The Romance of Innocent Sexuality

By Geoffrey Rees

From the polling place to the pulpit, The Romance of Innocent Sexuality investigates the passions that are enacted in debates about same-sex marriage. In a critique that is at once humorous and unrelenting, Geoffrey Rees argues that sexual desire is fundamentally a desire to make sense of oneself as a whole person. Through a constructive engagement with the writings of Saint Augustine on original sin, Rees turns on its head the conventional wisdom regarding the goodness of sexual relationship, arguing that sin, not innocence, is the starting point in pursing justice in sexual ethics. To that end Rees boldly reclaims the wisdom of the most disreputable teachings of the Augustinian tradition: that original sin is a literal inheritance of all humanity of the singular disobedience of Adam and Eve in Eden, and the inherent sinfulness of all human sexuality. This work also engages theological readings of nineteenth-century fiction and literary readings of contemporary theological writings. In so doing Rees shows that debates about same-sex marriage are so compelling because the participants are all telling a common story in which they seek to establish the innocence of their own preferred forms of self-understanding as defined against some other persons' sinful selves. In contrast to this, Rees argues for the acceptance of responsibility for the sinful exclusions that make possible finding the meaning of embodied personal identity through marriage between any two persons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781621892366

Geoffrey Rees

Geoffrey Rees teaches health care ethics in the Department of Religion, Health, and Human Values at Rush University in Chicago, Illinois, where he also serves on the ethics consultation service.

Book preview

Preface

I only desire one favour; that no part of this discourse may be judged of by itself and independently of the rest; for I am sensible I have not disposed my materials to abide the test of a captious controversy, but of a sober and even forgiving examination;

that they are not armed at all points for battle; but dressed to visit those who are willing to give a peaceful entrance to truth.¹

The following work was written primarily in the private and leafy quiet of New Haven, Connecticut, but it begins in a noonday public encounter on lower Broadway. Adrift and barely employed in New York City, I was living alone in a studio apartment in the East Village, in the home stretch of what had been a difficult decade. At the time I was an avid collector of cookbooks, and mornings at home writing and editing were often followed by a walk that terminated in the cooking section of the Strand Bookstore. Tucked against the wall to the left about a quarter of the way back from the street entrance, the cookbooks were my diamond field, a refuge where I could lose myself in the search for some culinary treasure. Mostly I was scrounging in the dirt. Occasionally I walked away with a gem—James’s Beard’s American Cookery, Paula Peck’s The Art of Fine Baking, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies. In those days I kept a pile of cookbooks on my bedside table. On my pillow at night I recited Rose Levy Beranbaum’s formula for Neoclassical Buttercream. Many nights I went to sleep excited to wake up the next morning with Marion Cunningham’s The Breakfast Book beside me. Frequently also I thumbed through a copy of the New English Bible, in my drowsy wandering returning always to reading Psalm 13.

Entering the Strand off Broadway, it happened that the most direct access to the cookbooks was through the religion section, and one day, en route to my fix of food in print, the glint of white lettering against the maroon spine of a paperback caught my eye. Without thinking I stopped, reached overhead, and pulled the book from the shelf. Standing in view of the cashiers and the plate glass windows and the stalls beyond them turning onto Twelfth Street and the intermittent canary flurry of taxis speeding downtown, I began reading. Immediately time slowed, or rather expanded through a power I had associated with books in childhood. I was mesmerized, riveted to the spot. I knew that other persons had already journeyed through these pages, but still each word seemed vivid and distinct as if it had been addressed to me alone, had been waiting for me, and we were rejoicing at our happy discovery of each other through the shock of mutual recognition, but also were a little embarrassed, a sense of shared indecency binding us together even more tightly. The book was Augustine of Hippo, the author Peter Brown, and before I left the store I had finished the first chapter with the indelible impression that I had just discovered an ancient world so vivid and real and new that already it was exercising its power to transform my own.

Over the next couple of weeks I devoured Brown’s book, but my pace altered when I subsequently turned to reading Confessions. For several months I savored R. S. Pine-Coffin’s wonderfully mournful translation. It consumed an hour of each afternoon. I was so overwhelmed by the searching intensity of Augustine’s questions that I could only read a few pages at a time. I call them Augustine’s questions, but they seemed my own also. They promised definition and organization to a host of inchoate thoughts that had occupied my mind for as long as I could remember. It was through these months living with Confessions that religious ethics emerged to my view as a rubric of study under which my eclectic interests and disjointed education began to appear as a possible coherent trajectory with a future also. After a lot of reflection, weighing doubts that persist to the present, and at an age when many persons are already completing their doctorates I found myself at the public library on Second Avenue scanning the pages of Peterson’s Guide to Graduate Schools and wondering how I would explain to my family and friends that I was seriously considering attending Divinity School.

As I look back now in order to encourage my readers to look forward into this book, I realize also that in my turn to the study of theology and ethics I was honoring an earlier public encounter that had joined reading and friendship. Almost ten years previous I had been serving time as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. One afternoon I was crossing the lobby of the Regenstein library—always a crowded gossipy space, especially in the dead of winter—when my friend Joseph—he was a student at the now defunct Graduate Library School—hailed me with excitement. With his arms crossed and his lips pursed, Joseph stood staring at me, fixing me to the spot with his wide-open brown eyes even as he was also batting his lacy black lashes at me, deliberately making a spectacle of ourselves. I must, he insisted, proceed directly to the fourth floor and read an excerpt, just published in the magazine October, from a remarkable new book on relations between men in the classical world. Then he batted his lashes some more, daring me to defy him. Moved by his fervor, charmed by his flirting, a little bit intimated by his schoolmarm severity (he was a born librarian, as passionately interested in the history of the papacy as he was horrified at the innovation of open stacks), I did as told and crept back upstairs where I remained reading until dusk. The excerpted chapter, it turns out, was from Michel Foucault’s The Uses of Pleasure, and I left the library with the indelible impression that the actual event of sexual activity is the least interesting—to the point of even being boring—aspect of any sexual relationship.

It was only much later, at the mid point of graduate school as I was preparing a question on same-sex marriage for my comprehensive exams, that I was able to appreciate more fully Joseph’s enthusiasm that afternoon and also my debt to his instruction. In preparing to write the exam I was continually puzzled by the vehemence of the arguments for and against same-sex marriage. Honestly it was and remains a question about which I care relatively little, so much so that I consider it almost unjustifiable how other persons spend so much psychic energy and political capital fighting for or against measures to recognize same-sex marriage when so many injustices in the world persist unrecognized. Not that I don’t consider the unequal distribution of privileges and benefits associated with marriage a significant problem of justice, only that I consider the insistent bundling of them with marriage—in the provision of health care, for example—a frustration to their redress. It was out of that frustration that the question I had thought I was addressing began to dissolve, liberating in a way my inquiry from considerations of same-sex marriage in itself (as if it has any intrinsic qualities to assess) to the passions surrounding it, more specifically to the self-interest of those passions and their theological and political implications. Instead of asking about same-sex marriage, I would ask about the functions of the discourse surrounding same-sex marriage. I would ask about what people are doing when they argue about same-sex marriage. And in doing so I recalled the memory of Joseph’s friendship as my own introduction to the dictum that the personal is political, about which he was adamant.

From that subtle shift in focus a boring question became a consuming question that resonated with my insatiable appetite for nineteenth-century fiction. Youthful readings of Dickens and Henry James and Proust in recent years had grown into an obsession of sorts with such unduly neglected authors as Fanny Trollope, Charles Reade, Mrs. Henry Wood, and Eliza Lynn Linton among many others, nourished by the bounty of musty leather-bound volumes ripe for the picking in the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library. All of which added up to the realization that the most novel aspect of debates surrounding same-sex marriage was their indebtedness to the tradition of novels in which marriage is at once idealized and challenged as a means of completion of one’s sexed self, such completion itself imagined as necessary to the possibility of encounter between self and God. The question that subsequently emerged was twofold. How does alienation from God as a result of sin become narrated as alienation from God as a result of incompletion of one’s sex? And how is it possible to engage theological debates about sexuality without contributing to their narrations of sexed identity achieving its completion in marriage?

It is these two questions that The Romance of Innocent Sexuality strives to address. Complicated as the argument gets, the bottom line is simple: sin, not innocence. Rather than attempt to discern whose sexual desires and relationships are innocent and whose not, a more responsible sexual ethics—and more constructive also—starts with acceptance of responsibility by each person individually for the universal ruin of humankind in a single inheritable original sin that is meaningfully and appropriately associated with sexuality. Stated more practically, the best way to show that what appears like irresolvable disagreement about issues

of sexual morality is in fact a function of the nearness to crowding against each other of the standpoints of all the participants, is to pull the rug out from under everyone all at once. Easier said than done, though to the extent possible a proof I believe of my own longstanding conviction that innocence is overrated.

In light of these few remarks it will hardly appear a coincidence that my work is written through readings of writers who were themselves passionate readers. I have found a lot of pleasure in my readings, in the discovery of unexpected consonances among seemingly irreconcilable texts. I hope that my readers will share in some of that pleasure, will find some pleasure in their own indulgence of reading as imaginative play. Wide as the range of readings is, however, they are organized by interpretations of Augustine and Foucault, as they became organized in turn by acceptance of the literal sense of Scripture and the meaningfulness of the association of original sin with sexuality. Some comments on the hermeneutical starting points, and also on the status of theology as a cultural activity, should therefore help to orient readers towards the interdisciplinary, constructive, and exploratory qualities of the argument.

In writing of Augustine I have tried to follow the rule that he himself recommends to his readers as part of his discussion of the hermeneutics of charity in Book 12 of Confessions. Here Augustine insists that love of God and neighbor are the rule of interpretation. Here he insists, against the privatizing desires characteristic of sin, that the insights of interpretation are public property. And here he insists that the end of interpretation is the concord of the interpreting community. Most significant for my purposes, Augustine actually posits the future of his own writings in light of this hermeneutics:

Certainly, to make a bold declaration from my heart, if I myself were to be writing something at this supreme level of authority I would choose to write so that my words would sound out with whatever diverse truth in these matters each reader was able to grasp, rather than to give a quite explicit statement of a single true view of this question in such a way as to exclude other views—provided there was no false doctrine to offend me.

²

My own readings of Augustine all proceed in a way out of this bold declaration. They eschew claims to advanced expertise on Augustine and the classical world, but they do seek truth while also seeking to avoid the offense he warns against. The doctrine around which they are structured is that most insistently identified with Augustine himself in its most defamed aspect: the doctrine of original sin as a literal inheritance of all humanity that begins in the singular disobedience of the two created human beings from whom all others human beings are descended. A great value I believe of original sin as a hermeneutical principle alongside love is that it pushes the reader to engage the diverse truth in excluded other views, because it pushes the reader to recognize her own implication in the dynamics of exclusion that inescapably shape all reading practices. I recognize accordingly that The Romance of Innocent Sexuality is riddled with such exclusion. I cannot proceed otherwise, and I acknowledge that such exclusion is regrettable but also, crucially, that it is enabling.

Although my readings of Foucault focus almost entirely on the first volume of The History of Sexuality, they are shaped by the numerous essays and interviews from the latter years of his life, where he reflected most self-consciously on the political and practical as well intellectual import of his writings. It is during this final phase that Foucault breaks his silence and begins to affirm the possibilities of human freedom, to advocate resistance to oppressive and stultifying disciplines and technologies, and to explore the ideals of aesthetic/ascetic self-creation. This phase of Foucault’s career culminates, for me, in his striking summary statement regarding the status of the first volume in relation to his subsequent work:

This book does not have the function of a proof. It exists as a sort of prelude, to explore the keyboard, sketch out the themes, and see how people react, what will be criticized, what will be misunderstood, and what will cause resentment—it was in some sense to give the other volumes access to these reactions that I wrote this one first. As to the problem of fiction, it seems to me to be a very important one; I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or manufactures something that does not as yet exist, that is, fictions it. One fictions history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one fictions a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.

³

The language and idea of fiction as activity and accomplishment is the starting point of my constructive reading of the History. Following Foucault’s own evaluation I use his book as a resource in an attempt to fiction a history of the fiction of sex on the basis of the contemporary political reality of debates about sexed identity finding its fulfillment in marriage. And to fiction a sexual politics not yet in existence on the basis of the historical truth of original sin. The possibility of a more just future political reality of personal identity is thus a function of present imagination’s capacity to fiction it. In the meantime the story of same-sex marriage remains inseparable from the story of any marriage.

As a moderately observant Reform Jewish writer who dares to wade deep into contemporary Christian theological debates about sexuality and same-sex marriage, and even more daring perhaps, to propound an orthodox Christian doctrine, I find some support for my boldness in the conceptualization of theology as a cultural activity developed by Katherine Tanner. In her book Theories of Culture Tanner elaborates a framework that not only makes room for non-Christians to engage the doctrinal resources of Christian theology, but actually suggests that such non-Christian engagement with traditional doctrine demands serious attention from Christians themselves. Theology as a practice, Tanner explains, cannot wall itself off by specific defensible boundaries. Theological reflection is not finally bounded by any absolute cultural boundaries at all. Instead the boundaries are porous, shifting, indeterminate, so that theology is better described as a practice that arises at and across multiple boundaries. Just as Christian theological reflection potentially engages any aspect of the entirety of cultural resources that are its own context, so too the particular doctrinal resources of Christian theology are a constituent ingredient of that context. The following vision of theological imagination in practice emerges:

What has just been said against putative constraints on theological creativity suggests something about the nature of theological creativity. It does not seem to amount to any pure, freewheeling expression of creative drives. It seems, instead, to be the creativity of a postmodern bricoleur—the creativity, that is, of someone who works with an always potentially disordered heap of already existing materials, pulling them apart and putting them back together again, tinkering with their shapes, twisting them this way and that. It is a creativity expressed through the modification and extension of materials already on the ground.

⁴

I do not believe that Christian theology (nor any other tradition-dependent attempt to understand human beings in relation to their creator; the only kind of attempt humanly possible) has ever been an exclusive province of Christians, in the sense that its materials are always also the materials already on the ground of its cultural context. There has never been, I hope will never be, a world that is not plural. As a practical matter I therefore consider that the possibility of prophetic critique of culture includes within itself the possibility of critique by culture of its prophetic detractors.

In turning to the doctrine of original sin as an especially significant cultural-theological resource for analysis of a large array of additional already existing materials, I further believe that I am honoring the Christian tradition even as I don’t claim a place for myself exactly within it. In the process I am crossing, perhaps confounding, academic disciplinary boundaries. The interdisciplinarity of my project I consider a correlate of its theological presuppositions. As an exercise of theological creativity the arguments advanced throughout The Romance of Innocent Sexuality are more or less equal parts textual, cultural, critical, and historical. Readers who assert some enforceable boundary markers, whether disciplinary, doctrinal, political, across which the investigations presumably don’t move—for example by insisting on the insufficiency of Augustine’s and Foucault’s texts in translation to support the themes of the book—are in a curious way therefore making the argument for the importance of those themes. At least they are retreating into the fortress of academic criticism just at the points where I wish to draw them out, invoking truth to hide from the powers of fiction that render diverse effects of truth possible.

In choosing to address such expansive topics as sexuality and same-sex marriage and the doctrine of original sin and the relation of fiction to narration of truths about self through figures each of whom are the focus of specialized study—Augustine, Foucault, Dickens, and numerous lesser lights—I am well aware how exposed I am on all sides to this kind of criticism. It has never seemed possible to me to keep fully abreast of the wealth of scholarship that continues to appear on any one of these topics or persons, let alone some combination of them. At least it has never seemed possible to do so and also sleep, watch movies, travel, bake Danish pastry, maintain relationships with friends and family, and most of all move on to new work. In the face of such a daunting task I have instead struggled to master some of the discipline of scaling back, of restraint in reference, of marshalling no more primary and especially secondary resources than are necessary to establish the plausibility, the viability, of the arguments at hand. It honestly took a lot of concentration to ignore as much as I know that I have, never mind to remain ignorant of so much more that I don’t know. But then my aim has never been to intervene in one specialized discourse, but to generate a conversation across disciplines. My aim has been to write a book that others will find generally interesting, challenging, illuminating if also sometimes maddening, and perhaps occasionally even beautiful.

Among the numerous friends, colleagues, family, teachers, students

—often in combination—whom it is a pleasure to thank personally for their assistance and support in realizing this work to its end, as well as the anonymous reviewers who have commented on the manuscript during its journey towards publication, three person I wish to acknowledge publicly and apart.

Throughout my years at Yale Divinity School and then Yale Graduate School and beyond, Gene Outka has been an unflappable mentor. He has never been anything less than genuinely encouraging that I pursue my own path intellectually even as he was continually opening that path to view for me. I cannot recall a single instance in which he has ever told me what to think, or what not to think. Instead he has always modeled for me how to think more clearly and carefully. It was in a pair of seminars he offered, the first on Agape and Special Relations, the second on Ethics and Human Nature, that I began to discern the intellectual footings of this work. From those seminars to the present I have always found my own close readings exceeded by his close readings of them in turn. His writings I consider a model of analytic nuance which I continue to strive to match in my own. And from his restrained and honest criticism and praise I have learned the pedagogical value of a single word well placed, a brief question inscribed in the margin, a polite demurral, all the slender but powerful instruments in the art of caring criticism as an incitement to my own students, if they only knew.

Of the persons I met when I was exploring making the transition to the study of theology and ethics, it was Margaret Farley who made all the difference. I had visited a number of professors at various schools, explaining my interests. At the end of each introduction I would ask: Does that make any sense to you? Each time my question was answered by a pause just a bit too long, and then a politely distancing statement like, Have you looked at any of Martha Nussbaum’s recent work? or Problems of personal identity are definitely important for ethics followed by uncomfortable questions about my education and its notable lacunae. My last visit was to New Haven, on a muggy November day too warm. The night before I had been jumped on the street walking home from a movie in the rain (the only incident of its kind in my life). Sitting in her office at Yale Divinity School with a black eye enthusing over the vision of Eve in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley I must have looked a bit of a maniac, yet when I reached the end of my introduction and asked my question, the pause that followed was different. And then Margaret Farley said, the sincerity in her voice unmistakable: Absolutely. I think it would be fascinating to work with you. Really that honest vote of confidence, that willingness to hear me out in the present, was a turning point, one that I return to regularly in thinking about my obligation to attend to my students whose attention I ask in turn. She has since modeled for me the indivisibility of the intellectual and the practical in ethics. Her genius in holding them together without compromising either continues to shape my own practice in the classroom and beyond.

Finally, I am very grateful to have worked with Charlie Collier at Cascade Books. On a gloomy January morning in the basement of the Hyatt Regency on Wacker in Chicago, my frustrations all too apparent and tinged with darker sentiments, he patiently heard me out. Good as his word at the time, he embraced my manuscript quickly and enthusiastically. He is a generous, sharp, and sure editorial guide. It is a great relief in multiple senses to turn over this work to him.

1. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry,

50

.

2. Augustine Confessions

12

.

31

.

42

(Chadwick,

271

).

3. Foucault, Power/Knowledge,

193

.

4. Tanner, Theories,

166

.

1

---

---

The Valorization of Sex in Death

The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. It is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct. When a long while ago the West discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this equivalence, the highest of all. And while the deployment of sexuality permits the techniques of power to invest life, the fictitious point of sex, itself marked by that deployment, exerts enough charm on everyone for them to accept hearing the grumble of death within it.

¹

Mature Humor and Charitable Anger

So much has been published in recent decades on theology and sexuality it seems foolhardy to attempt yet another contribution to the topic. The foolhardiness consists most of all in imagining that it is possible to articulate anything fresh or new. Still it should at least be possible to refresh some old wisdom and to present it in a renewed light. Even granting that such accomplishment is possible, however, it seems foolhardy to imagine that anyone might be able to listen above the din of a conversation that is already so over-crowded and overwrought. Nor does it seem likely that anyone who might bother to listen will stay tuned long enough to allow the possible insights of another voice on the subject. As if these obstacles are not discouraging enough, to write about theology and sexuality is also to expose oneself to a multiplicity of unwelcome interpretation. This is because the conversation is so discordant, marked more by the collision than intersection of divergent theoretical, methodological, and political approaches. To write about theology and sexuality is to invite ascription to oneself of all sorts of hopes, attachments, desires, and dreads that one is unlikely to wish to recognize as one’s own.

Given these hazards of irrelevance, neglect, misinterpretation, and exposure, a sense of humor in a general way seems indispensable to participation in this conversation almost as a matter of survival. Yet in the place of humor a magisterial tone reigns supreme, as if it were the only means available to maintain one’s dignity against the indignity of having to speak at all about such matters. Enjoining perhaps so much seriousness, the imperative of having always to keep a straight face, is that a bit of abjection, and the humorous wisdom to own its satisfactions, promises to accomplish more than just soften the edge of so much writing on theology and sexuality. To lack a sense of humor when writing about theology and sexuality is obligatory for so many because it is to lack the self-deprecating playfulness that makes discovery of the greater meaningfulness of such writing possible. Without a sense of the absurdities, the ironies, the vulnerabilities, and also the longings, the beauties, the fantasms, and the delights of sexual desire and relationship; without the capacity to relish some old-fashioned gossip and rumor-mongering; without the fearlessness of appearing abased; without the willingness to allow appetites and pleasures and bad smells and awkward postures; without the courage to look into the mirror and own that the strange animal with a forlorn gaze staring back at you, is you, the desire to engage this conversation looks less like a desire to think critically about sexed identity and more like a desire to enforce some impossible regimen of self-understanding. The absence of a general sense of humor consequently helps to explain why so much of what passes for writing about theology and sexuality is more screed than inquiry, more polemic than reflection, more shouting at than conversing with.

If humor is what is needed to break through the multiple barriers constraining theological discourse of sexuality, the writings of Saint Augustine seem an unlikely resource to accomplish the task, least of all the association of sexuality with a literally inheritable original sin. Unless one takes the very suggestion itself as a joke. What could be funny, after all, in the idea of an original sin in which all subsequent generations of human beings fully and responsibly participate? For which all humanity is justly punished by death? And which is transmitted through the biology of sexual reproduction? Not without apparent cause has Augustine often been characterized (and then blamed too) as the greatest exponent of human shame at the irrepressible stirrings of sexual desire:

For after their disobedience to God’s instructions, the first human beings were deprived of God’s favour; and immediately they were embarrassed by the nakedness of their bodies. They even used fig leaves, which were perhaps the first things they could lay hands on in their confusion, to cover their pudenda, the organs of shame. The organs were the same as they were before, but previously there was no shame attaching to them. Thus they felt a novel disturbance in their disobedient flesh, as a punishment which answered to their own disobedience.

²

As Augustinian as Augustine gets, any humor in his account of how humanity’s collective fall from grace in the fact of an original disobedience by Adam and Even in Eden concentrates in a novel disturbance of the organs of shame at first glance only looks possible at Augustine’s expense. As if he is unwittingly acknowledging the spontaneous delight of a matinee and wondering at its exclusion from paradise. As if, in his confused haste to lay his hand on some rhetorical fig leaves, he has been caught in flagrante delicto of the suggestiveness of his own words, betraying his phallogocentric obsessiveness, his concern for the loss of God’s favour so intensely focused on his own erection that he cannot comprehend that Eve does not have and never did have a disobedient and offending penis, so that Augustine and all men bear a double burden of guilt for themselves and for those defective men with whom they beget more misbegotten generations of human beings. Except that in a felicitous word choice Augustine’s translator hints that a more literally novel disturbance will eventually prove the potency of words to shape the experience of disobedient flesh.

The case against any humorous appeal to the Augustinian association of sexuality and sin only looks worse when one considers how passionately writings on theology and sexuality are energized by some combination of anger and fear. Adding sin to the conversation only seems to intensify the stakes, since so much of the anger and fear of theological discourse of sexuality concentrates in the contest to establish the innocence and guilt of the participants in the conversation through articulation of permissible and forbidden forms of sexual desire and relationship. Sin only figures negatively, as something other people do. It is only valued as the means for distinguishing the innocence of one’s own desire and behavior. Hardly anyone seems willing to stand accused of sin, or to remain silent in the face of accusation of sin, let alone willing to embrace sin. Instead, accusation of sin is typically met by accusation of the sinfulness of the accusation of sin, enjoining a cycle of recrimination that ceaselessly undermines potential grounds for reconciliation. Defense against any imputation of sin, not confession of sin, is the default stance adopted by most writers. To suggest then that the inherent sinfulness of all sexuality is the most responsible and conciliatory starting point possible for a theological sexual ethics is only a little less incendiary than walking into a hydrogen factory with a blowtorch. It is also to offer oneself as a common target to forces that otherwise can agree on nothing, not even to disagree.

The promise for theological investigation, admittedly risky, of confession of the inherent sinfulness of all human sexuality is that it offends equally. It succeeds by pleasing no one. It comprehends the entire landscape of theological discourse of sexuality and places at its center not the morality of any particular sexual activity but instead the morality of the activity of the discourse itself. The ethics of sexual relationship and the ethics of the conduct of debates in sexual ethics become one continuous project, so that writings on sexuality and theology become subject to critique as a kind of fig leaves for which all the parties involved are reaching in haste to cover over the shame of their own sin. The nakedness of the body, implied in even the most elliptical discussion of sexual relationship, is only an index, Augustine explains, of the nakedness that all this writing attempts to cover over and that ensues from the original disobedience of Adam and Eve: And so ‘they recognized that they were naked’—stripped, that is, of the grace that prevented their bodily nakedness from causing them any embarrassment, as it did when the law of sin made war against their mind.³ The embarrassment and shame of original sin turns out not to concern one’s present body exactly, so much as it concerns a loss of experience of embodied completion that haunts human memory. What is embarrassing and shameful is the exposure of one’s lack of grace. The association of sexuality and sin consequently seems even less amenable to humor because so profoundly obscene, more obscene than any image of individual or joined naked human bodies could be, projecting as it does an ultimate exposure of culpable human selves to each other in the starkest possible light of God’s harsh judgment. An exposure that no amount of words or cloth or fig leaves can ever wholly cover over. Elaboration of the enduring meaningfulness of the association of sexuality and sin in a literal interpretation of original sin therefore requires recognition of the common exposure that joins all of humanity in a single fallen community. It also requires recognition, both by writer and reader, of the inevitable defensiveness, the ineluctable reaching for some sort of covering garment, which characterizes theological discourse of sexuality, and which thereby also signifies the potency of the association of sexuality and sin.

⁴

To counter this defensiveness it is not only not possible, but also not desirable, to try to overcome directly or entirely the instinctive desire of the fallen self to hide one’s sinfulness. To seek to do so would be Satanic shamelessness, since the very impulse to shame and embarrassment that persists after the Fall attests to the grace that remains of the grace that was stripped away. Every confused and hasty reach for whatever garment is at hand is a testament of memory to the one lost garment and thus an acknowledgment that the self apart from God is unbearably, impossibly naked, more flayed alive than naked, having lost the distinctive envelope of self that renders any person wholly recognizable to self and to others. To marshal this defensiveness in the service of open theological inquiry therefore requires more than a general sense of humor, but also a version of the psychodynamic of humor detailed by Sigmund Freud in the concluding section of his work Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.⁵ All forms of the comic, Freud argues, are means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing affects that interfere with it, but humor is distinguished from the prior categories of jokes and the comic, because unlike the latter two, the pleasure of humor is not derived at any one else’s expense. Freud explains: Humour is the most easily satisfied among the species of the comic. It completes its course within a single person; another person’s participation adds nothing new to it.

⁶

Ultimately the distinction between humor as intra-psychic and inter-psychic requires qualification, but it nevertheless points to the way in which the humor denoted by the former term manifests a kind of emotional maturity that the humor denoted by the latter term does not. With regard to this maturity one need not accept the total model of psychic economy underlying Freud’s definition of defensive processes in order to appreciate the value of humor as a means of enabling the mature individual to integrate uncomfortable truths into self-understanding:

We can gain some information about humorous displacement if we look at it in the light of a defensive process. Defensive processes are the psychical correlatives of the flight reflex and perform the task of preventing the generation of unpleasure from internal sources. In fulfilling this task they serve mental events as an automatic regulation, which in the end, incidentally, turns out to be detrimental and has to be subjected to conscious thinking . . . Humour can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes. It scorns to withdraw the ideational content bearing the distressing affect from conscious attention as repression does, and thus surmounts the automatism of defence. It brings this about by finding a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of unpleasure that is already in preparation and of transforming it, by discharge, into pleasure.

⁷

Contrary to the Freudian model of intra-psychic energies, and the ejaculatory pleasure those energies presumably economize through mechanisms of repression and discharge, the current argument proceeds on the assumption that no such interior economy, separable from the interpersonal context of its actual production as psychology, is discernible. And that literature, and theological writings considered as a kind of literature, are integral to that productive context. Yet this counter-Freudian assumption only underscores the importance of humor as a defensive process that is also a disposition of interpersonal relationship.

Humor enables the possibility of conscious attention, not to some distressing affect that is an object of repression arising from internal sources, but to the interpersonal generation of both distressing affects and the defensive processes of relationality that serve as automatic regulation of the experience of those affects. Humor consequently enables the mature individual not to blame others for the discovery of distressing truths about the self as those truths are revealed through self-conscious attendance to one’s affective response to other persons’ insistent embodiment. A humorous disposition toward the narrative presentation of other persons’ sexed selves enables a renewal of self-knowledge in knowledge of others. It opens the reader to a hermeneutic of reverence even toward those points of view, those traditions, those political, theological, and methodological commitments, that one finds most offensive, as they provide the occasion to take offense and thereby achieve conscious thinking that is not otherwise possible.

⁸

With this more technical definition of humor at hand, enriched possibilities emerge for a mature reading of Augustine on the doctrine of original sin and its relevance for theological discourse of sexuality. An alarming power of the association of sexuality and sin is the ironclad enclosure it accomplishes of the particular sinning self within the universal scope of one single original sin. Instead of dismissing as offensive the meaningful possibility that anyone can justly inherit sin, the challenge becomes in humor to think more openly the place of oneself in the procreative dynamic that sinful sexuality describes:

Human nature then is, without any doubt, ashamed about lust, and rightly ashamed. For in its own disobedience, which subjected the sexual organs solely to its own impulses and snatched them from the will’s authority, we see a proof of the retribution imposed on man for that first disobedience. And it was entirely fitting that this retribution should show itself in that part which effects the procreation of the very nature that was changed for the worse through that first great sin. This offence was committed when all mankind existed in one man, and it brought universal ruin on mankind; and no one can be rescued from the toils of that offence, which was punished by God’s justice, unless the sin is expiated in each man singly by the grace of God.

⁹

If lust is shameful, it is not necessarily because it proves the disobedience of the body to the governance of the will’s authority so much as because it proves the place of every human being within the chain of human relationship formed in sexual reproduction. Every individual after Adam and Eve is both created and born. Lust merely describes the movement by which the shame of sin, the exposure of the fallen self, proceeds from the created pair of originally sinning human beings to all their subsequent generations. The nakedness of the first sinners is no different than the nakedness of all other sinners. It is one common and complete disgrace from which there is no place to hide oneself. If theological debates in sexual ethics—unlike debates about other issues—are so impassioned, so heated, so bitter, perhaps it is because the activity of the sexual organs (sexual reproduction) defines the terms by