Of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologicae, John Boswell has written that it “became the standard of orthodox opinion on every point of Catholic dogma for nearly a millennium and permanently and irrevocably established the ‘natural’ as the touchstone of Roman Catholic sexual ethics.”^[31] Such a touchstone entrains as its inescapable corollary a codification of “unnatural” acts, a taxonomy of perversions whose postulates would be transmitted intact to the Protestant English sodomy discourse, where, as we have seen, they would be redeployed and transformed in an increasingly secular and civil context. In the Summa Aquinas subsumes sodomy [vitium sodomiticum] as a specific subset within the more inclusive genus of unnatural vice or lust [vitium or luxuria contra naturam], for which he provides the following synopsis:

It may happen variously. First, outside intercourse when an orgasm is procured for the sake of venereal pleasure; this belongs to the sin of self-abuse, which some call unchaste softness. Second, by intercourse with a thing of another species, and this is called bestiality. Third, with a person of the same sex, male with male and female with female, to which the Apostle refers, and this is called sodomy. Fourth, if the natural style of intercourse is not observed, as regards the proper organ or according to other rather beastly and monstrous techniques.^[32]

Quite clearly, the generic principle that affines the species of perversity enumerated above (“It may happen variously”) is decidedly not a disorder or confusion in the relation between desire and gender; the vices numbered one, two and four are unaccountable according to the principle of the heterosexual alignment of an already gendered desire. Rather, as Aquinas’s analysis makes clear, the generic postulate governing the category vitium contra naturam is a failure to constrain the pursuit of pleasure, itself inspecific as to gender, according to what Aquinas calls “the natural pattern of sexuality for the benefit of the species”—that is, according to God’s procreative imperative. Obviously enough, this definition restricts the spectrum of the natural to the monochromatism of heterosexual vaginal intercourse while simultaneously determining a polychromatic range of the unnatural. In each of Aquinas’s enumerated perversities—masturbation, bestiality, sodomy, nongenerative “heterosexual” variations—it is the failure of the given sex act to conform to the procreative imperative, and not any malformation in desire itself, that defines transgressivity. Furthermore, as a continuing reminder of the definitional vicissitudes of sodomy, we should note that Aquinas restricts vitium sodomiticum to unspecified genital relations between members of the same gender (he includes what Coke will omit: womankind with womankind) and in doing so diverts what we would call heterosexual sodomy to that other category of “rather beastly and monstrous techniques.”

Two aspects of Aquinas’s thought deserve emphasis: his rigorously delimited notion of “the natural pattern of sexuality” and his understanding of the play of pleasure in relation to that pattern. What precisely is the “patterning” that makes generative sex the only natural sex? What disciplinary machinery insures that pleasure’s extravagance will accommodate itself—or, rather, be accommodated—to the shrunken parameters of Aquinas’s well-ordered sex act? Given the ease of perversity, how are the rigors of the natural achieved? The brief answer is that in Aquinas’s account the coordination of pleasure and nature is the function, at once hermeneutical and disciplinary, of the “higher powers” of “right reason.” Reason’s agency may be called hermeneutical because reason alone is dispassionate enough to read aright God’s procreative intention, and disciplinary because reason alone is potent enough to chasten the excursivity of pleasure. A cool power submits the heat of pleasure to the standard of divine intentions:

In the realm of human activity a sin implies a breach of the reasonable plan of life, which requires that things be fittingly ordered to their ends. If the end be good and if what is done is well-adapted to that, then no sin is present. Now as the preservation of the bodily nature of the individual is truly a good, so that of the nature of the race is an even greater good. And as food is for the first so sex is for the second. Augustine draws the parallel, What food is for the health of a man, that intercourse is for the health of the race. So then, as the use of food is without sin, if taken in due manner and order and for the body’s welfare, so also is the use of sex in keeping with its purpose that people should be fruitful.^[33]

Prior to the Fall this alignment between the “due manner and order” of the sexual act and God’s “purpose that people should be fruitful” was, theoretically at least, an Edenic automatism, an achievement so spontaneous that Augustine could theorize a perfectly “passionless generation” implicating bodies but not pleasures. Of course, this “ideal of Edenic placidity,” as Stephen Greenblatt calls it, was expelled from secular history, which is the history of the continuing dysfunction of flesh and reason.^[34] Aquinas writes: “That sexual desire and pleasure are not subject to the sway and moderation of reason is part of the penalty of original sin, for as appears from Augustine, by rebelling against God we deserved to have our flesh in rebellion against our reason.” As Adam stood against God, so flesh stands against reason; and with the specifically sexual implication that now “there is an excess of pleasure in any sexual act,” an excess “so absorbing” that “reason cannot function.” If once reason had been concomitantly the motive and the mode of human sexuality, it now arrives belatedly in the form of regulatory agency whose work is to chasten and correct the violence of desire: “Here is a matter where the order of reason is urgently required.”^[35]

Yet if the urgency of reason works to subdue the excursivity of desire, it must labor ceaselessly because postlapsarian sexuality—which is to say, sans Christ, all sexuality—is everywhere installed with a principle of unnatural extravagance; it always already tends to wander, turn, go the wrong road. Slightly transvaluing Aquinas, we may say that desire naturally tends toward the unnatural: a reflexive pleasure tropism. At the level of subjective affect, this entails an indiscriminate delectatio venereorum or “sex pleasure.” Aquinas: “The goal of lechery is sex pleasure, the greatest there is to sensory appetite, and therefore highly desirable, both because of the vehemence of the pleasure and because it is so bound up with our nature.”^[36] As the naturally unnatural “vehemence of pleasure” overmasters the “sway of reason,” a civil war among the members ensues:

One consequence of the lower powers being powerfully affected by their own interests is the blocking or derangement of the activities of higher powers. Now in lechery the lower appetites, namely those of the desirous emotions, are vehemently intent on an object because of the strength of the pleasure. A result is that the higher powers of mind and will are put out of gear.^[37]

Here, in the idea of an undifferentiated and self-delighting pleasure principle, is Aquinas’s conceptual pivot. As pleasure’s intrinsic vehemence neutralizes the higher powers of reason and self-control, the lower powers, motivated only by “their own interest” in polymorphic gratification, are free to solicit satisfaction anywhere. With reason thus disengaged, nothing remains to steer the sensual trajectories of delectatio venereorum, whose native modes are excess and excursus; and the very contours of gender, whose recognition is required by the higher powers and ignored by the lower, are simply erased by “the strength of pleasure.”

For Aquinas, then, sexual desire is not a dyadically structured energy motivating the concussion of genital opposites; heterosexuality is not desire’s intrinsic configuration. God’s scriptural imperative to generativity and his interdictions against nonprocreative variations are necessary precisely because excursivity is native or natural to postlapsarian desire. Without the directional guide of reason (tab A invariably inserted according to instructions into slot B), desire itself is polytropos, of many turnings and various contrivances. Sodomy is thus one of the various unnatural turns that polytropic desire so naturally takes; and as such it belongs as a subset to the broader taxonomic category of unnatural vice, which represents a disorder in the relation between reason and pleasure and not, as in sexual inversion, a disorder in the alignment between psychical desire and anatomical sex.

Something like this conceptual schema—which holds transgressivity to be specific as to act and inspecific as to desire, and which holds desire itself to be a polytropic pursuit of pleasure—would govern the West’s sodomy discourse from Aquinas’s time through the end of the eighteenth century, when the controlling paradigm began to shift toward the inversion or homosexuality model that would dominate late nineteenth and twentieth century discourses, both sexological and psychoanalytic, on same-sex eroticism. If the historical, institutional, and social specifics of this paradigm shift still remain opaque, it is nonetheless clear, in broad terms anyway, that the sodomy paradigm remains dominant until the later decades of the nineteenth century. An instance from the English discourse will clarify this assertion. Circa 1785 Jeremy Bentham wrote, but did not publish, an extended essay (over sixty manuscript pages) on the moral and legal aspects of sexual relations between men. Louis Cromptom, who edited Bentham’s essay and published it for the first time in 1978, calls it “the earliest scholarly essay on homosexuality known to exist in the English language.”^[38] We may concur with Crompton’s claim of temporal priority while pausing to demur at the word “homosexuality,” for Bentham, writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century, had no access to the conceptual category of homosexuality and instead entitled his essay “Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty.” It is a title worth lingering over.

The phrase “Offences Against One’s Self” alludes generally to a tradition of political and juridical representation and specifically to a contemporaneous legal text, and when thus contextualized the phrase registers as well a certain conceptual plasticity regarding the self’s relation to authority and desire’s relation to community. The specific textual allusion is to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, volume 4, Of Public Wrongs, chapter 15, “Of Offences Against the Persons of Individuals,” in which Blackstone, “having in the preceeding chapter considered the principal crime, or public wrong, that can be committed against a private subject, namely, by destroying his life,” then proceeds “to inquire into such other crimes and misdemeanors, as more particularly affect the security of his person, while living.”^[39] Blackstone’s ascending catalog of “such other crimes” begins in mayhem (by which he means dismemberment), moves to the forcible abduction of heiresses, escalates to rape, and then climaxes with that offense “of a still deeper malignity; the infamous crime against nature, committed either with man or beast.” As one of the “crimes of a public nature,” sodomy (a word Blackstone refuses to write because, as we have seen, “the very mention of [it] is a disgrace to human nature”) breaches both the “King’s peace” and the individual’s “security” or “person”—that is, his or her bodily integrity. Yet Blackstone’s catalog of security violations contains a noteworthy anomaly. Except for the infamous crime against nature, all the transgressions enumerated therein involve traductions of consent: an individual’s body or person is forcibly violated or overwhelmed, but in the case of sodomy the issue of consent is simply elided. Hence consensual sodomy, for reasons Blackstone disdains to explain, constitutes a violation of the communal body itself and therefore counts as a “public wrong.”

Bentham, whose reasoning on this subject is everywhere more explicit and composed than Blackstone’s, presses Blackstone on exactly this point:

Neither does this lawyer or any English lawyer in his comments make any distinction between this kind of filthiness when committed with the consent of the patient and the same kind of filthiness when committed against his consent and by violence. It is just as if a man were to make no distinction between concubinage or rape.^[40]

And again:

If either of them be unwilling, the act is not that we have here in view; it is an offense totally different in its nature of effects; it is a personal injury; it is a kind of rape.^[41]

Bentham’s specification of consent as a pivotal issue in the contradistinction of “paederasty” and “a kind of rape” registers two large differences in the way Blackstone and Bentham regard their subject. First and most obvious is the startling ease with which Bentham analogizes same-sex and other-sex relations; his unembarrassed parallelism between consensual sodomy and concubinage quite simply overturns a whole tradition of phobic masculine representation. Secondly, by simply discounting God’s scriptural interdictions and His spectacular correction of Sodom and Gomorrah (a precedent for punishment that Blackstone still regards as “an universal, not merely a provisional precept”), Bentham seeks to refer consensual sodomy—and implicitly all voluntary sexual practice—neither to God nor to king, nor even to the social body at large, but rather to something he simply calls the “self.” Unless consensual sodomy tends to “diminish the public force” (and Bentham argues that it does not), then it deserves inclusion “within the list of offences against one’s self, of offences of imprudence.”^[42] Thus the provinces of the body and the trajectories of sexual behavior are for Bentham, as they emphatically are not for Blackstone and his predecessor Coke, matters of personal jurisdiction, and this is so because the individual, quite simply, owns the body and the self. In Bentham’s argument, the public is not wronged because the communal/national/divine body is not invoked. For the purposes of abrupt contrast, consider Coke’s discourse, where the chapter “Of Buggery, or Sodomy” is situated within The Third Part of the Institutes, the subtitle of which is “Concerning High Treason and Other Pleas of the Crown.” Coke can account sodomy a species of treason because, according to the dominant Renaissance metaphysic conveniently known as “the great chain of being,” all human bodies, especially male ones, repeat, reflect, and represent the king’s (male) body, itself both personal and communal, which in turn represents God’s (also presumptively male) body. Hence Coke, quoting Fleta, can write “Sodomie est crime de majestie, vers le roy celestre.”^[43]

Yet if the first half of Bentham’s title—“Offences Against One’s Self”—signals this large difference in the conceptualization of the subject and the subject’s relation to divine and secular communities, then his title’s second half—“Paederasty”—should remind us that historical change is simultaneously a process of cultural continuity, that sameness and difference must accommodate each other in fluctuant interplay. Bentham’s mistaken employment of the word paederasty (derived from the Greek root paido: boy or, more generally, child) to represent all same-sex erotic relations is doubly instructive here: first because it may stand metonymically for the insistent and enduring androcentric bias of English discourse on sexuality (Bentham’s sixty manuscript pages contain exactly three perfunctory sentences on erotic relations between females; like Coke, indeed like the whole English legal tradition, he prefers to ignore womankind with womankind), and second because his large allusion to the Greek example forecasts the nineteenth century’s fantasmatic quest (Symonds, Pater, Wilde) for a noneffeminated intermasculine sexuality.^[44] What, then, is “paederasty” as Bentham defines it? Answer: It is one variety of the “offences of impurity,” one of the “irregularities of the venereal appetite which are stiled unnatural.”

Stiled unnatural: Bentham’s past participle concretizes his revisionary impulse by referring both nature and unnature to the arbitrary cultural process of semantic codification. Bentham implicitly revalues sexual deviance as a kind of lexical or syntactical oddity, and sodomy becomes a merely culturally anomalous or “irregular” way of “procuring sensations.” And yet if a revolutionary change is (only) potentiated here,^[45] there is also indication of a telling continuity. If, to be sure, Aquinas and Coke would pale at Bentham’s stylization of the natural, they would nonetheless recognize as familiar certain foundational assumptions informing the generic phrase “irregularities of the venereal appetite.” Consider, for instance, Bentham’s enumeration of the “varieties” of “these irregularities,” which, he says, “consist either in making use of an object”:

1. Of the proper species but at an improper time: for instance, after death.
2. Of an object of the proper species and sex, and at a proper time, but in an improper part.
3. Of an object of the proper species but the wrong sex. This is distinguished from the rest by the name of paederasty.
4. Of a wrong species.
5. In procuring this sensation by one’s self without the help of any other sensitive object.

The affinity between this catalog of sexual irregularity and those of Aquinas and Coke is manifest. Despite hierarchical variations within this taxonomic structure (example: contra Aquinas and Coke, Bentham, in a phobic gesture typical of the eighteenth century, will rank masturbation as “the most incontestably pernicious” of the variations), these three writers agree that the genus of the “unnatural” (Aquinas, Coke) or the “irregular” (Bentham) subsumes a special series of transgressive or impure acts whose essential relatedness derives from a shared principle or, better, from a common property. “The abominations that come under this head,” Bentham writes, “have this property in common, in this respect, that they consist in procuring certain sensations by means of an improper object.” Thus the generic affinity of, say, heterosexual fellation, homosexual sodomy, and individual masturbation derives from a libidinal economy of sensations and their loci, of pleasure and mobile gratifications; it is precisely the indifference of sensation to the sites of its gratification that motivates the strict organization of members and orifices. Once again desire is polytropos, a wanderer. And most importantly, this is not an economy of desire in gender and gender in desire. Indeed, for Bentham the difference in sexual object (whether a difference in gender or species or person) does not constitute a critical or explanatory difference, because each object is a merely circumstantial or accidental telos of pleasure’s polytropic inclinations. This notion of desire grounds Bentham’s use of “paederasty” as a representative deviation. He writes that “in settling the nature and tendency of this offence we shall for the most part have settled the nature and tendency of all the other offences, that come under this disgusting catalog.” The comprehensiveness of this exegetical claim may be astonishing, but it is coherent given the double postulate that grounds Bentham’s account of eros: that, first, desire is an indifferent wanderer and, second, that transgression is act-specific—a matter of doing, not of feeling or of erotic orientation. If, as is the case, this taxonomic logic did not survive the nineteenth century intact, it was because those two postulates, for reasons that remain partly occulted, would be overturned. Or, perhaps better, inverted.