Not A Solo Activity
In other words, despite appearances, pornography isn’t precisely a solo activity. As interviews with men and women attest, it plays into how people approach and function in relationships. Whether a couple watches together, or one or both partners uses it alone, pornography plays a significant role not only in sex but in couple’s sense of trust, security, and fidelity. As Mark Schwartz, clinical director of  the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St. Louis, Missouri, says, “Pornography is having a dramatic effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways — and nobody outside the sexual behavior field and the psychiatric community is talking about it.”

Not knowing whom to turn to when their boyfriends turn away from them and toward pornography, many women write in to magazine advice columnists for help or ask for support in online forums. Female-oriented internet communities (chat rooms, bulletin boards, online forums, etc.) teem with discussions on the subject. Every week, advice columnists across the country address the issue; presumably many similar letters go unanswered in print.

Just one example: A woman writes to a local newspaper, “We’ve been together five years, lived together half that time. We have a loving, happy relationship. Recent I discovered via the computer that he’s fascinated by hard-core pornography, lots of it. When confronted, he said I have no right to be upset, though he’s aware it offends me; he insisted I let it go. He’s still spending hours looking at this and I’m disgusted…. I’ve tried to discuss how degrading and controlling this seems to me, but he is not willing to give it up. I know many people think it’s harmless, but it’s making me question whether I’m willing to continue a relationship with someone who can disregard my feelings so easily.”

The Pornified/Harris poll found that overall, 34% of women see men using pornography as cheating in absolutely all cases. Yet only 17% of men equated pornography with cheating. Indeed, most men who use pornography tend to see pornography as not cheating: A man has his needs, and he’s fulfilling them in a way that prevents him from cheating on his wife with a real woman. According to the Pornified/Harris poll, 41% of men say pornography should never be considered cheating. Only 18% of women felt the same way.

Once she’s discovered his pornography, what next? Psychotherapist Marlene Spielman says when a woman finds out about a partner’s pornography habit, the result is usually a back and forth of very strong emotions. The woman typically feels, hurt angry and betrayed. Confronted husbands often begin with denial before confessing the truth, followed by a big fight, blaming, and accusations. He may accuse her of driving him to it; she might point to his avoidance of problems in the relationship.

In the 2004 Elle/MSNBC.com poll, one in four divorced respondents said internet pornography and chat had contributed to their split. At the 2003 meeting of American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a gathering of the nation’s divorce attendees documented a startling trend. Nearly two-thirds of the attorneys present had witnessed a sudden rise in divorces related to the internet; 58% of those were the result of a spouse looking at excessive amounts of pornography online. According to the association’s president, Richard Barry, “Eight years ago, pornography played almost no role in divorces in this country. Today, there are a significant number of cases where it plays a definite part in marriages breaking up:’.

The five lawyers from the office of matrimonial attorney Marcia Maddox are working on at least one case involving pornography. In one, a wife found her husband’s internet pornography while she and their daughter were working on a school project. Horrified, the woman hired a computer technician, who discovered a trove of pornography on the hard drive. The couple ended up getting a divorce; the mother was awarded sole custody.

The fact is, Maddox says, “Using pornography is like adultery. It’s not legally adultery, which requires penetration. But there are many ways of cheating. It’s often effectively desertion — men abandoning their family to spend time with porn.” Often the judges find that even if children aren’t directly exposed to a father’s pornography, they are indirectly affected because their fathers ignore them in favor of porn. Visitation in such cases may be limited.

Mary Jo McCurley, an attorney who has practiced family law in Dallas since 1979, agrees. In the past five years, more and more cases are brought forth in which a husband’s pornography habit is a factor.”We see cases in which the husband becomes so immersed in online porn it destroys the marriage;’ she explains. “Not only is it unsettling for the wife that he’s using other women to get off, but it takes away from the time they could spend together as a couple.”

In divorce cases these days, enormous amounts of time and money are spent recovering pornography from computers. “You can hire experts who specialize in digging through hard drives, McCurley says, “There are people who have made a profession out of it. It’s become quite common in Texas divorce.”

Bad For Teenagers
The statistics are frightening, but even more appalling are the effects of pornography on the next generation. According to a 2001 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, seven in ten fifteen-to-seventeen-year-olds admitted to “accidentally” stumbling across pornography online. Girls were more likely than boys to say they were “very upset” by the experience (35% versus 6%), although 41% of youth that age said that it wasn’t a problem.

Statistics show nearly all — if not all — teenagers are exposed to pornography
one way or another. A 2004 study by Columbia University found that 11.5 million teenagers (45%) have friends who regularly view internet pornography and download it? (Incidentally, teenagers with a majority of friends who do so are three times more likely to smoke, drink, or use illegal drugs than are teens who have no such friends.)

The prevalence of teens with friends who view and download internet pornography increases with age, from nearly one-third of twelve-year-olds to nearly two-thirds of seventeen-year-olds. Boys are significantly more likely than girls to have friends who view online pornography: 25% of twelve- and thirteen-year-old s, and 46% of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls say they have friends who regularly view and download internet pornography, compared with 37% and 65% of ^,s in those age groups.

Bear in mind that most of these statistics are already outdated.

Psychotherapists and family counselors across the country attest to the popularity of pornography among pre-adolescents. Even pre-adolescents are being treated for pornography addiction, says Judith Coche, a clinical psychologist who runs the Coché Center in Philadelphia and teaches psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. She describes one case in which the parents of an eleven-year-old girl found her creating her own pornographic website. When confronted, she said that pornography was considered ^`cool” among her friends. Perhaps it wasn’t a very good idea, she admitted, but all of her friends were doing it. Her parents were horrified. Coché says, “Before the internet, I never encountered this.”

“I’ve had my own therapy practice for over twenty-five years;’ she says. “I feel like I’ve seen everything.”She pauses and says almost apologetically, “I’ve been walking around my practice saying  “We have an epidemic on our hands: The growth of pornography and its impact on young people is really, really dangerous. And the most dangerous part is that we don’t even realize what’s happening.”

Pornography is wildly popular with teenage boys in a way that makes yesterday’s sneaked glimpses at Penthouse seem monastic. The prevalence of the internet among teenagers has made pornography just another online activity; there is little barrier to entry and almost no sense of taboo. Instead, pornography seems to be a natural right and an acceptable pastime. One teenage boy in Boston explained recently to the New York Times, “Who needs the hassle of dating when I’ve got online porn?”

There is a reason for this. Like all good marketers, pornographers know it’s important to reel consumers in while they’re young. Pornography is integrated into the cable TV and videogame cultures, for example. MTV recently announc launch of a Stan Lee/Hugh Hefner collaboration, Hef’s Superbunnies, an “edgy, sexy animated series” from the creator of the Spider-Man comic book series featuring a buxom team of specially trained Playboy bunnies.”

Mainstream videogames regularly feature pornographic elements. One 2004 game, “The Guy Game,” which features women exposing their breasts when they answer questions wrong in a trivia contest, didn’t even get an `Adults-Only” rating (The game manufacturer is being sued because one female included in the footage was only seventeen and didn’t give her consent to be filmed.)” “BMX XXX” adds a pornographic sheen to bike stunts and racing. Another game, “Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, features full-on nudity as garners live out the player lifestyle, trying to score hot babes. The manufacturers are fighting to obtain an “M” rating (the equivalent of a movie’s “R’) in order to ensure being carried at Wal-Mart’s across America.

Marketers have extended the porn brand to everything from sporting equipment to clothing. Two snowboarding companies, Burton Snowboards and Sims, now offer boards — clearly marketed to teenagers, the backbone of the snowboarding market — emblazoned with images of Playboy bunnies and Vivid porn stars. Sims boasts that the boards with photographs of porn starts Jenna Jameson and Briana Banks are their best sellers.

Sexually Cued To A Computer
The effects of such ever-present pornography on kids who are still developing sexually has yet to be fully understood, Coché explains. She has talked to parents who have witnessed their sons playing computer games when pornographic pop come onto the screen. “Pornography is so often tied into videogame culture and insinuates itself even into non-pornographic areas of the web. It’s very hard for a twelve-year-old boy to avoid.”

As a result, boys are learning to sexually cue to a computer, rather than to human beings. “This is where they’re learning what turns them on. And what are they supposed to do about that? Whereas once boys would kiss a girl they had a crush on behind the school, we don’t know how boys who become trained to cue sexually to computer-generated porn stars are going to behave, especially as they get older.”’

Kids also absorb pornography very differently from adults. Not only are they like sponges, they are also quite literal. Not only younger children, but even young teenagers are generally not sophisticated enough to differentiate between fantasy and reality. They learn direct lessons from pornography, with no filter, and with no concept of exaggeration, irony, or affect.

They learn what women supposedly look like, how they should act, and what are supposed to do. They learn what women “want” and how men can give it to them. Watching pornography, boys and girls learn that women always want sex and sex is divorced from relationships. They learn that men can have whomever they want and that women will respond the way men want them to. They learn that anal sex is the norm and instant female orgasm is to be expected. And they absorb these lessons avidly, emulating people they perceive to be role models.

“Kids today are going to run into pornography online, not erotica,” explains Aline Zoldbrod.”They’re getting a very bad model. Pornography doesn’t show how a real couple negotiates conflict or creates intimacy.” For girls especially, Zoldbrod believes, pornography is a “brutal way to be introduced to sexuality, since much of it is “rape-like” in its use of violence.

Still, many older kids at least partly recognize the negative side. When asked 2001 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 59% of fifteen- to twenty-four-olds said they thought seeing pornography online encouraged young people to have sex before they are ready, and half thought it would lead people to think unprotected sex is okay. Half thought internet pornography could lead to addiction and promote bad attitudes toward women. In a 2002 nationwide Gallup poll, 69% of teenage boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen said that even if nobody knew about it, they would feel guilty about surfing pornography on the internet, Not surprising, an even greater number of girls — 86% — felt the same way.

Interestingly, when asked about the effect of pornography for the Pornified/ Harris poll, young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four were most likely of all generations to report negative consequences. Four in ten of them believe pornography harms relationships between men and women, compared with only three in ten twenty-five-to-forty-year-olds. The internet generation is also more likely to believe that pornography changes men’s expectations of women’s looks and behavior.

Adults also see the harm pornography does to young children and teenagers. When asked in the Pornified/Harris poll, “What is the greatest impact of pornography on children?” 30% of Americans said the fact that it distorts boys’ expectations and understanding of women and sex, 25% said that it makes kids more likely to have sex earlier than they otherwise might have, 7% cited the way it distorts girls’ body images and ideas about sex, and 6% said it makes kids more likely to look at pornography as adults (men were twice as likely as women to believe this).

Only 2% of Americans actually believe that pornography helps kids better understand sexuality. And only 9% think that it doesn’t have any impact on children at all.

Pornography’s Effects
Pornography in all its permutations affects children’s developing sexuality; the younger the age of exposure and the more hard-core the material, the more intense the effects. Boys who look at pornography excessively become men who connect arousal purely with the physical, losing the ability to become attracted by the particular features of a given partner. Instead, they recreate images from pornography in their brain while they’re with a real person.

“It’s sad that boys who are initiated to sex through these images become indoctrinated in a way that can potentially stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Gary Brooks says.”Boys learn that you have sex in spite of your feelings, not because of your feelings. Meanwhile, girls are taught that you don’t have intimacy without relationships:’

No matter what kind of pornography teenagers look at, spending one’s pre-pubescence and puberty using porn can have lifelong implications. Masters and Johnson’s clinical director Mark Schwartz has seen fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys who are addicted to pornography. “It’s awful to see the effect it has on them;’ he says. At such a young age, to have that kind of sexual problem.”

Schwartz isn’t surprised about the growing number of young addicts in the Internet Age. At that age, “your brain is much more susceptible;’ he explains. “Many of these boys are very smart and academically successful; a lot of computer geeks are the ones who get drawn in. It affects how they develop sexually. Think about a twelve-year-old boy looking at Playboy magazine. When you’re talking about internet pornography, you can multiply that effect by the relative size of the internet itself

Research trickling in has begun to document the effects of pornography on kids a difficult area to study given obvious ethical challenges. Certainly, there aren’t any parents who would consent to have their children view pornography in order to further research on the damage it causes.

Still, some evidence has been gathered. A recent study of 101 sexually abusivechild ren in Australia documented increased aggressiveness in boys who use pornography. Almost all had internet access, and 90% admitted to seeing pornography online. One-fourth said an older sibling or a friend had shown them how to access pornography online, sometimes against their will; 25% said that using pornography their primary reason for going online. When questioned separately, nearly all of their parents said they doubted their child would access any pornography via the internet.

It Wasn’t Like This
Touring around this country to promote my book Pornified, I heard again and again concerned parents. “I know my fourteen-year-old son is looking at extremely -core pornography, but what can I do about it? He tells me he needs the computer for schoolwork.”I have a ten-year-old daughter. I don’t want to even think about boys her age are learning about the opposite sex online.” “My daughter found pornography that my husband downloaded on the family computer.” A pediatric told me there was an incident in her practice in which toddlers acted out moves from a pornographic movie.

A day’s worth of nationwide headlines inevitably brings up stories of children encountering pornography at the local library, child pornography arrests, and school incidents in which teachers are caught looking at pornography on school computers during school hours. It is terrible enough that adults are suffering the consequences of a pornified culture. But we must think about the kind of world we are introducing to our children. Certainly everyone — liberals and conservatives alike — can agree with the statement, “It wasn’t like this when we were kids.” And I can’t imagine anyone would have that thought without simultaneously experiencing a profound sense of fear and loss.

“It’s All Mainstream Now!”
That is what Seth Rogan’s character Zack says to his best friend and and intended love, Miri, in an effort to get her to make a pornographic film with him. The film is Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the latest gross-out comedy/romance from Kevin Smith, and one of many recent comedies (and romances, shockingly) to make light of pornography. Indeed, in Rogan’s last romantic hit, Knocked Up, his character’s’ job” is creating a pornographic website. The women in the film? After a quick, symbolic “Yuck!,” they become willing participants.

It is all mainstream now. Over the past ten years, technological advances, cultural shifts, and social attitudes have transformed the pornography landscape. Today men, women, and children are affected by the ubiquity and mainstreaming pornography in unprecedented ways. The internet, in particular, has made pornography more anonymous, more accessible, and more affordable than ever before, bringing in new users, increasing use among existing fans, and catapulting many into sexual compulsiveness. Children are being exposed to pornography earlier than ever before in ways that will profoundly affect their sexuality and their lives.

Not only is pornography itself more ubiquitous, the entire culture has become pornified. By that I mean that the aesthetics, values, and standards of pornography into mainstream popular culture. Young girls brazenly pose in pornographic ways on their MySpace pages, even creating porn-like videos of themselves and preening before untold numbers of strangers. Porn stars are regularly in the same tabloid magazines that profile actors, singers, and other celebrities celebrating those who sell sex with those who create art on the basis of other talents (though, of course, one could argue the relative merits of that “art”).

Pornography Is Everywhere
All of this would not be possible without the hyper speed spread of pornography over the past two decades. Today, the number of people looking at pornography is staggering. Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs (about one in five of all rented movies is porn), and the 11,000 porn films shot each year far outpaces Hollywood’s yearly slate of 400. Four billion dollars a year is spent consumers on video pornography in the United States, more than on football, baseball and basketball. One in four internet users looks at a pornography website in any given month. Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66% of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old men visit a pornographic site every month.

Pornography regularly makes headlines and sells products, even within the mainstream culture. In 2004, Janet Jackson notoriously bared her breast during the Super Bowl, in prime-time family television viewing hours. Shortly thereafter Paris Hilton’s amateur sex video became an internet sensation. More media attend followed — Howard Stern fled to satellite radio and soon porn star Jenna Jameson and Playboy bunny Pamela Anderson were topping the best-seller lists with a memoir a roman a clef, respectively.

A glossy coffee table book of porn star portraits accompanied by essays from writers such as Salman Rushdie and Francine du Pies Gray was published. Showtime ran a special in which porn stars, Jameson among them, bragged about the power women have in the pornography business. Today celebrity couples boast about their trips to the hottest strip clubs. Characters on prime-time sitcoms extol the benefits of porn. Even mainstream women’s magazines advise women to enliven their marital bedtime routine by turning on late-night Skinemax.

The message is that pornography is everywhere — and only ever-so-slightly scandalous. It is good for you, and especially good for relationships. Pornography is hip, sexy, and fun.

But particularly on the internet, where much of pornography today consumed, the type of sexuality depicted often has more to do with violence, extreme fetishes, and mutual degradation than with fun, much less with sexual or emotion connection. For those who haven’t double-clicked: These aren’t airbrushed photographs of the girl next door or images of coupling; they are vivid scenes of crying women enduring aggressive multiple penetration.

These are images created by pornographers for a single purpose: to help men masturbate and get them to pay for it. Sex, in pornography, is a commercialized product, devoid of emotion, stripped of humanity, an essentially empty experience. As one porn fan put it, after an evening of porn surfing, “You feel like, yeah, that was a release, but I don’t know, maybe not the best thing. Like eating a bag of potatos chips.”

Bad For Women And Marriage
“You get into a slippery slope,” cautions Massachusetts-based psychologist and sex therapist Aline Zoldbrod. “The majority of porn out there is degrading and has only gotten worse. The women are plasticized; there’s no longer as much diversity or naturalism as there was two decades ago.”

Zoldbrod believes many young men today are terrible lovers because they learn about sexuality from pornography. “In real life, sexually-speaking, women are slow cookers and men are microwaves. But in pornography, all a man does is touch a woman and she’s howling in delight.

Today, pornography is so widely used by young they learn these falsehoods. There’s good evidence that the more porn men watch, the less satisfied they are with their partner’s looks and sexual performance. Advice columnists across North America receive letter after letter in which women complain about their partner’s pornography. Men who watch a lot of porn seem to focus more intensely on the visual, even when in bed with a woman, asking her to emulate the look and moves of porn stars. Women have distorted body images feel the need to remodel their appearances — no matter how they personally feel about pornography.

Though pressured to accept pornography as a sign of being sexy and hip, women admit that in practice they are hurt by their boyfriend’s use of porn. A twenty-four-year-old from Baltimore complained to me about how her boyfriend got lap dances at a strip club every month. “If he were to do that with a woman in front of me on the living room couch, that would be considered cheating. Why is it somehow okay just because he’s at a strip club?” Another woman told me, “All of my girlfriends and I expect to find histories of pornographic websites on our computers after our boyfriends use it. They don’t bother erasing the history if you don’t give them a lot of hell.” The implications troubled her.”I fear we are losing something important — a healthy sexual worldview. I think, however, that we are using old ideas of pornography to understand its function in a much more complex modern world.”

Women view men’s relationship with pornography as a sign of betrayal, even cheating. A thirty-eight-year-old mother of two from Kentucky said finding her husband’s secret stash of porn “pretty much wiped out the trust in our relationship.” She she knew about his years-long subterfuge, she recalled, “I would find myself worrying all the time. If I were going to take a trip for my job, I’d wonder about what he might look at while I was gone.”

Pornography thus creates deception and distrust in relationships. Most women have no idea how often their boyfriends and husbands look at pornography because the men do not tell them. Usually the deception is deliberate, though many men deny to themselves how often they look at it, and most simply don’t think about quantifying the amount they view. While men consider trust crucial for a healthy relationship, they seem willing to flout that trust when it comes to pornography — deceiving their significant others into thinking they’re either not looking at it at all or are looking at it less frequently. Fitting pornography into one’s life isn’t always easy.

More women are installing programs such as Net Nanny on their computer to limit their home computer internet access to PG websites. According to one filtering company, WiseChoice.net, more than half the company’s 3,000 customers at adults who use the software not to block their kids’ access but to keep themselves and other adults from looking at porn. In a 2004 Elle/MSNBC.com poll, one in four women said she was concerned that her partner had an “out-of-control habit” with online pornography.

Matrimonial lawyers attest to a growing docket of cases in which pornography was a major source of tension, if not the cause of the divorce, “Pornography wreck marriages.” says Marcia Maddox, a Virginia-based attorney.

Bad For Men
Yet lest pornography get written off as a “women’s problem;’ consider the extensive negative effects of pornography on the primary users, men. According to a large-scale 1994 report summarizing eighty-one peer-reviewed research studies, most studies (70%) found that exposure to non-aggressive pornography has clear negative effects – and that is not the only kind of pornography most users view.’

Countless men have described to me how, while using pornography, they have lost the ability to relate to or be close to women. They have trouble being turned on by “real” women, and their sex lives with their girlfriends or wives collapse. These are men who seem like regular guys, but who spend hours each week with porn — usually online. And many of them admit they have trouble cutting down their use. They also find themselves seeking out harder and harder pornography.

In interviews for Pornified, a book I wrote about pornography’s effects, men — even those who were avid porn fans — confessed that their pornography habits had damaged their sex lives. Men who use pornography say they are losing the ability to relate to, be close to, and achieve orgasm with real women.

A single twenty-something graphic designer told me he would find himself in bars, berating himself over the way he scanned potential dates. “I’d be saying, ‘No, her breasts are too small, she’s not worth it then wonder,’ Who have I become? Why am I judging women like this?” After months of rampant use, he had to “restrict” himself in order to regain perspective.

A twenty-eight-year-old man explained, “I used to view porn online, but I began to find it more difficult to stay aroused when having sex with a real woman… During a dry spell, I discovered iPorn, and the easiness of it made it easy to glut — to the point where now, even though the dry spell is over, real sex has lost some of its magic.”

When they are having sex with real women, such men need to conjure images they’ve viewed in pornography in order to maintain their level of excitement. Other times, they want to focus on their partner, but find their minds filled with pornographic images instead — like getting a bad song trapped in their heads.

Men also told me that they found themselves wasting countless hours looking at pornography on their televisions and DVD players, and especially online. They looked at things they would have once considered appalling — bestiality, group sex, hard-core S&M, genital torture, child pornography.

They found the way they looked at women in real life warping to fit the pornography fantasies they consumed onscreen. Their daily interactions with women became pornified. Their relationships soured. They had trouble relating to women as individual human beings. They worried about the way they saw their daughters and girls their daughters’ age. It wasn’ t only their sex lives that suffered — pornography’s effects rippled out, touching all aspects of their existence. Their workdays became interrupted, their hobbies were tossed aside, their family lives were disrupted. Some men even lost their jobs, their wives, and their children. The sacrifice is enormous.

Nor is it only the most violent hard-core pornography that damages how the male users view women, including their wives and their girlfriends. Because pornography involves looking at women but not interacting with them, it elevates the physical while ignoring or trivializing all other aspects of the woman. A woman is literally reduced to her body parts and sexual behavior. Gary Brooks, a psychologist who studies pornography at Texas A&M University, explains that” soft-core pornography has a very negative effect on men as well. The problem with soft-core pornography is that it’s voyeurism — it teaches men to view women as objects rather than to be in relationships with women as human beings.”

But pornography doesn’t just change how men view women — it changes their lives, including their relation to pornography. The first step is usually an increase in frequency and quantity of viewing: more times logging online or clicking the remote control, prolonged visits to certain websites, a tendency to fall into a routine. In a 2004 Elle/MSNBC.com poll, nearly 25% of men admitted that they were afraid they were `overstimulating” themselves with online sex.

In fact, routine is an essential ingredient in the financial success of high-tech porn. Wendy Seltzer, an advocate for online civil liberties, argues that pornographers should not even be concerned about piracy of their free material. “People always want this stuff. Seeing some of it just whets their appetite for more. Once they get through what’s available for free, they’ll move into the paid services .” And once they’ve indulged in more quantity, they want more quality — meaning more action, more intensity, more extreme situations. The user’s impetus to find harder-core fare helps the entire industry.

Particularly on the internet, men find themselves veering off into forms of pornography they never thought they could find appealing. Those who start off with soft-core develop a taste for harder-core pornography.

Men who view a lot of pornography talk about their disgust the first time they chanced upon an unpleasant image or unsolicited child porn. But with experience, it doesn’t bother the user as much — the shock wears thin quickly, especially given the frequent assault of such images he encounters on the internet. He learns to ignore or navigate around unwanted imagery, and the third time he sees an unpleasant image, it’s merely an annoyance and a delay. At the same time that such upsetting imagery becomes more tolerable, the imagery that had aroused him becomes less interesting, leading the user to ratchet up the extremity of the kind of pornography he seeks, looking for more shocking material than he started with.

The Women’s Market
Having won over such a significant chunk of the male market, the pornography industry is eager to tap into the other potential 50% of the market: women. A number of companies are increasing production of pornography made by and for women, and the industry is keen to promote what it likes to view as women’s burgeoning predilection for pornography. Playgirl TV announced its launch in 2004 with programming to include an `erotic soap opera’ from a woman’s point of view, a 1940s-style romantic comedy with “a sexual twist;’ and roundtable discussions of “newsworthy women’s topics:’

In recent years, women’s magazines have regularly featured a discussion of pornography from a new perspective: how women can introduce it into their own lives. While many women continue to have mixed or negative feelings toward pornography, they are told to be realistic, to be “open-minded:’ Porn, they are told, is sexy, and if you want to be a sexually attractive and forward-thinking woman, you’ve got to catch on.

Today, the pornography industry and our pornified culture have convinced women that wearing a thong is a form of emancipation, learning to pole dance means embracing your sexuality, and taking your boyfriend for a lap dance is what every sexy and supportive girlfriend should do. In an Elle magazine poll, more than half of the respondents described themselves as “pro-stripping’ (56%), and said that they weren’t bothered if their partner went to strip clubs (52%).

Sociologist Michael Kimmel, who studies pornography and teaches sexuality classes at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says, “Twenty years ago, my female students would say, ‘Ugh, that’s disgusting,’ when I brought up pornography in class. The men would guiltily say, ‘Yeah, I’ve used it, Today, men are much more open about saying they use pornography all the time, and they don’t feel any guilt. The women now resemble the old male attitude: They’ll sheepishly admit to using it themselves:’ Women’s attitudes have merged even more closely with men’s.

The internet measurement firm comScore tracked close to thirty-two million women visiting at least one adult website in January 2004. Seven million of them were ages thirty-five to forty-four, while only 800,000 were over the age of sixty-five. Nielsen NetRatings has found the figures to be somewhat lower, with ten million women visiting adult content websites in December 2003. In a 2004 Elle/MSNBC. com poll, 41% of women said they have intentionally viewed or downloaded erotic films or photos, and 13% watched or sexually interacted with someone on a live web cam.

Yet as much as women are touted as the new pornography consumer, they still lag far behind men. The sensational headlines do little to reflect the reality of most women’s experiences. Statistics belie the assertions of the pro-porn movement and the go-go girl mentality espoused by female pornography purveyors.

While some polls show that up to half of all women go online for sexual reasons, the percentage of women who say they do is likely exaggerated by the inclusion in the definition of “adult” internet content of erotica, dating, and informational sites, areas to which women are disproportionately drawn compared with men. Others feel that admitting they don’t look at pornography at all is akin to affixing a “frigid” sticker to their chastity belts; better not to come off as uptight. Many women tracked through filtering programs visit pornographic sites by accident or out of curiosity, or are tracking down their male partner’s usage.

Some attribute the rise in female consumption to an increased supply in pornography for women. That may be part of the reason, but there’s more at play than a simple increase in supply — something has to explain the increased demand. Broader societal shifts in men’s and women’s roles in relationships and a corresponding swing in women’s expectations and attitudes toward their sexuality are driving women to pornography, too.

Not A Harmless “Guy Thing”
Many women try to treat porn as merely a harmless ^`guy thing;’ but they are profoundly disturbed when they are forced to come to terms with the way porn changes their lives — and the lives of their boyfriends or husbands. They find themselves constantly trying to measure up to the bodies and sexual performance of the women their men watch online and onscreen. They fear that they’ve lost the ability to turn their men on anymore — and quite often, they have.

One twenty-four-year-old woman from Baltimore confided, “I find that porn’s prevalence is a serious hindrance to my comfort level in relationships. Whether it’s porn DVDs and magazines lying around the house, countless porn files downloaded their computers, or even trips to strip clubs, almost every guy I have dated (as well as my male friends) is very open about his interest in porn. As a result, my body image suffers tremendously…. I wonder if I am insecure or if the images I see guys ogle every day has done this to me.’ She later confessed that she felt unable to her concerns to anyone. A guy doesn’t think you’re cool if you complain about it,’ explained.”Ever since the internet made it so easy to access, there’s no longer any stigma to porn.”

A thirty-eight-year-old woman from a Chicago suburb described her husband’s addiction to pornography: “He would come home from work, slide food around his plate during dinner, play for maybe half an hour with the kids, and then go into his home office, shut the door and surf internet porn for hours. I knew – and he knew that I knew. I put a filter on his browser that would email me every time a pornographic image was captured…. I continually confronted him on this. There were times I would be so angry I would cry and cry and tell him how much it hurt…. It got to the point where he stopped even making excuses. It was more or less ‘I know you know and I don’t really care, What are you going to do about it?

For many wives and girlfriends, it becomes immediately clear that the kind pornography their men are into is all about the men — about their needs, about they want — not about their women or their relationships or their families. It’s not surprising a woman ends up feeling second-rate. Not only does pornography dictate how women are supposed to look; it skews expectations of how they should act. Men absorb those ideals, but women internalize them as well. According to the nationally representative Pornified/Harris poll, commissioned for my 2004 book, women (six out of ten) believe pornography affects how men expect them to look and behave. In fact, only about one out of seven women believes pornography doesn’t raise men’s expectations of women.

Men tell women their consumption of pornography is natural and normal, and if a woman doesn’t like it, she is controlling, insecure, uptight, petty, or a combination thereof. The woman is demanding. She is unreasonable. He has to give up something cherished since boyhood. She’s not supportive. She blows everything out of proportion. If it weren’t for this attitude of hers, the relationship would be fine. For a woman to judge pornography as anything but positive is read as a condemnation of her man, or at the very least, of his sexual life. Discomfort with pornography also becomes a woman’s discomfort with her own sexuality.

Still, the Pornified/Harris poll found that only one-fifth of Americans belies pornography improves the sex life of those who look at it. Indeed, two-thirds respondents to this nationwide poll believe looking at pornography will harm couple’s relationship. And not surprisingly, half of Americans say pornography demeans women. Women are far more likely to believe this-58% compared with 37% of men. They are much less likely — 20%o compared with 34% — to believe that pornography isn’t demeaning.

Of course, with increased viewing, the arousing effects of pornography become less obvious over time. While 60% of adults age fifty-nine and older believe pornography is demeaning toward women, only 35% of Gen Xers — the most tolerant and often heaviest users of pornography — agree.

Mr. Eakin is a senior editor at the New York Review of Books and writes frequently about museums and the art market.  A version of this article was in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal.  Why does Van Gogh demand our attention? Because he, in many ways, represents an alternative to faith that some claim for Art. The post explains more…

**************************************

It is hard to pinpoint when exactly Vincent van Gogh crossed over from being a mere titan of modern art to a general symptom of our culture — a painter whose name adorns bottles of vodka and whose supposedly liberating madness is regarded with worshipful reverence. Twenty-five years ago, his paintings ushered in the era of stratospheric prices for leading Modernists, with the sale of “Sunflowers” for $39.7 million and “Irises” for $52.9 million — at the time, three- and fourfold increases over the previous world record for any work of art. Not long after that, Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito set a new mark again by paying $82.5 million for “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” and then suggested that he might have it cremated and buried with him.

But despite continual invocation in exhibitions, movies and books, little of the legend of mad Vincent withstands serious scrutiny. If anything characterizes Van Gogh’s intensely felt landscapes and portraits, the critic Robert Hughes long ago observed, it is lucidity, not lunacy. And the scrupulous recent biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, while continuing the tradition of viewing the artist’s work as an expression of his “fanatic” personality, nevertheless concludes that his untimely death by a gunshot wound was more likely an accident than a raving suicide. What is perhaps more surprising is that almost as many questions surround the art as the life. In the past two decades, museums around the world have quietly downgraded some 40 works formerly attributed to the artist, and doubts have been raised about even highly sought-after paintings like the record-breaking “Sunflowers.”

Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ was sold at auction for $39.7 million in 1987, then a world record for a painting. In  ”Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty,” the cultural historian Modris Eksteins argues that Van Gogh’s  paradoxical status — he is “the most popular artist of all time,” yet his work is clouded in uncertainties — points to something more fundamental about our own society and the place of art within it. Amid the devastating violence of the two world wars, Mr. Eksteins observes, the norms of behavior and belief that had governed social relations for centuries broke down. Critics, reflecting their times, increasingly saw in the fiery canvases of Van Gogh and other “misfit” Modernists not only a new way of perceiving the world but also a spiritual response to an age in which few certitudes had gone unchallenged. “Van Gogh’s greatest brilliance may have been his doubt,” Mr. Eksteins writes. “That doubt now pervades our entire enterprise.”

Mr. Eksteins has a knack for pinpointing moments in the rise of Modernism that expose the deep social forces that have shaped our world. His pathbreaking “Rites of Spring” (1989) argued that radical artistic experiments like Stravinsky’s infamous ballet “The Rite of Spring” were a defining part of the political and psychological crises that precipitated World War I. Now he sets out to show that Van Gogh’s pervasive hold on 20th-century culture has little to do with the early Modernists of fin de siècle France, where his brief career played out. Instead, Mr. Eksteins provocatively argues, Van Gogh’s prevalence can be traced to the cultural anxieties of 1920s Germany, where his art first gained wide notoriety — and where a major controversy over fakes erupted.

Van Gogh (1853-90) sold hardly any of his art during his lifetime, and on his death at age 37 his paintings were deemed nearly worthless in Paris.

On the other side of the Rhine, however, the artist was seen as a Nietzschean hero whose blazing canvases — “screaming in horror to the heavens,” as the critic Julius Meier-Graefe put it — seemed to anticipate an age in which art had replaced faith. Along with Meier-Graefe, who had become enamored of the French Impressionists while living in Paris in the 1890s, other instigators of the German Van Gogh cult included the socially connected Count Harry Kessler, the powerful art dealer Paul Cassirer and the shipping heiress Helene Müller, who quickly amassed a collection (now housed in the Kröller-Müller museum in the Netherlands) that was exceeded only by the artist’s own estate.

Even before World War I, Van Gogh’s work was represented in nearly a dozen German museums — far more than in any other country. But it was during the Weimar period that he entered the culture at large. Establishing the pattern that has been followed ever since, Meier-Graefe’s wildly successful biography “Vincent” (1921) celebrated the artist’s turbulent life as the fount of his art, and the pursuit of Van Gogh’s paintings took on a tulip-like mania. “Around this time,” the novelist Elias Canetti later wrote, “the Van Gogh religion began.”

Into this mix dived Otto Wacker, a gay dancer turned art dealer, who in 1925 produced a cache of 33 previously unknown Van Goghs. The paintings — of characteristic late subjects ranging from wheat fields to a “Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear” — were of variable quality, and their provenance was dubious. (Wacker claimed that he had been hired to represent an unnamed Russian collector who had taken the works to imperial Russia early in the century and recently smuggled them out of the Soviet Union.) Yet he convinced the leading experts — including Meier-Graefe and Jacob-Baart de la Faille, the Dutch scholar editing the first Van Gogh catalogue raisonné — and began selling the paintings to dealers like Cassirer, who placed them in the top private collections.

Only when a 1928 exhibition placed Wacker Van Goghs next to the real thing did misgivings surface. A fraud case slowly got under way, and, in 1932, Wacker was found guilty after a sensational trial that featured paintings in the courtroom and conflicting expert testimony. Despite having no particular expertise in Postimpressionism, Ludwig Justi, the ambitious director of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, told the court that the Wacker paintings were “as false as any pictures can possibly be” and ridiculed the scholars who authenticated them. For their part, the Van Gogh specialists confusingly claimed, in contrast to the court’s own findings, that some were real and some were fake.

None of this much dampened Van Gogh’s appeal. As a German newspaper observed in 1929: “Within a short space of time [the case] has done more for the artist’s fame than his prophets were able to achieve in 30 years.” Mr. Eksteins offers a more complex reading. “Though Wacker went to prison,” he observes, “it was the experts, and by corollary any traditional notion of authority, that lost the most respect in the prolonged and painful affair.” De la Faille, whose flawed catalog is still a standard reference work on Van Gogh, reversed his own conclusions several times. And Justi, even as he was heaping scorn on the Wacker paintings, rashly bought two Van Goghs for his own museum that were quickly exposed as likely forgeries.

For Mr. Eksteins, the collapse of established authority that emerges is a defining part of the Van Gogh cult. Our uncertainty about Van Gogh’s work, he paradoxically suggests, is inextricably linked to the rupture of traditional ideology and morality that attracts us to the artist in the first place. Nowhere was the rupture more dramatic than in the final years of the Weimar Republic, that “fantastic panorama of commotion, imagination, and violence” where Mr. Ekstein’s centers his account.

With a saturation of cultural reference, “Solar Dance” conveys the heady atmosphere that made Berlin the first European capital to embrace the transforming potential of art in a secular age. Yet it also created the ideological void that ended in the rise of Hitler. Van Gogh was celebrated as a solitary genius whose paintings rebelled “against the formalism of the establishment” and made “the untamed decorative”; but the potential for fakery in his messy oeuvre, and for embellishment of his biography, risked introducing just the kind of “fantasy world of myth and mastery” that drew people to National Socialism — a process Mr. Eksteins recounts in the final part of the book.

Yet in pressing the political reading of the Van Gogh affair, Mr. Eksteins can get carried away; he is unlikely to persuade readers that “Nazism was, in short, much like the artworks peddled by Otto Wacker.” A larger question is whether Weimar can adequately account for the durability of the Van Gogh myths today. In his overriding interest in the artist’s fascinating German afterlife, Mr. Eksteins gives rather short shrift to Van Gogh controversies elsewhere, some of which have involved a similar undermining of cultural authority without any of Weimar’s social upheaval.

He does not mention, for example, the case of “Study by Candelight,” an unfinished painting authenticated by De la Faille (who called it one of the artist’s best self-portraits) and sold to the head of Universal Pictures in 1948. It was brought to the United States and celebrated in the press, but after the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam declared it a fake, the painting was withdrawn from a 1949 Van Gogh exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (The Met’s curators termed it “strident in color, weak in drawing, and uncertain in the modeling of the head.”) Other experts hired by the U.S. Treasury — which was responsible for determining the painting’s authenticity since original artworks can be brought into the country duty free while reproductions are taxed — concluded that “it was a real Van Gogh and therefore exempt from import duties.”  Today the painting is omitted from Van Gogh catalogs, and its whereabouts are unknown.

Of course, none of these disputes can quite measure up to the actual paintings. Van Gogh’s elusive oeuvre still awaits a full treatment on its own terms, unraveled from the madness and the mania that surrounds it. But if the $119 million paid last week for Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” — the latest auction record — is any indication, the frenzied pursuit of Modernist anomie shows no sign of slowing. As Mr. Eksteins shows, that appetite, like the Van Gogh cult to which it has given shape, may tell us far less about the art than about ourselves.

Dr. Norman Doidge, a neurologist at Columbia, in his book The Brain That Changes Itself, describes how pornography causes re-wiring of the neural circuits. He notes that in a study of men viewing internet pornography, the men looked “uncannily” like rats pushing the lever to receive cocaine in the experimental Skinner boxes. Like the addicted rats, the men were desperately seeking the next fix, clicking the mouse just as the rats pushed the lever.
Pornography addiction is frantic learning, and perhaps this is why many who have struggled with multiple addictions report that it was the hardest for them to overcome. Drug addictions, while powerful, are more passive in a “thinking” kind of way, whereas pornography viewing, especially on the internet, is a much more active process neurologically. The constant searching for and evaluating of each image or video clip for its potency and effect is an exercise in neuronal learning, limited only by the progressively rewired brain. Curiosities are thus fused into compulsions, and the need for a larger dopamine fix can drive the person from soft-core to hard-core to child pornography—and worse. A paper published in the Journal of Family Violence in 2009 revealed that 85 percent of men arrested for child pornography had also physically abused children.

The “rival picture of human sexual desire” Scruton presents here is nothing less than the image that emerges from the Churches’ understanding of the human person, particularly in what we find in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. I’m beginning a new category for these writings on pornography but, in truth, this is really TOB in a different context.

***************************************

Now, I am one of those who think of pornography as something we should avoid ourselves and do everything we can to forbid to our children. But nothing in the modern myths justifies that attitude, and therefore I must search for the error these myths involve, and replace them with a rival picture of human sexual desire.

This is what I wish to sketch in the remainder of this paper. But first, let me make some disclaimers.

1. First, these myths involve an “instrumentalized” view of sexual conduct — the view that the sexual act, in whatever form it takes, is a means to something else, be it sensory pleasure, orgasm, or relief from internal pressure. It does not follow from this that the act does not have some other value. Just as eating is a means to gustatory pleasure and also to nourishment, so does it have another value — especially eating in company, a form of companionship that brings with it both intimacy and comfort.
2. Second, someone could adhere to the instrumentalized view of sexual desire and still argue that when we take this pleasure in company there is a social payoff, in the form of an intimacy and mutual enjoyment, and go on to build a picture of “good sex” which reconstructs some of the moral values we associate with loving relations in general and marriage in particular. However these moral values will not be intrinsic to the sexual act. They will be by-products of the act, and will have no intrinsic bearing on the morality of the act itself, any more than the social value of dinner à deux has any bearing on the rightness or wrongness of eating the particular thing that is eaten (and which may in fact be forbidden by some dietary code).
3. Finally, in opposing these myths, I am not insisting that the only alternative to them is the old morality that regards heterosexual relations within marriage as the only legitimate form of sexual expression, and which, for example, dismisses homosexuality as a perversion. Exactly what moral code is the right one, or whether there is any single right one, is not a matter that concerns me directly in this paper. I am concerned only with the more fundamental question, which is a question of philosophical psychology rather than morality — the question of what to put in place of the instrumentalized view of sex. If I go on to draw moral conclusions, they will be tentative, and based in a sense of what is at risk in our sexual encounters.

Persons And Animals
The first point to make is that sexual desire belongs to that aspect of the human being which we summarize in the concept of the person. Many of the things that we experience we experience as animals, and what we feel does not normally depend upon thought, intention, or personality. We feel the same pain from a wound that a dog might feel if wounded in the same way. But there are other states of mind •that only persons can experience. While a dog can experience aggression, he cannot experience remorse or shame, cannot wonder about the laws of nature, cannot judge another dog morally, and so on.

There are some states of mind that are rooted in our animal nature, but are transformed by our involvement as persons. Soldiers in the front line respond to an attack on their comrades by joining with them in the fight, and this response belongs to those collective reactions exhibited by pack animals. However, the soldier who rushes to share the danger of his comrades is not just obeying an instinct. He has risen above that instinct and judged acting on it to be right and honorable. He has not just an urge to join the battle but a motive, and that motive is honor and duty toward his fellows, and shame at letting them down.

The soldier is acting for others, and from a conception of himself, and of how he looks in others’ eyes. Such a motive can prevail over the animal instincts of fear and dread only because the soldier also has the virtue that enables him to act on it — the virtue that we know as fortitude or courage. In short, he acts from a full, free, personal involvement in his predicament, conscious that he is judged for what he does, and aiming at a good that he understands in personal terms.

Exactly similar things should be said of sexual desire. Sexual desire is rooted in instincts we share with the other animals, and the pursuit of one person by another may not look so very different from the encounter of horse and mare in a field. However, just as in the case of the soldier, the person who responds to these instincts also stands in judgment upon them. Is it right or wrong to respond? When he responds, he responds from a judgment that this is the right person, that in doing this thing he is in her eyes not demeaning himself but gaining her acceptance, just as she is in his. They share a reciprocity of glances, a gradual accommodation in which their consent is woven into their desire, so that the desire becomes an expression of something other than instinct. Of what?

To answer that question we must look a little more closely at the concept of the person. Most animals are not persons, and some persons are not animals. We, however, are both. Hence there are features of our mental life that non-personal animals do not share. We have rights and duties; we make judgments, reflect on past and future, on the possible and the impossible; we are self-conscious, distinguishing self and other, and attributing our mental states to ourselves on no basis; we relate to each other not as animals but as persons, through dialogue, judgment, and moral expectations.

Indeed, there are arguments for saying that the concept of the person is essentially tied to interpersonal relations: To explain what a person is, we must explain how persons relate to each other. One vital feature of interpersonal relations is their emotional content. My stance toward self and other is reflected in my emotional life. Emotions such as shame, guilt, anger, remorse, gratitude, forgiveness, and rejoicing are essentially directed toward persons — whether self or other — and learning to feel these things is part of what it means to grow up, i.e., to pass from the animal to the personal condition.

Fundamental to all these emotions, and to the life of persons generally, are our beliefs about freedom and responsibility. No two philosophers agree as to what freedom and responsibility presuppose, but for our present purposes we can leave the philosophical controversies to one side; my sole concern is to examine how we actually envisage ourselves in our lives as persons. In all our conduct toward each other we treat both self and other as free. My responsibility is revealed in my shame, and my freedom in my forgiveness. The belief in freedom and responsibility is pre-supposed in anger and resentment, in gratitude and love. Take that belief away and little would remain of our emotional life and its rewards.

The heart of freedom is the self. Kant suggested, in his lectures on anthropology, that the distinctiveness of the human condition is contained in the fact that human beings can say”I.” Self-consciousness brings with it the condition of freedom, and the knowledge of both self and other as responsible. But there is a yet more remarkable fact about the use of “I.”

By my use of this word I create a new center of being: I set my body aside, as it were, and replace the organism with the self, and present to others another target of their interest and response. To know my mind, and also to change it, they do not examine my body: They look to my words, my opinions, my thoughts. They enter into dialogue with this thing called “I;’ and see it as standing in the arena of freedom, both part of the physical world and situated on its very edge.

Something like this is assumed in our ordinary human relations. Just think of your response, when your friend betrays your secrets. You don’t think of him as you would of a computer, in which you stored information that somehow got out. You don’t ask yourself about who hacked into his brain. You go to him and you address him in the second person, I to I: “You promised:’ you say, and your words are addressed to that very center of being where his “I” resides. In accusing him you are not trying to provoke some physical reaction. You are expecting a response from that I — a response from the center of freedom where he resides, one self-conscious subject among others.

You expect him, in other words, to take responsibility for what he did, to say “I am sorry,” and maybe to show how he is going to atone for his fault, to make amends, and in this way re-establish your relations in such a way that you will forgive him. There is a process here, in which one “I” faces another, both of them exercising their freedom, taking responsibility for their choices, and acting as the sovereign of the human animal.

This does not mean that there are two things here — person and animal. There is one thing — an organism, organized as a person. That is how we treat each other in all our free relations.

And Desire
Now for sexual desire. It is rooted in animal instincts, but in a person desire is re-centered, self-attributed to the I, so as to become part of the interpersonal dialogue. It is an interpersonal emotion, in which subject and object confront each other I to I. Hence sexual desire, as we know it, is peculiar to human beings.

In describing sexual desire, we are describing John’s desire for Mary, or Jane’s desire for Bill. And the people themselves will not merely describe their desires, but also experience them, as my desire for you. “I want you” is not a figure of speech but the true expression of what I feel. And here the pronouns identify that very center of free and responsible choice that constitutes the interpersonal reality of each of us. I want you as the free being who you are, and your freedom is wrapped up in the thing that I want.

You can easily verify this, as I show in my book Sexual Desire, by studying sexual arousal. This is not a state of the body, even though it involves certain bodily changes. It is a process in the soul, a steady awakening of one person to another, through touches, glances, and caresses. The exchange of glances is particularly important, and illustrates a general feature of personal relations.

People look at each other, as animals do. But they also look into each other, and do this in particular when mutually aroused. The look of desire is like a summons, a call to the other self to show itself in the eyes, to weave its own freedom and selfhood into the beam that calls to it. There is a famous description of this phenomenon by John Donne, who writes in “The Ecstasy”:

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.
So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

The experience described by Donne is known to every sighted person who has ever been aroused. Likewise the caress and the touch of desire have an epistemic character: they are an exploration, not of a body, but of a free being in his or her embodiment. They too call to the other in his freedom, and are asking him to show himself.

All the phenomena of desire can be understood in that way, as parts of a mutual negotiation between free and responsible beings, who want each other as persons. And this has an important metaphysical consequence, which in turn has important moral consequences. Persons are individuals in the strong sense of being identified, both by themselves and by others, as unique, irreplaceable, not admitting of substitutes. This is something Kant tried to capture in his theory of persons as “ends in themselves.”

Somehow the free being is, in his own eyes and in the eyes of all those in a personal relation with him, the being who he is. He is never merely an instance of some useful attribute. To treat him merely instrumentally is always in a measure to abuse him; and while I can employ you for a job and in doing so recognize that someone else might have served my purpose just as well, I must, in employing you, respect your individuality, and not treat you as a tool or a slave. You are for me, even in this functional relation, the free being who meets me I to I.

It follows from this that, in those relations between persons in which self and other relate as subject and object, each views the other as unique, without a substitute, This has an immediate impact on sexual desire. John, frustrated in his desire for Mary, cannot be offered Jane as a substitute. Someone who says “Take Jane, she will do just as well” does not understand what John wants, in wanting Mary.

It follows also that desire requires complex, compromising, and potentially embarrassing negotiations, and that without these negotiations sexual intimacy is liable to induce self-disgust. When girls complain of date-rape, it is this kind of thing they have in mind. It is not necessarily that they didn’t consent to what happened. Outwardly maybe they did. But inwardly they did not, and didn’t realize, until too late, that this was so. Consent has to be prepared by elaborate games and intimacies, in which freedom and responsibility are alertly deployed by both parties to the transaction.

What I have said points at every juncture to difficult philosophical issues concerning the nature of persons, of freedom, of responsibility and self-awareness. I am consciously refusing to address those issues, because my task is simply to remind you of what you all know and what you all have experienced in moments of desire.

Arousal and desire are not bodily states or even states of individual persons: they form one pole of an I to I encounter, and involve a going out to the other, in which his or her freedom and responsibility are intimately involved in what is wanted. It is only in this way that we can explain some of our most immovable intuitions about sex.

Consider rape. On the instrumentalized view of sex surveyed earlier, rape is a crime of the same order as leaning on a woman without asking her permission and at the worst like spitting on her, doing something that disgusts her without caring what she feels. It involves using someone for a purpose that could have been achieved with any other instrument, but without troubling to seek her consent and even by ignoring her resistance.

As we know, however, rape is next in line to murder, by way of an assault. It is a violation of the other person in the very depths of her being. The view that I have offered immediately explains this. The rapist is not merely prepared to use his victim as a means: He steals her most precious possession, the thing that she wishes to offer only as a gift and in a condition of mutual surrender. He does not merely disregard her freedom: He poisons it, removes from it the most important thing for which it was made, which is the mutual self-giving of desire. And that is why rape is experienced as an annihilation and not just an abuse.

This account of desire explains why we feel disgust at pedophilia, impose a taboo on incest, and regard bestiality and necrophilia as perversions. It explains the role of modesty as an invitation to correct behavior, and shame as a protection against abuse — a point vividly made by Max Scheler in his long paper on shame. I do not think I need to spell these things out, since anyone who recognizes the core of truth in what I have said will be able to spell them out for himself.

Disowning The Myths
My purpose now is to sweep away the myths I began by enunciating. All of them, it seems to me, arise from a fundamental mistake about the intentionality of sexual arousal and sexual desire. These states of mind are not directed toward pleasure, orgasm, or any similar thing. They are directed toward one free being by another.

That last point is worth lingering over. You might think that the rapist is indifferent to the freedom of his victim. On the contrary, however. It is precisely her freedom that he wishes to seize, to overcome, to force to bow before him. For this reason you cannot rape an animal, even if you can sexually abuse it. The victim of rape is a free being, compelled to accept what she does not consent to.

The myths depend upon removing from the picture of sexual activity both the self-conception of the subject and the other-conception of the object. The subject regards the other as a tool with which to induce excitement and pleasure, and conceives himself as a sensory organism. The myths remove from the picture of desire both the person who feels it and the person toward whom it is felt. The myths, in other words, do not describe desire at all, but something else — something that we might observe in animals or children, or, as Socrates put it (according to Xenophon) in pigs rubbing against a post.

One thing that tempts people to endorse the myths is the very obvious fact that sexual activity involves bodily changes and bodily sensations, leading (though not always) to orgasm. This has made the caricature of desire believable, in the minds of those who take an accountant’s view of human satisfactions. It looks as though you could enumerate the benefits of sexual activity in terms of pleasure, and the costs in terms of the time and energy needed to find the person willing to stimulate you, and on that basis proceed to give a utilitarian morality of sexual behavior. If that sounds ridiculous, do not be deceived, It is ridiculous, so ridiculous that Judge Richard Posner has written a whole book, called Sex and Reason, devoted to treating the phenomena in this way.

There is a downside to such books, and to the myths they reinforce. Myths can work on reality in such a way that they cease to be myths and become true descriptions instead. Thinking of sex in the instrumentalized way that Judge Posner exemplifies you actually prepare yourself to experience it in this way.

Henry James had an inkling of this when he wrote, in the Preface to The Bostonians, of “the decline in the sentiment of sex;’ meaning the loss of that full-hearted, self-committing form of sexual desire which animates the heroines of Jane Austen, and its replacement by short-lived, titillating forms of seduction. And the more people think of sex as a means to the production of pleasure or a means for obtaining orgasm (as was famously believed by the madman Wilhelm Reich, who even invented a machine to help the orgasm-seeker to reach his goal), the more the other drops out of consideration as irrelevant, and the more sex ceases to be a form of interpersonal relation and retreats into narcissistic solitude.

Pornography And Self-Abuse
In conclusion I want to touch on the relation of pornography to a highly unfashionable idea, that of self-abuse, a term originally applied to all forms of masturbation, in ways that led to much ridicule and scorn of our ancestors and their puritan hang-ups. It is surely obvious from my account that sex, in what I would wish to describe as its normal form, involves a moving out from the self toward the other — an attempt to know and unite with the other in her body. It involves treating the other as a free subject, and enjoying the mutual arousal which is possible only through the reciprocal interest in each other as conscious and free.

The self is at risk in this: The other may refuse to cooperate, may turn away in disgust, may act in ways that elicit shame and humiliation. That is why you have to be ready for it, and one reason why it is such an injustice to inflict sexual relations on children. In the face of this risk people are tempted to retreat from the direct forms of sexual desire, and take refuge in fantasy objects — objects that cannot damage or threaten you, that cannot withhold consent since they cannot give it, that are without the capacity to embarrass or shame the one who watches them.

Such objects are provided by pornography. The people displayed in the pornographic film have no relation to the viewer, nor are they displayed as being in any other relation to each other than that of each using the other’s body as a machine à frotter. It is impossible to know what they are feeling, and in any case their feelings are in no way directed to the person who is using them and at the same time abusing himself.

The viewer’s pleasure is not the pleasure of desire, since there is no one he is desiring. Nor is he really aroused except in the purely physiological sense, since there is no mutual arousal of which he is a party. Everything is cold, bleak, objective, and also free of cost and personal risk.

Pornography exactly conforms to the myths about desire that I have rejected: it is a realization of those myths, a form of sexual pleasure from which the interpersonal intentionality has been surgically excised. Pornography takes hold of sexual desire and cuts away the desire. There is no real object, but only a fantasy, and no real subject, since there is nothing ventured of the self. To say that this is an abuse of the self is to express a literal truth — so it seems to me.

Like all cost-free forms of pleasure, pornography is habit-forming. It short-circuits that roundabout route to sexual satisfaction which passes through the streams and valleys of arousal, in which the self is always at risk from the other, and always motivated to give itself freely in desire. The short-circuiting mechanism here is in all probability not different from that researched by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kubey in their studies of gambling and TV addiction.

It exhibits in addition, however, a depersonalizing habit — a habit of viewing sex as something external to the human personality, to relationship, and to the arena of free encounters. Sex is reduced to the sexual organs, which are stuck on, in the imagination, like cutouts in a child’s picture. To think that this can be done, and the habit of doing it fully established, without damage to a person’s capacity to be a person, and to relate to other persons as one sexual being to others, is to make a large and naive assumption about the ability of the mind to compartmentalize.

Indeed, psychologists and psychotherapists are increasingly encountering the damage done by pornography, not to marriages and relationships only, but to the very capacity to engage in them. Sex, portrayed in the porno-image, is an affair of attractive people with every technical accomplishment. Most people are not attractive, and have only second-class equipment. Once they are led by their porn addiction to see sex in the instrumentalized way that pornography encourages, they begin to lose confidence in their capacity to enjoy sex in any other way than through fantasy. People who lose confidence in their ability to attract soon become unattractive.

And then the fear of desire arises, and from that fear the fear of love, This, it seems to me, is the real risk attached to pornography. Those who become addicted to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind. They risk the loss of love, in a world where only love brings happiness.

When sexual gratification occurs in the context of pornography use, it can result in the formation of a virtual mistress of sorts. Dr. Victor Cline, in his essay, “Pornography’s Effects on Adult and Child,” describes this process as follows:
In my experience as a sexual therapist, any individual who regularly masturbates to pornography is at risk of becoming, in time, a sexual addict, as well as conditioning himself into having a sexual deviancy and/or disturbing a bonded relationship with a spouse or girlfriend.
A frequent side effect is that it also dramatically reduces their capacity to love (e.g., it results in a marked dissociation of sex from friendship, affection, caring, and other normal healthy emotions and traits which help marital relationships). Their sexual side becomes in a sense dehumanized. Many of them develop an “alien ego state” (or dark side), whose core is antisocial lust devoid of most values. In time, the “high” obtained from masturbating to pornography becomes more important than real life relationships. . . .The process of masturbatory conditioning is inexorable and does not spontaneously remiss. The course of this illness may be slow and is nearly always hidden from view. It is usually a secret part of the man’s life, and like a cancer, it keeps growing and spreading. It rarely ever reverses itself, and it is also very difficult to treat and heal. Denial on the part of the male addict and refusal to confront the problem are typical and predictable, and this almost always leads to marital or couple disharmony, sometimes divorce and sometimes the breaking up of other intimate relationships.
Dr. Doidge notes,”Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and a release from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is addiction, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn’t like it.” In the book Pornified, Pamela Paul gives numerous examples of this, and describes one person who decided to limit his pornography use, not from a moralist or guilt-based perspective, but out of a desire to again experience pleasure in actual physical relationships with women.
“Porn impotence,” where the man experiences sexuality preferentially with porn instead of a woman, is a real and growing phenomenon. When a man’s sex drive has been diverted away from his spouse in this way, writes Dr. Cline, the wife can “easily sense this, and often [feels] very lonely and rejected.”

**************************************************************

We are a long way from the days when homosexuality was described as a perversion, pornography as an offense against public morals, and masturbation as “self-abuse.’ The old morality that condemned sex outside marriage and saw nothing wrong with treating homosexuality as a criminal offense, even if it has a following in the Muslim world, has few adherents in the West. We have moved on at such a pace in the last half-century that to many people any talk of sexual morality at all appears quaint. If there is sexual misconduct, it is only a special case of the more general sin of forcing, defrauding, or manipulating other people into doing something they do not really want to do. If they really do want to do it, and the feeling is mutual, then what on earth is wrong?

That is the view I wish to challenge. What I say may not persuade everyone; indeed, it may not persuade anyone. But I will have achieved half of my purpose if I convince you that the argument is not about consent but about the very nature of the sexual act and the desire expressed in it.

Some Modern Myths
This way of describing and in consequence experiencing sexual phenomena I believe to be founded in five myths. Some of the myths originate in wishful thinking, and some in scientific and pseudoscientific theories.

1. The first myth is that sexual desire is desire for a particular kind of pleasure, ie sexual organs. On this view all sex is like masturbation — a manipulation of sexual organs for the sake of pleasure. The other person is a stimulus to the desire, but not an object of it. The desire is not for him or her but for a pleasure that could be obtained in other ways. The effect of this myth is to remove sexual pleasure from the realm of interpersonal- responses, and reconstitute them as purely sensory appetites, like the desire to scratch and the pleasure of scratching.Why should people believe that? There are two dominant reasons, I think. One is that it simplifies the phenomena of sex in a way that makes them intellectually manageable. Sex becomes like eating and drinking: the desire is for sensory gratification, and is part of the general pleasure-seeking character of the animal organism. The instinct on which this pleasure depends is aroused by the sight of or contact with another person: and that explains the function of sexual pleasure in the life of the human organism, and why it is usually aroused by a member of the opposite sex. This pleasure helps the reproductive process, in just the way that the pleasure of eating helps to keep the organism fed.The other reason for believing this myth is that it simplifies the phenomena of sex in ways that make them morally manageable. If sex is just like eating, then personal relationships, commitment, and the rest can be discounted from the moral point of view, As long as the other person sits down with you voluntarily to enjoy the meal, the elementary requirements of morality are satisfied. Maybe you should be careful about the diet, but only for health reasons. All those old reasons for care, such as shame, honor, marital duty, and the rest, are as irrational as the Jewish dietary laws and a mere survival from an era in which “safe sex” was difficult to guarantee.
2. The second myth is that sexual satisfaction depends upon such factors as the intensity and duration of sensory pleasure, culminating in orgasm, and that “good sex” is a matter of getting those things right.This is what lovers should aim at, and what ultimately cements the bond between them. Around the myth of “good sex” has grown an enormous literature, both popular and “scientific.Like the previous myth, this one serves to simplify the phenomena of sex, both factually and morally. It reduces to a technique what is more properly described as an art, and represents as a means what is understandable only as an end. In short, it “instrumentalizes” the sexual act.
3. The third myth is of a different kind, since it involves an attempt at, or at any rate a pretense of, science. This is the myth that sexual urges need to be expressed, and that the attempt to “repress” them is psychologically harmful. The origins of this myth lie in the theories of Freud, who did not, however, endorse the view that repression is harmful. What Freud did do was to introduce the “hydraulic” imagery with which sexual desire is now so often understood. The urge welling up inside can be kept down for a while, but eventually will seek a channel to escape, and if not allowed to escape through one channel may escape through another. The longer it is kept down, the more dangerous might its inevitable eruption be, if it finds release in activities such as sadism or child abuse. The great apostle of this view was Wilhelm Reich, who saw orgasm as a kind of release, sex as the technique for securing it, and repression as the path to insanity.
4. Associated with this third myth is a fourth, which is that sexual desire is the same kind of thing, whatever the nature of the partner who arouses it. The urge welling within me might be stimulated by a woman, or a man, or an animal, or an imaginary being. Convention and decency set limits to how a human being should satisfy his sexual urges. But nothing in the urge itself demands any particular kind of partner. Sexual ^`orientation,” as it is now called, is simply an ingrained habit of arousal, trained on a particular object. This myth goes naturally with the other three, but the motive for adopting it is rather different, namely the desire to revise and perhaps even abolish the traditional idea of sexual normality. For the fourth myth offers an easy path to the conclusion that there is no such thing as sexual normality, and that homosexuality (for example) is not in itself a perversion. Homosexual and heterosexual conduct use different instruments, but to the same end, and any argument for distinguishing right from wrong applies equally to both. There should be no coercion, no fraud, no trickery; and each partner must be open and honest with the other, but the sex of the partner is irrelevant to the morality of the act.
5. Finally, the fifth and in many ways most important of the modern myths about sex tells us that attitudes such as shame, guilt, and disgust are unhealthy. What makes people feel bad is the “judgmental” attitude prevalent in the surrounding culture, which people interiorize, so that they accuse themselves in the very moment of sexual release. Hence we should strive to free ourselves from these hangovers from an old and discredited ethic of ^`pollution and taboo and learn to engage in sexual activity in full awareness that it is in essence no more guilty an activity than eating or drinking — a psychological benefit that need have no psychological cost. Much modern sex education is designed as a therapy for guilt and shame, a way of getting young people to accept their sexual urges and to find ways to express them without feeling bad about doing so. Moral progress means freeing ourselves from this internal judgment, learning to express our sexuality freely, and to overcome the irrational guilt that stems from others and not from our true inner selves.

Now, I agree with the view that we must find ways to express our sexual desires without feeling guilt and shame. But I also think that guilt and shame are often justified, and that what they demand of us is not therapy, in order to remove them, but right conduct, in order to avoid them.

Some Consequences Of The Myths
Not everyone adheres to these myths, and there are of course more and less subtle ways of upholding them. But they define a pattern of thinking in our society, which affects every aspect of the culture. Whenever people write of the “recreational” use of sex; whenever they suggest that there is no basis to sexual morality other than the rule that force and fraud are forbidden; whenever they describe “gay” sex as though it were a mere variation of an activity that exists also in a “straight” variety — they are usually leaning on those myths.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the triumph of these myths is the growing indifference in our society toward the glut of pornography. For if these myths are true, it is impossible to condemn pornography or the practice of those who use it as a sexual stimulant. Indeed, pornography might even be regarded as the best form of sexual recreation, in that it is free from the dangers — medical, psychological, and personal — of sex with a partner. As Oscar Wilde said of masturbation: “It is cleaner, more efficient, and you meet a better class of person; by which he meant himself.

The unknowing reader might at first think that Jesus of Nazareth is coauthored. At the top of the dust jacket is “Joseph Ratzinger.” Then, directly below it, in much larger type, “Pope Benedict XVI.” Perhaps it was, in the manner of many books, written by the pope “with the assistance” of Joseph Ratzinger. But of course that is not the case. The book, we are told, has undergone a “long gestation.”

Most of it was written by Joseph Ratzinger when he was Joseph Ratzinger, and he says that, since becoming Benedict XVI, “I have used every free moment to make progress on the book.” As it is, Jesus of Nazareth is Part I of a larger project. It is the story of Jesus from his baptism in the Jordan to Peter’s confession of faith and the Transfiguration. Part II, including the infancy narratives, may or may not come later [It has. DJ], “As I do not know how much more time or strength I am still to be given.”

We [First Things] are very pleased to have published the review of Jesus of Nazareth by Richard Hays, the distinguished professor of New Testament at Duke University. It is, I believe, the very model of what a book review should be. It tells what the book is about, respectfully engages its arguments, and sets forth in an accessible way both its strengths and weaknesses. I expect the pope was pleased with Mr. Hays’ sympathetically critical treatment of the book. But, of course, and as always, there is more to be said.

Initial reports that the pope was going to publish the book emphasized the novelty of the idea. One British paper excitedly reported that the pope was declaring that he is not infallible. And indeed he writes: “It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but it is solely an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of Jesus.’ Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.” It also goes without saying — although the pope has just said it — that this book has nothing to do with infallibility, which is a very precise and narrowly defined exercise of teaching authority that ensures that the Church will never require anyone to believe what is false.

Nor is it unprecedented for a pope to publish a book that claims no magisterial authority. One thinks, for instance, of John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope and Memory and Identity, the former, like the present book, being an international bestseller. Some popes are undeniably prolific. Leo XIII, pope from 1878 to 1903, issued eighty-five encyclicals, plus hundreds of pastoral letters, bulls, and other documents. But it is true that in the past two centuries popes tended to be seen as rather remote figures who spoke in public seldom and then in the mode of magisterial authority. That changed dramatically with John Paul II, and Benedict is obviously following in his steps, and indeed going further. He has, for example, engaged in extended Q & A sessions in public gatherings.

The complaint is heard that John Paul, and now Benedict, are expanding papal authority and hogging the public spotlight, making the pope the teacher of the Church. Who listens to their bishop when they can listen to the pope? The same voices once complained that the papacy needed to be “humanized” and “personalized” rather than presenting itself as an oracle issuing occasional pronunciamentos from on high. There is no pleasing some people.

A Living Relationship
As to why he published Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict says, “It struck me as the most urgent priority to present the figure and the message of Jesus in his public ministry, and so to help foster the growth of a living relationship with him.” The entire book is marked by this sense of urgency. It is not so much another book about Jesus as it is an invitation to follow him in the adventure of discipleship. Of course it is also about Jesus and is supported by the scholarship pertinent to historical facts and the development of the Church’s understanding of his person, message, and mission. Although, as Richard Hays respectfully noted, some of the scholarship is rather dated.

Of the writing of books about Jesus there is no end. I don’t know whether Benedict had in mind and seeks to counter fabrications such as The Da Vinci Code and its predecessors and imitators, but it seems more than likely. I see Garry Wills has a new book out, What Jesus Meant. It purports to explain what Jesus meant to say and no doubt would have said had he the advantage of being Garry Wills. While Wills and likeminded authors depict a Jesus in radical discontinuity with the Church’s teaching, Benedict — convincingly, if not surprisingly — makes the case that, from the beginning and on all the really big questions, the Church got it right.

Benedict is taken with Jacob Neusner’s little book, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In many ways, Benedict acknowledges, Jesus disappointed some messianic expectations. “What did Jesus actually bring,” Benedict asks, “if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world?” “The answer is very simple: He brought God.” He continues:

 He brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance, gradually, first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom Literature — the God who revealed his face only in Israel, even though he was also honored among the pagans in various shadowy guises. It is this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God, whom he has brought to the nations of the earth. . . . Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origins and destiny: faith, hope, and love. It is only because of the hardness of hearts that we think this is too little.

He is the “Christ,” meaning the Messiah. Since the title “made little sense outside of Semitic culture,” it was “joined with the name of Jesus: Jesus Christ. What began as an interpretation ended up as a name, and therein lies a deeper message: He is completely one with his office; his task and his person are totally inseparable from each other.” “In the end,” writes Benedict, “man needs just one thing, in which everything else is included; but he must first delve beyond his superficial wishes and longings in order to recognize what it is that he truly needs and truly wants. He needs God. And so we now realize what ultimately lies behind all the Johannine images: Jesus gives us ‘life’ because he gives us God.”

It is frequently claimed, Benedict writes, that the teachings of Jesus, especially in the Beatitudes, represent “the Christian ethics that is supposedly superior to the commands of the Old Testament.” This, he says, is wrong, since “Jesus always presupposed the validity of the Ten Commandments” and explicitly said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

Running throughout Jesus of Nazareth is a powerful anti-Marcionite insistence upon the inseparability of the Old and New Testaments. The German biblical scholar H. Gese is favorably quoted: “Jesus himself has become the divine word of revelation. The gospels could not illustrate it any more clearly or powerfully: Jesus himself is the Torah.”

In his “talk” with Jesus, Rabbi Neusner poses the question: What of the law and the prophets did Jesus leave out? The answer is “Nothing.” So what then did he add? The answer is “Himself.” To which Benedict adds, “Perfection, the state of being holy as God is holy as demanded by the Torah, now consists in following Jesus.”

Agreeing with Neusner, Benedict underscores that the crucial decision is in response to the question, Who is Jesus? Echoing Lumen Gentium (Light to the Nations), the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the Church, Benedict writes: “Jesus has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel’s Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great definitive promise to Israel and the world. This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob . . . is what proves him to be the Messiah.”

As an aside, Benedict takes exception to the now common use of the Tetragrammaton (“I am who I am”), the name of God given to Moses. This, he says, is who God is without qualification. “The Israelites therefore were perfectly right in refusing to utter this self-designation of God, expressed in the word YHWH, so as to avoid degrading it to the level of the names of pagan deities. By the same token, recent Bible translations were wrong to write out this name . . . as if it were just any old name. By doing so, they have dragged the mystery of God, which cannot be captured in images or in names that lips can utter, down to the level of some familiar item within a common history of religions.”

Benedict returns to the Jewish-Christian connection in his treatment of the parable of the prodigal son, which he prefers to call the parable of the two sons. A conventional interpretation is that the elder brother represents the Jews. In the parable, the father says to the elder brother, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” In this way, writes Benedict, “the father not only does not dispute the older brother’s fidelity but explicitly confirms his sonship.” Thus “it would be a false interpretation to read this as a condemnation of the Jews,” writes Benedict.

At the same time, there are those, both Jews and non-Jews, for whom “more than anything else, God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him. But God is greater: They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of love. . . . In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us, too, to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.” This is a delicate treatment of a delicate subject. Christians who affirm the universality of the mission of Christ cannot help but hope that all people, including Jews, will accept him as the promised Messiah. At the same time, one is somewhat surprised to find in the foregoing passage traces of the idea that Judaism is a religion of law while Christianity is a religion of love. That is an idea that is apparently rejected elsewhere in the book.

Jesus of Nazareth is indisputably a scholarly work, although a scholarly work that is readily accessible to the general reader. Benedict at several points addresses the problems associated with contemporary biblical scholarship. A purely historical approach to individual texts cannot recognize the Bible as the Bible, the book of the Church. Such a method “can intuit something of the ‘deeper value’ the words contain. It can in some sense catch the sounds of a higher dimension through the human word, and so open up the method to self-transcendence.

But its specific object is the human word as human.” “We have to keep in mind the limits of all efforts to know the past: We can never go beyond the domain of the hypothesis, because we simply cannot bring the past into the present.” Therefore, we must go beyond the historical-critical method to recognize that these texts constitute the one Scripture that speaks with a living voice and is to be understood by “taking account of the living tradition of the whole Church and of the analogy of faith (the intrinsic correspondence with the faith).”

An “Anonymous Community”
While recognizing the limits of much biblical scholarship, Benedict regularly invokes its practitioners, either to agree or disagree with them. In one paragraph, for instance, we encounter Peter Stuhlmacher, Martin Hengel, E. Ruckstuhl, and P. Dschulnigg. (German is, after all, the pope’s first language.) Many scholars claim that the high Christology to be found in, for instance, John’s gospel is the construction of the early community trying to make sense of their experience of Jesus. Benedict is skeptical. “The anonymous community,” he writes, “is credited with an astonishing level of theological genius — who were the great figures responsible for inventing all this?

No, the greatness, the dramatic newness, comes directly from Jesus; within the faith and life of the community it is further developed, but is not created. In fact, the ‘community’ would not even have emerged and survived at all unless some extraordinary reality had preceded it.” On question after question, critical biblical scholarship turns out to offer little more than “a graveyard of mutually contradictory hypotheses.” But as I said, while he recognizes the severe limits of such scholarship, Benedict nonetheless employs its findings and suppositions in advancing his argument.

Benedict does not mention by name Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose work he has elsewhere praised very highly, but one suspects Balthasar’s presence, if only to disagree with him, in the treatment of Christ’s descent into hell. There is this, for example, on the baptism of Jesus: “Jesus’ baptism, then, is understood as a repetition of the whole of history, which recapitulates the past and anticipates the future. His entering into the sin of others is a descent into the ‘inferno.’ . . . He goes down in the role of one whose suffering-with-others is a transforming suffering that turns the underworld around, knocking down and flinging open the gates of the abyss.”

And there is this: “The Apostles’ Creed speaks of Jesus’ descent ‘into hell.’ This descent not only took place in and after his death but accompanies him along his entire journey. He must recapitulate the whole of history from its beginnings — from Adam on; he must go through, suffer through, the whole of it, in order to transform it.” And again: “Thus it is not only after his death, but already by his death and during his whole life, that Jesus ‘descends into hell,’ as it were, into the domain of our temptations and defeats, in order to take us by the hand and carry us upward.” While employing aspects of its rhetorical force, Benedict distances himself from Balthasar’s contention that, in his descent, Jesus experienced the hell of the damned.

A striking feature of the book is the author’s delight in tackling biblical passages that strike many as strange, if not contradictory. He notes, for instance, that the “Good Shepherd” text of John 10 does not begin with “I am the good shepherd” but with another image, that of the door. “He who does not enter the sheep-fold by the door but climbs in by another way is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.” Then Jesus says, “I am the door of the sheep.” How to understand this? Benedict answers: “This can only really mean that Jesus is establishing the criterion for those who will shepherd his flock after his ascension to the Father. The proof of a true shepherd is that he enters through Jesus as the door. For in this way it is ultimately Jesus who is the shepherd — the flock ‘belongs’ to him alone.”

Or consider Luke 9:18, where we read, “As he was praying alone, the disciples were with him.” That is, says Benedict, a “deliberate paradox.” “The disciples are drawn into his solitude, his communion with the Father that is reserved to him alone. They are privileged to see him as the one who . . . speaks face-to-face with the Father, person to person. They are privileged to see him in his utterly unique filial being — at the point from which all his words, his deeds, and his powers issue.”

In his treatment of these and other passages, Benedict follows the pattern of the early Church Fathers. Nothing in the biblical text is accidental or out of place; every passage, every word, has its purpose. While his book does not address in detail the question of scriptural inspiration, the presupposition of divine direction is evident in every page.

As I said, the review by Richard Hays in the last issue is, in my judgment, altogether admirable and quite the best that I have seen anywhere. The foregoing reflection is simply intended to lift up additional aspects of the book, in the hope that it will encourage others to read it with the care that it deserves. Jesus of Nazareth is not, as the author himself takes pains to underscore, the last word on the subject. But it is a greatly needed word in a time when mass audiences are titillated by fanciful fabrications about the discovery of “the real Jesus.” The last word on the Word will be spoken when there is a final answer to the last words of the Bible, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Georges Roualt Self Portrait, 1907

 Makoto Fujimura is an artist, writer, and speaker who is recognized worldwide as a cultural influencer by both faith-based and secular media. A Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts (2003-2009), Fujimura has contributed internationally as an advocate for the arts, speaking with decision makers and advising governmental policies on the arts.

**************************************************

Myriad Parisians, returning home from work, rushed about in the square in front of Gare de Lyon station. “He would have been able to see Seine river,” Gilles Rouaut told me, and pointed to far horizon where the newer buildings now block the view. He stroked the chair his grandfather would have sat, and showed me a photo of Georges Rouault with Marthe, wife of over fifty years, to the opposite end of the window.

Georges Rouault (1871 – 1954) was a keen observer of people, and he must have enjoyed watching the square from his window. He painted figures and portraits as “a fit object of grace, while more visibly born in and for suffering.” He sought out the marginalized poor, prostitutes, clowns, politicians; to him Kings and homeless were equally significant as his symbol of brokenness. But ultimately they, especially the misfits, were celebrated as God’s chosen manifestation of light into darkness. I asked Gilles if this area was popular area for artists to live, having just walked about the gentrified “creative zone” nearby filled with design studios, art students, and cafes. “No,” Gilles told me, ” back then this area was not very popular among artists.”

Gare de Lyon area does not have the charm of Montmartre, where Rouault once painted with late-impressionsists like Degas, or the intellectual rigor of St. Andre-des-Arts, where Sartre and other existentialists would have discussed philosophy; no, what you see, and must have been from Rouault’s studio were scenes of ordinary people mingled about in a theatre of life.

We should expect Georges Rouault to live where no other artists would live. His work, and his life seem distinct from the conventional creative forces of the time. Picasso, Braques, Brancussi, Matisse and others would have walked about the streets of Paris then, as well as Cezanne if not for the light of Provence in southern France to have lured him back. Georges seemed to live and work from a different sense of time and calling. When the French state began to close down monasteries and ban Bibles from schools, Rouault turned to Catholicism as a result, knowing that such decision would put him at odds with the authorities. He was not a person who accepted conventions at face value; he probed deeply into both the malaise and despair of those around him, and at the same time held to a deep abiding reality of greater hope.

Though he was not overly social, those who knew him, they got to know him well: and they testify to his trustworthiness as a friend. When the French salon master and teacher Gustuv Moreau died in 1898, it was Rouault who was asked to manage and run the estate. But he never seemed to seek attention, to demand the world around him, including the elite society, to pay homage to him. He seemed content to see himself as a craftsman or an artisan, given the task to capture the monumental struggles of a common person.

Rouault was born on the day the ended Prussian-French war. As the casualty mounted for the French Commune, and with no hospital to go to, his mother gave birth to him by herself in the basement shelter. ‘I believe [...] that in the context of the massacres, fires and horrors, I have retained (from the cellar in which I was born) in my eyes and in my mind the fleeting matter which good fire fixes and incrusts, Georges later recounted. His early memories included being taken to Victor Hugo state funeral march in Paris when he was 12. His “ground zero” began at the cellar of his Belleville home, and expanded as he saw the devastation and the fragmentation that would confront him them, and haunt him later as France faced the shadows of Nazis invasion, and then the ideological fragmentation that Modernist intellectual milieu would march forth for the remainder of his life.

He never felt comfortable in such a schism, and struggled with depression: the darkness or the broken realities would insist upon him to depict the oppressiveness as is, making some of the early paintings almost unbearable. But eventually his palette would find colors streaking through the somber darkness via the clown’s faces, and blemishes of cheeks of the prostitutes. They were becoming his existential statement, as if to force back the darkness, or perhaps more accurately, give grace a chance to shine in the margins of stark and bold lines. Early on, he found refuge in the colors of the stained glass windows that he apprenticed to create, and in the prints that his grandfather, a postal worker, showed him of Manet and Rembrandt from Paris market influencing the young Georges.

In turn, today, Rouault has influenced many. As a student in Tokyo, I once asked a zen master of calligraphy who among the western masters he admired the most. He replied “Georges Rouault…because his lines contain the weight of life.” And in many conversations among artists and intellectuals, especially in Japan, Rouault’s name pops up as a major influencer for them. Recently I had the privilege of spending some time with contemporary American great Chuck Close, and he told me of his high admiration for Rouault. “I wanted to buy one of Rouault’s prints as a student at Yale,” he said, ” but just could not afford it.” For an art student to even consider buying an artwork, would be the greatest show of admiration.

With such respected following among artists, one would think that Rouault would be positioned among the greats, such as Picasso, or Matisse, who was a close friend of Georges. But his reputation never found such foothold, as he continues to confound the critics, never seeming to fit into the neat categories of modernists, abstract expressionism, or, despite exhibiting with them, the Fauves. Why? Rouault’s paintings are not ideologically driven, like the modernists, or of pure abstraction, like some of the expressionists, nor hedonistic, like the Fauves: Rouault paintings are faithful depiction of the broken realities of his time, eloquent testimonies of color in fragmentation and graceful reminder of faith in an agnostic, and increasingly atheistic era.

Georges Rouault’s paintings are a portal that peaks into the ages past, and then, magically, invites us into a journey toward our future. They transport us to a past beyond the fragmentation of Modernism into the enchantment and mysteries of medieval aesthetic: Before rationality was segregated from passion, and our hearts divorced from faith. Like the stained glass windows he grew to have a “passionate taste”⁴ for their colors, Rouault’s world is principally determined by colorist space and not dependent upon traditional formula of illusionistic space. They create in-between space within layers of paint, what contemporary art historian James Romaine called “Grace arenas.” No, they are more than Modernist or Classical, Rouault’s paintings “Trans-Modern paintings, ” synthesizing bold and calligraphic colors, humble view of humanity, and a prophetic visage of a forgotten reality.

Like the Rembrandts that he valued and imitated as a youth, and Cezanne he celebrated in his letters and poems, Rouault paintings capture not a mere reflective, descriptive light, but Light behind the light, Reality behind reality. They are generative, and seem to grow more and more pregnant as they age. Rouault may yet prove to be the first Twenty-first Century painter, bringing synthesis out of an age of fragmentation. They stand in complete contrast to the path the other modernist artists took, like Picasso and Mondrian, to delineate and dissect reality into flat cerebral spaces. Takashi Murakami, a recent incarnation of his post-Modern visual language states in his “Superflat,” essay that flatness is the essence of artistic innovation of recent path and considers Superflat as an “-ism, — like Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism and Simulationism.”⁷ Rouault’s work was a resistance to this age of “flattened perceptions.”

The assumption in “Superflat” is that the reality itself is readable in a flattened perceptions; Rouault spends his entire life and career disputing this fact. Just like in Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, a nineteenth century “romance of many dimensions” about a journey in two dimensional universe, a dot approaching toward you in “flatland” may not be what it seems. A resident of a two dimensional world must determine if the “dot” approaching us quietly in the horizon is innocuous, or a huge round ball of an object rolling to crush us but imperceptible in the flat dimension.

“Superflat” ism, likewise assumes we can lose dimensionality without much harm. But as twentieth century moved toward the collapse of form and ideas, we lost connection with the fully orbed dimensional reality. Into that increasingly flat world Rouault gives flesh to the synthesis of these alienated elements. In doing so, he may even be warning us, from his vantage point of the early twentieth century, that the “dot” rolling toward us may not as innocuous as it may look.

When modernism depicted chasms of splintered conditions, Rouault’s little paintings shed light into that room. When the prevailing notion of the existentialism posted “No Exit” signs in our studios, Rouault was a little window that looked out into a vision of wholeness. His work awakens us to a greater sensation.

Juhuani Pallasmaa, in “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses” states:

“The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us…”

Pallasmaa points out the “flattened perception” in recent architecture designs, and calls for recovery of our fully orbed sensory experience, to design to awaken our holistic being, to have “eyes of the skin.”

Similarly, Rouault’s work engages us not merely in the visual mode but in this holistic mode, and thus, Murakami’s “Superflat” ism does not justice as a proper grid: Rouault paints with the “eyes of the skin” as much as his ocular vision. When modernism created chasms of splintered conditions, both with truncating ideologies, and deprivation of sensory signals, Rouault stubbornly kept painting a small windows of senses, fighting against the dehumanization of visual vocabulary.

As a graduate in student invited National Scholar at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, I, too felt, the oppression of “No Exit” reality. For a modern painter, one of the only avenues to explore was the language of angst and despair. Very similar to Rouault’s depiction of his darker images early on, I began to depict sinister elements of nature, and struggled to grasp beyond the closed door of perception handed to me by the philosophical air of our time.

It was then that I encountered the works of Rouault’s Passion paintings at The Bridgestone Museum and other Rouault paintings in Idemitsu Museum in Tokyo. At the same time, writing of Jacques Maritain, William Blake whose writings I read in college began to capture my attention again. Japanese, for surprising reasons, have the best collection of Rouault. The post-war intellectual movement of Shirakaba championed artists like Rouault among other continental artists (including William Blake). I made pilgrimages to see these small but heavily painted surfaces.

Once in my graduate program studio in Tokyo, one of the assistant professors walked into the studio unannounced. I was working on a semi-abstract painting that I felt was close to finished. He took one look at the painting and said “this painting is so beautiful, it’s almost terrifying,” and walked out. Immediately I proceeded to wash the painting down, destroying the surface.

Why did I do that? It was because I realized, in honesty, I did not have a room for that kind of beauty inside my heart. I now realize it may have been Rouault’s paintings that caused me to pursue the path of “terrible beauty,” a path I was not prepared to walk. I was simply astounded that this terrible beauty would be birthed out of my own hands. Philosophically, I did not have the luxury of having beauty to capture and possess my heart.

Jacques Maritain’s writings began to affect my philosophical outlook then. His Creative Intuitions in Art and Poetry, a book I had carried around with me since college, began to bring a different outlook: Maritain wrote “For poetry there is no goal, no specifying end. But there is an end beyond. Beauty is the necessary correlative and end beyond any end of poetry”. Beauty as a “necessary correlative” of art and poetry, allows for a broader context in which deeper wrestling, and synthesis, can take place.

It was only in reading up on Rouault’s life for this exhibit that I discovered that Maritain wrote his seminal Creative Intuition in Art as a summarization of his encounter, and his friendship with Rouault. Little did I realize that this Thomist thinker’s overlap with Rouault. It could very well be that while my visual arena was touched by Rouault’s “weight of life” paintings, I was concurrently reading, being influenced philosophically by Maritain, without knowing the connection between the two. And, it occurs to me now that I may not have encountered Rouault, and perhaps Maritain, to such an extent if I did not come to Japan.

Thus, Rouault’s influence in my life is far more than mere inspiration; he gave permission in the “No Exit” room to look outside from the most unlikely place of exile: his painting were little windows into a Reality I did not know existed. What I saw there was both beautiful and terrifying. It showed a path of a suffering servant who took on the broken condition of our souls, the historic Jesus of Nazareth, who chose to walk into darkness as claiming to be the “light of the world.” The images of the Savior that entered my eyes, became etched into my heart, and eventually broke through into my life, and along with the words of William Blake, and Jacques Maritain, became central guiding posts for my journey of art, faith and creativity.

To Rouault, to create such indelible images, hard labor and discipline is required. Many people today assume that being an artist or musician is irresponsibly drifting into a romantic ease; young artists and musicians may think that as well, until they actually attempt to make it work. Artists actually work longer hours, with lower wages, with no guarantees of security than most other occupations. There is no “nine to five” boundaries for us. But those who make it work, do so knowing that their expression has a place inside more enduring conversations that go deep beneath the culture’s superficial terrains. And to Rouault, and often for me, that conversation is rarely with contemporaries, but with artists of the past influences, like Rembrandt or Fra Angelico, or, for my journey, artists like Tohaku Hasegawa. We are caught in the five hundred year conversations. And in such reality, consistency, diligence and commitment to discipline is the only way to gain entry into an enduring conversation.

In Rouault’s sun lit studio, I faced a photo showing stacks of paintings. The varnish bottles and used bristles of brushes seem to beckon the master artist to walk in and start working. The heavy impasto of his surfaces, though now completely dry, seemed to give the illusion that it was painted yesterday, still seem to give a slight scent of linseed oil. The tubes of paint lay inside the boxes they came in, somewhat arranged in an ad hoc manner. His process of working allowed parallel progression, and he literally stacked framed paintings on top of each other, working in literal layers. One painting competed against, and even visually bled into, each other. When I visited later the Rouault room at Pompidou, and faced with many paintings with similar colors, I began to, in my mind’s eyes, see Rouault painting them in the sun lit little room. Although the paintings used similar motifs and same colors, the series of paintings opened up as completely new creation, unique and distinctive offering.

These colors used in Rouault’s are combinations that I was taught avoid in school. Bright yellow and sharp purple never should work well on a painting, nor muted color mixes with black; and yet in Rouault’s hands, these “impossible” colors speak deeply and resonate. To observe each painting of Rouaut is to throw away conventions of painting, to watch a literal miracle take place in front of you. This is why, to this day, many painters admire him and see him as their great influence.

Rouault was a painter’s painter. Purists seem to gravitate toward his work: what makes him different from Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard , or countless other example of artists from around the same period? Is it the use of colors? Application of paint? Delineation of lines? Rouault’s works are unique in their audacity of conviction: an affirmation of the light that lay behind the darkness, and the gestural authority to capture that reality. His works still, so many years after the viscous layers of paint has dried out, teaches us to trust paint. Rouault reminds us that our souls are being squeezed out like fresh paint, directly onto the canvas of modern struggles, raw, pungent and pure, about to be pushed about by a great master. And when we allow ourselves to be moved in such a way, as I did that day at Pompidou, inevitably we begin to notice the visual language Rouault developed all his life, and we may finally begin to truly “see” Rouault’s paintings. Let me list three of visual “keys” I’ve discovered that may help in looking at Rouault paintings.

Christ on the Outskirts

First visual key is the perspective he often uses. The masterpiece “Christ on the Outskirts” which is at the collection of Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo, depicts Christ with two other figures (children?). The perspective used here is much like the contemporary artist Richard Diebenkorn or Anselm Kiefer, as an “angelic” perspective. The perspective used is not perpendicular to the ground, nor from the ground looking into the horizen: The angle is “angelic” half way between heaven and earth. Recently, at Fuchu Museum in Tokyo, I spoke in front of one of my Twin Rivers of Tamagawa paintings which were displayed there. I noted the use of the same perspective used in Rouault: I had done so unconsciously in my Twin Rivers paintings, imitating Rouault’s work. The Outskirts painting influenced countless Japanese masters, including Ryusaburo Umehara, the most significant post war artist that worked in western style.

The second visual key is in the sun/moon in the horizon, often depicted in Rouault paintings. When I see the “Outskirts” painting now, my eyes gravitate up toward the moon in the sky. But then, with Rouault, the moon is not guaranteed to be just a moon.

Very similar to Vincent van Gogh’s sun/moon, a symbol of the new Heavens and the new Earth in the Starry Night; but for Rouault, the sun/moon is a Sacramental vision, like the round bread of life offered by the priest at a Mass. Bread of Life, the body of Christ, is superimposed with the sun. In France, Catholic Mass often uses Monstrance, a large round, golden signpost to lift up the Sacramental reality to invite the communicants to encounter worship.

In such a Reality, materiality has direct connection with the sacred, and gives conviction to an artist, like Rouault, to see the spiritual, heavenly presence to manifest itself in reality of earth. If Communion wafer is the actual body of Christ, the intensity of the greater Reality can, in a smaller way, inhabit even ordinary paint. Heaven can, in other words, intervene our ordinary Reality to break forth physically. And this Reality of heaven being manifested on earth is a portal into any earthly reality to be filled with a sacramental possibility.

And as a third key, we must note Rouault’s unique use of colors.

During my recent stay in Japan, I traveled to Yamanashi prefecture where Rouault is exhibit at Shirakaba Museum. The Rouault Chapel, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, with a crucifix that Rouault himself hand painted. The 54 Passion paintings that I saw in Tokyo as a student was collected by Chozo Yoshii of Yoshii Gallery, and he is the principle owner of the museum. In one of the literally journals Shirakaba movement created, Japanese philosopher Sogen Yanagi writes of Rouault’s colors:

Beneath the richly painted surface, we hear a song. Sometimes, it is a lamentation sang by those being oppressed, a dirge for those dispersed into the darkness at the end of their suffering…

And yet, what is signified beneath cannot be compared to the power of the colors:

The blue, once the color of the sacred sky by Giotto and stained glass craftsman… (though I believe the emerald of the Passion series is an homage to that), now fallen upon earth as the shadows falling upon the prostitutes’ tired skin, or in the exiled outskirts of town in a winter landscape. The red is the color of the clown’s nose or the woman’s lips, or the judge’s ruddy, fat face – but ultimately it is the color of the blood of Christ streaking down from his crown of thorns. The sun is light of yellow, with a touch of occasional red, and at times it reads as ominous color of blood, and at other times the sacred color of the proof of Love. Yellow that is depicting light is layered upon much white underneath, giving it a particular glow, and enhanced sometimes by a top layer of emerald. White is the color of the garment of Christ, but it is also the color of the moon dominating over the night sky cast upon the ash ground in the hallowed evening.

And then, there is black

Yanagi continues to describe the black in Rouault as his most important color, noting, quite correctly that Impressionists did not use black. “Black may not hold a certain worldview: but black holds a definite spiritual outlook.” Rouault, to Yanagi, was an artist of the night.

Yanagi correctly states that only in such darkness, recognizing the bleak conditions of the world and the fallen reality of our souls, can Christ’s appearance make sense. He is the true Light behind the light. “The hope and love Christ shines into the world, and He is the only Light that will never be extinguished.

One should not be surprised, in following Rouault, to find a philosopher, like Yanagi, who do not identify himself as a Christian write so eloquently of the Biblical realities. That, in essence, is the power of Rouault’s universe. He is not merely a “religious” painter: he was the painter of a greater generative Reality, of multiple colors behind our dark, foreboding and destructive world.

Thus in homage to him, my Soliloquies painting begins with a dark background on linen, and minerals are layered on top in the traditional Nihonga technique. As Rouault sought to bring stained glass colors into the darkness, I am literally painting refractive colors into the darkness. As Rouault sought to incarnate God’s love into the faces of prostitutes, exiled to the outskirts of culture, so I face my paintings to bring medieval colors to dance, and gold leaf squares to invite the City of God into the hearts of the City of Man.

As I stood in the sun filled studio of Rouault in Paris, I pondered the conversations, the thoughts that Georges must have had. He must have been pondering upon Maritain’s philosophical musings as he painted one stack of paintings after another. He must have prayed, knowing that his art, too, was a prayer. Rouault and Maritain were instrumental in recovery of integration of faith and art at the time in France where their separation of church an state lead to closing of monasteries and banning of faith teaching in schools. To Rouault, his faith was not a private event, it was connected to the public reality, a threat he felt encroaching upon the whole of humanity.

My journey with faith, art and culture has lead me to begin the effort of International Arts Movement, a non-profit arts organization that would champion artists on the “outskirts” like Rouault. Georges and Marthe had three children, as Judy and I, struggling to raise them, not knowing exactly where the next month’s income will come from. Standing alone, in Georges’ studio, I had an inkling that my struggles were not foreign to him, but that they were inherited, worthy cause, passed down via the corridors of time inviting all of us for the Feast to come.

Rodin — The Eve. Edward Steichen, 1907
My Master,
… I wrote you from Haseldorf that in September I shall be in Paris to prepare myself for the book consecrated to your work. But what I have not yet told you is that for me, for my work (the work of a writer or rather of a poet), it will be a great event to come near you. Your art is such (I have felt it for a long time) that it knows how to give bread and gold to painters, to poets, to sculptors: to all artists who go their way of suffering, desiring nothing but that ray of eternity which is the supreme goal of the creative life.
Images from A Year with Rilke
http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.com/2011/02/love-song.html

Writer and poet, Rilke was considered one of the greatest lyric poets of modern Germany. He created the “object poem” as an attempt to describe with utmost clarity physical objects, the “silence of their concentrated reality.” He became famous with such works as Duineser Elegien and Die Sonette an Orpheus . They both appeared in 1923. After these books, Rilke had published his major works, believing that he had done his best as a writer.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague as the son of Josef Rilke, a railway official and the former Sophie Entz. A crucial fact in Rilke’s life was that his mother called him Sophia. She forced him to wear girl’s clothes until he was aged five – thus compensating for the earlier loss of a baby daughter. Rilke’s parents separated when he was nine. His militarily inclined Father sent him at ten yesrs old to the military academies of St. Pölten and Mahrisch-Weisskirchenn. At the military academy Rilke did not enjoy his stay, and was sent to a business school in Linz. He also worked in his uncle’s law firm. Rilke continued his studies at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Berlin.

As a poet Rilke made his debut at the age of nineteen with Leben und Lieder (1894), written in the conventional style of Heinrich Heine. In Munich he met the Russian intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome, an older woman, who influenced him deeply. In Florence, where he spent some months in 1898, Rilke wrote: “… I felt at first so confused that I could scarcely separate my impressions, and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendor.”

With Lou Andreas-Salome and her husband Rilke travelled in Russia in 1899, visiting among others Leo Tolstoy . Rilke was deeply impressed by what he learned of Russian mysticism. During this period he started to write The Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life , which appeared in 1905. He spent some time in Italy, Sweden, and Denmark, and joined an artists’ colony at Worpswede in 1903. In his letters to a young would-be poet, which he wrote from 1903 to 1908, Rilke explained, that “nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.” (in Letters to a Young Poet, 1929 )

In 1901 Rilke married the young sculptress, Klara Westhoff, one of Auguste Rodin’s pupils. They had a daughter, Ruth, but marriage lasted only one year. During this period Rilke composed in rhymed, metered verse, the second part of The Book of Hours . The work expressed his spiritual yearning. After Rilke had separated from Klara, he settled in Paris to write a book about Rodin and to work for his secretary (1905-06).

In the Spring of 1906 the overworked poet left Rodin abruptly. Rilke revised Das Buch der Bilder and published it in an enlarged edition. He also wrote The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke , which became a great popular success. During his Paris years Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry. After Neue Gedighte (1907-08, New Poems) he wrote a notebook named Die Aufzechnungen des Malte Laurdis Brigge (1910), his most important prose work. It took the form of a series of semiautobiographical spiritual confessions but written by a Danish expatriate in Paris.

Rilke kept silent as a poet for twelve years before writing Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus , which are concerned with “the identity of terror and bliss” and “the oneness of life and death”. Duino Elegies was born in two bursts of inspiration separated by ten years. According to a story, Rilke heard in the wind the first lines of his elegies when he was walking on the rocks above the sea – “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?“

Rilke visited his friend Princess Marie von Thurnun Taxis in 1910 at Duino, her remote castle on the coast of the Adriatic, and returned again next year. There he started to compose the poems, but the work did proceed easily. After serving in the army, Rilke was afraid that he would never be able to finish it but finally in 1922 he completed Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) in a chateau in Muzot, Switzerland. He also wrote an addition, the Sonnets to Orpheus , which was a memorial for the young daughter of a friend.

In the philosophical poems Rilke meditated on time and eternity, life and death, art versus ordinary things. The tone was melancholic. Rilke believed in the coexistence of the material and spiritual realms, but human beings were for him only spectators of life, grasping its beauties momentarily only to lose them again. With the power of creativity an artist can try to build a bridge between two worlds, although the task is almost too great for a man. The work influenced deeply such poets as Sidney Keyes, Stephen Spender, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and W.H. Auden, who had Rilkean angels appear in the collection In Times of War (1939).

In 1913 Rilke returned to Paris, but he was forced to return to Germany because of the First World War. Duino Castle was bombarded to ruins and Rilke’s personal property was confiscated in France. He served in the Austrian army and found another patron, Werner Reinhart, who owned the Castle Muzot at Valais. After 1919 he lived in Switzerland, occupied by his work and roses in his little garden. For time to time he went to Paris for a few months or to Italy. Rilke’s companion during his last years was the artist Baladine (Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro), whose son, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), become also an artist. Rilke wrote a foreword to a book illustrated by Balthus’s drawings of cats. Rilke died on December 29, in 1926.
From poemhunter.com

**********************************************

Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

***************************************

I don’t know if Rilke was Catholic or not but this is such a powerful image of how divine love touches us as a musician holds the strings of an instrument and plays a melody from two strings.  I guess if you are an atheist you have to reject the whole thing as nonsense but what a loss not to experience the overwhelming sense of a love that touches the divine.

I hope this is the kind of love you have found, Stella. God bless you.

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.
SPINOZA, Ethics

***********************************

Some people believe in life in heaven after death because it is the only thing that makes the troubles and tragedies of this life bearable. In the absence of any proof that there is no heaven, they cling to the faith that there must be. If God is all-powerful and loving, He should be both willing and able to provide a happy ending to our all-too-brief and frustrating lives on earth. If God could create life out of nothing, why can’t He restore a life that was already there?

Benjamin Franklin, shortly before his death, penned his own obituary: “The body of B. Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out…. But the work shall not be wholly lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the Author.”

I would like to believe it. It would be a source of immeasurable bliss to think that when I die, I would be reunited with my son and make up for all those years of being together that I was denied when he died at age fourteen. But that joyful possibility is one of the things that makes me skeptical about the notion of an afterlife. I learned early that the world is not designed to make me happy. Books and movies can be manipulated by their creators to have happy endings; real life doesn’t always work out that way.

More than that, I am uncomfortable with a faith system that posits a definition of God and then decides “what God has to do” in order to live up to their definition. It sounds a bit like saying, If the facts conflict with my theology, I would rather ignore the facts than question my theology.

My colleague Professor Neil Gillman, in his excellent study The Death of Death, points out something I had never noticed before. The last line of the Passover Seder, when Jews celebrate God’s redeeming of our ancestors from bondage in Egypt, describes God destroying the Angel of Death, as if anticipating a parallel between the Egyptian Exodus and a deliverance from the enslavement to mortality that limits us. We may no longer be slaves to Pharaoh, but our bodies are slaves to the Angel of Death, who will one day come to claim us. On Passover, we yearn to be freed from that limitation.

My family and I will continue to end our Seder meal with that image, but as we do so, I am chastened by Gillman’s cautionary words: “The surest way to trivialize any eschatological doctrine is to understand it as literal truth, as a prediction of events that will take place as they are described in some eventual future.” To me, the vision of God destroying Death offers not the promise of physically living again or of living forever but a poetic expression of confidence that there are some things about a person who links his or her life with God — deeds of kindness, medical breakthroughs, great works of art — that permit that person to outlive even his or her own death.

A reality check would remind us that our bodies decay and return to the earth, but so many of our after-death fantasies assume that we will still have bodies, probably because we can’t imagine what it would feel like to exist without them. I have always been drawn to the vision of the afterlife offered by Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher of the twelfth century. He posited that, after we die, the righteous are rewarded by having their disembodied souls spend eternity in the presence of God, and the wicked are punished by missing out on that reward. My only problem with that view is that it assumes a duality, an essential divide between body and soul, which is more of a Greek notion than a biblical one.

Let me then offer my own belief on the subject: We don’t have to be afraid of dying because it is not really death that scares us. We are afraid of not having lived. In my nearly fifty years as a clergyman, I have been at the bedside of many, many dying people, young and old, religious and freethinkers, successful in life and less successful. They taught me the profound truth that terminally ill people are not afraid of death. When you are very sick, when little by little your body stops being able to do the things it has always been able to do, death may be the only cure for what ails you. There are three things that terrify the very ill person more than the prospect of dying.

They are afraid of pain, they are afraid that people will abandon them while they are still alive, and they are afraid that they will die having wasted their lives, having never accomplished anything that will cause people to remember them when they are gone. For most people, the prospect of nullification, of having left no mark on the world, is more frightening than the prospect of not living forever. The real fear of dying, I am convinced, is the fear that we will leave this world with our tasks unfinished, and the best way, indeed the only way, to defeat death is to live fearlessly and purposefully.

When it comes to the fear, of pain and of abandonment, the best thing that has happened in my lifetime has been the emergence of the hospice movement. I was recently invited to address a conference of hospice workers and volunteers, and I began by congratulating them on having changed the average American’s definition of a good death. Had you asked the average person a few years ago for his notion of a good death, he probably would have said “to go to sleep and not wake up,” echoing Woody Allen’s words, “I don’t mind dying; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Today, hospice has taught us to define a good death as one that sees us surrounded by family and loved ones, giving us the opportunity to say good-bye, to thank them for having cared for us and shared their lives with us, leaving no words unspoken that need to be spoken.

And hospice has persuaded doctors to let go, to forgo uncomfortable, invasive treatments that would only bring the patient a few more days or weeks of discomfort. Doctors no longer see assigning a patient to hospice as giving up or admitting defeat. As one doctor put it, when it comes to the terminally ill, medical care should usually involve more care and less medicine. American society has been slower, however, to recognize the need of the terminally ill for human companionship. Perhaps because we feel so inadequate to do anything helpful (“I never know what to say”), perhaps because it involves looking in the mirror and seeing a preview of our own mortality, we visit the terminally ill less often, we phone them less often, and we spend less time with them.

I remember a colleague of mine, an outstanding rabbi and pastor, who once confided to me, “I have a congregant whom I like a lot. He’s about my age, a good friend, an occasional tennis partner. He’s in the hospital with cancer and doesn’t have much time left. I know I ought to visit him, but for some reason I never get around to it.” I suggested, “Might it be because when you visit him, you see yourself one day in that situation and that’s scary?” David Kessler, author of The Needs of the Dying, has written, “We may never feel more alone than when we ourselves are dying.” Elsewhere, Kessler pictures the hospitalized terminally ill person saying, “You can talk to me, you can talk about me.: Just don’t talk without me, as if I weren’t here. I’m not dead yet.”

Recently, a close friend had to bury his ninety-seven-year-old aunt. He told me that when he visited her at the assisted-living facility where she spent her last years, the staff would comment on his frequent visits, telling him, “You have no idea how many people here go for weeks and months without a single visitor.”

I know from my own experience in hospitals and nursing homes that it is not pleasant visiting the seriously ill. We feel there is so little we can do for them. When we do bring ourselves to do it, we should realize that our presence, our caring enough to come, does a lot for the dying person. It may not extend her life, but it reassures her that people know that she is still very much alive. Kessler offers a beautiful image of what we can do when a loved one is dying. He suggests that we escort them to the door of death the way we would accompany a friend leaving on a journey to his or her gate at the airport. (Given today’s airport rules, we might think of accompanying them to the security transit point.)

But in case after case the dying have taught me that what frightened them more than pain or loneliness was the fear that they had wasted their lives, that they had used up their allotted time on earth keeping busy but never really having lived. Earlier, I cited the theory that the knowledge Adam and Eve acquired when they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the knowledge that elevated them above the level of animals, was the knowledge that they would one day die, and I asked how that awareness of mortality could be called good and bad, as the Bible describes the fruit.

The answer may be that death is not good (except where it brings release from unbearable suffering), but the knowledge that we are destined to die can be good if it moves us to take our choices and preferences more seriously. If our time is limited, we realize that what we put off today, we may never get around to doing. It has been said that death, like birth, provides life with a temporal frame, a beginning and an end. Without them, there can be no middle. In the words of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote so meaningfully on the subject, “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know you must do.”

Death does not negate the meaning of our lives. Death helps to define our lives. Remember, the word “define” means “to set boundaries.” Death marks the end of life in the same way that a period marks the end of a sentence. It doesn’t rob the sentence of meaning; it clarifies what the meaning of the sentence is. Your life is not meaningless just because it doesn’t go on forever. It is precisely because our lives do not go on forever that our choices and values have significance.

But what if we understand that we are mortal yet get the frightening feeling that we may be running out of time with a large part of our agenda unfinished? What if, as we grow older and notice changes in our health and vigor, as we read more obituary notices for people our age and younger, we find ourselves thinking less about life and more about the prospect of dying? To speak of death in the abstract, to speak of the inevitability of death for all mankind, is a philosophical-theological conversation. To confront the prospect of one’s own imminent death is an act of immense courage. My friend Forrest Church, a Unitarian minister in New York and author of a dozen books, recently sent me the manuscript of his next book. In an accompanying note, he told me that this book would be his last; he was dying of esophageal cancer. The book would be called Love and Death.

How does a man who has dealt with death professionally for years deal with the prospect of his own death? First, he overcomes the temptation to blame himself for contracting a fatal illness, not asking himself, “What did I do to deserve this?” whether in terms of unhealthy living or moral misbehavior. Too often, asking why either becomes an effort to find someone to blame or suggests that if we had never made any wrong choices in our lives, we might have lived forever. Church writes, “The hard truth is … we all die of something. Vegetarians die. Joggers die. Even people with low cholesterol die….However we may have lived, the ultimate culprit is not sin or squalor but life. Life draws death in its glorious train.”

Next, he realizes that his death will be a source of anguish for his family and friends, and it is his obligation to be aware of that even if he won’t be around to see it. He reaches out to them, articulating his fears so that they will feel free to express theirs, forgiving and seeking forgiveness. In that way, the loneliest thing any of us will ever do becomes just a bit less lonely.

And finally he draws comfort from his faith, not faith in a God of happy endings for good people and not faith in the certainty of a life in the hereafter but the faith that life is not meaningless just because it is not endless. “Everyone suffers but not everyone despairs. Despair is a consequence of suffering only when affliction cuts us off from others. The same suffering that leads one person to lose all hope can as easily promote empathy, a felt appreciation for other people’s pain.” It can also lead us to take pleasure in savoring one’s time with loved ones, knowing it will be brief and therefore all the more precious.

Over the years, my appreciation of the books of Philip Roth has been enhanced by the realization that he and I are about the same age. I could identify with his characters, from the randy adolescents of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy ‘s Complaint to the rueful middle-aged figure of Nathan Zuckerman.

When, in his most recent novels, I find heroes who are his (and my) age obsessed with the prospect of growing old and dying, I can’t help feeling that this reflects issues with which Roth himself is grappling, and it saddens me that a writer of Roth’s immense talent should be focusing on how little he has left rather than on how much. It bothers me because I recognize that same tendency in myself as I grow into my seventies and have to make allowances for physical and mental things I can no longer do as easily as I once did. It is the plaint of Ecclesiastes, who finds himself in old age thinking, I have striven to do so much and now I am running out of time and wondering what the point of it all was.

In contrast with this obsession with the gathering darkness, I am drawn to the attitude of the artist Marc Chagall, who just before his death at age ninety-seven completed his last painting entitled Towards Another Light, showing a young painter with wings (as if ready for flight) working at his easel and an angel descending from heaven to carry him off. I would like to see a person’s last years (including my own) guided by the words of Spinoza that appear in the epigraph to this post, “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.”

The sin of Ecclesiastes — to focus too much on the fear of death, to see it as canceling out everything you have done in your lifetime — gives death more power than it deserves. Death is not the final word. Your life is the story; death is only punctuation. We sin against life and against everything that is holy and valuable in life if we let the fear of death rob us of our freedom to enjoy as much life as we are granted.

I read Roth’s novel Everyman shortly after it was published, not realizing at the time that Roth had taken the title from a well-known medieval morality play and modeled his leading character after the hero of the play, a man who is terrified at the prospect of dying and dismayed to learn that neither friends nor family nor worldly success can postpone his passage. Happily, there is evidence that many people do deal with growing old and approaching the end of life more like Chagall than like Roth’s protagonists. After Roth’s novel appeared, two social scientists wrote to The New York Times Book Review citing the results of their research on middle-class Americans in their seventies. They wrote, “Only a small minority `worry about oblivion.’ Most accept their lives, including illness, loss and their many past misdeeds, and purposefully engage with the present…. Some despair, but they tend to be the same people who were also despairing in young and middle adulthood…. We share this note lest too many aging Americans take permission from Roth to dwell in the past and fear the future rather than seize the present.”

My own experience endorses theirs. People are living longer, and most of them are no longer spending their last years watching television in an empty apartment and waiting for the end. More and more of them are finding useful, creative things to do, mentoring young people, organizing book clubs, and keeping themselves vital as they do so.

I have two specific suggestions for those people (and I include myself in their number) who realize that the years behind significantly outnumber the years ahead, and for those who may find themselves looking forward to death because they find their current lives unsatisfying. We have to cleanse our souls of accumulated bitterness, envy, and resentment. We have to get over our anger at people who may have hurt, cheated, or betrayed us, most of whom may be long dead themselves or long gone from our lives. I would say to people, Why do you insist on carrying that heavy baggage into whatever is waiting for you? Why are you giving those people such power over you, to define you as a loser, a bitter, jealous person? Let go and travel light.

And second, we have to be able to focus on one or two meaningful things in our lives that we can feel we did well. A life doesn’t have to be remarkable to be meaningful. If you were not that successful in business, if you never earned a lot of money, you can focus on the fact that you lived and worked with integrity, that you were a good neighbor and earned the respect of your coworkers. If as a mother you are disappointed at the way your children turned out, you can still take pride in your ability to go on loving them and caring about them despite your disappointment. Love them because of who you want to be, not just because of who you want them to be.

If you worry that no one cares about you now that you are old and failing, find times to surround yourself with friends and family to give you the message of how much they care and to celebrate with them what your life has been about. Many years ago, when I was a young rabbi preparing to officiate at my first funeral (and only the third one at which I had been present), an older colleague gave me a valuable piece of advice. He told me, “Every life is a unique story, one that has never happened before. Your task as a eulogizer is to find that unique dimension and build your eulogy around it, so that friends and family will have that to remember.”

When Thornton Wilder wrote his novel in an effort to make sense of the death of innocent people, he had them die when a bridge collapsed. Why did he have them die that way? Why not in a fire, an automobile accident, a plague, or at the hands of a violent murderer? Wilder may have been using the image of the fragile rope bridge over a chasm as a symbol of the precariousness of all of our lives. Whether we understand the bridge as carrying us to a better world or just taking us to tomorrow’s problems and possibilities, each of us every day is making his or her way across a shaky bridge, aware that something might happen to us at any moment but at the same time realizing that if all we can think about is the fear of falling, we will never get anywhere in our lives. Feel the fear but cross the bridge anyway.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, one of the dominant personalities in the world of Eastern European Hasidic Judaism was a man named Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlay. He enchanted his followers with his enigmatic stories and sayings, many of which are pored over to this day by theologians and psychiatrists alike. One of his many sayings became a popular song in Israel several years ago at a particularly tense time in Israeli society. This whole world, he said, is nothing but a narrow bridge, and for those who would cross it, the most important thing is not to be afraid.

We too, the only creatures who live with the daily awareness of our mortality, may feel that we are called on to cross that narrow bridge every day of our lives. If we let ourselves be paralyzed by the fear of falling into the chasm, we will never get anywhere or achieve anything. It will be the fear of death, not the fact of death, that will rob our lives of meaning. For us, as for Rabbi Nachman’s disciples, the most important thing to remember is not to be afraid.

In its entirety, all the world
is a too-narrow bridge
and the key
is to not be afraid
at all.
(Attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav)

Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow men, I’d prefer to live on in my apartment.
WOODY ALLEN

****************************************

When I was fifteen years old, I fell in love with the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. I loved Ecclesiastes then for much the same reasons that my fifteen-year-old grandson loves Jon Stewart and The Daily Show on television, for the same reasons that fifteen-year-olds have for decades responded to J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye – because it seemed to challenge the hypocritical pieties of the adult world that controlled my life. “All is vanity. What does a man gain from all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). “I amassed silver and gold, more than anyone before me … and it was all futile, there was no real value to it” (Ecclesiastes 2:8-11). “Be not excessively righteous nor excessively wise lest you bring yourself to destruction” (Ecclesiastes 7:16).

When I was thirty-five years old and working toward a doctoral degree in the Bible, I returned to the study of Ecclesiastes and discovered another dimension of the anonymous sage who wrote it. Now I came to see him as a middle-aged man who worried that all he had worked so hard for — wealth, fame, pleasure — would ultimately disappear, and nothing would remain. He was asking, “What is worth investing my time and energy in? What will endure?”

Then, the year I turned fifty, my father died, and I became the oldest living member of my family. I turned again to Ecclesiastes, making it the focus of my book When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, and for the third time in my life, I thought I finally understood it. Now I saw the author of Ecclesiastes as an old man, terrified at the prospect of dying. Now what frightened him was not the thought that everything he had worked for would disappear. It was the fear that he would disappear. The prospect of dying cast a pall over everything he had done and everything he still yearned to do, shrouding it with an air of futility.

He had met every challenge life had put to him, but he would not be able to meet the challenge of defeating death. Ernest Becker, in his classic work The Denial of ‘Death, writes, “Of all things that move men, one of the principal ones is the terror of death…. It is the basic fear that influences all others, a fear from which no one is immune.”

All living things, when faced with danger, struggle to escape and survive. But only human beings are haunted by the knowledge of their ultimate mortality even when they are not in mortal danger. Some years ago, I heard a lecture on the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The speaker asked, “What was the knowledge that Adam and Eve acquired when they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad? Was the story meant to teach us that they learned that some things are good and others are bad, that they acquired a conscience? Or was the story less about the meaning of the fruit and more about their act of disobedience, that having been given one rule, they broke it?”

The speaker said that by eating the fruit, they learned something that was both good and bad. They learned that one day they would die, and having learned how brief and fragile a human life could be, they would never again be able to think of their lives in the same way. God’s warning to the first humans, “for on the day you eat of it, you will die” (Genesis 2:17), would be understood to mean not that they would die instantly (they didn’t) but that they would realize, in a way, no other creature does, that they were fated one day to die.

The question of how the knowledge of our inevitable death can be called both “good and bad” is an important one that we will have to deal with. But the speaker went on to justify his interpretation by calling our attention to what happens immediately after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. The very next verse tells us they realized that they were naked and they were embarrassed (Genesis 3:7). Why were they embarrassed, given that there was literally no one else in the world to see them in their nakedness?

They were embarrassed to have bodies, not because there was anything wrong with their bodies, some parts too big and others too small, but because it was their bodies that made them mortal, vulnerable to illness, injury, and death. Their bodies would one day betray them, made up as they were of bones that could break, organs that could fail, blood that could become infected. If it weren’t for their physical bodies, they would be able to go on living eternally.

We human beings are caught up in a perpetual struggle between the yearnings of the spirit and the demands of the body. No matter how much we cultivate the spirit, no matter how much we strive to subordinate our bodies to it through prayer, dieting, and sexual restraint, we can never escape the realization that in the end, our physical bodies will have the ultimate victory. They will give out, and, no matter how pious we are, we will die.

The fact that only the human being is burdened every day of his life by the knowledge of death’s inevitability may explain why the author of the Twenty-third Psalm speaks of the “valley of the shadow of death.” Long before someone comes to the point of actually dying, the prospect of death, the inevitability of death, casts a shadow over his days.

The knowledge of our mortality spurs people to do great things in an effort to cheat death. Families have children so that their name, their values, and their DNA will live on into the next generation. People who never have children find other ways of achieving a form of immortality. Artists, writers, and composers labor to fashion works of art that future generations will continue to cherish.

Doctors strive to find cures for diseases, whether in the hope that future generations will invoke their names with gratitude, the way we speak of the Salk vaccine against polio, or as a symbolic victory for the human spirit in the fight against disease. Physician and author Dr. Sherwin Nuland has written, “Of all the professions, medicine is one most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying. We become doctors because our ability to cure gives us power over the death of which we are so afraid.”

If we were pure spirit, if we were angels, we could happily exist forever without worrying about illness, physical decline, and death. If we were only animals, we could live, age, and perish without the distraction of dreading the end of our lives. If we were pure spirit, we would never be seduced by gluttony, envy, or sexual desire. If we were bodies without souls, without conscience, we could indulge in our fill of sensual pleasure without pangs of guilt. But because we are unique creatures that combine body and spirit, we crave religion to guide and elevate us, and at the same time, we resent it for making us feel guilty whenever we are tempted to do things that most normal people are tempted to do. (I have long suspected that many anti-Semites are really feeling hatred for the Jew from Nazareth for imposing Christian morality on them.)

When we are young, we act on the assumption that our time is unlimited. Young people are not uncomfortable wasting time because they believe they have an endless supply of it. To them, middle age is unimaginably far off and death is too far over the horizon even to be glimpsed. It has been said that eighteen-year-old young men make the best soldiers and the worst drivers because they can’t imagine they won’t live forever. When I have had to officiate at the funeral of a young person, a victim of disease or accident, I have found adults to be saddened by the tragedy. But the dead young person’s friends feel more angry than sad. They feel betrayed. “This is so unfair; this is not supposed to happen, ” they say.

But soon enough, the time comes when those who survive have to come to terms with their mortality, when they realize that no matter how wisely they eat or how strenuously they exercise, they will not live forever. How then do they avoid the fate of Ecclesiastes, deciding that nothing matters because, despite their best efforts, they will die one day and the world will keep going without them?

It is when people confront these kinds of questions that they turn to religion. How does religion guide us in not letting the prospect of death cast a cloud of futility over our lives? Religious guidance typically goes in one of three directions. Sometimes religion tries to justify an individual’s death as appropriate, part of God’s plan. I have seen life and death in this world compared to a tapestry seen from the wrong side, a jumble of long and short threads fitting no discernible pattern.

But seen from above, from God’s perspective, the long threads, the knotted threads, and the threads cut short all fit together to make up a work of beauty. Or premature death may be a reward for having successfully completed one’s life mission. Buddhism speaks of a death as “the drop of water returning to its source in the ocean.” Or it may be seen as part of God’s long-range plan, impossible for us on earth to comprehend.

Sometimes religion tries to banish the terror of death by assuring us that death is not real. It offers us a promise of the hereafter, a life beyond this life, a realm where our spirits will have shed their earthly bodies and will live on eternally. In heaven, we will still have a sense of who we are. We will recognize our loved ones. But everything that was wrong in this world, everything that was broken or imperfect, will be healed. In heaven, there will be no illness, no hunger, and no jealousy.

And sometimes religion promises us that, despite the limitations of our corporeal nature, we are capable of lives of such heroism and spiritual excellence that we will represent the triumph of the spirit over the flesh here on earth. In his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder offers his solution to the question of why death often seems to interrupt an unfinished life. The book begins with an accident that claims the lives of five apparently unrelated people. A rope bridge over a chasm in a small. Peruvian village gives way, sending the five people who were crossing it to their deaths.

A young Catholic priest witnesses the accident, and it challenges his faith in the goodness of a world under God’s direction. He sets out to investigate the lives of the five victims to see if in any way it was morally appropriate for them to die at that moment and in that manner. He discovers that in each case, the person’s ability to enjoy life had been blocked by an excessive focus on the self and an inability to love. But each of them had recently resolved that problem and opened himself or herself to love. The priest’s conclusion is that how long a person lives may be the least important measure of that person’s life. Our lives are measured in breadth and depth, not only in length. The purpose of life is to learn to love, to learn to reach out beyond the self. When we have learned to do that, we will have reached our goal and will be ready to “graduate” from this life to a higher level.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a beautiful book that has comforted many people over the years, but in the end, I find Wilder’s solution unsatisfying. Why should people whom we love be taken. away from us just when they have learned to love us in return? Are we wrong to grieve for them if their death represents their “graduating” to a higher form of life? Wouldn’t this world be a better place if people who were capable of sharing love remained on earth to bless us with their love? Are we all destined to suffer the fate of Romeo and Juliet and all the other star-crossed lovers of medieval and modern literature, to die just when love seems within reach?

And why would Wilder write a book to warn us against learning to love because it might prove fatal? We are left having to believe either that death (not death in general but the death of a specific person at a specific time, someone we knew and cared about) is tragic because it reduces the amount of goodness in the world, in which case we are baffled as to why God permits it, or that death in our world is one necessary stage of a larger plan on God’s part.

It can be tempting to fasten on to the idea that death need not be tragic because a better life awaits us on the other side. I remember seeing a cartoon that showed a husband and wife who had died arriving in heaven, which is a world of sunlight and soft music and comfortable places to sit and relax. The husband turns to his wife and says, “Just think. If we hadn’t quit smoking and eaten all that oat bran, this could have been ours ten years sooner.”

The notion of a life beyond this one came relatively late to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Most of the Hebrew Bible never speaks of it. In fact, the book of Job, the story of a good man who suffers terribly, where one would expect the defenders of orthodox theology to comfort Job with visions of heavenly bliss and reward, never mentions it at all. To the contrary, all the speakers in the book seem to agree that “there is hope for a tree; if it is cut down, it will renew itself…. But mortals languish and die. Man expires and then where is he?” (Job 14:7, 10).

It is only in the book of Daniel, the last book in the Hebrew canon to be written, that we first find explicit references to the idea that those who die tragically and heroically will be restored to a better, longer life through God’s intervention (Daniel 12:2-3).

Most scholars believe that the impetus for the emergence of this idea was the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks, the story behind the festival of Hanukkah some 160 years B.C.E. Many pious Jews died defending their faith against the efforts of the Greek emperor to wipe it out. Even as in our time, people might have been willing to accept the tragic death of individuals, telling themselves that we don’t know all the details behind God’s designs, until the Holocaust forced them to reconsider their beliefs, so the experience of seeing the most faithful and heroic people killed in battles defending God drove many Judeans, unwilling to conclude that life was unfair, to insist that that could not be the final event of those people’s lives: Sometimes that insistence led to anticipating the resurrection of the dead to live out the stolen years of their lives on earth, a doctrine that, after bitter disputes, found its way into the Jewish prayer book. Sometimes it led to a belief in a person’s soul spending eternity in heaven with God and other pious souls.