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 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
 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 and 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
 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
 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.
 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
 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.
 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.
 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
 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 Neoplatonic 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.
 Martyr, mother, matter, 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 did eat."
 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.
 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 manuals, the moral penitentiaries of the theologians of the Middle Ages list
 all sorts of penances that must be said even by married couples who performed sexual intercourse
 on the night before attending Mass, worse 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.
 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.
 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
 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.
 Then 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.
 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."
 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
 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 grandism, 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
 art forms.
 And the conduct of the British aristocracy during that period beggared description.
 People like Freud and Havelock Ellis made a certain mistake.
 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 the 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, "It's nothing of the kind.
 We deny this.
 We think that this reduction of everything to sex is just a way of attacking holy things,
 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 the 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.
 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
 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 expression
 of man and woman's love.
 And this 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 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.
 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
 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 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
 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.
 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.
 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.
 [laughter]
 [LAUGHTER]


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