Tina Shermer Sellers has given me a wonderful gift by taking the time to reply to my recent article, “All Sexed Up.” She is right to make the important point that the soul/body dualism of the Western metaphysics has left its destructive marks upon many of those in our society. Similarly, she is right in her feverish argument for the inclusion of the body in Christian life and of our understanding of ourselves. Neither of these points would I disagree with or argue to the contrary.
However, in what follows I will offer a brief rejoinder to her read of my essay and the confused alternative she seems to offer. In my response I will describe how much of what Ms. Sellers describes as the Erotic God, while thinking that it recovers the body for Christianity, in fact does quite the opposite, because it remains entrenched so deeply in the Western metaphysics of essentialism. Finally, I will briefly try to clarify some of the arguments from my essay in order to reposition sex and sexuality within the Christian form of life.
Let me begin my reply to Ms. Schermer Sellers’ argument in an unlikely place, by focusing my attention on the birth of nominalism in the 13th century.[1] While this may seem an odd place to begin my reply, our modern formations of sexual identity owe much to the lineage of this philosophy and in order to understand them we must first understand how we came to them in the first place.
With the crumbling of scholasticism during the 12th and 13th centuries, a new conception of metaphysics began to emerge. The birth of this metaphysics was not merely an intellectual exercise, but was in many ways a response to famine, drought, plague and the collision of cultures taking place at the time.[2] The name most associated with the emergence of this philosophy was and continues to be William of Ockham, who we have come to know as the father of nominalism.
Ockham is most prominently known for his “razor” philosophy, which stated that when seeking to get at the truth of something a person should not produce categories needlessly. In the face of scholastic philosophies riddled with complexity, Ockham introduced the idea that the simplest explanation and understanding of something was the best. Elaborate systems of universal categories organizing the world became unnecessary and, in fact, detrimental not only to our understanding of this world but also to God’s omnipotent freedom to interact with it however he pleases. Reason and revelation were no longer good bedfellows.[3]
Basically, what this came to entail was that people began to see the world as no longer unified, the scholastic notion of the real existence of universals razed. No longer thought to be a self-contained whole, the cosmos was divided and life on the earthly level was no longer connected through a hierarchy of categories and forms to heaven. People begin to think that they lived in a world composed of individual, particular things separate from one another and totally separated from God. Instead of a world where the sphere of God and the Forms sit atop a hierarchy of being—wherein the form of Animal incorporates more distinct forms of Horse, Cow and Dog, and these more distinct forms include all specific horses, cows and dogs respectively—nominalism takes the razor to all of these additions, settling simply for the view that there are only particular entities in our world. In the place of the domed world, a world of distinct and separate levels and entities had been born.
In a world of individual things, language no longer spoke to essential natures, but it became merely a way of organizing the chaos of individual entities. Language began to function as a way of labeling these things with signs, or names, which describe not intrinsic or essential qualities but similarities of appearance, function, speed, etc. Hence, in the world of nominalism the term “horse” did not refer to a real, existing form, but was merely a label given to certain individual things in the world that share a certain resemblance.
This is all to say that by the end of the 14th century, the world was no longer thought to be a unified whole centered on the positive and known presence of being, a full understanding of essences, but it became a world of fracture and individual pieces where essences could not be known. The old unified world of scholasticism crumbled and the dissipated metaphysics of nominalism began to dominate the scene. Without a solidified and structured ontology of presence, God as omnipotent was free to do whatever God wished, but this view of the world came with a cost, the fractured world of individual entities had become chaotic and deeply unknowable.
To a great extent we can understand all of modern philosophy, from the self-assertive humanism of Nietzsche to the logical positivism of Bertrand Russell, to be a series of attempts to put this fractured world back together and to restore, at least in some sense, the foundation of knowledge.[4] The final triumph of modern science, in our day and age, becomes fully apparent with the conclusion that something is what it does. With no real ontology, “how” something works is the closest we can get to what it “is.”[5] And this presupposition has become standard operating procedure for our understanding of what constitutes knowledge of something.
We are, no doubt, inheritors of the philosophical and theological developments since the 13th century, as Western culture’s modern infatuation with science clearly displays. We inhabit a world formed by our current social imaginaries[6] and these social imaginaries have been formed in a large part by the attempt through modernity to respond to the fractured world that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries.[7] Hence, the history of Western philosophy is really an attempt to answer a very deep theological question that emerged at the end of the medieval period, as modern thinkers labored intensively to put the world back together in a way that avoided the violence that came in its wake.
As I tried to show in “All Sexed Up,” it is within these diverse attempts to reassemble the world that our contemporary understandings of sexual identity emerge. They emerge within peculiarly modern understandings of ontology and epistemology. As part of this argument, I asserted that the dichotomy of expressions, either in exposé or married sex and pre-marital continence, both emerge from a primary assumption with regard to the location of one’s sexual identity. Furthermore, I proffered the idea that our modern configurations of sexual identity, whether in the church or secular culture, spring from the false understanding of sex (gender and orientation) as an ontological category that we come to know (epistemology) thorough expression and practice. Hence, sex becomes something we believe to be the deepest thing about us, and the thing we must express in order to know ourselves as fully human. In the end, I tried to point out the ways in which conceiving of sex as an ontological and essential quality leads us into a myriad of problems, not the least of which is that the practice of our sex becomes a right and, even more, a duty.
In “All Sexed Up,” then, my argument was not so much to pull sex out of ontology, but to aver that the ontologies of modern culture are themselves flawed with an internal antinomy, leading us to see that our understandings of sexual identity are merely symptoms of a deeper issue. My intent was to argue that we must turn our attention in the church away from ontological discussions as the base for sexual identities in a nominalist world, and instead, refract our understanding of sexual identity through Christ. That is to say, I was arguing that we need a Christological, not an ontological, understanding of sex. It was a conversation about this Christological view and practice of sex (including gender and orientation) that I hoped to initiate with the essay. What I have tried to argue is that when the nominalists pick up Augustine and read his deep-seated confession of libidinal desire, they interpret it to mean that this individual desire is what is most central about all of humanity. Hence, this gives to sex, whether in the form of gender or sexual identity, an ontological grounding. And fairly soon we are faced with the conundrum of having to constantly renounce that (sex) which is deepest about us.
In her reply to my essay, I think Ms. Sellers’ challenge to my argument continues to rely on this faulty, modern ontology. Cloaked under the auspices of incarnational theology, her understanding of sexuality has a strikingly ontological, essential ring. In this way ,I think that what Ms. Sellers has mistakenly done is to try to name a particular (one’s gender or sexual identity) as a universal essence, common to all. Though she attempts to compassionately make room for a person’s particular sexuality, she can only do so by making sexual identity the deepest thing about us. Hence, while she may not start with what appears to be deeply tangible and particular (incarnational), she ends up working it into an ontological category.
As a result, her sexual identity takes on the modern dualistic formation I tried to point out in my article, the dualistic sexual identity created by reading Augustine from a nominalist perspective. When we try to read a universal human essence, “a humanity,” from our particular perspective, we continually encounter the central crisis of modern thinking. We find that we can never know if our particular perspective has universal validation. Hence, what is most central to us we can never really know—our ontological identity gets trapped in an epistemological problem. We can’t know if we really know ourselves because we don’t know for sure what we really are.
The antinomy latent in this attempt to get to ontology is what gives Ms. Sellers’ idea that sex is essential it’s hauntingly Heideggerian tone. Trading sex for being, within her framework sex becomes tied to ontology in such a way that it also is always present and yet withdrawing, as a Deus Absconditus. This is what Ms. Sellers has unknowingly called her Erotic God.
When Ms. Sellers says that I have based my argument on a “dichotomized thinking which is not, and has not, been historically useful,” appealing further to the idea that “position[ing] an argument to state that something is not (in this case) essential, we bifurcate it from that which is essential,”[8] she bases her criticism on the faulty assumption that I endorse any form of universal ontological essentialism. Furthermore, while she claims that I have “sterilized Jesus, ignoring Christ as Lover,” reducing him to a “textbook” figure fit for scientific discussion but lacking bodily interaction, I must continue to say that it is the Incarnational Christ that I am so, though no doubt imperfectly, hoping to put back into the discussion of Christian sexuality. Though I admit that my definition of sex is vague, a point I tie directly to my recognition that this is exactly the state of sex in Western culture, I struggle in reading her essay to understand her definition of sexuality and incarnation. It seems that sexuality implies love, touch, presence, breath, eyes, attention, and even healing, a definition that defies any sense of sexuality in its common usage.
What it does display, however, is her tendency to fall into the dualistic trap she has accused me of furthering, a dualistic trap wherein sex is always present with me and yet always withdrawing from my grasp of it (similar to Heidegger’s Being). It is a conception she clearly communicates when she states that, “We are essentially our sexuality, as we are bodies, hearts, minds, and spirit, relationships and experiences.”[9] At heart, what she is saying is that sexually and incarnationally we are essentially everything, and all at the same time, an answer that I’m not sure gets us out of the problematic configurations of sexuality our church and our society currently hold.
Sellers’ argument, in the end, falls prey to this same mode of Western thinking. Her sexuality, it seems to me, can with utter equivalence be substituted for Being. It is, like Heidegger’s Being, always both present and retreating from us, always necessary as the ground of who we are, yet at every moment slipping out of our grasp. Hence, she reiterates the Western confusion of being-there (Da-sein) with sexing-there. That is, we find ourselves to be constituted of an essential sexual identity that we cannot deny but to which we can never have complete access. The “sacred gift of sexuality” is simply a new name for the gift of Being. It is this view of sexual identities and sexual practice that I have indeed found to be very detrimental and destructive, dare I say, even idolatrous.
The fact of the matter is that Christians in the early centuries had no idea what to do with sex. But one thing is for sure, it was not until very recently in the history of Christianity that anyone would have conceived of him or herself as having a “sexual identity.” They clearly did not think that a person had to know herself as “woman” or as “man” or as “homosexual” or “heterosexual” to fully appreciate the Incarnation. In fact, it seems that one thing common to all of these groups is that far more frequently they were willing to give up the act of sex completely (an answer I am not exactly excited about).
This is not to say that they viewed sex as something sinful or wrong, though one could find this thought in Jerome, Origen, and parts of Augustine. Engaging in sex, having breasts and a vagina, or being attracted to someone of the same sex were not sinful, but neither were they thought to be central to the Christian life or to one’s identity and humanity. Like eating, drinking, and bowl movements, sex was merely part of the way things were, and they thought that any over-indulgence would eventually lead one to becoming soft, and thus, more open to the threat of the chaotic world.
My point, then, is not to say that we should give up sex, or go back to a patriarchal structure that denies the existence of women, or to embrace a neo-conservative homophobia based on an idolatry of marriage, but to simply begin a discussion about what it looks like to understand ourselves Christologically in a fractured world. In doing so, I hope to point out that our present configurations of sex and sexual identities are not the way Christians have always understood them. Furthermore, I asseverate that elucidating the development of our current ontological, essential view of sex and the problems it has created for us, frees us to take our fixation off of sex and turn it back toward the primordial threat of chaos in death. That is, we must not allow sex, whether questions of whose having it and when, to distract us from the real threat of death and chaos.
I think a start to this form of Christian existence is to refuse the ontological divisions of our society and to see the ways that these divisions have been malignantly adopted by our church. Hence, I argued that we can only begin to find a Christological understanding of our sexuality by breaking down the categorical divisions erected between married folk and singles, between young people and old, and between homosexuals and heterosexuals. In doing so, I hoped to point us toward a deeper understanding of friendship, based on and located in the practice of the person of Christ.
Furthermore, I intoned that we need to avoid the language of “coming out,” because latent in this terminology is the idea that there is a sexual identity deeper to me than my body. As the flip side to a bad theology of confession in the form of a dedication to accountability partners, “coming out” is simply the attempt to state this same malformed theology of confession in a positive manner.
Finally, I argued that our churches are guilty of fashioning an idol out of marriage and the family, a point I am not alone in making. Getting married and having children are not necessities for faithfulness to Christ, and in fact they are at best neutral if not distracting from the real task at hand. Hence, I tried to render problematic the equivalence of Christ-like love to marital love and affection, opting for an emphasis on friendship instead.
I have tried to argue that one possibility of living as a Christian in a fractured world is through a revival of evangelical asceticism, one that sees Christian life as an imitation of Christ in as many ways as we dare to follow. By this I mean to say that in a world of fracture (and there is no way to go back) Christians must embark upon the journey toward living in a peculiar ontology, one where we no longer look into ourselves to find what is deepest about us in order to generalize it as the quidity of humanity but one in which we enter into the particularity of Christ. In the end, as Barth might say, Christ is the only thing that is essential. But it may take a lifetime for us to understand what this means.
Notes:
[1] I must note from the beginning that I am extremely dependent on the work of Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming May of 2008).
[2] See Gillespie, p 15 (pagination correlates to a pre-published manuscript).
[3] Gillespie, p. 22.
[4] See Gillespie, pp. 261-3.
[5] One can understand Martin Heidegger’s distrust of technology based upon this point. Given the fact that his project in Being and Time was an overt attempt to return to the question of being, that is, the question of ontology, we must turn our attention away from the question of function. We must engage in a different for of study than that of science. We must attend to the appearance of something, we must engage in phenomenology if we are to rediscover the deepest and most ancient question of humanity. We must attend to what is, and scientific method will not give us access to it because it was never intended to do this in the first place.
[6] See chapter 4, “”Modern Social Imaginaries,” of Charles Taylor’s monumental work, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007) pp. 159-211, and his Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004) for a full discussion of this concept.
[7] Gillespie is extremely convincing in making this argument as has been Milbank, Taylor and others.
[8] Tina Schermer Sellers, “An Erotic God: A Reponse to ‘All Sexed Up’ by Dan Rhodes,” The Other Journal, 10 available at https://theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=276
[9] Sellers, “An Erotic God”.