Christianity and Queerness
People who
know me know now tend to take me for a ‘Cultural Marxist’ or perhaps 'Regressive Leftist' (not quite accurate
but I’ll leave that for some other time) firebrand who goes a bit too far in my
denunciations of economic liberalism and is a bit too obsessed with ecological
pessimism. People who knew me 25 years ago took me for an arch-reactionary
ready and willing to wage cultural war all this crazy modern nonsense. Some
might ask me how my mind changed though I’m not sure my mind has changed. I
have always been these two things in some kind of combination. What happened is
that one part of my brain has slowly asserted dominance over the other. Take
the issue of same sex eros as a pertinent
example. This is an issue I have said fairly little about because my
contradictory attitudes towards it long puzzled me and it is only later in my
life that I’ve come to a clearer understanding on the matter. Here, if you like,
I will reflect on my puzzlement though it is my puzzle and nobody else’s and it
may be of interest to hardly anyone. Still, should anyone ask here is what happened
to me and here is my mature position on the question.
Long ago I used to mouth Thomist/natural
law/ orthodoxy on this question all the while reading the Phaedrus and Symposium with
no sense of discomfort whatsoever. Nor did gay artists like Wilde, Auden,
Ginsberg or Britten bother me in the least. This is a peculiar enough thing to
comment on for I strongly suspect it reflects a historical compromise
Christians have always made. When I was an undergrad I was around clergy a fair
bit and if you know clergy you know gay people closeted or not so closeted. It
was assumed in my environment that homosexuality was a vice and abomination to
be denounced from the pulpit but also something to be winked at and indulged
among people of taste and sophistication. The majesty and objectivity of the
divine law was one thing and quirks of individual behavior another and the less
one examined the gap between them the better life was. Such unstated
adjustments have long allowed people to navigate the complexities and
contradictions of human existence. It allowed St. Anselm, for instance, to
counsel that sodomy in the court of William Rufus should be subject to ‘gentle’
correction only. In my milieu, at a historically Anglican college (though for
the record I have never been a member of that noble institution), you knew full
well that the arch-traditionalist ‘Father Jones’ had his private ‘thing’ that
you didn’t really bother him about so long as he towed the line publicly about
the Book of Common Prayer and other conservative
causes. Plus, I have little doubt that others, in other communions, have
noticed the exact same things I have. The traditional Christian response to ‘queerness’
has been, in many cases, dissonance: denouncing things in public that
one tolerates in private and studiously ignores in one’s friends and
colleagues.
Anyone can
live happily with a contradiction if reality never forces one to confront it.
This is called conflict avoidance and it is one strategy for getting through
life. One can read conservative polemics against gay liberation and listen to Ziggy Stardust with separate parts of
one’s brain. However, there is no stopping revolutions if their basis is
impeccably moral and gay persons themselves have rejected dissimulation and
irony in the name of honesty and one can’t argue with that choice because, to
quote the scholastics, truth is one of the transcendentals along with beauty,
unity and goodness. So, there is NO return to the culture of winking and
nodding at Professor Smith’s or Father Jones’ odd proclivities while
acknowledging him to be a jolly good chap in most other circumstances. Honesty
is the best policy. This demand has been socially transformative in a way that
forces one to take sides. I don’t like taking sides all that much. Sides make
me queasy but if it has to be done there is only one principle, luminously
clear to me at least, on which to do it. If one takes a side one takes the side
of the poor in whatever form one finds them economic, social or cultural. I
recall many years ago reading liberation theologian Jon Sobrino. I must say it
sounded too newfangled to me but one thing was clear: so long as I left to
enjoy Latin masses and Palestrina I would not shed a single tear if every
general in Latin America were hung from a lamp post.[1]
Politically I could not find a real disagreement with Fr. Sobrino at least as
to core principles. I certainly tried to contrive one or two for form’s sake
(because I was that weird and stubborn) but at the end of the day I could not.
Politics begins with solidarity with others and Christian politics begins with
solidarity with the excluded, ridiculed and oppressed full stop: which is as
much as to say that agape is a stance, or way of being in the world that it
self-authenticating once one has adopted it.[2]
That means that there is only one Christian response to gay people and that is come
on in from the cold. If, sometime, you want to discuss what Aquinas says in
this passage or Paul in that we can do that or not it is up to you. We could
discuss the tension between what these older authors say and modern realities
OR NOT. Your acceptance is not conditional on the outcome of a debate or the
massaging of a text by subtle hermeneutists. I understand what Dante said about
sodomy in the Inferno and I
understand why he said it. I also understand that hundreds of years later new
possibilities are unfolding around us and a modern Dante might well have to
revise his opinion: in fact, if Dante were to express his underlying intuition about sexuality in a new context he might well
do it differently.[3] Solidarity with the poor and excluded come
first and scholarly theological discussions second (in retrospect it amazes me
how long it took me to see something that simple but there it is).[4]
The odd
thing is that this has always been my position in life because I had a life
brain and an ideas brain which existed in perfect distinction from each other.
When I lived in Houston Texas I used to wander the gay districts of that
fascinating city as much as any other not really caring either way. If I wanted
a coffee or a meal, I had one there as I would any other place and had any of
my conservative friends seen me do so they would certainly have commented
adversely on it. While ideas Bernie raged on about the crisis of modernity life
Bernie just ate sandwiches and chatted with whoever because other people’s
business was other people’s business. The ideas brain can be superficial
compared with the life brain and when the two war with each other, as at
certain points they always do, it is through that warfare that one cobbles
together a personality, hopefully balancing the two in some productive way. At
any rate an anti-modernist philosophical and theological discourse went on in
my discursive brain while a deeper, wiser, self quietly subverted much of what it
was saying. I really don’t know why any of this happened and it is probably
better left to a therapist if and when I can afford one. I can only assume it
was some desperate effort at individuation through putting myself in conflict
with the world which is an attitude I have examined elsewhere. This explains
why I am only a qualified ‘Marxist’ by the way though that is another matter.
Above I
mentioned Thomistic natural law and some of you might be wondering what I mean
by that. Others who are vaguely aware of what I mean by that might be wondering
why I would be bothering my head about something so stupid and wrong. On this
point though I need to give Ideas Bernie a bit of a hearing. Though you may
think only a fool would read an author as dated as Aquinas (and that is the
implicit, un-thought assumption of most North American liberals and
progressives about the sufficiently distant past or, to use Mel Brooks’ phrase,
“when things were rotten”) he is actually a powerful and coherent thinker. I
have ALWAYS been deeply impressed by the “Treatise on Law” in the Summa of Theology and I still am. My antiquarian
tastes and attitudes were debilitating in many ways but they ABSOLUTELY saved
me from the error of a-historical thinking and indeed ANTI-historical or apocalyptic
thinking and perhaps that was their providential function.
At any rate let me explain it to you
this way. St. Thomas’ statements on law can be given a minimally secular
reading that appeals to the basic ethical perceptions of most rational people.
Expressed in this way it may well possess significant advantages in both
coherence and fruitfulness over contemporaries of a deontological and
utilitarian type. It certainly is superior
to the empty formalism of the ‘divine command ethics’ that so obsesses analytic
philosophers of religion and their atheistic critics. At any rate ‘natural law
theory’ has this built in flexibility because it assumes nothing beyond the
intrinsic disposition of the practical intellect to view beings under the
formality of the good. This is the entire sense of its being ‘natural’. For St.
Thomas, the natural law is natural as pertaining to the ‘nature’ or intrinsic
disposition of a rational being to order its actions in accordance with a
hierarchy of ends, embracing the basic goods of subsistence, vegetative life,
animality and rationality in an ascending order of universality. It is the very
opposite of the ‘biologism’ decried by over hasty readers too eager to move on
to another text. It is not the reduction of the person to a natural determinism
for inorganic being and organic life are assumed as moments in the
self-expression in creation of universal subsistent reason (i.e. God). As such
they generate, each at their own proper level, an ethical dimension or ‘law’.
Thus the being of substances
generates the laws of conservation and preservation: the self-communication of living substances generates the
obligations of loyalty and care that constitute (in humans and perhaps other social
animals) the family: the universality of rational
substances the social demands for justice and the intellectual virtue of
truthfulness. In all this, the practical activity of the intellect retraces and
reaffirms the logical procession of the created order from the unity of the
divine nous as being life and knowledge
though the persuasiveness of natural law precepts does not directly depend on
explicit consciousness of this fact. This, by the way, is why we do not need to
be theists to be ethical beings. The universal good is moving us to our ends on
a preconscious, implicit level. The conscious reflection that goes into an
ethical decision does not rest upon a prior reflection on the divine being
though it may, at some point, blossom into such a consideration. This though
would be a second order reflection.
In all this Aquinas is a good
Aristotelian (as he always is even if he is correcting Aristotle). Our rational
nature and its values are not imposed externally
on a dead mechanistic realm of pure determinism (and surely to God we have had enough of that notion for a few
centuries). The values of rationality subsume
and reinscribe the values of material
and living nature in a higher synthesis that preserves them exactly as the rational
soul includes the ‘lower’ functions of growth and sensitivity. This is clear if
we presume at a pre-reflective and, please note, pre-theological, level that is has some direct relation with ought (it is true that there are MANY
scenarios in which we need to separate these two things though what I mean by
this exception will be clear below). At any rate this is an identification we spontaneously
make on a daily basis however hard it may be to self-consciously revert to a
judgment so implicit and direct. For instance, getting up in the morning entails
the judgment that we ought to be awake because activity has a higher degree of
actuality (i.e. being) than passivity. What is more the most basic precepts of
the natural law also cover the self-diffusion of human life into the otherness
of a subsequent human generation. If it is good for the human to be it is good
for the human to be over time. Thus, our inclination to self- love which we
share with everything from amoebas to elephants, if it is ordinate and not
unhealthy, blossoms naturally into benevolent care for the common human future.
One way (and not the only way) in which this care expresses itself is in the
propagation and education of offspring. On this point even The Jacobin agrees for socialism, it tells us, is all about the
kids!
I suppose for these reasons
Aristotelians have been highly solicitous (like overprotective parents) of the
social institutions built up around the process of human generation. This now
seems to me to require a course correction. This is because participation in
the great cosmic liturgy seems subject to certain ‘deviations’ or, to use a
term I’ve come to prefer, ‘queernesses’.[5]
Any fair assessment of the evidence must
admit the distinct possibility that queernesses, oblique motions (as I put it
in my last book) are baked into the human condition. Things move in a certain way
and things move against that movement in a harmony that may be hard for reason
to discern but which there is no point in trying to suppress or alter. I myself
spent the first half of my life trying on certain forms of ‘queerness’ that had
nothing to do with sexuality. One of those is, as I adverted to above,
authorial creation: a form of non-participatory participation in the complexity
of life. I now think outsider stances of various sorts are something to be protected
and cherished. The reason is I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t. A skeptical,
ironic ‘queer’ detachment seems essential to me and in fact to the human
condition though not every human need directly embody that attribute. I don’t
do so in a sexual sense though I do in others. Of course, at some point
queerness in the sexual sense may become one more form of normality and if that
happens then nothing I say here has much sense or point which I don’t mind in
the least. That said I can imagine no society that does not have oblique
elements short of a dehumanizing tyranny devoted to crushing human particularity
in the name of an abstract ideal: a thing I think Marx never intended or wanted
deep down though among his disciples it was a ‘temporary necessity’ that, like
all temporary necessities, quickly became obligatory and permanent. At any rate
I follow Blake in his concern for the minute particulars of human existence and
on this point, as on many others, I find him a deeper and more radical thinker
than Marx.
[1] One
point on which I found Fr. Sobrino deficient was that he had neither a theology
of beauty nor one of creation and this because of a too literal adherence to the
perceived ‘modernism’ of the Marxist standpoint. He may well have addressed the
questions of art and nature in some form since but it is ages since I have had
anything to do with theology so I don’t know.
[2] Oddly
it was not a book that brought this home to me in a direct and powerful way but
the film The Mission: it occurred to
me as I watched it that one’s superiors in the Jesuit order cannot order one to
abandon the poor in the sense that this can never be their REAL order and if
they think it is then they are wrong and true obedience to them is to disobey.
Discursive reason can always try to cheat conscience and for a time can succeed
but if one has superiors it is their higher mind one must accede to not their
lower one. One part of speaking truth to power is to call power to witness against
itself. Of course, I do not mean to diminish
the complexity of real word judgment. The poor may not be easy to identify in a
given situation for instance plus the poor are often pitted against each other
as in populism.
[3] I
am no longer a proponent of any traditionalism Catholic, Anglo-Catholic or
Orthodox. There is a reason for this pertinent to what I said above about
Dante. While still an Anglican John Henry Newman wrote his Essay on the Development of Doctrine. Reading this book caused a
slow but steady alteration in my thinking (I tend not to do things quickly).
Newman argued that the inherent dynamic power of the basic truths of
Christianity expressed in time necessitated
a historical development of the church’s teaching that could not in principle
exclude alteration in its specific theological AND moral judgments. Moreover,
he thought that such alterations could be principled
when it could be shown that the same ideas
expressed in different historical epochs could ground distinct explicit judgments.
What is more, he saw that this could easily be shown from the actual history of
Christianity: whatever the church self-consciously thought of itself as doing,
it was always in fact doing what Newman said, constituting its doctrine and not simply restating the ‘primitive
truth’ of scripture or tradition. Newman himself saw this discovery as
principally destructive of Protestant Biblicism and historical Anglicanism. He
surely did not anticipate the profound alteration he would bring about in his
own Roman communion. Historicism of some kind or other is now basic to Catholic
self-understanding so much so that in contemporary Catholicism doctrinal development
itself is scarcely in question only its pace, form and direction. All this is
as much as to say that theology is a gateway drug to historicism and those who
distrust the latter should definitely give the former a miss.
[4]
Ideas Bernie will interject here and say “of course, but charity is a firm and
persistent willing of one’s neighbor’s total
and final good (which willing is also
the perfect love of God) and this does not necessitate the indiscriminate affirmation
of all one’s neighbor’s sentiments and desires”. True enough but as far as I
can tell queerness is something far more complex than a simple desire, like for
a cigarette, that can be satisfied or not. Nor is it simply a sub-personal
disposition like alcoholism. It is, to use only one example, a crucial
aesthetic stance and the authorial stance (say) always has ‘queerness’ or ‘being
off to the side’ as an essential component. In other words, there are other frameworks
for understanding homosexual behavior than the traditional natural law ones or
the traditional scriptural ones and these must be weighed and balanced against each
other. The old moralists were certainly wise but they did not possess every
single lens for viewing every single object and nor do we. One thing they did
not consider, and to be fair had no vocabulary to consider, was queerness not
as a behavior or a choice but as a way of being in the world. At any rate if I
have erred in any of this I have erred on the side of generosity and will, on
the last day, happily submit to the peer review of heaven.
[5]
Hence my thing for Latin masses, which I thought, and still think, a splendid visible
icon of the cosmic procession and reversion from the one and the moment of
radical humanism (the incarnation) that embodies it. For this reason,
modernist, truncated liturgies bore me to tears though I see and accept why
they exist. I myself am ‘queer’ with respect to these I suppose. Unfortunately,
frequenting such traditional liturgies puts one shoulder to shoulder with
people who want the Bourbons restored to the French throne or regard the
minimum wage as a contrivance of Satan that makes the Blessed Virgin cry. For
obvious reasons I have no time for such people.
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