THEOLOGY OF SEXUALITY Part II Rev. ALAIN NICOLIER 2008
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Relationship with One's Father
Another constant that is common among most of the homosexuals who have been willing to trust in a therapy or an exploration is found in the relationship with the father.
One must understand that the father has a definitive role in the socialization of his child. By his repeated, daily attitude he can stimulate or inhibit the capacity for self-acceptance and the ability to adjust to change, to meet diversity, to develop his communication with the world and with other people, and to accept his own uniqueness.
Unlike many children, the homosexual never had any desire to imitate or admire his father for one or several reasons. Some of these are: his too frequent irritation, fits of devastating anger, verbal and physical bullying, derision, extreme slothfulness, lack of affection, and no tenderness. These diverse reasons make it impossible for the little boy's budding masculinity to develop because of the emotional abuse and the feeling of having his individuality denigrated. So he will stifle his virility by detaching himself from everything the father should have been able to represent for him. Many homosexuals have made a secret vow to never be like their fathers. In the end this detachment is generalized to include other men as well, to the point that they totally separate themselves from symbols of masculinity. This induces a dichotomy between biological identity and psychological identity, a separation between the body and the mind.
Through Swedenborg we know that because of this separation an absence of correspondence results and Divine influx can no longer operate, which causes all kinds of behavioral disorders. Regeneration consists in re-establishing the correspondence, being purified of the evil, and beginning the work of healing, but we will return to this later.
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If the father is not in a love of God, he cannot be a good father, but will transmit evil heredity only. "A person is born into a state of evil....A person acquires the state from his father, from whom he has his soul....The seed which comes from the father is the first vessel receptive of life... being in the form of his love....It follows therefore that evils we call hereditary come from fathers, and so from grandfathers and great-grandfathers, being transmitted in succession from them into their offspring." (Divine Love and Wisdom 269) "The interior man or spirit itself comes from the father, but the exterior man or body itself from the mother" (Arcana Coelestia 1815).
In the absence of any good identification with the father and with men in general, masculinity is hidden and remains latent. This is why most homosexuals say they see nothing but absolute emptiness in themselves, no accessible internal, for the internal closes early on as it protects itself against external aggression. So the child grows up in total superficiality; and even if numerous homosexuals do have great sensitivity, intelligence, amiability and so on, their masculinity is non-existent, and their personal esteem and socialization remain very problematic.
Lacking access to the healthy and viable internal that comes from a good relationship with his father, the homosexual fills this void with phantasmagoric imaginings, projecting his sick psyche in deviant behaviors. He does not want to grow up; he hides behind appearances-the mask, the game, the theater. He does not want to become a man because he does not want to resemble his father; he does not want to become dominating, cruel and destructive.
However this is often what he does become, because the homosexual relationship is often fraught with domination, betrayal, lies, obsession and dependency, and culminates in depression, illness and suicide.
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The Two Constants
The constants among homosexuals are (1) an abused parent, often the mother-creating a situation of emotional incest-with one parent, and (2) an abusive parent, often the father-creating the impossibility of masculinization-with the other one.
This picture suggests neither a parental nor a marital archetype, just a pattern of brokenness and suffering. It is the homosexual tragedy.
Androgyny in ancient cultures
It seems that history repeats itself, for the myth of the primordial androgyny of the first humans is found in all ancient cultures. Here again I am speaking of myth, for what was in the beginning a spiritual principle has been interpreted and understood in a biological and psychological way. What confusion! But isn't all this confounding of the spiritual with the material an effect of the fall?
In all the original cosmogonies one finds the idea of the cosmic, anthropomorphic egg that represents the initial androgyny in which opposites are mixed together and where duality is but one.
In the Tao, "One" produces "Two", which is how the primordial Adam, not male at all but androgynous, becomes Adam and Eve.
Hinduism. Shiva, an androgynous divinity, is identified as the informing principle of manifestation that is portrayed intimately entwined with Shakti, his own power. One notices traces of androgyny in Adonis, Dionysius, and the Sybil. The Chinese phoenix, symbol of regeneration, is a hermaphrodite, seen as the union of seed and breath.
Plato. He recalled the myth of androgyny in "Banquet", where he says, "At that time, androgynous was a distinct gender which, as to both form and name, derived from two beings that both had male and female qualities." (189)
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Also for Origen, Gregory de Nyssa, Maximus Confessor, and even Simon Magus who was a contemporary of the disciples, becoming One is the purpose of human life. In Adam they saw an image of androgynous God that was lost through differentiation with Eve, but found again in the new Adam, and glorified through the Christ. According to them "metanoia", that is, conversion, causes an overturning of values that results in an individual becoming either male or female, or neither male nor female but in the image of God.
This is how they interpreted the words of the Lord when He said, "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven" (Matthew. 22.30). Or the words of Paul, who said that by baptism: "there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). They also use Christ saying "...that they may be one as We are" (John 17.11).
That theme has been taken up in certain apocryphal writing, such as the gospel of Thomas where Jesus supposedly said, "If you make male and female into a one, so that the male is no longer male and the female no longer female then you will enter into the kingdom," (Logon 17-18) or in the gospel of Philip: "Christ came to restore what was separated from the beginning and to again unite the two." (Doresse II, p. 157)
The epistle of Clement could be cited, or Philo of Alexandria, as well as the neo-platonic and neo-Pythagorean theosophists, and also the heremetics and a number of Christian Gnostics who fall back on ancient Greek theories, using only Christ's words on Unity.
In ancient Greek mythology numerous divine beings procreated all by themselves, in fact. This parthenogenesis implies androgyny, an image and likeness of the Divine Creator who produced the Cosmos and its inhabitants from His own unity.
I won't go into all the details, nor refer to all the authors who have written about the myth of androgyny, because it would fill an encyclopedia. Isn't it amazing to see how fully and with what interest this subject has been treated?
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Carl Jung took up this duality of gender in the mind of a human being using the terms anima and animus, which are also found in Swedenborg's Arcana Caelestia. In Genesis 1:27 it is said, "And God created man in His own image. He created them male and female." In the explanation of the internal sense of this verse, The Writings tell us that this passage treats of the Most Ancients who were interior, celestial people for whom marriage was a source of the greatest joy, and we find there this interesting sentence: "They called the understanding in the spiritual man Male and the will Female, and when the two acted as one, they called it Marriage" (Arcana Coelestia 54).
This celestial humanity, that existed before the fall and was in the image and likeness of God, considered the mental duality of the intellectual and affective functions "male" and "female." Other passages tell us that this duality emanates from the duality that exists in the Creator. We read elsewhere, "Being and expression in the human God are distinctly One like soul and body. A soul does not exist apart from its body, nor does a body apart from its soul. The Divine soul of the human God is what we mean by the Divine being, and His Divine body is what we mean by its Divine expression. To believe that a soul can exist and can think and be wise apart from a body is an error arising from misconceptions; for every person's soul exists in a spiritual body after it has cast off the material remains which enveloped it in the world" (Divine Love and Wisdom 14; see 17 and 34).
Those who wish to fully understand the subject of "distinctly One" should read the whole chapter. In a similar vein we read, "Man was created in such a way that those two parts should constitute one single mind, and no other difference should exist between them than, to use a comparison, between that of a flame and the light shining from it" (Arcana Coelestia 2231.2).
Before the fall the human mind was one, that is to say, a har�monious communion existed within it. But after the fall a dishar�mony was established, for the will became self-centered and evil.
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The purpose of the Lord's incarnation was to offer humanity a new possibility of union between the two [mental] functions by a process of regeneration of the will. This was made possible by means of the revelation of the Divine wisdom that had been lost in the flood.
Before the fall, will and understanding were ONE. This does not mean that the celestial beings of that period were androgynous, but that harmony existed between their intellect and their feelings, or between their heart and their mind, between their soul and their body. Thus hypocrisy did not exist; what was outside was the same as what was inside and this was in communion with God. But, according to Swedenborg, these celestial beings were either male or female. What was different was that they could perceive in their conscience who their soul�mate was, and so they could enter into a conjugial relationship in late adolescence. Many examples are given where angels in heaven recognize their eternal partner as if by instinct.
It is otherwise today. With a divided mind it is difficult for us to recognize our soul-mate. At best we can, with a partner, prepare ourselves for conjugial life by learning to be honest, faithful, authentic, helpful, to love each other freely and to cleanse ourselves of evil and falsity.
To return to the subject of the sex of the soul, we read in the Writings that, "After death a man is still a man, and a woman is still a woman, and there is nothing in the soul, mind, or body which is not masculine in the male and feminine in the female; and the two sexes have been so created as to strive for conjunction, indeed for conjunction in order that they may become one" (Conjugial Love 46). According to this passage then, it is said that the male is male, even in his soul, and similarly the female, and that the gender of an individual is the same from inmost to outmost.
If it happens today that there are identity issues with many, this is due to the absence of parents who love each other, the absence of archetypes, and the absence of role-models and points of reference.
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The gender identity crises with homosexuals relate to the absence of guidelines and have nothing to do with a wrong soul in a wrong body. The feeling of inadequacy is existential and emotional, and not due to an error of soul-body compatibility. Another passage tells us, "The soul is a human form, from which nothing can be taken away, and to which nothing can be added, and it is the inmost form in all the forms of the entire person. Moreover, because the forms which exist outwardly take both their essence and their form from the inmost one ...therefore... the form of the soul is fully... human" (Conjugial Love 316). This is why, in the conjugial relationship the masculine soul of the husband and the feminine soul of his wife become ONE, and many references speak of "union of souls."
This union of two souls, male and female, becomes the image and likeness of the Divine Human who Himself is "distinctly ONE" in the union of Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, or in the union of His Divine essence with His Human essence.
From all eternity, God is ONE, and when He creates souls He creates them, as I understand it - and this is only me and my reading of the Writings - in pairs, in soul-mates, one male and one female. These souls, in their incarnation, are led to find each other by deepest human perception under the guidance of Divine Providence. This occurred instinctively during the golden age, whereas today, since the fall, it is a real obstacle-course. It nevertheless remains possible for those who allow themselves to be guided by the Lord and who have begun their regeneration.
I have mentioned before that in describing and explaining the mind, all the researchers and authors from ancient times up to the present have had, and still have, difficulty presenting a clear picture of how the mind works. This is mostly due to the fact that they do not know the doctrine of discrete degrees, which was revealed to Swedenborg by the Lord. This science, together with the science of correspondences, makes it possible to rationally understand and explain the Divine nature, the nature of man, creation, the incarnation, revelation, the conjugial etc.
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I am not going to expound this science of degrees here because it would require whole books. Nevertheless you can read in the Writings (Divine Love and Wisdom 173-277) how they work and how they explain everything.
In conclusion, I will briefly show here how they can shed light on our subject.
In the Writings the Eternal Creator is frequently called the Divine Human, especially in the Arcana Caelestia. Outside of time and space, which is to say in His transcendence, He is distinctly ONE; in Him exists the union of all dualities. When He creates in time and space, He does it from His Divine essence through the intermediary of His Human Essence. His Human is the form of His Divine, as His wisdom is the expression of His Love. His Human became visible in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, in whom dwelt the invisible Divine. This Human, masculine in form, enters into communion with His creation which is feminine in nature, as in a conjugial relationship.
Thus God is called the husband, and humanity, desirous of conjunction, is called the wife. However there is a discrete degree between God's intrinsic, transcendent duality, and His creation. The non-time and space communicates with the spatial-temporal by correspondence.
The influx of Life can pass from the Infinite Eternal to the finite temporal, because of the qualitative similitude. Similarly a discrete degree exists between the Divine Human and the duality of mind of the human being. In the light of the stated passages, we can understand that human souls are either male or female, but that in each one there is a duality, of intellect and affections.
A man has these two polarities, as does a woman, and it is frequently stated that in spite of the more intellectual nature of the male, and the more affectionate nature of the woman, a male can have an affectionate or sensitive side that is more developed, and the woman can have a dominant intellectual and rational side, without either losing their sexual gender identity because of this.
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As I have said before, one can be a very sensitive, feeling male who loves being a father to his children, and still be male and not "effeminate" because of it; and similarly with a woman.
The confusion in sexual orientation is rooted in the absence of guidelines or direction on the part of parental couples. And because the homosexual did not receive appropriate guidance from his father or mother, he seeks to affirm his identity by having relationships with people of the same sex. This has nothing to do with his deep nature.
Parents who desire a conjugial union and are in the process of becoming one, enable their children to develop their identity in a harmonious way. We read: "The offspring born of couples who are in a state of truly conjugial love derive from their parents a conjugial connection between good and truth, from which they have an inclination and faculty, if a son, to perceive matters having to do with wisdom, if a daughter, to love the things that wisdom teaches" (Conjugial Love 202). "Everyone derives from [one's parents] an innate character in the form of a disposition....The evils that the parents themselves have acquired and by transmission passed on to their offspring are those into which people are born" (Conjugial Love 525).
This explains why the process of becoming spiritual parents, as couples, is in spite of everything the means given for our regeneration in today's world. This parental couple is the celestial father and the earthly mother; the husband and wife that I mentioned earlier, and who are spoken of in the Word. We are all called, then, to heal our wounds, to put right what is distorted and to purify ourselves in order to open ourselves at last to eternal, conjugial happiness.
"Let us be glad and rejoice... for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready... Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper...And the Spirit and the bride say, 'Come!'" (Revelation. 19.7-9; 22.17).
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