Today, partly as a result of daring experimentation, but mostly because of a willingness to go along with fashion, sex seems to be everywhere. The mass media, advertising, and a general inclination to rebelliousness, have together encouraged the spread of a sub-Freudian culture which, combined with Marxist fantasies, has even lost the awareness of death which Freud had recovered. The horror of ‘repression’, the shallow sensation-seeking demanded by our jaded nerves and imagination, seem to arise from a whole mass of disappointments.
The first disappointment is work, which is so often mechanical, repetitive and apparently purposeless; and although it is less laborious than it used to be, thanks to the advance of technology, it causes more nervous tension, for which sex seems to be the only relief. For many people in a technological society, the only real bit of nature they are ever going to encounter is the body of another person.
Ultimately everything is a disappointment, because of people’s extreme isolation and the nihilism implicit in their outlook on life. The last approach to holiness, or other people, that is left to them, is through erotic experience. When the young revolutionaries realize that their Utopia is unattainable, they are left with their facile sexual revolution, their intoxication with ‘freedom’, their experience of ecstasy through orgy, which they think they are the first to discover. The ‘communes’ with their sexual promiscuity are a pathetic and infantile attempt to achieve fusion, to escape from loneliness and death, from the loneliness of death.
With the constant talk about sex, the erotic fantasies that invade our minds, and the laboriousness of having to act them out, and the ‘permissiveness’ which results from the pressure to conform or to rebel, everything eventually loses its meaning. And because of this meaninglessness, arousal becomes even more important, inasmuch as, for the time being, sex seems to be selling well and to be making other things sell. Whence the ever more violent and more mechanical character of modern eroticism, a sign in itself of how feeble we have become in our capacity for true feeling. There are signs of impotence and frigidity. In fact, those who really know about eros scarcely talk about it. Mediterranean people, for example, are more modest than those of the North. There are also signs of things falling apart. We may be less repressed, but we are also less integrated, even within the personality, where it is becoming harder to trace any consistent principle.
But why stop at sex? Leaving the intellectuals to their exercises, we find that ordinary people have quite a different preoccupation: passion, or ‘romance’. Denis de Rougemont, in Love and the West, a seminal book of our time, says that one of the most enduring myths is that of Tristram and Iseult, even, or especially, among people who have never actually heard of them. Rougemont’s theory is that romantic love is born of the opposition between the Christian affirmation of the person and the deep-rooted persistence, in the Christian world, of a purely functional idea of marriage. For a very long time marriages were arranged irrespective of love, to ensure the continuity of the line. But the person, now awakened to the necessity of free choice, sought love outside marriage; so came about the romantic passion of the troubadour or the knight for his lady. We can go further and demonstrate that the first form of entirely personal love in Western history was the spiritual friendship between men and women who had renounced marriage, such as the spiritual love displayed by St Boniface in his letters to St Lioba. We must remember the context: Merovingian society, brutal to the point of cruelty, where people married for purely biological reasons and sought carnal diversion in rape and adultery. Monks and nuns exerted an immense effort to rescue personal existence from all this frenzy of ‘flesh and blood’. Then they were able amongst themselves to use the language of genuine love. But the flesh was still so violent that personal love seemed incapable of finding expression through the body.
True love is neither impersonal sex nor passion as an end in itself. Eros must be subordinate to affection; love desires the salvation of the other, but knows that reciprocal love can be the means of the salvation of both. Christ has brought us back to the original marriage in Eden, repeating exactly what was spoken by the creative Word, that the man and the woman should be ‘one flesh’. True marriage, not the social institution but the mystery, has been possible ever since. In Christ we can overcome ‘hardness of heart’ and serve an apprenticeship of faithfulness to the image of God, who has always been faithful, saying yes to us, even when we were rejecting him. From that moment onwards the deep relationship of man and woman in marriage has been governed by forgiveness, the love that is stronger than death. At the same time, we can no longer say, as the discipline of the Old Covenant insisted, that it is not good for man to be alone. For, in the communion of the Church, the dangers of solitude are overcome; celibacy can be a calling of prayer and service, a sign of the world to come. Beside marriage, and deeply related to it, is the monastic way, also leading to the fulfillment of eros.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
