“Mother, heart of my heart, truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise.”

“Lord,” I wept and thought, “can that possibly not be true?”

—The Monk Zosima, recalling the death-bed words of his elder brother. From Brothers Karamazov1

IT’S A REALLY NICE PHRASE, “the romance of innocent sexuality.” It perfectly connotes a quixotic nostalgia for innocence on the verge of sex, but also, the times being what they are, with just the right hint of creepiness. As far as romances go, this one is not finally very romantic; Rees will exhort us to meet its pretentions with “mature humor” (sobering stuff) and “charitable anger” (good luck with the charity). Better we opt for the old stories that put sin before innocence and beg us off from ever expecting much in the way of sexual redemption. Sin will win out.

But what is it exactly that makes for a romance of innocent sexuality? I am now going to condense a great deal of the complexity of Rees’s characterization, a great deal, into what is admittedly a crude and simplistic schema. Assume that I am a narcissist afflicted with erotic longing. (Hey, I’ve been there.) As a narcissist I am uncomprehending of my own narcissism; I rather matter-of-factly see other people, when I see them at all, as my refracted self-image, as a distorted and scattered ego. These shards of externalized ego inevitably return me, by way of their imperfection (by way of their partiality), to the beauty that has always been fully my own. As a narcissist afflicted with erotic longing, I no longer feel that I am in full possession of this beauty. I can’t explain how I have come to feel this way; it is just palpable to me that I am missing something inside, some boon of vitality.

When I first fall for her, my beloved other, I am frantic for conjunction, for the oneness that is true sex. It is not that I want to possess her beauty (I’ve only ever wanted to possess my own); but there is something about her, something about being in intimate contact with her beauty, that promises consummation. I aspire, through her, to become one with myself, to become whole. I soon realize, however, that the sex isn’t working. Her otherness to me intrudes upon my erotic reverie like a noisy and unwelcome guest, and I find myself, for a time, looking for someone else. But I have gone this route many a time before, and I prudently remind myself of just how unsatisfying any lover can be. And so I condescend to stay with her and either work things out or tolerate some substantial degree of their not working out—not a very romantic resolve, perhaps, at least not in the superficial sense of romance, but honest, pure of heart, and even noble, like a knight’s quest or a good king’s love. And I take comfort in knowing that I am not in the sort of relationship, an unnatural sort, where consummation is a lie, imperfect consummation is in the service of a lie, and there is no virtue there for abiding one’s desire.

In the preface to his book, Rees tells us that he will be aiming to address a twofold question: “How does alienation from God as a result of sin become narrated as alienation from God as a result of incompletion of one’s sex? And how is it possible to engage in theological debates about sexuality without contributing to their narrations of sexed identity achieving its completion in marriage?”2 Rees does tend to fold these two questions together, but for the purposes of my remarks here, I need to pry them apart.

I am not precisely sure what the first question is asking. It puts into play two possible sources of alienation from God and imagines that one source has, in many people’s imagination, displaced the other. Begin with sin. Assume that sin causes alienation from God. Fair enough, but what story do we have of how sin came to be? Augustine’s rendition of Genesis 2:4b—3:24? Not hardly. (But stay tuned.) Move on to sin’s narrative doppelgänger, “incompletion of one’s sex”—here a painful form of self-incoherence. This pain or penalty of sin can’t be a cause of alienation from God; it can only be a symptom. We sin, we become alienated from God, and (presumably) such alienation renders us unintelligible to ourselves, a painful thing. But now notice how often we sexualize this symptom of sin and reduce redemption to a return to innocence, to Adam and Eve in the garden, minus the serpent. I take it that this directive is more or less what the first question is enjoining.

The second question, having presupposed the dubiousness of the romance of innocent sexuality, casts further doubt on the marriage that is taken to be its holy grail. In other words, can we please stop invoking marriage to idealize a sexuality that admits, in whatever orientation we care to attribute to it, of no idealization? While I am inclined to agree with Rees that a sexualization of sin makes too much of sex (we need to get back, strange as this may sound, to sin itself), I do not share his apparent distaste for the sacralization of marriage. It is very important to Rees’s critique of romanticized sexuality that we notice how much the romance here feeds on practices of exclusion. In my schema of erotically afflicted narcissism—a.k.a., the romance of innocent sexuality—I flag two basic forms of exclusionary practice. I exclude my partner when I reduce her to a means for my own self-realization; I exclude others, those I take to be in unproductive marriages, when I infer my own innocence and spiritual fecundity from the perversity I impute exclusively to them. The latter kind of exclusion, wildly popular in a culture obsessed with sexual orientation, is what Rees takes as primary. I see it as a dreary footnote to the former, albeit a distressingly repetitive one. There is no reason to assume that narcissists need to be bigots; they are narcissists first and foremost. So, to recapitulate: the sexualization of sin and the sacralization of marriage are two separate issues.

One rather notable illustration of the sexualization impulse has been Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of the Oedipus myth, where Oedipus comes to epitomize in his agonized self-knowledge a son’s struggle to renounce his desire for his mother, honor his father’s authority, and take heterosexuality outside the house. Such a reading turns Oedipus’s unintended acts—killing his father, wedding his mother—into unconscious wishes and suggests to other sons, with time still to normalize their sexualities, that they may yet hope to avoid an Oedipal fate. Here the besetting sin is misdirected sexual desire. But that is certainly not the sin in the story, not, at least, in the version that Sophocles tells of it. There we learn of the cruelty of the father. Laios gets word from one of Apollo’s priests, a servant of the oracle, that he is fated to be killed by his son, Oedipus, then barely three days old. Valuing his person and his power (same difference) over the life of his newborn son, Laius orders Oedipus to be left for dead on a wooded and lonely mountain side, but not before having the boy’s ankles pierced and bound together—so as to prevent his crawling off.

Even if we were tempted to frame this cruelty (perversely) as a case of self-defense, that wouldn’t change the fact that the self defending itself here has no love for his son. Sophocles doesn’t give us the slightest reason to believe that Laios, given more to rage than to sorrow, ever mourns for Oedipus. And we can be pretty damn sure that Laios never consults Jocasta and takes her feelings to heart before he decides to maim and cast off the child that is hers too. The sin that gets passed down from father to son is that of an extraordinary obliviousness to the natural ties that alternately bind and release a mortal life. When young man Oedipus, having grown up in Corinth, hears from a drunken rival that he is a bastard son, he goes to the Delphic Oracle for reassurance. He wants to know from Apollo, son of the Olympian patriarch, Zeus, whether he is truly his father’s son. Oedipus wants to know, more specifically, whether the man who has been calling himself his father—Polybos, King of Corinth—is really his father, his own flesh and blood. Being assured of this, Oedipus will be assured of his inheritance of power. But it is not just Apollo who speaks at Delphi. An old parting from within divinity—heavenly from earthly, male from female—speaks there, temporarily with one voice, to those who have the self-composure to listen and the willingness to check their self-images at the threshold. You don’t consult the Delphic Oracle for reassurance; you go to die to yourself and live forward. Oedipus, despite what he assumes, is given a direct answer to his question. He is his father’s son. He is a patriarch, and patriarchs are fated to displace their fathers, turn their wives into their mothers, and bring new into the world their monstrous, same-old selves. The saving grace for Oedipus is that this is a fate that he can suffer rather than own. He is not, the gods be thanked, only his father’s son, a truth that the sexualization of his sin does much to obscure.

The Hebraic analogue to the Delphic Oracle is the Tree of Knowledge in the Yahwist’s tale of creation and expulsion (or creation by other means). There too there has been a parting from within divinity, conveyed to us by the apparent divergence between the two perspectives in the story on the fruit of knowledge. Yahweh, a male sky god, who inspires life into moistened clay, warns Adam (a creature of the ’adamah, the soil) that knowledge adds death to life (Gen. 2:16–173): “From every tree of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat of it, you are doomed to die.” The other perspective, whose truth Yahweh never overtly denies, comes from the serpent, who speaks directly to the woman, the female part of Adamic humanity, and likely represents the interests of Yahwist’s counterpart, the deity who causes water to swell up from within the earth to moisten the surface clay. The serpent tells the woman that she will not be doomed to die if she partakes of life and knowledge (the two trees are never differentiated in her perspective); on the contrary, she will become divinely knowing (Gen. 3:4–64): “You will not be doomed to die. For God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will become as gods knowing good and evil.”

I am inclined to think that the ancient redactor of the different creation stories in Genesis—Priestly (later in time, but put first) and Yahwist (the older account)—positioned the unresolved drama of the man, the woman, the serpent, and the sky god to serve as a chastening gloss on the Priestly source’s disclosure of divine/human intimacy of being (Gen. 1:275):

And God created the human in his image,
in the image of God He created him,
male and female He created them.

We are, as female and male, the veritable image, though not the essence, of the living God, but accessing this image is no easier than living and dying, knowledgably, with our differences.

The relatively little that Rees has to say about Gen. 1:27 is largely cautionary in tone, a primer on how not to read the verse: “The male and female created by God are not the essence of the sex narrated by the romance of innocent sexuality. In theological discourse on sexuality the ideals of Man and Woman are ideals of orientation.”6 It is almost always a bad sign when Man and Woman are capitalized. Prepare for a not-so-sublime sublimation. Rees gently goes on to remind us, that “as a matter of contingent fact, it just happens to be the case that the opposition of orientations defined alternatively as ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘homosexuality’ constitute the dominant framework for the establishment of sex, idealized in the opposition of Man and Woman.” I take it that we could do better than to use as ramshackle a notion as sexual orientation to frame the divine image of sexual difference (and, note: not hierarchy, just difference). We don’t even know from the biblical text, Rees wonderfully reminds us, “which of the two creatures is the male, which the female.”7 Reading Gen. 1:27 to vindicate heterosexuality is rather like going to the Delphic Oracle for reassurance. It is not a practice that tends towards edification.

Bearing in mind all the sneaky ways that Gen. 1:27—a cynosure for a sacred wedding—can be snuck into a horrid romance (and you know the one I am talking about), I still think that the imaginary of male and female in God is worth a little incautious exploring. Rees lavishes a great deal of apologetic ingenuity on the doctrine of original sin, but he almost never lets himself play with Augustine’s actual reading of Yahwist’s tale and its drama of broken trusts. I find Augustine to be most compelling as an exegete when he is differentiating between the roles that the man and the woman respectively play in bringing about the original sin. Here I will confine my attention to a just few of the details in City of God 14, chapter 11, where Augustine’s mature exegesis of Genesis 3:6-7—the quick succession of eating, hers then his—is conspicuously on display. The serpent in this reading is not, as I would have it, the agent of Yahweh’s consort but (thanks in no small part to Augustine) the familiar figure of Satan, lord of lies, in serpentine form. The woman, being more of a sensualist than her male counterpart, slips seamlessly into believing the serpent’s promise of superabundant life, the knowledge that is both carnal and divine. When the man joins her in transgression and eats, it is not because he too falls for the serpent’s lie (he is too shrewd for that); it is not even because he craves sex with his suddenly supercharged partner, looking like life herself (made of strong stuff, that Adam). It is simply because he cannot abide being with Yahweh, the breath of his breath, but not with the woman, the flesh of his flesh. He assumes that Yahweh, who knows very well that it is no good for the human to be alone (Gen. 2:18), will be forgiving. But as Augustine chillingly puts it, Adam is “unschooled in divine severity” (inexpertus divinae severitatis).

There are two things about this reading of Augustine’s that I find particularly instructive. Go to the moment in the story when the woman has just eaten of the fruit of knowledge and the man has yet to. There is not much room in the pace of the Yahwist’s narrative for a dramatic pause here—she eats; he eats; eyes are open; loins get covered—but Augustine manages to find within the flicker of a moment a crisis worthy of a Hamlet. His Adam is pitched precariously between two great forces of life, male and female, and he must, more as a multitude of engenderings than as an isolated and self-assured man, wed human desire to the oracular logic of that queer conjunction. (Here is where I begin to think of a sacred wedding, even as I shun, along with Rees, the cul-de-sac of innocent sexuality.) Also notice in Augustine’s sexually differentiated reading of the original sin that Adam never breaks with God; he presumes upon the continual inspiration of this relationship as he ventures fretfully into dark waters. This Adam is no Satan-knockoff narcissist; he is not even much of a sinner.

Of course I readily admit, being a not utterly dense reader of Augustine, that Augustine resists his own inclination to parse sin along the lines of sexual difference and thereby run the risk of leaving divinity divided between heaven and earth. He constantly veers back towards a story where God, like imperial Rome, remains in the business of sparing the conquered and battling down the proud. The Adam who serves here as the human paradigm of pride is less pleased with himself than afflicted with a constitutional insanity: he would rather be related to nothing than to any source of life outside of himself. He does not really have a relationship to God, or to the woman, to break. And so there is no story to be told about how he goes about breaking it. The Augustine who would pretend otherwise is no ally to Rees in his desire to trade in the romance of innocent sexuality for “a more just theological understanding of human sexuality.”8

The Augustine who is an ally makes room in his paradise for the serpent. This is the paradise where each one of us is truly, as Dostoyevsky’s Father Zosima comes prematurely to realize, answerable for the other: not a taking of responsibility but a presumption of it. We look for a place we never left.

GEOFFREY REES’S THE ROMANCE OF INNOCENT SEXUALITY represents A major step forward in what he might term queer theology’s1 maturation into humorousness. Rees has done the discipline a service not only in terms of the specific argument he offers for a queer Augustinian theology of original sin, but relative to the discipline’s conventions of argument and engagement with sources. He exhibits an exemplary combination of care and fairness with a kind of gentle humor in his deployment of unexpected themes taken from Augustine and nineteenth-century novels in making theological arguments. Since I share many of Rees’s theoretical and theological proclivities, and in obedience to the dictates of the conversational mode of Syndicate, I raise three topics for further conversation: sin, utopia, and time. These areas of discussion combine interesting or provocative moves on Rees’s part with certain theoretical and theological questions that have either been underexplored or are only now beginning to be raised. These three topics for conversation are specific ways of reflecting on what the perils and promises of imagining that the “world” might be radically different from what it now is.

When I taught portions of Rees’s book in my course on queer theology at Yale Divinity School last spring, it was perhaps unsurprising that his rehabilitation of the doctrine of original sin via Augustine created the most confusion and dissent among students of any text we read. (And we read some very demanding and controversial texts, including Lee Edelman’s No Future, to which I return below.) The primary forms of dissent were two: on the one hand, some students showed distaste for the very notion of rehabilitating sin or original sin in any form for queer purposes. Is not the Christian problematic in relation to queerness precisely its over-enthusiastic designation of queer sinfulness? And do not queers who enter Christian spaces seeking to worship need to hear of God’s love rather than their status also as sinners whom God hates? On the other hand, students of a different bent were uncomfortable with this use of Augustine—could such a usage ever pretend responsibility to Augustine’s intentions or to the canons of Augustinian interpretive practices? In the first case, students allowed—as sometimes happens in divinity school—imagined and experienced situations of pastoral care to trump serious engagement with Rees’s argument for solidarity based on shared sinfulness. In the second case, students deflected engagement with the text on a different level while also missing Rees’s argument for (and use of) humor. These distinctions mirror the way queer theology is positioned in relation to more conventionally recognizable “systematic” theology as an identitarian discourse of liberation that some systematicians charge is inattentive to the need for canonical, traditional, and interpretive faithfulness that characterizes proper Christian speech.

The argument that shared sinfulness—or shared embeddedness in structures of original sin—can provide for solidarity among human beings is not a new one, and its structural form is particularly characteristic of liberation theologies. But a version of that argument—not about sin, but about sinthomosexuality (coined from the Lacanian sinthome)—has also appeared in one of the debates in which queer theory has been embroiled in recent years, about the nature of time and futurity. Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive2 developed concerns about inclusion and integration that have belonged to queer theory since its inception at the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States. In No Future,Edelman argues that queers need to accept the way they are socially positioned as threats to society and the reproduction of the social order—figural positionings (like “homosexual recruitment” or the “predatory gay”) that may be summed up in the slogan: “But what about the children!” Queerness figures the repudiation of the future, as the future is figured by the image of the innocent child whose innocence, and even existence, the queer threatens. Social reproduction, Edelman suggests, takes place in part by mobilizing resistance to whatever threatens the continuation of the existing order. Social reproduction thus requires that someone stand in the position of ‘that which threatens the social order.” Queers are currently one of the forms in which such threat is represented.3

But Edelman’s argument is not only that society needs figures of threat against which it can summon its powers of resistance and destruction. Edelman also argues, on psychoanalytic grounds, that neither the subject nor the social order can achieve integration, wholeness, plenitude, and self-identity. That is, whatever the social order is, it will require someone to figure its intrinsic inability to be or become that which it must represent itself as. Similarly, the subject imagines a plenitudinous wholeness that, by reason of the very nature of subject formation, is unachievable. The social thus produces the sinthomosexual (the figural representation of that which threatens society and can’t be integrated into society) of necessity. If queers (as in gays and lesbians) no longer figure that threat as they too become decent and upstanding citizens, someone else will be forced into that figural position, with the concomitant consequences. Instead, Edelman argues, they should remain in the position of that-which-has-to-be-excluded, that which threatens the child and therefore threatens the future. (It is for this reason that Edelman’s argument, despite his protestations to the contrary, is clearly an ethical argument.) The queer is non-identity’s resistance to identity.4 Although “futurism . . . perpetuates the hope of a fully unified community, a fully realized social order, that’s imagined as always available in the fullness of the future to come,”5 such visions serve to constrain political possibilities in the present while representing those who threaten “the children” as in need of erasure.

We may seem to have wandered far from Augustine and Rees at this point, but in truth we have not. For Rees’s argument is informed by and in resistance to Edelman’s throughout. Edelman’s nonidentity is the refusal of the dream of intelligibility that Rees sees as a symptom of fallen sinfulness. As Rees argues, “The promise of intelligible selfhood is a necessary chimera in the formation of human community.”6 The social order of necessity generates such dreams of plenitudinous identity and transparent intelligibility. Indeed, Rees follows Edelman on the very nature of politics: “the struggle to effect a fantasmatic order of reality in which the subject’s alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chain of signifiers lived as history.”7 Refusal to admit the chimerical nature of that dream serves for Rees as a denial of one’s own implication in original sin, and it causes disengagement from the struggle to remain “aware . . . as much as possible, of the continual shifting distribution of the burden of shame of unintelligibility.”8 That distribution is both enacted by the self and caused by changing historical dynamics, but it reflects sin either way in conditions of fallenness. “Blaming others, by shaming them, is a means of disowning one’s own responsibility for sin.”9 Rees’s solution is acceptance of one’s own sinfulness and responsibility therefore, along with the sacrifice of the dream of an achieved intelligibility in a fallen world. Instead, one ought to seek “to redress the continually unfolding harms that ensue from the inexorable present reality of sin.”10 Yet such action is informed, from the perspective of faith, by the hope of the resurrection and the gift of an achieved relation to a God who alone can render identity stable and intelligible and community non-exclusionary.

At this point, Edelman and Rees part company at a fundamental level.11 For Edelman, this solution is no more than the return of the same in an only slightly different form. As long as the dream of wholeness and identity persists, even if (perhaps especially if) that dream is unachievable in this life (but will be so in a life to come), the subject and the social will remain trapped in the destructive consequences that fantasy entails. In truth, Edelman believes the trap to be unavoidable; the sinthomosexual may at best serve as a witness (or perhaps as a brake) to society’s relentless march forward into ever-new atrocities.12 While Rees’s trap also catches all comers, for him, Christian theology’s emphasis on the resurrection, on hope for a different order, and the promise of identity in the life to come serve as spurs to free action. Giving up the dream of an identity fixed in and by sexuality permits “faithful responsiveness to God who creates.”13 The promise of resurrection and a transformation of the sinful self offers hope for temporal discontinuity, a difference between what is and what will be.

Indeed, in one of the most suggestive but underdeveloped passages of the book, Rees says: “More productive theologically is the fantasy of a communal existence where sex doesn’t exist, where the fictional expression of the fallen self’s dream of wholeness in a sex never arises, where the self projects no sex to image its completion, especially in another human being, instead finding that completion in God.”14

Rees here departs from an exceedingly common claim in queer or gay-affirming theologies of sexuality, that sexuality’s and gender’s distortions will be corrected in the life to come as sex, sexuality, and gender are transformed into an even better version of what they now are in their fallen forms, that they will then realize their intrinsic telos (perhaps toward participation in a triune and relational God).15 The queer version might project “communal, polymorphous indulgence of uninhibited sexual pleasure”16 backward into unfallen creation and forward into the life to come; the gay-affirming version might do the same for a perfected version of marriage. Rees’s suggestion implies that sex and sexuality may not be perverted by the fall: they may be results of the fall. Now that’s a queer idea!

Rees remains coy about whether he is willing to follow this suggestion to its logical conclusion. Surprisingly for someone who is so (rightly) critical of Eugene Rogers on this issue, he too ends on a queer wedding feast, although he does not specify who is getting married or even what a non-exclusionary “wedding” entails beyond a general image of a banquet.17 The resistance that many contemporary Christian theologians have to characterizations of Christianity as body-hating and sex-judging has heightened the volume in which such theologians insist that Christianity (alone?) can figure the truth of sexual desire and its fulfillment in the transcendent-resurrected sexual body in God. The heavenly body must be sexed, sexual, and gendered, they insist; anything else is Manicheanism or dualism or Gnosticism or (insert preferred term of derogation here). But can a Christianity that affirms the basic goodness of sex, sexuality, and gender as they currently exist, refusing only their distortions (whatever they may be), ever be queer? Does not such a Christianity conform (or so I would argue) to the theological heresy of sexuality as identity of which Rees’s book is such an elegant and persuasive critique? How—if at all—can sex, gender, and sexuality be imagined as radically different from what they now are, if they indeed are fallen in the way that Rees argues they are?

The turn to temporality in recent queer theory focused intently on a debate between Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz over just this question, in a slightly different version: can and should a future (or a utopia) be imagined or invoked, and what are the consequences either way? As we have seen, Edelman insists that any vision either of fulfillment in a future to come or of a radically different future for the current social order is a (perhaps even ethically culpable, albeit unavoidable) chimera. Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity18 argues that a future utopia must be invoked, must be called upon, as the horizon of hope. Yet, at the same time, Muñoz remains wary of any content-filled utopia, any utopic imagination that populates its future with a too-developed vision of how things ought to be. Perhaps Rees draws back out of similar concerns with the possible and unintended consequences of filled-out utopic imaginations. (After all, attempts to achieve utopia in history are not notorious for their successes.)

In each case, different visions of the relation between present and “future” are in play. (“Future” is ambiguous: from the perspective of Christian theology, it is not clear that either the resurrection or the eschaton are in the “future” in any ordinary sense of the term.) Rees posits two radical discontinuities: between pre-lapsarian and post-lapsarian existence, and between the social order as it presently stands and what it will be in the world to come. Such discontinuities cannot take place on a single timeline. Multiple “times” and timelines are required in order to take seriously the literal character of original sin in the way that Rees proposes. In that, there is nothing new to Christian theology: the already-not yet and the simul both have the same requirement. This might suggest that all Christian theology and queer theory have yet to do in order to be speaking mostly the same language is to hash out which timeline ought to be in play where, and just how much continuity and discontinuity (or other, non-linear forms of time) will apply to any given element of existence in a Christian resurrection or in a queer utopia.

But here, Rees’s divergence from Edelman takes place at just the right point, and it raises a final question. For intrinsic to the very concept of sin is that things ought to be otherwise than they are, that the world ought to be or could have been or will be radically (in some sense) different from what it is. The ought not of sin cannot be made compatible with the inevitability of the sinthomosexual (as Rees suggests with respect to psychoanalysis in general19). Whatever hope of a different order the queer theorist or the queer theologian might allow for the future, there is a difference between affirmation of finitude itself (as psychoanalysis sees itself doing) and recognition of the guilt of distorted finitude (as Christian sin-talk requires). This difference brings us back to the assumption some of my students brought to their reading of Rees’s book last year, that talk of sin and guilt is an obstacle to good human becoming and right sociality, rather than their condition of possibility. I share Rees’s love for the doctrine of original sin and his sense of the discontinuity brought by fallenness. Yet I also wonder about how seriously the queer-theoretical or psychoanalytic critiques of the costs of such imagining-otherwise ought to be taken. Can those of us who take original sin seriously in this way affirm the world as it exists, and what, ultimately, is lost if we cannot?

GEOFFREY REES HAS IDENTIFIED an unexpected ally for his argument for the validity of same-sex marriage. St. Augustine is not usually the go-to author for support for liberal causes. Rees’s densely argued thesis is ingenious, a tour de force. Rather than bringing gay marriage to the status of “innocent sexuality” enjoyed by heterosexual marriage, he finds in Augustine’s most-criticized doctrine—original sin—grounds for finding all forms of sexuality equally sinful; the “romance of innocent sexuality” is negated by original sin.

According to Rees, the romance of innocent sexuality goes like this: alienated from God, who is the source and guarantor of the self, by original sin, North American society in our time considers sex “worth dying for”1 (Foucault’s phrase) because it seems to us to be the uniquely resonant individual possession by which the self (in alienation) can be constituted and unified (other societies in other times have chosen differently, for example, courtly love in medieval European elite society):

When marriage becomes idealized as a means of recovery of the unity of the self lost in original sin, marriage becomes a principal means of refusal of that loss, which is to say that marriage becomes a principal means of refusal of responsibility for sin. The romance of innocent sexuality is thus a disavowal of sin, the disavowal of the loss of unity of self in God through sin, accomplished through assertions of the innocence of certain persons’ sexuality, sexual desires, and corresponding relationships against other persons’ sinful sexuality, sexual desires, and corresponding relationships.2

Rees claims that the fiction of innocent sexuality informs the political combat over gay marriage in contemporary society. Both those who struggle to protect heterosexual marriage and those who seek to extend the illusion of innocent sexuality to same-sex couples have an exaggerated understanding of the benefit of marriage. Rees argues for a much more modest claim for marriage as a “good but limited human relationship” that nevertheless lacks the power to be the “origin and source of one’s personal identity.”3

Debate over same-sex marriage is so intense because its participants all share a common commitment to the narrative capacity of marriage to render the secret of the self, its sex, accessible. The question of who may or may not marry whom matters so much because it is finally a question of who will or will not experience a regnant fiction of intelligible bodily and psychic integrity.4

We think within narratives, Rees writes, and he finds the “fiction of sex,” to be damaging to the community of sinful humanity.5 In fact, Rees (and Augustine) claim that original sin is “the genuine unity of humanity.”6 Claiming to construct “an inclusively queer Augustinianism,” Rees argues for the “exclusion of all exclusion” from the community of sinners. Again, Augustine is an unlikely exemplar of inclusion, as his doctrine of predestination, discussed below, amply demonstrates.7

Rees is neither an Augustine scholar nor a Christian. He does not seek to intervene in “one specialized discourse” (presumably Christian theology), but to generate a “conversation across disciplines”8 In so doing, the task he undertakes is not to understand Augustine in the context of his own corpus,his cultural and intellectual loyalties, and his historical location. Rather he finds in Augustine’s theology tools—suggestions—that help him to address a contemporary debate. Similarly, Michel Foucault invited his readers to treat Foucault’s own writings as a toolbox, selecting useful and usable ideas for understanding and argument and discarding any that are not needed to get the work done. Although he does not acknowledge this, Rees participates in a tradition of “advocacy scholarship,” initiated in its contemporary form some decades ago by Vincent Harding for Black Theology. Advocacy scholarship acknowledges a particular perspective and attempts to think through present quandaries from that perspective for the benefit of those who share this perspective. Although it can be—and often is—argued that all scholarship argues from a particular social, cultural, intellectual, racial, and gender perspective (to name only a few of the variables that constitute a perspective), most scholarship implicitly claims the elusive, if not impossible, goal of unmediated “objectivity.”

Both approaches to historical authors are, in my view, legitimate. It is, however, necessary to distinguish an approach that seeks to render the complexity of a historical author understandable, and one that employs the toolbox approach to the author. Each approach is vulnerable to criticism. Those that help us to understand a historical author in her/his own context can be accused of ivory tower irrelevance. Those that seek tools with which to address a contemporary issue risk accusations of misunderstanding, or partial understanding, of the historical author whose ideas they employ. The Romance of Innocent Sexuality will not help its readers understand, for example, how Augustine could embrace both the affirmation that God is love—and that is all you need to know about God, as he preached in his homilies on 1 John—and his doctrine of predestination which leaves the massa damnata, by far the larger crowd, howling helplessly outside the gates, forever excluded from “the eternal felicity of the city of God in its perpetual Sabbath.” The democracy Rees seeks in Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is, it seems to me, significantly, if not fatally, undercut by his insistence on irrevocable predestination. On this point I am not unsympathetic with Rees; I notice that I too tend to forget predestination when I wax eloquent on Augustine’s beautiful, and seemingly inclusive, doctrine of love!

Rees’s point is, of course, that there is no innocent sexuality, no place to stand outside original sin—no, not even in celibacy (recall the proud virgins who are inferior to humble wives in Augustine’s treatise On the Good of Marriage). However, the effects as well as the content of a doctrine should also be noticed. Rees sees in Augustine’s doctrine of original sin the foundation for a community of sinners who recognize that they have no grounds for judging the sexual orientation and practices of anyone else. If, indeed, it is impossible to exempt oneself from the sinfulness of humanity, it necessarily follows that one’s participation in the human community should entail hospitable and respectful treatment of other sinners like oneself.

The more negative effects of the doctrine must also be noticed. Generations of earnest Christians, like my parents, have attempted to stamp out every evidence of original sin in themselves and their children. Ironically, the admission of original sin—I am a sinner—has produced doubled and redoubled efforts not to act like a sinner, “as if the avoidance of sins somehow means the self is less fallen.”9 At this point perhaps, for just a moment, the doctrine of predestination could also be seen to have a potentially positive effect. If sin is quite impossible to stamp out in anybody, then the parents’ job becomes simply socialization, teaching the child to behave in ways that harm others minimally. The child’s salvation is not at stake, having been decided long before the child was born; thus, her or his eternal destiny is not within the realm of parental responsibility. This interpretation, however, has not had a noticeably relaxing effect for generations of Christians who took Augustine’s doctrine of original sin seriously.

Finally, why does Rees focus so exclusively on sex as the evidence and reality of sin?

The bottom line is simple: sin not innocence. Rather than attempt to discern whose sexual desires and relationships are innocent, and whose not, a more responsible sexual ethics—and more constructive also—starts with acceptance of responsibility by each person individually for the universal ruin of humankind in a single inheritable original sin that is meaningfully and appropriately associated with sexuality.10

From the early centuries of the Christian movement, theology identified pursuit of the objects of sex, power, and possessions as compulsions strong enough to displace and divert love of God as the source and stability of the self. Early monasticism addressed these addictive desires directly, substituting celibacy for sex, obedience for power, and poverty for possessions. After Augustine, medieval theologians named seven deadly sins, fascinations with sufficient power to distract and destroy the life of the Spirit: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride. Each of these compulsive behaviors creates the illusion of a unified self. But Rees’s interest lies exclusively in what he identifies as “the hold of marriage on theological discourse,” namely, “its illusory promise of solution to the melancholy of original sin through the realization of the fiction of sex.”11

Harmful as the romance of innocent sexuality is—and has been—many or most advocates of same-sex marriage have much more practical (and less metaphysical) reasons for seeking marriage equality, namely, marriage’s social and economic privilege. Of course, metaphysical and practical motivations are not mutually exclusive. By recognizing and describing a factor that underlies practical reasons for legislating marriage equality, Rees has helpfully demonstrated the complexity of the struggle over gay marriage.

ARE WE EVADING SIN through a story that claims our sexual lives are redeemed through marriage? Am I, as a monogamous, heterosexual (I’m using all these terms in their most naïve form) married man, sequestering sin from my sexuality? Geoffrey Rees counts sex as an integral part of the proliferation of sin into humanity (à la Augustine) and wants us to consider how Western Christianized culture has ameliorated sin through the fiction of sex.

Unintelligible Due to Romance and Fiction

In this rich and often dense text, Rees’s thesis plumbs our fictions about sex. He claims throughout that these fictions move sex from the dense nexus of its biological, social, and existential components to a comprehensible goal of marriage. This problematic story does not, however, square with the fact that, “no such thing as a stable sovereign center exists that fixes the intelligibility of the social order sustaining theological discourse on sexuality.”1 What is sex? “Sex is not something people do, nor is it something people are. It is something that people become, a possibility of intelligible personal identity with a history.”2 The claim seems to be that finding a coherent “I” in my “I-Thou” relation is so compelling that I am willing to do violence to my body while subject to theological fictions in order to locate the “I” that is a unified me. Sex becomes the unifying feature that redeems me, but at the cost of maintaining a romantic view of marriage. Thus, my epistemic restlessness—my need to understand the complex of sex—finds its rest in this romantic fiction of marriage. Rees’s precise words are worth reading:

When marriage becomes idealized as a means of recovery of the unity of self lost in original sin . . . marriage becomes a principal means of refusal of responsibility of sin, the disavowal of the loss of unity of self in God through sin. . . . The hold of marriage on theological discourse on sexuality is its illusory promise of solution to the melancholy of original sin through the realization of the fiction of sex.3

Rees offers us an incisive analysis on the role of sex in relation to self, spouse, society, and God. Tailoring Augustine’s account of sin to dovetail with Foucault’s dictum, “sex is worth dying for,” he offers fresh vistas to the well-worn discussions of sexuality and gender. Rees insists that no body—individual or social—leaves the room unstained by the profundity of sin, which allows him to then “humorously” explore the problem that we do not actually understand the complex of identities, bodies, relationships, and more that constitute sex. This makes our efforts to hew out a specific narrative for sex—namely, heterosexual marriage—untenable in making it intelligible. Rees argues against several fictions that have been romanticized: the innocence of children, the completion of sexuality in marriage, and the hetero-homosexual dichotomy. If there is no actual hetero-homo dichotomy within which one can situate her own sex, and marriage does not resolve the dilemma, then sex remains unintelligible.

Rees employs two main interlocutors to explore the unintelligibility of sex. The first is Foucault, focused through the lens of his statement “sex is worth dying for.” And the other is Augustine’s theological goose-chase for the self through concrete, embodied experience. I must admit at the outset that I am a neophyte concerning Foucault’s analysis of sex—a seminal subtext to Rees’s thesis. I am hopeful that our panelists will better exegete his use of Foucault in toto.

Rees also draws upon Augustine’s reflections on the body to show that the child’s common question, “Where did I come from,” arrests a concrete attempt to understand the self as a mysterious product of sex. This attempt then creates an analog for one to understand the mystery of creation writ large—an unseen genesis of the universe that we become cognizant of as is:

The point of sex, its power as a fiction, is the fictive unity it promises. Given the overwhelming force of the desire of self for unity, it is not surprising that sex has been unquestioningly assumed as a causal origin of personal identity, as a causal origin of the self who can experience unity through union with another.4

Additionally, marriage offers a powerful fiction that alleviates the unintelligibility of sex. (Though, for those of us who have experienced marriage, that alleviation only provides a thin veneer of intelligibility. The quest to find a unified self through marriage easily wrecks the fiction of sex by sober reality.) On multiple fronts, the cultural messages that play upon and extend the fiction of sex do nothing to make sex or marriage more comprehensible. In relation to God, our desire for unity is then corrupted into accepting these fictions of sex and thus, we actually “disavow God” by theologically excising sin from a sexually redeemed marriage. This move, the sequestering of sin from sex, produces subtle violence that we even perpetrate on children.

For Rees, the violence of this fiction comes from the hetero-homo dichotomy, especially when we attempt to secure our identity on one side of the dichotomy by making children’s bodies innocent, segregated from the narratives of our society’s sexual partisans. “The result is a fantastic innocence ascribed to children, most often figured as diminutive play of adult sexed identity fetishized almost under the rubric of cuteness.”5 The suggested antidote is caught by Augustine’s dictum: “So tiny a child, so great a sinner.”

Greater caring for children is therefore enhanced when they are recognized as the entirely sinful creatures that they are, as fully belonging to the community of fallen humanity. The violence of the sentimental spectacle of childhood is especially harmful in its capacity for erasure, its capacity to render invisible and inadmissible the ambiguity and complexity of children’s bodies.6

Ritualizing Sex

Catherine Bell’s brilliant tome Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice tackles a spurious dichotomy of a different sort that appears similar to Rees’s critique.7 Namely, she sought to oust the fiction that because humans are primarily thinkers, our actions directly reflect our thoughts. Instead of this thinking-acting dichotomy, Bell offered ritualization as a better paradigm for understanding human practices. Ritualization means that rites are strategically utilized human practices meant to form our bodies (think Merleau-Ponty’s “habit-body”) and create a new type of person within the social body of the ritual. For instance, John’s baptism in the Gospels is not like other Jewish baptisms (e.g., mikvah baptism) and not like the normal human practice of bathing. It has been strategically changed in order to shape the participants into people who understand their sin differently in light of the ritual. Hence, John ritualizes both normal bathing and Jewish baptism into a new rite.

Bell highlights the fact that our bodies are formed through scripted practices—what Rees might call “fictions”—of all sorts and this formation informs our epistemic perspective. In other words, rituals do not outwardly reflect our internal thinking; they craft our thinking. It seems to me that Rees’s critique aims at something similar: the ritualization of sex. Sex is not a byproduct of our thoughts about sex and the world, it is the biologically scripted practice that shapes how we see ourselves, and hence creation.

I am not certain Rees would agree with me here, but it might be that the very practice of sex—the very desire to do it—inescapably generates a perspective of my self. Regardless of that complex of sexuality, cultures always ritualize sex, which crafts how we think through our sexual desires and practices. In the same way that Bell argues that we are ritualed beings by constitution, not beings who merely choose to follow rituals, we are sexed beings. This reality of our being qua sexual burgeons from childhood in ever-unfolding and perplexing instances, entangled in and confused by our cultural fictions of what sex is for. These stories help us to situate ourselves as sexual beings and also prescribe for us how to enact the practice, ritualizing it beyond the brute experience of pleasure, procreation, or something else. We ritualize the practice of sex to make its meaning transcend the practice itself, its cultural taboo, and the confusion of its purposes and ends.

However, by admitting that we ritualize the complex of sex, we are not presuming that the reasons for ritualizing sex are clear to us. We could easily fall into a presumption found widely in ritual theory that when a normal human practice is ritualized, it acts as a solution to a particular cultural problem.

We can find a renowned version of this conflict-resolution approach in René Girard’s theory regarding cultural scapegoats.8 For Girard, a cultural conflict such as violence must be remediated by funneling the violence onto a victim. Every culture, says Girard, contains a ritualized outlet of violence and the resolution most often entails a central figure that is sacrificed by means of channeling their violent impulses. This focused violence sanctions the conflict, but alleviates the need to commit more mundane acts of brutality. Biblical examples of this trajectory range from John the Baptist’s beheading to the thousands of swine driven of the cliff at Gerasa, not to mention the scapegoat of Yom Kippur or Jesus of Nazareth. Although much of Girard’s work appears promising and on many fronts, critique has focused on his presumption that violence is a conflict that has a ritualized resolution.

To understand a ritual, Girard’s methodology requires one to look for a conflict that the ritual is meant to resolve. In the case of sex and its rites, the conflict created by its incomprehensibility resolves through a marriage that removes sexuality from the hetero-homo binary, placing the married couple squarely in the heterosexual camp. Even more theologically dangerous, this ritualization of sex in marriage removes the sex complex from the traditional discourse of sin.  Sex has been redeemed, strategically employed apart from sin.

On the whole, I found much of Rees’s dense text very helpful for articulating my own sensibilities. As I struggled to figure out what he was getting at, he forced me to think again about almost everything sex does and gave me new theological tools to wrest this conversation from the elementary categories like sexual orientation and same-sex attraction. However, it is not clear to me that Rees escapes this same critique of Girard. In fact, his analysis might project a conflict-resolution pattern into the discourse that neglects how the biblical authors might be ritualizing sex (more below).

Though I do believe that I understand what he means by the “incomprehensibility of sex,” I also know that my LGBTQ friends might have a different sense of the construct than do I, maybe even a richer sense. His use of Augustine helps to root the notion in something more tangible, but the notion never quite crystalizes and I suspect that reinforces the idea. On the other end, I often teach undergraduates that heterosexual marriage is just as “stained by sin” as is any other sex. In some way, I would suggest that we are all ritualizing sex—producing some conflict and set of rites that mean to resolve the conflict and offer something to transcend sex. We are all trying to get beyond sex and so we give it some purpose, a proper context, and prescribe rites and taboos to follow.

Slightly jarring for a theological account is the secondary role of Scripture in Rees’s understanding. Biblical authors were also ritualizing sex, prescribing the rites, conflicts, and roles to the human body within the social body of Israel. In the end, Rees offers radical hospitality (i.e., “queer hospitality”) as demanded by Torah in order to make sex intelligible, both within and without marriage. I think that he is largely correct there. Hospitality notwithstanding, I wished that he would have pressed on to consider the Torah’s ritualization of the sex complex on the whole.

For instance, procreation is central in the depiction of sex, but even procreation is not a patently good commodity in the Torah’s ethical economy. As it turns out, Israelites will later procreate for the purpose of making children who can be murdered in sacrifice to other gods (e.g., 2 Kgs 16:3). It is not sufficient to espouse that the purpose of sex is to merely be fruitful and multiply. Moreover, the times (Lev 18:19), relations (Lev 18:1–18), and procreative body fluids (Lev 15) of sex practices are all ritualized in the Torah with Genesis 2:18–25 acting as the foundational story which circumscribes all sex. I agree with Rees that “sodomy,” biblically understood, should mean something more like “egregious inhospitality.” Hospitality itself is also ritualized in Leviticus (see especially Lev 19:9–34). However, we cannot overlook the willingness to violently rape any human regardless of relation, fluid, or biology as equally egregious under an emic reading of Torah. These ritualizations of human practices seem to have something to say about the logic, and therefore intelligibility of sex too.

Conclusions

Rees thesis offers us generous portion of much needed critical discourse on the irascible categories that fly under the flag of human sexuality. Even now, I am guilty of falling back into that lingo that creates the fiction Rees so aptly critiques. The unintelligibility of sex does appear to me as the center of his thesis—the epistemological crux at the center of this text. As well, I am sure that many scholars will find in Rees a harmonic voice who never tires of warning about the power of fictions and romanticisms that too easily reconcile the murky swamps of life as it is lived.

I do worry that in following Rees’s argument, I could have substituted one fiction for another. But that kind of disparaging is too easy and wide-ranging—and could become a boomerang to my own work. More precisely, I worry that one fiction could be replaced without considering the “fictions” prescribed by the biblical authors. If they were ritualizing the cosmos for Israel, from which Christianity funds its ritualizations, then the question of their authority to situate sex among things such as hospitality needs to be meted out.