The Sexual Relationship in Christian Thought

Abstract

THE idea of the sacramental potentiality of sexual love is one of the most creative and ennobling ideas in which the European imagination has shared. Anticipated by Plato and by some of the neo-Platonic philosophers, particularly Plotinus, it began gradually to be affirmed in the Middle Ages: in the legends surrounding the Holy Grail, in that ley de cortezia of the Provencal palaces which marks the first break with the ascetic spirit of the mediaeval world; in the love of Tristan and Iseult and later in that of Dante and Beatrice, as well as in the works of Renaissance figures like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Subsequently it is celebrated by several of the English poets—by Shakespeare, Spencer, Blake, Emily Brontë and Yeats, to mention but a few of them— and attempts are made to give it a philosophical or religious basis by writers like Soloviev and Berdiaev. One of its more recent literary expressions is in Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. What are the implications of this discovery? When we speak of sexual love, we cover by that term a whole host of meanings, moods and activities. It denotes anything ranging from desire for the body of another person to the passion of an Othello or a Don Juan. Most confusing of all, we speak of "making love" when what we mean is another function altogether. In fact, most of our references to sex or sexual love are colored by associations with purely physical or what is called carnal activity. Hence it is necessary to discriminate and to say that this sacramental form of sexual love is something different from the love (if it can be called that) which is simply sensual desire or passion. It is something different even from that mutual sympathy, fidelity and affection which by and large stands as the Christian ideal of marriage. What is indicated in this form of love is a relationship between two people—a man and a woman—in which each through their mutual awareness and recognition of each other experience what Plato calls that "something, they do not know what" which overflows their beings and transforms their individual existence into a single reality. Through it, an "I—thou" totality in the way that Martin Buber understood it is established; or a single heart and a single soul in two bodies: So they loved, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain. It is a mutual awareness and recognition which is a total act of the soul. We tend to distinguish between the love of God and the love of one person for another—to distinguish between Agape and Eros—and to regard the second as a rather debased form of the first, if not as directly opposed to the first and only indulged at the expense of the first. In a sexualized sacramental love there is no such distinction. It is transcended and eliminated and there is but a single communion, a single participation of the man and the woman and the divine in each other, although it must be remembered that however transparent the two human beings become to