The second paradox is that the Catholic populations (which, in their behaviour, are much better sexually balanced than Protestants or — above all — Muslims) have been subject to a canonical sexual and marital morality that surpasses in theoretical prohibitions and practical restrictions all that Islam, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, or the other great religions have been able to invent. But the ethnopsychology of the Latin and Celtic people is perhaps more flexible. And then, the Church’s prescriptions were, in the matter of chastity, both for clergy and for the laity, so impractical that they were not really taken seriously.
* * *
The repressive sexual obsession of Christianity (whether Catholic or Protestant) has gradually exhausted itself since the end of the 1960s. The pressure-cooker has burst. The sexual liberation which began in the 1970s has ended in the sad sex of the pornographic industry, the submission of couples to psychiatrists and to ‘successful’ and mechanically normalised sex (and thus the increasing fragility of the couple), the animalisation of the mow primitive erotic code and the code of seduction, the cult of sexual therapy (for which Freudian scholasticism prepared the ground), the destabilising of the sexual awakening of adolescents through premature access to simplified pornographic spectacles, brutal and virtual.
Sex, under the repressive authority of Christianity, was an area of severe frustration. More serious still, however, are the frustrations and neuroses provoked by the pansexual society that is inflating like an uncontrollable bubble before our eyes, where the libido has no more intensity, and desire no more direction. Eros has run away mad from the asylum in which Christianity had locked him up.
We must nevertheless insist on the fact that Christian puritanism is partly responsible for this inversion, for the birth — by way of reaction, by a brutal explosion as of a repressed person — of universal pornography, the deviation of Eros, the breakdown of family codes and rules, and of the ideology of panmixia. The mental mechanism is easy to explain: the aberrant forbidding of normal sexuality which combines marital reproduction, eroticism, and regulated infidelity has given way, as soon as the prohibitions collapsed, to a sort of blowing off of steam as opposed to a return to normality. Sex having been presented as diabolical by Christian morality; Eros became the figure of the dark tempter, a disfigured god. Unconsciously, contemporary sex-mania still thinks of itself as sin. The attraction of sin explains the deviations of sexuality. The delinquent sex maniacs are travelling the same road as St Augustine, though in the other direction. From a debauchee, he became a sexophobe; they, having been sexophobic puritans, have become debauchees. It is still the same path, however, whether you are travelling it in one direction or the other.
In both cases (Christian puritanism and sexual deviance), we note a profound sexual immaturity, an inability to understand the need for sexual equilibrium such as the old, pre-Christian European societies of Antiquity practiced, with a balance between discipline and release, prohibitions and tolerance, self-mastery and pleasure, sociobiological norms and libidinal art.
Sex has been placed at the centre of everything, either to suppress (and diabolise) it or to deregulate and pervert it, but in both cases to denature and mutilate it. For absurd prohibitions are perversions which run contrary to nature. The sexual morality of the Church has had very negative effects when is has been taught and when vain attempts have been made to apply it. The moral and practical sexual chaos which followed when it collapsed is, however, provoking even more unhealthy frustration than that of Christian sexual morality. The result is that we are today facing a ravaged sexual landscape which plays a role in our social disorders which only continue to grow.
From Sexual Sin to the Sin of Racism
We must touch upon another point, since the Church today no longer insists at all on its sexual and marital morality for reasons explained above (apart from a few exhortations by John Paul II to the youth, or a few not-very-feisty remarks against homosexual marriage or the teaching of ‘gender theory’). No, that is no longer at all the target upon which the official Church concentrates its fire.
As regards the principal sin, which leads directly from the humanist ideology of ‘Love’ and ‘Peace’ and which serves as a new theology for the prelates, it is no longer sexual sin that is the first to be denounced, but the sin of ‘racism’. This development, which took thirty years, is not surprising. The Roman Church (which is ‘Catholic’ — that is, universal) has throughout the twentieth century castigated so-called racist doctrines and ideology, and even condemned the followers of Maurras for nationalism. It has never formally opposed miscegenation, and it has always encouraged the evangelisation of the coloured peoples (though it no longer dares to, out of fear of Islam). It has opted to ordain foreign priests, and merrily continues to do so, in order to make up for the lack of recruitment from the European pool. Nevertheless, sexual sin remained infinitely more serious.
By all account, sex has deserted Catholic morality. It has been buried without ceremony. Policing bedrooms is no longer its preoccupation, which is a notable development. But, just like the State and the dominant ideology, its principal preoccupation is the regulation of consciences. Examine your own conscience: Are you racist? Have you voted for a xenophobic party? Have you had bad thoughts regarding your brothers of a different origin? If so, it is a much more serious matter in God’s eyes than if you had practiced adultery or countless forms of vulgarity. One ‘progressive’ curate went so far as to refuse communion to those of his flock who had voted for the National Front — for this revealed the cardinal sin of racism.
In their preaching and teaching, our clerics have changed their weapons as also in their admonitions, and in the various communications of the episcopate, deviant morals, universally accessible pornography, and so on, are now only rarely castigated, and this merely a matter of lip-service. What does get castigated is the expulsion of a few ‘undocumented persons’, laws against illegal immigration (woefully lax as these are), and the xenophobic attitude of Christians who vote badly or engage in Islamophobia — another new sin.
Expressing this masochism of a Church in deline, the Catholic press and the services of the Episcopate concentrate their propagandistic work no longer on the regulation of morals or piety, as formerly, or even on obedience to the commandments of the Church, but to hunting down bad political thoughts. Encompassed under this term are the crimes of nationalism, pride in and defence of one’s people, the will to perpetuate one’s lineage without racial mixture, the desire to live among one’s own kind in a homogeneous city and not a Babel, the rejection of cosmopolitanism, the condemnation of mixed marriages, the opinion that the Islamisation of Europe is a real danger, and so on. Such are the sentiments proscribed (but only for native Europeans) by the new Church — capital sins entirely unrelated to sex, which contravene the imperative of Love of the Most Distant (and no longer one’s neighbour), the new paradigm of Christian charity.
In this sense, the Church is making an interesting decision: it is uniting perfectly with State ideology. There is no longer any doctrinal separation between Church and State.
[1] On this point see André Lama, Propos Mécréants [Unbelieving Opinions –Tr.] (Société des Ecrivains, 2001).
[2] In his study Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Gallimard, collection Folio de l’histoire, 2008), E Leroy Ladurie describes at length the difficulty the Chuch has in getting its morality of sexual rigour accepted, including by the parish priest.
[3] In general, Luther and Calvin were reacting against a kind of ‘paganisation’ of the Church, accusing it of no longer following the spirit of the Gospel at all. Among their many reproaches was that of the Church’s laxity, not only toward its clergy’s sexual excesses but also toward the representation of the nude body by artists. The Protestants would try to recover an austerity in all domains, especially their rites, which had been abandoned by
Catholicism.
[4] On this subject, consider the endless quarrels between French royalty and the authorities in Rome concerning the luxurious life of the courts, the official favourites and mistresses of the Kings (who in practice adopted polygamy). The audacity of Bossuet’s sermons against the dissolute life of the Court of Versailles are well known. We should also mention the presence of prelates at the very centre of political power, of whom Talleyrand was the most famous, who were agnostics, practicing none of the Church’s commandments and openly living with concubines.
[5] As a former student of the Jesuit fathers, I am qualified to understand the teachings of the Church. This teaching was openly affirmed to the end of the 1960s. Afterwards, it was neither made milder nor altered, but hypocritically suppressed and disguised under the pressure of evolving social mores. In the fourth century, Julian, called the Apostate, who briefly reestablished a solar paganism in the Empire, who, educated in neoplatonism and mystical Plotinism, led an austere and chaste life, was nevertheless shocked by the rigour which the Galileans wished to impose on everyone. cf. Lucien Jerphagnon, Julian dit l’Apostate (Tallandier, 2010).
[6] The Cathar schism, e.g., with its ‘Perfected Ones’ at the top of the hierarchy, preached celibacy and sterility for all its adepts, even the laity. The adoration of God and hope of a life in paradise were worth more than the impure contingencies of marriage and reproduction. The stupidity of the Cathar doctrine is obvious: its very adepts would not have been born if their parents had not conceived them in impurity. Not to mention, the disappearance of humanity — created by God by means of sexual reproduction — would be preferable to its perpetuation. God Almighty, then, made a mistake. He should have been content with creating asexual angels to adore him.
[7] One of the fundamental texts on Christian sexuality is St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, which poses the ideal of virginity above that of marriage. With St Augustine, also a founder of sexual doctrine, we enter into pure and simple raving. Voltaire said of him, concerning the idea of original sin he developed and which is not expressed in the Bible: ‘Let us admit that it was St Augustine who first gave credit to this strange idea, worthy of the hot and romantic head of a repentant African debauchee, Manichaean and Christian, indulgent and persecuting, who spends his life contradicting himself.’ (Philosophical Dictionary, article ‘Original Sin’)
[8] Catholics are practically the only ones to impose celibacy on priests, for reasons both of sexual morality and effectiveness in the ministry. Today, however, many claim that the dearth of vocations comes from this prohibition. It is impossible to decide the matter, for it is impossible to know ‘how it would be if....’ It is possible that a new Pope could permit the marriage of priests. The Church is trying to resolve this problem by giving increasing importance to the laity (those who have taken no vow), even in religious rites (apart from performing the sacraments) such as masses and burials, because of the declining number of officiants.
[9] Chastity, demanded of the priest and the bachelor, forbid even masturbation or ‘bad thoughts’, which is taking things rather far. Certain authors claim that this disposition of moral terrorism was aimed at inciting bachelors (or widowers) to marry and reproduce. A polemic arose within the heart of the Church on this very point of sexual morality: certain handicapped persons, for example, who could hardly hope to marry — must they renounce all sexual life in order not to fall into sin? This would be inhumane, say the modernists. No, respond the traditionalists, for the ‘sexual life’ is of little importance apart from when it is for reproduction. They should turn to spiritual exercises. For traditionalists, the sexual life is basically of little importance for the human psyche, which exactly reflects the teachings of the Church. This demonstrates a profound misunderstanding, a contempt for human nature. It also demonstrates enormous hypocrisy, for most of these traditionalist censors do have a sexual life or else aspire to have one (even if it is frustrating and resented). For apart from exceptional cases (and only among aged persons who have had plenty of experience), the absence of sex is a psychic mutilation. On this point, the late pagan philosophers of the fourth century, such as Iamblichus, reproached the ‘followers of Chrestos’ with giving moral lessons to everybody and, above all, not respecting them.
[10] With this we enter into the theologico-sexual arcana of which the monotheistic religions called ‘of the Book’ (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are very fond. For many so-called modern theologians, especially Jesuits and Dominicans, unfruitful sexual relations within the married couple are not sinful if they are not the fruit of a purely concupiscent and lewd desire, but if it incorporates ‘love’; i.e., if the partner’s pleasure and not merely one’s own egotistical pleasure is the primary goal of the sexual act. In this case, eroticism between the couple is permitted. But violence and sadomasochistic acts (even consensual) are proscribed from the list of permitted acts. On the other hand, a bachelor’s eroticism remains implicitly lustful, along with extra-conjugal eroticism, which is against nature.
The prescription of ‘double virginity’ — of the man and of the woman — before marriage is dangerous and unrealistic. Most civilisations and religions prescribe virginity for the bride but not the groom. Only Christianity demands that the man reach marriage a virgin. Of course, this prescription was discreetly circumvented. In bourgeois Catholic families, young affianced men were discreetly ‘initiated’ shortly before their marriages, either with a high-class prostitute or with benevolent older women who were friends of the family and capable of discretion. This was to avoid having two virgins in the same bed on their wedding night.
[11] The Church, especially in religious schools for boys, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1970s, accorded an obsessive importance to the prohibition and culpabilisation of adolescent masturbation — a mortal sin more serious than copulation with a girlfriend or a grown woman. A whole dubious medical literature, mainly produced between 1860 and 1940, relayed Church teaching on this point, claiming that adolescent masturbation provoked a loss of substance, a weakening of physiological energy, mortal illnesses, etc. In proof of this obsessive (and very louche) focus on adolescent masturbation on the part of teaching priests, I can attest to the surreal courses I attended as a pupil of the Jesuits in secondary school. Father B — , our ‘spiritual Father’, explained that masturbation was the scourge of youth (drug use was marginal at that time); he drew complicated schemas on the blackboard to distinguish between nocturnal emissions and erotic dreams, which were venial sins, and voluntary masturbation attended with bad thoughts (a mortal sin, punishable with hell). In (obligatory) sessions of confession, if a student did not accuse himself of ‘impurity’ (masturbation) he was suspected of lying. For every adolescent was supposed to commit this mortal sin and had to accuse himself of it. In reality, all this was the product of an unhealthy obsession of these priests — a perversion, a voyeurism, but also a kind of repressed paedophilia. To get young boys to talk about sex: such was their principal preoccupation.
[12] Greek: ‘healthy-mindedness’. Interpreted by Juvenal as ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. –Ed.
[13] The ‘morning after’ pill, which is taken after sexual relations in order to neutralise ovulary fertilisation, has aroused surreal polemics, since a living thing is thereby killed, as in the case of abortion. Is the human soul present at that moment? Or after the first instance of mitosis, just after the fusing of sperm and egg? As soon as the fetus has reached a certain size? What size? These theologico-moral questions are insoluble.
Chapter 11
Sex, Biotechnology, and Biopolitics
Improbable Human Nature
Nature exists as a whole [un ensemble], but human nature probably does not. The claim that human nature is fixed, a dogma of all monotheistic ideologies and all subsequent ideologies, comes under the he
ading of illusion and ignorance. What is fixed and immutable is the natural law, that is, the cosmic law, which surpasses man who is mere dust in the universe. The natural law is very well expressed by the basic principles of chemistry, genetics, and physics. It encompasses and surpasses human nature. The human species undergoes becoming. It only has being in its intimate chemical, molecular, and atomic structure, like the entire living and mineral kingdom.
Not only is Homo sapiens subjected, like all species, to natural evolution, but it is in the process of acquiring the ability to make itself evolve by the intervention of biotechnology and genetic manipulation. But whether it is the ‘voluntary’ human brain (which is an integral part of nature) or the flux of unconscious natural evolution which causes the human form to be transformed, one thing is certain: human nature as such is random and passing. Only the general law of life is fixed (and even here we cannot be sure, at least on Earth). In philosophical terminology, one could say that human nature falls within the realm of existence (becoming), while life falls within the realm of essence (being). Yet even this proposition is false, for the laws of life were probably not fixed on Earth until after the birth of life. In reality, the cosmos is subject to becoming, to impermanence. Being is subject to becoming, or rather the latter includes the former.[1]
If I follow the chain of my ancestors backward in time, father after father, I will not find ‘man’, but an animal and, beyond that, a protozoon. If I anticipate my progeny in the thousands of years that will follow the present, it will probably not be a being similar to me, but certainly a being that I would consider a monster if I were put in its presence.
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