The sensual and the sublime

But everything in life and nature is, by divine intention, meant to be holy and life-enriching. This is the basic religious assumption. But nothing is, in itself (that is, seen in isolation from this divine purpose), either holy or unholy. If it were otherwise, human freedom would have been an illusion and moral responsibility superfluous. Ourfreedom includes the choice to corrupt, no less than ennoble, what we handle. How we respond to the world around us affects its worth and well-being substantially.

Iron, for example, is neither helpful nor harmful in itself. The intention is that it be used in a sensible way, but that intention is not imposed on us. So, we can turn a certain quantity of iron either into a kitchen knife or an assassin’s dagger. It is the will of man that turns iron into a means for cooking or killing. The problem is not with iron. It is with us. Our aberrations result from violating the harmony between means and ends. Spirituality is both a mandate to harmonise the two, and the means for doing it. Nothing can be healthy or holy if, in using it, the means are divorced from the purpose and turned into an end in itself. When that happens, it creates a culture of indulgence harmful to human dignity and fulfilment.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the sphere of human sexuality. For, sexuality is not a human invention, but adivine intention. Intentionally, it is pure and sacred, but operationally it is fraught with immense scope for cruelty and corruption. It is the foremost theatre of the culture wars of our times, where competing ideologies collide, generating much sound and fury.

Neither the physics nor the chemistry of the sexual act is sacred or dirty in itself. They are mere vehicles. The all-important thing is what they express. Purified by the fire of love and reinforced by responsibility, human sexuality becomes a sacred thing. It is the ultimate cementing force, and is the foundation for family and society.

Divorced from its purpose and unbridled by love, human sexuality increasingly becomes a demonic force. It corrupts and perverts the site of human interaction. Rapes, and all forms of sex-related crimes, are the raw material of human sexuality turned into daggers of interpersonal aggression. This is an eccentric sexuality resulting from a divorce between means and ends.

The purpose of sexuality is to cementrelationships. It is meant to be a celebration of reciprocity. This implies a culture contrary to that of solipsistic self-indulgence. Indulging the self, in the sexual context, necessarily involves turning the Other into a means for self-gratification. Sex-related crimes, especially rapes, signify the absolutisation of the goal of self-gratification. In rape, for example, the edges of solipsistic pleasure are sought to be sharpened by the brutal imposition of the rapist’s will on the victim. It denotes a pathological condition in which sexual pleasure needs to be intensified with the friction of crime.

When the spiritual vision declines, however, nothing is real but the physical and material dimensions of life. As a result, the sexual union loses its larger significance and becomes the means for Freudian impulse-release, almost like easing yourself when the bladder is full. It is a model that degrades both parties. Given the dynamics of human reciprocity, one cannot degrade another human being, withoutcorrupting oneself.

From a spiritual perspective, sexual union is the deepest experience of knowing the Other. Ideally it is a self-giving and a participatory experience that takes place beyond the assertion of individual wills. It effects mutual knowledge at the level of their shared destiny, far beyond the reach of the will to power and mutual manipulation. Human sexuality becomes wholesome when it is a celebration of committed intimacy and oneness. It involves the overcoming of alienation and impersonality. In contrast, sex soured by crime, is a function of impersonality and alienation. It is a metaphor of violent self-contradiction. Rather than seeking to know the other, it functions in terms of prejudice: the prejudice that degrades the other as a mere means for self-gratification.

Sex-related crimes are alarmingly on the rise everywhere. Whatever civic and legal measure we resorted to prove ineffective in curbing this trend. That is hardly surprising. When it comes to organic and social maladies,only radical solutions will work. Ulcers caused by diabetes will not heal by simply dressing. They can’t be cured without controlling the sugar level in the blood.

Sexual aberrations and sex-related crimes are not the primary malady. They are, rather, the symptoms of a socio-cultural epidemic; the rise of a culture of unbridled indulgence with its necessary accompaniments of lust, impersonality and cruelty. Such a culture tends to focus all of human energies on self-gratification, leaving little for any altruistic purpose. It erodes our sense of humanity and creates a society that is sexually hyperactive, but socially exhausted and enervated. Constructive dynamism involves a balance between release and restraint, articulation and silence. Strangely, it is silence that makes human communication possible and meaningful. But silence is a function of purpose; the purpose of clarity and understanding. Without silence, communication becomes a bedlam of noises without the joy of sharing. Sex-related crimessymbolise such a pathological state.

The core idea in spirituality is the supreme worth and significance of every human being. Joseph Conrad, the great novelist, suggests that we think of a woman as a temple in which sacred and mystic rites are in progress, and not as an instrument to be used and discarded at will. We need this sense of the sacred much more than any legislation or executive action to prevent the crime graph from soaring. It is futile to fight crime. The need of the hour is to create a healthy society founded on love, where the worth of every human being is respected.

The writer teaches at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi