DREADPUBLISHING: 'Being Heard' John Heard - Same Sex Attraction, Catholicism & Beauty

:: Update ::

DREADNOUGHT's latest column for syndication is on beauty, same sex attraction, and the persistence of faith. It ran last week in The Record newspaper.

:: BEING HEARD – ‘Beautiful Wounds’ ::

By John Heard

People often want to know why I am (still) a Catholic. The “still”, of course, implies that a same sex attracted man should, as a default position, find the Church at best inhospitable and at worst – totally repulsive.

Indeed, I received an email the other day that was full of the most remarkable claims. You are “stifling” yourself, my interlocutor – a total stranger – wrote. You have “given up your own mind to allow a man who sits on a high chair in the center of Rome, Italy” to take over. I must be a slave to that “Vatican Church”, he claimed, and recent events in Boston and a sordid history everywhere had shown it to have “inhumane attitudes about sex”. In the mind of my reader, Catholicism is nothing more than a pernicious lie, a monstrosity that takes “glorious pleasure” and turns it into abuse, “soul-killing guilt”, and shame.

The exaggerated claims aside, what impressed me about the email was its literary richness. It is difficult for anyone with a public profile to avoid brickbats, but rarely are they so expressive. No one writes about “glorious” this, and “stifling” that, indeed, unless he is alive to beauty. No one bothers to write an email full of such things unless he suspects the person at the other end is similarly alive, and might demonstrate some fellow feeling. That sense, that longing, I recognize and cherish. It is, of course, in discussions on the Catholic teaching on human sexuality, the first place to look for common ground.

Typically, too, honesty – upfront, raw, and personal, if necessary – works wonders. Sometimes, indeed, when asked why I am a Catholic, I respond that I have been “wounded by Christ”. Occasionally, depending on my interlocutors, I vary the wording, “I have been wounded by the crucified One” I say, or I have been “wounded by Him”. This is not hyperbole; it is a condensed version of my re-conversion story, however purple the language.

Still, I have learned that when speaking to those who are profoundly secular, whether willfully so (i.e. apostates) or because of their cultural and social experiences (i.e. closer to what Christians once called heathens, without malice, and some now refer to as neo-Pagans), it is best to speak to beauty first.

Certainly, it might be better to say – in some contexts – when asked about my faith and its persistence, that I have been wounded by Beauty. When people start to get alarmed, modernity abhors discomfort after all, there is an opportunity to introduce some other ideas: virtue, suffering, love, truth, and what Aristotle knew as telos (the end of things). From beauty, the discussion, then, can flower.

Beauty hunts me, I might say – and, when we really get going – Christ hunted me down and would not let me escape Him. Of course, it is never as planned and formulaic as that, nor can a Catholic aim for stilted phrases when speaking to non-believers. Rather, the goal is to be as eloquent and compelling as Francis Thompson. He wrote of the persistence of faith - the “unhurrying chase, //
And unperturbèd pace,
// Deliberate speed, majestic instancy” - in his celebrated poem The Hound of Heaven.

Here is the Holy Father on the same notion:

“The beautiful wounds, but this is exactly how it summons man to his final destiny. [It]…has nothing to do with superficial aestheticism and irrationalism or with the flight from clarity and the importance of reason. The beautiful is knowledge certainly, but, in a superior form, since it arouses man to the real greatness of the truth”.

The hound of heaven, the beauty that arouses man to the real greatness of the truth, these are things to offer when someone questions one’s faith.

In my experience, certainly, there are few people indeed who are totally dead to beauty. Even the most rabid anti-Catholic will know, then, and respond graciously to, an invitation to shift from polemic / apologetic, to a less fraught mode.

Especially in the context of a discussion about the Catholic teaching on human sexuality, it is usually better to start at beauty, to discuss truth and goodness, and then – when some agreement has been reached about those enduring topics – to invite one’s interlocutor to wade out a little further in the waters of Christian thinking.

This helps me answer the question: Why are you (still) a Catholic? Beauty, truth, goodness, Him.

John Heard is an Australian writer. You can read more of his writing on sex, religion, and politics online, and on Facebook join the DREADNOUGHTERS Group.

DREADTALK: 'On Gay Couples & The Help Of Gracious Friendship' John Heard - September 30, 2009 At The University Of New South Wales - Remarks

DREADNOUGHT delivered the following prepared remarks during an event at the University of New South Wales.

-- ON GAY COUPLES AND THE "HELP OF GRACIOUS FRIENDSHIP" --

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

What does it mean to be faithful to each other amicitiae gratuitae auxilio?

John Heard

Thank you very much for being here with me. I must thank the Catholic Chaplaincy, and Daniel, for inviting me, and I must express my gratitude to the Archdiocese of Sydney. I appreciate your efforts on my behalf.

My comments here, at UNSW, come at the end of a loose, three part series of discussions, wherein I have engaged the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. Earlier this year I introduced the topic “Holy Sex and Christian Friendship” at the University of Sydney, and I spoke then about what someone might mean by that phrase: “holy sex”.

I also spoke about what someone cannot mean by it, and I discussed an idea of friendship that holds male on male bonds to be beautiful (good and true). I also acknowledged, of course, that many people today find Christian friendship – indeed, perhaps much of Christian thinking generally – challenging. I sought to engage that reticence. I seek to do that today, as well. I sent a direct invitation to the Queer Representatives at this university, and I hope some of them have joined us today.

In this context, at Sydney, I talked:

- about the condemnation of homosexual acts;

- about marriage and the family;

- about how, in Catholic thought, there is no such thing as a sexual orientation, beyond “male” and “female”;

- about how holy sex might be said to make us more human; and

- about a series of lectures given by Pope John Paul II, the Theology of the Body – which I chacterised as a profound attempt to speak meaningfully of man’s original nature (including about our original sexual nature).

Yesterday, at Macquarie University, I spoke about a Platonic conception of the ascent to beauty, about the "ladder of love" described in Plato’s Symposium, and about how a same sex attracted man might start to answer the question: what happens to eros in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality? I introduced the idea of sublimation, and discussed why someone might want to discipline erotic inspiration and direct the energy towards creative, beautiful ends. I spoke of how this effort, that discipline, might offer something unique to same sex attracted men and women seeking a middle ground between so-called “reparative therapy” techniques, on the one hand, and the glorification of sex per se that tends to characterise so much of late modern “gay culture”.

At Sydney, then, I focused on right action and Christian truth; on what we can discover about properly ordered relationships (both horizontal relationships, those we have with each other, and vertical ones, those we might want to enter into with G-d), and I suggested ways in which Christian friendship might be considered worthwhile and compelling. At Macquarie, I constrained myself to a discussion of beauty and sublimation. Today, however, I want to bring those two threads together.

I am interested, finally, in what might be called, in another context, “gay relationships’.

In the previous discussions I returned time and again to an excerpt from the Catechism , which deals specifically with same sex attraction. It is relevant here, too. The Catechism states, in the context of a universal vocation to chastity, that:

“Homosexual persons are called to chastity [too]. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”

I have previously unpacked various parts of this teaching, but let us zone in on that phrase, “disinterested friendship”.

First a note about the translation. In the original Latin, the Catechism phrase is:

“Personae homosexuales ad castitatem vocantur. Ipsae, dominii virtutibus quae libertatem educant interiorem, quandoque amicitiae gratuitae auxilio, oratione et gratia sacramentali, possunt et debent ad perfectionem christianam gradatim et obfirmate appropinquare.”

In my shoddy rendering, that comes out somewhere near “with the help of gracious friendship”. The official English translation, however, has the more opaque reference (to “the support of disinterested friendship”), which appears to be a direct translation from the Italian version (which speaks of “un'amicizia disinteressata”). The German, if anyone is interested, has something like “with the help of selfless friendship”.

I will use “with the help of gracious friendship” from now on, because that translation helps to pick out the most important parts of the phrase, for our purposes.

In any event, the phrase is provocative. What does it mean?

Some Catholics, particularly in the United States, have taken “the help of gracious friendship” to refer to group therapy, or to recommend so-called “reparative therapy” techniques. I spoke at length, yesterday, about some problems I have identified with “reparative therapy”, from a Catholic perspective, and how some allied approaches seem to me to distort the Catholic teaching on human sexuality, especially as it bears on a Christian understanding of the passions, and the discipline of “self-mastery”. Today, then, let me just follow that up by listing some problems I think of as ancillary to the general problem of offering therapy, at first instance, to same sex attracted Catholics.

In the efforts that have grown out of this interpretation, indeed, there has too often been a stress on the professional mode. Priests, for instance, are sometimes encouraged to recommend psychological methods in the confessional, and too much of the language of “reparative therapy” seems to me to be co-opted, and quasi-religious. The worst of it reads, indeed, as psycho-babble. On the website for a so-called “Reparational Group”, one of a number attached to the otherwise commendable Courage apostolate, for instance, I found a reference to “those of us who struggle homo-emotionally”. That is a phrase laden with concepts that are not found in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. This is an important point.

Further, inasmuch as such efforts often centre on a detached facilitator, therapist or support group, surrounded by a network of same sex attracted people, they also seem to me to fall short of the Catechism’s reference to “the help of gracious friendship”. Certainly, where same sex attracted Catholics are encouraged to pay for psychological services, the fact of payment alone would render the help offered in that context somewhat less gracious ("gratuitous") than the Catechism demands. Finally, those who seek guidance on the Catholic teaching on human sexuality should not, simply because of the therapeutic context of some of the reponses to the phenomenon, and the nomenclature attached to those responses, be treated as though they were suffering from a mental disorder.

Nor, however, should Catholics respond to the challenges posed by the Catechism reference to “gracious friendship” by impossibly glorifying same sex relationships. Like all human interactions, same sex interactions are only as virtuous and worthy as the actions and intentions of the relevant parties allows. As Michael Kirby is fond of repeating, “gay people are as boring”, and I might add, as prone to error, “as everybody else”. It is no secret, either, certainly not to same sex attracted men in particular, that too many same sex interactions fall far short of even common standards of decency, love, and consideration.

Let us return, however, and try to pick out a properly Catholic approach. What does “gracious friendship mean”?

On a popular Catholic blog, What Does the Prayer Really Say, the phrase came up in the context of a fraught discussion. One of the posters there asked for a:

“plausible description of what the Catechism means for gay and lesbian couples? What does it mean [he asked] to be faithful to each other “[with the help of gracious friendship]”?”

It seems to me that the answer to this question is not tremendously tricky. Nor is it harsh. But it will take us some time to unravel, first because of the complex nature of Catholic thought generally, second because we want to be sure that we are always referring back to the properly Catholic understanding of human sexuality, and third because some of us are living the answer, or trying to model it, and we are not perfect, and we cannot always trust our self-reports.

The first thing to say, on this, is that, of course, “the help of gracious friendship” means precisely what it says. In the Catholic context, we might think of this concept as the assistance same sex attracted Catholics receive from (A) other Catholics, and (B) each other. It is important here to note that the Catechism specifically assumes that the assistance offered models a particular sort of relationship, one that is characterized by grace (a vertical element) and friendship (a more horizontal notion).

On the help same sex attracted Catholics receive, then, from other Catholics, we might say that the “help of gracious friendship” must refer, at first instance, to the pastoral attention offered by properly formed priests and religious. Such help cannot be underestimated. When I had my first same sex sexual encounter, the first person I told was my confessor. The first words I heard, about same sex acts, were the words he spoke. In the sacramental context, of course, those words took on a particular resonance and power, the friendship was already gracious, but where priests and religious interact with same sex attracted men and women in other contexts, let me suggest - humbly - that they might recall the Catechism reference to the “help of gracious friendship”.

Parents, relatives, and friends, these people also have a role to play in terms of the help same sex attracted Catholics receive from other Catholics. Their responses must always aspire to the “gracious friendship” that the Catechism models.

What interests us most, however, is the second sort of help I mentioned, the “gracious friendship” same sex attracted men and women might offer to one another.

In this context I think, first, of the thousands of readers who write to me and comment on my writing, those who write to offer corrections to my ideas, in particular. Over the years, indeed, a community has developed and we now call call its members DREADNOUGHTERS. DREADNOUGHTERS are Christians, agnostics, Jews, and other seekers. We form a diverse collection. DREADNOUGHTERS are men and women who are same sex attracted and own sex attracted, priests and laymen, older and (mostly) younger - but all of us are open to engaging the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. We discuss homosexuality and other allied issues. By supporting each other – prayerfully, graciously, and lovingly – in a sincere and hopeful effort at Christian friendship, we attempt to model “gracious friendship”. There are currently more than 200 people, from all over the world, who collect together on a Facebook Group called, simply, DREADNOUGHTERS. I think of the DREADNOUGHTERS, when I think of "gracious friendship".

Second, and perhaps more provocatively, I have never lost faith in the idea that two men might, if properly formed and worthily inclined, model for each other the most loving and enduring sort of friendship. Let me move, now, to a discussion of some of the problems and opportunities I see, then, in this more fraught context. What we want to know here is, indeed, what does it mean to be faithful to each other “with the help of gracious friendship”?

My ideas on this part of the topic are still unsettled, as you will notice. I am living this, and some of you will be living it too.

One of the most frequent questions I receive, indeed, via email is any of a number of variations on “yes, but can a Catholic male have a boyfriend?”

The “yes” typically implies some sort of acceptance of the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. This is important. No one is going to make an effort to find out what it means to be faithful to someone else with the “help of gracious friendship” unless it really bears upon his life; unless the person thinks the answer will transform the nature and quality of his interpersonal relationships.

The rest of the question betrays a yearning for friendship, for companionship, however expressed. I cannot think of this yearning, the basic need for closeness with others, as anything other than worthy.

Often, however, this yearning is couched in jarring, or as described before, co-opted language. Some people use the language of late modern romantic narratives. They claim to be waiting for their one great love, and they hope to meet someone who will sweep them off their feet. Other times, although less frequently, one of my readers will write in a style heavily inflected with the language of marital union, even though this language will not admit male on male coupling (without great stress to the syntax and grammar of the marriage claim).

It is important, then, to get this yearning right. The best way to understand what it is that a same sex attracted man wants from another same sex attracted man, then, in this specific context is not a “boyfriend”, or a “husband” – rather he wants the “help of a gracious friendship”.

What might such a thing look like? Unlike some commentators, while I am wary of what Catholic experience calls “near occasions of sin”, I do not think the Catholic teaching on human sexuality necessarily precludes same sex attracted individuals living together. Certainly, same sex attracted individuals – like all other Christians – must keep in mind, and attempt to limit, those situations which we might wander into willingly, despite the fact that we know they will make us more inclined to choose the wrong course of action. But the analogy here is with cohabitation, with mixed dorm rooms and male and female campuses. If the Church trusts male and female university students to live together side by side, in some situations, without that experience unduly restricting their horizons for right action, there can be no proper blanket reason for rejecting all cohabitation arrangements that might spring up between same sex attracted men and women.

So, living together is not immediately out of the picture. What else is there? Well it must be repeated that, if the individuals are truly interested in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality, homogenital acts cannot figure in any properly Catholic understanding of the “help of a gracious friendship”. I do not think, at this slightly more mature stage in the public discourse on sex and religion, a discourse characterized by freedom of religion and expression, that voluntary adherence to a religious creed should continue to prove controversial in this respect. No-one, after all, is forcing me to live my life as a Catholic human being. I joyfully choose this path, however useless and unworthy I might prove to be.

So, same sex attracted Catholics might live together, but there is no place for homogenital acts. What else? At this stage, some of my readers get very specific. "What about caresses?" "What about sharing a bed?" "I sometimes see my friend naked, and I like it, what am I to do?" Such questions, while obviously immediately and sincerely vexing for the individual involved, are not really amenable to general directives. There is a reason, after all, that the Church has not spelled out the finer details of all moral and sexual matters – she provides spiritual directors, confessors and others to help any individual to discern the best path to holiness in light of the particular sorrows and blessings of his or her given experience.

The important thing to note, in this context, is that the discernment process should be characterized by joy. If we are constantly grumbling about the restrictions imposed, then we are not modeling “gracious friendship”, for we would be lacking either the vertical aspect, which speaks to one’s right relationship with G-d and His laws, or we would be deficient along the horizontal dimension, for failing to see why this particular relationship is worthy of my time and effort.

Finally, let me say something further about the idea of “disinterested friendship”. There is a tradition, in the Christian Church, of discouraging what have been called “particular friendships”. The reference to “disinterested friendship” is, especially in the context of writings on relationships between Christian religious, a response to this tradition. I first encountered the phrase in the writings of St Aelred (of Rievaulx), which will be known to his same sex attracted readers, in particular, as an expressive and early body of writing which explicitly engages some of these issues, albeit in the context of what St Aelred calls “spiritual friendship”. It might be worthwhile, at this point, to indicate that I think that whatever it is that we mean by “gracious friendship” must align, in its broad outlines and in many of its practical applications, with what St Aelred meant by “spiritual friendship”.

Let me finish, then, by asking you to give me your thoughts on these ideas. What does the phrase “gracious friendship” suggest to you? What do you think of the ideas surveyed (of “reparative therapy”, of same sex attracted men and women living together and attempting, in that context, to remain faithful to the Catholic teaching on human sexuality)?

Thank you very much.

- - ENDS - -

:: The Upshot ::

After the prepared remarks, there was a one and a half hour question / wide-ranging discussion session. I was privileged to speak with so many keenly intelligent young people. DREADNOUGHT is grateful to the organizers, and to the men and women who asked questions. This has been a marvellous series.

:: Resources ::

A selection of photographs taken on the day:

John Heard speaks at the University of New South Wales (Discussion).

John Heard speaks at the University of New South Wales.

John Heard speaks at the University of New South Wales (Lecture).

All Images © John Heard 2009, All Rights Reserved.

DREADTALK: 'On Self Mastery and the Scala Amoris' John Heard - September 29 2009 At Macquarie University - Remarks

DREADNOUGHT delivered the following prepared remarks during an appearance at Macquarie University.

-- ON SELF MASTERY AND THE SCALA AMORIS --

MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA

What Happens to Eros in the Catholic Teaching on Human Sexuality?

John Heard

Some months ago, I was invited to speak at the University of Sydney. I chose to discuss the topic Holy Sex & Christian Friendship; and I structured my comments there around the concepts: history, communion, and innocence.

While at Sydney, then, I had an opportunity to discuss what someone might mean by that phrase: “holy sex”. I also spoke about what someone cannot mean by it, and I discussed an idea of friendship that holds male on male bonds to be beautiful (good and true). I also acknowledged, of course, that many people today find Christian friendship – indeed, perhaps much of Christian thinking generally – challenging. I sought to engage this reticence.

In this context, I talked:

- about the condemnation of homosexual acts;

- about marriage and the family;

- about how, in Catholic thought, there is no such thing as a sexual orientation, beyond “male” and “female”;

- about how holy sex might be said to make us more human; and

- about a series of lectures given by Pope John Paul II, the Theology of the Body – which I chacterised as a profound attempt to speak meaningfully of man’s original nature (including our original sexual nature).

At the end of that discussion, a representative of the Queer Action Collective said, in effect, very well – you may have made a compelling and apparently intelligent defence of the ideas you have been discussing, but what happens to eros (or erotic love) in the Christian teaching on human sexuality?

In particular, she wanted to know what happens to erotic love in the context of holy sex and Christian friendship?

This question, which I could not engage at the time, animates our discussion today. For it reveals, of course, the wider problem of what there is in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality for same sex attracted men (and women)?

The discussion today is the second in a loose series of three talks on the broad topic of holy sex and Christian friendship. So, Sydney some months ago, Macquarie today, and then UNSW tomorrow.

The remarks from the first discussion are already available online.

It will help to know that while in the first lecture I spoke to the topic generally, and quite broadly, today I will focus on what might be thought of as some problems and opportunities that beauty presents in the context of the Catholic thinking on sex and morality. Specifically, I want to engage the question – what happens to eros? – by investigating the erotic charge associated with naked male imagery, and seeing where that ends up after it has been put through the Catholic wringer.

Tomorrow, for those who are interested, I will present some ideas about living together, or sharing one’s life with a mate. Tomorrow might be thought of as the practical side of things (praxis), then, an attempt to respond to the hundreds of emails I have received asking me some variation on the question: “can I have a boyfriend?”

Today, however, and in preparation for that, I want to start thinking (theoria) about sublimation – about what a Catholic might do with erotic love, and how the process of self-mastery and self-discipline might be considered appealing, or even noble.

My ideas on this are still nebulous, as you will hear. This is at least in part because of the fact that I am living this. Some of you may be living it too.

What we are really looking for is an answer to the topic question, then. What happens to eros in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality?

Eros is one of three concepts that are typically used to get a grip on what we mean when we talk about love. I spoke of the other two, about agape and, briefly, philia, in the first lecture. Tomorrow, I will speak at length about philia. Today, however, we are all about eros.

Eros is, of course, a concept that covers erotic love, what today we might think of as (1) initial arousal and sexual interest, and (2) what has sometimes been called, in various strains of psychoanalysis, the life-force, the love and energy, that opposes us to death.

It is the first idea of eros, of eros as arousal and sexual impulse, that I am interested in today. It is this idea of love that speaks most pointedly to us, especially those who are trying to work out what the Church might have to offer us in terms of our sexual feelings and impulses.

Pope Benedict XVI in his Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est described eros as:

“That love…which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings...”

We should contrast this idea of eros as unplanned and unwilled, as a force that imposes itself on human beings, with the treatment of the passions in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“…passions are emotions or movements of the sensitive appetite that incline us to act or not to act…The passions are natural components of the human psyche…In themselves passions are neither good nor evil. They are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will. Passions are [only] said to be voluntary, [when]…they are commanded by the will or because the will does not place obstacles in their way...It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by reason."

Here we have, albeit in a very condensed form, the answer to our questions about what happens to eros in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. For, indeed, inasmuch as eros is experienced as a passion, the Catholic teaching on sex and morality understands it in a very precise way. As the Catechism continues:

“Strong feelings are not decisive for the morality or the holiness of persons; they are simply the inexhaustible reservoir of images and affections in which the moral life is expressed. Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case. The upright will orders the movements of the senses it appropriates to the good and to beatitude; an evil will succumbs to disordered passions and exacerbates them. Emotions and feelings can be taken up into the virtues or perverted by the vices.”

This is why, indeed, I constantly make the point to Catholic audiences, and to my homoactivist interlocutors alike, that same sex attraction, understood as a passion, is morally neutral. It is neither sinful nor virtuous. As anyone can tell you, and as the Pope understands, eros imposes itself on us. What matters is how we deal with love when it arrives.

Against some people, then, especially those who might be taken with so-called “reparative therapy” techniques, I have consistently stated that it is not clear, then, that a Catholic ought to attempt to re-program his passions. There is no Catholic sense in which a passion, simpliciter, needs "repair". Same sex attracted Catholics do not, as a matter of fact, need psychotherapy to alter their attractions. No one does. That sort of thinking has nothing to do with the properly Christian discourse on eros and moral responsibility.

Against some homoactivists, however, I must use the same argument, but in a different way. For, indeed, it is often said that a man’s private sexual interests and activities are not the proper subject of moral or religious interest at all, except that some people want to extol them. A late modern sort of hedonism seems to hold in much of what now passes for gay culture, and it is not hard to see it as another sort of quasi-religious ideology. This time, the ideas are tied up in a recognizably neo-Pagan context. Gay culture and practice returns time and again to body worship, to muscle worship, penis-worship, and anus-worship, always with an emphasis on sex for the sake of gratification, or domination, or any of a number of superstitious add-ons, including Romanticism and Hollywood-type fantasies - which draw their potency from the idea of sex as always good. It is not, in this context, even so much about hedonism, because pleasure need not be part of the mix.

"In the Christian life…[in contrast with both the previous ideas, and uniquely, it is thought that]…the Holy Spirit himself accomplishes his work by mobilizing the whole being, with all its sorrows, fears and sadness, as is visible in the Lord's agony and passion. In Christ human feelings are able to reach their consummation in charity and divine beatitude. Moral perfection [then] consists in man's being moved to the good not by his will alone, but also by his sensitive appetite, as in the words of the psalm: "My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.""

I want to engage this Christian understanding, distinct from reparative therapy, on the one hand, and from the glorification of sex per se on the other, to see how a same sex attracted Catholic might learn to understand himself, and to learn to position himself vis a vis eros, so as he might start to say that his heart and flesh sing for joy.

In the Catechism, at 2358, the Church teaches that the "inclination...to homosexual acts" is mostly experienced as a "trial". When engaged a step earlier, however, when the inclination is still unformed (i.e. it has not been perverted by the vices), one can - I would like to suggest - receive the erotic inspiration as a challenge. One might engage reason and will to direct one's passions towards the service of virtue.

Indeed, at 2359, the Catechism teaches that:

"Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection".

There is mention here of "the virtues of self-mastery", "disinterested friendship", "prayer", and "sacramental grace", but no mention of "reparative therapy" or even of psychological treatments taken as a type.

A defence of "reparative therapy" would, I think, and as an aside, need therefore to be couched in these terms. How does it help a Catholic to grow in the "virtues of self-mastery"?

Passions are disordered, remember, inasmuch as they "effectively engage reason and will" AND they "are perverted by the vices". This is why, indeed, the condemnation of "homosexual acts" is found in Catholic teaching, while there is no condemnation of homosexuals per se.

But to serve virtue, one must discipline one’s will and look to one's acts. These are the activities of reason and will which relate to volition; the ways in which the Catholic teaching on human sexuality can be said to lead to human flourishing.

One obvious benefit, right at the outset, is that the Catholic path promotes self-knowledge.

There is also a sense in which it can be said that the Catholic teaching on erotic love, the exhortation to “self-mastery which teaches…inner-freedom”, derives from Greek, indeed, Platonic understandings of the value of philosophy, and what might be called an “ascent to the beautiful”.

It is the central claim of this discussion, in fact, that the scala amoris introduced in Plato's Symposium might provide a way for a same sex attracted man to get a grip on what happens to eros in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality.

In the Symposium, then, Plato includes a series of attempts to describe the nature of love. He puts various ideas into the mouths of various interlocutors. Two of the speakers (Phaedrus and Pausanius) focus on the Athenian tradition of an older male lover with a teenage boy. Eryximachus is close to us today in that he gives a view of love as craft and science – he is something like a technocrat, in love with his specialization – in love with specialization itself. Aristophanes and Agathon describe love in the language of comedy and tragedy, their respective vocations.

Alciabiades, however, is the most interesting for our current purposes. We might contrast the view of love that he is given to offer, with the true version revealed later in the speech of Socrates. Alcibiades seems to me to read like something of a spokesman for the running “gay culture” ideal of sex, while the idea of a ladder of love that comes through in Soctrates’ speech aligns with the Catechism call to “self-mastery”, “inner freedom”, and “Christian perfection”.

There is no time now to properly interrogate both speeches. It is enough, however, to pick out the main points.

Alcibiades was beautiful and famed for his licentiousness. He desired Socrates, and wanted him because, in a curious form of celebrity-worship, he thought that the true images, the real philosophy he discerned within Socrates could be transmitted by sexual contact. His love, then, was not totally shallow – he really saw something true and good and beautiful in Socrates, despite Socrates’ otherwise unappealing appearance - but his attempts to get a grip on love were deficient. Alcibiades failed at loving Socrates.

For Alcibiades, indeed, “sex [could] lead to virtue, without the need for hard work”. Alcibiades tells how he tried to seduce Socrates. He attempted to use his physical attributes, he is like some contemporary go-go-dancer, trading on his body so as to get at the true and good and beautiful things he has discerned, but it is all to no avail.

For Socrates is after something else. As Catholics, too, we are after something else. Socrates rebuts the speeches of all of the other guests, describing them as fantasies which participate in the creative force of love (that erotic power that the Pope spoke about), but which pervert it, making love a slave to context and personality. Socrates is not interested in sorts of love, after all, he is interested in love itself.

This sets us up for what comes next: the ladder of love.

The basic idea of the ladder of love is sublimation of the passions, in the service of real love. Instead of fixating on one particular object, one sexual partner, one apprehends the beauty in the curve of his lips, the beauty in the shape of his thigh, and tries to see that beauty in all of its manifestations. One cannot worship another person’s muscles, in this context, one should rather ascend to a higher level of contemplation. Not this muscle, not that penis – but all muscles, all penises, and then – beyond that – the recognition that one does not (and cannot, rationally speaking) worship a penis or a muscle, but rather one likes those things in the first place because it is there that one is awakened to eros, or by eros, to beauty. One can then begin to see beauty elsewhere, and to move ever higher on the ladder of love until one comes, at last, to love beauty itself, and so to love truth and goodness.

In the Catholic context, truth, beauty and goodness sometimes stand in for love and Catholics worship Love Crucified. To recall Pope Benedict’s Encyclical again – for Christians – G-d is Love.

In the time that is left, we will not totally apprehend what is going on here, and we cannot hope to get a complete sense of what Plato means from this crude précis of his ideas. So I admit, indeed, that I cannot completely answer the question today about happens to eros in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. I can, however, start to show you what I mean, in part, and hopefully get you thinking in the same direction.

I was watching a television documentary on John Ruskin the other day, and the narrator intoned:

“Art is not just a distraction from the grueling trick of life, it is life. It is our imaginative proposal for what like can be”.

Taking this idea as our starting point, then, we might try to explain where eros goes in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality by looking at the agency of beauty. How does beauty figure in our understandings of morality? What can the beautiful do with / to the erotic?

If we draw on the Catholic idea of the passions, and man’s sensual appetites, it is clear that eros, and love generally are implicated wherever beauty and goodness meet.

Again, the promotion of self-knowledge and “self-mastery" in the Christian tradition, does not immediately suggest to me a reliance on a therapist as that relationship is understood in modern, secular, English-speaking models of the mental health industry - and the understandings of "disinterested" and "friendship" might actually militate against paying a "professional" for "reparative therapy".

But they do suggest the ladder of love that Plato has Socrates expound. Here is an example of how I think about the ascent to the beautiful in the context of same sex attraction.

SLIDE 1 – Highly eroticized image of a half-naked football player (it is David Williams) – we say that it is highly eroticized because it is packed with eros, it hits our eros buttons. It is designed, in fact, to do so. We are right to ask, in this context, what for? To sell something? To increase someone’s fame / notoriety? We seem to have become comfortable with deploying eros in this manner, to sell, to promote, but perhaps we might deploy eros to improve ourselves, to seek after beauty (truth and goodness)?

SLIDE 2 – This was the ideal of classical Greek sculpture. The ideal is eros transformed, in line with ideas that fed into the Platonic ladder or love, and re-deployed, so as to provide an education in virtue. The Greeks worked to sublimate the sexual (notice the penis size) to make room for other more enduring things, like civilization and excellence. Here the viewer is taught something about grace, and proportion.

SLIDE 3 – In Hellenistic sculpture, eros is more obviously sublimated. It is used to feed excitement into a narrative context. Eros is associated with, and it complicates, this depiction of The Dying Gaul – we now learn something about pity, or perhaps (from the perspective of the victor) about the ambivalent nature of victory.

SLIDE 4 – Ascending up the ladder of love, getting further away from the base sexual force we encountered in the first image, eros can also be disciplined so as to tell not just a story, but archetypal stories. Here we have Hercules, identified by his cudgel and lion’s skin.

SLIDE 5 - From archetypal stories, we can move to expressions of even more refined notions. Sublimated eros is also transformed into civic virtue. We are no longer learning about how things are, or how people say they are, but about how things should be, about how men should be. We learn how government should be done, and how men should conduct themselves.

SLIDE 6 – Finally, in this context, we might also learn about the value of abstraction, or stylization. If we are not interested, after all, in the particular – and we seek after the universal – we can approach the cool grace and serenity of this archaic kouros. We come, here, to eros deployed in the service of religious and purely philosophical ends. No longer are we focused, in the language of the ladder of love, in the beauty of a man’s thigh – but we seek after beauty itself.

SLIDE 7 – We start to notice things like the hair, in this sculpture, and we might be moved by the grace and poise depicted. We learn, too, about excellence and balance.

SLIDE 8 – The same erotic charge is discernible here, but it drives a new, elevated search. Instead of being diverted to gratification, it is disciplined and enlarged by contact with, and contemplation of, the beautiful. We start to yearn for the good, for the true.

SLIDE 9 – We seek these marks of the beautiful and true wherever we might find them. The erotic force that might have compelled us onto a sexual partner, or might have animated our sexual fantasies, is redirected toward other things. We notice the beauty of these capitals, designed by Andrea Palladio.

SLIDE 10 - We swoon at his Villa Capra, La Rotonda, and – having been challenged earlier when looking at Greek sculpture – we might note especially the grace and proportion we can see in his angles and lines. We start to appreciate angles and lines around us. We develop a taste for such things.

SLIDE 11 - We can take this knowledge, this sensibility, anywhere. Instead of just looking at things, we can start to create a world of grace and beauty.

SLIDE 12 – We might take a second look at dance, for instance, and delight in even obscure things, like this depiction of King Louis XIV of France. Louis is dancing as Apollo before his court at Versailles. In such sophisticated examples, eros sublimated vivifies new stories, this time of nationhood, manhood, and power. Eros sublimated can establish, and found. It can create.

SLIDE 13 – Angles and lines. Beauty and form.

SLIDE 14 – Style has its place, too. We might trace the pleasing lines of cut and shape, as discernible in this image from the iconic fashion book Take Ivy.

SLIDE 15 – Personal excellence suggests itself to me in the context of fashion, especially in male style. Angles and lines, more beauty and form. The act of putting on clothing, or putting on a suit or a dress, is an act of sublimation. It is also often a direct conduit to virtue, to modesty in particular. As with all of these examples, sublimation does not kill eros, it diverts eros to virtuous ends.

SLIDE 16 – We can trace pleasing shapes, and the cut of cloth, and its reflections in symbols of power and victory. Eros helps to make sense, too, of images that speak to us of defeat and shame. Here is an image of Richard Nixon that could be viewed as the 20th Century’s version of The Dying Gaul. It provokes similar mixed reactions. It provokes reactions.

SLIDE 17 – A tree installation I found beautiful, which echoed Nixon’s arm gesture.

SLIDE 18 – When we become skilled in seeking for beauty, we find its marks everywhere. Our world opens up, and we participate in a vision of creation that is quite remarkable for its depth and richness. We discern a pattern, an order, behind otherwise atomized things and people. This is Versailles.

SLIDE 19 - What about the Christian focus in all of this? It helps to know, in this context, that Christian art and imagery participate maximally and deliberately in this idea of sublimation. Images and symbols point beyond the physical facts of things and great liturgical art intends to convey something divine. By filling their Churches with things of beauty, Catholics hope to create an environment conducive to the contemplation of beauty and truth and goodness.

SLIDE 20 – Because Christian believe G-d is love, then, this contemplation ascends to Him. The Pagan ladder of love becomes the Christian’s ladder to heaven. By faithfully treading this path, same sex attracted men and women – indeed all human beings – are called to seek after G-d. This is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

SLIDE 21 – Christ is; at the end of the Christian’s striving. He is the object of our love. He is, to answer Plato’s implicit question, beauty itself. G-d is love.

SLIDE 22 – In this manner, albeit crudely, we might say we have participated to some extent in the ladder of love. Christ is the answer to what happens to eros in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. Both in the particular sense that Hugh Eakin’s erotic impulses are sublimated here into a depiction of the Cruficied Christ, but also in this richer sense that a dwelling on the ladder of love allows us to think about.

Thank you very much.

- - END - -

:: The Upshot ::

This second lecture was an attempt to engage a question held-over from a similar event at the University of Sydney in April, 2009. A slide-show accompanied the final section. The third event in the series was held at the University of New South Wales on the following day (details to come).