The Ordeal of Civility

Sexuality and Christianity: The Refining Process

Sublimation “is what Nietzsche calls the transformation of coarse drives into refined ones,” writes Karl Jaspers.¹ But sublimation can take place only as a result of inhibition, Nietzsche argued, and “this provides a clue to the explanation of the paradox that precisely in Europe’s Christian period … the sex drive became love (amour-passion) as a result of sublimation.”² This is the bone that stuck in Freud’s throat. Christian Europe, the goyim, had a corner on “romance.” The whole phenomenon of courtship and its rituals, as well as courtesy itself, descended from the feudal court. Freud was deeply ambivalent about this sublimation. Herbert Marcuse would later say what Freud never did—that sublimation is repression. The whole program of revolution as derepression would have been abhorrent to Freud. And yet he felt that he himself was coarse, and that Jews were coarse, and that Christian refinement (sublimation) was hypocrisy.

All the Christian deferences to women, all the obliquities and courtesies and cunning delays in gratification converted the sex drive into Christian-bourgeois love. Or did it? Was the “conversion” only skin-deep? Freud concedes, though grudgingly, that “the ascetic tendency of Christianity had the effect of raising the psychical value of love in a way that heathen antiquity could never achieve.”³ Freud looked on sublimation, the conversion of the id, much the way he and other Jews looked on the conversion of the “Yid” to Christianity, namely, with considerable scepticism. Much of psychoanalysis can be seen as an elaborate device for catching the refined id in flagrante delicto. Like Augustine before him, but with a different “inner meaning,” Freud was forever reminding us of the location of our genitals inter urinas et faeces. “Everything preceding or following the sexual act,” Emil Ludwig writes, “was pretty much of a closed book to Freud.”⁴ No one ever called Freud “sexy.”

I look at it this way: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Industrial Revolution under (ultimately) Calvinist auspices took hold of European avarice (one of the “seven deadly sins”) and organized it in rational-bureaucratic forms in such a way that avarice was transubstantiated into something else. Marx, using the premodern pariah capitalism of his own people as his model, unmasked the whole thing as disguised greed and egoism. Similarly, feudal Catholicism and, later, bourgeois Protestantism took hold of lust (another of the “seven deadlies”) and institutionalized it, in the course of a long sociocultural revolution, into love. Freud, entering the West in:the late nineteenth century, using a pre-modern, coarse, pariah model of the sex drive, proceeds to unmask the whole thing as at best a pious fraud.

Ultimately, the spirit of bourgeois-Christian love—i.e., choice of partner, courtship, leading to monogamous marriage—depends on delayed consummation the way the spirit of bourgeois capitalism depends on delayed consumption. Freud paid scant attention to sexual foreplay. It either maneuvered the partners toward orgasm, or it was perversion. To Freud’s shtetl puritanism, forepleasure—like courtship, essentially, or courtesy—was a form of roundaboutness, of euphemism. To play with sexual stimulation, to postpone the intense endpleasure of orgasm, was a form of goyim naches, of games goyim play, endlessly refining themselves. Freud had a choice here. If the rules of that game genuinely transformed the old coarse “fuck” into something “rare and strange,” then he, Freud, was missing out on something. “They” were experiencing something he wasn’t. He, most of the time, bore a grudge against their claim.

It was another “lie” of “theirs,” he felt. In the 1960s the Supreme Court of the United States declared that something apparently pornographic (read: coarse) is really not pornography if it has “redeeming social value” (where “redemption” can be thought of as “refinement”). To redeem is to save; to save is to refine what is coarse, to give it “meaning,” to “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” To Freud, and to the generality of Diaspora Jewry in nineteenth-century- Europe, to become refined—which was what was happening to them—vwas to become spiritualized. They identified spirituality in the West with refinement, and both with the stigma of “assimilation.” No wonder they were of two minds: about it. To the Eastern European Jew this was Reform Judaism (covert or overt); and Reform Judaism, in Eastern European conviction, could no more refine the (Orthodox) “Yid” than bourgeois Christianity could refine the (primordial) id.

Max Weber goes to the heart of this animus against sublimation when he argues that the

ascetic aversion of pious Jews [and, we may add, of certain of their descendants in the era of Jewish Emancipation] toward everything esthetic was originally based on the second commandment of the Decalogue…. But another important cause of aversion to things esthetic is the purely pedagogic and jussive character of the divine service in the synagogue, even as it was practiced in the Diaspora, long before the disruption of the Temple cult…. Thus among the Jews the plastic arts, painting, and drama lacked those points of contact with religion which were elsewhere quite normal. This is the reason for the marked diminution of secular lyricism and especially of the erotic sublimation of sexuality, when contrasted with the marked sensuality of the earlier Song of Solomon. The basis of all this is to be found in the naturalism of the Jewish ethical treatment of sexuality.⁵ [My emphasis]

The concept of marrying because one had “fallen in love,” Freud’s disciple Theodore Reik assures us, was inconceivable to the older Jewish generation in his boyhood Vienna: “Love is to be found only in novels and plays,” was their conviction. Love, “which was not considered a necessary condition to marriage within the ghetto and which became so highly valued in the period of the emancipation,”⁶ was a highly problematic matter to Freud in late nineteenth-century Vienna. “No,” Reik says decisively, “love or romance had no place in the Judengasse. Meeting and mating was the Schadchen’s (matchmaker’s) doing.”⁷ A whole genre of Jewish wit turns on the ways the Schadchen would “mislabel” his product as a broker in the give-and-take of matchmaking. No “individual object choice” is legitimated within the shtetl subculture. The love-death linkage of the “romantic love complex” occurred only at the turn of the century, in authors like Arthur Schnitzler.⁸ With Jewish Emancipation, there were earlier figures “such as the highly romantic Heinrich Heine. But these were emancipated Jews. Unemancipated Jews even today,” writes Ernest van den Haag, “are characterized by a nonesthetic, utilitarian attitude toward the body, whether they are religious or not.”⁹ Alfred Kazin’s parents, van den Haag writes (commenting on Kazin’s memoir A Walker in the City) "regarded love as a goyish invention,¹⁰ and so, in fact, did Freud—and so, in fact, as it happens, it was.

Eros, of course, means intermarriage. Freud was not about to become the legitimator of assimilation, yet he was being so used twenty years after The Interpretation of Dreams. Ludwig Lewisohn would write Don Juan in 1923, Ben Hecht A Jew in Love in 1931. Whereas Abraham Cahan’s concerns in The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) had been social and Marxian, “the secular Jewish prophet honored by Hecht and Lewisohn,” Leslie Fiedler writes, “is not Marx but Freud…. Psychoanalysis seemed to them one more device for mocking the middleclass, one more source for arguments in defense of sexual emancipation.”¹¹ It was also a device for pitting the putative “honesty” of sexuality against the “hypocritical” propriety of bourgeois social decorum. If Hecht’s own Freudianism was of the “vulgar” variety, at least one of the preoccupations of his hero Jo Boshere (né Abe Nussbaum) was quintessentially Freudian. Boshere, who had changed his name, who had surrounded his self “with such delicate mannerisms … that his personality has almost lost its Semitic flavor,”¹² was a Don Juan who delighted for a night or two in his physical conquests, so long as one thing held his interest: “The varying mannerisms with which women surrendered their bodies fascinated him. He studied their disrobings and listened avidly to their first honest murmurings of passion. Then their slow return to planes more polite was a process which also held his studious eye. For the brief humanizing and revelatory phase of sex … he felt a deep social delight. [Then] Boshere lost most of his interest in copulation”¹³ (my emphasis).

Freud disbelieved in romantic love. There is an old Yiddish proverb—“Zey hobn zikh beybe lib—er zikh un zi aikh: They are madly in love—he with himself, she with herself”¹⁴—that expresses his scepticism. For Freud, courtoisie is a decoration of sexual intercourse in the same way. that courtesy decorates social intercourse. His deepest urge was to strip both of their courtliness. He experienced both as a hypocritical disguise—analogous to Marx’s superstructure—that must be stripped away, like any “appearance,” exposing the “reality” underneath.

In bourgeois-Western lovemaking, foreplay—“love play’—foreshortens the ritual of courtly love into the space-time requirements of the bourgeois bedroom. Freud and his psychoanalytical heirs make short shrift of the”rules" of courtly love: in the pathos and longing of such love they see the practice of coitus interruptus. They see “the courtesy and gentleness, which were the essence of the Courtly attitude, serving as a reaction-formation against underlying sadism…. The culture of which Courtly Love was symptomatic,” concludes one analyst, “had not achieved full genitality.”¹⁵

Both Marx and Freud unmasked the “sublimation” that was courtly love. Both had a ressentiment against it. It was so “refined,” so “spiritual,” so un-Jewish. The young Leslie Fiedler, commuting daily from Bergen Street in Newark to the Bronx campus of NYU, would carry his “dissent into the classroom itself by writing Marxist interpretations of Courtly Love.”¹⁶ Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1966) continues those early “Marxist interpretations’ under the auspices of Freudianism.”One senses from the start in the verse of courtly love," he writes, “a desire to mitigate by ritualized and elegant foreplay a final consummation felt as brutal [read: coarse], or else a desire to avoid entirely any degrading conjunction with female flesh.”¹⁷

Love as “an esthetic exhilaration and as a romantic feeling,” Ernest van den Haag notes, “never made much of a dent on Jewish attitudes toward the body or toward the opposite sex. Love as ‘sweet suffering’ was too irrational. If you want her, get her…. All forms of courtship which do not end in marriage are seen not as pleasures in themselves, but rather as exploitations, misuses: ‘she takes his money, or ’he is just using her.’”¹⁸ This tradition continues. One senses, for example, that it is with considerable relief that sociologist Peter M. Blau eventually finds a way, in his “Excursus on Love,” of translating—as he believes, without residue—the whole “romantic love complex” into the tough-minded, Homansian, utilitarian exchange system.¹⁹

Courtship is the act of paying court or wooing. It involves the attentions and tendernesses of a man to a woman whom he desires to marry.²⁰ Read Freud’s deeply beautiful letters courting Martha Bernays from 1882 to 1886: “The Courtship of Sigmund Freud,” as it might be called.²¹ His practice of love far outruns the legitimations available in his subculture. Yet, is it not apostasy to give “their” meanings to his “experiences”? So, with Martha safely in the marriage bed, he “cuts back” to the essentials of ancestral Yiddishkeit: “Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”

It is a claim of this analysis that Freud had considerable awareness of the interrelations among the institutions of Western culture. “Romantic marriage” is one institution, along with the institutions of capitalism and liberal democracy, to which Christianity—especially Protestant Christianity—gave strong religious sanction.²² Freud sensed, I think, the inner “meaning-nexus” between European “love” or romantic sexual intercourse and European “civil society” or courteous—later, “civil”—social intercourse. In both types of intercourse—sexual and social—distantiations are introduced that are absolutely foreign to earlier, premodern Gemeinschaft-types of sociosexual “withness.” For three generations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries troubadours and minnesingers sang of a faithful “love service” to a “high-minded” and exacting lady by a frustrated and sorrowful lover: she does not grant him the amorous “reward” he covets but only approval, reassurance of his worth: “The great lady accepts him as a being worthy of her attention,” Herbert Moller writes, “but only at the price of behavioral restraint and refinement of manners, that is, at the price of ‘courtois’ behavior. As contemporaries put it,” he adds, “‘courtoisie’ is the result of courtly love.”²³ The full meaning of this “restraint” is not revealed until the nineteenth century, when the thesis-antithesis dualism of the eighteenth-century Enlightment is “sublated” in Hegel’s Enlightenment-romantic synthesis: Christianity, by secularizing itself into refinement, emerges as a “secularized spirituality.” “By refining substance into subjectivity,” Karl Löwith claims, “Christianity produced a revolutionary reversal in world-history.”²⁴