The Original Human, Sex, and Friendship
This chapter is the hardest one of this book. Patient reader, we have thought with some of the smartest people of human history about the important matter of friendship. We have seen that there are good reasons to hold that friendship is the point of being human, that our ultimate happiness is found in friendship, and that, for Christians, this desire for friendship extends ever more broadly and includes even friendship with God. All this is highly countercultural, but it is as nothing compared to our next topic.
What shall we say about sex?
We return to Genesis 2, which Aelred showed us is about the establishment of friendship, to attend now to a rather obvious detail. There are two human beings; one is male and one is female. What is the significance of sexual difference? How does it relate to friendship?
We retrace the logic of Genesis 2 with sex in mind. God pronounced that it was not good for the human to be alone. This spurred the creation of the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. It seems their creation was prepared for by the preceding injunction for the human to avoid political knowledge, the knowledge of “good and bad” that Solomon, much later, prays for in order that he might rule Israel well. The suggestion is that the resulting community of humans and birds and beasts was to be egalitarian, without rule or lawmaking or the relation of command and obedience. Yet birds and beasts, although capable of meaningful community with the human, were not able to remove the problem of his aloneness.
The original human, discovered to be lacking in his aloneness, needed a friend. As it turned out, true friendship waited upon the emergence of the woman from the side of the man.
This, one hardly needs to say, is not a historical account; the promise, however, is that if we attend closely to the Word of God as written, we can find therein depths of mystery. So it is here with the original human being. Traditionally translated as “man” and given a masculine pronoun, “he” might be pictured in our minds with male sexual apparatus; when woman is made out of his side, then (in this imagining) the original singular male comes to have a complement. Yet it seems to me that the text is patient of another reading. The “man” that God made from the dust of the earth could have been (for all the difference it makes in the story) a being without gender, sexless. And then when the help-meet for “him,” “his” fitting companion, comes into being from “his” side, both sexes are created at once. “He” awakes from sleep as male, and she who stands before him is female.
This reading interestingly deprioritizes the male, but more importantly, it coheres with the teaching of the rest of the chapter: that the primal garden was to be a place of communion without rule. Yet whether we imagine the original singular human as being a male or not, the story teaches us that friendship makes its appearance and becomes a concrete human possibility precisely when there is another human being who is, as a woman at the side of a man, at once the same and yet irreducibly different. A human and a bird, or a human and a beast, whatever fellowship they may have, are found in this story not to be similar enough for friendship. Equality of a fundamental sort is needed.
Still, although needed, fundamental equality is not enough. At the point when friendship emerges as a possibility—the point where there are two human beings—the text shows the two as non-interchangeable, visibly different and inescapably so. One can see them as exactly equal: neither was there prior to the other, for the original human somehow contained the woman that God fashioned from that original human’s side. They are exactly equal, and yet they cannot be interchanged, a point guaranteed by their sexual difference. The friendship that answers the problem of human aloneness is made with one who is equal (in a way that no other creature is equal) and yet different in a manner that perdures.
Now the text immediately comments that their sexual difference is the origin of marriage. And in the way the story continues through the acquisition of the knowledge of good and bad, the expulsion from the garden, the giving of the law, and so forth, this story does give an account of the origin of marriage. The point, in fact, is made by the text itself. The two emerge as a separation made out of the original human; there is delight in their meet-ness, their fittingness for each other, and thus, it says, “shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). That this verse is significant for our understanding of marriage is underlined by Jesus’ singling it out in his teaching on divorce (e.g., Matt. 19:5). So the reader cannot deny that Genesis 2 is about marriage. Was Aelred wrong, are we wrong, if we persist in seeing it as pointing to the origin also, and perhaps even more so, of friendship?
We may find our first clue if we ask where those words “his father and his mother” came from, there in the garden. In the garden, those words cannot refer to anything: there are only two human beings, neither having the history marked by a belly button. No mothers and no fathers are in this picture; the text does not itself give any referent or contextual meaning for such terms. The verse about a man leaving his parents provides an explanation of something that comes after the garden: it explains the function (or one function) of sexual difference in our world after the fall. It is, in the context of the story, a parenthetical remark, an aside spoken to the reader. For us, a man and a woman who leave their childhood homes and form together a new thing—“one flesh”—are creating new and successive generations. One generation follows upon another; the new comes, the old passes away. Such is the place of marriage in our world: the constitutive link of the generations, the divinely given means for new families to arise as the older ones die off.
But we are not required to hold that the postlapsarian context of fathers and mothers and children had to be the original, prelapsarian point of sexual difference.
This brings our attention to another feature of Genesis 2. In this chapter, there is only one instance of every animal and bird, and there are only two human beings. There is no command to any of them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the spaces God has made for them. Genesis 1, by contrast, is trying to show the importance of sexual difference as the means of being fruitful and completing the plenitude of the creation God has made. Genesis 2 has a subtly different and complementary emphasis. It focuses on the problem of aloneness. That problem is solved once there are two humans, one male, one female. Once the problem is solved, there need not be any more.
We may note that the text does not specify what “male” and “female” mean in the garden, nor does it interpret their “cleaving” for us. To cleave to each other seems to have been their spontaneous joy, a sexual embrace that put the two back together. Not only has the one been made two, but the two are also one. But what was the character of that sexual embrace? Most early Christian theologians (with Augustine as a notable exception) thought there would have been no children had there been no fall. And that means two people, only two people, living forever. (It seems also to mean one cat, one dog, one horse, one swallow, and so forth.) Which is to say, the two humans would live forever, without aging or death or succeeding generations, thanks to that tree of life, the named but not forbidden tree. And in that case, the question of the relationship of sex and friendship would never arise. The man and the woman, solitary apart but not solitary together, would have cleaved to each other, and they would have been friends. Our problem—how to recover friendship in our day and the problem of the place of sex within friendship—would never have become their problem.
We should note that even for Augustine, who held that sexual relations in the garden would have been procreative, the purpose of God in creating human beings was for them to have friendship. That is to say, for Augustine, friendship is more fundamental than marriage in God’s design. “Since every man is a part of the human race, and human nature is something social and possesses the capacity for friendship as a great and natural good, for this reason God wished to create all men from one.” Endowed thus at creation, we have a built-in capacity for friendship, a “great and natural good.” Indeed, for Augustine, the point of marriage is friendship. Marriage is a “natural companionship between the two sexes”; quite apart from procreation or sexual intercourse, “the marriage of male and female is something good.”1
In this part of Genesis, there is a further depth—namely, the absence of vulnerability in the garden. One of each animal is enough because no animal dies. There is no ruling of one over another but only the friendly fellowship of the beasts with the man and the woman, themselves cleaving to each other in invulnerable friendship. This “cleaving” of the original man and woman does not—as the next verse points out—entail or result in the knowledge of nakedness, a knowledge that comes to be after the fall and is connected with shame (contrast Gen. 2:25 with 3:7). To know you are naked is to know you are vulnerable.
The ultimate vulnerability, which clothing may cause us to forget but cannot overcome, is the vulnerability to death. God had told the original human, when he forbade eating the fruit of the tree of political knowledge, that “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). But he did not forbid eating of the other named tree, the tree of life (2:9), and once the humans took on political knowledge, he found it necessary to expedite their expulsion from the garden lest they eat of it also and thus have unending life as political beings subject to rule and obedience and sorrow (3:22–23). Thus it appears that the mortality that comes from political knowledge is neither instant nor inevitable death. Having become mortal by their own shameful disobedience, they understand their genitals not as shameful in themselves but as the mark of their shame. Fallen, they have become procreators. The mark of their shame will be their children—a paradoxical mark, to be sure, since bearing and rearing children will also be a mark of their hope.
In Genesis 2 and 3 there is no “knowledge” of nakedness that is not shame filled. Robert Sacks, whose work on Job and Genesis we noted earlier, asks, “Why should nakedness be shameful outside the Garden and yet not shameful within?” One reason, he puts forth, is that the most painful thing in human life—more painful than all our other “pains and labors”—is our knowledge that we will die, that our life will come to an end. “But the act of procreation is intended to be a replacement for immortality and hence a constant reminder to man of his mortality. Since sexual relations in the Garden did not have that character,” he concludes, “there was no reason for shame.”2
We have been focusing on Genesis 2, the so-called second creation account of the Bible, for the reason that it addresses the problem of solitude and thus has promise for insight into human friendship. By having complementary creation accounts, the Bible suggests that there will be no simple answer to any question about our human origins. The first chapter gives us a glorious cosmic vision of creation as a whole, opening with the great expanses of air and water that God initially brings into being, which he then, in days four, five, and six, fills with creatures who, with his blessing, assist in the completion of creation’s fullness. The fish are to fill the water and the birds the air, and to human beings is given the earth. “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill . . . the earth” (Gen. 1:22; cf. 1:28). Genesis 1 does not face the problem of human aloneness but simply assumes its solution by creating humans, along with everything else, in plurality. It is a creation account of abundance and indeed plenitude, with a blessing to fruitfulness and multiplication and filling—and, significantly, no fall (although it has hints of it: “rule” and “dominion” appear, unanticipated, in vv. 16, 26, and 28). In the very different account that begins in Genesis 2, fallen humanity knows it is fallen because it is mortal; the sign of its mortality is that it has children, children who attest to the hope in the hearts of their parents even as their arrival on the stage foreshadows their parents’ exit.
Genesis 2 is a close-framed creation account. It has no spaces that need to be filled; the garden needs only to be tended. It is designed as a place of equality and friendship, without rule and, at least to explicit appearance, without procreation. Disobedient man and woman, exiled into a harsh world of rule and obedience and sorrow, will know they are—beneath whatever protection their clothing may allow—naked. However much they cover up the fact, they are exposed to a hostile or indifferent world in which they will die, and human life will continue not in themselves but in the succession of their descendants, who will gradually spread abroad over the difficult soil of earth. There is (there has to be!) a role for friendship in this world—a centrally important role and a precious one, as the vulnerable Job came to see.
What might this mean about the relation of sex and friendship?
Experiencing Sex and Being Human
For clarity, let’s put it baldly. One must have friends in order to be fully human. One need not marry or otherwise have sexual intercourse in order to be fully human.
This is why I have labored to show that friendship is the inner meaning of Genesis 2: as Aelred says, “Woman was created expressly as an incentive for happiness and friendship” (I.57).3 For us who are fallen, Genesis 2 is also a story of the origin of marriage, but its deeper purpose is to reveal friendship as the point of human plurality.
But what will we then say about our friendships? Should we seek somehow to go back to paradise, to restore somehow our original goodness? No. The text makes it clear that the garden is not for us, and we are not to seek to return to it. Redemption in Christ is no restoration to the original paradise; it is something new, encompassing both vulnerability and rule. Christ’s nakedness on the cross shows his complete human vulnerability. And there, as the king of all kings, he opens for us not a politics-free zone, not a primitive, egalitarian garden—but a kingdom.
Is there a place for sexual relations in the kingdom? Jesus teaches—it is the insight with which we began—that in the kingdom of God, there is no marriage. This teaching signals that the “cleaving” of the garden, at least if it is interpreted as sexual union, is not characteristic of redeemed humanity. It seems to me that a more intense intimacy is on offer to those who seek the kingdom. But at any rate, we should welcome these questions because—although I have called it, conventionally, “the fall”—the disobedience of the two humans in the garden had many joyful results. Adam indeed seems from the start to be a fundamentally hopeful man, for immediately after God pronounces the dire consequences for the humans and the animals and the earth, Adam calls the woman Eve to signify that she is the mother of all the living. It is as if he were saying, “Life is going to be hard; we are all going to have to endure rule and obedience and pain and toil—but, goodness, how many people there are going to be!”
That is the mark of a hopeful soul. If what happened in the garden was a fall, it was nonetheless felix culpa, a happy fall. We can rejoice that now the population of the kingdom of heaven can be huge, and that means that the possibilities for friendship in the end may reach beyond all number.
The Sex Question and Jesus
Jesus taught that there is no marriage in the kingdom of heaven. The resurrected body is to be deathless without decay of any sort. There will be no disease, no aging—and thus no children growing into adulthood.4 In this sense, it will be like the original paradise: there won’t be generations, for in the world to come, people will not progress through various stages of life.
We should contemplate the universal friendship of the kingdom of God without wondering whether there will be multiple if not universal paired-up cleavings. Jesus’ teaching (that he has come to reestablish friendship, that the kingdom has no giving and taking in marriage) shows us that in the end the cleaving of marriage is incompatible with the universal friendship of the kingdom of God; it will pass away, but friendship will endure. But we are not there yet. In this life, which includes the eschatological call to have and be friends, some of us, some of the time, experience the particular form of friendship that is marriage. For us, friendship and the sexual embrace are not mutually exclusive; indeed, the cleaving of marriage can be experienced as a heightened measure of intimacy that goes beyond other experience. Despite this, there remains in this life a stark difference between the exclusivity of marriage (leaving father and mother, and indeed all others, for this spouse) and the innate expansiveness of the desire for friendship, where one may be added without leaving others behind.
These are theological clues that invite us to imagine something rarely thought of: an intimacy with friends that is deep, like that experienced by lovers but not expressed or prepared for by an intimate physical cleaving. This intimacy, since it is not physically consummated, is open to new friends in a way that marriage is closed. And even more speculatively, might these same clues also invite us to imagine that in the world to come there is some sort of nonsexual “cleaving” that pertains to the profound intimacy of friends? Could that be the complete mutual understanding that Jesus gives in his flesh and blood?
These reflections, these speculations, these guesses—they all hang on a willingness to say something that many people will find offensive. Dear reader, how Christianly countercultural are you willing to be? I take no pleasure in multiplying grounds of offense, and so this is not a point I have trumpeted in sermons or teaching or writing. It is with some repentance, therefore, that I say we need to make this clear: one need not experience sexual union in order to experience the fullness of being human. Saying this will be received as scandal, and yet it may be that this is the particular proclamation we Christians today are called upon to make unabashedly.
Consider again the life of Jesus. He, according to all reliable testimony, did not experience sexual relations. Yet despite this, faith attests him as the one complete human being. (Being without sin means he had nothing that subtracted from his humanity; we must keep in mind that the essence of sin is a failure to be fully human.) To be faithful to the revelation in Jesus, we must say that the experience of sexual union is not needed for a full and complete human life.
There is no reason to belabor how radically this runs against the thought patterns and assumed truths of our age. Sex, we are told a thousand times a day, is natural; to abstain from it is unnatural and creepy. The film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, for instance, plays on this assumption (while also here and there savvily undermining it). There are shows called The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, I am told, which trade on the same assumption. Sex is a normal thing that consenting adults do; it’s just a part of being human.
A widow gave me a recent memoir that had been given to her, The Widower’s Notebook, with a note for me to pass it on, read or unread. It’s the sort of book many well-intentioned people give to those whose spouses have died. (My own Losing Susan probably falls into the same category.) The author, a writer and artist, and his wife, similarly creative, had been married for forty years. Then a simple meniscus surgery quickly led to her death, possibly through medical malpractice (a combination of medicines felled her within days). He writes grippingly, starting there at the end and moving backward and forward, filling the reader in with details of their life together and chronicling his ongoing, now single life. Very soon people start asking him to go out. He isn’t ready. They invite him to dinner parties; he puts them off. His conversations with his friends reveal asymmetric assumptions: they are certain he needs to find another woman, or at least have sex. Not a friend or acquaintance in the book assumes otherwise. He himself dismisses celibacy as his future, but he wants more time, feels pushed. He knows that having sex with a friend would change the friendship forever, perhaps detrimentally, so it isn’t going to be a casual step for him. One friend, finally, gets him to meet her for dinner. He is late; he starts to apologize. She asks him to guess what she has been doing. He says, “Waiting.” She says she has been making a list of what she needs to do. “One: have sex. Two: go away for a romantic weekend and have more sex. Three . . .”5 After dinner they walk and stop in a bar for drinks. They walk to her home; she asks him if he wants to come up for coffee—he recalls, in Seinfeld, how the question about coffee is always a euphemism for sex. He says no.
Sometime later, after a buddy invites him into an exclusive online prostitute service (he declines), after a couple have him over for dinner (he declines their offer to introduce him to a suitable and sexy woman; the wife says never mind, he’ll be f***ing her or someone else soon enough), and after many other such conversations, a young woman comes up to him at a party. She is half his age and turns out to have been a student of his several years ago. They get talking, they go out for a walk, she invites him to her place. They have sex, several times, over what we gather is a few months. But they are clearly unequal: he never invites her to his place, for instance; their interests are quite different; they don’t share much besides sex. It wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted, of course, was for his wife to be alive.
It is a sex-saturated world out there, but some people would be open to hearing from the church that an alternative exists, something that is not negative (focusing on what you are not doing—namely, not having sex) but, to the contrary, positive (what you are doing—namely, building real intimacy in friendship). Here Christianity could be countercultural in a big way. But we need to be so wisely, with simultaneous cunning and innocence. (As Matthew has Jesus say, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” [10:16].) We need to listen to people, to find out what they really think, and we need to attend to social science data. The late-modern, laissez-faire sexual landscape is not empowering people to flourish. It does not satisfy the human longing for friendship, which is what human beings are made for. It is a gospel opening.
Celibacy Is for Everybody
Traditional Christian teaching about the place for sexual relations is clear: sexual relations belong in marriage and nowhere else. The explanations for this have varied, and the ranking of marriage vis-à-vis, for instance, vowed celibacy has also varied. But sex outside of marriage has, at best, been tolerated as a concession to a fallen world, and in this, Christianity has found itself hugely countercultural, not least in the environment of late antiquity in which it emerged.
This teaching means that Christianity calls every person, without exception, to celibacy for at least part of his or her life. We are called to be celibate prior to marriage. We are expected to be chaste if we marry, which means many things but includes having sexual relations with none save our spouse. And if our spouse dies, we are to return to celibacy, which continues for the rest of our life unless we marry again. Moreover, Christianity also has no expectation that any given person will marry or should marry or should seek to marry. So its clear teaching is that celibacy is for everybody, at least for part of life and sometimes for all of it. And furthermore—by the logic of this teaching, if not in the actual experience of people in congregations—this is a good and natural thing. It is not unnatural to be unmarried and therefore celibate—not unnatural and not harmful in itself.
So far so clear. Difficulties come in explanations, for to explain is to put a teaching in a particular cultural context, whereas this teaching extends universally.
Christian teaching can affirm that sexual relations are capable of ecstasy, a powerful pleasure that takes one out of oneself and can bind one particularly close to one’s sexual partner. (In a hook-up culture, this sexual affirmation is already countercultural.) Sexual ecstasy is in a sense sacramental: it points to the joy of total, mutual self-giving. Of course, there is much tawdry sex and much rather everyday sex, but its binding force is there and is a unique pleasure.
Yet to say that sex is a powerful pleasure, or even a unique pleasure, is not to say that it is a necessary human experience. There are other extraordinary and intense pleasurable experiences of ecstatic magnitude. Skydiving is said to be one, as are acid trips, and even, as happened to Dostoyevsky, being blindfolded and bound for execution, hearing the rifles go off, and finding one is still alive. A sensitive and accomplished artist can show us how these other intense experiences may contain their own erotic element or even be compared to a sexual climax. In the emergency room for back pain, I felt the narcotic enter my lower right arm. It went up to my shoulder, crossed my chest, then eased down through my whole body. While I did not experience arousal, I could understand if someone were to compare a drug experience with a postcoital sense of well-being. It was a bliss I had never experienced before and have not had since.
Pleasure is good in itself, and great pleasures are to be particularly valued, for they are signs of the goodness of God. The best pleasures are shared. Yet it is not necessary to our human flourishing that we have any of them in particular. The traditional Christian teaching is that the goodness of sexual union lies in marriage, but one who does not experience this good has no more a diminishment of human flourishing than a person who never jumps out of an airplane.
To speak broadly, all pleasures should be understood as ways of binding people together; sexual congress is something like an archetype for this. It is vividly, literally true when we think of skydiving: a novice is likely to take her first jump tightly bound to another who knows what is going to happen! Conversely, pleasures that turn solipsistic—masturbation could be the archetype—are destructive of our humanity because they cannot be shared (and therefore are increasingly unpleasurable). After my hospital experience of the pleasure of morphine, a colleague cautioned, “Watch out, Victor. That’s how guys like you get addicted.” Addiction is when you keep doing something even though the pleasure is all but gone.
This is the traditional teaching—that sex is good, that it belongs to marriage, and that celibacy is perfectly normal for all of us for at least part of our lives. But it is (will the reader allow me to say “alas”?) not a teaching much heard in our churches and not a teaching much lived out in our congregations. Reports come from single adults who desire opportunities to develop Christian friends but discover that the presumptive practice of their local church is that singles are looking for partners, people whom they might eventually marry. The conservative churches will expect the partners to abstain from sex until married; the liberal churches will have no such expectation; but both are united in a cultural concession and, in this, a failure to be Christianly courageous.6 Love of our neighbor, the sincere concern for human well-being, calls us to speak clearly. The ultimate point of life for everyone and for all parts of life, given by God and made vivid in Jesus, is friendship, not marriage.
Difference, Better-ness, and Deficiency
When we say that marriage or the experience of sexual relations is not necessary to being fully human, we must not insinuate that there is something wrong or dirty about marriage. (Making sex dirty is part of the devilish work of pornography, which a Christian sexual ethic must counter.) Marriage, and thus the experience of sexual relations, is a good thing, given to us by God. And again I underline the point: the shame, the “knowledge,” of nakedness that comes with the fall is not over the human body or the sexual act.
Part of my usual preparation of a couple for marriage is to work through the traditional opening speech of the celebrant in the marriage rite. In the prayer book of my church, one finds these words: “The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.”7 I point out to the couple that there are many things it is good for us to have, and yet we have them only because of the fall. Laws, for instance: we need them, but God didn’t give them originally. Languages in themselves, in whose multiplicity we find the delight of diverse ways of seeing the world, seem to exist in their plurality because of the baleful divisions within humanity. By contrast, that opening speech locates marriage uniquely prior to the fall in the goodness of creation. Furthermore, if one were to say of marriage that it isn’t a good thing because Jesus was not married, the rite points out that Jesus “adorned” the married state by being present and indeed by doing his first miracle at a wedding (see John 2). So while Jesus didn’t marry, neither did he demean or dismiss marriage.
We see it again: something can be a good thing and yet not a necessary thing. It is good for people to be expert at brain surgery. But if you are not a brain surgeon, you are no less human. Or a different sort of analogy: it is good for human beings to have language, but one is no less human if one’s language is French rather than Mandarin Chinese, or Sign rather than English. Or yet another: a child, once she exists, is a unique good, but prior to her coming into being, she was not necessary. So marriage can be good without being needful; although good, it is not a “manner of life” that all people should enter. And even though not all people need marry, that does not make it a bad thing.
With a sort of sophomoric mind (and remembering that a sophomore is, literally, a “wise moron”), I used to think in rather broad strokes that Christians early on promoted celibacy over marriage and that they made a mistake in doing so. I took the sixteenth-century Reformation as a time of correction, and Vatican II as the occasion for Roman Catholics to catch up, with the result, I thought, that we had broad ecumenical agreement today that marriage and celibacy are two equally good manners of life. I believe now that I was mistaken.
At least as a matter of clear thinking, it is not necessary, in order to affirm that two different things are each good, to go further and say that they are equally good. One good can be greater than the other, without there being anything wrong with either one. A person who is a fine chef and also an excellent surgeon, we might say, is better than someone who is a fine chef but not a surgeon (although excellence with a knife seems common to both). Or if we disagree on that, perhaps the following is easier. Money is a good thing, and human life is a good thing, but money is of less value than life (which is why murder is worse than robbery). To speak generally, there is no reason in principle to deny that some goods are better than others—however hard it might be to recognize the better-ness or to gain agreement about it in particular cases. For a beautiful example, one might meditate upon Dante’s Paradiso, an extended study in how one saint can be greater than another without there being any sadness anywhere. Difference and gradations and variety are all part of the heavenly gyroscope.
What I’m trying to do is to open up some conceptual space so that we might see that both celibacy and marriage are good and that indeed, while many in the history of the church have held the former to be a higher good, their position might not have been as bone-headed as I once thought it was. Celibacy (whether for a time or for life, whether chosen or not, whether consecrated or not) is different from marriage. Much of Christian tradition has, in fact, asserted it to be better, a higher good. The tradition could be correct on this without thereby implying that the married state is deficient.
We can uphold celibacy without demeaning marriage.
Sex and Friendship
Aristotle, we have noted, did not think it possible that a wife could be a man’s friend, nor, centuries later, did the French philosopher-essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). Montaigne had a very close friendship with the poet Étienne de la Boétie for an intense but short four years, ending with Boétie’s death in 1563. One of Montaigne’s famous essays speaks of his friendship with him and contains Montaigne’s beautiful line, often quoted. Asked why they were friends, he could say only, “Because it was he; because it was I.”8 It was an intimacy founded initially on the high reputation of each. When they subsequently met for the first time, Montaigne says, “We discovered ourselves to be so seized by each other, so known to each other and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other.” It was a classic, uncommon, high, exclusive friendship, such as Cicero might have extolled, and just as rare. Montaigne opines, “So many fortuitous circumstances are needed to make” such a friendship “that it is already something if Fortune can achieve it once in three centuries.” (Therefore, how fortunate he was!) Along the way of these reflections both philosophical and autobiographical, he says that “the passion men feel for women”—which, since he takes it as a desire to seduce, is a contest of wills—cannot be compared with friendship, for when such passion “enters the territory of friendship (where wills work together, that is) it languishes and grows faint.” Turning immediately to marriage, he finds it burdensome and constraining—“only the entrance is free”—and yet he says that if it were possible for a marriage to be a friendship so that “not only the souls had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union—where the whole human being was involved—it is certain that the loving-friendship would be more full and more abundant.” But alas, Montaigne regretfully concludes, women are not capable of this.
Having found that neither an affair with a woman nor a marriage can be a friendship, Montaigne considers “that alternative license of the Greeks,” which he says “is rightly abhorrent to our manners.” But when he goes on to describe the male-male sexual relationships of the Greeks, he emphasizes their asymmetry: on the one hand, the Beloved, who is young and beautiful; on the other, the Lover, who is neither young nor beautiful and whose beauty, should he have any, will be thus not external. Through this relationship, the Beloved learns to see deeper than the skin, to appreciate what is within. Whatever may have been good in this, Montaigne does not see it as friendship; it is neither “equable” nor “equitable.” He seems to be saying that there is something not only unbalanced but also unfair in this; yet friends must be supremely at one, holding all things in common, having a common mind, and so forth.
Nonetheless, one should note that Montaigne does not consider, perhaps would not have ever imagined, a sexual relationship between two men who were equals in age and in excellence of character such as to make a superior friendship. Although he enjoyed the pleasures of the bed with women, his friendship with Boétie was quite a different matter. Montaigne separated sex from friendship, while regretting that marriage could not be a friendship. He had no other friend; after Boétie’s death, “I merely drag wearily on. . . . There is no deed nor thought in which I do not miss him.”
Christianity, from the early centuries, had a different view: marriage was a particular variety of friendship. Oliver O’Donovan claims that early Christians simply took it for granted that “marriage was a field of friendship between husband and wife.” This is a signal Christian innovation. For these Christians, “the highest value of marriage,” the most important thing about it, or that for which it was most highly esteemed, was that it was a friendship.9 Carol Harrison similarly summarizes Augustine’s view in his treatise of AD 401, “On the Good of Marriage”: “In respect of each of these goods [of marriage] in this treatise [namely, progeny, fidelity, and the sacrament] marriage is above all treated as a relationship which is founded upon, informed by and which finds its ideal realisation in the friendship of the partners.”10 As the Christian assumption (that marriage aims at being friendship) played out in history, it tended to elevate the estimation with which marriage was held—and in parallel with marriage, the estimation of married women themselves (despite such retrograde sentiments as expressed by Montaigne).
Although it sees marriage as a species of friendship, this innovative Christian logic will not allow marriage to be taken as the highest form of friendship—precisely because of the Christian conviction that the friendship that marks a fulfilled human being cannot be exclusive. On the contrary, as we have seen in many places already, it aims decidedly at ever greater expansion. Our Lord’s disciples, in the end, were his friends, and thus friends of one another, and as such the forerunners of the friendship that is universal in his kingdom. Marriage, by contrast, is committed to a lifelong exclusivity, an intimacy that is closed to others.
To unpack these thoughts further, we need first to expose more of the logic of Christian opposition to unmarried sex. That logic is captured by the Christian use of a Greek word, porneia.
The Christian Invention of Fornication
In our post-Freudian age, one can still hear the indictment that Christianity is sexually repressive. Christians are accused of being against sex, and on that account (it is said in various ways), they oppose abortion, women’s equality, divorce, public eroticism, fertility rites, and on down the line. In their anti-sexuality (the indictment continues), Christians themselves are sexually repressed, and one consequence of this is the sexual acting-out of supposedly celibate priests (but, to be honest, Protestant clergy are hardly innocent in this) and the cover-up scandals that seem to have been motivated by a desire to protect the church’s reputation and its repressive teaching—cover-ups carried out by men who did not really believe said teaching but felt the need to pretend they did. Much better, the indictment goes, is to acknowledge that we are sexual beings, that sexual expression is liberative and at the heart of our self-creation (which is how we become ourselves, by choosing our values and making our own path in life), and that the best policy is to throw off all external authority, to “let it all hang out.”
Entangled with this narrative of Christian repressiveness is a myth about classical society. The story is that the Roman and Greek societies of the ancient world were blissful, guilt-free, and sexually open worlds in which public eroticism and numerous sexual variations were happily celebrated. Then came the tragic takeover of the legal system by Christians, who proceeded to introduce and then enforce repressive legal structures. The world then fell into a darkness of repression and ill-health until our twentieth-century liberation, thanks to Freud and/or the Pill and/or the Supreme Court.
That is a myth, and like most myths, there is truth in it: the Christian transformation of the Roman legal system was aimed at sexual control—at reshaping the sexual practices of society. But the antecedent classical world was hardly a libertine free-for-all. In fact, the ancients had their own highly developed, well-defined practices for the social control of sex, practices that aimed at cultivating a particular notion of shame.
Let us sketch some of the complexities of ancient shame and sexual practices. A Roman girl became marriageable at the age of twelve, as we know from Augustine, who shortly after he turned thirty was engaged to a girl who was not yet of age; she was ten. Augustine, having dismissed his concubine of the past decade and more, could not wait and thus took on another woman (as he tells in Confessions VI.xv.25).11
Boys did not marry until they were much older—typically in their late twenties. But it was considered unhealthy to dam up the sexual fluids and fail to express one’s sexuality. The well-born girl was to pass directly from virginity to the hallowed status of wife; the alternative was shame. What then were the necessary sexual outlets for the males, both before and within marriage? They were the public brothels, prostitutes, male slaves of the household, and boys who were not freeborn and who were in that indeterminate period between childhood and manhood. Same-sex relations per se were not despised, yet it was shameful to be penetrated by another male.
What was wrong with a male being penetrated or a female having sex before she was married was that it was shameful. Shame, however, was a class-differentiated concept. Lower-class people were incapable of suffering shame, and so slaves, male and female, could be used to sate male desire.
In his study of the change Christianity made to sexual morality, the classicist Kyle Harper puts it in the contrast of two words: shame and sin.12 In the popular romances, he shows, the Roman dramatic arc concerned the passage of a woman from childhood to the secure status of wife, a perilous passage that, if successfully navigated, avoided shame. By the end of the sixth century, Christian romances had replaced this with a new dramatic arc of the repentance of sexual sinners, whose conversion to a new life marked, implicitly, the triumph of freedom over fate. Shame, once acquired, adhered to the person forever, but sin could be taken away.
My description in the preceding few paragraphs is exceedingly simplified; it is but an attempt to point to a real transformation achieved by Christianity. Faced with a society that saw sexual release as normal and necessary, that stratified people, that subsisted on the ready supply of a vast number of slaves (perhaps 20 percent of the population of Roman cities), Christians, who understood themselves as citizens of a kingdom where distinctions of slave and free, male and female, young and old made no difference, were able to say, “We can live without this. We can say no.”
They were, in the end, not much interested in the distinction between high-born boys and other boys, between high-born women and other women, between being passive or active in a male-male sexual act, for they had a new concept, drawn from the writings of Saint Paul, that all sexual relations whatsoever, outside the marriage of a man and a woman, could be grouped together and put under a single word, fornication (porneia in Greek, fornicatio in Latin). This “churchly” word was used in a novel sense by Christians for a concept that the ancients simply did not have: an undifferentiated grouping together of all sexual relations outside of marriage—grouped together and cast aside.13
The Limited but Real Value of Rules
You can’t play a game if there aren’t rules. Rules are boundary conditions that set out what counts as playing the game. If I pick up a soccer ball with my hands (which, dear reader, you may call a football if you wish) and run with it as far as I can, you should stop me and tell me that I’m not playing soccer. If I want to play soccer, I have to follow the rules, which include not touching the ball with my hands. At the same time, I could keep all the rules and still not be playing soccer. You just need to imagine me standing still in the middle of the field, paying no attention to the ball, avoiding touching it, and so forth. You should say to me, “Victor, you may be keeping all the rules, but you still aren’t playing soccer.”
So here’s a rule for, if I may so put it, “playing the human game”: if you want to live a fully human life, you must separate sex from friendship (outside the special, term-limited case of marriage). Try to bring sex into friendship, and it becomes a pseudo-marriage. It then loses the expansiveness that belongs to friendship: the desire to have ever more friends. Sex, apart from its casual use (as when someone says, “What’s the problem? It’s just friction”), is a movement toward one other person to the exclusion of others. Friendship is a movement toward another person that does not exclude others. To put it another way, “friends with benefits” aren’t really friends (as indeed they aren’t really in the film by that name).
We will help people if we spell out this rule, and by doing so, we can build up one another through the creation of common expectations for friendships. Yet following this rule would not mean that you were succeeding in making friends. Like Victor stuck in the middle of the soccer field, determinedly not touching the ball with his hands but doing nothing else, you could keep this rule—you could completely shun fornication throughout your life—but still fail to grow in friendship. Celibacy (understood in its bare sense of avoiding sexual relations) is a very different thing than friendship; it merely marks out the field within which friendship can grow (and remembering that there is a piece of the field reserved for marriage and its own disciplines of fidelity).
Rules are important, but they are never enough.
Maturing into Friendship
Some decades ago, I was asking a priest-professor how he understood gay relationships, what he thought about homosexuality. He said that in his observation, over time a same-sex relationship tends to develop into a chaste friendship. The sex, he said, turns out to be not that important.
Many fathers of the church saw the same development as to be desired for married couples. After they had children (if God gave them children), and then only by mutual consent, they might grow into a state of mutual celibacy. If they no longer had obligations to their children, they could enter monastic establishments, but they could equally (at least it seemed to some) go on living in a home with each other, but continently.
As I indicated above, for years I resisted this view (with its implicitly higher valuation of celibacy over marriage), but if one studies the literature, it is clearly present. Yet there may be more. It seems to me marriage developing into celibacy could be (at least for some people) in deep accord with the Christian claim that marriage is only “till death us do part.” Death concludes a marriage—but the friendship (which the marriage was a type of) continues, one prays, into the life to come, where it will not be exclusive but rather a part of the expansiveness of Jesus’ friends. At least in some cases, some church fathers seem to have thought that this continuing quality of friendship could be experienced in an anticipatory way if the bodily cleaving were to become less of an ongoing feature of the marital friendship even in this life.
This seems to be Augustine’s mature view, as Harrison summarizes it:
The sexual aspect of marriage was by no means definitive of it for Augustine. . . . He maintains that there is an enduring “quiddam coniugale,” an enduring marital “thing.” . . . There is, as he puts it, a “natural society (societas) itself in a difference of sex” which is independent of procreation, or the age of the partners. . . . He develops these views most especially in relation to Mary and Joseph, who were married even though there was no sexual relation between the partners. They are called husband and wife because, as he puts it, “intercourse of the mind is more intimate than that of the body.”14
That Augustinian term “intercourse of the mind” points to the friendship that is always there in a marriage yet into which a marriage can more deeply mature. A universal human friendship is Augustine’s ultimate dream, as we see at the end of his City of God. It is a state of unimaginable intimacy in which “the thoughts of each of us will then also be made manifest to all.”15
With hope for that ultimate intimacy, here are some rules for human beings in this life.
Sexual relations outside marriage are wrong, without regard to class, gender, or other human differentiation.
Human happiness and flourishing is thoroughly compatible with sexual abstinence.
The flourishing of human beings does not lie in marriage but in being able to live with others as friends, and marriage itself should be understood, in its ultimate sense, as being oriented to friendship.
These rules have the limitations of all rules. Here the purpose is to identify boundary conditions of human friendship. I set them forth with the hope that they will provide the framework needed for a culture of friendship to grow, but of course they cannot themselves grow that culture. We Christians need to uphold one another with encouragement to develop spiritual friendships—which is to say, nonmarital friendships—and to avoid undermining them with the suspicion of sexual intimacy. We need to learn from one another how to be friends who are intimate and chaste and how to encourage more of such friendship. In other words, we need to be secure in the boundary conditions so that friendship can grow and flourish as the highest and greatest activity of human beings.
And that means we need unapologetically to champion celibacy as a positive gift for everyone in all parts of life save those times of marriage—and to recognize marriage itself as ordered toward celibate, postmarital friendship.