A Response to the New Oxford Review (Part 2)

Sodom & the City of God

Gore Vidal once observed: “Much has been made — not least by the Saint himself — of how Augustine stole and ate some pears from a Milanese orchard. Presumably, he never again trafficked in, much less ate, stolen goods, and once this youthful crime (‘a rum business,’ snarled the unsympathetic American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) was behind him, he was sainthood bound. The fact is that all of us have stolen pears; the mystery is why so few of us rate halos.”
     It was, of course, more than a matter of purloined pears that kept Augustine from the pearly gates. In addition to shenanigans involving other people’s orchards, he kept a concubine for about a decade (and one shudders to think what the unsympathetic Holmes thought of that).
     Vidal (a self-described “fag writer”) is certainly no expert on sanctity. But I believe that he does put his finger on the mystery of why so few of us rate halos: “I suspect that in certain notorious lives there is sometimes an abrupt moment of choice. Shall I marry or burn? Steal or give to others?”
     There is, of course, a great mystery of grace in sainthood; but the mystery of grace does not explain the scarcity of saints, because God offers grace to all. Sanctity, however, requires not only grace, but also the prospective saint’s free choice to surrender himself or herself to that grace.
     Augustine’s lament was not, “late have you loved me,” but “late have I loved you.” God’s grace was available from birth, but Augustine, even as he recognized the graces offered, resisted, praying “Lord make me chaste — but not yet.” And hence the great mystery of sanctity is the mystery of free will. Without our full, free consent, even the omnipotent God will not make us a saint.
     I was certainly powerfully drawn to follow Vidal and others down the road to “gay liberation.” That I did not is a testament to God’s grace, and also a testament to the power of the truth to set us free.
     When I was about 10 years old, I read C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape tells his protégé that until a few centuries ago, “the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as a result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other weapons, we have largely altered that... He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical,’ ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary,’ ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless.’ Jargon, not argument is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.”
     Thus, several years before I entered the turbulence of adolescence, Lewis established in my head the idea that truth and falsehood matter infinitely more than mood or feeling. And so when adolescence came, though I hoped and even in a sense believed that a gay relationship could be just as good as a marriage between a man and a woman, I also believed that it was essential to demonstrate that this belief was not merely “contemporary” or “practical,” but was in fact true in an absolute sense. Needless to say, this was a somewhat quixotic enterprise.
     I entered into all of this with the muddle of “values” I had absorbed from my environment and the (accurate) intuition that gay relationships were consistent with those “values.” I had a vague notion that “traditional” sexual ethics were based in superstitions — that masturbation makes you go blind, that “every sperm is sacred,” etc. — but that modern psychology would enable us to separate the wheat from the chaff and produce a coherent sexual ethic, which would certainly limit unloving acts (like promiscuity or child abuse) but would still allow for gay relationships. I proceeded in this more or less muddled way until a (most unwelcome) question pushed its way into my consciousness: could I really argue that contraception, serial marriage, and other modern sexual trends had really made it easier to be either happy or good?
     The answer to this question was obviously “no.” Since I had worked so hard to show that gay marriage was the logical progression of these trends, if they were bad, then gay marriage would be even worse. Hoping, however, to avoid this checkmate, I set off down a different path: to prove that David and Jonathan were gay lovers. It sounds rather silly in retrospect, but seemed like a serious gambit at the time. In my defense, if two men in contemporary American culture acted as David and Jonathan acted (swearing loyalty to each other, wearing each other’s clothes, embracing, kissing, etc.) it is not improbable that some would wonder whether or not they were “fags.” But I came to see that this is more a comment on our culture’s impoverished view of friendship than it is proof of anything about David and Jonathan’s morals.
     And so, at the age of seventeen, before I had any kind of sexual contact with another man, I concluded that homosexual acts were wrong, and retreated to what I saw as a Biblical sexual ethic, which forbade divorce and contraceptives, sodomy and solitary vice — and in fact bore a remarkable resemblance to Catholic teaching.

Copyright © 2003 by Ron Belgau