O Papa Francisco e S. Francisco de Assis - por Frei Nuno Allen

The Modern Sexual “Martyr” - by R. J. Snell

In Crisis

According to Christianity, we are made for communion. Created in the image of a God who is Divine Communion, we are made to give ourselves to and for others. Without Eve, for instance, Adam could not enter into the communio personarum and so was not fully able to bear the image of God.

A recent Esquire piece by John H. Richardson, “The Martyrs of Sex,” sees it quite differently.

With an ear to scandal, Richardson intones a litany of martyrs—Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, David Petraeus, Anthony Weiner, and others—all sacrificed to “our hypocrisy and denial.” Patron saints of adultery, each reveals that “sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing … sex itself is the moment of grace.”

As is often the case, grace is rejected, locked out of “the invisible prison we build for ourselves,” although adultery is “a glorious terrifying truth that bursts through our barriers if we have the vitality to rebel,” lifting ourselves “up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand.”

Men are “geldings of civilization,” wives “indentured … into the role of prison guard … slowly killing” the vitality of the male in the name of social order. And just as Nietzsche proclaimed priestly morality to be cruel, so too we ought to pity the wives/prison guards, for “no free person would choose such a role … [t]heir cruelty is in direct proportion to their own suffering, as cruelty usually is.”

We’ve chosen civilization when we ought to have “declare[d] ourselves as gods,” instead allowing “mean little scolds who drag us down from the throne and tell us we are hateful, our desire is hateful, that our essential vitality is a sin.” Unlike “healthier societies,” we’ve enforced “denying that vitality” so to fit “into the three-piece suit of civilization.” In doing so, “it makes liars of us … we always make our dilemma worse by getting everything backward.”

The noble and bold include sexuality “in their definition of power … part and parcel of why the great become great in the first place.” The wives of the great know this: “Of course I knew what he was doing. I celebrate him! That’s the man I married, that’s why I married him, for the vital fire you pretend to despise.” So why do we geld our godlike status, our nature as “Big Dog”? Nothing is accomplished except “the ugliest need born of … civilization … declaring that which is most beautiful to be filthy, that which is most natural to be unnatural.” A “rage for order always invites destruction,” and the only way to avoid destruction is to destroy order, “to open the prison doors of civilization and finally learn how to live free.” Civilization or life, one cannot have both.

Modernity Brings Alienation When Nature Replaces God 

As articulated by Luigi Giussani, founder of the international Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, earlier periods had “an unfragmented conception of the person … the figure of the saint as the exemplary image … who has realized the unity between himself and his destiny.” The unity of sanctity, however, was expelled from our ideals during “the great change” of modernity. Offering a brief history, Giussani explains how Humanism offered instead “the divo, the successful man who relies on his own forces.” No longer was the ideal “projected … towards something greater” than the individual, an adherence to the “Voice of an Other,” but was instead achievement, accomplishment. But once worth was loosed from the objective love of God, “instead consigned to the mercy of fortune, what then?” Fortune can be resisted, perhaps, wrestled by the very greatest of men, but time levels all mountains, overcomes all heroes, and humanism imbibed the tragic sadness of the ancients, “that sense of ultimate limitation,” the failure, in the end, to “lift myself above the earth.”

Unable to adequately ground worth in the divo, transcendence “must come from something else, something greater,” and, says Giussani, the Renaissance identified “the ultimate source of creativity … with nature.” From nature springs the “impulsive, the spontaneous, instinct,” now equated with the good. “Do what you will,” declares Rabelais, “because man is, by nature, driven to act virtuously,” which is, at the same time, “a subtle but real hostility to … a God who says yes or no, who seeks to regulate, to prune human instincts.”

Consequently, the last centuries bequeathed a legacy convinced “that success is what makes life worthwhile; that nature merits our complete trust (i.e., instinct is exalted); and, finally, that reason can bend nature … in accordance with its every wish and command.” For men and women so formed, freedom comes to be understood as “abandonment of one’s self to nothing but the force of one’s reactions, instincts, fancies, and opinions,” in stark opposition to “adhering to what is real … to being.” Enslaved to this distorted account of freedom, it’s unsurprising to find conflict between the individual and civilization, for civilization’s claims and limits must be understood as deeply restrictive of freedom. Civilization, so understood, must be overcome to maintain the natural, the free, the noble. Or, as “Martyrs of Sex” puts it, there’s no “vitality left after all the social and personal castration that we enact every single day of our miserable slavish self-denying lives.”

Note the “cultural bewilderment,” as Giussani terms it, in such statements. In declaring undifferentiated freedom the absolute goal, “man is powerless to be man” insofar as he is “free for nothing.” Consequently, the celebration of natural vitality alienates, cementing freedom as deep estrangement, for “if man is so free as to be the measure of reality, he is condemned to an abysmal loneliness … a stranger to everything that is,” particularly to culture and civilization, which cannot but appear as stultifying.

While Richardson presents his vision as one of vitality and life, just as Nietzsche did, Giussani sees through such façades, noting instead “spiritual sickness … the loss of the taste for living.” True, sickness is couched in the language of life, power, or strength, but this is “temper tantrums in the fact of being.” The freedom they seek is estrangement, “cut off from any relationship with things, with others,” and even with themselves. They speak life, they live death.

This last statement needs more explanation, I suspect.

Christianity Rejects Moralism and Proclaims Communion with God 

What is morality, sexual or otherwise? How this is answered decisively shapes, I should think, whether civilization is viewed as alienating and enervating or a source of life and joy. As loving embrace with Another, or a slavish martyrdom.

Giussani states that “moralism is the forced adherence, voluntaristically stressed, to the ideals of humanity approved by the dominant culture,” which “requires a guilt-inducing conformism.” Richardson would agree, claiming his a noble attempt to throw off the shackles of culturally induced guilt in the name of vital freedom and power, and, moreover, identifying the Faith as a (the?) noxious host for much of the guilt and hypocrisy.

But the Faith is not a moralism. It does not force, it is not voluntaristic, and it pays scant heed to the ideals of dominant culture. Moralism posits norms and rules for action—commanding this, obliging that—while Christianity proclaims communion.

The Faith values freedom to act, of course, but its understanding of action is non-reductive, refusing to limit the meaning of action to the rules or strictures of a social group. Instead, human action has an origin not of its own making and a purpose far outstripping the measure of man. We act because we seek some good; we seek, it seems, because we lack; our restlessness and longing reveals our desire for fulfillment, for meaning, for the good we lack. We sense, too, that the good intended is rather more than this or that particular object of desire—the raise, the house, the toy, the sexual conquest is not enough, not “full enough” to satisfy that completion for the sake of which we act. (Richardson knows this, thus professing power or greatness rather than sexual satisfaction as his fundamental motivation.)

Our desire is excessive, it would appear, always going beyond the particular objects, always reaching farther than our grasp. We desire complete fulfillment. In the Christian articulation of this experience, our desire is for God, and, moreover, our desire takes the form of love. That is, we seek relation: loving, intimate union—communion.

Christian action springs from a loving desire for communion, and in love of God the basic principle of Christian morality takes its meaning—Love your neighbor as yourself, which is to say, nurture, allow, and do not impede as others freely seek communion. Absent the loving reaching out for communion, however, morality becomes moralism, “something that derives from laws and from the coherence of an understanding of life validated by power.” So understood, “moralism always points an accusatory finger at man.”

If this is true, then Richardson is not entirely incorrect in viewing civilization as a yoke, for, as Giussani articulates, unless “one’s behavior flows from the dynamism intrinsic to an event to which one belongs [like love of communion],… it is an arbitrary and pretentious selection … among which the choices most publicized by power will dominate.”

Richardson Mistakes Moralism of Distorted Civilization with Christian Love 

Ours is a deeply fragmented and contradictory civilization, exalting the bold conqueror, deifying authenticity, instinct, and self-importance, while simultaneously condemning inequality, naked aggression, and open disdain for the weak. Of course men like Richardson experience alienation and angry estrangement, for he’s been commanded to seek freedom as the purpose of life, especially to follow his own unique nature and proclivities—which urge him to hit, to rut, to achieve, to overcome, to dominate—while the very same culture insists also that he be nice and privilege the voice of the marginalized. He’s had enough of the fragmentation, choosing his nature over the gentler voices, and in this way striving to bring his splintered self together, to be fully human again. It’s a temper tantrum, but can the culture provide him anything better?

Giussani warns of the Church failing mankind, offering merely “a narrowed moral horizon, the boundaries of which are those stemming from the dominant conception of the life of the society.” When this happens, the Faith “ends up becoming a pretext for some concern or other that wins the consent of the mentality in power.” If we merely scold Richardson but cannot show the way of love we risk perpetuating the fragmentation, choosing moralism rather than love, siding with the narrow concerns of this or that element of the disintegration.

We’ll create martyrs, as Richardson thinks them, those who, in the name of their own dignity and wholeness, however misconstrued, revolt against the incoherence and arbitrary shame foisted upon them by a distorted civilization, and these noble martyrs will be unable to distinguish the Faith from the bent culture, and not without some cause.

Instead of moralism, Giussani notes, Christianity “must offer the living God. Not the god of the dead, or of human intelligence, but the living God,” an “all-embracing fact.” And since God is communion, and since the all-embracing, full desire of our restlessness is love of this communion, the living God is offered and known as “the experience of a great love.” Only love coheres, only love unites our splintered selves, only love orients morality towards our full humanity as beings for communion with ourselves, with others, and with God. Only love is credible.

Somewhat strangely, then, we must be saints so as to avoid creating martyrs.

On Being Human In a Civilization of Forgetfulness - James V. Schall, S.J.

In CWR

“The Church represents the memory of what it means to be human in the face of a civilization of forgetfulness, which knows only itself and its own criteria. Yet just as an individual without memory has lost his identity, so too a human race without memory would lose its identity.”

— Pope Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, December 21, 2012.

“I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity. To be sure, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us; Christ, who is the truth, has taken us by the hand, and we know that his hand is holding us securely on the path of our quest for knowledge.”

— Pope Benedict XVI, Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, December 21, 2012.

I.

Each year the Holy Father gives a significant lecture to the Roman Curia about the events of the previous year. In this year’s account, Benedict spent time recalling his trips to Mexico, Cuba, and Lebanon. In the course of a year, the modern popes probably see more important (and “unimportant”) people in the world than any other public figure. Their trips to various countries are usually major events in those countries. It is said that John Paul II was seen in person by more human beings than any man in history. 

In introducing Pope Benedict, Cardinal Sodano recalled the liturgical antiphon: “Propre est jam Dominus, venite adoremus–The Lord is near, come let us adore Him.” The Child in the stable in Bethlehem, Benedict continues, “is God himself and has come so close as to become a man like us.” Benedict never hesitates to identify Christ as true God and true man. These very words—the “Child is God Himself”—defy and challenge the whole world by affirming its truth. 

Benedict made a most interesting remark about Cuba: “That country’s search for a proper balancing of the relationship between obligations and freedom cannot succeed without reference to the basic criteria that mankind has discovered through encounter with the God of Jesus Christ.” One presumes that, if that statement is true for Cuba, it will be true for other lands, including our own. Evidently, mankind has learned something about obligation and freedom from its dealing with the reality of Christ. Essentially it is that no freedom exists without corresponding obligation. Likewise, an obligation that is not freely accepted is more like determinism or coercion than free responsibility. 

II.

To the Curia, Benedict devotes considerable discussion to two topics: the family and the meaning of dialogue. The meeting on families in Milan gave the Holy Father an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the family and the modern effort to eliminate it as the central institution of human life.

Many questions come up about the family with which we must be familiar: “First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself to a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to human freedom?” These are the common questions that we hear when we try to justify divorce or infidelity of various sorts. They are rooted in an individualism that does not see human perfection as a relationship of commitment to others, including to God Himself.

 

But Benedict brings up something of great profundity about the nature of the modern attack on marriage. Evidently, the pope has been reading a reflection on marriage by the Chief Rabbi in France, Giles Benheim. Rabbi Benheim points out that the current attack on the family, child, and marriage is not just rooted in a false notion of freedom. This latter view has been characteristic of much modern opposition to permanent marriage. Now the issue goes to the very nature of what a human being is, not just his freedom.

What is questioned is the being of man as we have known it. It is only if we deny the being of man that we can embrace views of human relations that undermine the structure of man. Traditionally, Rabbi Benheim notes, to be a human being meant to be born “of woman.” Chesterton noted somewhere what a terrible thing it would be if we were “born of man.” But today, the notion of gender is not something of given fact but of choice. What one is born of makes no difference. “Sex is no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of; it is a social role that we choose for ourselves.”

If man is born of woman, the role chosen for him is essential to his own good. But if we conceive “being given ourselves” to be a denial of our “freedom,” we must develop a theory that denies our given nature. We thus have to choose our “gender”, whatever it be. Of this view, Benedict states: “The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.” This obvious falsity, however, does not prevent individuals and governments from choosing it.

People deny they have a “nature” that derives from the fact of the body (and soul) given to them at conception and birth. They want to “make” themselves with no relation to God or nature. They will seek to prove that nothing in them has an origin from anything but themselves. “According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of human nature.” The male and female division of human beings is essential to human nature as such. This duality is now questioned.

What are the consequences of this new view? It is the belief that it was “not God who created us male and female.” What did this was “society,” whose authority we now also deny We decide for ourselves. “Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.” This is a new form of what Maritain once called “angelism.” The body has nothing to do with our soul and spirit. Will is everything, shades of Nietzsche. We need not account for our body, let alone see in it as part of our own real good. The pope points out that now we are manipulating human nature, a manipulation often pursued by the same people who are up in arms about manipulating the environment. They oppose manipulating the latter but demand that we manipulate human nature.

One can only stand in awe at the force of the pope’s mind as he examines the logic of these views of gender. “From now on there is only the abstract human being who chooses for himself what his nature will be. Man and woman in their created state as complimentary versions of what it means to be human are disputed.” Yet, we are not just spirit and will but we are persons with body and soul in one whole. We are a unified being, all aspects of which belong together in a harmonious whole

Benedict proceeds to draw out the logic of this denial of the normalcy of male and female in one nature. “But if there is no preordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.” The dignity of the child is that it is a gift, not the product of human engineering or ownership. He is a good in his own being.

“Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately too man is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God…. The defense of the family is about man himself…. When God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” (See Schall, “On the ‘Right to Be Born,’” in Political Philosophy and Revelation, The Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming 2013).

If we maintain that someone, male or female, has an independent “right” to a child apart from the stable male-female marital relation, it follows that any arrangement in which a child can be obtained—in vitro, cloning—is merely the exercise of one’s rights. The child, who ought to be the center of the issue, is deprived of his own need of father and mother, of his own dignity.. What comes first is not the child but oneself, the complete opposite of the natural order.

III.

Benedict next takes up the issue of dialogue. It is a confused area. The noble Platonic notion has become—if not useless in a world of relativism in which no truth can be found—at least a justification for endless discussions that decide very little. Benedict sees three areas of dialogue: with the state, with society, and with religion. When civilizations forget what man is, the Church becomes the memory of mankind, of what man is. What the Church knows from its experience is relevant to non-believers.

Benedict draws a delicate line here. Knowing the almost impossible task of discussing theological issues publicly, particularly with Muslims, he grants that dialogue still must find some basis of agreement about common problems. Still, any dialogue will lead in some way to fundamental issues. “A dialogue about peace and justice is bound to move beyond the purely pragmatic, to become an ethical struggle for the truth and for the human being.…” What began as a pragmatic issue does bring up the question of what is the right way to live and why.

Two reasons are given for dialogue among those whom we are not seeking to change. “1) Dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at understanding. In this respect it differs from evangelization, from mission. 2) Accordingly, both parties to the dialogue remain consciously within their identity, which the dialogue does not place in question either for themselves or for others.” These principles, of course, strike us as being a long way from Plato’s understanding of dialogue. The pope himself finds problems with them. “I find them too superficial. True dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at better mutual understanding—that is correct. But all the same the search for knowledge and understanding always has to involve drawing close to the truth.”

A Christian cannot say that his discussion blocks out any approach to the truth. “I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity.” He can do this because reason open to revelation and revelation addressed to reason constitute a grounding in the what is that unifies our knowledge and sees the truths in other views together with their limitations.

The Church exists in part that we do not forget who and what we are. It sees that the most fundamental institution of society, the family, is now an object of complete elimination and the relations that are associated with the family, the most fundamental ones, are left without grounding in nature or being. The dialogue with any of the disparate religions and philosophies of our time cannot ultimately forget that truth is the direction in which all reason tends. When Socrates said that dialogue taught him what he did not know, he only reached this conclusion after eliminating many positions that were in fact not true. Dialogue may not be conversion but the establishment of any truth or the rejection of any error remains a central task. The wars of the world are still fought in the minds and hearts of men. Benedict quite clearly understands this fact.