Facs
Transcript
and perhaps the first and most important thing. The main question is not better rules – they would be rules again – but the main question is: better relationship of this power of man and nature to the Ultimate; to see it in its created goodness and not in the distorted state in which the later ancient world has brought it, producing then the ascetic reaction which crept into Christianity and which has no basis in the genuine Jewish-Christian tradition; neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is there a real basis for the creeping of ancient asceticism and negation of sex into Christianity. This is the first point.
The second point is: the function of the sexual. Here the great fight is going on between a modern Protestant view and the Catholic and partly old Protestant view, namely that the meaning of sex is the production of the following generation, and that it is justified only for purposes of propagation and has no justification at all beyond this. Now in this fight there is no doubt where Protestantism has to stand – and humanism stands there mostly anyhow, today – namely on the side of those who say there is a double function of sex: the fulfillment of all vital potentialities, in moments of ecstasy, in which the differentiation of body and body is overcome; and at the same time the propagation and the creation of children, of new life. The unity of these two and the possibility of separating them under many circumstances is the basic answer which we have to give against the laws of repression which had been put upon mankind in the later part of bourgeois society and Calvinist Protestantism.
Now this is my preliminary answer to this. It is not a lecture in ethics, but it is a lecture in culture and religion. And as always in these lectures, I repeat: the problem of sex is not resolved