In modernity, all parties - Christians, progressives, and Vitalists alike - compete to have the most boring and facile understanding of sexuality and eros.
Our task is to rediscover its mystery and power: to re-bind sex and metaphysics, to regain ancient understandings of the erotic, and to discover how to offer up our acts to the divine.
Our only question is who to attack first!
To aid us in this task, let us draw upon the powerful allies of Julius Evola & Pope John Paul II.
I’ll start at the point on which I suspect most readers of this publication can agree: modern, secular man has a radically degraded and impoverished understanding of sexuality and love.
Sex appears to be everywhere in our society, and yet we are more sexually barren than ever before. Pornography consumption is ubiquitous, girls sell images of themselves on subscription sites, people advertise their ‘sexual identity’, and hook-ups apps are normalized.
Despite this seeming promiscuity, the average person is less sexually attractive than ever (due to obesity and the adoption of hideous aesthetic choices), testosterone levels are plummeting, the incel population (of both sexes!) grows, and our fertility rates are collapsing. Sex has become cheap, ugly, sterile, and worthless.
Evola noticed the universality of this low-level, unsatisfying prurience half a century ago, as recorded in his book ‘Eros and Mysteries of Love: Metaphysics of Sex’:
First is a widespread and chronic excitement, almost independent of every concrete, physical satisfaction because it persists as psychic excitement; and second, partly as an outcome of the first characteristic, this sensualism can even coexist with apparent chastity. As to the first of these points, it is true that people think much more about sex today than they did in the past.
As to the second point, certain female forms of sexual anesthesia and depraved chastity related to what psychoanalysis calls the autistic varieties of libido are highly significant. An example is the type of modern woman whose main interests are exhibitionism, the accentuation of everything that may make her alluring to man, and the worship of her own body. Such women derive from this a vicarious pleasure which they prefer to the specific pleasure obtained from real sexual experience.
The description of ‘autistic’ sexuality is a good one. New depths of sterility are being plumbed constantly: the introduction of ever more technologies to facilitate romance, the financialization of parasocial relationships (‘simping’), and bizarre phenomenon like ‘furries’, who have to cover themselves entirely in opaque costumes before meeting.
The rise of ‘sex nerds’ is indicative of one of the distortions of the present moment: the mistaken primacy of the ‘engineering’ of pleasure production. This is also expressed in the apparently wide use of ‘toys’ and other instruments.
Elevating pleasure to become the main end of sexual relations precludes and closes the door to sexuality’s real power. Evola is correct to observe that in real, intense passion, the mechanical pleasure of the act is an afterthought. One should instead obsess over the partner themselves, immersed in the totality of their allure - physical, animal, psychic, spiritual.
In natural erotic development, every experience of deep passion and strong inclination doubtless follows the path of that which is called “pleasure,” but it does not have pleasure as a principal and preset objective; if it does, we may well speak of lust and debauchery, which are trends corresponding to dissociations, degradations, and “rationalizations” of physical love. The idea of “pleasure” as a ruling motive does not exist in the “normal state of eros,” but the impulse aroused by sexual polarity causes a state of intoxication reaching its apogee in the “pleasure” of physical union and orgasm. Any man who is truly in love, in possessing a woman, entertains the idea of “pleasure” as little as that of children.
Discovering and maintaining a true allure of raw intensity, however, is made difficult by an over-familiarity between the sexes in modern society.
Paradoxically, we are de-sexed by the constant and undifferentiated superimposition of the sexes: both genders are present at work, in church, in the gym. In this constant exposure, one loses the deep energy that should begin humming upon contact with the mysterious ‘other’. Modernity, with its relentless destruction of boundaries, has destroyed those private spaces that are necessary for the germination of the most exclusive and rare feelings.
Evola makes reference to a belief system of the Orient, which I have chosen to include here due to its metaphorical utility:
…in the traditional teachings of the Far East, when a man and woman meet, even without any physical contact, a special energy or immaterial “fluid” called tsing is aroused in the deepest layers of their beings. This energy springs from the polarity of the yin and the yang, which we provisionally define as the pure principles of female and male sexuality… This special magnetically induced force has as its psychological counterpart the state of diffused intoxication, vibration, and desire proper to human eros… The mere presence of the woman in front of the man arouses the elementary degree of tsing and its corresponding state. In societies where a sense of this elementary force of sex has been retained, strict conventions are formulated from this deep existential basis… If a man and woman are alone before each other, even if no contact takes place, it is just the same as if it had. This is because the first level of tsing, the elementary magnetism, has been awakened.
The constant summoning and diffusion of the magnetism between the sexes is akin to over-exposure to dopamine. It reduces our ability to feel anything at all.
Overexposure to women is a grave injustice to them, because it robs them of their mysterious power: the fascination and yearning that should swell in their presence. Over-familiarity makes the most majestic woman seem mundane.
As Yukio Mishima describes in a beautiful passage from Spring Snow:
Dreams, memories, the sacred - they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.
This takes us to the Vitalists. The Vitalists are correct in diagnosing the de-sexed nature of modern man, but wrong in the prescription that they make for its cure.
Various attempts are made on right wing Twitter to re-awaken man’s raw sexuality by posting images that are intended to remind man of the beauty and attractive potential of the most exquisite female forms. We see this in Gio Scottii-posting, in e-girls flashing up in sonnenrad edits, in BAP blasting generously endowed anime girls at his legion of followers.
But the publication of sexually charged material on Twitter - however beautiful the objects portrayed - worsens the problem. This is because the divide between viewer and object over the medium of the internet is insurmountable. Thus, the only phenomenon that can be generated by this posting is lust, rather than the full spectrum of sexual energy.
One cannot love what one does not know. One cannot ascend to the highest levels of unity with what one does not have. Lust is sexuality turned inwards: sexuality ordered towards satisfaction of the appetites and needs of the self, rather than the partner and the divine.
Lust is often viewed, mistakenly, as a force that draws us together, causing dynamism and drama and excitement. This misconception is particularly present in those Vitalists who have an incomplete understanding of the Bacchanalian elements of classical society and myth. This surface level understanding gives rise to the fallacy that arousing lust alone can revive ancient strength.
But in its purest form - as we are increasingly seeing in modernity - lust, due to its emphasis on satisfying the self, turns inwards, becomes autistic, and isolates and stultifies. The purest form of lust is manifested in pornography, in which the self-serving nature of the desire is so complete that the object of the sin doesn’t even know that the viewer exists. The individual’s isolation is total, his energy wasted, his feelings meaningless.
Pope John Paul II describes the dynamics of the fall of man to lust in his ‘Theology of the Body’:
The soul heated like a burning fire will not be quenched until it is consumed… A man who breaks his marriage vows says in his heart, “Who sees me? Darkness surrounds me and the walls hide me. No one sees me. Why should I fear?”… He only fears the eyes of men. He does not realize that the eyes of the Lord are ten thousand times brighter than the sun. They see all the ways of men, and consider even the hidden places. (Sir. 23:16–19).
Flaring up from within, lust invades the senses, excites the body, and takes hold of the heart. Lust is restless - it creates an insatiable desire to satisfy the body and its senses. It promises gratification and peace, but only adds fuel to the fire. In its restless pursuit of satisfaction, lust drowns out the voice of conscience and dulls sound thinking. Eventually, it exhausts the spirit and its prey is consumed.
Here it is necessary to answer the common charge that the Church replaces lust with frigidity - and that it thus crushes sexuality in a different way. Pope JP II clarifies:
This is not to question sexual desire itself, which is directed towards union and procreation. Christ’s teaching is far from Manichaeism - the belief that the spirit is good and the body evil. True Christian belief has always affirmed the goodness of God’s creation, including the body, sexuality, and procreation. Disorder occurs when sexual desire seeks its own satisfaction rather than the communion of persons.
In this sense the accusation against the church of frigidity is backwards: not only does the church have no prohibition on sex - on eros - it demands that we experience the fullness of erotic love, in all its power and majesty.
But this is a reality that modern Christians all too often forget!
Many modern Christians have lost contact with the highest ends and experiences of the marital act: interface with the transcendent and worship of God. They are misled by their exclusive conception of sex as an act of interpersonal love and a mechanism for reproduction.
Love in its fullness is not just ‘good will to one’s spouse’. As Fr. Chad Ripperger declares in his lecture series on the theology of marriage, it is an act of supreme worship of God:
Charity is the love of God and love of neighbor, for the sake of God. It's not just loving your neighbor. Christ said “Look: the Gentiles do as much.” No, that's not charity…
Now, that means that in the context of the of your marriage, perfect love of spouse consists of perfect charity; which means you don't love your spouse for natural reasons - you don't love them with a natural love - you love them with the supernatural.
Modern ‘love’ is all to often felt as a received emotion - ‘the warm satisfaction derived from the comfort that my spouse brings me’. It thus becomes proximate to all the other warm comforts of a modern materialist existence. If the element of fear of the Lord is lacking from your love, it will degrade into the safe, elderly, comfortable, feminine mode of relationship that is apparent in many Christians.
A relationship with a spouse should be a microcosm of a relationship with God, complete with moments of terror, divine agony, mystery and awe. If one is optimizing for comfort one may as well just watch television.
Neither is the exclusive end of marriage the production of children (though this is a righteous end). Although it is tempting to over-emphasize this end in an otherwise barren age, the disorder that this brings about risks reducing Christianity to a fertility cult.
Evola describes the subversion brought about by uniquely elevating reproduction:
…those mysteries which may well be called the “mysteries of the Mother” and which take us back to the pre-Hellenic, pre-Indo-European substratum of a civilization oriented toward the earth and the rule of woman. Let us reserve the right to return to this subject later and say here only that in the eyes of such a civilization, which set the maternal mystery of physical generation at the summit of its religious concept, the individual has no existence on its own; it is a fleeting thing that lasts for a day. Only the maternal cosmic womb is everlasting, for the individual beings return and are dissolved in it but also swarm forth forever from it, just as new leaves sprout on a tree in the place of those which have fallen. This is the opposite of true Olympian immortality, which implies instead the abrogation of the naturalistic and earthly-motherly bond, the departure from the everlasting circle of generation, and the ascent toward the region of immutability and pure being.
To put it in more Catholic language by quoting the Catechism:
2361 Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death.
2363 The spouses' union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple's spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family.
So far in this essay, we have seen the shortcomings of the secular, Vitalist, and ‘Christian’ approaches to love, sexuality, and eros. So how then are we to proceed?
First, let us understanding the dynamics of true attraction, of the cultivation of the erotic. Evola’s advocacy of the ‘magnetic’ model of love is compelling:
As we have seen, eros cannot be explained by biological finalism, by the genetic impulse, or by the detached idea of pleasure as the end purpose. Apart from all these theories, eros must be considered as a state governed directly by the polarity of the sexes in the same way that the presence of positive and negative poles governs the phenomenon of magnetism and everything connected to a magnetic field.
It is necessary to start by defining absolute man and absolute woman, male and female in their pure state as Platonic ideas or archetypes, so that we may discern the degree of actual sexual development in given individuals.
…the absolute man and absolute woman are conceived not only from a heuristic point of view as being abstract measurements for masculinity and femininity, but also ontologically and metaphysically as being real primordial powers that are always and inseparably present and active in men and women, even though actual men and women show such powers to a greater or lesser degree.
Thus, as there are various degrees of sexual development, such a situation arises when a given degree of virility finds its counterpart in a corresponding degree of femininity in the other being.
If mutual attraction is thus dependent on the degree to which we occupy the purer ends of the sexual spectrum (ie. more masculine men have more erotic power, as do more feminine women), then we have a duty to cultivate these purer qualities within ourselves. Men must become closer to the ideal man, and woman must become closer to the ideal woman.
In fact, this process is not merely necessary for our worldly duties (the stability and intensity of spousal relationships), but also for our divine duties: the full worship of the Lord. It is in the act of uniting the two poles of magnetic attraction that a more complete being is achieved: a unity that more closely approximates the God whose image we are made within.
Though we must tread carefully here, lest we stray into heretical ‘sex magic’ and other esoteric attempts to improperly harness the power of eros, Pope John Paul II confirms that this path - properly followed - is a necessary one. Separated, man and woman live in solitude. Their task is to form a communion of opposite persons:
Following the narrative of Genesis, we have seen that the "definitive" creation of man consists in the creation of the unity of two beings. Their unity denotes above all the identity of human nature; their duality, on the other hand, manifests what, on the basis of this identity, constitutes the masculinity and femininity of created man.
In this way the meaning of man's original unity, through masculinity and femininity, is expressed as an overcoming of the frontier of solitude. At the same time it is an affirmation - with regard to both human beings - of everything that constitutes man in solitude.
As we have already seen, in his original solitude man acquires a personal consciousness in the process of distinction from all living beings (animalia)….
Furthermore, the communion of persons could be formed only on the basis of a "double solitude" of man and of woman, that is, as their meeting in their distinction from the world of living beings (animalia), which gave them both the possibility of being and existing in a special reciprocity.
How is this communion of two individuals formed out of their mutual solitude? Part of it must be the joining of the bodies in the pursuit of the transcendent. This is the central exhortation of Evola on the subject of eros:
Sexual love is the most universal form of man’s obscure search to eliminate duality for a short while, to existentially overcome the boundary between ego and not-ego, between self and not-self. Flesh and sex are the tools for an ecstatic approximation of the achievement of unity. The etymology of the word amore, as given by a medieval “Worshipper of Love,” although unfounded, is nonetheless meaningful: “The particle a means ‘without’; mor [mors] means ‘death’: If we join them together, we get ‘without death’ or life everlasting.” Fundamentally, therefore, by loving and desiring, a man seeks the confirmation of self, participation in absolute being, the destruction of steresis, and the loss and existential anguish associated with it.
Pope John Paul II grounds this in the Christian call to ‘know’ one’s love.
Genesis draws a connection between sex and knowledge: “Adam knew his wife.” The Hebrew word used here, jaddah, doesn’t mean “head knowledge” alone; it also refers to concrete experience. Significantly, the experience in which husband and wife unite so closely as to become one flesh is called “knowledge.”
Throughout the Bible, sex is referred to often in this way. In fact, when the angel Gabriel tells the Virgin Mary that she will give birth to the Savior, she answers, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” This term, “knowledge,” raises human sexuality above the level of animals to the level of persons.
Knowledge refers to the deepest essence of married life. In becoming one flesh, both men and women acquire knowledge through the body. A husband and wife come to “know” the meaning of their bodies. In a unique way, the woman is given to the man to be known, and he is given to her. This experience of the gift mysteriously makes them one, without blurring their individuality…
Three of the Old Testament prophets use this same word, “knowledge,” to describe the union of God and his people. In the book of Hosea, God tells his people, “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord”.
Go forth and know the Lord.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Do we remember how it was when we were teenagers? We dreamed of kissing and holding hands, and just the thought of her looking at you made you giddy? Remember how we dreamed of simple contact, which would give way to smiles and happiness?
All that means nothing anymore, as we see fully naked eve, unabashed, flaunting it all on the screen. Base desires give way to meaningless relationships that lead to marriage being just two people sharing a room, with no intimacy involved.
With the loss of contact, of eros, of simple joy, walls appear, there is no sharing, no communication, no joy, just two people existing.
Just two people, one feeling alone, and one browsing on the phone.
It is worth nothing, I think, that one must be careful if they wish to facilitate more masculine/feminine aspects of themselves (i.e., men wanting to be more masculine; women wanting to be more feminine). I say 'careful' because if we stray too far into earthly stereotypes then we risk becoming inauthentic and imbalanced--possibly making social interactions with the opposite sex even more difficult. If we want to cultivate these things, then I think we should focus on the "divine" masculine/feminine--the pure versions of ambition, nurturing, etc.