Let us follow Karl Menninger’s 1973 treatise on “whatever became of sin,” his analysis of our modern predicament then, and consider its relevance now.
Menninger gives his readers an informed definition of “sin,” though psychiatrists have not usually concerned themselves with the tasks of the clergy, as he states. He writes, “Sin is transgression of the law of God; disobedience of the divine Will; moral failure. Sin is failure to realize in conduct and character the moral ideal, at least as fully as possible under existing circumstances; failure to do as one ought toward one’s fellow man….”
Menninger has depended on the help of Webster, but now he appends his own incisive understanding as a Christian psychiatrist. He writes, “The wrongness of the sinful action lies … in an implicitly aggressive quality — a ruthlessness, a hurting, a breaking away from God and from the rest of humanity, a partial alienation, an act of rebellion.”
His definition correlates with Hebrew Scripture and the Christian New Testament.
Menninger has shocked us with the title of his book, and now, he shocks us with his explicit, psychiatric description of how we express our human relationships and sexuality. That, too, aligns with his definition of sin and with the Bible. Certainly, our grandfathers who winked at their growing sons’ “sowing their wild oats” and barely, if at all, disguised their pride in those sons’ presumed, maturing manliness, would have flinched at reading the psychiatrist’s analysis and diagnosis.
Menninger writes, “Many marriages occur as an escape from the masturbation conflict because intravaginal masturbation which characterizes unloving coitus is believed by many to be a more ‘normal’ act.”
What? Intravaginal masturbation? Who has ever heard of that?
Unloving coitus is just self-loving masturbation? Does Menninger say that? Does he mean that? Unloving sex, or casual sex, uses another person’s body for gratification of desires for intense pleasure, new excitement, power enhancement, dominance, and yes, for unconscious self-destruction and destruction of another, we can believe; but is that masturbation?
Such unloving sex is not, in Menninger’s clinical appraisal, merely innocent recreation, as today’s relaxed view of casual sex might suppose; that is correct. Harm can, and often does, result from indiscriminate sexual indulgence, from unloving sex. But are Menninger’s words exact? He surely seems to be intending them to be exact.
From the theologian’s point of view, mine and others, unloving sex amounts to a literal embodiment of Paul’s notion of setting the mind on things of the flesh (no pun intended, maybe) and leaving God out, refusing to set the mind on things of the Spirit and organizing our lives around God. In theological understanding, narcissism in all its forms is spiritual self-idolatry. I state this authoritatively, “skating (swimming?) in my own lane.” (Fun to use the Olympics metaphor now, too!). Menninger’s psychiatry accords with that theology.
Having debunked much ignorance harshly condemning young boys’ natural, and normal, experience of masturbation, Menninger then exposes the serious, and actual, sin of adult “intravaginal masturbation,” and the obsessive self-love, into which masturbation degenerates in the psyche of the narcissistic male, unable to give love away to another. Menninger diagnosed, and treated, this not uncommon malady in a number of his male patients.
Applauded by our culture as masculine virility, sexual indulgence, referred to as “tom-cattin’,” or “one-night stands,” Menninger knew, was tacitly approved behavior in 1973. “Unloving coitus,” comfortably received as “recreational sex” today, has now landed on “hook-ups” and other such terms, and is broadly accepted behavior in 2021.
But Menninger defined and exposed “unloving coitus” as “intravaginal masturbation.” He diagnosed and named obsessive patterns of “sexual indulgence” as narcissistic psychosexual masturbation. Neither virile nor manly. Nor is sexual indulgence the romantic, almost obsolete, though still honored, miracle of falling in love.
Now, in 2021, he would shock us yet more, including “intra-other-body-orifices masturbation,” within his defining term, despite the clumsy, unwieldy phrase, we can confidently assume. Maybe People magazine’s “Sexiest Man of the Year” award and title are not an honor at all.
Indifference and refusal to own responsibility for what he calls “the morality gap” between what we are and what we, by now, might have become, are Menninger’s concern and stated reason for writing “Whatever Became of Sin?”
He calls on the clergy to speak up and out.
Let us return next week to attend to his call for a “speaking up and out.”
Thanks be to God.