On the death of a Queen

Queen Elizabeth II (ERII) is dead, and it appears as if the entire world – or at least that portion on social media – has something to say about her, the Crown, and the British monarchy. My own relationship with ERII is, I would like to think, cool and distanced. When I started thinking seriously about my own social location as a Goan in India I realised that the history of British India, and consequently the Indian attachments to Britain, weren’t really as close to me as I had been taught. My history was more properly that of Portuguese India, and my relationship with the British, and British Indians, could also be routed through a Portuguese lens. I have found this way of looking at Britain, and all things British (including British India) hugely useful since it provided an alternate grounding, and a more dispassionate way of relating to the British, British-Indian, and Anglophone world around me. None of this is to contradict the fact that as a privileged Goan growing up in the Indian nation-state, and a British-Indian mother, I was raised up as an Anglophone, and consequently Anglophile. But in this, I realised after living in Portugal for more than a decade, I was not dissimilar to the privileged segments of Portuguese society, many of whom are substantially Anglophile.

It is this curious relationship that all of us, across the world, have with Britain, and British institutions, that has occasioned this outpouring of response to the death of ERII. One aspect of this relationship was very succinctly captured by Frank Cottrell-Boyce when writing for The Guardian:

“One of the reasons the Queen’s death feels so huge is that she was a living connection with that postwar consensus, that attempt to build a better nation and a rules-based world. A vision that is being demolished even as we plan her funeral. Ten years ago, we lived in a world of divided opinion. Now, we live in a world of divided reality.”

Consensus was the word that jumped out at me when I read this passage. ERII was in fact the epitome of a world that revolved around a consensus, at the heart of which, was a socio-cultural one, and perhaps this is what ERII, with her all-important dress-sense and etiquette, represented best – a way of being, and doing things that everyone agreed with.

This is not to say that the consensus was democratically reached, or that everyone who was a part of the consensus agreed with it wholeheartedly. But thanks to Britain’s couple of centuries in the sun – to put it politely – it was central to determining the way in which we all behaved, from the British-Indians who were a subject population of the British Crown, to the Portuguese, who, though not a subject population, nevertheless had a less than equal relationship with the Crown.

The consensus worked because there was something in it for all of us. Above all there was a discourse of fairness that one could appeal to. Even if this fairness was not necessarily realised in the operation of the British Empire, the discourse ensured that one could hold Britain accountable, then, and in the future. There was also, as I suggested earlier, a socio-cultural consensus eventually rooted in western European Christianity, that made us better people. Women were treated as social superiors, there was a way one behaved at the dining table, there was a way one dressed. All these were important, because it enabled us to create a uniformity, a level playing field, that allowed us to understand one another. After post-modernism and post-colonialism, as Cotterll-Boyce rightly points out, that world has disappeared. We don’t live in a world of divided opinion any more; we live in a world of divided reality. As contemporary Indian politics itself demonstrates, we can’t even agree on the reality of the world we live in since our points of departure are so radically different.

ERII’s death represents the disappearance of that world that we were all used to, and we must all be sorry for her death, because the fading away of the world she embodied makes our lives that much poorer and unstable.

As should be obvious from the tangential references above, I am well aware of the critique of the continuing violence of the British Empire. However, I would like to once again stress that the Empire also built into its operation a discourse that has allowed for it to be taken to task. One can think of the way in which this was ensured in the case of the Mau Mau rebellion, or the case of the Gurkhas. I fear the same cannot be said for the dissensus that represents the alternative to ERII’s world.

Take, for example, the horrific responses to ERII’s death. I offer only one, particularly troubling response, that of Uju Anya, a professor at the Carnegie-Mellon University, who reportedly tweeted: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating”. Just so that we don’t forget the context, this vitriol was directed at a ninety-four-year-old woman, who has been a figure-head at best, and for all we know done her best to moderate things she was capable of moderating.

Sadly, Anya’s response is not an aberration, but true of a good number of persons who identify as “woke”. This kind of self-righteous indignation, and the willingness to inflict harm on a representative of an order one is opposed to, is becoming increasingly common, whether by persons on the right, or on the left, or centre. If this horrific incapacity to distinguish between a person and an institution, and to wish ill to a person, particularly one who is not directly responsible for the actions attributed to her, is the world that woke activists wish, then this is not a world, or better still a consensus, I would like to be a part of.

The Catholic Church teaches in its Catechism that one may not engage in armed resistance to oppression by political authority, if one cannot ensure that the resistance will not provoke worse disorders. This teaching offers us a definite lesson in the current and similar cases: if your resistance to colonial, or other, oppression is to justify unequal violence against often-innocent actors, and inaugurate a worse system than that which preceded it, then you are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. There is no doubt that ERII was a figurehead not only for the genteel consensus I speak about but an Empire that has unleashed much violence that continues to wreak havoc. However, our response to this violence cannot, and must not, be to unleash more violence.  Our response must be to unleash, what the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the [Catholic] Church, calls “a civilisation of love”.

It bears reminding that none of us is innocent of violence, and that we are all figures trapped within our own contradictions. I believe that ERII attempted to do her best despite the contradictions she was born into. In many ways, her heir, King Charles III represents continued attempts to do good despite the contradictions he has been born into. Let us wish him well.

The Queen is dead. Long live the King.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 14 Sept 2022).

Responding to the Desiring God

In 2017, while sitting in the Jardim Munícipio in Panjim and discussing ecclesial and liturgical matters, a priest friend expressed a fairly popular idea. He asked me: “Have you noticed how it is often it is priests who are gay who are overly interested in liturgy?” My response at the time is the seed for the thoughts that I write here, which I believe allow for us to put desire within a Catholic frame.

My first response suggested that to speak about celibates – as priests are required to be – as gay was incorrect. One could possibly refer to these people as having homosexual inclinations, which is perhaps what most people suspect when they link a fascination for liturgy with aberration from a heterosexual norm. However, to confuse this predilection for liturgical beauty with being “gay” would be a categorical mistake. To be gay is to occupy a political position. A political position, which despite its widespread global occurrence, is located in a certain cultural milieu – one which could be described as predominantly white, in particular Anglo-American and Northern European, and segments of the national(ist) elites that articulate with this cultural group across the post-colonial world.

 This is not a novel argument, but has been made by a number of queer activists and academics, among which I could point to Jasbir Puar’s argument in Terrorist Assemblages. The problem that gay culture and politics poses is especially visible to me, a Catholic in an increasingly Hindu majoritarian India. In a recent essay, I have pointed to the subtle, and not-so-subtle ways in which gay politics aligns with Hindu nationalism. As such, I can quite literally see how gay agenda poses a threat to my own life, and the communities I belong to.

I continued to counter my priestly interlocutor by going on to point out that the association of an appreciation of beauty with homosexuality draws upon a recent and modern tradition which has reconstructed masculinity. A tradition that associated men with brute power, and the appreciation of beauty as effeminate. I wasn’t satisfied in simply denying an imposition of a gay identity ; however, I suggested that the sexual frame was one that we were imposing on them. Perhaps, in other times, when the sexual frame was not the primary frame of reference that it is today, similar men would have been understood differently, seen as having gifts, or graces, from God which were being put to good use.

My rationale was, and remains, that our selves are composed of desires that we are unable to interpret, and the hermeneutical framework arrives from outside of us, from society. It is the singular tragedy of our times that our primary frame of reference in contemporary times is, and has been since at least Freud, sexual. Thus, we tend to interpret things sexually, rather than being open to other, particularly transcendental, frames of reference.

I am not unique in feeling this distress with the primarily sexual way of understanding the world. In How Catholic Art Saved the Faith (2018), art historian Elizabeth Lev contests the largely sexual reading that Bernini’s famed sculpture of the ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila has received ever since the Enlightenment: Bernini was not representing an embodied spiritual experience, but sneaking a profane, erotic, work into a sacred space. Lev argues that Bernini was doing was nothing of the sort. Rather, he had offered a “compelling” and “powerful argument for the Catholic experience of divine love” (150).

Lev suggests that the secular world is unable to comprehend this interpretation, because we have lost sight of the spiritual and our relationship with God, in other words, the divine love that God has for us. She argues that, “Teresa’s Face, emulating that of Christ in Michelangelo’s Pietà, is the ultimate image of total self-offering to God, as well as the knowledge, through these moments of ecstasy, that the love is requitted” (150). I would like to work with this idea, that the total self-offering to God is a valid sexual response to the desire that God expresses for us.

Before developing ideas about the love of God, it would be useful to point out that contemporary sexual politics has problems with understanding celibacy as a valid sexuality. In Celibacies, Benjamin Kahan notes how “even champions of sex and advocates of sexual diversity like Alfred Kinsey feel free to denigrate” celibacy as part of a trio of “the great distortions of sex,” including it alongside delayed marriage and asceticism and suggesting celibacy to be a “cultural perversion” (1). Two of these practices, celibacy and ascetism, are not unique to Catholicism, but are typical to it. The hostility towards these practices is not coincidental, but part of a larger culture of anti-Catholicism (13-16) motivated by the threat perceived by Anglo-Protestant middle class national elites of the USA.

The Catholic tradition is redolent of God’s love for humanity. This love is often represented in particularly spousal terms. Indeed, as the first letter of John teaches us, love is not that we love God, but that God loved us first (4:10). In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (2005) Benedict XVI boldly links this love not only to agape, as is often done, but also to eros (9). Calling for an attitude that unites the body and the soul, Benedict XVI suggests that “eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns” (4). This approach provides the possibility of integrating a transcendental framework into our all too immanent frames.

This suggestion is not too different from that offered by St. John of the Cross. In his biography of St John, Peter Tyler, a psychologist concerned with holistic approaches that are not restricted merely to the immanent, points out that “rather than seeing sexuality as separated from spirituality” St. John acknowledges the intimate connection of the two whilst at the same time being able to distinguish their different properties”. Tyler quotes from St. John’s opus, The Dark Night of the Soul in support: “‘Both the spiritual and the sensory part of the soul receive gratification from that refreshment, each part experiences a delight according to its own nature and properties’ (DN 1.4:2)” (90). 

Unlike a Freudian approach where sexuality comes first as the wellspring of many aspects of the personality, including spirituality, Tyler notes that “in [St.] John’s schema we can almost say that sexual desire derives from spiritual desire” (90). St. John highlights that “’it happens frequently so that in a person’s spiritual exercises themselves, without the person being able to avoid it, impure movements will be experienced in the sensory part of the soul, and even sometimes when the spirit is deep in prayer or when receiving the sacraments of Penance or the Eucharist’ (DN 1.4.1)” (91).

St. John suggests that we should not panic in such situations. Rather, he offers an appealing explanation: “As we are full of joy by spiritual delights so… it is inevitable that the bodily passions will be excited too. It is not bad as such, just taking its share according to its mode” (91). In making this argument, Tyler points out, he is quoting Aristotle: “Whatever is received, is received according to the mode the receiver” (91). These challenges, however, are to be subjected to purgation, in St. John’s words, or to the discipline that Benedict XVI refers. The primary principle of this discipline and purgation is that the desires and senses are not bad in themselves, but need to be ordered towards our first principle, God. It is when they are disordered, or directed away from God, that they become concupiscible desires which cause us to push away things for God (89).

It is through this broad context that I investigate the experience of same-sex desire. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that same-sex activity is disordered (CCC § 2357). This is because it teaches that sexual activity must be exercised within the bonds of the sacrament of matrimony, and directed towards confirmation of conjugal love and procreation. This teaching has understandably caused much hurt among those who experience same-sex desire, and have understood this desire within the framework offered by gay politics – a politics which is, as I have indicated above, racially, economically, and geographically marked. However, we need to appreciate that this teaching comes within a context – that of natural law, Thomism, and above all one that is actively transcendental in its imagination of the political – which – once we appreciate the nuances of this context – does offer space for dialogue.

Further, this teaching does not, as I will continue to argue, necessarily turn what manifests as same-sex desire as manifestation of a disordered nature. On the contrary, it could be argued that what is understood as same-sex desire is in fact the result of our inability to understand the movements of our hearts moved towards wholly returning the love of God by living a chaste life directed toward the service of His community. We are unable to understand this desire precisely because of the sexual frame that contemporary society places over us, and the lack of a transcendental framework to guide the stirrings of our hearts. I believe that it would be worth contemplating the idea that a numbers of persons confessing a same-sex attraction are the result of a larger social and personal inability to interpret the call of God to himself. As should be obvious, what I am trying to do here is affirm “queer” sensibilities, while pointing that understanding ourselves, or labeling others, as being gay is not the only option available.

With this argument in place, I would like to suggest that this requires us to broaden Benedict XVI’s understanding of the direction of eros, which he indicates is directed towards marriage (11). It would be more appropriate to indicate that eros directs us towards the sacraments at the service of communion, i.e. the sacraments of matrimony and holy orders. One could argue that the sensibility of homosocial company, even desire for homoaffective intimacy is, in fact, the result of graces granted to enable one to live in a religious community. Communities which have traditionally been, and still are, ordered by gender.

I recognize that there are many who argue that the priest must be heterosexual, i.e. able to feel physical desire for women to be fit for the priesthood (see for example the discussion Why celibacy? reclaiming the fatherhood of the priest 101 – 105). However, I wonder if this response to contemporary sexual politics is not as trapped within the frame of the immanent as sexual politics itself. For example, the arguments of Carter Griffin, the author of Why Celibacy? referred to above, make no reference to grace, but rather seem to smack of an immanentist psychology and cultural politics unmarked by the operation of grace. As Patrick Hannon points out in “Can Gay Men be Priests?”, such a response is not restricted to theological and religious conservatives. On the contrary, he offers examples of persons who position themselves as liberals, a notable example being James Martin SJ, who seem to exclude the possibility that what are experienced as homosexual tendencies may in fact be mistaken readings of our feelings.

What I suggest, however, is that they are not gay, nor are they in fact, homosexual. I am opposing any idea that the sexual desire they may be experiencing is, in fact, a permanent part of their nature at all. I argue that such persons are unable to discern the movements of their heart, and it is being determined for them by a hypersexualised society. I am suggesting that we simply do not know enough, and may be guilty of a mistaken analysis – when looking at this desire as homosexual in the first place.

In conclusion, I would hazard that the issue that was first broached between my friend and I in a public garden in Panjim, is not about merely homosexuals or gay men at all. Rather, the question is a larger one about sexuality itself, a question that impacts all of us. To this extent, we must recognize that what we see as homosexuality and the cause of disorder, is in fact a gift, which urge us to reconceive the world outside of the straightjacketed modern frameworks that have been dominant thus far. As such, I propose that we approach the issue of (sexual) desire with humility, acknowledging that despite our arrogant post-Enlightenment scientism we still simply do not know enough about workings of the human psyche. What we do know, however, because it has been revealed to us, is that God loves us (first) and that He calls us all to Himself. We are all fundamentally attempting to respond to his call. After all, St. Augustine astutely observed so many centuries ago: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

(A version of this text was first published in the blog of the Political Theology Network"

Looking Beyond the Modern: A Catholic response to the terror of Hindu nationalism

Hindu nationalism seems poised to rule the roost in India for the near future. How do Catholics in India deal with this crisis? In May 2018, Anil Couto, the Archbishop of Delhi, wrote a letter inviting Catholics in the Archdiocese of Delhi to begin a regime of prayer and fasting in the period leading up to the recent parliamentary elections. By upturning modernist and liberal assumptions about politics and opening up the political field from the immanent to include the transcendental, Archbishop Couto offers a way forward that includes an opportunity to correct the mistakes that Catholics have been committing for some time now.

Exposing the modern

The significance of the modern period lies in the fact that it dramatically changed how the world was perceived. Henceforth, we would think in terms of binaries: the individual and the community, the private and the public, the state and the Church, religious and secular, the immanent and the transcendental, etc. This period also saw the rise of the nation-state, which sought to contain one nation within a single state, persecuting those groups that either could not or refused to be assimilated into the national. Further, it sought to be the only authority within a definite space or territory. This was a novel desire given that earlier political arrangements had witnessed a plurality of legal authorities such that every person was subject to multiple jurisdictions. This pluralism allowed for a system of checks and balances that enabled groups to play one power against another, preventing the rise of absolute hegemonies. The modern state also desired to control both time and space. Promising utopia on earth, it was within the limited time of the immanent that it functioned best, constructing a parallel sacred realm, where the nation replaced God, offering a cult of national heroes and martyrs to parallel the saints and a national liturgy of anthem and flag.

In Europe, these ambitions ensured conflict with the Catholic Church, whose politics exceeded the bounds of hived-off nation-states. More importantly, it preached a life that extended beyond the immanent or the material. That there is a life beyond the grave allows for a range of political actions. These actions eventually undermine the modern state, as does the teaching that the cycles of unspeakable violence in modern times are the result of man assuming the terrifying powers of God to realize utopia.

Looking beyond the modern

Therefore, the horrors of contemporary Hindu nationalism are not an aberration but part of a longer continuum that begins with an apparently benign secular nationalism. In other words, Hindu nationalism has its origins in Indian nationalism, with Nehruvian secularism merely a pit stop en route to a fast-approaching destination.

Then, clearly, the solution to the current crisis cannot be found in liberalism or other modernist philosophies. Rather, the response must come from a post-liberal order which transcends modernist binaries to restore a holistic vision of the world while simultaneously encouraging greater legal pluralism.

Such a suggestion would, understandably, elicit the response that the collapse of the secular–religious binary is exactly what the Hindu right seeks. However, by its very logic, nationalism is a religion. As many scholars have highlighted, Hinduism is a modernist production from the late nineteenth century amalgamating the beliefs of dominant castes to enable the capture of state power. The modernist lenses that we have adopted simply prevent us from appreciating that the Church is already collapsed into the state.

We must also challenge modernist and secular notions that all religions are essentially the same, because the implications of the sacral order vary across ideologies. To Islam and Christianity, the body of every human being is sacred, which is not so in brahmanism, for example, where only the bodies of the brahmin and the king are considered sacred, while the rest are marked by decreasing levels of dignity.

Archbishop Couto’s letter is critical to articulating a Catholic politics that transcends modernism and liberalism because, by proffering prayers and fasting as useful strategies, it affirms a broader conception of time and space. It also explicitly affirms Christ’s agency in our politics, reminding us that our role is merely to work towards the kingdom; the establishment of utopia is His alone. Critically, this recognition prevents us from going down the road of identitarian politics, which is precisely what an immanent politics engenders and indeed what Hindutva will push us towards. More importantly, recognizing that we may not see utopia is a pragmatic necessity because things in India will likely get significantly worse before they get better. We are obliged, therefore, to articulate a politics rooted in faith that recognizes how Jesus consoles – in an Ignatian sense – those who suffer by pointing out that eternal life is about standing up for truth even in the face of terror.

In addition to transcending modernist binaries, we must also restore a distinction between the sacred and the profane, while affirming not only that the sacred can percolate into the profane but that it is important that this mundane world be sacralized by Christ and His message. Indeed, India desperately needs to appreciate the sacrality of human life. While the notion of rights does this in a limited manner, we must go beyond this formal notion of rights and highlight the Christian spirit of this law of human rights rather than remain restrained by the letter of state law. In other words, we urgently need a renewed preaching to all Indians of the social teaching of the Church instituted by Christ.

The idolatry of nationalism

As much as Archbishop Couto’s letter offers these grand Christian possibilities, it nevertheless lingers on the threshold of idolatry by making constant reference to the national. Urging the love of one’s country within the context of a belligerent nationalism that brooks no competition effectively encourages the idolatry of nationalism. It is critical, therefore, that we change our language to use the word “state” rather than “nation”. The philosopher Hannah Arendt presents the nation-state as a symbol of the conquest of the state by the nation. Through this conquest, the modern state has been perverted from an instrument of law into one of lawless discretion in the service of the nation. Indeed, we are called by Jesus to preach to “all the nations of the world”, such that in the end, there is “neither Greek nor Jew”. That is, we are to work to undo national boundaries rather than consolidate them. In these times of nationalism on steroids, it is critical that Catholics insist on the valid argument that a refusal to work for the nation does not translate to working against the state. Rather, working for the well-being of all persons is ultimately in the larger interest of the state, even if current occupants of government fail to realize this. Service to the nation-state, therefore, may well be incompatible with service to Christ.

In sum, in the face of rampant Hindu nationalism, we must rely on the recognition that we have reached the limits of modernism and that one cannot effect a cure by administering more of the poison that caused the sickness. Rather, the way forward must rely on a rejection of modernism and an insistence on the universalism preached by Christ and His Church.

(A version of this post was first published in Matters India on 13 Dec 2019.)