Plato was no friend of safe sex, and latex would not have changed his mind.
In his great erotic dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus,
Plato’s love is like C. S. Lewis’ divine lion, Aslan, who though very good is
certainly not tame. The erotic desire beauty provokes, Plato tells us, is the
path to madness, not to the security and dull reasonableness of the prudent.
We slander love and the gods who bring that desire when we refuse its transfigurations
and ecstasies. Control and the dear old self: these are not gods, but their
idols of clay.
Every love is a giving birth, a conception that takes lover and beloved beyond
themselves into an undiscovered country, a procreation. Love is always emigrant.
The Platonic lover muses on the beloved, doting to idolatry over this image
and likeness of God. It is union above all duty. Why teach ourselves to hope
for less? But in truth we shy from using these sacred names, as much from human
fear as holy awe. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the new world’s greatest Platonist, understood
our reticence. “We but half express ourselves,” he wrote, “and are ashamed of
that divine idea which each of us represents.” To own the mad aspirations of
Plato’s fertile love is to risk a charge of public intoxication in this our
sober age, which usurps the name of temperance, but shows itself to favor prohibition.
Its representative would be T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, whose hundred indecisions
and revisions are but poor shelters from the overwhelming questions and indefinite
answers of love. Love has no safe harbors, only interminable oceans. It must
dare disturb the universe, and it will search out the expressions it needs for
its work.
But where do we find ourselves? Erotic lethargy is the master tone of the age.
Like Mark Antony by Caesar, we are dispossessed of our erotic estate by mere
administrators, and the angels of love fold up their wings affrighted and overpowered.
Our genius is fled, since love cannot be found measured and reckoned like so
many spoons of coffee. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,”
said Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of the last century.
Our mother tongue feels her limits, and stammers and scolds when she tries to
speak of love.
The present contractions of our erotic language are painful to behold, and
God knows what rough beasts are waiting to be born. Hardheaded realism is the
mask worn in our time by hard-hearted cynicism. Emerson saw it coming, this
world where our experience refuses all the expressions of idealism. So we keep
the high things of the world outside, the better to keep our petty inside secure
and tranquilized. “The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats
that shed every drop.” Now sex itself is like the weather, and the law of erotic
prudence is always to have at hand one’s slicker.
Scholars and poets are nature’s victims of expression. We wax and wane with
the language. Every word chagrins us, and we blush from inarticulacy. The most
common word we mouth to describe the conjugal embrace is as old as English,
our four-letter friend derived from a Dutch root, fokken, having to do
with breeding cattle. (So much for romance.) What is common comes to lose its
savor, and in the end is good for nothing but to be thrown in the street and
trampled underfoot. When I was a boy four decades ago, the word at least retained
a certain vulgar potency, even when voiced only among other boys—it was unthinkable
to say it in front of girls, and it was uttered in front of adults only for
the most extreme of purposes. It meant something then, something about crossing
a line or refusing to feign innocence. We could wear it as an impudent badge
of adolescent knowingness. But forty years of trampling have made it in truth
what the Oxford English Dictionary says it has been for a century, a
“meaningless intensifier.” The limits of this erotic world are common indeed.
One wonders if the century has made a meaningless intensifier not only of the
name, but of the action named as well. On college campuses, the genius of language
has found the name “hook-up” for an evanescent sexual entanglement, especially
when catalyzed by artificial intoxicants. The word is meant, like its precursors
“affair” and “fling,” to carry the holiday in its eye, a spirit of roving adventure.
I find the association with travel real enough, but the name loses some of its
enchantment in my local habitation. Where I live in Indiana, roving is associated
with recreational vehicles, those massive motor homes of camping enthusiasts.
This vehicular lifestyle depends on transient resting places where the mighty
rovers can dump their waste, and campsites with accommodating plumbing advertise
the provision of “hook-ups.” Perhaps this connotation of “hook-up” is the Hoosier
version of William Faulk ner’s pithy description of uncaring sex as finding
“an evening’s spittoon.” One does not dote on a hook-up.
But when we try to ascend from the common to the public, do we fare better?
The phrase “sexual intercourse,” and the use of the word “sex” to cover not
just the fact of male and female, but what we (though not our former President)
call “sex acts,” are also hardly a century old. At the very moment our Dutch
word left the confines of the erotic and became a general term of excitement
or abuse, the vacuum was filled with words more at home in a hospital than the
nuptial chamber. Our talk of love came under the severe influence of the public
health authorities. The nuptial meaning of the body, to use a phrase of Pope
John Paul II’s, all but disappears.
This medical turn in our language made public speech about the erotic possible
by sanitizing it, like chlorine in so much sewage. It was the beginning of the
movement toward safe sex, a prophylactic of the tongue. “Sexual intercourse”
comes from the same region of the language native to various sorts of -ectomies
and -oscopies. It does not sound like something for which one would cross the
hall, let alone the world. “I’m sorry, I can’t meet you for lunch today; I have
to go to the medical center for a sexual intercourse.” My favorite illustration
of where this way of talking takes us is the phrase “sexually active.” It seems
to be modeled on “radioactive”: the “sexually active” teenager is an isotope
with a short half-life, spewing particles of sexuality that threaten to cause
beta decay in the surrounding atoms.
The metallic aftertaste of words medical and the impudent tastelessness of
words adolescent make every choice unpalatable. They cannot speak to our erotic
desires. Here even a good Christian might long to be a pagan. How like finding
fresh water it is to read in Plato that Eros is a great god, and to speak of
love with the sacred names of Dionysus, god of wine, and Aphrodite, goddess
of beauty. We have Plato’s testimony that every one of us—male and female, free
and slave, gentile and Jew—is pregnant, and erotic desire is our surest sign
that the gods will have us give birth.
Our poor tongue seems to cover itself in shame when confronted with this erotic
theophany. The earth-bound scholars will try to dispirit us with their malicious
insinuation that the Greek word aphrodisia, “the things of Aphrodite,”
is merely another way of saying “sexual intercourse.” The fact and the inference
are not to be trusted. One might as well say the Church’s word for “cup” is
“chalice,” and confuse a mundane instrument of profane life with the container
for a bloody yet nourishing god. What conceptions do the scholars attach to
love, what to religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their
hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them with their knowingness.
The art of love has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Nietzsche was right
to say Eros has been poisoned into degeneracy, but he misidentified the poisoners.
It is the intellectuals, not the Christians, who have drugged Eros with a contraceptive
of the mind.
In our time, the Catholic Church has done more than anyone else to keep visible
this divine aspect of sexuality. I do not claim she has done enough. The tongue
remains a most erotic organ, but our language labors to make itself heard over
the sniggers of boys with dirty pictures and the cold clatter of doctors with
their instruments. We need love-intoxicated Christian poets to find new heaven,
new earth, new words. “The conjugal embrace,” “the nuptial meaning of the body,”
cannot for most of us be the cadences of our native place. They are the quaint
idioms of Vaticanese, the foreign speech of a land where we may visit, but do
not live.
It is an honest response to bide one’s time and bite one’s tongue, until the
weather clears and new work can be done. As Wittgenstein said, “Whereof we cannot
speak, thereof we must be silent.” But there is a risk in waiting, too. If I
bite my tongue too often, I may lose the power of speech altogether. And then
where will I be? Nowhere to be found.
David K. O’Connor is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the
University of Notre Dame and senior fellow of the Morris Institute for Human
Values in Wilmington, North Carolina. He has recently edited Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
1818 translation of Plato’s Symposium for St. Augustine’s Press.
