So, I picked up Richard Sipe’s new book, The Serpent and The Dove: Celibacy in LIterature and Life  (October ’07 – and $49.95, just so you know…) from the “new arrivals” section at the library. 
I thought I would be getting a survey of what the title indicates, informed by Sipe’s deep experience in the field – not in literature, but in dealing with the issue of celibacy.
(And before anyone starts ragging on Sipe, please know that Sipe doesn’t think celibacy is freakish or unnatural in and of itself. In fact, it’s the opposite in his view. The last few sentences of the book are: “Celibacy is a part of human experience and spiritual striving. Many people beyond committed religious men and women have garnered knowledge of the value of sexual restraint. It is of nature.” ( 229) No, what Sipe thinks is unwise and worth revisiting is mandatory celibacy and the culture it creates. I disagree with certain elements of Sipe’s analysis of the issue, but it’s important to represent his views accurately.)
Well, I really didn’t get that – the survey I expected –  because the book is strangely scattered, beginning with accounts of celibacy in the lives of Gandhi, Fr. Charles Coughlin and Bishop Sheen. And then he moves on to a few treatments of celibacy in literature – Joyce, Greene and others, including J.F. Powers, which was the best section because Sipe knew Powers.
So, no, the book doesn’t really succeed in that it’s not a coherent examination  – which would be interesting – but rather a collection of disparate essays that don’t fit together that well and don’t all even focus on the issue of celibacy. Unless I’m just dense, which is always possible.
But what I really didn’t expect is that the core of this book – to such an extent that the other material almost seems like an excuse – is a sustained critique of Fr. Andrew Greeley. No, “critique” is too gentle.
Contemptuous evisceration?
Yeah, that might do it.
I don’t know if there’s a history of bad blood between Greeley and Sipe, but the low view Sipe has for Greeley – and expresses in no uncertain terms – is pretty obvious. Greeley gets two chapters of his own, plus frequent mentions in other chapters.
It’s almost bizarre.
Here are the subtitles of a section in one of the Greeley chapters called “The Celibate Author and Personality.”
Authority (..as in “problems with”)
Grandiosity and Projection
Hypersensitivity
Narcissism.
Er, okay.
Sipe, not surprisingly, slams Greeley’s fiction writing style (one chapter – compares Greeley and James T. Farrell. Guess who wins.) on countless levels, and basically accuses him of being an arrested adolescent, deeply immersed in the madonna/whore myth, a false feminist, with an exaggerated sense of himself and a skewed and unhelpful vision of celibacy (in which the function of celibacy is to render the celibate  a “man of fascination” – that is, more available for emotional intimacy with women than noncelibates.). He concludes one chapter:
Although Greeley is certainly an accomplished rhetorician and exposes the reader to a plethora of his own fanatasies about sex and judgments on the state of celibacy in the priesthood, he provides little evidence to support the conclusion that he has completely integrated his sexuality/celibacy. Greeley also reveals his own exaggerated investment of being “a man of fascination.” (110)
Couple this with a dense chapter on Joyce, a comparison of Graham Greene and an obscure writer named Ethel Voynich, an exploration of Gandhi…you can probably see how this book was not what I expected.
And you can probably see how, at points, I couldn’t put it down.