A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll

Introduction

THIS BOOK BEGAN AS A CHAPTER I DIDN’T WANT to write. In 2006 I had been contracted to write a book about Catholicism; the theme was how liberal and conservative Catholics could end the disputes that have divided them for forty years. I had hoped to lay out ten basic things, from abortion to the liturgy, that both sides could agree on. Where the liberals would at long last concede that abortion was a unique evil that could not be defended, conservatives might be convinced that laws that attempt to deport up to ten million illegal immigrants and send them back home, despite how poor and desperate they are, are unjust. My book was about how both sides of the Catholic culture war could achieve peace by—well, by following the teachings of the Church.

The first chapter in the book was going to be about sex. I wanted to write about sex first not because I found it the most interesting, but because I wanted to get it out of the way. I still had a reticence about sex that went back to the way I was raised, by parents who were by no means prudes, but who also never talked about sex. I also am a sinner and a faulty vessel and wanted to avoid sounding like a conservative scold about sexual matters. So the first chapter would be about sex and then I could go on to less chaotic and terrifying topics.

But then something happened. While doing research, I came across some of the most poetic, beautiful, inspiring writing about human sexuality—and it was all written or said by Catholics. Much of it came from the years before Vatican II, the Church council from the early 1960s that supposedly modernized the Church. I had thought that before the council the world, and especially the Catholic Church, was lost in a puritanical darkness that dared not speak of the human body. Then I came across writers like Saint Teresa of Avila, who lived in the sixteenth century and used erotic metaphors to describe our seduction by God, and the genius Dietrich von Hildebrand, who spoke openly about the power of the orgasm—in 1925. Then there was Pope John Paul II and his The Theology of the Body. In The Theology of the Body, John Paul II goes back to Genesis to reveal the true meaning of love and the human body. In it, John Paul II emphasizes that man—meaning persons—were made in the image of God. When we are seeing another person, we are seeing the image of God. And we become even more like God through the act of loving that person—as a person, in the image of God, not as a thing. And we can come to know mastery of ourselves and our sexuality by realizing that we ourselves are also created in the image of God. When we come to know this fully, we can come to realize genuine freedom. John Paul II talks about the Song of Songs, those wonderful, and even steamy, love poems of the Old Testament, not as a metaphor of the love of God for His people, as was traditionally done in Catholicism, but as the reflection of a very real event—the love of Adam and Eve before the Fall. In one crucial passage, John Paul II contradicts the notion that God made Eve as a helper so she could get next to Adam to push the plow in the Garden of Eden. In fact, Eve’s help was spiritual help. She would do no less than make it possible for Adam to experience the Trinitarian love of God. Prior to this, Adam sensed that he was alone. He was different from the animals, and while in communion with God, he was not God. Eve, rather than bringing about Adam’s ruin, allowed him to experience the interior life of God.

For the past fifty years—indeed the last one hundred years—a crusade has been fought to defuse the basic reality of sex as a unique, supernatural experience of its power. We have shaken off the sexual reticence of our parents and grandparents, which was often unhealthy, and replaced it with an unimaginative frankness—human sexuality as plumbing. Television, movies, journalists, and teachers have slowly stripped sex of its mystery and power, ironically in the name of greater freedom and understanding. To them, sex will become healthy and free once it is accepted that the human body and the conjugal act are nothing to get excited about. Humans need to have sex for health and well-being—in this regard we are not that different from animals. To many pop stars with limited talent, sex is a way to gain legitimacy with those in the culture who consider themselves avant-garde. When the bourgeoisie react to the provocation, the artist claims that there’s no there there. After all, sex is natural. There’s nothing to get excited about.

And yet, there is something to get excited about and there is a mystery that, however much sex education we unload on our children, cannot—must not—be violated. Human beings seem to have been equipped not only with the sexual urge, but an inability—at least without great struggle—to separate that urge from greater meaning. Indeed, if we judge by the majority of popular songs, finding and achieving a perfect union with one’s soul mate is the driving goal and purpose of life. In an episode of The Real World, the sex-drenched reality television show, a young woman agrees with a young man that their relationship will be strictly one of hooking up—i.e., sex without attachment. Yet after a couple of hook-ups, the girl is seen crying. Despite her best efforts, her sexual adventure has come with love. In a sad revelation of exactly how far the pornified culture has gone in convincing people that sex has nothing to do with the soul, God, or even love, the young woman actually wondered as she wept why she was so upset. The culture of Playboy, Girls Gone Wild, and Britney Spears had told her that sex was merely recreation. Yet she had formed an attachment. In her soul, she realized that she had given something away. And that something, whether one calls it the heart or the soul, belongs in the realm of the metaphysical. Forty years of pornography and mechanistic sex education have not been able to change that.

Indeed, the liberated view of sex that began in the 1950s with Playboy—or even as far back as the bohemians of the 1920s—now seems tired, unimaginative. What has increasingly captured the imagination of young people instead are the traditional views of sex, but given more punch by modern Catholicism. Though we should not ascribe too much real-life influence to a book, The Theology of the Body has the potential to free countless young people from the tired—and ironically enslaving—ideas that came with the sexual revolution. It can do so because John Paul II was a thoroughly modern man and probably the most frank of all pontiffs in speaking of human sexuality. In fact, the reality of John Paul II is utterly contrary to his popular image (popular among secular elites, that is) of a repressive prude. This, after all, was the man who, in his 1960 book Love and Responsibility, wrote: [Female frigidity] is usually the result of egoism in the man who, failing to recognize the subjective desires of the woman in intercourse, and the objective laws of the sexual process taking place in her, seeks merely his own satisfaction, sometimes quite brutally.

This was something quite different from the stifling sexual atmosphere of the Catholic Church prior to the 1960s—an atmosphere that has been satirized so relentlessly and for so many decades that it can no longer amuse, but only bore. For decades—or rather centuries—nuns and priests taught ordinary Catholics that the purpose of human sexuality was to bring more souls into the world and thus—hopefully—to heaven. Talk of the process that brought those souls into the world was usually stiff, unimaginative, and pedantic—although not quite as silly as modern liberals claim. It is perhaps fairer to say that for centuries the Catholic Church taught if not falsehoods, then incomplete truths about sex. It was only in the 1920s that certain theologians began to challenge the Church’s teachings when they argued that, aside from producing children, the sexual act itself is a totally unique, life altering and sacramental act. Dietrich von Hildebrand insisted in 1968 that the Song of Songs be read not as a metaphor or an analogy of the love of God for the Church, but literally, as an ecstatic love poem and a song of praise for the sexual union between lovers.

It took the Catholic Church until the 1980s to catch up with von Hildebrand. By then, American—and Western—culture had dramatically changed. Many Catholics, having been taught that sex was simply the way to have a lot of children, rebelled against Church teaching. While their use of contraception was an error, their belief that sex in and of itself—and within the bond of marriage—was a wonderful thing was perfectly sound. What was not sound was the sexual propaganda that came out of the media during the sexual revolution of the 1960s as well as the decisions of judges who took over the role of passing the sexual laws of the nation. Americans went from hearing that sex was a word that should not be said aloud to the declaration that sex was not much more complicated or meaningful than exercise. The job of legislating sex went from citizens to judges and, finally, to teachers, journalists, and celebrities.

The great Georgetown University Jesuit James Schall has noted that culture is never neutral. That is to say, certain values will always be encouraged. After the sexual revolution, America did not settle into a neutral position on sex, but rather replaced the old reticence and repression with a new mode of self-expression and a different form of repression—namely, the repression of the enlightened, which taught that curbing the sexual instinct in any way was physically and emotionally unhealthy. While this new ethic considered itself revolutionary, it was—almost—a throwback to the paganism and promiscuity of pre-Christian Rome. Yet there is one essential difference. The theologian Hans Jonas once noted that unlike the Gnostic man—the person of the early Christian centuries who disagreed with orthodox Christians that the body was good yet still believed in the soul and a world battling between good and evil—the modern man believes in nothing. Jonas calls this nothingness an absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit.

These days it is not enough for conservatives to request that they be left alone. Now there is a desire to convert that is as intense as any sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary’s. Dan Savage, a popular syndicated sex columnist, spends an equal amount of time giving advice on various fetishes and condemning conservatives. His columns often combine the red-hot rage of post-1960s liberalism with the cold, impersonal dehumanization and aggressive proselytizing of fascism. In one column he advised a girl who had given up on her chastity pledge. Take that fucking silver ring thing off your damn finger, he wrote. You’re in college now, cupcake, not high school, and virginity pledges—whether they’ve been honored or not—will impress precisely none of your new peers. He told the girl to get a clue, reminding her that if you’re having sex when you’re drunk or high, odds are good that you’re having sex with other drunk or high people—which means that neither of you consented to the sex, so you raped each other, so you’re even.

Contrast it to the words of John Paul II: "The body, in fact, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible