A Catholic Perspective
Andrew Greeley
The University of Chicago
The University of Arizona
The University of Cologne
Is it legitimate for erotic desire to be portrayed in art with a Catholic perspective?
I propose to argue that it is not only legitimate but in some cases necessary, especially in those cases where the art purports to depict relationships between men and women since erotic desire in some form is never absent from such relationships.
From what we now know of the evolutionary process, it selected in our species for males and females with a propensity to bond for sustained periods of time, a propensity based on affective desire between the male and the female. The offspring of such quasi-bonded couples had a better chance of surviving in adulthood than the offspring of other couples and hence they shaped the future development of the species.
Proto love was a necessary prelude to the emergence of homo sapiens. Once the capacity for tenderness towards the mate appeared, it developed in some members of the species into a capacity for tenderness towards others – children (in the male), relatives, friends, neighbors; the members of the species gifted with the genes that passed on such a capacity were again most like to protect their children into adulthood. Without erotic desire, now transformed into much broader tenderness, humankind could not have developed into what it is today.
There is nothing in this briefly summarized scenario that the Catholic tradition cannot accept. We believe that human nature is good, that God designed the human reproductive process and that it is also good, and that human love between man and woman is a sacrament, a hint, a revelation, a sign, a metaphor for Jesus’s love for His Church, and for God’s love for his people.
Nor do we have any trouble with the social science finding that sexual desire between the man and woman leads them into marriage, helps to heal the wounds and friction of the common life, and often draws them together in a renewal of their love. When the scholars who study those who came before us in the evolutionary process tell us that this erotic attraction existed even before the species became fully human and was a necessary prelude to the emergence of humankind, we are hardly inclined to be offended or to want to debate their finding. Was it not clever of God, we might say, to arrange such an ingenious process.
The audience talks Pope John Paul II gave on human sexuality early in his pastorate in effect confirmed such a view of erotic desire as good, virtuous, beautiful, and sacramental.
The most obvious and powerful evidence of the goodness of erotic desire is the presence of the Scripture of the Song of Songs, an intensely erotic series of poems about the passion between two young people who are patently not married. Even in the frequently bowdlerized contemporary translations, the desire of the couple one for another is patent. Attempts to "spiritualize" their emotions or to divert the poems in a "figurative" translation, do not finally work. Curiously many if not most Catholics are unaware of the Song (and of the love story in the book of Tobit). Catholic teachers and clergy apparently are afraid that the Song will "confuse the laity" with dirty thoughts.
Bernini’s statue of St. Theresa being transfixed by the arrow of divine love dares to portray her ecstasy as orgasmic, as explicit a metaphor as one could imagine. The saint herself was not hesitant about the use of erotic vocabulary in her description of her relationship with God. Her confrere, Juan de la Cruz’s love poetry is intensely erotic.
Marital liturgies have never hesitated to compare human love with divine love. The Sarum ritual includes a blessing of the marriage bed and a prayer that the bride may be compliant and vigorous in bed. These elements were eliminated when the Sarum rite was introduced into the Book of Common Prayer. Lay Catholic writers such as Dante, von Eisenbach, and especially Chaucer did not hesitate to use erotic desire as a component of their work.
In this component of the Catholic tradition there is no question that erotic desire is part of human life and an important part that. Like all powerful human energies it can turn demonic, but it is not evil in itself.
However, another element of the Catholic tradition, influenced by St. Augustine and the neo-Platonic tradition, comes close to asserting that desire is evil, immoral, sinful. Desire deprives humankind of its rational, and reduces it to the level of the beasts; sexual pleasure is sinful unless it’s purpose is the conception of children; women are whitened sepulchers because they lead men into sin. Humankind should try to avoid erotic need, yield to it as rarely as possible, pretend as best it can that erotic desire does not exist, and speak of sex only in hushed whispers.
It is hard to argue against this perspective whether it is defended in the elevated prose of personalist ascetics, or, as is more, more often the case, in the viciousness of outraged private sensibility. It is a position that is beyond discussion, self-evidently correct, and the only truly Catholic attitude on sex: The Mother of Jesus ought not to have breasts in statues of her; neither should any other women saints; Michelangelo’s figures require loin cloths: sex ought not to be mentioned in polite conversation, the fact that men and women find one another’s bodies attractive and often passionately desire such bodies ought to be hidden as completely as possible; sex should be kept a secret from children; there is patently no possible use for eroticism in Catholic art.
That settles that!
The fury with which this view point is defended – a fury comparable with the worst anti-erotic manifestations of puritantism – suggests that the defenders have problems with their own sexuality. Their inability even to listen to any other position, much less to perceive that another position is compatible with the Catholic heritage confirms this suspicion. Sex is dirty and that is that.
Such a stand may be appropriate for those whose tradition tells them that human nature is depraved and that human sex is evil, for those who think that sexual desire is a dirty joke and that the appropriate response to erotic desire is the leer and the snide laugh. It is not appropriate for a tradition which believes that the erotic is sacramental.
A few of the Catholic puritans (and there were Catholic puritans long before their were Puritans) argue that the border between the erotic and the pornographic is so thin and so dubious that the erotic must be avoided lest it either become or (worse) be perceived as pornographic. In fact, however, the border is thick and the erotic and the pornographic are easily distinguished from one another by those who do not have prurient minds.
Thus a woman who views Bernini’s St. Teresa and understands what the artist is doing will surely recall her own orgasmic experiences and note with interest what the metaphor implies. Moreover she may find herself in the beginnings of sexual arousal and yearn for another orgasmic experience. Whether her husband will be sensitive enough to the artist’s designs to recognize the similarity between the Saint’s expression and his memory of his wife’s expression may be less certain, because men are less perceptive in these matters than women. If he does, it is possible that he too will feel the beginnings of sexual arousal. Whether these beginnings will lead to later love making and full orgasmic pleasure for either of them will depend on many factors.
The point here is not that the non-too-subtle metaphor in the statue will always or even often lead to sexual arousal. Most likely it will so only rarely. The point is rather that it has the capacity to do so to those who are sensitive to the implications of the metaphor. Moreover, for those who are open to and perceptive of the metaphor in the statue, the link between divine penetration of a woman’s organism and human penetration may also add an extra dimension to the observer’s understanding of human erotic desire.
In our fable of the husband and wife who are both aroused by the statute and who later make love because of it (perhaps without mentioning to one another the origins of this particular episode) it is possible that the encounter will be a richer one because of its origin and contribute marginally to the enhancement of their ongoing love affair.
Again I make no claim that such an outcome is inevitable or even likely, only that it is possible. Nor do I claim that such an outcome existed in the mind of the sculptor, only that he was very well aware of the metaphor involved in his work.
As he fashioned the ecstatically pleasured face of the saint, did he figure more frequent desire for the body of whoever was his bed mate at the time? I wonder how it would have been possible for him not to do so, especially given the fact that for men the fulfillment of a beloved woman is even more important than their own fulfillment.
Most Catholic puritans, hearing this reflection on Bernini’s statue, would want promptly to hide it somewhere. Any work of art that stirs up erotic need – and the joy which comes with it – should be covered up.
As if one can walk along Michigan Avenue on a spring day and not experience sexual arousal. Or sit on a beach. Or swim in a pool.
Thus the attitude that anything which incites erotic arousal is pornographic is simply unacceptable, as is the attitude that to use the word "breast" in a story, much less to describe the wonders of a particular breast is ipso facto pornographic. Human secondary sexual characteristics have evolved in such a way that they serve two purposes. In the case of the female breast it exists to nurse the young, but it takes the form and shape that it does to attract men. To say that men tend to be obsessed with women’s breasts is merely to observe that such a reaction is a natural response in the human male which for which the evolutionary process has selected both for continuing the species and for bonding the man and woman together. It can indeed degrade the woman into an object, but does not necessarily do so. To contend that a man who is fascinated by a woman’s breasts (perhaps his wife’s) is acting like a fourteen year old stealing a peak at Playboy is to remove his fascination from the context in which it occurs and to forget that if there were not a bit of the fourteen year old in both the men and women of the species, humankind would soon cease to exist.
It would seem therefore that erotic desire, delicately and sensitively treated, would be proper for art with a Catholic inspiration and indeed has been in the past history of Catholic art, though, truth be told, rarely.
It becomes necessary when one considers how much the notion that erotic desire is degrading is still assumed among those working in other traditions. Thus desire in the stories of John Updyke, one of the greatest of contemporary American novelists, is an irresistible fate which draws men and women to their own destruction. There is much sexual coupling in his stories, but little sexual joy and virtually no happiness.
To leave erotic desire out of art depicting human relationships is to distort the human condition beyond recognition. Consider the novels of Anthony Trollop, for example. His characters, men and women both, desperately want one another, but, caught in the taboos of his time, he could not attend to the nature of that want. His stories are not failures for that reason but devoid of the power they might otherwise have. They lack both the irony and the tragedy as well as the joy and satisfaction which erotic desire introduces into the human condition.
"It was a fine story," I am told occasionally, "but why did you have to ruin it all by putting sex in it."
One never wins an argument with someone whose complaint is based on unanswerable assumptions. Nonetheless, I try to answer by saying that the protester should complain to God who put sex in the human condition, made it such a powerful component of human relationships, and ordered things in such a way that it creates and then renews love between the genders.
Men ought not to desire the bodies of women, I am also told, usually by feminists who consider male desire to be automatically degrading. Men ought not to fantasize about the secondary sexual characteristics of women or about how delightful a woman might be as a bed partner. Male sexual desire, driven by testosterone, is in and of itself chauvinist and exploitive.
One leaves aside for the moment the fact that women also experience desire for the bodies of men, more discretely, more cautiously, more, as they would claim, sensitively. One rather argues that if the assumption is made that all man are rapists, that all men degrade women in their imaginations when they desire them, that all attention to the sexual attractiveness of women is debasing, then the conversation on the subject is automatically terminated.
Some women do not want to be sexually desirable which is their privilege (the same goes for men). It does not follow, however, that the sexual desirability of women should or even can be ignored by men.
Some women resent the attractiveness of other women, even when these other women are only fictional characters. But resentiment is not a legitimate motive for the criticism of art (as much as it silently permeates criticism). If one argues that in art men should feel no erotic impulses towards women, one is in effect demanding that art deal only with male eunuchs.
The issue of erotic desire in art is especially pertinent to written art– fiction, poetry, drama, screen plays. Visual art may be erotic but only rarely does it attempt to depict its subjects in the state of erotic desire (though some renaissance paintings of the risen Jesus do apparently portray him as sexually aroused). Thus the Zwinger gallery in Dresden abounds in nude figures, though few of them could be considered erotic. However one artist, Carlo Cignani, in his depiction of "Jospeh and the wife of Potiphar" presents a jarring and thought-provoking image of erotic desire. Both participants are young, teenagers by our standards. The half-naked girl is pretty, vulnerable, and very much in love. Her assault on Joseph seems almost innocent. He recoils in horror and turns to flee her. One understands Joseph’s panic: if he yields to this attractive young woman he violate the law of his Fathers and would also risk both their lives. One also understands the surprise and humiliation of the young woman: in her culture her love for Joseph would be risky but hardly immoral.
This astonishing painting establishes that if one is to try to integrate erotic desire into art, one cannot present it only in its benign or virtuous manifestations – or its thoroughly unambiguous dimensions (should such exist). Occasionally I am challenged by those who say that I should not present in my stories sinful priests whose desires for women are exploitive and immature. Priests, such critics say, should give good example to other men. Such critics can be either Catholic conservatives or feminists; in either case they do not understand that the purpose of story telling is to illuminate, not indoctrinate or educate. A world in which all priests were paragons of virtue would not be a world in which illumination is possible, since outcomes have been predetermined.
(Though it should be required of a novelist, even a priest novelist, to portray any good priests if such portraits did not fit the vision of the story, most of my priests are respectful of women, none more than Bishop John Blackwood Ryan who is infinitely respectful towards them and deals with them as full equals if not superiors, which as an Irish Catholic male he has been socialized to do.)
While paintings like Cignani’s and sculptures like Bernini prove that the visual arts can and sometimes do delineate erotic desire, normally the literary arts, since they are able to get inside the subject’s mind and imagination, are especially likely to delve into the mysteries of erotic desire, most particularly when they are concerned with the complexities and intricacies, the successes and the failures, the disappointments and surprises of the relationship between man and woman. The advantage fiction has over the other literary arts (poetry, film, drama – the last two of which share also in the visual arts) is that the story teller is not forced to approach his characters emotions and imaginations indirectly but can permit the reader to share in the character’s feelings and images, so to speak, as they happen. In a sense the reader and the writer invade the mind of the character, strip the character of all rights of privacy, and break through the veils of secrecy (if not quite that of self-deception) with which most of us hide our most intimate and powerful emotions. The reader becomes a respectful voyeur, perhaps learning more about herself/himself and the possibilities for life in the world beyond the novel from a brief immersion in the world of the story.
In my novel White Smoke, a subplot recounts the story of two journalists in the very early middle years of life who were once happily married and passionately in love. But she was a hot-tempered fighter and he a diffident evader of conflict. This difference of personality combined with the complexities of professional life and of child-rearing weakened the bond of passion and love which held them together. He became a drunk and she a shrew. The marriage floundered. They divorced and went their separate ways. However, neither sought a Catholic annulment, both went into therapy (he to A.A.), and neither took other lovers.
Dinny Mulloy, come to Rome to cover the conclave, fears that he will encounter his wife, Patricia Anne McLaughlin. But he misses her. Rarely do we get inside of her head because of the constraints of the narrative preclude that. But there is reason to think she feels the same way. At Fumicino airport Dinny is welcomed by a colleague, a lovely Italian principessa, only a little older than his daughter. He treats her with the same blend of charm and respect with which he would treat his daughter. Yet her appeal reminds him that erotic longings are still powerful in his life.
The two one-time lovers meet at dinner. After an initial reaction in which he stands up to one of her outbursts, they are civil to one another. Bishop Blackie Ryan, who in this case represents the Church playing a role that it normally does not play in promoting reconciliation informs them (in a lecture on the problems of the Church) that sexual attraction is like a rubber band which pulls people back together when the strains and friction of marriage cause them to drift apart.
"In effect human sexuality is distinct from the sex of other primates in that it is for bonding as well as for pro-creation. The bond between husband and wife stretches like a rubber band," he moved his hands apart. "Then when it is at the breaking point, the force of passionate love, draws them together again." He brought his hands together again. Dinny knows the priest is talking to them because when Patty introduces him to the priest as her former husband, Blackie says, "how romantic."
It was a glorious spring night in Trastevere, a full moon had risen over Santa Maria, the smell of flowers and blossoming trees permeated the air, street noises, and bits of conversations suggested that we were indeed in a neighborhood not unlike the one I grew up in, I was sitting between two glittering women, with both of whom I wanted to engage in prolonged sexual play.
Fat chance.
I was enough of a trained journalist to absorb everything the funny little bishop was saying. But my fantasy, despite the stern warnings I tried to impose on it, was preoccupied with my former wife. It was not just lust, I told myself. I feel residual affection for her. I was indeed besotted by her cleavage. I did indeed want to strip away her dress and the black lace beneath h it. But hurt her even a little bit?
Good God, no! I wanted rather to ease the pain which occasionally flashed at the back of her green eyes.
Those who complain about Dinny’s erotic thoughts about his wife apparently missed her feelings about him as she prays in a Church at the top of the Spanish Steps.
You got me into this mess and its Your job to get me out of it!
Don’t You ever answer anyone, not even here in the church of Trinita dei Monti?
I’ve fallen for him the second time around as badly as I did the first time. I’m a horny old cow. Whenever I’m with him, by body betrays me. When he touched my face this morning I almost fell into his arms.
He looks great, he’s obviously on the wagon and likely to stay on, he’s his old, genial charming self, the man I fell in love with.
I’ve read that women’s desires become stronger as they grow older. That’s another one of Your dirty tricks on us!
He wants me. When men undress me in their imaginations, I’m usually offended. When he does it, I turn hot and wet all over.
I want him. It’s been so long since I’ve enjoyed physical love. You don’t want me to be a celibate for the rest of my life, do you? I’d make a lousy nun with my temper and my mouth.
So, if we’re not careful, we’ll fall into bed with one another and all the old problems will come back. This time around they could destroy both of us. We were badly matched and we’re still badly matched, whatever our lusts are.
I’ll be honest, especially since You know anyway. I want to feel his hands all over me, demanding, caressing, invading, reassuring. I want his tongue and fingers exploring all my secrets. I want him inside me, filling me up thrusting and pushing and driving me out of my mind with pleasure. I want to feel the glowing heat intensify within me. I want to feel his power within me. I want to twist and squirm and yell and then burst with pleasure and joy. I want to be rent open, cleaved, joined not only to him but to everything in the universe. I want to belong to him totally. I want to lose myself totally in him. All day. Every day. For the rest of my life..
I’d never do that of course. I could never give up control completely.
Remember how shy and modest I was as a kid? I’ve come a long way haven’t I? And that’s Your fault too.
Bishop Blackie’s rubber band snapping us back together again. Only the rubber band doesn’t know that we shouldn’t be back together again.
You know that. So why did you bring us both to the same story and put us in adjoining hotels. If I don’t stay away from him, You know what will happen and it will all be Your fault.
I’m so lonely. When I’m working it’s all right. I don’t notice the loneliness. At night it’s terrible. Maybe I should have an affair. You know I’m not the affair type. I shouldn’t have let the divorce happen. If he had stood up to me, there wouldn’t have been a divorce. He joined AA without my insisting. That should have been enough. He’s not an ordinary drunk. I drove him to it. When he got away from me, he stopped drinking. It’s my fault I lost him.
Look, I know that I’m more to blame for what happened between us than he is, poor lout that he is. I worked it all out with my shrink. I was a bitch. I am a bitch. I will always be a bitch. I can’t help it. I can apologize now, which is something of an improvement. But I’ll do the same thing all over again, the next minute, the next hour, the next day, no matter how hard I try.
OK. He is to blame too. But he’s not a bitch, he’s only a wimp and then only with noisy women like me.
If I ever try to apologize to him for everything, I’ll die. I’ll simply die. And he’ll own me. As much as I want him, yes, all right, as much as I love him, I don’t want to be owned by him or anyone else. No way.
Well, You can own me. But only You.
But You still have no right to put me in this awful mess.
Well, all right, yes You do.
What do you want me to do? They say human love is like Your love. Do you want me the way I want him?
But I couldn’t ruin Your life like I ruined his.
I don’t want to do it again. No way.
Still no answer, damn You.
Sorry, I didn’t mean that.
Anyway I have a pretty good idea what You want.
Well, I’m not going to do it.
So I’ll light my votive candle and go home.
I’m stopping here at the door of the church, looking out on the Piazza de Spagna. I have one more request.
Please take good care of him. Don’t let anything bad happen to him. I love him very much.
Please.
As their renewed passion increases, Dinny and Patty Anne recover their former professional respect and banter with one another as they had in the past. They work together in covering the conclave. The memories of all the good times in their marriage haunt them as does the love of their children who suspect a reconciliation once they know their parents are in Rome at the same. Desire is not the only factor at work, but it is awaking all the other binding energies that once tied them together.
As is often the case it is the woman who pushes the relationship towards closure. They are invited to dinner at the home of the Principessa’s parents. They have a fight before they go. In the car, Patty Anne holds his hand. She is wearing a very revealing dress.
I had calculated that Patty was wearing only pantyhose and a strapless bra underneath her dress. Not serious obstacles to a man who wanted to claim his wife again. The slit would be provide me with easy access to critical areas. I knew that I wouldn’t do it, but it was fun to imagine.
Dinny loses his nerve and shakes hands with her at the end of the evening as they to their adjoining hotels. But he cannot sleep and finally sneaks over from the Hassler where he is staying to the Hotel de la Cite where she is staying.
I knocked lightly on the door.
"Yes?"
"Dinny."
She opened the door slightly and peered out at me around the corner.
"It is you."
"I think so."
She had let her hair down and washed her face.. No trace of make-up. She had also changed her scent. This one was pure invitation. And she was so beautiful and so attractive and that heart did a slow lazy turn.
"Come in," she said, opening the door all the way. "Don’t stand out there all night long."
No rejection. Just the opposite. Almost too easy. Dangerous, but it was far too late to run.
She was wearing a short white gown, gauze like in texture and transparency. And the wedding ring.
"I couldn’t sleep," I said lamely.
"I couldn’t either. It’s too hot."
Her eyes were liquid emeralds, brimming with desire and enticement.
What took you so long, she demands as he flicks off the gown. So there love is consummated again and sealed later, in an alusion to Batpsim renewal, when they swim in the Mediterranean. Their reconciliation is tentative and unsteady, both are afraid, both think they might have made a mistake, both are desperately in love, both find that Blackie’s rubber band won’t let them go.
I claim no great merit for the story, though I will argue against two nasty reviewers that it is about more than an aging journalist having the fantasies of a fourteen year old about his ex wife. The story illumines reconciliation, not all reconciliations, not a typical reconciliation, not an average reconciliation, but simply reconciliation driven by erotic desire – and sustained by respect for the admirable qualities of the two participants and the support of the Church.
What will happen to them? It will not be easy. The habits of past conflict will recur. The interlude of intense passion which brought them together again in Rome will fade. Perhaps it will be renewed, as such interludes can be renewed. Perhaps not. But for Dinny and Patricia Anne, there is at least some hope. They will return to Chicago (which is her base) where, as the little Bishop remarks, they belong. He will be the Church for them and they may find it difficult to escape the patronage and the protection of such an ingenious, outrageous, and attractive Church.
Does the story in the subplot work, given the constraint that it is part of an exercise in popular fiction?
Maybe, maybe not. It is not for me to say. Most reviewers liked this part of the story. I received mail from married laity who told me that the renewal of love between my characters had helped them renew their own love. That should be enough for any priest writer.
Anyone who thinks that the subplot is even soft core pornography is sick.
By way of conclusion, there is no need for other writers who are Catholic to tell a similar story with a similar happy ending. One might just as well tell a story in which a priest blocks a reconciliation which is on the edge of success. Or a reconciliation that is a mistake. Or a sign of weakness. My only point is that Catholic artists of every kind should be granted the freedom to explore such themes, free from the harassment of the prudes, the prurient, and the puritans – both of the left and the right -- who still flourish in the Church and who believe, as the great Catholic novelist Bruce Marshal once remarked, "that the Almighty made an artistic mistake in ordaining the mechanics of procreation."
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