Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: A Catholic and Antitotalitarian Theory of the Body

Chapter 9: The Politics of the Cross

Chapter Nine THE POLITICS OF THE CROSS The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ. — Cor. :  Politics must be able in fact always to be checked and criticized starting from the ethical. —Levinas. A Jesuit author has recently argued that Catholic moral formation helped National Socialism to identify its enemies and helps explain ‘‘the savagery of its violence’’ toward those enemies. In his argument, Catholic moral theology set the framework for the  Nuremberg Laws prohibiting sexual relations between Germans and Jews. If Germans were identified with spirit and Jews with flesh, then not only is Nazism’s desire to see the two kept apart explained but so too is the violence visited upon the Jews: for is it not a central tenet of Catholic moral theology that there is a war between spirit and flesh and that flesh must needs be coerced by spirit?1 At least three questions immediately arise respecting this thesis. If Nazism employed the struggle between spirit and flesh to legitimize their persecution of the Jews, () was it Catholicism that provided the logic of this struggle? After all, the pagan Plato, in his image of the chariot, speaks eloquently of reason’s violent control of sensuality. More, the architects of modernity, and thinkers who at best are only ambiguously related to Christianity, also speak of a violent control of PAGE 156  ................. 11244$ $CH9 03-18-05 08:28:55 PS The Politics of the Cross  sensuality. Kant, for example, speaks of the need for reason to ‘‘stamp out’’ the ‘‘rabble’’ and ‘‘mob’’ of sensuality.2 One might then argue that the context of National Socialism was a secularized modernity3 and that Nazism could have found its violent logic of the war between sensuality and reason there. I have shown in chapter  that one can find such a logic even in ‘‘Cyborg feminism’’: and a conception more self-consciously devoted to human liberation could not be found. I also showed there that Malebranche clearly conformed his religious thinking to the thought of the Early Modern period, abandoning in dramatic fashion Aquinas’s notion of the love that wounds the lover in favor of a Cartesian conflict between the parts of the human. In Malebranche one certainly does find talk about the ‘‘malignity of the passions ’’ (TE, ) and ‘‘the gross and sensual Jews’’ (TE, ). Moreover, () is it even true that Catholic moral formation relies on such a violent approach to sensuality? True, Giles of Rome, a student of Thomas Aquinas at Paris, does develop a violent model of moral formation, but he does so in opposition to Aquinas: in Aquinas’s model, reason persuades rather than coerces sensuality.4 And, of course, it is Aquinas, not Giles, who has been the foundation of Catholic moral thought for the last  years or so. Although, as I showed in chapter , it is undeniable that Thomas’s thought on these matters was seriously misunderstood in some Catholic circles at least. In light of questions () and (), the work of the Jesuit Gaston Fessard helps us to ask () whether it might be that the violence of Nazism had its roots precisely in a failure to adopt a Christian theory of the flesh. Rather than looking toward Catholic moral formation as the source of Nazi violence, Fessard argues for a quite different source: liberal political theory. This chapter develops a critique of what might be called a ‘‘liberal conception of the body’’ and the liberal political thinking that accompanies it. First, let me summarize the Thomistic understanding of the flesh that has been discussed in these pages. Two basic things have been seen: sensuality is not wholly negative, and spirit does not violently control flesh. Regarding the first, sensuality is naturally ordered to ecstasy , as a good ordered to God, and sensuality contains important moral knowledge which must not be ignored. Indeed, the rebellion of sensuality against the false rule of reason can be seen as salvific. The PAGE 157 ................. 11244$ $CH9 03-18-05 08:28:55 PS  Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics rebellion of the flesh can be—as in the case of Merton—an attempt by sensuality to live out its ecstatic possibility and therewith convert reason back to its rightful rule under God. As to the second, if reason rules sensuality correctly, it does so through moral persuasion. This...