Aldous Huxley: Sex and Salvation

Abstract

Aldous Huxley, a representative spokesman of the twenties in England, combatted the traditional Christian association between sex and sin, perhaps not aware that Protestantism rejected the cult of asceticism and affirmed that the body is to be enjoyed, not mortified.¹ In a debunking spirit, his fiction drove home the point that the religious effort to suppress the sexual instinct ran counter to the nature of man. The battle that the spiritually deluded individual waged against the call of instinct was absurd and self-defeating. This was, after all, how man was constituted. His kinship with the animal world was both ludicrous and lamentable, but there it was and it had to be accepted. If he sought to deny his descent from the animal creation, he became a hypocrite like Burlap in Point Counter Point, a slimy sensualist who gratified his lustful desires beneath a mask of spirituality, or else he reaped for himself a pernicious harvest of neuroses. If he yielded incontinently to the furies of sexuality, he felt unclean, allied with the beasts of the field, his craving for transcendence frustrated. Huxley’s early fiction brilliantly satirized the insistence of the Church that sex existed solely for the purpose of procreation. For l’homme moyen sensuel, sexuality was a source of pleasure, an end in itself. Huxley’s chief characters boldly defy the artificial moral standards of society. Sex, however promiscuous and illicit, is an accepted and delightful diversion; talk of sin is in this context reactionary and ridiculous.