a post-girardian world: alison and the corpse of natural law

Christopher Ruddy has a nice overview of James Alison’s theology, “In Defense of Desire”, over at Commonweal: A Review of Religion, Politics, and Culture. What a breath of fresh air it was to read, especially since the last article I read was by Eve Tushnet, a Catholic apologist for self-hating lesbians.

Eve Tushnet and the New Face of Catholic Sexuality

Eve Tushnet is articulate, brilliant, and dangerous. Dangerous because she writes with phlegmatic self-disclosure and sounds quite reasonable. In actuality, she’s an apologist for oppression, but her call is really for self-oppression. She puts into practice the Catholic Catechism, wherein it tells us that being homosexual isn’t a sin but acting on it is. (Alison has something to say on this bit of hypocrisy, which I’ll mention later.)

I was pleased to see that in Homosexuality and the Church, Eve Tushnet emphasized that homophobia is often tied in with misogyny. She’s aware of the cultural issues, but she tends to dismiss them. She seems to be seeking a morality more essential, which she feels — as the Church does generally — that post-modern culture doesn’t provide.

Like many converts who are drawn to the Church, she seems to be seeking a perpetual engine of moral clarity, as if one’s hard moral choices shouldn’t rely on time, place, or circumstance but come in a handy indexed volume. Post-modern morality is a challenging thing because, like a box of squirming puppies, it means you have to be alert to changing priorities and consequences.

She begins her argument with her own coming out story. And then, there is this:

Experience is itself a kind of text, and texts need interpreters. How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses?  

Yes, she’s an apologist. Do you recognize the first step of any institution seeking control? Don’t trust yourself. Tushnet continues:

To my mind, Johnson’s approach places far too much trust in personal experience. He views our experience as both more transparent and less fallible than it is. To take personal experience as our best and sturdiest guide seems like a good way to replicate all of our personal preferences and cultural blind spots. Scripture is weird and tangly and anything but obvious-but at least it wasn’t written by someone who shared all our desires, preferences, and cultural background. At least it wasn’t written by us.

At this point, I see Tushnet has abandoned her reasonableness. Scripture is a result of personal experience, both produced and interpreted by the personal experiences of a fraction of humanity during ages of class oppression. I do believe it is divinely inspired; I’m just waiting for the divine interpretation. The Tradition that has given us our current understanding of Scripture is based in patriarchal culture, which Tushnet herself seems to acknowledge with a nod early, but now forgets.

And so I ask, with what experiences and values shall we interpret that Scripture? Who is wise enough that they should trust themselves to understand? Finally, Tushnet sums up her experience:

The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants.
…
I feel as if every week or so I discover yet another hidden treasure of the church that speaks to me in exactly the way I need in order to deal specifically with my struggles, resentments, longings, and strengths as a woman and a lesbian.

I want to ask why she gave up sexual relationships. Did she surrender that expression through discipline or did one desire replace a stronger one in her? My question, you see, is whether she chose her own sacrifice and finds more rewards when she chooses to support tradition and live in conformity with official teaching on sexuality. And yet, she seems to be telling other lesbians who find greater rewards in personal sexual relationships that they are not listening to God.

Tushnet has chosen to make a sacrifice of her lesbian sexuality, but maybe God wants her to sacrifice her attachment to a patriarchal tradition. I would say only she knows the answer to that. She would say the Church knows better than she does.

What would make me more open to Tushnet’s ideas is if she simply made the point that she chooses celibacy because she finds greater rewards in it, not because she’s choosing the moral high ground.

James Alison’s Love

I find myself liking James Alison’s theory of sacrifice better than Rene Girard’s, and that’s not just because Girard has come out recently sounding rather homophobic.

But I find discomfort with any idea of sacrifice. Claiming that Christianity breaks the cycle of escalating sacrificial violence by having us make sacifices of ourselves is seeming less true to me all the time. I’ve never really seen the difference between sacrificing someone else as a scapegoat versus sacrificing ourselves.

Girard’s Mimetic Theory tells us that by making an outsider group the scapegoat for our troubles, we strengthen our own in-group. But the other side of that coin is that by making a scapegoat of ourselves, we also strengthen our in-group and our cause. It doesn’t matter from where the blood flows but why. How many times have we heard that soldiers’ lives haven’t been, or shouldn’t be, “wasted”? And so the violence continues on in order to pay back that sacrifice.

There must be some place post-sacrificial that we’re heading. But is post-sacrificial also post-human? The most important item in Alison’s thought, to me, is the emphasis on living beyond resentment. That, too, may be post-human.

The Church’s Hypocrisy

When expressing his view of homosexuality and the Church, Alison offers an insightful analysis of the hypocrisy of Catholic theology as it tries to assimilate certain aspects of modern science without altering its underlying premise of sex-for-procreation. Like some Frankenstein, the Church’s theology of sexuality has sewn the gangly limbs of scientific concepts and modern language all over the corpse of Natural Law.

Here are some excerpts from the Ruddy article at Commonweal. I don’t think you can view it without a membership, but this article alone would make it worthwhile.

Alison builds his argument for the goodness of homosexuality by drawing from Catholic teaching on creation, original sin, and salvation. As [The Council of] Trent taught, human nature retains its integrity, even after the Fall. No dimension of human desire is therefore intrinsically evil-that is, irredeemable-because it is capable of being rightly ordered and healed. Salvation is the perfection of human nature, not its rejection.

As Alison lays out the argument, Catholicism has long taught that people are heterosexual by nature, and that homosexual activity is thus unnatural. But this teaching conflicts with the growing recognition that homosexuality is a way of being, not simply a way of acting; unchosen, it belongs to one’s nature or essence. Drawing upon the scholastic axiom agere sequitur esse (acts flow from being), Alison maintains one cannot hold both that the homosexual inclination is natural or involuntary and that homosexual acts are inherently evil.

“Either being gay is a defective form of being heterosexual,” he reasons, “or it is simply a thing that just is that way”-a reality, like “rain, or tides, or left-handedness,” as he puts it elsewhere. Alison affirms the latter position, and consequently holds that homosexuality is morally equivalent to heterosexuality. Like rain or tides: arguments from nature, for so long used to condemn homosexuality, now become its greatest support. “Natural Law is our friend,” Alison writes; the gay or lesbian person is saved in the perfection-not the rejection-of his or her homosexual nature.

Only a “faith beyond resentment” can break the cycle of scapegoating and self-destruction. Embracing such a faith, in his estimate, gives gays and lesbians a privileged place in the church. Called, like Peter in Luke’s Gospel, to “strengthen the brethren,” and standing in a place of shame and scapegoating, they can renew the church by being forgiving victims themselves, overcoming lies with truth and violence with peacefulness. (In Defense of Desire)