Father Smith on sexual desire
What the young man going to the brothel is looking for
Father Thomas Edward Smith was the creation of the Scottish novelist Bruce Marshall, in The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith, published in 1944 and the source of an oft-quoted and memed line about sex. The jacket copy of the book describes Marshall, a Scottish convert, veteran of both World War I, where he lost a leg, and World War II, as having “a great fund of pity for humble, toiling people whose virtues are seldom proclaimed, a vigorous and delightfully malicious humor, and a savage dislike of bullies, stuffed shirts, humbugs and toadies.” His 1931 novel Father Malachy's Miracle was produced as a play on Broadway in 1937. Here is the oft-quoted line in context.
Father Smith has met a young novelist, author of a best-selling novel called Naked and Unashamed, who asks him how he can believe “‘All that poppycock about baptism and purity and the Virgin Birth,” which is “against all modern science and obstetrics.” He’s just tried to explain clerical celibacy in terms we would have to think misogynist (he’s the hero of the novel but not a perfect one).
“What you have just said proves what I have always maintained: that religion is only a substitute for sex,” Miss Agdala said.
“I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God,” Father Smith said.
“Read D. H. Lawrence if you don’t believe me,” Miss Agdala said. “Read any of the moderns. It’s no use struggling against nature. People must be true to their chemistry. I’m a varietist myself.” She rolled her eyes and swung her haunches as she spoke. “I may as well tell you once and for all that I don’t believe in inhibitions,” she said.
“Only in exhibitions, is that it?” Father Smith said, still finding it difficult to keep the rage and hurt in his soul from rocking his voice. “Well, let me tell you that Christ came into this world precisely in order to teach men how to struggle against the chemistries, if so you must call them, of desire and self-love. All through the ages the Church of God has worked and prayed for this one end: to persuade men to obey Christ; its mission is and has always been and will always be an immense effort for a small effort: to storm, to threaten, to controvert, and to plead people into trying to correspond with sanctifying grace.
“Call the practice of this discipline an inhibition if you will. In that case there is not only one inhibition but many, for Christ called men to refrain from murder and theft as well as from impurity. The Catholic Church, however, has another name for this obedience, because it is a rigour which makes saints.”
“But who wants to be a saint these days?” Miss Agdala asked.
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