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“For it was Christian faith that first taught the male warrior a code of courtesy, compassion, and charity, whose first expression was Christian chivalry, whose later expression was the ideal of the Christian gentleman, and whose underlying ideal has been the equality of women and men in baptism, in faith, and in the promises of God.  The Christian ideal of equality before God not only did not erase sexual differentiation, but, on the contrary, rested upon that reality as its foundation.”  -- Michael Novak

The Freudian term “sublimation” has come to be used carelessly for two relationships between high and low, relationships which are not only different but even opposite to each other.  I illustrate with sex, his obsession.

In what Freud called sublimation, something that isn’t sublime is stretched out of shape so that it seems to seem different and better.  He viewed humans as pressure vessels, and libido as superheated steam.  If the pressure keeps building and all the relief valves are jammed, then the walls of the vessel balloon into an unforeseen shape.  This, he thought, is how art, religion, civilization, and romantic love arise -- they are merely high-pressure expressions of a thwarted sex drive that cannot be displaced.

Does anything like that happen?  I doubt it, but I know something that does.  Rather than the low putting on airs of the lofty, that which really is high can be reflected or echoed by a lower thing which in some way resembles it.  For example, the sexual union of the husband and wife resembles the spiritual union of God with the soul, just because each one is a communion of the Self with the Other.  Because of this resemblance, for us sex can never be just sex, as it is with the animals.  In humans it reverberates with music, like the strings of a sensitive violin humming with the chords of a more powerful instrument somewhere else.

So it is that the love of the human lovers arouses two longings, not one.  The first longing is to become one flesh, and can be satisfied by the flesh; the second longing transcends the flesh, and flesh cannot appease it.  Some lovers ignore the second longing, trying to become like the animals, mutilating themselves in the attempt.  Other lovers admit the second longing, but confuse it with the first.  Either they make an idol of carnal love, or else, having discovered that their idol is stone, they fall into sadness and disillusionment.

For lovers, the only possible resolution is the one St. Paul speaks of in Ephesians 5, in which the husband and wife submit to the grace by which their love is made a finite likeness of the divine love.  He writes, “this mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.”

Kant thought we could either give the law to ourselves, which he called autonomy, or accept a law imposed from outside, which he called heteronomy.  In this view, autonomy is freedom, but heteronomy is bondage.  What does the picture leave out?

John Paul II wrote inVeritatis Splendor that “obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom .... Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man's free obedience to God's law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God's wisdom and providence .... Law must therefore be considered an expression of divine wisdom: by submitting to the law, freedom submits to the truth of creation.”

Notice that John Paul speaks not simply of theonomy, which Kant would have regarded as just another heteronomy, but of “participated” theonomy.  That is a very different thing.  God’s law is not an imposition on us from outside, but an imprint on own rational nature.  We are not jerked around by it, but made finite participants in His providential care for the universe.  If we refuse to participate, if we decline to accept the privilege, we become not more ourselves and more free, but less ourselves and less free.  To deny Him is to deny man as well.

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“Why did the slaveholders act as if driven by the Furies to their own destruction? ... Why did they take such risks, why did they persist beyond prudent calculation?  The answer must be that in a moral question of this kind, turning on basic concepts of humanity, you cannot be content that your critics are feeble and ineffective, you cannot be content with their practical tolerance of your activities.  You want, in a sense you need, actual acceptance, open approval.  If you cannot convert your critics by argument, at least by law you can make them recognize that your course is the course of the country.”  --  John Thomas Noonan, A Private Choice (1979)

Does that phenomenon sound familiar?

"Suppose we agree with the Supreme Court's new gospel that there is a right enshrined in the Constitution to make intimate and personal sexual decisions .... If I were a stereotypical lawyer, I would gleefully contemplate our new divorce laws.  Thing of the fees I could charge litigating cases such as these:  Can Wife #2 claim visitation privileges with the children of Husband and Wife #4 on the grounds that an emotional bond had arisen within the context of the progressive family?  How is Husband #3's pension to be divided between himself and the two other husbands who want to remain married to Wife?  If Wife #1, who was barren, prevailed on Wife #2 to have Husband's child, are both Husband and Wife #1 to pay child support when Wife #2 wants out of the marriage?”  --  Ian A.T. McLean, “Criminal Law and Natural Law"