What Makes Sacred?

Apropos of my AFF panel comments on marriage, Helen Rittelmeyer:

James is right that the important and interesting thing about marriage is that it binds two people together by some kind of sacred authority, but he doesn't give a very clear picture of where this sacred authority comes from. I can't make something sacred just by saying it is — two roommates, for example, couldn't invest their living arrangement with the same kind of holiness that marriage has just by calling it a "sacred" commitment.

Maybe it's possible that, while one person doesn't have the authority to make something "sacred," a whole community acting together does, and so if your community or church decides that gay marriage is sacred then it is. As Eve pointed out in a question, though, it ain't necessarily so:

Do you all think there is a difference between a "contract with the community" and "entrance into a tradition?" Those two seem to have different resonances with me, to the point that when I hear "contract with the community" I think, "Oh God, Hillary Clinton wants to raise me like a baby," whereas when I hear "entrance into a tradition" I think, "Oh, that sounds cool and beautiful and somehow aesthetically pleasing."

If it's not what your community says but the tradition of marriage that makes it a sacred relationship, then we have considerably less freedom to decide which relationships count as marriage and which ones don't. If it turns out that the Western Canon from the Song of Songs on down talks about marriage in deeply gendered terms, then we can't crowbar gay marriage into "the sacred" and expect it to work.

Well, certainly Helen's on to something, and it's her distinction between the authority of collective compact and authority as such that has driven me in the not-so-distant past to try to coin a distinction between intersubjective and interobjective knowledge. But this is unfortunately just the start of the hunt. "Mine" or "Ours" are two answers to the question "By what authority?" that a strong concept of the sacred renders inadequate -- not necessarily unnecessary; merely, or certainly, insufficient. Indeed the authority of the sacred is at its strongest when the authority of the self and the authority of a sacred union and the authority of a community of the sacred are asserted -- as incarnations of divine authority.

But the history of Christianity has revealed how this, too, settles little: when it comes to Christian sacredness, for example, either the authority of the Magisterium 'has to count' or it doesn't. It should also be clear that Protestant Christianity (as I tried to suggest at the CPAC panel, incidentally) has historically both strengthened sacred authority and broadened it such that claims to the sacred filed in antagonism to intermediary/doctrinal authority, including unabashedly heretical claims, may be made under auspices declared (at least sometimes) persuasively to be in affinity with divine authority!

So I myself am short of strong arguments as to why gay unions should be understood as sacred, but I am full of strong arguments as to why I or anyone else is disentitled to make that argument on anything other than the internal terms of one or another sacred authority. And the thrust of Christianity, particularly outside of Eastern Orthodoxy, seems to me strongly predisposed toward not one but three separate but interlinked thrusts in favor of understanding gay unions as sacred: one is the rise of direct, unmediated experience with God as the organizing principle of evangelical Christianity; two is the rise of gay and theologically gay-friendly clergy within 'mainline' Protestant churches; and three is the rise of advocates of the gay sacred who use precisely the intellectual tradition of Catholicism to craft and present theologico-philosophical arguments as to a nature of the sacred which does not exclude homosexuality or homosexual love or gay union. In his recent Intercollegiate Review review of Roger Scruton's Arguments for Conservatism, Robert Kraynak has noticed that Scruton seems to think likewise [pdf]:

I wonder then why Scruton concludes pessimistically that 'it will not be possible to resist' the current trends toward accepting gay or civil unions. Has he not made a strong case showing that the nature and dignity of man includes an eros for the eternal and that present trends are merely temporary distortions of natural, and therefore permanent, longings?

Well I haven't read the book and I don't know, but my answer would be that the 'right answer' -- either from an intersubjective or an interobjective point of view -- is often widely considered wrong or unacceptable or too awkward to be defended or put up with in a confrontation. And the gay marriage situation is a confrontation: "who are you to deny love?" A tough question for therapeutically informed liberal optimists in a late-modern democracy. Love -- indiscriminate, totalizing, all-purpose, universal-adapter love -- is the ultimate in 'cool' and 'beautiful', the ultimate in 'aesthetic pleasure', the ultimate declaration of the reduction of all articles of faith to the optimism principle: 'somehow...!'. Somehow, we can make such-and-such feel sacred! Even if -- !

But in church, that question has at least a few potential answers, and so it's there that the confrontation should, and, indeed, must, be made. Benedict seems to understand this. But the bottom line is that Christianity as we have it today supplies people with an incredible resource for setting up fresh sects, schisms, heresies, and evolutions -- call it the individualization of revelation. One still has to make persuasive arguments about why one's particular form or practice of Christianity exists in authority, but persuasiveness within various Christian traditions becomes harder or easier (usually, it seems, the latter) as mores and faiths continue themselves to shift. And the capacity of Christians to tolerate schism -- cf. Mormonism -- remains very strong. So, we'll see.

Comments

[Robert C. Cheeks]

In his chapter from Theo-Logic, The Logos Declares Himself, Hans Urs von Balthazar writes, "He (Christ) could, however, use two things, though in nonphilosophical, quotidian form. The first was a shared existence with one's fellowmen which he called love of neighbor and expressly elevated to the level of the supreme commandment. The second was fruitfulness. Because of its familiarity to everyday experience, the parables of growth could use even the subhuman form of fruitfulness as a manifold example of the mysteries of the kingdom...Likewise, the difference between action and contemplation, even the difference between the sexes and their specific roles, cannot, despite the maior dissimilitudo, be utterly without foundation in the life of the living God." The homosexual act, as such, mocks God's creative narrative; a homosexual marriage consecrated by the "church" is blasphemy.
The "shifting" you describe within the "Christian" community are merely examples of the continuing breakdown and derailment brought about by the calcification of doctrine and dogma,the tension of postmodernity, and a people who are unable or unwilling to experience
the "Christ event."

[Matt S.]

James, you might consider digging out Kierkegaard's little essay, On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle. The difference, of course, is authority. I have yet to figure out exactly what Kierkegaard meant by this. But it might fit into some of your work on these matters. I might say something more useful if I could get around to reading Rieff -- I'm just about done with my proposal, so maybe then.