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And I think it’s very fascinating to think out what this idea itself means, or what is intended when it’s said that life has to have a purpose. I remember so well as a child listening to sermons in church in which the preacher would constantly refer to God’s purpose: “For you and for me.” And I could never make out what it was. Because when questioned about this, the reverend gentleman seemed to be evasive.
What is the purpose of God for the world? We used to sing a hymn, too: “God is working His purpose out as the year succeeds the year.” And the nearest clue one got to it was in the (sort of) refrain of the hymn: “Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be, when the Earth shall be filled with the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea.” And, of course, that raises the question: what is the glory of God? Well, now, it’s pretty obvious, I think, that when we talk about life having or not having a meaning, we’re not using quite the ordinary sense of the word “meaning” as the attribute of a sign.
We are not saying, are we, that we expect this natural universe to behave as if it were a collection of words signifying something other than themselves. It isn’t a point of view which would reduce our lives in the world merely to the status of signs. And it’s obviously in some different sense than that that Goethe wrote his famous lines at the end of Faust: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis”—forgive my pronunciation of German—“All that is mortal (or all that is perishable) is but a symbol.” And so: a symbol of what?
What do we want to feel, what would satisfy us as being the meaning behind this world? It’s so often, you know, that we don’t follow our ideas and our desires through. Most of the things that we want very fervently are things that we’ve only half-glimpsed.
Our ideals are very often suggestions, hints, and we don’t know really exactly what we mean when we think about it. But there is this obscure sense in which we feel that life ought to have significance and be a symbol in at least that sense—if not just so arid a symbol as a mere sign. Or it also may mean that life is meaningful; an individual feels that his life amounts to something when he belongs and fits in with the execution of some group enterprise.
He feels he belongs in a plan. And this, too, seems to give people a sense of great satisfaction. But we have to pursue that question further, too.
Why is it that a plan, why is it that fellowship with other people gives the sense of meaning? Does it come down, perhaps, to another sense of meaning that life is felt to be meaningful when one is fully satisfying one’s biological urges—including the sense of hunger, the sense of love, the sense of self-expression in activity, and so on? But then again, we have to push that inquiry further: what do our biological urges really point towards?
Are they just, however, things always projected towards a future? Is biology and its processes nothing but going on towards going on towards going on? Or there’s a fourth and more theological sense of the meaning of life.
In all theistic religions, at any rate, the meaning of life is God himself. In other words, all this world means a person, it means a heart, it means an intelligence. And the relationship of love between God and man is the meaning of the world.
The sight of God is the glory of God, and so on. But again, here, there’s something to be further pursued. What is it that we want in love with a person, and even a person in the sense of the Lord God?
What is the content of it? What is it that we are really yearning after? Well, now, if we go back to the first point—taking Goethe’s words that all that is transitory is but a symbol, and that we want to feel that all things have significance—it does seem to me that there’s a sense in which we often use the word “significance” where the word seems to be chosen quite naturally, and yet at the same time it’s not quite the right word.
We say, for example, often, of music, that we feel it to be significant, when just at the same time, we don’t mean that it expresses some particular kind of concretely realizable emotion, and certainly it’s not imitating the noises of nature. A program music, you know, which simply imitates something else, and it deliberately sets out to express sadness or joy (or whatever), is not the kind of thing I mean. So often when one listens to the beautiful arabesque character of the Baroque composers—Bach or Vivaldi—it is felt to be significant not because it means something other than itself, but because it is so satisfying as it is.
And we use, then, this word, “significance,” so often in those moments when our impetuous seeking for fulfillment cools down, and we give ourselves a little space to watch things as if they were worth watching. Ordinary things. And in those moments when our inner turmoil has really quietened, we find significance in things that we wouldn’t expect to find significant at all.
I mean, this is, after all, the art of those photographers who have such genius in turning the camera towards such things as peeling paint on an old door, or mud and sand and stones on a dirt road, and showing us there that, if we look at it in a certain way, those things are significant. But we cannot say significant of what so much as significant of themselves. Or perhaps significance, then, is the quality of a state of mind in which we notice that we’re overlooking the significance of the world by our constant quest for it later.
All this language is, of course, quite naturally vague and imprecise, because I think the wrong word is used—and yet, not entirely the wrong word because, as I said, it comes so naturally to us. It was Clive Bell, the great aesthetician, who wanted to say that all the characteristic of art, especially the characteristic of aesthetic success in painting, was the creation of significant form. Again, a very vague, imprecise expression.
But it certainly is an attribute not only of those moments in which we are tranquil inside, but also of moments of deep, spiritual experience—of what would be called mokṣa (or “release”) in Hinduism, or satori in Zen. That, in those moments, the significance of the world seems to be the world, seems to be what is going on now. And we don’t look any further.
The scheme of things seems to justify itself at every moment of its unfoldment. I pointed out that this was particularly a characteristic of music. It’s also a characteristic of dancing, and in the sensation of belonging with one’s fellow man; in the carrying out of some significant pattern of life, which I mentioned as a second sense of the world being meaningful.
Again, the character of this feeling is, again, something that is fulfilled in itself. To dance is not to be going anywhere. When we dance in the ballroom, we don’t have a destination, we’re just going around the room.
And it’s in doing this—it’s in executing the pattern, in singing the music with other people—that, even though this does not point to anything else outside itself, we again get the sense of meaning. And this is also obviously the case so often in the satisfaction of the biological urges. Does one live to eat or eat to live?
I’m not at all sure about this. I’m sure I very often live to eat because, sitting around a table with people (I don’t like eating alone) and enjoying food is absolutely delightful. And we’re not thinking when we do this—at least certainly I’m not—that we have to eat because it is good for us, and that we have to throw something down the hatch, as Henry Miller said, and swallow a dozen vitamins just because our system needs nourishment.
I remember, quite recently, there was an article in the Consumer Reports about bread. And there had been some correspondence and protest, saying that the bread one bought (white bread one buys in the stores) is perfectly inedible and lacking in nutrition, and that it’s much better to eat peasant-type breads: rough pumpernickel and things of that kind. And the experts replied that our white bread is perfectly full of good nutrients and there’s nothing really the matter with it at all.
Well, I felt like saying: it isn’t a matter, perhaps, of the bread being deficient in the essential vitamins. Bread isn’t medicine, it’s food. And one’s complaint against it is that it’s bad cookery.
It tastes of nothing. And we do tend, don’t we, to look upon food so often for what it will do for us rather than the delight of eating it. But if the satisfaction of biological urges is to mean anything, surely the point of these urges is not the fatuous one of mere survival.
We might say that the point of the individual is simply that he contributes to the welfare of the race. And the point of the race is that it reproduces itself to reproduce itself to reproduce itself and keep going. Now that isn’t really a point at all, that’s just fatuous.
Surely the race keeps going because going is great, because it’s fun. If it isn’t and never will be, then there’s no point, obviously, in going—I mean, looking at it from the most hedonistic standpoint. But then when we come to the question: what is fun?
What is the joy of it? Again we come to something that can’t very well be explained in the ordinary language of meaning of leading to something else. And this, I think, becomes preeminently true if we think of it in theological language: that the meaning of life is God.
In any of the theistic religions, what is God doing? What is the meaning of God? Why does He create the universe?
What is the content of the love of God for His creation? Well, there’s the frank answer of the Hindus that the godhead manifests the world because of līlā, which is the Sanskrit word for “play.” And this is likewise said in the Hebrew scriptures or the Christian Old Testament, in the Book of Proverbs, where there is a marvelous speech by the divine wisdom, Sophia, which in describing the function of the divine wisdom in the creation of the world—the world, in other words, is a manifestation of the wisdom of God—wisdom uses the phrase that in producing men and animals and all the creatures of the Earth, wisdom is playing, and it was the delight of wisdom to play before the presence of God. And when it is likewise said in the scriptures that the Lord God created the world for His pleasure, this again means, in a sense, for play.
And certainly this seems to be what the angels in Heaven are doing according to the traditional symbolic descriptions of Heaven: they are ringed around the presence of the Almighty, calling out “Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” through all eternity.
Well, “Alleluia” may have meant something originally, but as it’s used now it doesn’t mean anything except, well, in our own slang, “whoopee!” It is an exclamation of nonsensical delight. And it was Dante in the Paradiso who described the song of the angels as the laughter of the universe. Now, this sense of nonsense as the theme of the divine activity comes out also very strongly in the Book of Job.
I always think that the Book of Job is the most profound book in the whole Bible—Old Testament and New Testament—because here is the problem of the righteous man who has suffered, and all his friends try to rationalize it and say, “Well, you must have suffered because you really had a secret sin after all, and you deserve the punishment of God,” or rationalize it somehow. And when they’ve had their say, the Lord God appears on the scene and says, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel with words without knowledge?” And then proceeds to ask Job and his friends a series of absolutely unanswerable conundrums, pointing out all the apparent irrationality and nonsense of His creation. “Why,” for example, He said, “do I send rain upon the desert where no man is?” Most commentators on the Book of Job end with the remark that, well, this poses the problem of suffering and the problem of evil, but doesn’t really answer it.
And yet, in the end Job himself seems to be satisfied. He somehow surrenders to the apparent unreasonableness of the Lord God. And this is not, I think, because Job is beaten down and that he’s unduly impressed with the royal, monarchical, and paternalistic authority of the deity and doesn’t dare to answer back.
He realizes that somehow these very questions are the answer. I think, of all the commentators on the Book of Job, the person who came closest to this point was old G. K. Chesterton. He once made the glorious remark that it is one thing to look with amazement at a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who doesn’t exist, but quite another thing to look at a hippopotamus, a creature who does exist, and looks as if he doesn’t.
In other words, that all this strange world with its weird forms like hippopotami, and when you look at them from a certain point of view (stones and trees and water and clouds and stars), when you look at them from a certain point of view and don’t take them for granted, they’re as weird as any hippopotamus, or any imagination of fabulous beasts of gorgons and griffins and things like that. They are just plain improbable. And it is in this sense, I think, that they are the “alleluia”—as it were, the nonsense song.
Why do we love nonsense? Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his Why is it that all those old English songs are full of “Fal-de-riddle-eye-do” and “Hey nonny-nonny” and all those babbling choruses? Why is it that when we get hep with jazz we just go “Boody-boody-boop-de-boo” and so on, and enjoy ourselves swinging it?
It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world—that isn’t going anywhere, that is a dance. But it seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is non-sense. But still, we want to use about it the word “significant.” Significant nonsense?
Yes! Nonsense that is not just chaos, that is not just blathering balderdash, but that has in it rhythm, fascinating complexity, a kind of artistry. It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we come to the profoundest meaning.
I don’t think I need to tell you that, in a very special and peculiar way, Western Man is hung up on sex, and the major reason for this is that he has a religious background quite unique among the religions of the world. I’m thinking specifically of Christianity, and in a secondary way Judaism, insofar as Judaism in Europe and the United States is strongly influenced by Christianity. But Christianity is, of all religions in the world, the one uniquely preoccupied with sex, more so than priapism, more so than tantric yoga, more so than any kind of fertility cult which has ever existed on the face of the Earth.
There has never, never, never been a religion in which sexuality was so important. And there are a certain very simple standards by which this can be judged. In popular speech, when you say of a given person that he or she is living in sin, you know very well that you do not mean that they’re engaged in a business to defraud the public by the sale of badly made bread or anything of that kind.
You know that they’re not setting up a check forgery business. No, people who are living in sin are people who have an irregular sexual partnership. In the same way, when you say something is immoral it pretty much means that it’s something sexually irregular.
I remember when I was a boy in school, we used to have a preacher. He came to us every year—the same man, once a year—and he always talked on the subject of “drink, gambling, and immorality.” I remember the way he rolled it round his tongue, and it was very clear what “immorality” was. And also, I might point out that—present company excepted; the Unitarian Church being somewhat unusual—most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the Western world are, frankly, sexual regulation societies.
They occasionally get excited about other moral issues, but really not very much. In other words, when you ask: what can people get kicked out of church for? Let’s suppose you consider important ministers, bishops, priests, and so on—they can live in envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, and be in perfectly good standing.
But the moment anything about their sexual life becomes a little unusual, out you go! And that’s about the only thing you can go out for. You study, for example, a Roman Catholic manual of moral theology, these manuals of moral theology are technical books about sins of all kinds, just exactly what they are, how they are done, how grave they are, mostly for the advice of confessors.
And they’re always arranged according to the ten commandments. And when they get to the commandment “thou shalt not commit adultery,” the volume expands like this. In fact, it occupies two thirds of the whole book.
All the details. So we have in a very special way got sex on the brain—which isn’t exactly the right place for it. Now, this needs going into, because it’s not as simple as it looks.
There are really tow roots of the whole problem. One of them is the problem of why sexual pleasure, of all pleasures—as a kind of really supreme pleasure—is singled out for religious people to be particularly afraid of. This is not only true in Christianity.
I say Christianity emphasizes it in a certain way. But in Asian religions also (especially in India) there is a prevailing view that if you want to attain real heights of spirituality, the one thing you must give up is sexuality—in the ordinary sense of genital sexual relationships with man or woman, as the case may be. And this reflects in part, you see, an attitude to the physical world.
Because it is, after all, through sexuality that we have—along with eating—our most fundamental relationship to materiality, to nature, to the physical universe. And it is the point at which we can become most attached to the body, to the physical organism, to material life. That’s one reason why it’s problematic.
The other reason why it’s problematic is more subtle, and that is that sexuality is something which you cannot get rid of. Do what you may, life is sexual—in the sense, for example, that you are either male or female; there are various other gradations, but basically they’re forms of maleness and femaleness—and also that every one of you is the result of sexual intercourse. And this feature of life can be looked at in one of two ways.
You can say on the one hand that all Man’s higher ideals—his spirituality and so forth—is simply repressed sexuality, or on the other hand you can say that human sexuality is a manifestation—a particular form or expression—of what is spiritual, metaphysical, divine, or whatever you want to call it. I hold to the latter view. I don’t think that religion is repressed sexuality.
I think, however, that sexuality is just one of the many forms in which whatever all this is expresses itself. But, you see, if this thing is something you cannot get rid of, and if you realize that, indeed, a way of life in which sexuality is in some way put down or repressed is nonetheless an expression of sexuality, then we come to a view of a religion in which sex is a very special taboo, which is rather unusual. It’s normally said, you see, yes, that Christianity is a religion in which sex is taboo.
And this has simply no getting around it. I know up-to-date ministers today think sex is alright. It’s perfectly okay if you’re married and you’ve got a mature relationship with a woman.
It’s alright, and they kind of damn it with faint praise. But if you read anything of Christian writings prior to, shall we say, 1850—to set a date rather arbitrarily—you will find that it’s not alright. Not at all.
It’s tolerated between married couples and strictly for the procreation of children. But on the whole, to do without it is best. As Saint Paul put it: it’s better to marry than to burn—to burn with the first of lust, and ultimately to burn in hell.
But always, consistently, there is simply no getting away from it. In all the writings of the church fathers, from Saint Paul himself right through to Saint Ignatius Loyola—or any of the great, relatively modern, leaders of Catholic spirituality; or you can look at Calvin, you can look at great Protestants; John Knox—on the whole, sex is sin and sex is dirt. And you can say very simply that this is all bad and something very wrong, but I want to point out that there is another side to all this.
There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it. And as a result of all these centuries of sexual repression and associating it with dirt, the West has developed a peculiar form of eroticism.
But that is an aspect of this whole problem which I don’t think is really very profitable to explore. I just want to mention it in passing that the whole attitude of anti-sexuality in the Christian tradition is not as anti as it looks. It is simply a method of making sex prurient and exciting in a kind of dirty way.
And I suppose it’s to be recommended for people who are not feeling very frisky and need to be pepped up. The other side of the problem is much more interesting. That is to say, the first thing I mentioned—why it is that there has been a problem for human beings about pleasure.
And we’ll take sexual activity as a supreme pleasure, as a supreme involvement of one’s self with the body and with the physical world. Why should there be a problem here? Well, the point is simply—isn’t it?—that the physical world is transient.
It’s impermanent. It falls apart. And bodies that were once strong, smooth, and lovely in youth begin to wither and become corrupt, and turn at last into skeletons.
And if you cling on to one of those and it suddenly turns into a skeleton in your hand—as it will if you speed up your sense of time a little—you feel cheated. And there has been, for centuries, a lament about this: that life is so short, that all the beauties of this world fall apart, and therefore, if you are wise, you don’t set your heart on mortal beauty, but you set your heart on spiritual values that are imperishable. Even that supposed tipler and rake, Omar Khayyam, says that: And so don’t bet on that horse.
And read any kind of spiritual literature you want to. Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist. All of them seem to emphasize the importance of detachment from the body, from the physical world so that you won’t be engulfed in the stream of impermanence—the idea being, you see, that, to the degree that you identify yourself with the body and with the pleasures of the body, to that degree you are simply going to be something that is sucked away in the course of transiency.
So, therefore, hold yourself aloof—as in, for example, the advice of many Hindus in the practice of yoga: you are advised to look upon all sensory experiences as something out there which you simply witness. You, yourself, identify yourself with the eternal spiritual unchanging Self, the witness of all that goes on, but who is no more involved in it than, say, the smoothness or the color of a mirror is affected by the things which it reflects. Keep your mind like a mirror: pure and clean, free from dust, free from flaws, free from stain, and just reflect everything that goes on, but don’t be attached.
You will find this all over the place. But it has always seemed to me that that attitude of essential detachment from the physical universe has underlying it a very serious problem. The problem being: why a physical universe at all, in that case?
If god is in some way responsible for the existence of a creation, and if this creation is basically a snare, why did he do it? And of course, according to some theologies, the physical universe is looked upon as a mistake, as a fall from the divine state; as if something went wrong in the heavenly domain, and causing spirits such as we are to fall from their highest state and to become involved with animal bodies. And so there is an ancient analogy of man which runs right through to the present time that your relationship to your body is that of a rider to a horse—Saint Francis called his body “Brother Ass”—that you are a rational soul in charge of an animal body, and therefore, if you belong to the old-fashioned school, you beat it into submission.
As Saint Paul said, “I beat my body into submission.” Or if you are a Freudian, you treat your horse not with a whip, but with lumps of sugar: kindly, but still it’s your horse. Even in Freud there is a very, very strong element of puritanism. Read Philip Rieff’s book on Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, and how he shows that Freud basically thought that sex was degrading, but nevertheless something biologically unavoidable, something terribly necessary, which couldn’t just be swept aside.
It had to be dealt with. But there is, you see, that heritage of thinking of ourselves as divided—the ego as the rational soul of spiritual origin, and the physical body as the animal component—and therefore, all spiritual success in life requires the spiritualization of the animal component: the sublimation of its dirty and strange urges so that it’s thoroughly cleaned up. I suppose the ideal sexual relationship of such persons would be held on an operating table under disinfectant sprays.
Now, it is of course true that the physical world—its beauty and so on—is transient. We are all falling apart in some way or another, especially after you pass the peak of youth. But it’s never struck me that that is something to gripe about.
That the physical world is transient seems to me to be part of its splendor. I can imagine nothing more awful than, say, attaining to the age of thirty, and suddenly being frozen in that age for always and always. You would become a kind of—we would all be a sort of—animated waxworks.
And you would discover as a matter of fact that people who had that physical permanence would feel like plastic. And that is, as a matter of fact, what is going to be done about us by technology in order to attain perpetual youth. All the parts of us that decay and fold up are going to be replaced by very skillfully manufactured plastic parts so that, in the end, we will be entirely made of very, very sophisticated plastic.
And everybody will feel like that, and everybody will be utterly bored with each other. Because the very fact, you see, that the world is always decaying and always falling away is the same thing as its vitality. Vitality is change.
Life is death. It is always falling apart. And so there are certain supreme moments, you see, at which (in the body) we attain superb vitality—and that’s the time.
Make it then. That’s the moment. Just like when an orchestra is playing: the conductor wants to get a certain group of, say, violins to come in at a certain moment, and he’s conducting, and he’s got to now make it, and they all have to go zzzt right now, see?
Of course. That’s the whole art of life: to do it at the right time, to do it in time—like you dance or you play in time. And so, in the same way, when it comes to love, sexuality—or equally so in all the pleasures of gastronomy—timing is of the essence.
And then it’s happened, and you’ve had it. But that’s not something that one should look upon with regret. It only is something regrettable if you didn’t know how to take it when it was timely.
And this is really the essence of what I want to talk to you about. Because, you see, to be detached from the world—in the sense that Buddhists and Taoists and Hindus will often talk about detachment—does not mean to be non-participative. You can have a sexual life, very rich and very full, and yet all the time be detached.
By that I don’t mean that you just go through it mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere. I mean a complete participation, but still detached. And the difference of the two attitudes is this.
On the one hand, there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure, so afraid that you won’t make it, that you grab it too hard, that you just have to have that thing! And if you do that, you destroy it completely. And therefore, after every attempt to get it you feel disappointed.
You feel empty, you feel something was lost—and therefore you want it again. You have to keep repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, because you never really got there. And it’s this that is the hangup.
This is what is meant by attachment to this world in an evil sense. But, on the other hand, pleasure in its fullness cannot be experienced when one is grasping it. I knew a little girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit.
She was so delighted with the bunny rabbit and so afraid of losing it that, taking it home in the car, she squeezed it to death with love. And lots of parents do that to their children, and lots of spouses do it to each other: they hold on too hard, and so take the life out of this transient, beautifully fragile thing that life is. To have it—to have life, and to have its pleasure—you must at the same time let go of it, and then you can feel perfectly free to have that pleasure in the most gutsy, rollicking, earthy, lip-licking way.
One’s whole being taken over by a kind of undulative, convulsive ripple, which is like the very pulse of life itself. This can happen only if you let go; if you are willing to be abandoned. It’s funny, that word “abandon.” We speak of people who are dissolute as being abandoned.
But we can also use abandon as the characteristic of a saint. A great spiritual book by a Jesuit father is called Abandonment to the Divine Providence. There are people like that who just aren’t hung up.
They are the poor in spirit—that is to say, they spiritually are poor in the sense that they don’t cling on to any property, they don’t carry burdens around. They’re free. Well, just that sort of spiritual poverty, that let-go-ness, is quite essential for the enjoyment of any kind of pleasure at all, and particularly sexual pleasure.
Now, when I was a boy in school—I’ll go back to this, because my experience may not be… I don’t know how typical it would be of children brought up in the United States in a religious environment—but my experience in England was quite fascinating. You know, when one is baptized as a child, and you don’t know anything about it, and your godfathers and your godmothers are your sponsors. Then there comes a time when you are about to enter into puberty when you are confirmed, when you undertake for yourself your own baptismal vows that were made on behalf of you.
And in England, confirmation into the Church of England—which is Episcopalian in this country—confirmation is preceded by instruction. And this instruction consisted very largely of lessons in church history, because the British approach to religion is peculiarly archeological. It is based on the great past, the great Christian saints and heroes.
And it’s really quite interesting, because it somehow associates you and puts you in the tradition of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and all that sort of thing. But the time comes when every candidate for confirmation has a private talk with a school chaplain. And obviously, in every process of initiation into mysteries from time immemorial, there has been the passing on of a secret.
And so there’s a certain anticipation about this very private communication. Because you would think if you are being initiated into a religion, what the secret consists of is some marvelous information about the nature of god, or the fundamental reason for being, and so on. But not so in this case.
The initiatory secret talk was a serious lecture on the evils of masturbation. What these evils were were not clearly specified. But it was vaguely hinted that ghastly diseases would result.
And so we used to—sort of in a perverse way—enjoy tormenting ourselves with imaginations as to what kind of terrible venereal diseases, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and the great Siberian itch, would result from this practice. Now, the extraordinary thing about it is this: that the very chaplain who gave these lectures had in his own upbringing been given the same lecture by other chaplains—and this went back some distance in history, I imagine—and they all knew perfectly well that one of the characteristic behavior patterns of adolescents is ritual defiance of authority: that you have to make some protest against authority, and in this you are in league with all your contemporaries, your peer group. And nobody, of course, would dream of giving anybody else away, because that would be to be a tattletale, a skunk, definitely not one of the boys.
And so, therefore, quite obviously, masturbation provided the ideal outlet for this ritual defiance because it was fun, it was also an assertion of masculinity, and it was very, very, wicked. So I meditated on this some time as to why this system continued, and I came to the realization that the Christian put-down of sex is an extremely mysterious thing. In the religious background of the Western world we have, in the main, two traditions: one Semitic, and one Greek.
So far as the Semitic tradition is concerned, the material world and sexuality are definitely good things. Both Jews and Muslims think that god’s creation of beautiful women was a grand idea. In the Arabic book which is their Islamic version of the Kama Sutra, known as the Perfumed Garden, the book opens with a prayer to Allah which is a thanksgiving—a very full, detailed thanksgiving—for the loveliness of women with which Allah has blessed mankind.
And in the Book of Proverbs we are to enjoy our wives while they are young. But on the whole it is the Semitic belief that sexuality is justified solely for purposes of reproduction of the species. This makes it good in the eyes of god.
And sexual energy should not really be wasted for other purposes. That’s the limitation put on it. Now, on the other hand, we have a Greek tradition which is peculiar in that it is strongly influenced by a dualistic view of the universe in which material existence is conceived as a trap; as a fall into turgid, clogging matter which is antagonistic to the lightness and freedom of the spirit.
And therefore, for certain kinds of Greek religion—among which we must name the Orphic mysteries, the new Platonic point of view, and the late agnostic points of view—being saved means being delivered from material existence into a purely spiritual state. From this point of view, sexual involvement is the very archetype of material involvement. Mater: “mother,” matr: “matter,” are really the same word.
And so the love of woman is the great snare—this is, incidentally, a doctrine invented by men. And it goes back to the words of Adam: “The woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me, and I did eat!” Now, in the development of Christian theology, from approximately the time of Saint Paul through the beginning of the Renaissance, it was universally held that sex was a bad thing. You should read Saint Augustine on this.
He said that in the Garden of Eden, before the fall, reproduction took place in just the same way, and with just the same lack of excitement, as one excretes or passes water, and there was no shameful excitation of the sexual parts. And the whole attitude of the church fathers in those centuries was that the virgin state was immensely superior, spiritually, to the married state, and that sexual relationships were excusable only within the bonds of marriage and for the sole purposes of reproduction. And the manual, the moral penitentiaries of the theologians of the Middle Ages, list all sorts of penances that must be said even by married couples who performed sexual intercourse on the night before attending mass, worse still before receiving holy communion, and of course it must utterly be avoided on certain great church festivals.
So although in theory marriage is a sacrament which somehow blesses this peculiar relationship, there is a definite attitude that it is after all dirty and not very nice. Now, you must realize, too, that in those days, the institution of marriage was not what it is today. Marriage at the time of the rise and development of Christianity was a social institution for alliances between families.
You did not marry the person of your own choice except under the most peculiar circumstances. You married the girl your family picked out for you. And they thought it over carefully from its political point of view as well as from the point of view of eugenics, and whether this was a good, healthy girl, and whether this was a good, healthy man, and they had an economic bargaining about it, and you married this girl.
You weren’t necessarily in love with her. And it was perfectly well understood in the secular world that, on the side, you had other arrangements. You had—if you could afford them—concubines or even second and third and fourth wives.