ECSTASY AS SOLACE: I really liked this quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, found via Wesley Hill:

Secularism is a religion because it has a faith, it has its own eschatology and its own ethics. And it “works” and it “helps.” Quite frankly, if “help” were the criterion, one would have to admit that life-centered secularism helps actually more than religion. To compete with it, religion has to present itself as “adjustment to life,” “counselling,” “enrichment,” it has to be publicized on subways and buses as a valuable addition to “your friendly bank” and all other “friendly dealers”: try it, it helps! And the religious success of secularism is so great that it leads some Christian theologians to “give up” the very category of “transcendence,” or in much simpler words, the very idea of “God.” This is the price we must pay if we want to be “understood” and “accepted” by modern man, proclaim the Gnostics of the twentieth century.

For it is here that we reach the heart of the matter. For Christianity, help is not the criterion. Truth is the criterion. The purpose of Christianity is not to help poeple by reconciling them with death, but to reveal the Truth about life and death i order that people may be saved by this Truth. Salvation, however, is not only not identical with help, but is, in fact, opposed to it. Christianity quarrels with religion and secularism not because they offer “insufficient help,” but precisely because they “suffice,” because the “satisfy” the needs of men. If the purpose of Christianity were to take away from man the fear of death, to reconcile him with death, there would be no need for Christianity, for other religions have done this, indeed, better than Christianity. And secularism is about to produce men who will gladly and corporately die — and not just live — for the triumph of the Cause, whatever it may be.

Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely an enemy to be destroyed, and not a “mystery” to be explained.

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So here are some random thoughts prompted by this quotation. Take home what resonates with you and discard the rest as the styrofoam peanuts of my stupidity!

One thing I like about this quote--I like a lot of things about it, but this is one--is that it may seem to contradict Augustine's famous line about how "our hearts are restless 'til we rest in Thee," and yet I really don't think it does. Just as the Desert Fathers often seem to contradict themselves (let alone one another!) because they're addressing very different seekers with radically divergent needs, weaknesses, and longings, so I think Schmemann is simply not addressing the same kind of person Augustine is. I suspect each of us is a Schmemann-addressee some of the time and an Augustine-addressee some of the time, although we'll sway more toward one end or the other (I'm much more an A-a, I think), so here are some scattered thoughts about Christ as comforter and as troubler of the waters.

First, Christ always stands against contentment. If you're satisfied you aren't a philosopher, let alone a Christian. Christ, like the James Bond franchise, tells us that The World Is Not Enough.

Sometimes we really need to hear that! Sometimes we are content to cultivate our gardens, to love the people we want to love and turn away from the shadow of death. An immense amount of basic, boring, necessary good gets done in the world by people who are contented... and yet that should never be enough for us.

Then there are those of us for whom the inadequacy of immanent beauty and everyday love is all too obvious. We're like the people in the AA slogan, for whom "one drink is too many and a hundred isn't enough." We're like the people in Chesterton's punchline, which was instrumental in my conversion: "The man who enters the whorehouse is seeking God." We're like the Bagthorpes, in Helen Cresswell's terrifically sardonic children's series, whose family motto might be Too Much Is Never Enough.

It's easy for those who can suffice themselves on the incredible loveliness of this life to look down on those of us who can't. They can accuse us of ingratitude and of pretension; who promised us a life in capital letters? And so they can remain where they are.

And it's easy for those of us who do feel that both ourselves and the world are radically insufficient to make do with "cheap grace," in the form of politics or alcohol or art or psychoanalysis, all of which are well enough in their own right and legitimate sources of insight and/or ekstasis but none of which are as big as the need. All of these possibilities are erotic in some sense, but none are as erotic as religious devotion. (But then, what is?) And so we, too, find a million ways to remain where we are.

Or to summarize this entire post in two sentences: A life without unconditional surrender is banal. Only in devotion to God can the ecstasy of surrender marry the solace of ethical love.

While Noboru wandered through private dreams Tsukazaki stood at Fusako's side, and the heat of his body in the sultry chart room was beginning to oppress her: when the parasol she had leaned against a desk clattered suddenly to the floor, she felt as if she herself, fainting, had fallen.
--Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, tr. John Nathan

THIS IS MY AMCON PIECE about Dupont Circle and bobos and rum and... rambling. This link actually works!

#3: Miss Ogilvy:

...But for now, on to "Romoeroticism" (my reaction is kind of lengthy). [Also, by way of identification: I'm also SSA, female, and a recent adult convert (well, grad student convert, which isn't quite adult) to Christianity. I'm still trying to figure out the ethics of same-sex love.]

One of the comments-boxers accuses you of “trying to see the world through the prism of same-sex attraction.” But I wonder if it might be more accurate to say that you’re simply noticing ways in which Catholicism enables celibate same-sex attracted Catholics to receive God’s love corporeally. Let me flesh this out (pun intended).

As I was reading “Romoeroticism,” I kept thinking of Rowan Williams’ essay “The Body’s Grace.” For Williams, the question of embodiment is central to the problem of same-sex sexual ethics. In sex one learns that her body can be the cause of happiness to herself and to another person, and, as Williams puts it, “The life of the Christian community has as its rationale - if not invariably its practical reality - the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy.” And the problem of embodiment, of knowing ourselves to be desired, doesn’t go away for the single person:

All those taking up the single vocation – whether or not they are, in the disagreeable clinical idiom, genitally intact – must know something about desiring and being desired if their single vocation is not to be sterile and evasive. Their decision (as risky as the commitment to sexual fidelity) is to see if they can find themselves, their bodily selves, in a life dependent simply upon trust in the generous delight of God - that other who, by definition, cannot want us to supply deficiencies in the bliss of a divine ego, but whose whole life is a “being-for,” a movement of gift.

I’ve thus often bristled at the fact that so much of the Biblical picture-language for God’s love focuses on heterosexual marriage. How can I understand the tenor of divine love when my experience excludes me completely from the vehicle of these metaphors?

I think you’ve come up with an awesome solution in the way you look at Mary and the Church and Dante’s Beatrice.

That said, I have a couple of questions re: your desire to renew the practices of same-sex friendship blessing:

I take it that in your view one of the main reasons for recovering this tradition is to sublimate same-sex desire. But what if we saw the chief end of such friendships differently, focusing instead on its material and social benefits? In that case, what would you make of the possibility of a vowed, lifelong, liturgically-blessed friendship between a gay man and a gay woman? Or between a gay woman and a straight woman? Or between two straight women or two straight men? I know I would find a lifelong vow of sexless yet intimate friendship much easier to undertake with a gay or straight man – and maybe even with a straight woman – than with another lesbian: it would be heartache to live with a beautiful woman who also loved women and to remain chaste.

The “Romoeroticism” project implies that we can isolate the sex in same-sex relationships and call it wrong, while seeing the rest of the relationship as fine (the comment-boxers noticed this). I want to think carefully about what makes this sort of theological move possible. At first blush it seems silly – if the friendship structurally resembles marriage (sharing finances, caring for the friend’s aging parents), what makes having sex so bad? Is it simply a question of procreative potential?

The English poet W.H. Auden, a gay convert to Christianity, has an interesting take re: question-cluster #2. In a letter to Wendell Stacy Johnson in the early 50s, he writes: “Have you seen the C of E report on homosexuality? In its wish to be fair, it falls into the odd position of declaring that only the act is sinful which is, of course, heretical and, from a practical point of view, ineffective. Nobody, where there is mutual consent and pleasure, can possibly feel an act is wrong: if it is, the reason must lie in the personal relationship which desires the acts.” But from your comments in the Romo-thread, it seems like you imagine that personal relationships which become vowed friendships probably won't include desire for sexual acts (I note your example of the eroticism w/ your striking, brilliant friend that pointed toward education, not sex). I get this - maybe it would help your argument if you talked about the (hopefully communal) discernment process that would lie behind such vowed friendships. On your chaste model, it would be important to partner w/ people w/ whom shared eros very obviously didn't point toward sex.

Eve says: Hmmm, first of all, I'm so glad the Beatrice stuff made sense to you! Second, I think possibly my basic vision of how vowed friendship could work will be a bit clearer in a moment when I've posted my next installment of wiggy ponderings on the subject.

Third... I find both Williams's and Auden's quotes here very odd indeed, especially the latter! The act of sex makes a difference because our bodies make a difference. (And I would argue that some form of iconicity--la difference--is primary in the Christian vision of sex, and procreation is secondary.) I genuinely don't understand his argument w/r/t "Nobody, where there is mutual consent and pleasure, can possibly feel an act is wrong: if it is, the reason must lie in the personal relationship which desires the acts." I can consent to and take pleasure in all kinds of acts with another person which in fact I should sublimate and express in another way. This seems so obvious that I think I must be misunderstanding! If so, please just ignore all this, as I don't mean to waste your time with unhelpful ranting. (I can give examples and analogies if needed, though I'm trying to avoid that since analogies, as I've said, generally beg their questions in this kind of discussion.)

I... see your point, re communal discernment of a vocation to a specific vowed friendship, since it's easy to fool ourselves and assume that the sacrifice we want to make is the sacrifice God wants. And yet every fiber of my being revolts against the idea of trying to explain my love to a parish committee! In fact, there seems a danger of "sincerism" there, if we believe and require that love can be fully articulated and brought under the sway of juried evidence and common sense. I am unwilling to recommend specific forms of communal discernment to everyone, though I will recommend getting outside perspectives from people you trust. I know that's very individualist--you are most likely to trust the people who will give you the answer you already want!--but I don't see a better alternative. More on the necessary humiliations involved in renewing vowed friendship in a moment. But I wanted to say that you make an important and difficult point here.

And finally, I highly recommend Miss O's blog to anyone interested in Gay Christian Whatnot! I will link it in my blogroll forthwith.

#2, Philomena:

I've been a lurking follower of your blog for some time now, and am just emerging from the shadows to comment on the comments on "Romoeroticism" at InsideCatholic (don't really feeling like fighting it out amongst the commenters at the moment, but wanted to offer a positive review anyhow).

I loved the piece for the same reason I enjoy all your writing: intellectually rigorous without being pedantic, orthodox beliefs which you don't feel the need to constantly apologize for, lovely prose, and (last but not least, as they say) for the experiences and reflections that I identify with. In this piece particularly, I immediately recognized the feeling you talk about, a yearning which is essentially unfulfilled but which seeks to be fulfilled through God, something which is deeply associated with the body but not reducible to physical urges and desires. Though my own tendencies don't generally run in the direction of SSA, I find that your writing often touches that chord of recognition in me. Maybe it's just a function of being young and reared on the same sort of critical/theoretical/philosophical language, like the post-modern tendency to find sexual motivations for everything. It gets silly, but that kind of thing is rooted in a real experience, the thread of eros (the longing, that is) that runs through a lot of everyday life.

But the comments at InsideCatholic puzzle me because so many of them just seem to be missing the point completely. They're either a) identifying eros with lust and/or , which I'm pretty sure is not theologically sound, or b) wanting the "bottom line" of whether or not you're saying homosexuality is sinful. Or both. None of the contentious commenters seem to be really engaging with the spiritual reality that you're describing, and instead are telling you what you're "really saying" and then going from there (I'm trying really, really hard not to be snarky right now!). I'm forced to think that the problem is a lack of recognition, because surely everyone has felt that formless longing at some point in their lives; they're just not identifying their experience as being the same as what you're talking about, since yours is attached to SSA and theirs is presumably attached to something else.

If they did recognize it, then they wouldn't be gabbing on about how God told them personally to be fruitful and multiply and how if there's a sexual shading to adult friendship it renders the relationship poisonous and how we all just need to read our Bibles really. Instead, they would actually maybe be able to sympathize with gay people, who currently (and quite understandably) feel frustrated by the amazing unhelpful stuff they're saying.

Internet comment threads are where the influence of the Tower of Babel really becomes clear. We're all speaking the same language, even using the same words, but we mean rather different and specific things by them. The only way to define them is with more words, which leads to the same problem. The only way to escape it is to make a leap of understanding and identification not strictly intellectual in nature; my theory is, there used to be a bridge there, so we didn't have to jump.

Sorry for the long and somewhat rambling email. I should really stop reading comment threads, cause they always make me want to hit something.

Eve says: Well first, thanks for the very kind words! And yeah, I think there is a point at which prudence becomes safety-fetishism... which is not the Catholic way. (Or not the only Catholic way!) I understand why many of the IC commenters thought I was imprudent, but I still disagree with where they draw that line. More on this in a bit.

HEAVEN IS NOT A FARM. I have a piece in the current American Conservative--basically vignettes from Dupont Circle. You can read it here as PDF; I'll let you know if an html version goes up.

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION: So due to one of the snafus with which freelance life is riddled, this review of Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll didn't get placed in a timely fashion. I've decided to post it even though the show closed a while ago, because I think it may interest some of you all. I vacillated on whether or not to include the bits specific to this production, but ended up keeping them in, since this was not only the best Stoppard I've seen by far but the best Studio Theatre production I've seen by far. I want you guys to know that they can really knock it out of the park.
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Now that Europe’s “short 20th century,” 1914 – 1989, is over, everyone’s fighting over who gets the credit for the collapse of the Soviet empire. How much to Gorbachev, how much to Reagan, how much to John Paul II?

Into this reverse-ostrakon of historical popularity, Tom Stoppard has thrown an unexpected name: the Great God Pan.

His play Rock ’n’ Roll, in an intimate production at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre through June 21, dramatizes the clash between the “cultural Left” and the more strictly political Left in the last half of the Cold War. Yet all the play’s oppositions--culture vs. politics, eros vs. reason, soul vs. matter--are embodied in the complex relationships between finely-drawn, resonant characters. The sentimentality which sometimes mars Stoppard’s work is absent. It’s a comedy, and a love song, but its joys and reconciliations are hard-won.

Studio’s actors are completely engaging, and the small theater space makes everything immediate: You can smell the joss-sticks. It is weird sitting quietly, occasionally clapping, as the actors explore the ecstatic release of a great guitar riff. There’s no way around that, given the bourgeois nature of just about any American audience who would come to see a Stoppard play. But the play is good enough to overcome our habitual complacence.

The first scene presents Great Pan in the unlikely form of Syd Barrett, crouching on a stoned hippie teen girl’s garden wall. We then set up the tension which will define the play: It is 1968 and Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. In Cambridge, half-feral British Communist Max is growling at half-dissident Czech Jan, as Jan decamps for home: “I said, ‘You. I’ll take you,’ because you were serious and you knew your Marx… and at the first flutter of a Czech flag you cut and run like an old woman still in love with Masaryk.” Max does offer the self-consciously ironic machismo of apologizing to Jan “about the tanks.”

Max is a bitter-ender: “Why do people go on as if there’s a danger we might forget Communism’s crimes, when the danger is we’ll forget its achievements?” He feels piercingly the humiliation of his position:

I meet some apparatchik working the system, and he’s fascinated by me. He’s never met a Communist before. I’m like the last white rhino.

(One of the many subtle touches in this play is the way Max’s rationalism lands him in cruelly absurd situations.) His materialism gives no quarter to fuzzy-headed talk of “inspiration” or “soul”: The meat is all there is. This belief gets one of the funniest smackdowns in a very funny play, when his wife’s student Lenka says he believes a human is a “pinball machine which thinks it’s in love.” But Max also gets one of the play’s most wrenching lines, after his wife accuses him and his materialism of collaboration with the cancer which is killing her.

Max is the sort of man who says, “A worker’s state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work.” Max’s marriage lasts until his wife’s death. He’s the Communist bourgeois.

Jan, meanwhile, just wants to listen to his records. His return to Czechoslovakia is something of a road-not-taken for Stoppard: As the playwright explains, “He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.” Back behind the Iron Curtain, Jan spends his time playing rock music, maneuvering around the police, and arguing against politics. The cops force all his employers to fire him, then arrest him for being a “parasite”--in a pointed callback to an earlier scene in which Jan praised British freedoms, and Max snapped that in England “everyone’s free to have lunch at the Ritz and it’s absolutely legal to be unemployed.”

Here again materialism matters, though the play doesn’t hammer it home. A cop can hit you in the face. A cop can bash in your head. A cop can control the meat. If, as the anti-Nazi resistance song says, “Thoughts are free,” it is only because there is something irreducible, a soul which can’t be destroyed by hitting it.

This is part of the importance of the recurring pagan metaphors. As Eleanor, Max’s wife, translates Sappho for a student: “Eros is amachanon, he’s spirit as opposed to machinery, Sappho is making the distinction. He’s not naughty, he’s--what? Uncontrollable. Uncageable.”

At first Jan and Ferdinand are sharply opposed in their ways of existing under totalitarianism. Jan accuses Ferdinand of “moral exhibitionism” for his constant petitions and protests. Jan argues that his rock musicians--preeminently the Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe--have found a deeper form of rebellion against tyranny:

FERDINAND: Who’s got the best chance of getting Husak’s attention--Havel or the Plastic People of the Universe?
JAN: The Plastics.

At first Ferdinand is exasperated. After he meets the Plastics’ impresario in prison, however, he comes to Jan with convert’s fervor:

FERDINAND: He explained about the hair. The tempter says, “Cut your hair just a little, and we’ll let you play.” Then the tempter says, “Just change the name of the band and you can play.” And after that, “Just leave out this one song”…. It is better not to start by cutting your hair, Jirous said--no, it is necessary. Then nothing you do can possibly give support to the idea that everything is in order in this country. Why couldn’t you have explained this?

This play is passionate about the transformative power of music--the moral force of joy. But it is not naïve. Stoppard hints that perhaps rock’s transformative power is not the same in the liberated West as in the repressed Eastern Bloc: Although Jan’s line, fairly early in the play that “the Grateful Dead must be so envious of the Plastics” gets a laugh, by the play’s end the primary representative of Western rock is the aging Syd Barrett, shambling through the eternal present of late-stage drug addiction. And one of the sharpest exchanges in the play is this one, toward the very end:

MAX: There was a place once, a huge country where square-jawed workers swung sledgehammers, and smiling buxom girls with kerchiefs on their heads lifted sheaves of wheat, and there was a lot of singing, and volumes of poetry in editions of a hundred thousand sold out in a day…. What happened to it?
JAN: If pornography was available, the poetry would have sold like poetry in the West.

The last time the gods are mentioned, Lenka is in Cambridge, as a student of her own reads from Plutarch: “…and Thamous in the stern shouted towards the shore--Great Pan is dead!” The play ends in the Czech Republic, because it has to, because the joy of liberation depends on who’s liberated from what. It’s possible to read the play’s gentle ending as a statement that the time of the gods has passed, and we are now in a time of humanity. But even this is a much too reductive reading of a play which is, like the ecstatic soul, irreducible.

SHE NEEDS YOU/MORE THAN SHE LOVES YOU: An email in response to my post about tradition and iconicity:

First, you suggest that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona out of an impersonal thing (like a place or an institution) so that individual human beings might truly love it. But it seems to me that this position reduces love to an exclusively inter-personal phenomenon. I will accept that love cannot exist apart from the relationship between persons, but consider that (theologically) the act of God's creation is sometimes described as an overflowing of the Love within the Trinity. Thus, God loves rocks and trees though they are impersonal.

Might we not say that human love of institutions, places, etc. result from a similar overflowing. A Frenchman does not first love France, but rather his family, and then, later, his love overflows into the place that made his family possible, and the institutions that gave it shape. Under this scheme, tradition does not create a persona but rather forms a shifting network of channels into which love may overflow. Love allows us to see the beauty of the beloved even where it is concealed from plain sight. Just so, loving the beloved allows us to love what the beloved loves, and to love what brought the beloved into being, and to love a thousand other things as well. And as love overflows, so do we become privy to ever more beauty.

And tradition, by binding people together and to institutions, customs, foods, ways, stories, etc. etc. makes the flow of love from one thing to the next easier and more regular. But I think you miss something if you say a French person loves France more fully as personified rather than as experienced.

Secondly, I would like to make a distinction... you mention the Church as one of the "fictive women" alongside Marianne and Israel. The Church, however, must be distinguished because the Church is in some sense a real Being with an existence distinct (if not independent) from its constitutent parts. France is the people of France and their ways, land, and all the things to which the people of France are bound. The Church, however, is the Union between God and man, which is a Unity in the image of the Unity between the Persons of God. And just as the three Persons of God make up a single Being Who is not merely three Persons existing in a certain relationship to one another, so the Church is a single (eschatological) Being. Consider that Marianne (a fiction) is the symbol of France, but the symbol of the Church is Mary.

That being said, the Church is a Unity as well as being a truly human institution (that is the mystery of the Incarnation, right?) and thus is formed by tradition as any other human institution. I think this actually lends support to my "overflow" model of tradition, since the idea that tradition builds up the Church into a persona would set up two parallel and conflicting symbologies -- one of Marianne and one of Mary.

so yeah, that's awesome.

Some quick responses: I really do believe love is "an exclusively interpersonal phenomenon." I'm not sure how to defend this belief--I've tried a couple of paragraphs and deleted all of them--but actually I don't think my interlocutor is really disagreeing here, he's just pointing out that tradition might be explained without rejecting that basic belief.

I'm still not sure he's right, though. If I love France as an overflowing of my love for my family, can I ever serve France when that would damage my family? Can I have some ideal of France with which my family members would disagree?

The Unabomber was turned in by his brother. I've been convinced of a vision of America which is very different from the vision of ditto embraced by my family. Can we really negotiate these conflicting and shifting loyalties without personifying nationhood--and even, sometimes, putting those personified nations above other forms of personal loyalty?

I very much agree with the distinction between the Church and "Marianne." In fact, I generally think that Christianity (like Judaism) cuts the Gordian knot of philosophy by presenting an object of love Who is simultaneously a moral arbiter.

BUT SHE'S TOO ROUGH AND I'M TOO DELICATE: A reader writes, after my Catholic and Feminist review:

I share your disappointment that the book didn't tackle the real fascination of "Catholic and/or/but feminist," which is the dynamic of submission in feminism: what kinds are privileged (sorry, English major), who says so, why, etc.

Take Morrissey. One of the weirdnesses of his persona is that he is avowedly feminist, and yet he totally possesses, in Laura Mulvey's eternal phrase, "to-be-looked-at-ness." Just as much as any woman in von Sternberg or Hitchcock, he is completely constructed as an image to be consumed by the audience. He chooses to position himself as powerless and for-your-pleasure (or, according to St. Morrissey, as a Northern Woman). And while I've read about why he might like Factory girls or Northern Women as a viewer, has anyone really accounted for why he would choose aesthetic submission for himself?

Of course, I'm not trying to suggest a real equivalence. Aesthetic submission can be worn lightly because it's a pose, and authenticity is the enemy (or irritant) of art. Religious submission is another matter entirely. But in the sense that the aesthetically submissive must choose that for themselves, maybe there is something of a model there for a submission that does not become dominating and coercive and violent, as feminists fear. Or maybe it does, and Moz and Grace Kelly really are just so much siren song luring us into degradation. (Morrissey might like that.)

My readers: so much fun!

SOME SUNNY DAY: If you live in or near DC, I can tell you one thing you need to do right now: Go and fetch yourself a ticket to the Studio Theater's production of Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll. I haven't been blown away by other Stoppard I've seen, but this thing is just fantastic on every level. I'll be reviewing it, so I'll say more then, but... it's about the Velvet Revolution, and ethics vs. Dionysos, and the materialism of dialectical materialism, and... it's really funny, and it earns its ending. Dooooooo eeeeeeeet.

“'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'": And now I come to the thing I care about most: songs.

For it seems to me that there is one way in which the gay-marriage movement deserves the adjective “Orwellian.” It is designed to make any sense of the uniqueness of heterosexual eros unspeakable, and ultimately unthinkable.

There are boring practical reasons to have a separate and specific language for describing sex between men and women. I talked about that stuff here and here. The task of marriage is to make intercourse fruitful rather than devastating, since it has such great potential to be either.

But there are also ways in which heterosexuality is uniquely beautiful, and our language of marriage developed to recognize this, too. Here’s one way to get the quick thrill of encountering a foreign belief system: Check out the Mattachine Society’s 1953 brief against gay marriage. Mattachine was one of the first gay-rights organizations in this country; and yet here, the writers sound not even like John Paul II but more like Paul VI. I don’t think I would wax this rhapsodic about the sanctity of motherhood! [EDITED: Well, I should re-read things before I link them; this is fascinating in its way, but less unpredictable than I'd remembered. Thoroughly skippable. Ah well.]

There’s something uniquely lovely about bringing together the two halves of humanity; about bridging la difference; about moving He and She past mutual incomprehension and suspicion, into harmony. (This is of course related to procreation, but separate from and prior to it. That’s why JPII roots his “theology of the body” in Adam and Eve’s couplehood in Eden--before they had children.)

There’s something uniquely lovely about recognizing the sexual Other as one’s home.

(I’d suggest that there’s also something uniquely lovely about homosexual love, insofar as through love, one’s sexual… compatriot? likeness? whatever is not “self” nor “Other” but “similar”… becomes an Other. Eros is the complete union of two beings who nonetheless remain distinct, remain Other to one another; this is why heterosexual union is such a frequent Jewish and Christian symbol for the union of God and Israel or humankind. My experience of lesbian love is that it tends to draw out and heighten the ways in which the beloved is Other, or even transform her into Other, so that she can be the target of love. This is perhaps a rebuttal to the criticism that homosexuality is narcissism. Nonetheless, it is clearly a different form of eros than the heterosexual form, in which metaphysical Otherness is iconically represented by physical, sexual difference.)

And yet now, if you try to talk about “the halves of humanity,” or anything at all which might be unique to heterosexual eros, you’re a bigot. This is a new development. There have been cultures--I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--which honored some forms of homosexual relationships, while still considering marriage to be something separate.

I don’t know if that’s a path our conflictedly-Christianized culture can take. Still, it would be more accurate and more poetic than the moralistic, bourgeois denial of heterosexual uniqueness which fires the rhetoric of the gay-marriage movement.

FALLING IN LOVE (IS SO HARD ON THE KNEES): Out of all the responses challenging my half of that Commonweal piece on Scripture and homosexuality, I think Teresa Wymore's might be the strongest. And not just because she says I'm "articulate, brilliant, and dangerous"!

I'm going to respond to those portions of her post where I think I have something to say. So this isn't a comprehensive response, should such a thing be possible; and if you want her full argument, you should read her full post, not this selective rebuttal/drum solo....

"self-hating": If you get that adjective from my essay, it's possible that reading this would be illuminating, esp. the question about changing one's orientation--? I don't know. It's impossible to convince someone else of your internal mental state. I will say that I'm much, much more ashamed of owning the Daredevil soundtrack than of being queer...!

Righteousness and peace shall kiss each other: Teresa writes:

Like many converts who are drawn to the Church, she seems to be seeking a perpetual engine of moral clarity, as if one’s hard moral choices shouldn’t rely on time, place, or circumstance but come in a handy indexed volume.

So there's absolutely no way she could know this, but that is a really inaccurate take on my actual conversion! I think she's using "moral clarity" here to mean, "It's obvious what you should do in particular situations"; and not only was wanting that moral guidance absent from my motivations (as best I can remember), rules were something I strongly resisted.

(Would it help if I said I was almost an English major? One of the things I find so fruitful about Catholicism is the way it meshes rules and roles [sorry for the cute phrasing]--philosophy and literature, thou-shalt-nots and "follow Me," commandments and weird saints. I genuinely don't think Catholicism provides easy or even frequent answers to the moral questions I confront in daily life, even though of course it does rule a lot of things out, like support for torture or for abortion. And to the extent that there is a "rulebook," that rulebook was basically the opposite of my motives for conversion!)

So what did I want? Morality definitely played a role, though perhaps a more abstract one. I wanted justice and knew I needed mercy. I believe very strongly in justice--in desert. Sometimes I attribute this belief to the left-Jewish tradition in which I was raised. That may be overreading, but anyway, I believed in justice and yet fled from applying that standard to myself. ("Relativism means never having to say you're sorry.") The things we do wrong, we can never take back, and never fully make amends for; we simply don't have that capacity. If there is resolution and reconciliation, it must happen outside time and beyond our own abilities to enact justice. Only God can make justice reconciliation, rather than merely punishment.

So there was that. I also sought an explanation for the meaning I found in the beauty of the created world; more on that in a bit, though.

Don't tell me what I want to hear: More Teresa:

She begins her argument with her own coming out story. And then, there is this:

Experience is itself a kind of text, and texts need interpreters. How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses?

Yes, she’s an apologist. Do you recognize the first step of any institution seeking control? Don’t trust yourself.

This I think is the key, the best criticism of my piece, even though the first sentence I quoted does give the hint of how I will respond.

It's my fault that my essay can be read that way--as if I'm making the self-contradictory statement that your core epistemological principle should be self-mistrust. (Who is doing the mistrusting? Why, myself!) I don't help this misunderstanding by occasionally using "self-mistrust" as a synonym for humility.

What I actually meant can perhaps be discerned by noting that I don't only begin the Commonweal piece with my coming-out story. I begin it with two parallel love stories: my crush on a high-school girl, and my Catholic conversion. The implicit narrative of the essay is the story of how love of Christ and His Bride the Church became more central to my life than lesbian love (real love, not just crushes!), and how, therefore, I began to interpret the latter kind of love in light of the former.

Both of these loves are things I really experienced my own self. So my argument probably should not have been cast in terms of experience vs. tradition, but in terms of which experiences lead us to reinterpret prior experiences and transform our response to subsequent experiences.

(Was I perhaps hampered in making my case clearly because a) my conversion had a lot of philosophical work on the front end--there were a lot of things I needed to work on through reason, before I could convert, and/or b) I find it very difficult to describe the experiential aspects of my conversion, what it felt like, in ways I think might resonate with others?)

Sure of You: Teresa:

Scripture is a result of personal experience, both produced and interpreted by the personal experiences of a fraction of humanity during ages of class oppression. I do believe it is divinely inspired; I’m just waiting for the divine interpretation. The Tradition that has given us our current understanding of Scripture is based in patriarchal culture, which Tushnet herself seems to acknowledge with a nod early, but now forgets.

OK, I'm boring on this stuff. I don't get why you'd trust Scripture at all, to the extent of believing it is divinely inspired, if you don't trust the Tradition which canonized, preserved, and translated it. Why not the Gnostic gospels, or any story you find meaningful? Without the Church, the Bible is simply "one bible among others."

But more to the point, again, for me it is a question of certainty. I am more sure of the church of Caravaggio, Wilde, Augustine, Anselm, Juan Sánchez Cotán, John Paul II, and Dorothy Day than I am sure that gay sex is a-okay. In my essay I did try to argue for submission to the Church, but of course if you are more certain that prohibiting gay sex is cruel and unjust than you are of the Catholic Church's teaching authority, that argument will be utterly unpersuasive to you, as it should be.

Teresa summarizes well here (although I think the word "rewards" is vague enough to foster misunderstanding--a cross is a reward, you know?--and I'd replace "replace" with "transform"):

I want to ask why she gave up sexual relationships. Did she surrender that expression through discipline or did one desire replace a stronger one in her? My question, you see, is whether she chose her own sacrifice and finds more rewards when she chooses to support tradition and live in conformity with official teaching on sexuality. And yet, she seems to be telling other lesbians who find greater rewards in personal sexual relationships that they are not listening to God.

Tushnet has chosen to make a sacrifice of her lesbian sexuality, but maybe God wants her to sacrifice her attachment to a patriarchal tradition. I would say only she knows the answer to that. She would say the Church knows better than she does.

But then she says this, to which I hardly know how to respond because it seems to come from such a different sense of what Christianity is:

What would make me more open to Tushnet’s ideas is if she simply made the point that she chooses celibacy because she finds greater rewards in it, not because she’s choosing the moral high ground.

I mean... does this translate to, "It's okay to be celibate if you feel fluffy about it, but not if you're doing it just because it's the right thing to do"? I think even those who believe not all homosexual people are called to celibacy should still reject this claim if they believe in vocation, since vocation is not something you choose. So you may have a celibate vocation even if there are no evident "rewards" for you in that life, and you believe other gay ladies can get busy with their ladyloves as much as they like. This phrasing of "reward" vs. "moral high ground" isn't how I think about either universal morality or particular vocation, so like I said, I'm kind of baffled as to how to respond; and possibly I'm therefore being too dismissive--? I dun' get it.

Me, I think the universal morality of "no gay sex" requires of me a personal vocation including but not limited to celibacy. (I think my primary vocation is writing, though that may well be completely self-aggrandizing. But in general I think it's best to conceive one's vocation as positive--I have a vocation to pregnancy center counseling, I have a vocation as the friend of those I love--rather than negative.) But I just wouldn't use the terms Teresa uses here, and I challenge them.

Saint Monica, Rene Girard/preserve me from my past: Then Teresa switches to a discussion of James Alison vs. Rene Girard, which began on this note:

But I find discomfort with any idea of sacrifice. Claiming that Christianity breaks the cycle of escalating sacrificial violence by having us make sacifices of ourselves is seeming less true to me all the time. I’ve never really seen the difference between sacrificing someone else as a scapegoat versus sacrificing ourselves.

At first I found this a bizarre statement. Murder and martyrdom are equivalent! Stealing your wallet and punching you in the face is just like turning the other cheek! Yeah, no.

Besides which, I've been on the whole love-requires-sacrifice kick for a long time.

But one of her commenters wrote:

...I guess one question is, does letting someone enact violence reinforce the mechanism of violence or contribute to its end? Thinking about the U.S. civil rights fight, and then thinking about domestic abuse and mob violence, I come up with different answers.

(more)
And this made me see the real challenge here, to which I have no adequate response. When does witness become enabling? When does Adam Smith become right, and mercy to the guilty becomes cruelty to the innocent?

I have no answers; but I would recommend that anyone interested in the questions check out David Adams Richards's novel Mercy Among the Children. Here's part of what I said about it in Crisis magazine in February '02:

Very few authors today believe in human greatness as sincerely as David Adams Richards does.

That may seem like a strange conclusion to draw from a novel set among poor rural Canadians, in which a relentlessly kind couple is ostracized, beaten, abused, poisoned by chemical dumping, and accused of everything from theft to child molestation and murder. A list of the horrors to which Elly and Sydney Henderson are subjected would read almost comically, like the stage directions from Titus Andronicus: "Enter Lavinia, with hands cut off, tongue cut out, and ravished." But in Richards's hands, despite the book's stylistic flaws, both the abuses and the gentle response are believable.

The book's creed might be: I believe that good and evil are real. I believe that complete pacifism, self-sacrifice, and sainthood are possible. I believe that we can love our enemies. I believe that any man can search for the truth, that any woman can find it. ...

But notice, too, what is left out: I believe in God. I believe that it is good to be a saint. Those are two conclusions Richards, within the world of his novel, does not reach.

As a child, Sydney Henderson almost killed another boy while fighting drunk on a snow-covered rooftop. Afterward, he made a pact with God that he would never harm another person. ...

But is it even possible to understand the nature of Sydney's pact? He is Christlike, but there are moments when his life seems as much Stoic as Christian. Sydney sometimes appears to believe not that harming others is wrong but that it will ultimately backfire. He tells Elly, "[N]o one can do an injury to you without doing an injury to themselves. ...Those who scorn you taunt only themselves." This belief doesn't square with Sydney's passivity--he won't even tell others when they are acting wrongly. Sometimes it's clear that he is silent because he fears his own power to hurt. But if Sydney truly believes that the viciousness inflicted upon him will harm its perpetrators most, why doesn't he try to stop them, for their own sakes?

(There's more to the book than that, obviously; I'm just quoting the part of my review which engages with the questions Teresa and her interlocutors raise.)

All for now....

"DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP": My new piece at Inside Catholic. Quick summary: "Do you have a personal relationship with God?" is a reductive and kind of cloyingly Hallmark question; but it might still help us understand times when we're angry at God, when we feel abandoned by God, and when we feel an ironic distance from God.

[...] the devouring gorgon romantic love, toward which, as toward wine, unfaith is renewal
--Marianne Moore, as excerpted here

I WANT TO DO EVERYTHING: In which Joan Jett is the Catholic Church, and I'm a reform-school girl (as is traditional).

MIXING MEMORY AND DESIRE: NOTES FROM MY THEOLOGY ON TAP THING. This isn't going to be an outline of my presentation, because a) it was ridiculously scattershot (hey man, I could barely speak! Don't expect brilliance from a petrie dish!) and b) a lot of it was stuff I'd said before, most notably here and in my essay in Faith on the Edge. (So if you liked it, read that piece and buy the book!)

So instead, these are notes about what I said, and what I was asked. I'll try to say things I've never said before. In order from least to most interesting, I think.

1. "Do you believe gay sex is a sin?" The TOTNYC people collected questions on paper during and after the talk, so I could answer them, and this was one of the more frequent ones.

I think this speaks to a problem on my part: I find it, in fact, humiliating to say that I do. I'm okay with saying, "I believe all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches"; c'mon, I said this at my baptism. But to say, "Hey, I'm the chick who doesn't get to git wit' it," seems a bit more humiliating!

There are more defensible reasons I got this question several times over: I truly believe it's important to focus on sublimation as the opposite of repression, and on how I can express my lesbian desires while not merely respecting but even strengthening chastity. Possibly that focus can make me sound like chastity isn't crucial to me, when in fact the need for chastity is precisely what's pushing me to develop this understanding of sublimation as expression of eros.

But I need to keep in mind that the fact that a statement is humiliating is never a reason to avoid making it. I need to practice more humility and honesty--I know this--and I think these virtues would have helped my talk be more clear. As well as being good for, you know, my life.

The other thing, though, is that it's worth keeping in mind that I am pretty up-front about where I stand on Catholic sex stuff, and yet it's still very difficult for me to say some of these things. I think just as it's very easy for gay people to underestimate the tragedies and humiliations inherent in heterosexuality, it's easy for straight people to underestimate the ditto inherent in homosexuality. I don't in any way mean to say, oh my life is so hard!--not at all, more just that I was startled by how difficult this particular thing turned out to be. It reminded me that there will always be difficulties I don't choose, no matter how trivial.

2. Gay marriage. This is one of the other questions I got on several different slips of paper. (The third was some variation of, "How do I talk to my gay friends without being horrible?", which is a real question, but which depends so much on your own persona, your friend's persona/self-conception, and your relationship, that I don't feel comfortable answering it on the blog, where I can't get into the nuances of circumstance.)

First, and most importantly, I want to separate this question from the question of what Catholics who find themselves erotically drawn to the same sex should do. They are somewhat related questions, because both turn on the nature and meaning of human sexuality, but the differences are at least as important as the similarities. And so I focused, at TOTNYC, on drawing this line of separation, because I thought it might give people some degree of emotional space in which to work out their beliefs about the personal question--what should I do?--before moving on to what the laws should be.

But I think also that people asked me this question because they were grappling for a language with which to address marriage. Marriage, as a pre- and non-liberal institution, is exceptionally hard to talk about. Eros in general is pre- and non-liberal, and extraordinarily hard to talk about--this may be why feminism is both so attractive, and so convoluted and self-opposed--because eros is not really about happiness or choice, and those two categories are the only ones in which we've been taught to think.

So, while I want to re-emphasize that I do not think this question is the same as, or even follows obviously from, the question of Catholic chastity--I do want to give people some sense of how I talk about gay marriage. This post rounds up several other articles/posts I've written on the subject.

3. Ars longa, vita brevis. One of the best things about being Catholic is that there has been a lot of Catholicism already. This is also one of the most difficult things about being Catholic!--viz. my posts on the mintiness of the Pope. But for gay Catholics, specifically, the Church's age is important in at least three ways:

a. We are not sola Scriptura, in part because that doesn't make sense. Every text needs interpretation; every interpretation requires tradition (language is itself a tradition); every tradition requires a beloved or Beloved, real or imagined, Who gives content to its abstract nouns.

It is easy to pick apart the references to homosexual acts in Scripture. It is much, much harder to argue against the entire orthodox interpretive tradition (i.e. what the Church has for two millennia taken those curt phrases to mean) or the overall symbolic pattern of Scripture (i.e. the fact that marriage is treated as a mirror of the divine love affair with humankind, and so is same-sex friendship, but the latter is never conflated with the former).

Let me unpack that parenthesis a bit. There are many metaphors for God's love in Scripture, covering just about all of our human loves: filial love, friendship, eros, even the love of the stranger, even the love of the enemy. And yet these metaphors are all different facets of the crystal broken at the Fall. If we are going to be excruciatingly precise about the translation of arsenokoitai , shouldn't we be equally clear on the fact that the Bible can portray many different kinds of love without ever suggesting they are the same love, or that they should be expressed in the same way? And that sacred Tradition might have something to say about that?

b. Keats and Yeats Are on Your Side, While Wilde.... The second important point about the Church's age is that She is rich in resources for contemporary gay people--because She is rich in resources for just about anybody. You have incredible models of sublimation, people who poured out their friendships or their eros as oil across the feet of the Crucified. (The Roden book here is the book I mentioned at the talk, btw.) Why aspire to be liberated when you could aspire to be Teresa?

c. Fra Angelico cats come out tonight! The last, and perhaps most controversial, way in which the Church's age is important is that She has provided images of vocation even outside of those officially recognized.

The most obvious of these is the artistic vocation. Who will stand up to say that Flannery O'Connor was a bad Catholic? Perhaps soon the same will be said of Oscar Wilde, or even Morrissey. (I'm of the belief that if the Messiah tarries, Wilde will be canonized sometime in the next few centuries.)

I don't have any problem with the privileging of the vocations of marriage and vowed religious life. But I do think the Catholic Church, with its eccentrics, its holy fools, its uncanny and astonishing saints, offers a whole bestiary of forms of love for God; and the diversity of that bestiary is the freedom of Catholics.

4. What is the point of you? The previous points blend into this final one. I think one of the most pressing questions for gay Catholics--and maybe for anyone, but there is only one thing that I know how to do well etc--is, "What is the point of me?" Why am I the way that I am, with my besetting weaknesses, my strange silences, my crimson joys?

A guy wrote to me at one point to ask, among other things, whether he would still be gay in Heaven. I wrote back a bunch of things, but one thing I said is that we know from Scripture that there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage in Heaven. Whatever marriage is here, it is a foretaste of and preparation for what we will experience if we end up in Heaven. And similarly, St. Aelred delineates how friendship can be our means of seeing the face of Christ, and presenting His holy face to those we love.

And so where there is love in homosexual relationships, that love too, I think, is a preparation for something in Heaven, as all love is. It likely reflects a different aspect of our love of God. Marriage, for example, plays on the eros of difference, the thrill of la difference. But anywhere there is love, be it capable of chaste sexual expression or requiring complete sublimation of sexual expression or completely absent of any desire for sexual expression--anywhere, that love is preparing us for Heaven. Maybe by bringing us to the Cross; maybe by teaching us how to sacrifice with joy; maybe by teaching us to sacrifice while expecting nothing in return; maybe by pushing us outside the bourgeois world of society and family, the world that makes things work, and exposing us instead as fools for Christ.

What love does to you will depend--like drinks at Philip Larkin's party!--"on where you are; or who." But there is a point to you, and to your love. Christ is Lord of Time, and He has brought you into this world in this time and place and culture for some purpose; you have been given some unique way of manifesting His love to the world.

The Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine argues, in "The Jewish Century" (2004), that Yiddish did not evolve typically: if you study its form and structure, you discover its deliberate and fundamental artificiality--it is the language of people who are interested, in Slezkine's words, in "the maintenance of difference, the conscious preservation of the self and thus of strangeness."
--The New Yorker, via Ratty

From what sharp, biting file
Does your tired skin keep growing thin and failing,
O ailing soul?

Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love
That opened his arms on the cross to take us in.
--my notes say that this is Michelangelo, from a book (and likely a translation) by S.B. McHam, book title Looking at Italian Renaissance Art

SKIRTING THE ISSUES: My review of the Shakespeare Theater's all-male Romeo and Juliet (closes 10/18! tickets still available! act now while supplies last!):

Love does not alter when it alteration finds; and neither, apparently, does D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre’s all-male interpretation of Romeo and Juliet.

That’s how it would’ve been in Shakespeare’s day, don’t you know? The women characters are all played by men in wigs and dresses, who drop occasionally into deeper voices for comedic effect. Other than that, this is a really well-done, entirely standard production of R & J in which the only innovation is that Romeo drowns Tybalt in a barrel.

The sex-switching doesn’t do much in the end, but it does work well in at least two ways.

First of all, James Davis’s Juliet is amazing. Davis has played adapted Shakespeare drag before--as Julia in 2 Gents (i.e., of Verona) and Lady Capulet in Shakespeare’s R and J--and he’s the standout of this production. He’s all nose and knees, all coltish, breastless edge-of-fourteen. He makes Juliet seem young again. He can chew his wig just the same way every girl chewed her hair when she was just starting middle school--and he can deepen his voice to suggest a level of introspection and intelligence perfectly befitting the character. Director David Muse, in an otherwise unilluminating interview for the theater’s brochure, notes that Juliet was the hardest casting decision; and it’s entirely to his credit that it’s the one he got most obviously right.

Juliet’s tragedy is that she’s an exceptionally precocious, beautiful, intelligent idiot, sophisticated and philosophical and barely adolescent. Somehow the gender confusion in Davis’s performance reflects the inherent conflict between Juliet’s aptitude for abstraction and her lack of maturity. A man who won’t ever grow into his gown makes a terrific girl who hasn’t quite grown into her brain.

(It’s too bad Finn Wittrock’s Romeo can’t match her. He’s all floppy hair and callowness, the Renaissance male equivalent of writing her name in glitter paint on his Trapper Keeper. Romeo is already the dumber one--as is typical for Shakespearean romantic couples--so casting a less-accomplished actor, or perhaps directing him in a more standard-issue style, is just unfair.)

Second, there are moments when the Shakespeare Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet suggests that there might be different archetypes appropriate for men and women--and that Juliet, so often portrayed as an innocent destroyed by a cruel social conflict, might be something more sinister. Juliet as a man, especially in the balcony scene, has echoes of Tadzio, the beautiful boy from “Death in Venice” whose secret name is mortality.

The bright boy called death is a well-known homosexual archetype; but the femme fatale, the heterosexual equivalent, is often a woman well past girlhood. Interestingly, her age often makes her an equal match for her prey—her sex is what makes her vulnerable, what makes her male target think they’re punching in the same weight class. If Juliet is a boy, she’s a boy whose kiss is death; and there is an already-established convention for that, from Dorian Gray to Suddenly, Last Summer.

Unfortunately, the Shakespeare Theatre’s production isn’t willing to commit to this interpretation--or any unconventional interpretation--of the show. The gender-switching makes for a few politicized laughs (Juliet on marriage: “It is an honour that I dream not of”), but overall it offers no especial insight into the play. The tensions and attractions between Romeo and Mercutio, Mercutio and Benvolio, and Romeo and Benvolio are just as ambiguously homosocial/homoerotic as they always are. The Nurse is wonderfully draggy, but that doesn’t really change her character, which I suppose is commentary in itself. Akiva Fox’s brochure commentary on male violence suggests that the gender dynamics should matter, but the production doesn’t bear that out in any unexpected way. The audience seemed generally a bit deflated when it was over, maybe because they’d been expecting something more provocative.

The sad thing is that this is a really great production if you ignore the gimmick. The direction for both of my favorite speeches is subpar--Juliet’s horrified speech about what it will be like to awaken in her family tomb is a little too histrionic; Mercutio’s amazing, play-changing Queen Mab speech, on which an entire and much better all-male production might have been hooked, comes across as manic-depressive rather than otherworldly and Hitchcockian. But almost everything else is fantastic. There are many musical interludes, and they’re all well-done, catchy and evocative and fun to watch. Benvolio is great, Mercutio is fine, and the production allows both the teens and the adults to be just as stupid as they really are in the play. No one will be governed by reason; no one will be ruled by wise counsel. There’s even a nice touch where the chorus, at the very beginning of the play, speaks in their normal masculine voices without wigs, emphasizing the male authorship and viewpoint of the play. (This goes nowhere, maybe because it can’t go anywhere useful; Shakespeare’s women are so smart and real that they are basically the reverse of the academics’ “male gaze.”)

This is a fine production. It’s violent and smarter than its characters. It’s able to see that the Nurse is both practical and melodramatic, and Juliet is both highly intelligent (her “What’s in a name?” speech comes across as almost Heloise-level Scholasticism...and simultaneously a parody of that Scholasticism) and highly silly. (I think it’s Shakespeare’s fault, rather than the production’s, that the most obviously complex characters are women.) It gets that weird, compelling Shakespearean combination of genre convention and genre challenge.

It just doesn’t tell us anything about men and women. In fact, in its ostentatious refusal to shape the interpretation around the all-male gimmick, it pretends that nothing interesting can be said about that difference. “Back in Shakespeare’s day, they did all-male performances because they had these weird beliefs about gender archetypes; but now we know that a man can be just as much Juliet as a girl!”

This would be a better production if it had the courage of its commercialism.

EROS AND EDUCATION: I know this is ridiculously late, but I've been distracted and all August humid-hazy in the brain. Here are some clarifying comments I made to X. Trapnel of Books Do Furnish a Room, about our brief dust-up. (Me, him, me.)

1) "I totally agree [that it's still possible for people with radically divergent premises and even languages/definitions to pursue truth together], and I'm sorry this particular approach to meta-discussion didn't highlight that agreement. BUT--and this is why so much philosophy goes so wrong--good debate on morals & politics (I still prefer 'virtue' as the word for this stuff) can only take place when there's a rich context of story and persona. If I want to talk about marriage (to use the easiest example to hand) I need to talk about the Song of Songs, not just more abstract nouns, and I need to create some sense of my persona in your mind.

"That's necessary b/c persuasion is leadership. We need to create some kind of relationship in order for you to understand what I'm saying. Huckabee (or the rhetorical strategy I'm calling 'Huckabee'!) fails here b/c he basically rejects any attempt to create a relationship with people who don't already share his conclusions. That's ridiculous, it's retreat, just the opposite of leadership.

"This is why a) good philosophical dialogues are superior to good philosophical treatises, and b) just about all of the work that has to be done to 'resurrect' virtue-talk must be done at the level of culture, not politics as such. (So Huckabee/'Huckabee' was already quite handicapped.)"

2) "I think we disagree on what aesthetics is, and where its limits are. Possibly I can clarify by saying that I'm talking about aesthetics as a philosophy of love, not a philosophy of taste? [edit: Should be, not solely as a philosophy of taste.] I mean, I disagree with you about 'de gustibus' anyway, but I think you can keep believing that and still end up on my side here."

[note: Of course it's possible to dispute taste! The guys at Project Rungay do it all the time, and often convince one another or their readers.]

[and here I say that leadership is not only about showing people something new to love, but also about revealing the secret identity of the beloved for whom they're already longing:] "I'm very OK with showing people how their own longings (aesthetic!) are answered by my worldview."