My view of the Catholic doctrine of sexuality
No recorded commandment of Jesus condemns homosexual desire or practice. This has been used by modern activists to imply that their desires are morally innocent, even blessed by the Lord. The first and elementary objection to this piece of nonsense is that you might as well say that Jesus endorses crimes, rape, betraying your friends, selling your country for money, or poisoning your children; none of which activities does He explicitly condemn anywhere. The truth is that Jesus rarely condemned. His teaching is overwhelmingly positive; and while when he did condemn anything, he did so with vigour (“You generation of vipers, who has taught you to flee from the wrath to come?” “My Father’s house should be a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves!” “It is necessary that scandals should take place; but woe to that man through whom they take place! It would be better for him to have a millstone tied to his neck and be thrown in the depths of the sea”), most of the time He told people, not what they should not do, but what they should. Blessed are they… Blessed are they… Blessed are the… Blessed are you, when… Which of you would not…? Which of you would…? Jesus was always outlining the image of the saint, and of the saint’s behaviour; to know what we should not do, we have to work by exclusion.
Now if there is one doctrine about human nature and morality that can be deduced easily and with no great space for doubt from the Gospels, it is the doctrine of the sexes in man. St.Paul’s teachings on sex, and especially in the prohibition of promiscuity and homosexuality, only apply them logically - if with some leftover Pharisee misogynist feeling. Start from this: if there is one commandment Jesus clearly gave, it was the prohibition of divorce. In his time and place, this was revolutionary. Jews, Greeks and Romans all had pretty relaxed views of the wedding tie; divorce and remarriage were easy and common. And we should not only notice this, but also notice how he did it. His debating strategy on this matter was quite extraordinary, apparently designed not only to break with Jewish tradition, but to underline that break, to make it so blatant that His followers should be forced to choose between Jewish law and His word. When asked - and asked not by anyone, but by a group of Pharisees, men skilled in the law - whether divorce was permissible, he answered: “What did Moses teach you?” In other instances, this was a prelude to an unanswerable conclusion. Not here. When they answer him that Moses had allowed a certificate of divorce to be written, he answered, astonishingly: “Moses gave you that permission because of the hardness of your hearts; but from the beginning it was not so.” This is the most explicit challenge I can remember, not only to Jewish practice, but to the letter of the Law, in all the Gospels. At no other point did Jesus ever say explicitly that the Law was just plain wrong, a permission granted purely because men were so hard-hearted, so naturally unjust, that they could not cope with the totality of Divine command. Because, Jesus went on, “That is not how it was in the beginning” - that is, when God created heaven and earth. How did He create man? Jesus quotes Genesis 1.27: “God created them male and female”; no doubt He had in mind the rest of the verse, which says “in His own image created He them” - in other words, it is the totality of male and female that is what is created in the image of God. And he goes on to Genesis 2.24: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and stay permanently with his wife; and they shall be one flesh.” In this context, we ought to remember the fourth Commandment, and the immensely high respect that Father and Mother drew in Jewish culture; for any human claim to surpass theirs, it must truly be supreme among mortal relationships. And Jesus concludes: “Therefore, what God had put together let no man separate.” This is both a statement of the Divine nature of marriage, made by God and not by mortals, and a blow at the predominance of the male within it - since in Jewish law, as in Muslim law today, the man alone could pronounce himself divorced, greatly to the wife’s disadvantage. No male is allowed in his pride to dissolve the sacred relationship within which he and his wife achieve the status of being “in the image of God”.
If there was one thing in which Christ's teaching was an absolute break with every convention, it was just this. And it was, typically, the result of going back to first principles. The keynote and the taste of Jesus' moral teaching seems to me to be reducible to the words do what you have always known you must do, only a lot more so. Do not only not commit adultery, don't even think about it; don’t think about your own wife lustfully. Do not just forgive and love your friends, forgive and love your enemies too, those who really wish you harm. And so here he simply ripped the one common Jewish, Greek, Roman idea to bits in the name of eternal realities. Marriage is a bond in the eternal nature of things, by the word of God Himself, because God made us male and female so that we might become a higher unity: "one flesh" (Mk 10. 6-8; Mt 19.4-6).
This was astonishing teaching. At least one of the Evangelists could not cope with it: Matthew was clearly horrified. He repeats the teaching twice (5.27-32 and 19.3-12), unlike both Luke and Mark, who only quote it once, and in both cases he adds a strange rider “setting aside the matter of fornication”. This is not very clear, but it is clearly intended to indicate a reservation in the matter of sexual misconduct - “fornication”, however defined, could be held to invalidate a marriage. And when he brings it back the second time, Matthew -again unlike Mark and Luke - has the disciples react in horror: this is tough stuff, who can deal with it? And Jesus more or less seems to say that the teaching is only for those strong enough to cope.
This is the passage that has been abused by faithless churches when, in the twentieth century, the preachers started to fear that the flock was running away from them, and, instead of preserving the doctrine, decided to run after them. After twenty centuries of prohibition, the Scots Presbyterians and other such champions of orthodoxy decided that Matthew showed that Jesus had not really meant to forbid divorce altogether and in every circumstance. Alas, the rest of the New Testament is against him and them. Neither Luke nor Mark report either the “setting aside the matter of fornication” rider or the final qualifications. What is more, St.Paul, whose letters are generally held to pre-date the Gospels, had clearly heard the teaching, without any qualifications (1Cor.6.16, Eph.5.31). His view of fornication is quite different from Matthew’s: far from breaking up the idea of two people being one flesh, he actually extends it to casual relationships - only it is a corrupting and detestable kind of unity (1Cor6.15-17). Finally and most tremendously, he speaks to the Christians in Rome as though everyone just agreed that marriage was for life (Rom7.1-3), a statement that would have been wholly incomprehensible to Greeks, Romans and ordinary Jews of his time. What Romans 7.1-3 proves is that the indissolubility of marriage was an accepted rule among the earliest Christians. This was written years before Matthew. Jesus was no fool, and if he actually intended to forbid divorce, He would know that if He left the tiniest dubitative clause in the prohibition, human nature would widen it into an eighteen-track motorway.
I do not charge Matthew with lying, at least not consciously. Matthew is throughout the voice of the Jewish element in the new Church. He is always desperate to bring in some piece of Old Testament prophecy or statement to connect with the strange and inexplicable events in Jesus’ life; even where this leads him to use very inappropriate quotes - the famous “the virgin shall conceive and bear a child, and his name shall be called Emmanuel, which neither means what he wants it to mean, nor prove what he wants it to prove. And in the case of divorce, he evidently cannot bring himself to believe that Our Lord really taught something so odd and impious as that the union of man and wife cannot be broken even if one of them has sex with a third person; clearly, he felt, if He had been challenged on that particular point, He would have conceded it. St.Paul saw it quite differently: do not fornicate, because even a casual link with a prostitute forms that supernatural union that Our Lord taught.
Jesus, then, taught that male and female were made to come together in a unity as solid as that of a single being. Both Paul's warnings against adultery and his condemnation of homosexuality depend on this doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, which was not his but Jesus’. We will see that Paul also made his own comment, and not a favourable one, on the bitter Jewish polemic against Greco-Roman pederasty (we remember that one of the things that had caused wars between Greeks and Jews had been the building of Greek gymnasia, where boys wrestled naked, in Jewish cities). But in 1Cor.6.12-20 he spells out the centrality of marriage with relentless logic: the Church, and therefore all its members, is bodily one with Christ; but as according to Christ's teaching sex creates its own kind of unity, casual sex is an abuse of Christ's body. Paul's mind forms the awful picture of dragging Christ to lie in bed with a whore; from which he quite rightly recoils.
This very emphasis on the union of the sexes forces our view on their differences. Male and female humans are physically quite as different as either of them is from many other animals, and the attitudes of each of them to work, time and space (especially the ordered space of the home) are conditioned by their experience of their own bodies. Most women go through no less than four major physical mutations: their first menstruation, the loss of virginity, their first pregnancy, and the menopause. The analogous stages in a man's life are nowhere as dramatic. A boy feels no serious change as he reaches puberty, and nothing is different after his first sexual relationship. But a girl's body knows the change. This is probably why women very unfairly tend to regard men as overgrown boys. A man's maturation is a gentle process with no violent emotional connotations; that of a woman is a major upheaval, which some women suffer like diseases or disasters. A man may easily feel he's still the same little boy as ever; a woman cannot - not in the same sense.
Not only do women experience these radical changes; the menstrual cycle binds their bodies more constantly to time than men's. Men feel the patterns in their lives far less strongly. Hence, I think, our tendency to sloppiness, even slobbishness: we can put up with disorder where women, even if angry and exhausted, will rush in with a brush and pail. How many times have we heard our female friends complain that their partners leave things lying around for them to pick up? It's not (necessarily) selfishness; it's a genuinely different sensibility. The man may have trouble understanding the woman's sensitivity to mess; he may find it excessive, even hysterical. For women are bound to order and pattern by an experience so deep and natural they themselves do not notice it. It's not so much that they love an orderly environment as that they experience pattern within themselves to an extent unknown to men.
(It's not irrelevant that it was a woman anthropologist, Mary Douglas, who produced a celebrated theory about the significance of pollution in cultural discourse, explaining the cultural category of dirt as "matter out of place"; Douglas herself explained that the theory was the result of quite personal experiences.)
That is also why women are in general eager to look good: it is a matter of achieving a pattern, a grace, an outer order and cleanness that satisfies their inner needs. It is only male vanity, and ignorant male vanity at that, to conceive that women would exercise, dress and make up only to attract men! Nonsense echoed down the ages and often accepted by women, but nonsense nevertheless. Few women are stupid enough to subject themselves to all sorts of discomfort, expense and work only to snare a man: they know well enough that brutal and graceless sexual allure is enough to get one to bed, but that on the other hand no amount of work on one's own beauty will ever win anyone's heart. Love is too stubborn and mysterious a thing for cosmetics. The identification of elegant and sexy is a modern one, part of the sexual obsession I will deal with in time. Only since the end of World War One has fashion aimed at being sexy; anything less likely to inflame desire than the forbiddingly magnificent fashions of previous centuries is hard to imagine.
Once we get over the cliché, it is a fact - and a fact that should strike us with every female conversation we hear - that women's pursuit of beauty and elegance impresses primarily other women. What horrifies women is to be seen badly dressed or sloppily made up by another woman; the opinion of a male counts for a lot less - apart from anything else, they know that most of us lack the technical knowledge to judge. The technical aspects of the pursuit of beauty are always a major talking point: I remember my surprise listening, back in Oxford, to a most unworldly, nun-like creature, discussing clothes, cosmetics, diets and fitness regimens, with the knowledge of an expert and the passion of a connoisseur (or should that be connoisseuse?). The truth is that women bring to it a genuine aesthetic, artistic passion. They judge the successes and ridicule the failures; and never does a female conversation get sharper than when discussing the failures in taste of a common acquaintance. Males do wrong to see this talk as merely "catty"; women need order, pattern, and grace, like they need the light, and perceived faults - bad taste, lack of measure, sloppiness - offends them deeply. They don't like it in men, why should they bear it among their number?
We shall never meet aliens; even if they existed, the distances from star to star are too great. But we have our own aliens at home. God could have made us without the sexes; He could have let us reproduce like some of the lower animals. Instead He made us twofold. It did not please Him to create a mankind that should know nothing else than itself; instead He, who came to bring not peace but a sword, put a constant challenge to our categories in our very being. We cannot take ourselves for granted, because we ourselves have among ourselves this element of strangeness, of difference. We can communicate; there are none of the total incomprehensions some science fiction postulates among alien races; but never without some adjustment, some mutual concession, some effort to cast ourselves beyond the bounds of our being, to imagine and understand the experience of a different kind of being.
Across this abyss takes place the greatest spiritual experience in most of our lives. I have no time for any Christian who takes a sniffy view of the love of man and woman, or separates it from marriage (and even C.S.Lewis did so!); it is only after they falling away from it that they can be "realistic" - i.e. dismissive - towards it. Those Christians who disparage sexual love have simply missed the point. No man loves a woman, no woman loves a man, for their beauty, their habits or their features (for this reason alone the male delusion that women make themselves pretty for them should be discarded out of hand). They love the individual as an individual. They take pleasure in the beloved him/herself; the very fact of his/her being is a wonder and a joy, a gift, and a justification for their life. It is worth living if I can live for D.W.. I am convinced that this pleasure in the very existence of a being other than ourselves is our share in the Creator's joy in His creation: the joy that something independent, other than Himself, should exist. The greatest love poem, perhaps, ever written, says it perfectly:
Ist’s moeglich dass ich, Liebchen, dich kose,
Vernehme der goettliche Stimme Schall!
Unmoeglich scheint immer die Rose,
Unbegreiflich die Nachtingall.
Is it possible, my darling, I should touch you,
Should hear the divine music of your voice!
Impossible, every time, seems the rose,
Beyond understanding the nightingale.
(Goethe)
That is why marriage is a sacrament: because God gave us, however briefly and impermanently (according to our nature), an experience close to His own. I am convinced that God loves us as most of us have loved, perhaps, once in their lives; He loves us because He is love and we are there for Him to love.
But what we experience only then at such a level, we are never completely without. If we were, we would cease to be able to think. Love, I am ready to argue, is the base of human understanding, as much part of it as body and soul; our most fundamental relationship with anything outside ourselves is one of love. What we know, we love. I mean that we cannot know so much as a blade of grass without some emotional contact. The notion of passionless intellect, meaning passionless understanding, is a contradiction in terms, for nothing can be understood unless it is known, and nothing can be known without reacting to it.
Of the many proofs I could bring of this, one of the most curious is the phenomenon of nostalgia. There are very few places where we can say we have been happy; but there are even fewer places which to visit ten years later does not fill us with a sweet, silent happiness. Especially places of childhood. We may have been quite unhappy, but the place must have been nothing short of Auschwitz not to feel this silvery joy as we revisit it. The truth is that we had loved it all along, and didn't know it; if it is not, I'd be glad to hear of another rational explanation of nostalgia - I mean one that isn't simply and irrationally cynical.
The reason why the statement that love is the base of human understanding sounds like a burst of poetry - not to say sentimentality - rather than the rational assessment of a fact, is that, 1) the thing is so close to the core of ourselves that we are rather nervous about admitting it, as much as about showing ourselves naked; and, 2) that it is quite hideously easy to be, in fact, sentimental. Concentrating on love rather than on the thing loved means that the precious distinctions are lost; love itself does not, so to speak, matter - what matters is the thing loved. Each object of love calls for and deserves a different kind of love (a fact which is directly related to the connection between love and understanding). St.Augustine has a most important concept called ordo amorum, the order of loves, which means that all things are to be loved in their own particular way, beginning with God. Most of the evil in the world comes from misapplied love - for instance, the enthusiasm for a political theory in defiance of facts. Indeed, St.Augustine would say that all of it does.
In a very imperfect world and a fallen mankind, however, understanding is not a steady light, but a fitful, ill-regulated, oft-obscured glimmer. Here we see through a glass darkly; it is only there that we shall know as we are known. This explains the agonizing phenomenon of delusive love, love for the unworthy, good men marrying bad women and good women marrying bad men: there is some cognitive problem that has made it impossible for them to know the truth about the person, and superimposes a largely unreal figure to the real and (to say the least) flawed human being. More than one woman was swept off her feet by a dashing pirate, only to wake up ten years later in the bed of a violent slob: but what she sought in the man was something that no man has, an unreal answer to mistaken desires. The same thing, of course, can and does happen to men.
(I am a million miles from blaming the victims of violence for being beaten and abused; the crimes of violent men - and sometimes women - are their own responsibility, not their victim's, and it is quite right to punish them. I am only saying that the victimized partner has sometimes put her or himself in a false position by being unable or unwilling to see the facts.)
We bear a mysterious, irrepressible, relentless burden of failure. The world has its own comforting way to deal with it: we like to shift the sense of guilt to the pressure of unreasonable expectations from mummy/daddy/family /old school/Church/workplace/and, best of all, that wonderfully useful abstraction "society", blaming which has the immense advantage that you don't have to be rude to anyone particular. Now it is often true such things result from external pressure; I know people scarred by abusive fathers, overbearing mothers, or a child-abusing priest; all I am saying is that it is dangerous to make such assumptions all the time. We know that we fall short of what we ourselves should be, though we may not be quite sure of how and why. What is central is the failure, not the real or imagined cause, because the failure is what we have to live with here and now. A good deal may well result not from failures of the will (and therefore not to individual sin) but from inborn and often hereditary physical factors. Some may actually be palliated with treatment of some sort, but all of them affect the person in his or her most central place: relationships with other human beings and the world at large. Many people can be seen to be naturally unsociable, wrathful, insensitive, or manipulative, and it is not always easy to point to a reason beyond natural disposition. The scientific study of the brain and nervous system is discovering physical causes for some of these things. Yet they affect our spiritual condition, in that they can make it hard if not impossible for their victims to relate decently to people and things. The body, it seems, can and does affect the soul even in its most sacred functions, for these disabilities strike us in the area (love) where God Himself becomes manifest to men. They may never be left out of account when discussing morals. From ancient times, a man's natural disposition has been a major consideration.
The disposition to being attracted to one’s own sex must be seen as one of these problems of disposition. It is as such that Catholic doctrine treats it. Pope John Paul II clarified Catholic teaching (I refuse to be bound by the views of any other group): the Church does not hold the homosexual impulse to be sinful, but that the act is. Homosexual fornication is what the Church has always condemned and demanded confession and repentance for; and though I am hardly an expert on the history of Catholic moral teaching, I think I can say that in at least some cases homosexual fornication has been treated as no different from heterosexual fornication. The Penitential of St.Gildas, for instance, imposes the exact same penalties for both.
I understand this to mean that Catholic teaching places the homosexual impulse, not under the heading of evil, but under that of natural misfortune. This is what I mean when I say that "I don't think that homosexuality is a natural condition in the sense of suiting the deepest human nature". Homosexuality and other natural misfortunes have in common that they draw what we might call natural cruelty: there is little difference between the instinctive prejudice against the disabled and that against homosexuals, except that the latter often takes more virulent forms. Both arise because the existence of these people asks questions that the natural sinful man, the old Adam, would rather not hear. The existence of disabled persons plays up our dependency on people and things (such as wheelchairs), which is a scary thought to the person who claims to owe nobody anything - a particularly popular superstition today. In spite of the absurdity of the claim, there is a mental revulsion against believing you depend on anyone; yet our whole life is a welter of unpaid and unpayable debts - to God, to our parents, to our friends, to people we don't even know. "What have you got that you weren't given?" says St.Paul somewhere. It is the Old Adam of pride, the worst of sins, who claims to be physically complete and perfect; when any dog could rightly pity our defective sense of smell, any bat our pathetic hearing, and any whale our pitiful weakness. We tell ourselves we can deal with the world as an independent monad, and we can only reinforce this spectacular self-lie by looking down on those whose dependency is more evident than our own.
As for homosexuals, the prejudice against them is a positive force in silencing self-doubt. I do not want to exaggerate it as political homosexualists love to do; it is a minority phenomenon, and the majority of people don’t give a damn either way. Nonetheless, it exists. I have seen a couple of homosexual friends of mine come home with their faces swollen and bleeding from a violent beating, so I am not likely to underrate it. It is however my view that those who react so violently to homosexual practice are people who feel too close to it for comfort. Queer-bashers tend to be men whose environment of choice is beery, self-enclosed all-male groups, and who are least capable of dealing with women or different social groups (watch one of them among academics or clergymen). At the heart of their mutual self-reinforcement lies an unspoken doubt: is this pack-like way of life of mine really the best, the sanest, the most breathable on offer? Hostility makes up for the lack of a positive answer. We are right, they are odd, and we establish it by beating them up. We don't want to be told how very close to our boozy all-boy gangs their "scene" really is. I remember at least two serial killers of gay men whose motive was quite clearly an intense doubt as to their own identity: they looked at gay bars and the "scene" with horror and hatred, feeling threatened on a personal level, and the cruelty inflicted on their victims was clearly very much like revenge.
But while this sort of savagery is in the last analysis only a way to silence the questions asked by difference, it is not the only one. Indeed, it is hardly the most significant. People who do not want to face their hatred have a safer device at hand: to deny that any difference exists at all. That is the predominant lie of the age - and the wretched fools in the Politically Correct activist world keep pushing it with increasing violence, without realizing that they are pushing an agenda of disguised hate. Alice Thomas Ellis sums it up: "Mindless ecumenism is another manifestation of the human inability to accept or tolerate the 'other'. Genocide [or] the murder of heretics or members of different faiths... are no longer in style in some quarters, although by no means all. Now, confronted with difference, we try to minimise it, a move which has led to the incorporation and better dissemination of error rather than the hoped-for 'better understanding'."
The symptom of the submerged hatred and self-hate that drives them is the violence of their attitude to any opposing view, however mild. I never found more hypocrisy, more rotten reasoning, more bigotry, and less genuine charity, than among "liberal Christian" and PC types (including one supposed Buddhist). The kindest way they will describe ideological opponents is as “nutjobs”; resist them a bit further, and they will suddenly be charging you with wanting to re-open Auschwitz and light the ovens. Some even rediscover the word "heresy" (a word that no Christian should use except for the gravest reasons), tossing it happily around at any opinion they dislike. They genuinely want to silence any opposition - an attitude that shows a profound and abiding insecurity. The token of a strong, confident person is that s/he can accept that certain views and certain forms of behaviour are incompatible with each other, and that certain people disagree with you. To accept the existence of contradiction means you can consciously decide to live, under God, with them; to deny that there is a problem only means to deny validity to the views of anyone who claims that the problem exists - and if they are invalid, then there is no reason to either consider or tolerate them. The idea never even occurs. Self-righteousness, driven out once by the Christian call for unconditional love, comes back with seven spirits worse than itself, and the man's last state is worse than the first.
Now if there is one doctrine about human nature and morality that can be deduced easily and with no great space for doubt from the Gospels, it is the doctrine of the sexes in man. St.Paul’s teachings on sex, and especially in the prohibition of promiscuity and homosexuality, only apply them logically - if with some leftover Pharisee misogynist feeling. Start from this: if there is one commandment Jesus clearly gave, it was the prohibition of divorce. In his time and place, this was revolutionary. Jews, Greeks and Romans all had pretty relaxed views of the wedding tie; divorce and remarriage were easy and common. And we should not only notice this, but also notice how he did it. His debating strategy on this matter was quite extraordinary, apparently designed not only to break with Jewish tradition, but to underline that break, to make it so blatant that His followers should be forced to choose between Jewish law and His word. When asked - and asked not by anyone, but by a group of Pharisees, men skilled in the law - whether divorce was permissible, he answered: “What did Moses teach you?” In other instances, this was a prelude to an unanswerable conclusion. Not here. When they answer him that Moses had allowed a certificate of divorce to be written, he answered, astonishingly: “Moses gave you that permission because of the hardness of your hearts; but from the beginning it was not so.” This is the most explicit challenge I can remember, not only to Jewish practice, but to the letter of the Law, in all the Gospels. At no other point did Jesus ever say explicitly that the Law was just plain wrong, a permission granted purely because men were so hard-hearted, so naturally unjust, that they could not cope with the totality of Divine command. Because, Jesus went on, “That is not how it was in the beginning” - that is, when God created heaven and earth. How did He create man? Jesus quotes Genesis 1.27: “God created them male and female”; no doubt He had in mind the rest of the verse, which says “in His own image created He them” - in other words, it is the totality of male and female that is what is created in the image of God. And he goes on to Genesis 2.24: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and stay permanently with his wife; and they shall be one flesh.” In this context, we ought to remember the fourth Commandment, and the immensely high respect that Father and Mother drew in Jewish culture; for any human claim to surpass theirs, it must truly be supreme among mortal relationships. And Jesus concludes: “Therefore, what God had put together let no man separate.” This is both a statement of the Divine nature of marriage, made by God and not by mortals, and a blow at the predominance of the male within it - since in Jewish law, as in Muslim law today, the man alone could pronounce himself divorced, greatly to the wife’s disadvantage. No male is allowed in his pride to dissolve the sacred relationship within which he and his wife achieve the status of being “in the image of God”.
If there was one thing in which Christ's teaching was an absolute break with every convention, it was just this. And it was, typically, the result of going back to first principles. The keynote and the taste of Jesus' moral teaching seems to me to be reducible to the words do what you have always known you must do, only a lot more so. Do not only not commit adultery, don't even think about it; don’t think about your own wife lustfully. Do not just forgive and love your friends, forgive and love your enemies too, those who really wish you harm. And so here he simply ripped the one common Jewish, Greek, Roman idea to bits in the name of eternal realities. Marriage is a bond in the eternal nature of things, by the word of God Himself, because God made us male and female so that we might become a higher unity: "one flesh" (Mk 10. 6-8; Mt 19.4-6).
This was astonishing teaching. At least one of the Evangelists could not cope with it: Matthew was clearly horrified. He repeats the teaching twice (5.27-32 and 19.3-12), unlike both Luke and Mark, who only quote it once, and in both cases he adds a strange rider “setting aside the matter of fornication”. This is not very clear, but it is clearly intended to indicate a reservation in the matter of sexual misconduct - “fornication”, however defined, could be held to invalidate a marriage. And when he brings it back the second time, Matthew -again unlike Mark and Luke - has the disciples react in horror: this is tough stuff, who can deal with it? And Jesus more or less seems to say that the teaching is only for those strong enough to cope.
This is the passage that has been abused by faithless churches when, in the twentieth century, the preachers started to fear that the flock was running away from them, and, instead of preserving the doctrine, decided to run after them. After twenty centuries of prohibition, the Scots Presbyterians and other such champions of orthodoxy decided that Matthew showed that Jesus had not really meant to forbid divorce altogether and in every circumstance. Alas, the rest of the New Testament is against him and them. Neither Luke nor Mark report either the “setting aside the matter of fornication” rider or the final qualifications. What is more, St.Paul, whose letters are generally held to pre-date the Gospels, had clearly heard the teaching, without any qualifications (1Cor.6.16, Eph.5.31). His view of fornication is quite different from Matthew’s: far from breaking up the idea of two people being one flesh, he actually extends it to casual relationships - only it is a corrupting and detestable kind of unity (1Cor6.15-17). Finally and most tremendously, he speaks to the Christians in Rome as though everyone just agreed that marriage was for life (Rom7.1-3), a statement that would have been wholly incomprehensible to Greeks, Romans and ordinary Jews of his time. What Romans 7.1-3 proves is that the indissolubility of marriage was an accepted rule among the earliest Christians. This was written years before Matthew. Jesus was no fool, and if he actually intended to forbid divorce, He would know that if He left the tiniest dubitative clause in the prohibition, human nature would widen it into an eighteen-track motorway.
I do not charge Matthew with lying, at least not consciously. Matthew is throughout the voice of the Jewish element in the new Church. He is always desperate to bring in some piece of Old Testament prophecy or statement to connect with the strange and inexplicable events in Jesus’ life; even where this leads him to use very inappropriate quotes - the famous “the virgin shall conceive and bear a child, and his name shall be called Emmanuel, which neither means what he wants it to mean, nor prove what he wants it to prove. And in the case of divorce, he evidently cannot bring himself to believe that Our Lord really taught something so odd and impious as that the union of man and wife cannot be broken even if one of them has sex with a third person; clearly, he felt, if He had been challenged on that particular point, He would have conceded it. St.Paul saw it quite differently: do not fornicate, because even a casual link with a prostitute forms that supernatural union that Our Lord taught.
Jesus, then, taught that male and female were made to come together in a unity as solid as that of a single being. Both Paul's warnings against adultery and his condemnation of homosexuality depend on this doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, which was not his but Jesus’. We will see that Paul also made his own comment, and not a favourable one, on the bitter Jewish polemic against Greco-Roman pederasty (we remember that one of the things that had caused wars between Greeks and Jews had been the building of Greek gymnasia, where boys wrestled naked, in Jewish cities). But in 1Cor.6.12-20 he spells out the centrality of marriage with relentless logic: the Church, and therefore all its members, is bodily one with Christ; but as according to Christ's teaching sex creates its own kind of unity, casual sex is an abuse of Christ's body. Paul's mind forms the awful picture of dragging Christ to lie in bed with a whore; from which he quite rightly recoils.
This very emphasis on the union of the sexes forces our view on their differences. Male and female humans are physically quite as different as either of them is from many other animals, and the attitudes of each of them to work, time and space (especially the ordered space of the home) are conditioned by their experience of their own bodies. Most women go through no less than four major physical mutations: their first menstruation, the loss of virginity, their first pregnancy, and the menopause. The analogous stages in a man's life are nowhere as dramatic. A boy feels no serious change as he reaches puberty, and nothing is different after his first sexual relationship. But a girl's body knows the change. This is probably why women very unfairly tend to regard men as overgrown boys. A man's maturation is a gentle process with no violent emotional connotations; that of a woman is a major upheaval, which some women suffer like diseases or disasters. A man may easily feel he's still the same little boy as ever; a woman cannot - not in the same sense.
Not only do women experience these radical changes; the menstrual cycle binds their bodies more constantly to time than men's. Men feel the patterns in their lives far less strongly. Hence, I think, our tendency to sloppiness, even slobbishness: we can put up with disorder where women, even if angry and exhausted, will rush in with a brush and pail. How many times have we heard our female friends complain that their partners leave things lying around for them to pick up? It's not (necessarily) selfishness; it's a genuinely different sensibility. The man may have trouble understanding the woman's sensitivity to mess; he may find it excessive, even hysterical. For women are bound to order and pattern by an experience so deep and natural they themselves do not notice it. It's not so much that they love an orderly environment as that they experience pattern within themselves to an extent unknown to men.
(It's not irrelevant that it was a woman anthropologist, Mary Douglas, who produced a celebrated theory about the significance of pollution in cultural discourse, explaining the cultural category of dirt as "matter out of place"; Douglas herself explained that the theory was the result of quite personal experiences.)
That is also why women are in general eager to look good: it is a matter of achieving a pattern, a grace, an outer order and cleanness that satisfies their inner needs. It is only male vanity, and ignorant male vanity at that, to conceive that women would exercise, dress and make up only to attract men! Nonsense echoed down the ages and often accepted by women, but nonsense nevertheless. Few women are stupid enough to subject themselves to all sorts of discomfort, expense and work only to snare a man: they know well enough that brutal and graceless sexual allure is enough to get one to bed, but that on the other hand no amount of work on one's own beauty will ever win anyone's heart. Love is too stubborn and mysterious a thing for cosmetics. The identification of elegant and sexy is a modern one, part of the sexual obsession I will deal with in time. Only since the end of World War One has fashion aimed at being sexy; anything less likely to inflame desire than the forbiddingly magnificent fashions of previous centuries is hard to imagine.
Once we get over the cliché, it is a fact - and a fact that should strike us with every female conversation we hear - that women's pursuit of beauty and elegance impresses primarily other women. What horrifies women is to be seen badly dressed or sloppily made up by another woman; the opinion of a male counts for a lot less - apart from anything else, they know that most of us lack the technical knowledge to judge. The technical aspects of the pursuit of beauty are always a major talking point: I remember my surprise listening, back in Oxford, to a most unworldly, nun-like creature, discussing clothes, cosmetics, diets and fitness regimens, with the knowledge of an expert and the passion of a connoisseur (or should that be connoisseuse?). The truth is that women bring to it a genuine aesthetic, artistic passion. They judge the successes and ridicule the failures; and never does a female conversation get sharper than when discussing the failures in taste of a common acquaintance. Males do wrong to see this talk as merely "catty"; women need order, pattern, and grace, like they need the light, and perceived faults - bad taste, lack of measure, sloppiness - offends them deeply. They don't like it in men, why should they bear it among their number?
We shall never meet aliens; even if they existed, the distances from star to star are too great. But we have our own aliens at home. God could have made us without the sexes; He could have let us reproduce like some of the lower animals. Instead He made us twofold. It did not please Him to create a mankind that should know nothing else than itself; instead He, who came to bring not peace but a sword, put a constant challenge to our categories in our very being. We cannot take ourselves for granted, because we ourselves have among ourselves this element of strangeness, of difference. We can communicate; there are none of the total incomprehensions some science fiction postulates among alien races; but never without some adjustment, some mutual concession, some effort to cast ourselves beyond the bounds of our being, to imagine and understand the experience of a different kind of being.
Across this abyss takes place the greatest spiritual experience in most of our lives. I have no time for any Christian who takes a sniffy view of the love of man and woman, or separates it from marriage (and even C.S.Lewis did so!); it is only after they falling away from it that they can be "realistic" - i.e. dismissive - towards it. Those Christians who disparage sexual love have simply missed the point. No man loves a woman, no woman loves a man, for their beauty, their habits or their features (for this reason alone the male delusion that women make themselves pretty for them should be discarded out of hand). They love the individual as an individual. They take pleasure in the beloved him/herself; the very fact of his/her being is a wonder and a joy, a gift, and a justification for their life. It is worth living if I can live for D.W.. I am convinced that this pleasure in the very existence of a being other than ourselves is our share in the Creator's joy in His creation: the joy that something independent, other than Himself, should exist. The greatest love poem, perhaps, ever written, says it perfectly:
Ist’s moeglich dass ich, Liebchen, dich kose,
Vernehme der goettliche Stimme Schall!
Unmoeglich scheint immer die Rose,
Unbegreiflich die Nachtingall.
Is it possible, my darling, I should touch you,
Should hear the divine music of your voice!
Impossible, every time, seems the rose,
Beyond understanding the nightingale.
(Goethe)
That is why marriage is a sacrament: because God gave us, however briefly and impermanently (according to our nature), an experience close to His own. I am convinced that God loves us as most of us have loved, perhaps, once in their lives; He loves us because He is love and we are there for Him to love.
But what we experience only then at such a level, we are never completely without. If we were, we would cease to be able to think. Love, I am ready to argue, is the base of human understanding, as much part of it as body and soul; our most fundamental relationship with anything outside ourselves is one of love. What we know, we love. I mean that we cannot know so much as a blade of grass without some emotional contact. The notion of passionless intellect, meaning passionless understanding, is a contradiction in terms, for nothing can be understood unless it is known, and nothing can be known without reacting to it.
Of the many proofs I could bring of this, one of the most curious is the phenomenon of nostalgia. There are very few places where we can say we have been happy; but there are even fewer places which to visit ten years later does not fill us with a sweet, silent happiness. Especially places of childhood. We may have been quite unhappy, but the place must have been nothing short of Auschwitz not to feel this silvery joy as we revisit it. The truth is that we had loved it all along, and didn't know it; if it is not, I'd be glad to hear of another rational explanation of nostalgia - I mean one that isn't simply and irrationally cynical.
The reason why the statement that love is the base of human understanding sounds like a burst of poetry - not to say sentimentality - rather than the rational assessment of a fact, is that, 1) the thing is so close to the core of ourselves that we are rather nervous about admitting it, as much as about showing ourselves naked; and, 2) that it is quite hideously easy to be, in fact, sentimental. Concentrating on love rather than on the thing loved means that the precious distinctions are lost; love itself does not, so to speak, matter - what matters is the thing loved. Each object of love calls for and deserves a different kind of love (a fact which is directly related to the connection between love and understanding). St.Augustine has a most important concept called ordo amorum, the order of loves, which means that all things are to be loved in their own particular way, beginning with God. Most of the evil in the world comes from misapplied love - for instance, the enthusiasm for a political theory in defiance of facts. Indeed, St.Augustine would say that all of it does.
In a very imperfect world and a fallen mankind, however, understanding is not a steady light, but a fitful, ill-regulated, oft-obscured glimmer. Here we see through a glass darkly; it is only there that we shall know as we are known. This explains the agonizing phenomenon of delusive love, love for the unworthy, good men marrying bad women and good women marrying bad men: there is some cognitive problem that has made it impossible for them to know the truth about the person, and superimposes a largely unreal figure to the real and (to say the least) flawed human being. More than one woman was swept off her feet by a dashing pirate, only to wake up ten years later in the bed of a violent slob: but what she sought in the man was something that no man has, an unreal answer to mistaken desires. The same thing, of course, can and does happen to men.
(I am a million miles from blaming the victims of violence for being beaten and abused; the crimes of violent men - and sometimes women - are their own responsibility, not their victim's, and it is quite right to punish them. I am only saying that the victimized partner has sometimes put her or himself in a false position by being unable or unwilling to see the facts.)
We bear a mysterious, irrepressible, relentless burden of failure. The world has its own comforting way to deal with it: we like to shift the sense of guilt to the pressure of unreasonable expectations from mummy/daddy/family /old school/Church/workplace/and, best of all, that wonderfully useful abstraction "society", blaming which has the immense advantage that you don't have to be rude to anyone particular. Now it is often true such things result from external pressure; I know people scarred by abusive fathers, overbearing mothers, or a child-abusing priest; all I am saying is that it is dangerous to make such assumptions all the time. We know that we fall short of what we ourselves should be, though we may not be quite sure of how and why. What is central is the failure, not the real or imagined cause, because the failure is what we have to live with here and now. A good deal may well result not from failures of the will (and therefore not to individual sin) but from inborn and often hereditary physical factors. Some may actually be palliated with treatment of some sort, but all of them affect the person in his or her most central place: relationships with other human beings and the world at large. Many people can be seen to be naturally unsociable, wrathful, insensitive, or manipulative, and it is not always easy to point to a reason beyond natural disposition. The scientific study of the brain and nervous system is discovering physical causes for some of these things. Yet they affect our spiritual condition, in that they can make it hard if not impossible for their victims to relate decently to people and things. The body, it seems, can and does affect the soul even in its most sacred functions, for these disabilities strike us in the area (love) where God Himself becomes manifest to men. They may never be left out of account when discussing morals. From ancient times, a man's natural disposition has been a major consideration.
The disposition to being attracted to one’s own sex must be seen as one of these problems of disposition. It is as such that Catholic doctrine treats it. Pope John Paul II clarified Catholic teaching (I refuse to be bound by the views of any other group): the Church does not hold the homosexual impulse to be sinful, but that the act is. Homosexual fornication is what the Church has always condemned and demanded confession and repentance for; and though I am hardly an expert on the history of Catholic moral teaching, I think I can say that in at least some cases homosexual fornication has been treated as no different from heterosexual fornication. The Penitential of St.Gildas, for instance, imposes the exact same penalties for both.
I understand this to mean that Catholic teaching places the homosexual impulse, not under the heading of evil, but under that of natural misfortune. This is what I mean when I say that "I don't think that homosexuality is a natural condition in the sense of suiting the deepest human nature". Homosexuality and other natural misfortunes have in common that they draw what we might call natural cruelty: there is little difference between the instinctive prejudice against the disabled and that against homosexuals, except that the latter often takes more virulent forms. Both arise because the existence of these people asks questions that the natural sinful man, the old Adam, would rather not hear. The existence of disabled persons plays up our dependency on people and things (such as wheelchairs), which is a scary thought to the person who claims to owe nobody anything - a particularly popular superstition today. In spite of the absurdity of the claim, there is a mental revulsion against believing you depend on anyone; yet our whole life is a welter of unpaid and unpayable debts - to God, to our parents, to our friends, to people we don't even know. "What have you got that you weren't given?" says St.Paul somewhere. It is the Old Adam of pride, the worst of sins, who claims to be physically complete and perfect; when any dog could rightly pity our defective sense of smell, any bat our pathetic hearing, and any whale our pitiful weakness. We tell ourselves we can deal with the world as an independent monad, and we can only reinforce this spectacular self-lie by looking down on those whose dependency is more evident than our own.
As for homosexuals, the prejudice against them is a positive force in silencing self-doubt. I do not want to exaggerate it as political homosexualists love to do; it is a minority phenomenon, and the majority of people don’t give a damn either way. Nonetheless, it exists. I have seen a couple of homosexual friends of mine come home with their faces swollen and bleeding from a violent beating, so I am not likely to underrate it. It is however my view that those who react so violently to homosexual practice are people who feel too close to it for comfort. Queer-bashers tend to be men whose environment of choice is beery, self-enclosed all-male groups, and who are least capable of dealing with women or different social groups (watch one of them among academics or clergymen). At the heart of their mutual self-reinforcement lies an unspoken doubt: is this pack-like way of life of mine really the best, the sanest, the most breathable on offer? Hostility makes up for the lack of a positive answer. We are right, they are odd, and we establish it by beating them up. We don't want to be told how very close to our boozy all-boy gangs their "scene" really is. I remember at least two serial killers of gay men whose motive was quite clearly an intense doubt as to their own identity: they looked at gay bars and the "scene" with horror and hatred, feeling threatened on a personal level, and the cruelty inflicted on their victims was clearly very much like revenge.
But while this sort of savagery is in the last analysis only a way to silence the questions asked by difference, it is not the only one. Indeed, it is hardly the most significant. People who do not want to face their hatred have a safer device at hand: to deny that any difference exists at all. That is the predominant lie of the age - and the wretched fools in the Politically Correct activist world keep pushing it with increasing violence, without realizing that they are pushing an agenda of disguised hate. Alice Thomas Ellis sums it up: "Mindless ecumenism is another manifestation of the human inability to accept or tolerate the 'other'. Genocide [or] the murder of heretics or members of different faiths... are no longer in style in some quarters, although by no means all. Now, confronted with difference, we try to minimise it, a move which has led to the incorporation and better dissemination of error rather than the hoped-for 'better understanding'."
The symptom of the submerged hatred and self-hate that drives them is the violence of their attitude to any opposing view, however mild. I never found more hypocrisy, more rotten reasoning, more bigotry, and less genuine charity, than among "liberal Christian" and PC types (including one supposed Buddhist). The kindest way they will describe ideological opponents is as “nutjobs”; resist them a bit further, and they will suddenly be charging you with wanting to re-open Auschwitz and light the ovens. Some even rediscover the word "heresy" (a word that no Christian should use except for the gravest reasons), tossing it happily around at any opinion they dislike. They genuinely want to silence any opposition - an attitude that shows a profound and abiding insecurity. The token of a strong, confident person is that s/he can accept that certain views and certain forms of behaviour are incompatible with each other, and that certain people disagree with you. To accept the existence of contradiction means you can consciously decide to live, under God, with them; to deny that there is a problem only means to deny validity to the views of anyone who claims that the problem exists - and if they are invalid, then there is no reason to either consider or tolerate them. The idea never even occurs. Self-righteousness, driven out once by the Christian call for unconditional love, comes back with seven spirits worse than itself, and the man's last state is worse than the first.