Concupiscence (2)

I saw a book the other day that had a picture of a woman in black lingerie squatting on the front cover. Naturally, I picked it up. It was in the literature section. The back cover talked about a couple who decide to explore their fantasies. The end result was "a dark journey".

This happens over and over again. Watch a movie like Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut for example and the message is that sexual desire leads us to the dark places of the heart.

Given this, you'd think the other side of this debate—the side that believes in faith, hope and love—would have no trouble winning. Well, you'd be wrong because the other side also relentlessly teaches that desire leads to the dark places of the heart.

Only they don't talk about desire. They talk about the wrong kind of desire to which they sometimes attach this rather odd word "concupiscence".

Christopher West
 My Serpentine Friend called my attention to a story featuring the word just yesterday. The story concerned Christopher West. He is apparently taking a five-month sabbatical to reconsider his positions. My first thought was hooray for that as I have wished for years now that West would just stop talking.

West, for those who don't know about him, is a Catholic thinker who writes and talks about sexuality and marriage. West represents something of an attempt to save desire from the bad guys. Unfortunately, he tends to come off as a bit of a goofy guy trying hard to prove that Jesus is cool with sex.

When I looked up the story myself I found that West's positive sex talk had gotten him in trouble with the church's moral harridans. In an interview last September for saying that Hugh Hefner may have got some things right.

What to say? I guess the main thing is that if you aren't hip, don't try to be. Really, crediting Hugh Hefner with starting the sexual revolution is like crediting Guy Lombardo with inventing jazz. It was a clumsy, stupid interview and West deserves every bit of criticism thrown at him.

The Blue Meanie
As if that wasn't bad enough, his clumsy remarks opened the door for one Dr. Alice von Hildebrand. She, seems to have led the attack against West.

And she is a charter member of the purity squad. Here is a taste of her thinking

Women have the key because they are the guardians of purity. This is already clearly indicated by the structure of their bodies, which chastely hides their intimate organs. Because their organs are "veiled," indicating their mystery and sacredness, women have the immense privilege of sharing the sex of the blessed one: Mary, the most holy of all creatures.

That is to say that women are the ones who should be providing the leadership on sexual morality and the model for all women to follow is, wait for it, a woman who never had sex. And women are to do this because they are supposed to have moral power over men.

You can get a notion of what she has in mind reading her analysis of what went wrong with the world.

The poison of secularism has penetrated deeply into our society. It did so by stages. Men were its first victims: They became more and more convinced that in order to be someone they had to succeed in the world. Success means money, power, fame, recognition, creativity, inventiveness, etc.

Many of them sacrificed their family life in order to achieve this goal: They came home just to relax or have fun. Work was the serious part of their life.

Innumerable marriages have been ruined by this attitude. Wives rightly felt that they were mere appendixes -- a necessary relaxation. 

So the guys came home wanting sex not love.

Although she says here that this "evil" is caused by secularism, elsewhere she attributes it to original sin.

“The tragedy of original sin is that all the beautiful male qualities of strength, courage, objectivity, nobility, a chivalrous attitude towards women, degenerated. The danger created by original sin is that many men use their strength and become brutal and abuse women or look at women as mere objects of pleasure.

 It's hard not to read things like this and think that Hildebrand has a bit of a problem with men and sex. A suspicion that is not helped much by this afterthought:

“Eve was also profoundly affected by original sin,” she added.

 Let's take a moment here to consider the kind of evil that the good Doctor here describes. Can we think of places in the modern world where this sort of thing exists? Places where men go out into the world while women are confined to the home and then men come home demanding sex and treat women as "mere objects of pleasure"?

We can imagine such a culture for it exists in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The odd thing, however, is that it is also in those countries where we find precisely the model of humility and modesty that Dr. Hildebrand suggests for women. In fact, it seems to be a fairly dependable occurrence that where men are given the power to oppress women they demand humility and modesty from women.

(A quick aside, does this match your experience of the word? When you look at women with their "veiled" sexuality, does that make you more or less likely to desire them? It should come as no surprise that recent research indicates that even women respond to other women.)

The Holy Family
One of the best things ever written about theology was the work of an atheist and materialist named Feuerbach. He said that religion takes human qualities and sublimates them. It takes ordinary human virtues and projects them up into a heavenly sphere. This impoverishes human beings by taking these virues away from us and projecting them onto perfect figures we can never live up to.

Fortunately, Feuerbach is right. He has given us a valuable test of good theology. Anytime we find ourselves taking human qualities and projecting them upwards, we are making a mistake.

It ought to be odd that Feuerbach's critique was ever applied to Christianity. To other religion's yes, it makes sense. But the message we find in the Gospel is actually the reverse of Feuerbach. Christ is not a projection of humanity, he is God's Son. He comes down and assumes our human form in order to give us dignity and purpose thereby redeeming us.

It's people like Alice von Hildebrand who make Feuebach's critique of Christianity credible. Note that she focuses not on Jesus but Mary. Mary ceases to be a human being like the rest of us who is redeemed by Christ but becomes instead "the most holy of all creatures".
 
Not surprisingly, the next step is one of denial. Mary is great not for what she did for what she did not do. The supreme example of sexual virtue is not to have sex at all. Those who do have sex do it right when they most approach this "ideal". That is to say they deny themselves virtually all the time.

This isn't sexual morality, it's anti-sex views being passed off as morality. And it's not pro-life either.