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Freudianism interprets man in terms of sex; Christianity interprets sex in terms of man. The romanticist loves love; the Christian loves a person. There is a world of difference between sex loving sex and a person loving a person. Sex tries to be simultaneously both the receiver and the giver of passion; both the subject and the object. In sex the male adores the female. In love the man and woman together adore God. As a result of this dismemberment of sex from personality, sex is cerebralized, in the sense that it is made an intellectual problem. In normal human beings, sex is physical and organic. In the abnormal, it is something thought about, studied, dissected, and reduced to statistics and reports. In the older barbarism, sex was considered as physical. In the newer barbarism it is mental. Much advertising is based on sex. Instead of concupiscence arising from the body, it is now made to rise within an artificially stimulated imagination.
There is no doubt whatever that sex is an important energy in human life, but is it the basic energy as so many psychologists contend? Or is it, better, only one of the branches on the tree of life? Instead of being the reservoir, may it not be one of several channels through which the original Life Endowment is communicated? As water is basically H[2]O and can appear as liquid, steam, and ice, so there may be in the human person a fundamental dynamism and power, which comes from the soul-body unity, and which flows out in three different directions.
Man is not a soul. As St. Thomas says: "My soul is not myself." But the soul of man is the actuating principle of the body and makes it exist as a body, unifies it, possesses it, and develops it. The parents prepare the body; God infuses the soul and makes the person. The union of the body and spirit form one being! The original source of Power, Energy, Thought, Action, Love, and Passion comes from the soul united to the body! This Original Energy, which we will call Vita, has three principal manifestations, because man may be considered as related (a) to himself, (b) to humanity, and (c) to the cosmos.
In relation to himself, Vita appears as self-preservation, a consciousness of dignity, an urge to be all that one ought to be. Personality feels itself, therefore, as a bearer of inalienable rights and liberties which are given by God, and which no state or dictator can take away. The right to life inspires not only needed physical development, but mental and spiritual development, as well. In brief, it implies not only a self-respect, but also a very legitimate self-love, which strives for perfection. "You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt. 5:48)
In relation to humanity, this Vita manifests itself in the generation of the human species, the begetting of a family, which in turn becomes the unit of a state and society, in which his personal rights and liberties are conditioned by the rights and liberties of others for the sake of the good of all.
In relation to the universe, the Vita takes another channel, which is that of compensating for the poverty of personal being through having, which becomes the ownership of private property as the economic guarantee of external liberty, as the soul is an inner and spiritual guarantee.
These three distillations of Vita are good because given by Divine Goodness. And all three emanations go together. No one would ever be so shortsighted as to describe man's role as self-development, leaving out his magnificent power of cooperating with God in the begetting of new areas of love. Neither would one be so narrow as to describe man in terms of the things on which he works, or which he eats, or with which he clothes himself. It would be like describing an elephant in terms of his tusk, or his tail, or his trunk alone.
But, and here is the important fact, the right to self-preservation could become egotism, and the power of generation could become license, and ownership could be monopolistic capitalism or communism, if there ever were a basic disturbance of the Vita and the God-given relations of soul and body. And that is precisely what did take place in what is called the Fall of Man. The fringes of this truth modern psychology has rediscovered in the conflicts and tensions and anxieties which go on inside of man. Something has happened to man to make him what he is. Whatever he is, he is not what he ought to be. All the disorder and anarchy both within himself and society possess the earmarks of being due to an abuse of freedom. Even though man now and then acts as if he lived in a jungle, one can still see in some of his actions that he once played in a Garden.
It is not our point here to describe the rebellion of man against His Creator. Every one analyzing his conscience can find examples of what happened, especially when he becomes sad and remorseful because he has hurt someone he loved. When the mainspring of a clock becomes broken, all the works are still there, but they do not function. In like manner, as a result of the rebellion against Divine Love, the Vita, the fundamental soul-body unity in man, lost its balance; it did not become intrinsically corrupt. A derangement took place among the three outlets of the Vita. In relation to himself, man became inclined not always to do what he ought, but to do what he pleased, even though he hurt others and himself. In relation to the human race, man, because he was endowed with reason, could manipulate the levers of life, which animals could not do, and could seek the pleasures of the flesh without assuming responsibilities. Finally, in relation to the cosmos, he became inclined to want more than he needed in the way of property, or to use illegitimate means to acquire what he did not have, or else to deprive others of what was their own.
If the pendulum denies its dependence on the clock, it is no longer free to swing. Because man denied his dependence on God, Who alone is the Source of his independence, the harmony of his nature became disturbed. There sprang up in his Vita what is called libido, or concupiscence, a tending toward certain things in defiance of rational restraint. Abnormality was introduced in all the three channels of the Vita. From now on legitimate self-love could become Egotism and Selfishness; the union of two in one flesh could become Sex, in the modern sense of the term; and the right to property could become Communism, Monopolistic Capitalism, and Revolution. They need not become any of these things, for man still has human freedom, but it became harder for man to keep the lower passions tamed and under control. This concupiscence or libido is not a sin; it is more like a temptation, which becomes a sin only when the will consents to this disorder. This original catastrophe to human nature made man eccentric, that is, inclined to get off center, from which tendency has come the need of Abnormal Psychology.
The first of these concupiscences becomes Pride or Egotism, the second becomes Lust, and the third, Avarice or Greed, and from these three flow all the sins that a human can commit. Note that there are three concupiscences or libidos, and not one of them is to be identified with the Vita. Pride is not the basic energy of life, nor is Sex, nor Greed, but all three are tendencies toward disorder in the one basic energy or Vita.
Most psychologists are narrow, in the sense that they take one of these to the exclusion of the others. Freud takes Sex and forgets the other two equally important libidos. Adler takes Pride, and Jung takes Greed or Security. Psychology will never give a total understanding of man until it incorporates all three and relates them to something more basic in man. Freud is right in speaking of the importance of sex in man, as a man is right in describing the importance of a trunk to an elephant. Our complaint is that it is not scientific, because not total. The libido is not sex, but sex is one of the expressions of the libido. The inferiority complex is not the basic libido of life, but it is one of them. The desire for security is not the sole explanation of man, but it is an important part of the explanation. Each of the great schools is one-third right. Of the three, Freud has chosen the one which is certainly the most appealing to a dis-God-ed generation. It is also very important, because the other libidos are not both personal and social. Pride involves only one individual and avarice involves things. But sex implies two persons, and through them humanity. Freud dropped one dim hint that possibly he was too narrow, for toward the end of his life he suggested widening the term sex. But it was never widened enough to include even remotely the other two eccentric tendencies and disharmonies without which no psychology is complete.
If sex were as "natural" as the sex psychologists assume it is, there should never be associated with it the sense of shame. But if anarchy was introduced into human nature by an abuse of freedom, it follows that the shame accompanying sex has some hidden relationship to man's rebellion against God.
Sacred Scripture tells us that before the Fall, Adam and Eve were "naked but not ashamed." They were naked and not ashamed because the passions were completely subject to reason, and there was not yet in the human body a tendency on the part of the passions to rebel against reason. The nakedness without shame was due in part to that inner spiritual perfection. It is a well-attested fact that those people who are most impoverished in their souls try to cover up this inner destitution by extreme luxury on the outside. The more naked the soul, that is, the more devoid of virtue, the greater the need of the body to give the appearance of possession through fantastic dress, display, and ostentation. The more the soul is clothed with virtue, the less is the need of outer compensation. The poor boy who wishes to be known as rich must make a display of riches. The boy who is really rich needs no such prop. We meet the reversal of this distinction of the poverty and riches of the body and soul in the ceremony known as the clothing of nuns. In many communities, the day the young lady becomes professed she dresses first as a rich bride and is adorned with many jewels. Some believe this is to express the fact that she is the Bride of Christ. That such is not the case is evident from the fact that after she pronounces her vows, she goes to her cell and exchanges the elaborate gown for the humble and menial habit of her community. The implication is that now that her soul is adorned with the beauty of God's grace, there is no longer need for seeming richness of the body. It is very likely that Adam and Eve, instead of being naked in our sense of the term, had reflected in their bodies an effulgence of light, which came from Original Justifying Grace in the soul. As a result, one perceived less a body than a person bearing the Divine Image.
It was only after our First Parents rebelled against God that they disturbed the equilibrium of their human nature. It need hardly be stated here that Catholic tradition has never taught that their sin was the marriage act. On the contrary, God told our First Parents to "increase and multiply." As St. Augustine says: "He who says that there would have been neither copulation nor generation but for the sin, simply makes sin the origin of the holy number of the saints." The position of St. Thomas is that there was far greater pleasure in the marriage act before Original Sin. "There would not have been less pleasure then, as some people have asserted. Rather the same pleasure would have been all the greater, inasmuch as man's nature was then purer, and his body was therefore capable of more exquisite sensations."
No one sins against Love without hurting himself. A triple concupiscence, or tendency to excess, resulted from Adam's and Eve's turning from God. What effect did that have on the second manifestation of Vita, or generation? As regards the marital act, St. Thomas says we "must distinguish two features in the present state of things: One which is natural, namely, the conjunction of male and female for the purpose of generation.... The other is a certain deformity consisting in immoderate concupiscence. The latter would not have been present in the state of innocence, for then the lower powers were already subject to reason." This tendency to derationalize or irrationalize the passion of generation, along with acts associated with it, is what is embraced in the modern use of the term "sex." It includes, therefore, what is good (the passion of the flesh to generate), and what is evil (namely, its disorder and excess).
It was after the loss of grace that our First Parents perceived themselves to be naked and were ashamed. To some extent, the sense of shame may be natural, but it now begins to appear as associated with guilt. Shame can be, and often is, the expression of the tension and antinomy which in its higher realms was a rebellion against God. Original Sin tore them from the union with God through grace, which is a participation in the Divine Nature. But the disruption of the union of man and God had an echo in the disturbance of the union of soul and body. The big cog in the machine broke, so the little cogs went out of order, too. Nothing better describes and represents this initial rebellion against God than the tendency of the body to rebel against the spirit. Shame is one of the expressions of that rent.
It must be repeated that it was not because of sex that Adam and Eve were ashamed, for they had sex, and they used it before their sin. It may very well be that the unsatisfying character of the union, in the sense that it does not fulfill the infinite longings of the soul for unity, is a reminder of how the finite was torn from the infinite and the creature from his Creator.
St. Augustine also states that in a sense shame is related to disobedience. Positively, this would mean that when there is perfect obedience to God, there is no shame. This confirms, somewhat, the spiritual truth that Catholic educators have observed, namely, that as obedience to the law of Christ increases, concupiscence or the passions actually diminish. The sex passions are not the same in all persons. They are so much under control in some, that they resist them with the same automatic reflex as the blinking of their eye when dirt gets into it. The history of mysticism reveals that temptations of the flesh become less as one gets closer to God, although the temptations to pride may increase The Holy Eucharist, which is the Body of Christ, when worthily received, does diminish the uprisings of concupiscence. There is not the hardship imposed on a celibate priest that the sex-world would imagine, for, given power over the Physical Body of Christ, he already has the cure for the rebellion of his own physical body. In a lesser degree, parents who are married by a Sacrament and live their married life in union with a love of Christ probably feel between themselves an almost complete extinguishing of a sense of shame, precisely because of their obedience to the Spirit.
There is also another reason for shame, which is more related to the natural order. Sex is rightly called a mystery. It has its matter and form. Its matter is the physical power of generation; its form is its power to share in the creative purposes of God. Because sex is related to creativity, and God is the source of all creativity, sex is seen to have an intimate bond with religion. Because it is a summons to share in Creation, and because man and woman are God's coworkers in quarrying humanity, there is an awesomeness about the act. That is why all peoples have associated marriage with a religious ceremony.
But everything that is mysterious tends to be hidden and concealed. The Eastern World is much more aware of this than the Western World. That is why the consecration in the Eastern religions takes place behind a screen, whereas in the Western rite it is more public. The very hiding of the mystery of transubstantiation is a highly developed form of the concealing of anything which has to do with God. Since, in the natural order, there are few acts more mysterious than the union of two humans in one flesh, it follows that there should be a tendency on the part of man and woman to veil and hide themselves from others when they enter into the performance of that act which, in the supernatural order, symbolizes the mystery of Christ and the Church, and which in the natural order makes them co-creators with God. Here the explanation would not be a sense of shame in the sense of guilt, but rather a sense of shame in the sense of reverence. This is what Pius XII said in an address to mothers: "The sense of modesty is akin to the sense of religion."
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