Sex and mysticism

Cross Currents, Fall, 2004 by Ignacio L. Gotz

In one of his sermons on the Song of Songs, St. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of being united to Christ the Lord in a holy kiss. (1) In a later sermon he explained: "When the beloved Soul shall have been perfected, the Bridegroom will make with her a spiritual marriage and they shall be two, not in one flesh, but in one spirit." (2) The sexuality of such mystical expressions is clear, but, as we shall see, such utterances are not reserved only to St. Bernard, nor are they peculiar to Christianity. In this essay I want to explore briefly the sexual imagery that appears in the writings of the great mystics of all major religions. I will also contrast this mystical quasi-sublimation of sexuality with the more explicit, albeit mystical, sexual practices of Hindu Tantra.

Regrettably, I will not deal here with the whole realm of sexual symbolism and practice in the Mystery Religions. The idea of "sacred marriage" (hieros gamos), which reappears in the Braumystik of the late Middle Ages, is worth attentive consideration, but limitations of space must be observed. Moreover, the treatment of many dimensions of my principal theme must of necessity be brief, even perfunctory, though I hope it will be sufficient to establish the major points of this essay.

Sex and Spirit

Christianity has a long and complicated history of attitudes toward sexuality--generally, toward the body in so far as it is a mere physical entity. St. Paul's distinction between the pneumatikoi and the sarkikoi and psychikoi presages a host of other ideas which eventually would view sexuality with suspicion. (3) His comment that he would rather marry than burn (4) placed marriage in a subordinate state because of sex. The downgrading of sex echoed Jesus's remark that it would be better to enter the Kingdom lame than be cast out whole. (5) This seemingly innocuous remark, and the comment in Matthew 19:12 about castration, led Origen, in the third century, to actually castrate himself, an act for which he was widely criticized, since it was generally believed that such statements were not to be taken literally but only figuratively.

In the first centuries of Christianity many pseudo-epigrapha advocated a strict sexual renunciation, and this message was often accepted with enthusiasm by at least a segment of the Church. The Acts of Thecla, for example, centers around Thecla's refusal of sexual congress, and the case is the same in the Acts of Thomas and the Acts of John. Even though self-styled orthodox Christianity, at least officially, sought to avoid extremes, there remain in it to this day a certain mistrust of sexuality and, in some instances, a sort of preference for the monastic and priestly chastity in contrast to the conjugal life of the ordinary Christian. For the same reason, the virginity of Mary before, during, and after the birth of Jesus, became an accepted doctrine after the second century CE: being the mother of God, she could not have been soiled by sex. On the other hand, in the midst of all the negative views of sex, and almost against them, sexual intercourse became a metaphor for the feminine soul's intimate union with her Spouse, Christ. The Church in general appeared as the Bride of Christ already in Paul, but the mystical imagery was developed in great detail by subsequent writers.

None of this was totally new. In ancient Mesopotamia there were sacred hymns that recounted the courtship and marriage of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, and Dumuzi, the Shepherd-King of Uruk. The beautiful hymns, explicitly sexual, were also the basis of a re-enactment of this sexual union by the King and the Priestess of Inanna in a rite of fertility ushering in the rainy season. (6)

Echoes of these poems appear in the Hebrew Bible's Song of Songs, another explicitly sexual poem that has given rise to innumerable commentaries in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Marvin Pope claims that, "in proportion to its size, no book of the Bible has received so much attention and certainly none has had so many divergent interpretations imposed upon its every word." (7) In Christianity the tendency has been to interpret the poem in a mystical way as describing the search of the soul for God, her disappointment as she loses herself, and her triumphs as she reaches fulfillment. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote eighty-six sermons on the first two chapters of the Song, and he strove strenuously to inculcate an asexual interpretation of it. "Take heed," he exhorted in Sermon 61:2, "that you bring chaste ears to this discourse of love; and when you think of these two lovers, remember always that not a man and a woman are to be thought of, but the Word of God and a soul." (8)

A purely mystical view of the Song is developed also in the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross, who, however, adds his own fantastic vision of it. The Spiritual Canticle, some of which the poet wrote while in jail in Toledo in 1576, purports to contain an "exposition of the stanzas which treat of the exercise of love between the Soul and Christ the Spouse." (9) Later on, in the Prologue, he explicitly acknowledges that the poem is about "love understood mystically." (10)