tender, to appreciate even apparently non-erotic beauty, to be patient with my child, to pursue my own health, to give gifts, to work well. I lose my entire “appetite.”

It fell upon a holy day, / As many in the year, / Musgrave to the church did go, / To see fine ladies there.

I remember visiting the Barnes in Philadelphia with a new lover, and seeing for the first time the canvases of van Gogh’s human, all-too-human characters — such as this provincial French postman whose homeliness is so tenderly portrayed that I could only stand and weep. I could weep because my lover’s body, my desire for her body, had awoken me. (Please visit the Barnes if you are in Philadelphia — it is a revelation. Even better, visit it with a new lover.)

Desire and tenderness are not opposed; desire is the root of tenderness, even if it can be perverted and twisted.

The presence or absence of my “Matthew 5:28” problem is an effective gauge for whether or not I am truly living or just going through the motions. There is much, of course, to be said for going through the motions. But I do not believe that we should aim at merely going through the motions. I think we should aim at being lit, being alive.

“The glory of God is a man fully alive.” Of course St Irenaeus was not thinking of a man, for example, whose entire psychospiritual system is responsive to the flow of eros in the presence of a beautiful woman. But he should have been.

It is not apparent to me that sexuality exercised outside the confines of marriage must fail in “speaking” truthfully about this eros. By “outside the confines of marriage” I mean — sexuality exercised without a promise, explicit or implicit, of permanence, fidelity, or exclusivity.

In this realm, a sexuality that speaks the truth about the value of the sexual other is a sexuality that speaks a vital, present, and existential truth about the other’s presence within, and transmission of, the flow of universal eros, of the vital life energy that feeds us in every endeavor and experience of our lives. Sex then becomes a mutual celebration not of some half-known, intuited inwardness raised to an effectively disembodied spiritual realm, where the other is perceived and received as an immortal, almost as an idea; it becomes a mutual celebration within time of something that is itself alive, dynamic, and changing, something that is itself in coming and going; something that can come and go in one form, and come and go in another form; a dance that can be danced with many partners.

Is there a reason why that mutual celebration cannot be something that is more or less transient? Even without consummating it, I have experienced this transience and this celebration. In all frankness — my life has from time to time been enriched profoundly by the erotic presence of women with whom I had no formal relationship of any kind, and certainly no commitment whatsoever, sometimes not even friendship — sometimes not even real acquaintance. And yet for a season, they occupied a place in my erotic imagination and energy flow that enlivened me dramatically, that invisibly and secretly fed my inspiration in my entire engagement with life. Indeed I owe periods of spiritual renewal and advancement, in mysterious ways, to some of these muses. I daresay much of the wealth of the world’s culture is owed exactly to this erotic influence of women on men, utterly distinct from any formal or explicit relationship they may have.

I will say further simply that I know this is true not only for me, and not only for men. Here there is scope for the actual valorization of animal vital energy without descent into bestiality — a valorization that, I note, the tradition is painfully unable to provide. This frame permits me to say yes to that animal vital energy without devolving into an impersonalism. I can celebrate animal desire as such, without becoming a beast.

The Christian tradition is classically hostile to imagination across the board — a tendency which reaches its apotheosis in certain 19th century Russian ascetic writers such as St Theophan the Recluse and St Ignatius Brianchaninov. How much more hostile it is to the explicitly erotic imagination (here its mercilessness borders on sadistic mania)! There are various figures, including many in the “re-enchantment” camp, who, following the Romantic trail, attempt a retrieval of imagination: but what religious man will now attempt a retrieval of the erotic imagination? Yet I will say — the erotic imagination, distinct from degradation and cruelty and perversion, is an index of the life of our soul and body. It is not something that should be suppressed; it is something that should be cultivated, educated, catechized.

What if Wilhelm Reich’s parents could have engaged with the erotic imagination that so evidently tormented them, with transparency and honesty and without shame? What shame should there or could there fundamentally be regarding this erotic imagination that is simply the index of our entire receptivity as “living souls” to the vital energy of the cosmos, that force that through the green fuse drives the flower? Is it really to be desired that, ostensibly for the sake of defending an objective “truth” about erotic and sexual communion, we lie and hide our desires, even from those with whom we supposedly share our deepest life? What is this, and where does it lead?

So, cruelty and degradation and perversion: where do they come from? If marriage and erotic communion outside marriage both find their dignity in genuine regard for the sexual other — either regard for their person, for their spirit, contemplated, valued, and loved in the light of eternity; or regard for their participation in and transmission of the universal vital energy within their incarnate finitudes of season, time, and space — then what turns either use of the “language” of sex into a lie rather than the expression of truth is simply the denial of the other in either of these manifestations. In the case of marriage, the denial that the other is a person known and loved by God. In the case of non-marital sexuality, the denial that the other, like myself, is not a machine or a puppet, but a freely dancing eddy in the vast cosmic field of energy, that now unites, and now parts; that now is superposed on another wave, that now breaks and ebbs back into the ocean to seek its next return to the shore.

It may seem to pose a greater risk to truthfulness, a greater temptation towards the lie, to valorize sex outside the structure of marriage — but married sexuality can itself become a great temptation to lie against the truth of eros, to seek death rather than life, as is endlessly attested in both literature and folk culture. Marriage does not by itself confer safety and security against the temptation of erotic untruth, however much foolish humans may perennially confound rule with integrity. And of course, likewise, the mere presence of erotic aliveness in a sexual encounter does not confer safety from a self-seeking that fails to recognize the other as a person bearing a gift, and not a thing to be exploited.

I think that what we want — what I want — is, in all honesty, not one or the other of these, but both of them. We want marriage, but we also want the sexual life of lovers meeting for the first time; where our mutual desire is not spiritualized as the service to some greater thing than the presence of the living, fiery universal vital energy that is between us here and now.

The whole question is whether we can have both — and how. Speaking personally, I am not satisfied with an answer that denies either. Denying marriage is tantamount to denying God; denying free eros is tantamount to denying life. I negate the negations.

---

Epilogue

Then there is the pragmatic reality within which all this is occurring, which is that although eros has the dimension of an encounter between two subjects, it is also generative not just in the sense of giving subjective life to those subjects; it is generative in the sense of giving life to new subjects. Those new subjects are themselves the proper objects of moral concern on the part of their parents, which is to state the obvious: that family and children’s welfare is implicated in sex. (And also, incidentally, since women bear intrinsically so much of the burden related to childbirth and child-rearing, women’s welfare is also implicated in a way that calls for explicit recognition.)

However, it is a wholly different matter to say, “Children’s welfare is best served by deep, exclusive, and permanent pair bonding,” and to say, “The primacy and preferability of deep, exclusive, and permanent pair bonding as a context for sex can be drawn from neutral phenomenological observation of human life.” The latter is the religious claim, and the former is no longer a religious, but merely a practical claim that admits in theory of other solutions. That our present cultural situation, confused and taking neither position with consistency and seriousness, is a terrible mess, is itself also an accident; after the dissolution of our traditional patterns, other patterns may arise (which I note will not necessarily be any repetition of anything ever before elaborated by a human culture; new things happen). Some of these patterns might be quite functional, or better than functional. But in the meantime, we are not there; we are here.