On Materialism, Sex Cults, and Meaning

I remember laying on the couch as an adolescent, having just found out that the pretty girl in class “liked” me. I was in a daze, awash in some mixture of joy and wonder. I had no way to understand it at the time, but I’ve since come to understand that this was the first feel of a golden thread in my story. Remembering her glances sent my blood rushing. My eyes were opened to an entirely new dimension of existence, a first hazy view of the oceanic scale of a new kind of human love. Not the love that defines the home, but the love “out there” that calls us upward and inspires adventure.

This was no sexual awakening. It was more innocent, yet more powerful, than that. What awakened was not lust – we were both too young for that – but a different kind of love than I had ever experienced. That there was some other person in the world, not in my family but wholly “other,” who felt some attraction to me beyond friendship, opened a new door on the horizon. My first view to capital-M Meaning was glimpsed in the monumental fact that she was beautiful, and she smiled at me. It was an invitation to an innocent union with incarnate beauty, like the universe itself was opening its arms to me.

For many, romance provides the first view to the transcendent. It impresses upon us that we were fundamentally made for connection, and that we participate in the web of relationships that hold the universe together. With soul and body, we add to the abundant wellspring of life, a romance that descends from and ascends to Divinity itself. Beauty draws all its own into a joyful union.

Or, at least, that’s how it feels. The fork in the road, as we grow older, is whether we dismiss the power of this early experience as naïve idealism glommed on to a basic sexual instinct, or whether we honor it as a genuine experience of something higher. The temptation to the former gets stronger as our romantic experiences (escapades?) batter the vision and bring us to earth.

Sex as Asset

Today we often speak of sex as a physiological need that correlates with our psychological need for acceptance and intimacy. This betrays the commodified approach that infects our modern self-understanding: that the “health” which stands as our goal is viewed as a balance of psychological assets to be acquired. A meeting of “needs.” And in this materialist paradigm, meeting these “needs” is, at bottom, only the attainment of the proper cocktail of hormones coursing through our system. Modern people promote the adoption of religious practices, not for any belief in religious truth, but because, for instance, prayer and meditation can increase serotonin production.

They promote the need for intimacy and acceptance for the same reasons. Sex gets reified into an asset. The point of sex is not integration into some higher reality or a deeper fount of Meaning, but the acquisition of the ingredients of a Happy Life, according to the data. All our humanity gets commodified, and life is little more than an endless stream of needs, endless comparison, endless resentment of thwarted wishes.

I reject the idea of sex being a means of satisfying intimacy needs only because I don’t think we should view ourselves primarily as a set of empty labeled cups – intimacy, acceptance, adventure, power, etc. – that need filling. Of course we do have such needs, but they do not hang in midair. They are tied to something greater than our own biology. We should have the courage to believe the transcendent vision is genuine.

Sex is always spiritual, a window to higher reality, and if we can’t reckon with it on those terms, then it will always baffle us. So transcendent is the center of that bullseye that we throw ourselves at it with irrational fervor, staking our being on the attainment of its divine promise. And we do so heedless of the fact that missing the mark will land us in a swamp of abuses, addictions, murders and suicides.

Not an Asset but a Doorway

It always gets nearer to truth to speak of this force in mythological terms rather than the cold labels of clinicians. If romance were a mere asset, we might pursue it with cold, rational self-interest. But we don’t, and we regard those who would as sociopathic.

Thousands of years before our modern commodified sex, ancient pagans had at least the good sense to create sex cults. The point of these was never the meeting of needs or the acquisition of an asset conducive to flourishing. They perceived the divine undercurrent flowing beneath all things: the innate Eros that brought the disparate elements in nature together into one cosmos. To commune with that force, to get pulled up and woven together into the immanent divine, meant giving themselves over to that eros, body and soul. Their prostitutes were priestesses. Sex was not an asset, it was the gateway to divine meaning, or divinization itself.

“Eros” is a term that we fail to appreciate in its fullness. We recognize it as the base of “erotic,” which we almost exclusively relegate to the realm of cheap and illicit sex. But it’s both broader and deeper than that. Think of the desire between the sexes as an entry point to seeing what is beautiful in all Nature. Just as desire exists between the sexes, a desire that culminates in a joyful ecstasy and results in the creation of new life, so we can see an exuberant movement toward unity in all things. There is eros everything beautiful – in the unity of sand and sea, of sunlight on foliage. Rain is a life-giving union of Mother Earth and Father Sky. All are a joining of Heaven and Earth.

Ancient philosophers debated whether the cosmos was One or Many. Eros is nearly a one-word answer to the problem. It is always working in the background to bring the chaotic elements of nature, the Many, into some ineffable and unfolding unity, impossibly hanging together like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Sex embodies eros, but it is only one fractal level of this greater pattern of the creation of Life by way of the unity of complementary parts – not a concept to contemplate but a pattern that we can embody ourselves. It’s our participation in Beauty itself.

Compared to this paradigm, the materialist sex-as-commodity mindset is obviously impoverished. If we speak of ourselves as animals with mindless and meaningless cravings that we pursue as biological mechanisms, we should not be surprised when we ourselves become drained of both mind and meaning. The ancients were nearer the mark: sex never was a commodity and it isn’t today. When young men go looking for it, online or not, they are not seeking satisfaction but meaning. They are driven not by some hope to acquire an asset; they are knocking at the divine door of eros itself, hoping to be let in to a higher place.

This is the power of beauty, and it shouldn’t be underestimated. We don’t seek it as consumers hoping to have our preferences satisfied. Beauty is not something to “have.” It is something to get caught up into. It reaches out to us with its many arms – in nature, in art, in stories and melodies – inviting us further up and further in. Eros between the sexes is only the most potent form of this same invitation.

So it doesn’t matter how secularized a man becomes, a smile from a beautiful woman will stop him in his tracks. It is a sudden appearance of Jacob’s ladder, a doorway to something infinite.

Addiction as Inversion

A couple years after my reverie on the couch, I faced a time of confusion and alienation, moving as a young teenager across the country. It’s no wonder that I sought again that powerful vision, hoping to find my place. I looked for it in the eyes of any pretty girl I saw, online or not. I hoped for it like an exile waiting to be brought back home.

This was where the dysfunction began. The power of that early experience was twisted into a reversal of the natural form. I craved beauty, not so that I could offer myself to it, but that I might be filled by it. I reversed the natural romantic movement of self-emptying to the demonic desire to be filled. And just as eros properly pulls us to divine height, the reversal of this movement can pull us to infernal depths of craving.

The dysfunction continued into adulthood. In my 20s, the door was opened to an entry level position in a vast bureaucracy. I found myself on a kind of corporate conveyor belt bearing me toward the long-promised “good career” and “comfortable retirement” of my tepid dreams. I was trapped in the Matrix of commodified materialism. My entire life laid itself out before me only as an extended arithmetic problem of income versus expenses, of job security and retirement planning. A never-ending filling of needs. It’s only natural that I would be drawn to anything with a gleam of the transcendent.

Sex presented itself as a last remaining tether to something more meaningful. It was the last thing capable of stirring the deepest elements within me, the last thing that looked like a real adventure. At the office I could put in sufficient effort to meet my material needs before going home to my daily ritual in the digital temple.

As the frustrated pursuit gained urgency, I settled for increasingly fractured forms of it, content with ever more fraudulent forms of Eros. This is the mythical root of addiction. I became like a man rushing from door to door in a mad search for one that would finally lead to Heaven. In every chat room or dating site, in the face of every passing girl, I was hoping for a glimmer of salvation.

The madness of it is the giveaway. You’re no longer in the sober, waking world. It doesn’t matter how you think about madness – caught up in faerie, battling the unconscious, fighting demons – the people around you don’t understand what’s going on. Why can’t you control yourself? When are you going to grow up? But it doesn’t matter. Once the spiritual inversion is in place, you will never stop digging deeper to be filled rather than lift your empty hands to heaven.

The True Path Remains Whole

The whole point of a Jacob’s ladder to the infinite is that it is a single, unbroken path. It is not wrong to view sexuality as a kind of portal of divine meaning, but it’s crucial to keep the vision whole. Grasping at fragments is worse than meaningless; it is devastating. The Beautiful exudes Life and Abundance from beginning to end, but you can mark the cheap imitation by the trail of destruction it leaves in its wake.

The priestesses of the ancient sex cults had to abandon their infants on the outskirts of the city. The horror of the practice only came into sharp relief once Christians began to take up the crying babies as their own. In the same way, the fuller Christian vision of eros picked up the discarded shards of pagan hedonism and re-integrated sexuality into its proper end: committed and faithful marriage. This way, the joyful creation of new human life becomes an integral part of the beauty of eros – not an unfortunate byproduct to be disposed of.

In other words, the sex cult was exchanged for the marriage cult, which insists that the romantic trajectory from first sight to approach, flirting, dating, to marriage, sex and childbirth is all one beautiful Thing. The fact that not all encounters end this way does nothing to negate the shape of the whole. Nitpickers can add as many caveats as they want, the point is that the palpable energy at the thrill of first sight is powerful because it is charged with the potential of new life – because we are stepping into the divine current of Life itself.

The Christian insistence that sex should stay within marriage is not outdated moralism; it is trying to channel the flame of eros in a way that honors and sustains our humanity.

We may be tempted to cut the trajectory short to enjoy it on our own terms. We want to climb the ladder, just a few rungs of it, over and over until the craving stops. But the game is rigged: The only way to get the thing we crave is to take the ladder all the way up. The true craving is for what I sensed in my adolescent daze on the couch all those years ago. Not sex itself, not immediate pleasure, and, my goodness, not the dopamine. The craving is for the upward call of divine Beauty.

The sexual path to this transcendence is through marriage. Marriage is, after all, the predominant biblical metaphor with which God describes his purposes. Our union with God likewise culminates in the bodily union experienced in the eucharist and leads to the creation of new Life. Our understanding must transcend the sexual to understand how foundational this union is to the entire cosmos.

In The Ethics of Beauty, Timothy Patitsas explains how God’s act of creation is itself a holy eros:

“When” (we cannot use words for time in these mysteries, except allegorically) the Father caused the Spirit to proceed and rest upon his only begotten Son, the Son “at once” became willing to share out his Life with the world – a world which was then roused into existence through this very shining out, this self-emptying of Christ in the Holy Spirit in obedience to the Father.

To put it another way, St. Maximos says that God was so good that his goodness could not be contained within himself. It poured forth “outside” himself in a cosmic Theophany over against the face of darkness. The appearing of this ultimate Beauty caused non-being to forget itself, to renounce itself, to leave behind its own “self” (non-being), and come to be. All of creation is thus marked by this eros, by this movement of doxology, liturgy, and love. Creation is a movement of repentance out of chaos and into the light of existence. (p. 75)

This is the positive vision of Eros, the desiring that leads to life, abundance, and the running over of the cup. And when we get addicted to some fragmented version of this, whether flirtation, infatuation, or pornified false intimacy, pursuing health requires some vision of the full scale of the trajectory, a higher vision of the yearning for unity of all things, and the desire for God. New life begins when we empty ourselves in the presence of this creative Theophany so that we can become joined to it.

This is the cosmic significance of sex. It is only a secondary analogue to God’s act of Creation itself – an act in which we are invited to participate. The beauty and adventure of it can be ours, but only if we engage it as Christ does. Not the materialist vision of fulfillment or “self-actualization,” but the self-emptying sacrifice proper to our human role as deputy creators. In marriage we experience that strangest of Christian paradoxes: that the Cross of sacrifice and the Tree of Life are one and the same.