Dublin Core
Title
Tablet Review, 23 February 1963
Description
The Tablet, an independent Catholic weekly news journal, lauds the group's intentions but criticizes its conclusions in its review.
Source
clipping in HSC Quaker Group on Homosexuality records, Friends House, London
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
The Tablet February 23, 1963
Compassion Is Not Enough
The fact that all too often detestation of the sin (which is entirely justified and laudable) leads Christians into undue harshness towards the sinner seems to have led the Quakers authors of Towards a Quaker View of Sex (Friends Home Service Committee, 3s. 6d.) into a blurring of moral categories which can only be deplored in our present post-Christian society where young people, particularly, are left to work out their sexual morals for themselves. There are already sufficient forces at work to persuade people that traditional Christian sexual morality represents at best an ideal impossible of attainment, and it is to be feared that this pamphlet, contrary to its authors' intentions, may serve to reinforce these forces, particularly among those who learn of it at second hand.
With much that is said by the contributors to this pamphlet many Christians can agree. Their starting point would seem to be an intense and entirely praiseworthy compassion for the acute suffering caused by tragic sexual experience and for the unnecessary misery that can arise from too rigid an adherence to the letter, rather than the spirit, of the Christian moral law. They recognise that human love-making is good in itself and is meant to be enjoyed and are concerned to banish the kind of Manichaean attitude that would regard human sexuality are irretrievably evil in itself and marriage as essentially an outlet for an evil urge which cannot be totally suppressed. They feel great sympathy for homosexuals, from whom our present society demands, in a purely secular context, a level of heroic virtue which it in no way asks of the heterosexual majority, although the Church, of course, does demand some degree of heroic virtue in this respect from all its members, whether heterosexual or homosexual.
What above all concerns authors of this report (which, of course, is not in any way a policy statement of the Religious Society of Friends but merely one particular Quaker view of sex as seen by one particular group of Friends) is how the Christian should act when faced with his neighbour's sexual difficulties, rather than how the Christian himself should act when faced with his own sexual difficulties; and this is where the pamphlet may give a wrong impression, in that it is concerned with the objective judging of other people's actions (when charity demands that they should be given the benefit of the doubt) rather than arriving at an objective judgment of one's own behaviour. The compassion with which the authors handle pre-marital and extra-marital love-affairs may give rise, in the minds of hasty readers of their pamphlet, to the conclusion that they are condoning such behaviour, when what they are trying to do is to ask their fellow-men not to usurp the place of God in judging it.
Above all they give the impression not so much of tempering justice with mercy as of leaving justice out of account altogether; and it is here that three factors arise which they seem largely to have ignored and which give rise to doubts about the validity of some of their conclusions. One factor is the basis of the defence of traditional Christian morality on sex in the natural law: the fact that human love-making normally results in the birth of a child. In these days, when artificial methods of birth-control are so much taken for granted, this point is apt to be obscured; but it is for this reason that love-making, by implying the family, implies also marriage and the stability and sanctity of marriage, since there is nothing worse for the children than the spectacle of their parents not united by that bond of love which ought to be the basis of every marriage, let alone their parents' divorce and remarriage. While the fact remains that love-making outside marriage need not (and should not) affect the stability of marriage (in the same way as, for example, St. Peters' triple denial of Our Lord did not affect his devotion to Him), it does involved a depreciation of this unique expression of human love. Human love-making involves (or should involve) the total giving of one self to another in a way that necessarily excludes all others, and the uniqueness of this relationship is protected by the institution of the sacrament of marriage, life-long and indissoluble.
The second factor of the importance of the vocation of chastity, in which the uniqueness and value of human love is recognised by voluntarily making over and sacrificing this gift to God. The authors of the pamphlet give the impression--we hope it is unintended--of regarding life-long chastity as an impossible ideal; and, of course, regarded from a purely human point of view, it is. But, like the achievement of Christian marriage, its fulfilment depends upon grace and upon a humble recognition of one's need for grace to achieve something that would be impossible for human nature unaided. Chastity and marriage need to be regarded as the twin channels into which the powerful drive of human sexuality must be directed if it is to be truly creative and not leave a trail of destruction in its wake. Where the difficulties arise is not so much with those--mainly priests and religious--who embrace the vocation of chastity of their own free will, but with those for whom the discovery that chastity is, after all, their vocation is a painful process of learning: the men and women who, however eligible they may seem, somehow fail to get married, and above all the homosexuals who, by their very nature, are shut out from the vocation of marriage.
And this brings us to the third factor: compassion for the plight of homosexuals in our present society seems to have led the authors of this pamphlet into a condonation of the physical expression of homosexual love, given circumstances analogous to those which make the physical expression of heterosexual love good for the Christian. Their attitude here would seem to depend partly on the first factor, that of ignoring the procreative element in human love, which is the basis for the condemnation of homosexual behaviour in the natural law. Even those who share their compassion for the homosexual and who share (as we do not) their feeling that the present legal position only adds to the homosexual's difficulties without making it any easier for him to come to terms with his situation, while at the same time encouraging blackmail, must see that here is a radical departure from traditional Christian morality.
In general, we can agree with this group of Quakers when they condemn the doing of the right thing for the wrong reasons, when they point out that a situation which, form the outside, appears to be blameless may in fact be more blameworthy than another situation which, objectively speaking, is gravely sinful. The disagreement arises when it comes to a question of drawing lines between what is right and what is wrong, when we have to point out that a certain kind of behaviour is sinful, however understandable and excusable it may be in particular circumstances, and however undeserving of censure may be the people actually involved in it. Where a reading of this pamphlet, whatever its deficiencies of judgment, can be salutary for us is in reminding us of the dangers of a legalistic approach and of the letter that killeth rather than the spirit than (sic) quickeneth.
Compassion Is Not Enough
The fact that all too often detestation of the sin (which is entirely justified and laudable) leads Christians into undue harshness towards the sinner seems to have led the Quakers authors of Towards a Quaker View of Sex (Friends Home Service Committee, 3s. 6d.) into a blurring of moral categories which can only be deplored in our present post-Christian society where young people, particularly, are left to work out their sexual morals for themselves. There are already sufficient forces at work to persuade people that traditional Christian sexual morality represents at best an ideal impossible of attainment, and it is to be feared that this pamphlet, contrary to its authors' intentions, may serve to reinforce these forces, particularly among those who learn of it at second hand.
With much that is said by the contributors to this pamphlet many Christians can agree. Their starting point would seem to be an intense and entirely praiseworthy compassion for the acute suffering caused by tragic sexual experience and for the unnecessary misery that can arise from too rigid an adherence to the letter, rather than the spirit, of the Christian moral law. They recognise that human love-making is good in itself and is meant to be enjoyed and are concerned to banish the kind of Manichaean attitude that would regard human sexuality are irretrievably evil in itself and marriage as essentially an outlet for an evil urge which cannot be totally suppressed. They feel great sympathy for homosexuals, from whom our present society demands, in a purely secular context, a level of heroic virtue which it in no way asks of the heterosexual majority, although the Church, of course, does demand some degree of heroic virtue in this respect from all its members, whether heterosexual or homosexual.
What above all concerns authors of this report (which, of course, is not in any way a policy statement of the Religious Society of Friends but merely one particular Quaker view of sex as seen by one particular group of Friends) is how the Christian should act when faced with his neighbour's sexual difficulties, rather than how the Christian himself should act when faced with his own sexual difficulties; and this is where the pamphlet may give a wrong impression, in that it is concerned with the objective judging of other people's actions (when charity demands that they should be given the benefit of the doubt) rather than arriving at an objective judgment of one's own behaviour. The compassion with which the authors handle pre-marital and extra-marital love-affairs may give rise, in the minds of hasty readers of their pamphlet, to the conclusion that they are condoning such behaviour, when what they are trying to do is to ask their fellow-men not to usurp the place of God in judging it.
Above all they give the impression not so much of tempering justice with mercy as of leaving justice out of account altogether; and it is here that three factors arise which they seem largely to have ignored and which give rise to doubts about the validity of some of their conclusions. One factor is the basis of the defence of traditional Christian morality on sex in the natural law: the fact that human love-making normally results in the birth of a child. In these days, when artificial methods of birth-control are so much taken for granted, this point is apt to be obscured; but it is for this reason that love-making, by implying the family, implies also marriage and the stability and sanctity of marriage, since there is nothing worse for the children than the spectacle of their parents not united by that bond of love which ought to be the basis of every marriage, let alone their parents' divorce and remarriage. While the fact remains that love-making outside marriage need not (and should not) affect the stability of marriage (in the same way as, for example, St. Peters' triple denial of Our Lord did not affect his devotion to Him), it does involved a depreciation of this unique expression of human love. Human love-making involves (or should involve) the total giving of one self to another in a way that necessarily excludes all others, and the uniqueness of this relationship is protected by the institution of the sacrament of marriage, life-long and indissoluble.
The second factor of the importance of the vocation of chastity, in which the uniqueness and value of human love is recognised by voluntarily making over and sacrificing this gift to God. The authors of the pamphlet give the impression--we hope it is unintended--of regarding life-long chastity as an impossible ideal; and, of course, regarded from a purely human point of view, it is. But, like the achievement of Christian marriage, its fulfilment depends upon grace and upon a humble recognition of one's need for grace to achieve something that would be impossible for human nature unaided. Chastity and marriage need to be regarded as the twin channels into which the powerful drive of human sexuality must be directed if it is to be truly creative and not leave a trail of destruction in its wake. Where the difficulties arise is not so much with those--mainly priests and religious--who embrace the vocation of chastity of their own free will, but with those for whom the discovery that chastity is, after all, their vocation is a painful process of learning: the men and women who, however eligible they may seem, somehow fail to get married, and above all the homosexuals who, by their very nature, are shut out from the vocation of marriage.
And this brings us to the third factor: compassion for the plight of homosexuals in our present society seems to have led the authors of this pamphlet into a condonation of the physical expression of homosexual love, given circumstances analogous to those which make the physical expression of heterosexual love good for the Christian. Their attitude here would seem to depend partly on the first factor, that of ignoring the procreative element in human love, which is the basis for the condemnation of homosexual behaviour in the natural law. Even those who share their compassion for the homosexual and who share (as we do not) their feeling that the present legal position only adds to the homosexual's difficulties without making it any easier for him to come to terms with his situation, while at the same time encouraging blackmail, must see that here is a radical departure from traditional Christian morality.
In general, we can agree with this group of Quakers when they condemn the doing of the right thing for the wrong reasons, when they point out that a situation which, form the outside, appears to be blameless may in fact be more blameworthy than another situation which, objectively speaking, is gravely sinful. The disagreement arises when it comes to a question of drawing lines between what is right and what is wrong, when we have to point out that a certain kind of behaviour is sinful, however understandable and excusable it may be in particular circumstances, and however undeserving of censure may be the people actually involved in it. Where a reading of this pamphlet, whatever its deficiencies of judgment, can be salutary for us is in reminding us of the dangers of a legalistic approach and of the letter that killeth rather than the spirit than (sic) quickeneth.