It is Not Good that Man Should be Allone

Theology, if it is to retain its status as the "queen of sciences," must not only be capable of "dialoguing" with science, but accounting for its very possibility. No one doubts that it can do this; the question is whether it can be done in a simplistic or sophisticated manner -- if the queen can be truly regal or just a drag.

For example, one could simply say: "God created the world and scientists, ergo, religion explains science." This type of explanation is unlikely to persuade anyone who doesn't already believe it.

Atheists believe the converse, and it is of course no less simplistic: that man creates religion and everything in it. While this is a "scientific" explanation, it is just the mirror image of the first, and unlikely to convince anyone who isn't already inclined to believe it. Both statements are tautologies anyway, in that they conclude at the end what is foreordained at the start.

In the last couple of posts, we have been discussing John Paul's theology of the body. Here is a perfect example of how theology needn't only "dialogue" with science (assuming that psychology and human sexuality are sciences), as if the two are equal partners on the same plane of being.

Rather, I find John Paul's approach to be both much higher and deeper than any merely human model of human sexuality. Prior to knowing anything about his theology, I had believed modern object relations psychoanalysis to provide the most comprehensive and realistic account of human sexuality and sexual pathology.

But I find that John Paul's theology is capacious enough to contain the psychoanalytic explanation, whereas the reverse is strictly impossible, at least in official circles, in that psychoanalysis is a thoroughly secular enterprise (Jungians excepted) that even began with overt hostility toward religion (e.g., Freud's Moses and Monothesim and Civilization and its Discontents or Madman Reich's further reduction of psychoanalysis to a cult of pure id).

Sounds crazy today, but the latter superegomaniacal idiot had a major influence on the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and is often cited in the counter-culture illiterature of that era. There is nothing "new," much less "progressive," in these thinkers. Rather, their entire bloated corpus comes down to a new way to preach to man what he wishes were true, and for which there is always a ready audience of suckers.

It's just that in the subsitious modern world, the intellectual infanity must be clothed in the trappings of science, which is how we end up with leftist pione'er-do-wells such as Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm, and all the rest of those adorning acolyte weights. To this day, trolls such as William often cite their less-than-worthless "research" to prove the truism that people to the right of Marx are sexually repressed and/or mentally ill for reasons that follow inevitably from their false assumptions. (A few years ago the hapless John Dean published a book based upon this literature, with not the vaguest idea that he was but a tool and useful idiot for the propagation of cultural Marxism.)

Likewise, conservatives are intrinsically "hypocritical," since, deep down, they are no different from the leftist who knows that there is no such thing as "sexual morality." Rather, the latter is simply a bad-faith cultural construct designed to prevent man from being what he actually is, which is to say, a polymorphous seeker of sexual release.

I'm just thumbing through Kimball's book, which includes Freud's well-known statement that "It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of [sexual] instinct." Therefore, our "truest" self is our most primitive, pre-personal self, AKA our animal nature. As such, it is every man's task to "liberate" this "person" (which is really a thing). It is the exact inverse of the traditional view, which draws our animal nature up into the properly human sphere.

It is facile in the extreme to suggest that the latter is accomplished via "repression." While that certainly occurs, the real way is transformation. But there is just enough truth in the theory of repression to appeal to people who are sexually unhappy, and who believe that they would find happiness and sexual utopia if only they could f*** anything that moves.

In this regard, it is critical to bear in mind that this movement was not rooted in knowledge or wisdom. Rather, it was a doctrine of boastful ignorance founded upon a systematic denial of human nature. I don't have time to go into details, but thinkers from this era are impossible to parody; Kimball has many more examples in a chapter called "The Marriage of Marx & Freud." Talk about a pomosexual union.

Back to Wojtyla and the capaciousness of his worldview. Not only did he open and widen the Church's views on sexuality, but early on he formed a network of connections to the scientific world, especially to physics and biology.

For his part, one of the physicists in this network expressed the same principle I mentioned above regarding human sexuality. That is, Wojtyla's "way of thinking" -- in particular, his metaphysic -- provided a way "in which one could speak coherently and in a connected way about everything," from the most vast and abstract to the most mundane and particular. And this is indeed what we ask of a metaphysic: to provide a kind of comprehensive "map" of reality, in which everything can find its rightful place.

For example, a strictly scientistic account of human sexuality reduces to animal sexuality, which may be further reduced to genetic transmission and survival. All of the elaborate ritual surrounding human mating is really just a genetic trick to get oneself -- and the other -- over the genetic hump. The various sociobiological explanations of something as complex as "love" are mostly silly, but from the scientistic perspective, if genes explain everything, then everything is explained by genes. Does this include the explanation? Don't ask!

At the heart of Wojtyla's metaphysic is not matter, or math, or physics; rather, "love" is "at the very center of the human condition." While this undoubtedly sounds both sentimental and mythological to the uninitiated, this is not the way it is intended.

Rather, he means it quite literally; and because the human being stands at the "center" of creation (which he certainly does in the evolutionary/vertical sense, analogous to a dot at the top of a three-dimensional cone), then love is at the center of the cosmic center.

In 1956 he wrote a letter to a member of his intellectual circle, correcting the false impression that he would like to see everyone married. Rather, "the most important problem is really something else."

That is, everyone "lives, above all, for love. The ability to love authentically, not great intellectual capacity, is what constitutes the deepest part of a personality. It is no accident that the greatest commandment is to love. Authentic love leads us outside ourselves to affirming others.... Marriage makes sense... if it gives one the opportunity for such love..., if it draws one out of the shell of individualism and egocentrism."

Even deeper than love -- or, perhaps we should say a predicate of love -- is relationship. As such, I believe it would be slightly more accurate to say that relationship is at the foundation of Wojtyla's metaphysic, and that love is at the center of his theology. To get from the former to the latter requires the "leap of faith," in that it is possible -- even necessary -- to arrive at relationship using pure logic and no revelation at all.

But to know that this is a relation of love requires the lovers to reveal themselves as one in an eternal circle of lover-loved-love. In my view, everyman is a trincarnation of this ultimate reality, which is why it is not good that he should be allone -- which he cannot be anyway, because deepdown and wayup he is always allthree.