Setting Freud Straight: Homosexuality As Repressed Friendship

With William Main’s “Gay But Unhappy” in the March issue, Crisis is to be commended yet again for being at the forefront of the battle against homosexuality, both the affliction and the ideology. It is a marvelous piece and will hold out hope to those who recognize their affliction and who desire or are willing to do something about it. As a homosexual Catholic who has spoken on radio, appeared on television, and written on the subject, including in these pages (“Chaste and Faithful to the Church,” April 1987), I can vouch for the truth of much of what Main has to say about the work of Gerard J.M. van den Aardweg. This thoughtful and dedicated psychologist makes good sense to anyone who has eyes to see, and to any homosexual who has not completely surrendered his honesty to ideology.

Still, I do not think Aardweg’s understanding of the problem of homosexuality is complete, at least as presented by your correspondent, and this may largely explain his less than glowing success rate. I can begin to explain myself by pointing to what I find disconcerting in the very first sentences of Main’s article, when he quotes a heterosexual man (who contracted AIDS via a blood transfusion) to the effect that he doesn’t understand homosexuals; and when Main goes on to write that “his expression of bafflement as to the reason for homosexual behavior is shared by most people.” I can well appreciate most people not comprehending homosexual activity, but something else disturbs me here, and that is that such statements potentially render homosexuals subhuman or nonhuman, as if they have nothing in common with the rest of humankind. If one listens carefully to what homosexuals say (particularly when they are not being obnoxious or hysterical, but even when they are), and if Catholic teaching is indeed universally applicable, one can discern beneath the neurotic self-pity and compulsive complaining, beneath the incessant self-justification, what it is that possesses and consumes their whole being.

According to Dante, everything in the universe from the stars to man is moved by one powerful force called love. This love is an inclination of nature toward some object that promises pleasure for each of us, captivating the mind and allowing it to enter into desire—”which is a spiritual movement, and never rests until the thing loved makes it rejoice” (Purgatorio XVIII). But Dante hastens to add what many today would not like to hear: “Now it may be apparent to you how far the truth is hidden from the people who aver that every love is praiseworthy in itself, because perhaps its matter appears always to be good.” In fact, not every object is good, although the love itself is. This is wise psychology that Dante shares with Aquinas and Augustine.

Yes, Main does speak truly, and for all of us, when he concludes his first paragraph with the statement: “For all the often sensationalistic attention the subject has received, little has been done to illuminate the motivation behind homosexuality.” I would take this further and say it is true partly because of all the sensationalistic attention, whether that attention is fundamentally in reaction against or in sympathy with homosexual behavior and the claims of the gay movement. But our failure to grasp the motivation behind homosexuality is also partly because homosexuals themselves are largely ignorant of the cause. I have no difficulty with the familial relationships and environmental situations which Aardweg cites as contributing factors in the development of homosexuality. I would also not rule out congenital or constitutional factors in some cases. But there is yet another factor which may—at least I strongly suspect this after many years of grappling with my own problems—be more significant, a cause that lies deeper and is both cultural and spiritual, having precisely to do with the love I have already referred to.

If evil is often derivative and parasitic, then we might ask ourselves what positive good in life is there which if not culturally encouraged and spiritually nourished, would lead to its caricature and degradation. More specifically, what kind of love is there of which homosexuality is the perversion? I think C.S. Lewis provides the best answer in his book The Four Loves when he states:

When either Affection [love of family] or Eros [love between man and woman] is one’s theme, one finds a prepared audience. The importance and beauty of both have been stressed and almost exaggerated again and again…. But very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all. I cannot remember that any poem since In Memoriam, or any novel, has celebrated it. Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet have innumerable counterparts in modern literature: David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amile, have not. To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.

So Lewis begins the first paragraph of his chapter on friendship. His list of great friendships could be expanded to include Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroclus, Eger and Grime, among others. Once we have admitted these examples of friendship we are speaking of something far more profound, passionate, and self-sacrificing than what is usually thought of as friendship today. For Lewis, this friendship is, and should be, more spiritual than any of the other loves precisely because it is “the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary.” Yet without this intense love it is arguable there would be today no Western civilization, certainly not at all as we know it; it is eminently arguable that without the deliberate cultivation of this love civilization may not long endure to enrich our lives. Whether we call this friendship heroic after the great warriors, or ideal after Platonic philosophy, or immortal in the manner of Aristotle (who devoted two chapters out of ten to its analysis in his Nicomachean Ethics), or spiritual with St. Aelred of Rievaulx only serves to illustrate the riches we have somehow lost. Its loss or absence has been mourned not by Lewis alone, but by people as various as D.H. Lawrence, George Santayana, and Richard Weaver.

Now this is first of all a grievous cultural affliction of some magnitude, not only in what our children are no longer taught, but also in what they will not be able to observe and themselves experience as they live their lives beyond the schoolroom and the television. Perhaps it will be argued that such friendship is purely idealistic and adolescent, that we have passed beyond the need for non-sexual friendships that are yet physically demonstrative and passionately intimate. But we might then truly ask ourselves why we seem to be witnessing an increase of homosexuality, why there is this hysterical and obsessive crying out for something that by nature can never be truly and lastingly fulfilling? In his homosexual novel Maurice, E.M. Forster reveals this about his main character’s childhood dream, before he has made the discovery of his putatively “true” nature:

The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.”

If this is what lies at the root of homosexuality, then the question we should ask, even if Forster could not, is: How is this dream that touches the core of many young lives to be fulfilled without its becoming a lure for vice and sin? Lewis, again, seems to have come closest to what is involved here, first when he writes that “It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual”; and when he adds that “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.” Let me take this line of reasoning one step further: the reverse of the current “Freudian” wisdom that friendship is latent or repressed homosexuality is in reality the truth: homosexuality is itself latent or repressed friendship. (I place Freudian in quotation marks be-cause this current wisdom is a bastardization or misapplication of Freud’s theory; he himself believes homosexuality to be an instance of arrested development, which I should think is all too often obvious.)

Because the ancients prized and cultivated sublime friendships, they also left behind profound philosophical definitions of its nature and depictions of its development. In his dialogues the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato presents his vision of the nature of love, which for him, since it begins in beholding and being attracted to physical beauty, has a decidedly erotic element. But because in his understanding this overwhelming mortal beauty is a reflection of absolute eternal Beauty, the original desire for the beloved must be kept chaste. For Plato, anything other than intellectual expression of this love, i.e., sexual expression, is contrary to nature. Only through arduous self-control, through both determined and inspired disciplining of the sexual, does the lover come to love the intellectual and spiritual beauty of the beloved; he who is “pregnant” with desire comes finally to give birth to the virtues that uphold civilized society, and his love can then be said to have been transmuted from eros to philia (or friendship), to philosophia (the love of wisdom), to theophilia (the love of God).

Plato’s vision is all the more exemplary when we reflect upon the words of the philosopher Karl Jaspers: “Plato’s thinking has its source in his love of Socrates.” And it is arguable that the source of much of Aristotle’s thought is, however much he may have come to differ with his master, his early love of Plato. Aristotle himself sees homosexuality as a morbid pleasure acquired through habit, like nail-biting, and captures, I think, the neurotic element isolated by Aardweg. But the philosopher also classifies friendship into three different types based on (1) utility and (2) pleasure, referring to these two types as “accidental” because the friendship is temporary and a means to other ends. Homosexuality can be seen among the young as a fleeting friendship based on pleasure, though pleasure is certainly here not limited to the erotic. The third or ultimate type of friendship is what has been translated variously as “immortal” or “perfect” friendship and is based on goodness, on the cultivation of the intellectual virtues, on sharing a life of happiness; this friendship is, as its name suggests, permanent. Later, this same classification can be seen to influence and underlie Cicero’s treatise on friendship.

But the ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a monopoly on this exalted human relationship. “I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother!/ most dear have you been to me;/ More precious have I held love for you than love for women.” Thus David’s lament over the death of his friend, who, when he had first encountered David and heard him speak, “became as fond of David as if his life depended on him” and “loved him as he loved himself”; in the more famous words of the King James version, “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David.” It is, or used to be, one of the primary stories of the Old Testament, but homosexualists now seem more aware of it than do devout Jews and Christians and claim it for their own. In the New Testament, there is our Lord’s love for his disciples, particularly the beloved disciple, John, of which relationship Aquinas spoke eloquently and Aelred passionately, the latter in terms chastely reminiscent of the Song of Songs.

Our rich tradition which presents us with other moving examples of friendship, not least in Augustine’s Confessions—also possesses a treatise that synthesizes Cicero’s wisdom on friendship with that of the Judeo-Christian tradition into a most noble vision in which there is a third participant in any true friendship: Christ Himself. In this little-known (but still available) treatise, Aelred likewise classifies friendship into three types—the carnal, the worldly, and the spiritual—and it is quite clear that the carnal is our homosexuality, which “springs from mutual harmony in vice” and is “like a harlot.” He contrasts the baser forms of love with the higher in this way:

Since such great joy is experienced in friendship which either lust defiles, avarice dishonors, or luxury pollutes, we may infer how much sweetness that friendship possesses which, in proportion as it is nobler, is the more secure; purer, it is the more pleasing; freer, is the more happy.

Lewis’s eloquence on the absence of friendship today is perhaps only surpassed in these words by Aelred, which he wrote circa 1150: “But if in our day, that is, in this age of Christianity, friends are so few, it seems to me that I am exerting myself uselessly in striving after this virtue which I, terrified by its admirable sublimity, now almost despair of ever acquiring.” Yet friendship as a virtue seems worth striving after, for all the joys and virtues and intimacies of friendship “take their beginning from Christ, advance through Christ, and are perfected in Christ.”

I explain at such length in order to demonstrate just how much we moderns seem to have lost, though I am not so concerned as to how we have lost it, as to how we might restore what is there at the very root of our culture and our own religion. Without losing repugnance for and vigilance against homosexual behavior, we need to reform whatever it is we have done and not done as a culture and as Catholics to guarantee the growth and fulfillment of such friendships. We can begin by retrieving what has always been there in our Western heritage and in our religion, by presenting it whole and pure as part of every child’s intellectual and moral education. We can begin by being honest not only about the horror of homosexuality, but about the terrible beauty of heroic, ideal, spiritual forms of friendship, as a sublime possibility both in the monastery and in the lives of all lay people.

Perhaps we need first to recover that honesty with which Paul addresses the Corinthians about their various moral disorders, reminding them that some among their number were once sodomites and catamites: “But you have been washed, consecrated, justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of God.” How can a community, particularly a Christian communion, heal itself of its disorders if they are always kept secret? Must we always sweep things under the rug of gentility when we could, perhaps now more than ever should, open ourselves in all honesty to one another, allowing ourselves to be swept clean by the onrush of the Spirit?

I do not ask that question as a charismatic, since I am not one, but as a Christian deeply concerned about and troubled by the disharmony and disunity ravaging the Church today, as well as those outside its walls. Catholics have taken a most admirable stand—outspoken, active, public— against the evil of abortion. A similar stand needs to be taken with regard to the evil of homosexuality, one fully in keeping with the Vatican’s letter to American bishops on Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, one in which violence is not returned for violence or accusation exchanged for accusation. Rather a courageously moral and religious stand is required that incorporates, on the one hand, the work of such people as Aardweg and Fr. John Harvey (founder of Courage), and on the other, the full wisdom of our classical and medieval traditions; one which is capable of extending the hand of mercy, knowing that true liberation lies in the calm and patient authority of truth, that in truth alone is there a saving love, that without truth there is not even mercy, either for Christian sinner or for non-Christian sinner.

Author

  • Paul Edward Guay

    Paul Edward Guay is a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, ethics, and literature at Boston University. In 1987, he wrote Texts and Contexts of Ideal Friendship: Ethical Meditations Toward a Tradition of Erotic Philia.

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