I remember when I was a boy in school, I went to King's School Canterbury in England, which is the heart of the Church of England. We used to have every year a young clergyman come and preach and he always gave the same sermon and it was on drink, gambling, and immorality. He said just like that, and it was perfectly clear that by immorality he did not mean to be in envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word and commandment. He meant simply irregular sex. And the parable and the meaning of all this is that with few exceptions, and there are some exceptions, but with few exceptions, church organizations today are sexual regulation societies, and precious little else. One has only to ask the question, what can you get kicked out for?

[01:07]

For what reason do ministers get unfrocked, deposed, or whatever it is? Very rarely for heresy. There haven't been heresy trials in any of the major churches for years. Even in the Roman Catholic Church there are some pretty far out people today, so far as doctrine is concerned. Certainly very rarely is anyone ever excommunicated or put outside the pale for having a spiteful tongue, or for owning shares in shady slum corporations, or armaments manufacturing firms, or drug firms selling unreliable patent medicines, or anything of that kind. There is indeed a revival of a certain social concern in many of the churches today about the race problem, but that's something relatively new.

[02:18]

But the great fascination is sex. As I say, you can hold all kinds of shares in bogus companies, and you can have a bitter tongue, and you can hate people like nobody's business, and hold a bishopric. But the moment you sleep with your secretary, or worse still, have some sort of so-called perverse sexual taste, out you go. Unless you eat crow, and promise to repent, and not ever do it again, ever. Now, you must admit, that is very significant. And since this is the particular characteristic of Christianity, much more so than Judaism, one might say that in this way, Christianity is in practice, whatever it may be in theory. Whatever highly enlightened theologians may say, Christianity is in practice, the religion

[03:25]

particularly preoccupied with sex. More so than priapism, more so than tantric yoga, which uses sexual intercourse as a method of meditation. Christianity has sex on the brain. Now when I was a boy in school, I'll go back to this, because my experience may not be, I don't know how typical it would be of children brought up in the United States in a religious environment, but my experience in England was quite fascinating. About, you know, when as one is baptized as a child, and you don't know anything about it, and your godfathers and godmothers are your sponsors, then there comes a time when you are about to enter into puberty, when you are confirmed, when you undertake for yourself your own baptismal vows that were made on behalf of you. And in England, confirmation into the Church of England, which is Episcopalian in this

[04:28]

country, confirmation is preceded by instruction. And this instruction consisted very largely of lessons in church history, because the British approach to religion is peculiarly archaeological. It is based on the great past, the great Christian saints and heroes. And it's really quite interesting, because it somehow associates you, puts you in the tradition of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and all that sort of thing. But the time comes when every candidate for confirmation has a private talk with a school chaplain. And obviously in every process of initiation into mysteries, from time immemorial, there has been the passing on of a secret. And so there's a certain anticipation about this very private communication, because you

[05:29]

would think if you are being initiated into a religion, what the secret consists of is some marvelous information about the nature of God or the fundamental reason for being and so on. But not so, in this case. The initiatory secret talk was a serious lecture on the evils of masturbation. What these evils were, were not clearly specified. And so, but it was vaguely hinted that ghastly diseases would result. And so we used to, sort of in a perverse way, enjoy tormenting ourselves with imaginations as to what kind of terrible venereal diseases, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and the great Siberian itch would result from this practice. Now the extraordinary thing about it is this, that the very chaplain who gave these lectures

[06:36]

had in his own upbringing been given the same lecture by other chaplains, and this went back some distance in history, I imagine. And they all knew perfectly well that one of the characteristic behavior patterns of adolescence is ritual defiance of authority. It's not very, you know, it's not very serious, but you have to go through the motions of asserting your manhood, or maybe womanhood, I don't know. But you have to make some protest against authority, and in this you are in league with all your contemporaries, your peer group. And nobody, of course, would dream of giving anybody else away, because that would be, to be a tattletale, a skunk, definitely not one of the boys. And so therefore, quite obviously, masturbation provided the ideal outlet for this ritual

[07:42]

defiance, because it was fun, it was also an assertion of masculinity, and it was very, very wicked. So I meditated on this some time as to why the system continued, and I came to the realization that the Christian put-down of sex is an extremely mysterious thing. I want to go into this a little further, historically, because it's all immensely important. You will remember that in the four Gospels, Jesus doesn't have very much to say about it. There is a passage in the fifth chapter of St. Matthew, which is rather curious, and this needs to be explained, where, having uttered the famous Beatitudes, Jesus starts talking about the law, and he says, and I'm going to put it into a modern idiom, rather

[08:47]

than the King James, which is sonorous, but not altogether intelligible to a modern person. He says, don't imagine that I have come to destroy the law and the prophets. I have not come to destroy them, but to complete them. For I tell you that not one serif mark or typographical ornament will disappear from the law until the fulfillment of the purposes of God. For unless your justice, your righteousness, your observance of the law, exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. In the spirit of the law, they must also obey the letter down to the very typographical ornaments.

[09:48]

You know a serif is, say, a line drawn at the base of the letter I. The letter I is vertical, and you often find in typography a horizontal line at the bottom, which is an ornament. That's a serif. And so, in Hebrew writing, there are ornaments. And he says, even the ornaments must be exactly observed. And then he goes on and explains that you have heard that it has been said that you shall not be angry with your brother, and that who is angry with his brother is in danger of judgment. And he arranges a series of penalties, whereby he turns the whole order of justice backwards and says that whoever shall be angry with his brother, that is to say furious, hate his brother, shall be in danger of being tried before the lowest court, the ordinary district

[10:50]

magistrate. Whoever shall call his brother raka, which means simply, it's more or less equivalent to our expression, you dummy, or dumb cluck. Whoever says that to his brother shall be in danger of the higher court. But whoever says you fool, shall be in danger of hell fire, which is the most desperate judgment of all. People who read the King James translation are misled, because instead of using quotation marks at the beginning of direct speech, it uses a capital letter, and they imagine that thou fool is calling God a fool. But it isn't. It's simply saying, you fool, someone. In Greek, morei, you fool. And a few chapters on, Jesus himself turns to the crowd of people and says to them, morei,

[11:50]

you fools and blind, following blind guides. So is he in danger of hell fire, for having transgressed his own precept. Now he goes on in the same vein and says, if your eye offends you, pluck it out, for it's better to enter into the kingdom of heaven with one eye, than to take two eyes into hell. And then he goes on to say, you have heard it said of old time, that you shall not commit adultery, but I tell you that whoever looks at a woman to lust after her, has already committed adultery in his heart. Now look at the context of all this. You see, we take this tradition so solemnly, and so seriously, that we have made the assumption that Jesus never made a joke. That he was devoid of humor.

[12:54]

And humor is after all, one of the things that peculiarly characterizes us as human. The French saying, le rire c'est le propre de l'homme, laughter is peculiar to mankind. And if this great prophet, incarnation of God, or whatever you want to call him, had no humor, he would have been a disaster. But this is obviously the most humorous passage in the Bible. Because it's a lampoon, a satire on legal righteousness. Now you see those Pharisees were squares, and then they weren't squares, they were cubed. They were people who fancied themselves as just, because they obeyed the law, the ritual law of Judaism, to the very letter.

[13:55]

And Jesus was saying, now if you think that this is the way to be saved, I'll give you a law. In other words, he was working on the old technique of reductio ad absurdum. You mustn't even call someone a fool. You must observe even the serif marks. And of course, if you even so much as look at a woman and admire her beautiful figure, just in imagination, that's equivalent already to adultery. And people took that seriously. I mean, how much of a solemn ass can one be? So on the other hand, there are many difficult complications going to enter here. Because this is saying, this is a great challenge.

[15:03]

Just as the Lord God says, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, he also seems to say, thou shalt not think dirty thoughts. In other words, you've got to keep a watch over your mind, and see that you love properly, and see that you don't even think evil. Now that has very interesting results, if you try to put it into practice. In the religious background of the Western world, we have in the main two traditions. One Semitic, and one Greek. So far as the Semitic tradition is concerned, the material world and sexuality are definitely good things. Both Jews and Muslims think that God's creation of beautiful women was a grand idea.

[16:11]

In the Arabic book, which is their Islamic version of the Kama Sutra, known as the perfumed garden, the book opens with a prayer to Allah, which is a thanksgiving, a very full, detailed thanksgiving for the loveliness of women, with which Allah has blessed mankind. And in the book of Proverbs, we are enjoined to enjoy our wives while they are young. But on the whole, it is the Semitic belief that sexuality is justified solely for purposes of reproduction of the species. This makes it good in the eyes of God, and sexual energy should not really be wasted for other purposes. That's the limitation put on it. Now on the other hand, we have a Greek tradition, which is peculiar in that it is strongly influenced

[17:19]

by a dualistic view of the universe, in which material existence is conceived as a trap, as a fall into turgid, clogging matter, which is antagonistic to the lightness and freedom of the spirit. And therefore, for certain kinds of Greek religion, among which we must name the Orphic Mysteries, the Neo-Platonic point of view, and the late agnostic points of view, being saved means being delivered from material existence into a purely spiritual state. From this point of view, sexual involvement is the very archetype of material involvement.

[18:23]

Martyr, mother, natter, matter, are really the same word. And so, the love of woman is the great snare. This is incidentally a doctrine invented by men. And it goes back to the words of Adam, the woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me and I denied it easily. Now in the development of Christian theology, from approximately the time of St. Paul through the beginning of the Renaissance, it was universally held that sex was a bad thing.

[19:27]

You should read St. Augustine on this. He said that in the Garden of Eden before the fall, reproduction took place in just the same way and with just the same lack of excitement as one excretes or passes water, and there was no shameful excitation of the sexual parts. And the whole attitude of the Church Fathers in those centuries was that the virgin state was immensely superior spiritually to the married state, and that sexual relationships were excusable only within the bonds of marriage and for the sole purposes of reproduction. And the manual, the moral penitentiaries of the theologians of the Middle Ages, list all

[20:32]

sorts of penances that must be said even by married couples who performed sexual intercourse on the night before attending Mass, were still before receiving Holy Communion, and of course it must utterly be avoided on certain great church festivals. So although in theory marriage is a sacrament which somehow blesses this peculiar relationship, there is a definite attitude that it is after all dirty and not very nice. Now you must realize too that in those days the institution of marriage was not what it is today. Marriage at the time of the rise and development of Christianity was a social institution for alliances between families. You did not marry the person of your own choice except under the most peculiar circumstances.

[21:35]

You married the girl your family picked out for you, and they thought it over carefully from its political point of view as well as from the point of view of eugenics, and whether this was a good healthy girl and whether this was a good healthy man, and they had an economic bargaining about it, and you married this girl. You weren't necessarily in love with her. And it was perfectly well understood in the secular world that on the side you had other arrangements. You had, if you could afford them, concubines, or even second and third and fourth wives. And these subsidiary wives were, there was a somewhat more choice open to you in getting those than in the first one, the first one is definitely a family arrangement. Now that's the context of it, don't forget that. So what the church was saying was only that woman should be your bedfellow whose marriage

[22:40]

has been arranged by paternal authority. The idea of romantic love does not arise in connection with marriage until the troubadour cults of southern France, of Provence, in the late Middle Ages, when there begins to be this idea of the idealization of a woman as the inspiring goddess, almost, of the knight-errant. Dante's Beatrice is the inspiring woman who leads him to heaven. Now historians are not agreed as to whether the lady loves of the chivalrous knights were in fact their mistresses, or whether they were simply idealized women.

[23:42]

But the influence of the cult of romantic love on the West was profound, and it brought about a weird combination of ideas. One, the notion of the married state being the only licit relationship in which sexual play might be carried on, and two, the notion that the girl you marry should be the one you've fallen in love with. Two more ill-adjusted ideas would hardly be put together. Because naturally, when you love someone very much indeed, in the enthusiasm and ardor of youth, you say things that are hardly logical or rational. You stand up before an altar and you say, my darling, my sweetheart, my perfect pet, I adore you so much that I will live with you forever and ever until death do us part.

[24:46]

And that's the way you feel at the time. In a rather similar mood, ancient peoples would hail their kings and say, oh king, live forever. Obviously this was not literally meant. They were just wishing him a long life, but to live forever, no sir, no mortal does that. So, the trouble was, you see, that when certain kinds of extravagant, poetic expressions got in the hands of people like Augustine and Tertullian, who were rather influenced by Roman literalness, they wrote it into the law books. And so this amazing situation came about. But we still have not fully explored the subtlety of it. Let us consider certain periods when this attitude of prudism towards sexuality was

[25:50]

in an ascendancy. Nearest to our times is the bourgeois revolution, you might call it, in Victorian England and the United States. We all say Victorian as an adjective to indicate grumdyism, extreme monogamy, a definite disgust for all things sexual. And yet, when we really go into the history of the Victorian period, we find that it was an extremely lascivious epoch. One has only to look at the lushness of Victorian furniture to realize that chairs are disguised women, that the way even piano legs are shaped, I mean, this kind of thing is throughout Victorian

[26:55]

art forms, and the conduct of the British aristocracy during that period, beggar description. What is going on? You see what is really going on is this, that the secret motivation behind the repression of sexuality in Christianity is to make it more interesting. This kind of repression creates what one might call lush eroticism. The hard-core type of pornography where the ladies are dressed in black lace underwear. Why black? What color do priests and nuns wear? You see? Now, in judging all this, people like Freud and Havelock Ellis made certain mistake.

[28:13]

They said, about the church and about religion in general, that it was nothing but a form of sublimated sex. They said, these people, for curious reasons, suppress sex, and therefore it becomes a very powerful force for them. You must remember, of course, that they worked on a hydraulic analogy of human psychology, that they liken it all to a river, if you dammed it up, it would burst a dam. It doesn't actually follow that human psychology is hydraulic. But this is the metaphor they used. Now they said, the church has repressed sex, but actually if you look at its symbolism, it is nothing but an expression of sex. Everything is reduced to libido as the fundamental reality. And the church replied, nothing of the kind. We deny this. We think that this reduction of everything to sex is just a way of attacking holy things,

[29:23]

and on the contrary, we would say that people who are fascinated with sex and make it their god are repressing religion. Now the problem in this debate, everybody missed the boat. The church should have been in a position to say to Freud, well of course, thank you very much. Yes, indeed, our symbolism is sexual. The steeples on our churches, the vesicle shaped windows, and so heraldic shields on which we put images of the crucifix or the virgin mother of God. These are all quite plainly sexual. But you see, the sexual biology, in its turn, reveals the mysteries of the universe. Sex is not mere sex. Sex is a holy thing, and is one of the most marvelous revelations of the divine.

[30:33]

But imagine, the church just couldn't say that. If you look at Tibetan Buddhist iconography, their images, or you look in Hindu temples, you will find things that Europeans and Americans have never been able to understand. Here are images of Buddhas and of the gods engaged in amazing diversions with their female counterparts. And everybody thinks that these are kind of dirty sculptures. Now they're nothing of the kind. They are saying to the people who look at them, the play of man and woman is on that level, on the level of biology, a reflection of the fundamental play of the cosmos. The play of the positive and negative principles, of the light and the dark, of the mental and

[31:40]

the material, they all play together. And the function of sexual play is not merely the survival and utilitarian function of reproducing the species, as it is among animals, to a very large extent. What peculiarly distinguishes human sexuality is that it brings the partners closer and closer to each other in an intense state of united feeling. In other words, it is a sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace bringing about love. And so, if that is peculiar to human beings, it is perfect nonsense to degrade human sexuality by saying it should only be carried on in the way that the animals do theirs. Because they have not yet, as it were, evolved to the place where sex is the sacramental

[32:45]

expression of man and woman's love. And love, in that sense, is a kind of enthusiasm, which means a being possessed by the divine, falling in love, although considered by practical people to be a sort of madness, is actually the same sort of thing as the mystical vision, a grace. And in its light we see people in their divine aspect, when, as the song says, every little breeze whispers Louise, there is a sort of extraordinary state of mystical intoxication in which the ideal woman has become the goddess. Which is, from one point of view, what every woman is, if you see her with the scales of

[33:52]

your eyes. And, likewise, every man, seen with the scales of her eyes. So what happened then, as a result of this historical situation, was mutual name-calling between the proponents of religion and the proponents of scientific naturalism, such as Freud and Havelock Ellis, and in our own times Albert Ellis, and people of that kind. They've never got together, because they've never understood, neither the Church nor the opponents of the Church have clearly understood that the secret or unconscious motivation of sexual repression is to make it all the more interesting.

[34:53]

And on the other side, it has not been clearly understood that the sexual biology, and all that goes with it, is a figuring forth on the level of biology, of what the whole universe is about, ecstatic play. So, as a result, there has been a kind of compromise. Today, in ecclesiastical circles, sex is being damned with faint praise. People are saying, after all, yes, sex was made by God, and we should remember the Jewish point of view, and it is perhaps for something more than reproduction, to bring about the

[36:04]

cementing of the marriage ties between husband and wife. But, still in practice, it remains the frightening taboo. On the other hand, the opposition to Christian prudery goes overboard, and always moves in the direction of total license. You see, what's going on is a contest between the people who want the skirts pulled down to the floor, and the people who want them pulled up to the neck. And you, you know, you've got to draw the line somewhere. But the play between these forces is, where are we going to draw it? Well, that's very exciting. Provide neither side wins. I mean, imagine what it would be like if the Libertines won. And they took over the church, so that on Wednesday evenings, the young Presbyterian

[37:11]

group would meet for prayer through sex. Every child would go to the school physician for a course in hygienics, and they would have classes, and they'd have plastic models, and all the children would do it in class, in very clean hygienic circumstances, all sprayed with rubbing alcohol. Everything would be fine. Imagine how boring it would all become. So you see, the people who say, no, modesty is important, have something right about them. But they mustn't be allowed to get away with it. But they mustn't be obliterated. You see, life works that way. Let's take an entirely different analogy. Let's take a given biological group, a species we'll call A. It has a natural enemy, B. Now, one day, A gets furious at the natural enemy, B, and says, let's obliterate it. And they gather their forces, and they knock out their natural enemy.

[38:13]

Well, suddenly, after a while, they begin to get weak. They get overpopulated. There's nobody around to eat up their surplus creatures, and they don't have to keep their muscles tensed against any enemy, and they begin to fall apart, because they destroyed their enemy. What they should do is cultivate the enemy. That's the real meaning of love your enemy. There is such a thing as a beloved enemy. And if you don't have a beloved enemy, in other words, if the flies and the spiders don't go together, there's going to be too many spiders or too many flies. And these balances keep the course of nature going. Well, it's exactly the same thing as between the libertines and the prudes. They need each other. And you should thank, if you've got a prudish father and mother, you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting. So don't defy them completely.

[39:21]

Don't go around campus with placards bearing four-letter words, because that's going to spoil the show. But every generation must react to the one before, you see, to keep this tension going. And it is by this tension, this play of the opposites, that we have the love that makes the world go round.

[39:44]