Sexuality, Augustine and Capon .....

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from "Genesis : the movie" by Robert Capon.

"As you can see, Augustine -
and the author of "Song of Songs" .....
were all romantics long before the invention
of Romance in the 1200s .....

Failing to do justice to the "romanticism"
in Augustine's writings, [modern readers]
have blamed him for almost every sexual hang-up
in the history of Western civilisation -
medieval, reformed, or present-day.

..... why can't we hear the equally sublime lift
he gives to our physical passions ?
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about
the dreadful subject of "sublimation" here.
The way we use that word now is derogatory.
It implies running away from sexuality to something else entirely -
it suggests a substitution of "spirituality" for sex.

What i'm saying is that Augustine made no substitution, whatsoever.
Instead, the incurable romantic in him raised our sexual longings
to the great Original of all desire, namely,
the Word of God who is incarnate in human nature -
to the Light who is the light of humankind.

"in your Light we shall see light" (Ps36) .....
..... I think that however fallen our sexuality might be,
its beauty also exists in the Light Himself -
in the Word who holds it risen and glorified now.
He is the Light in which our sexuality has always been bathed.
He is the Beginning and the End
to whom all our longings are inexorably drawn,
because He is the Alpha and the Omega
who is the ultimate Point of everything He made,
sexual desire included.
Our sexual natures may be in exile here;
but He has them there,
they've gone home in triumph, now."
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God spoke: “Swarm, Ocean, with fish and all sea life!
        Birds, fly through the sky over Earth!”
    God created the huge whales,
        all the swarm of life in the waters,
    And every kind and species of flying birds.
        God saw that it was good.
    God blessed them: “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Ocean!
        Birds, reproduce on Earth!”
    It was evening, it was morning—
    Day Five.
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"That God should make the waters swarm with copulating fish,
that He should make their gametes almost as numberless
as the sand on the seashore and their fertilisations
as fruitful as rutting bucks -
all that, is small compared to the sheer hugeness
of sex among the whales.

You may know little or nothing about the couplings
of these sea monsters; but you don't need much imagination
to see that they hold sexual congresses far more fascinating
than the dull, quasi-Viennese meetings through which
you and I so sweatily bumbled our way.
This is our kind of sex taken to
an almost eschatological O Altitudo !
It's as if God,
having decided on a sexual creation in His Divine Mind,
now feels the urge to show us the vastness of His enthusiasm for it.
The lovemaking of whales is a bigger accomplishment
than anything I've presented you with, thus far.
The vast weight of bull whales is fully supported by the waters,
and far from pressing heavily on their partners,
they can be as gentle with them as bees caressing a flower.

So don't tell me that the intercourses of whales are nothing but sex,
or that they're of no more consequence [than gene exchange].
Such reductionism is dead wrong ..... "
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