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Question III
In The Soul of Sex, Thomas Moore says "religious institutions remain close to pornography, sometimes in their art . . . because ultimately both are concerned with life's deepest meaning and mystery." Do you see any connection between Catholicism and porn? Did Catholic artists ever purposely infuse their art and iconography with suggestions of sexuality in order to help convey the power of spiritual ecstasy to the masses (consider such Christian-themed works as the illustrated "O" in Bede's commentary on the Song of Songs, Donatello's David, Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas, and Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa)? And, if so, how should that affect the way we interpret contemporary renditions of Christianity such as Andres Serrano's photograph Heaven and Hell, Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ, Madonna's video "Like a Prayer," and Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi (all of which many religious fundamentalists have condemned as pornographic and blasphemous)?
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"Lovemaking is a form of contemplation anyway," Moore tells us. That ties in nicely with my recent efforts to discern similarities in the psychoneurophysiology of sexual and mystical ecstasies. There is fascinating, if preliminary, evidence from neurobiology that those rare times when everything comes together in our lovemaking, when Leonard Bernstein goes into orgasmic ecstasy conducting Tchaikovsky, Beethoven or Liszt, and when a shaman, Teresa of Avila, or John of the Cross experiences communion with the Ultimate Ground of All Being that these body-soul-enveloping altered states of consciousness are all closely related divine epiphanies. The excesses of our materialistic culture are no more dangerous than the moralistic sensual and sexual repression some justify to combat our dehumanizing materialism. |
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