Sexual Criteria by Committee
McInerny, Ralph
BOOKS i SEXUAL CRITERIA BY COMMITTEE RALPH MelNERNY lluman Sea.aRty: New D i r e c t i o n s i n American Catholic Thought KOSNICK, ANTHONY, et. al. Paulist Press, $8.50 in order to banish...
...Do not lie...
...We have accepted Vatican II's recommendation that the nature of the person and his acts be the fundamental criterion for evaluating wholesome sexual behavior...
...is, the committee feels, doubly flawed...
...One is struck, in com- endows one with a capacity to experiparing the Vatican Declaration of ence reality in a peculiarly feminine 1975, included in an appendix, with way...
...The linguistic style of Anglo-American philosophy is not only clearer than the continental, it is also closer to our (doubtful, in so trendy a document as this), it nonetheless seems right to me and I should like to see the thought developed...
...Broadly humanistic...
...Be creative," "Integrate...
...Negative precepts are more definite...
...Do not murder...
...Do not steal...
...The two powers of Eros and Thanatos which tore apart Quentin's life are reconciled in the "cosmic motherhood of Thalassa...
...In contrast to Benjy, psychological and moral issues are examined with excruciating persistence and Quentin eventually loses control of language, as the final few pages of his section reveal...
...The genesis of this novel can be compared to a Trauerarbeit, a work of mourning, reflecting Faulkner's statement, "So I, who had never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl...
...91) As the echoes of Tin Pin Alley die away, we may ask: then why say anything at all...
...Though Benjy reports to the reader discrete images and pieces of dialogue, he does not grasp the significance of his life...
...Instead we find sen- tance themselves from their scholastic tences like these: "We would, there- patrimony need not desert their nafore, define human sexuality simply tive tongue as well...
...The second level, the level of the heptad, identifies particular values associated with human sexuality, less abstract ways of stating the "thrust and direction" expressed on Level One...
...I can imagine someone, at least someone on the committee, evaluating handball with reference to the heptad...
...I don't know where it came from...
...302) The committee puts a strange interpretation on that base...
...it is surely the assumption of the guideline chapter, Chapter V. But surely nothing is easier than to formulate such precepts...
...The remaining Compson brother, the one who physically survives the family's decline longer than the other two, is a travesty on Faulkner's notion of endurance...
...he is exploited, robbed, victimized by the one person he tried to control and dominate...
...Do not commit adultery...
...The former is lucid, straightforward, easily understood...
...This might suggest that the book is not only written in English but also that, to the degree that it must avail itself of a technical prose, into English, and thereby show that ness to being, to the realization of they are either nonsense or banal, every potential within the personality, and content myself with the remark to a continued discovery and expresthat most North American moralists sion of authentic selfhood...
...85) of my acquaintance would find them Through this thicket one describes a unintelligible...
...Benjy's chapter serves as a prologue to the book, as Faulkner said: " . . . like the gravediggers in Elizabethan dramas...
...In The Ordeal o/ Gilbert Pin/old, Waugh writes that there was a phrase, common at the time, It is later than you think...
...96) As an abstract formulation, it is absolute and universal...
...A great many things are said, not all of them mutually tenable...
...It is possible that this committee suggesting that copulation book will prove to be an argument is not the only expression of sexualfor forcing moral theologians to re- ity, that to be a woman, for example, turn to Latin...
...91) Surely only a committee writing in the wee hours of the morning could consider this sort of thing either clear or helpful, particularly when none of the constitutive terms are ever adequately, or inadequately, defined...
...95) These criteria occupy a second level of moral evaluation...
...Nonetheless, he adds, it was never later than Gilbert Pinfold thought...
...At least I think that is what they are trying to say on p. 97...
...All his fears are realized...
...Bleikasten's extended study of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury masterfully explores each chapter of one of Faulkner's more difficult novels, in addition to providing an analysis of Faulkner's literary apprenticeship leading up to the creation of this novel...
...Paul's straightforward condemnations as random remarks on the Corinthian waterfront...
...Enjoy...
...its idle advocacy of a concept of sexuality broader than the genital...
...91) It is here that the committee offers criteria in terms of which "the great variety of sexual behavior may be honestly evaluated," the now notorious heptad: self-liberating, other-enriching, honest, faithful, socially responsible, life-serving and joyous...
...The question "Is this act moral or immoral...
...This principle of creative growth toward integration, which encompasses the Christian meaning of person, reflects an unfolding of Christ's ultimate commandment of love into the sphere of human sexuality...
...82) "Implicit in this beyond the genital, but this turns out of extramarital, solitary and homoview is the realization that we are to be idle for purposes of this book...
...Bleikasten stresses that Caddy serves as a "fiction within the fiction, her presence in the novel being rendered in such a way as to make her appear throughout as a pure figure of absence...
...These are kinds of acts which negate, thwart, deny fundamental moral values...
...Although the fourth section of the novel presents the same imagery of destruction and exhaustion as the first three sections, Bleikas~en shows with tremendous clarity and analytic concern that the Dilsey section gives an Commonweal: 507...
...Quentin, too, suffers from the acute loss of his sister as she leaves the family unit to seek a life of her own...
...84) Nonetheless, "it is in the genital union that the intertwining of subjectivities, of human existence, has the potential for fullest realization...
...First, then, the prose...
...But let us see if we can understand this talk of "levels...
...For the quite intelligible question, the committee proposes these substitutes: "Is this act, in and of itself, predictably an appropriate and productive means of expressing human sexuality...
...Faulkner's letter to Joan Williams, Wednesday [29 Apr...
...Typically Compson, Jason substitutes money for genuine affection and he, too, becomes inextricably involved in the process of self-estrangement...
...If the committee is representative of what theology has become, the theologian's point of reference is the zeitgeist, he is charmingly credulous where the secular sciences are concerned, and nothing of revelation or tradition is safe from his revisionary zeal...
...What is one to make of an interpretation of St...
...But they are impatient with what they have done, fearful that clarity is threatening to emerge...
...In the case of the present book, we are confronted by a document produced by five theologians, thinking and writing as a committee...
...Because we must...
...Is this use of the property of another theft...
...97) I take this to suggest a familiar difference between affirmative and negative precepts...
...The haunting voices of the past, without the pastness of the past, dominate Quentin's consciousness as his death wish accelerates...
...I suspect that what the committee systematically confuses is the identification of certain kinds of action as immoral or moral with evaluating or identifying acts of these kinds...
...It is disingenuour bodies . . . . Within this em- "For us humans, the teleology of the ous of the committee to invoke the bodied view of human existence, sexuality is seen as that aspect of our fleshly being-in-the-world whereby we are present and open to that which is not ourselves, to that which is ' o t h e r ' . . . . Embodied subjectivity reaches out to another body-subject pleasure bond is an intercoursing of Vatican Declaration of 1975 for supsubjectivities . . . . Subjectivity is em- port...
...I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel...
...These precepts entail that murder, theft, lying and adultery are always wrong, and so they are...
...Third, the committee's animadversions on the methodology of morals...
...86) The Vatican Document bodied in either a male or female spoke of conjugal acts "according to body...
...I should not be surprised if there are some who will regard this book as a breakthrough...
...What would we expect at this level...
...The first level is the level of universal principle...
...Such affirmative precepts, never mind the examples, can be exemplified in countless ways that are not specified in the precept...
...Can it constitute, from a perspective that is broadly humanistic and deeply influenced by the Gospel, an objective value or disvalue...
...its sketch of a moral methodolgy...
...84) But sex is not merely true human dignity" which "based on genital...
...What is one to make of the remark that the Bible does not ab5 August 1977:506 solutely forbid any form of sexual behavior, regardless of circumstances...
...Level Three consists of concrete norms, rules, precepts, or guidelines...
...He serves his purpose and is gone...
...or the Study o/ Traditional Culture (Irving, Texas), $20 S e l e c t e d L e t t e r s o f William Faulkner EDITED BY JOSEPH BLOTNER Random House, $15 PATRICK SAMWAY And now I realize for the first time what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made...
...as the way of being in, and relating Second, the committee makes an sex has ends other than procreation...
...1953] These four books are representative, for good or for bad, of the recent material concerning Fanlkner's life and fiction...
...If this goes contrary to feminism the text of this book...
...As Bleikasten says, Quentin is "the locus of alienating identifications rather than the location of identity...
...Bleikasten reads the novel as one might approach an orchestral score, reading it both vertically and horizontally or (paradigmatically and syntagmatically as he puts it), in an attempt to focus on the internal development of the novel and capture its movement and momentum, particularly as the novel relates Caddy Compson to the lives of her three brothers...
...That any specific act can be measured and evaluated in a way totally adequate to the intricate manifold of human experience is dubious at best...
...All three brothers, however, center their relationships with Caddy on various aspects of sex and death...
...Ironically, his rationality works against him and unwittingly he traps himself in a living death...
...Though each value may not be equally observed in any particular sexual expression, the substantial violation of any of these values should raise serious question about the ability of that sexual expression to enhance creative and integrative growth of the human person...
...Believe me, this is not humility, false modesty: it is simply amazement...
...Paulist Press, $8.50 in order to banish loneliness and to experience the fullness of being-withanother in the human project...
...It is not developed here nor, more seriously, is this expanded notion of sexuality operative in the book...
...Murder is not sometimes wrong, adultery is not occasionally immoral, theft is always bad...
...But surely they should be distressed to notice that none seems essentially linked to sexuality...
...He subscribes to no particular school of criticism, whether it be Freudian, structuralist, or psychoanalytic, but has been genuinely open to all the possible, and reasonable, dimensions of the text...
...We are of the opinion that the nature of the human person and the two sexes experience existence in his acts, preserve the full sense of subtly different ways by reason of mutual self-giving and human procreaCommonweal: 505 tion in the context of true love...
...Genital sex is the only kind discussed...
...On the whole, I think this is a bad book...
...Tentativity is inevitable in the attempt to discern the objective significance of such a mysterious and many-splendored (sic) reality...
...he does not break out of the confines of his linguistic enclosure and, unlike Quentin, speculate about his future relationship with his sister...
...Bleikasten, professor of English literature at the University of Strasbourg and no stranger to Faulimer studies, incorporates in his methodology a sensitivity to the critical developments on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Is this taking of a human life an instance of murder...
...p...
...Thus, when the committee says that it thinks it appropriate to broaden the traditional purpose of sexuality "from procreative and unitive to creative and integrative," it is concerned only to, the world as a male or female effort to extend the notion of sexuality to create an opening in the direction person...
...The identifying of certain acts which thwart, defeat, negate the values of human sexuality expressed on Levels One and Two...
...Do nothing that thwarts creativity, joy, otherenrichment, etc...
...The committee sa/s that its perspective is Roman Catholic and North American...
...We are more likely to be able to specify what thwarts a value than we can specify all the ways in which it can be exemplified...
...100) I resist manfully human persons by calling them to conIt has been said that there is no the temptation to put these sentences stant creativity, that is, to full openproposition so outlandish that at least two theologians cannot be found to defend it...
...The committee is pleased that these seven values are not expressed in terms of concrete physical actions...
...theologians who, is likely to sound familiar to North for good reasons or bad, wish to disAmerican ears...
...85) "In view of this understanding of sexuality, it can be said that sexuality serves the development of project...
...p...
...96) For the committee, this criterion is synonymous with "creativity and integration...
...His mind cannot understand the life Caddy had chosen for herself and he slides from one conception of her to another until he ultimately decides to accept the logical, final solution to his anxiety: suicide...
...Needless to say, the committee prefers the term "guidelines...
...And there is a large proportion of outlandish propositions...
...sexual genital activity...
...Be honest...
...I shall discuss its prose...
...Like that...
...By contrast, our committee is forever wandering off into polysyllabic byways where phenomological fustian takes over and the prose becomes at once hyperventilated and over-hyphenated...
...The committee's confusion on this pretty well vitiates everything it has to say in Chapter V. Once the theologian was a man who accepted God's revealed word as true and brought to bear on its interpretation man's secular knowledge...
...Caddy, who assumes the aspects of sister, mother, virgin, whore, angel, and demon, is often present to her brothers when they summon up the images of trees, water, twilight, and honeysuckle...
...Human sexuality is simply too complex, too mysterious, too sacred a human experience for such categorization...
...83) "If not acknowledged and integrated into a dialogue with the whole of one's being, the sexual reaching out may pursue a direction independent of and tangential to one's life their differences in bodily structure...
...The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's "The Sound and t h e Fury" ANDRE BLEIKASTEN Indiana U. Press, $12.50 A ]Loving Gentleman META CARPENTER WILDE & ORIN BORSTEN Simon and Schuster, $9.95 B i t t e r w e e d s : l a t e w~h WURam Faulkner a t Rowan Oak MALCOLM A. FRANKLIN Soc...
...Benjy's "polylogue" shows that he confronts the eventual absence of Caddy in a way that is inflexible, rigid, fragmented, where none of the elements in his life add up to a meaningful whole...
...Level One "provides a framework in the light of which the significance and interrelatedness of these various individual values are to be appreciated and interpreted...
...The problem of moral evaluation is hard enough without introducing confusion on this level...
...Oddly enough, the committee accepts as a methodological point that no moral precept that forbids a specified kind of action can be absolute...
...By focusing on the many-splendored (sic) values of wholesome sexuality and avoiding absolute categorizations of isolated, individual sexual actions, one can arrive at a much more sensitive and responsible method of evaluating the morality of sexual patterns and expressions...
...Indeed, the suggested expansion of sexuality beyond the genital becomes confused with the claim that genital it would do so with an eye to what scholastic tradition...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 16
