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Christianity and Sex: Orientations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Cornelius Ernst O.P.
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‘It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and refreshing’.

This eminently quotable and much quoted passage from Lady Chatterley's Lover allows us to indicate the purpose and scope of the reflections which follow. It is certainly an exploration of consciousness (and conscience) that we propose to make, but neither as novelist nor as saint, concerned to illuminate and purify the secret springs of life, so far as these are accessible to the intelligence of feeling and sympathy; it is rather from the viewpoint of the Christian theologian that an attempt will be made here to explore consciousness and conscience, to analyse its ingredients, to take stock: an exercise of intelligence sensitive enough, it is hoped, to avoid the crudities of brute imperatives, but none the less conceptual and discursively rational, while at the same time resorting to those privileged sources of insight available to the Catholic in divine revelation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 42 , Issue 493 , June 1961 , pp. 244 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © 1961 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The substance of one of the Dominican lectures given at Cambridge in March 1961.

2 Other lectures of this series, which will be published later in Blackfriars are explicitly devoted to this topic, which consequently need not be discussed in detail here. We may merely note in passing that in many languages, including Biblical Hebrew, sexual difference is indivisibly qualified socially and is never merely neutral: homo, e.g., is Man universally, while vir is man sexually and also ‘husband,’ the sexual differentiation implying the social link.

3 This would be the place to discuss the problem of sexual anomalies. The connection between grace and freedom can be presented in accordance with the characterization (due to the Catholic psychiatrist Lopez‐Ibor) of disease as a restriction of freedom, with particular reference to ‘interior’ factors restricting freedom in the ontogenesis of the person, the doors locked against the growth of the human spirit. Since the ultimate freedom, the will to will, is a gift of God's grace, the problem of sexual anomalies is to be seen as a special case of the problem of evil and its resolution in the paschal mystery, the source of our grace. Grace is the means whereby, in consenting to it, we personally appropriate Christ's victory over the néant of human existence.

4 The place of virginity in the Christian economy was discussed in a separate lecture, to be published later in The Life of the Spirit.