Touch:

Sexual Harassment or Sacred Healing?

 

 

Prof. Stephen Palmquist, D.Phil. (Oxon)

Department of Religion and Philosophy

Hong Kong Baptist University

(stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

 

1. The Primacy of Touch

 

            What is the most philosophically significant part of the human body? The most common answer would probably be the brain, for most scientists regard it as the seat of our ability to think. More romantic types would select the heart, the symbolic home of our feelings.[1] Ethicists are more likely to say the belly (the digestive and reproductive organs), because they generate the desires that cause us to struggle over issues of right and wrong.

 

            While these answers are all interesting and worth exploring in their own right, I would like to suggest a fourth alternative. For philosophers who regard their primary task as dis­covering the boundaries of (for example) knowledge, moral action, and beauty,[2] the skin has a special significance that is prior to that of the brain, heart, and belly, and so gives rise to its own set of real philosophical issues. No thought can be formed in the brain (if indeed this is where thoughts are formed) without being related in some way to sensory input that originates primarily in our skin. No feeling is felt in the heart (if indeed this is where feelings reside) that does not also exhibit a corresponding manifestation in our skin. And no desire can hold its sway over us without our skin being involved either in its quenching or in its resisting (or both). The skin is the meeting-point between ourselves and the world. It is the sacred boundary of our being.

 

            Touch, the primary function of the skin, is the foundation of all our bodily senses. This suggestion may sound odd, so accustomed are we to thinking of sight as the primary sense. Yet deeper reflection reveals this to be a mistake. True as it may be that we speak of blind people as "seeing with their fingers", we could hardly justify such metaphorical language as grounded in fact. With touch, by contrast, the reverse is true: sight and the other three senses can be regarded, quite literally, as forms of touch. Sight cannot take place until light waves[3] touch the retina of an eye; hearing begins when sound waves touch the ear drum; taste and smell likewise require the sensing organs (the tongue and olfactory glands) to have direct contact with—to touch—the sensed object or the particles it emits (i.e., its aroma). The only reason we don't typically regard these as forms of touch is that the other four senses each involve sensing organs that are located just slightly within the body. That is, "touch" normally refers to contact between the external world and our skin, whereas sight, hearing, smell and taste are all events that involve the external world penetrating beneath the skin and touching internal parts of our body.

 

            The logical relationship between the four secondary (internalized) forms of touch can be depicted as a perfect second-level analytic relation, using the system of mapping I have developed elsewhere.[4] The wave-nonwave[5] distinction can serve as the first "level" (corresponding to the first "+" or "-", respectively, in each of the components shown in Figure 1). A secondary distinction (corresponding to the second "+" or "-" in each component) can then be made between senses that are voluntary (+) and involuntary (-). A sense is voluntary if the organ is equipped with the ability to close itself off from the outside world and involuntary if it cannot do so on its own. As such, seeing and tasting are both voluntary, because we can shut our eyelids and keep our mouths closed, whereas hearing and smelling are involuntary, because our ears and nose cannot plug themselves but require external intervention (such as the fingers) in order to block out unwanted sensory input. Taken together, the relations between the four secondary senses can therefore be depicted using the following map, with touch at the center to indicate its primary status as the core of all sensation:

 


      

 

Figure 1: Forms of Sensation

 

 

            Recognizing the primacy of touch among the forms of sensation can help us to understand why skin-to-skin contact between two people is such a "sensitive"[6] issue in most cultures. When two people touch each other, they literally share the same space at the point where their skin comes together.[7] This is why even a slight touch can sometimes attract a person's full attention or be regarded as a highly meaningful expression of some emotional or intellectual message. If, as the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words", then an even deeper insight is that in some situations a touch can be worth ten thousand words. For those who are open to the language of touch, it can be used as an appropriate means of communicating the intimacy of deep friendship, without being regarded as sexually intrusive. Friends can and ought to share themselves physically at a level that is appropriate to the intellectual and spiritual depth of their relationship. The most intimate form of touching, sexual intercourse, takes this to the highest extreme by merging one's whole being with another.[8]

 

            Unfortunately, one of the many negative side-effects of modernization is that the ease and comfort with which people in traditional societies touch each other is gradually transformed into a coldness that I believe is one of the primary roots of many of our social ills, from suicide and psychological illness to alienation and divorce. So my purpose for the remainder of this essay will be to examine, from a religious and philosophical point of view, why touching has become such a difficult issue and how Christians might assist in an ethically-sound rehabilitation of touching in our so-called "post-modern" society.

 

 

2. Harassment: Ancient and Modern attempts to Legislate Touching

 

            How many people have you touched today? Has it been more or fewer than you would have touched on an average day two or three years ago? Your answer to these questions may be more predictable than you think.

 

            Recently the Hong Kong government has instituted its first laws concerning sexual harassment. Many (especially lawyers and ethicists) have hailed this as a great leap forward, bringing Hong Kong closer in line with Western conceptions of feminism, sexual equality, and basic human rights. In this essay I do not wish to comment on legal questions, such as whether or not such laws are just or how they might best be implemented in Hong Kong. My concern, as noted above, is primarily a religious and philosophical one.

 

            Laws concerning sexual harassment are actually not as new as some people might think. The term is new, but the idea has been around for almost as long as sex. In the Bible, soon after God gives his very first command, it is misrepresented as a prohibition against an inappropriate form of touching: in Genesis 3:3 Eve tells the serpent that God had said "You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die"; yet the text of the original command (Gen. 2:16-17) only disallows eating the fruit, not all forms of touching. This may be a trivial example, since it does not relate directly to personal forms of touching (i.e., touching between two persons). Nevertheless, it is not totally irrelevant, because some theologians, from the Church Fathers down to the modern day, have regarded the forbidden fruit as a symbol of sexual relations. Moreover, the intensification of God's command in this passage illustrates a basic human tendency to associate touching with transgression.

 

            The ancient Hebrews regarded touching as such a powerful act that it can transmit holiness (see e.g., Ex. 29:37; 30:29; Lev. 6:18,27; Num. 4:15) or defilement (see e.g., Lev. 5:2-3; 7:19-21; 11:18-47; 12:4; 15:5-28; 22:4-6) from one object or person to another. The effect of touching can be so strong that it is sometimes put on a par with sexual intercourse itself, as in Proverbs 6:29, where we are told that sleeping with or even just touching another man's wife makes a man worthy of punishment. Starting with the seventh commandment, "You shall not commit adultery" (Ex. 20:14; Deut. 5:18), the Old Testament contains many passages that reiterate such a sanction against touching anyone we have no legal right to touch (e.g., through marriage).

 

            Modern sexual harassment laws are based on the same core assumption as these Old Testament laws: that morality can be enforced through externally-legislated norms. Ethicists and lawmakers, in their efforts to help protect people from unwanted touching, have been mainly responsible for the increasingly widespread legislation concerning sexual harassment. This term, of course, does not necessarily refer only to literal touching. Sometimes, for example, purely verbal abuse may constitute a serious form of harassment. In most cases, however, the point at which an annoyance (merely verbal innuendoes) becomes actual harass­ment is the point when the sacred space of a person's skin is violated by unwanted touching. This is especially true if "touching" is taken to include its symbolic or spiritual sense: to touch a person's "heart" (emotions) when they are not open to being "touched" in this way is to harass that person. For our purposes, harassment can therefore be regarded as a basically touch-related issue.

 

            The point of the questions asked at the beginning of this section can now be made explicit: Do you feel more free to express yourself through touching (physical or emotional), now that Hong Kong has enacted sexual harassment laws? If you answered in the negative, as I guess most people would, then this should be a matter of some concern. For touching has another, deeper aspect that an over-emphasis on sexual harassment threatens to inhibit, to the detriment of some of the highest values of human life.

 

 

3. Healing: Christ as the Model for Healing Touch

 

            Although the Old Testament views touching most often as a dangerous means of defilement, it also portrays it as a way to transmit to a person the very power of God (e.g., Jer. 1:9; Dan. 10:18-19). The New Testament brings this latter theme to the forefront, to the extent that touching becomes one of the most common means Jesus uses to transmit his healing power.[9] Jesus uses the power of his touch not only to heal, but also to calm his disciples when they are afraid (Matt. 17:6-8), to bless babies and small children (Mark 10:13; Luke 18:15-16), and even to raise the dead (Luke 7:14-15). Indeed, the role of touch in the healing process was so highly regarded in those days that in one case a woman believes she can be healed (and is healed) merely by touching Jesus' clothing (Matt. 9:20-22)! The early church followed in Jesus' footsteps by using "the laying on of hands" as one of their primary methods of communicating the spiritual power of love, brotherhood, and divine healing to their fellow Christians (see e.g., Acts 6:6; 8:17; 2 Tim. 1:6; cf. Luke 4:40)—though they did recognize the need to exercise caution (e.g., 1 Tim. 5:22).

 

            One of the most touching stories in the Gospels comes in Luke 7:36-39f, where a prostitute tenderly washes Jesus' feet with her tears, then pours perfume on them (cf. John 12:3). The scene takes place at the house of a respected religious leader, a Pharisee, who naturally condemns the action. But Jesus, far from rejecting the woman's touch, welcomes it as a spiritual symbol: an anointing that symbolically prepared his body for the sufferings he was about to endure. Indeed, on the night before his crucifixion he performs a similar action himself by washing his disciples' feet (John 13:4-5). These are just two of the many examples we have that indicate how Jesus' spiritual power and authority were intimately bound up with his willingness to touch and be touched.

 

            If Jesus and his disciples were walking around today, I think most Christians would be totally shocked by what they would see. Many churches would probably not allow them to enter, to say nothing of preach or minister to the people. Why do I say this? Because Jesus practiced and taught his followers to practice a kind of radical freedom that seriously offended the Pharisees—who were the fine, upstanding religious leaders of Jesus' day. Jesus and his followers broke some of the most important religious laws, including several relating to the all-important Sabbath Rest (Matt. 12:1-14). The leaders responded by planning how they could use such actions to have Jesus put to death (12:14). Instead of giving in and submitting to the Pharisees' misuse of laws, Jesus began speaking all the more boldly and openly against anyone who tries to put political authority in the place where spiritual authority should have been (see e.g., Matt. 23). But I believe the way Jesus and his followers touched each other would have been at least as offensive to our modern sensitivities. Some gay Christian scholars believe Jesus had a homosexual relationship with the apostle John, who was known as "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (see e.g., John 13:23-25). Although I believe such an interpretation can be highly misleading in our modern context, I do agree that the text suggests that Jesus and John touched each other affectionately. It is easy to imagine sincere, church-going Christians in our society being cut off from communion with their fellow believers for committing no more serious "crime" than this!

 

            Although we do not have such a detailed record of how the Apostle Paul conducted his ministry, we do know that he rejected the overly-harsh, anti-touch aspects of his legalistic upbringing. For in Colossians 2:20-23 he says:

Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!"? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

Paul relates his point here specifically to the touching of forbidden foods (see also Rom. 14, where one of the Ten Commandments, keeping the Sabbath, is put on a par with eating forbidden foods); but the principle he defends captures an essential feature of any Christian ethics of touch. We are not to be bound by worldly constraints regarding touching taboos, but are to exercise freedom in Christ to share love in physical as well as spiritual ways.

 

            But just how far can we take this "freedom in Christ" (Gal. 5:1), without unwittingly turning those we touch into victims of sexual harassment? To answer this question, we need to reflect philosophically on the fundamental boundary-conditions of a Christian ethics of touch.

 

 

4. Friendship as a Foundation for a Christian Ethics of Touch

 

            Rather than attempting to sketch in the remaining space the outlines of a full-fledged Christian ethics of touch, I shall now conclude by proposing a comparison that I believe can serve as a foundation for such a sketch. The comparison I have in mind is between the five forms of sensation depicted in Figure 1 and five basic forms of love.

 

            By "love" I here mean the desire to be present with another person through shared activities of some sort,[10] or the actions performed in hopes of making that ideal desire into a reality. Given this very general definition, there are many different forms of love. But I would like to select five that are generally regarded as the most common: sexual attraction, kinship (i.e., blood relations), friendship, marriage, and divine love (i.e., God's love for a person or that person's love for God).

 

            These five forms of love have a surprisingly close, one-to-one correspondence with the five forms of sensation considered in section 1. Consider sight. Sight requires light in order to function. Light is not only the very first thing God created (Gen. 1:3), but is one of the most common metaphors for God's own nature (see e.g., 1 John 1:5). Sight therefore corresponds best to divine love—i.e., to agape, the self-sacrificial love best exemplified by Jesus' incarnation (the "self-emptying" of God [Phil. 2:5-11]), life, death, and resurrection. This suggestion is supported by the fact that, just as sight can be shut off simply by closing our eyes, we have the choice to accept or reject God's (freely given) love. Experiencing divine love, like seeing, is not involuntary: we must open our own eyes. And just as waves are more inclusive than particles, so divine love is universal in its scope, not focused exclusively on just one person.

 

            The kind of love expressed by kinship relations, by contrast, is not voluntary: we do not choose our blood relatives. Like divine love, kinship puts us in touch with many people. Divine love and the love of human family members are therefore polar opposites of each other, with the latter corresponding to the sensation of hearing (involuntary, but wave-like). This correlation is highly appropriate, since our families are (or should be) our primary source for learning an oral tradition. Although modern western culture has transferred much of this responsibility to radio and television (heard by most people mainly at home), families should still be the most significant context for sharing a kind of love that is primarily heard (see e.g., Deut. 6:4-9).

 

            That sexual attraction is aroused more by smell than by any other sense might be thought by some to be a matter of dispute. In any case, both smell and sexual arousal share an extreme form of individuality, whereby what strikes one person as pleasant may be regarded as repulsive by someone else. Moreover, there is an interesting formal correspondence between sexual attraction and smell. Both are to a large extent involuntary: just as we have to plug our nose in order to avoid smelling a nearby aroma, many people (especially men) have to make a conscious effort not to allow themselves to be sexually aroused in inappropriate situations. Likewise, just as a certain smell is transmitted into our nose in the form of particles, so also sexual arousal is not universal, but specific to certain persons, perceived to be attractive at the time. Thus sexual arousal and smell can be placed at the same position on their respective maps.

 

            Marriage, like taste, is first and foremost a matter of choice. Even in traditional societies, where parents choose their child's spouse, a choice still has to be made before a wedding can take place. In the same way, we have to open our mouth in order to taste anything. And just as tasting is a particle-based sensation, so also marriage is normally regarded as an exclusive relationship between two people.[11]

 

            The foregoing correspondences suggest that the remaining form of love (i.e., friendship) may relate most closely to the remaining form of sensation (i.e., touch). This is particularly appropriate for anyone who believes, as I do, that, just as all forms of sensation are species of touch, so also all forms of love are (or should be) species of friendship. With this in mind, we can summarize the foregoing reflections by mapping the five forms of love onto the same cross used in Figure 1, as follows:

 

Figure 2: Forms of Love

 

If this parallel between friendship and touch is accurate, then it gives rise to numerous implications regarding the proper role of touching between friends. For instance, it suggests that the deeper a given friendship is, the more intimately the two people can communicate nonverbally through touching without transgressing any principle of Christian ethics. Likewise, if friendship (broadly defined) is to be regarded as a necessary requirement for love, then a marriage license on its own does not automatically sanction intimate touching between spouses. A husband who insists on having sexual relations with his wife without doing so on the spiritual basis of a friendship with her may be committing a more ethically-questionable act than a pair of long-term, unmarried friends who mutually choose to express the depth of their spiritual commitment through an appropriate form of touching.

 

            This extended comparison raises as many ethical questions as it answers. In addition to those already mentioned, the traditional Christian (or any other advocate of traditional religious or cultural belief) is bound to have concerns over the issue of marital fidelity and sexual promiscuity. Attempting to resolve such issues here, however, is far beyond the scope of this short essay. Let it suffice to say that on my reading, the biblical writers are far less dogmatic on the issue of what a God-tuned person can and cannot do with his or her body than most Christians assume (see note 11). What is more clear is that God creates us as embodied persons, and that the proper use of our bodies can be a source of tremendous healing in our personal relationships with others. Indeed, the religious person's hope of being touched by God's loving hand is far more likely to be realized when we permit ourselves to touch and be touched by our friends.

 

            The model proposed here might be used to place limitations on how and when (or even if) Christians should ever appeal to laws concerning sexual harassment to settle problems that may arise in regard to unwanted touching. But here I have done no more than hint how this might be done. A fully developed Christian ethics of touch would also need to pay close attention to the danger that a person who exercises his or her "freedom in Christ" can easily become a "stumbling block" for those who still regard the rules and norms of their society as religiously binding.[12] In a nutshell, the foundation of such an inquiry should be the insight that we must exercise great restraint in how we touch anyone who is not a friend, but we should be open to give and receive tenderness with those who are or want to be our friends.

 

            This suggests the following definition: sexual harassment is touching or trying to touch another person (in any of the five senses depicted in Figure 1) when there is no friendship in place to serve as a basis for such touching, when the (prospective) recipient of the touch does not welcome the other person's advances. An advantage of this definition is that it resists the tendency to adopt a one-side formulation that makes the harassee into the only victim. For it indicates that the person who engages in sexual harassment is in a state of friendship-deprivation—at least toward the person being harassed. I say this not in order to excuse the harasser, but rather in hopes of helping anyone involved in such a situation to see it in a light other than a purely legal issue.

 

            The best and only sure way (short of prison) to end a case of sexual harassment, given my definition, is for the two parties to become friends. This puts the responsibility for changing such an unhealthy situation onto both parties. If the two people do genuinely become friends, then either the harasser will come to realize that his or her advances are inappropriate and (out of respect for the friendship) will stop, or the harassee, recognizing that this newfound friend really does have good motives, will allow the touching to take place in the hopes of receiving the spiritual healing that loving touches are meant to bring. Obviously, this does not solve the problem, if the harasser refuses to befriend the harassee or if for some reason the harassee is unwilling to befriend the harasser. Whether or not laws are necessary to cover such cases is, as mentioned earlier, beyond the scope of the present essay.

 

            Could this friendship-based model of touching provide an effective Christian alternative to the law courts when issues of harassment rear their ugly head? Or is it just an impossible ideal—a dream that could never become a reality in Hong Kong as we approach the dawn of a new millennium? Would Christians get a bad name if they began putting such a model into practice? Or is this a risk that is worth taking, for the sake of ushering in the kingdom of God on earth? These are questions I do not claim to have answered in this essay, but which I hope the students reading this year's journal can think seriously about answering for themselves.

 

 

 

 


 

FOOTNOTES

 


 



[1] In his recent book, The Heart's Code (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), Paul Pearsall argues convincingly that the heart itself actually thinks and remembers. This helps explain numerous otherwise inexplicable facts, such as that the heart of a person who is brain dead can sometimes continue to pump on its own.

 

[2] In order not to disappoint those colleagues who seem to believe I am incapable of writing or teaching anything without using a certain four-letter word (K***), I should mention that this is the essential feature of the "transcendental" approach to philosophy adopted by a certain well-known German philosopher, who was born in 1724 and died in 1804.

 

[3] Light, of course, can be understood either in terms of waves or in terms of particles (photons). To facilitate a more systematic arrangement in Figure 1, I have chosen to focus on the wave aspect of light. This should not be taken as a denial of its dual nature, but only to indicate the way light (being itself invisible) appears to operate according to our common sense perception.

 

[4] See especially Chapter 11 of The Tree of Philosophy3 (Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1995) and §III.3 of Kant's System of Perspectives (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993). In a nutshell, a "second-level analytic relation" is any set of two opposites that can be combined to form four logically possible alternatives. The "+" and "-" symbols, used below, provide a logical apparatus for representing these oppositions in a systematic form.

 

[5] I use the term "nonwave" rather than "particle" because light can also be viewed as particles (see note 3), whereas taste and smell are not also waves functions.

 

[6] This word "sensitive" has an interesting array of meanings in relation to our topic. A sensitive person may be someone who is acutely aware of what is happening to his or her skin, or the same term may refer to someone who is closely in touch with his or her own spiritual well-being and, as a result, can more readily come into meaningful contact with other people on a spiritual level. On the other hand, being "sensitive" can have negative connotations, referring to someone whose feelings are hurt very easily. Likewise, our skin can be too sensitive, so that everything we touch or feel causes us pain or irritation.

                It is also significant that the word we use for becoming more consciously aware of our skin's condition, becoming "sensitized", is also applied to our spiritual condition. Just as our true spiritual condition remains largely unknown to us most of the time, unless we engage in religious activities that direct our attention explicitly towards our spirit, so also we usually remain unaware of the sensations being registered by our skin. Some degree of unconscious functioning is a necessary characteristic of a healthy spiritual life, as it is for healthy skin.

            The spirit can best be regarded as being paradoxically both the dividing line and the bridge between God and humanity. (I have explained this further in chapter 2 of my book, Dreams of Wholeness [Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1997]), where I introduce the terms "positive spirit" and "negative spirit" as a way of conceptualizing this paradox.) The same is true of our skin. It both separates us from and unites us to all that is outside us—the physical world as well as other people.

 

[7] For a ground-breaking analysis of the psychological and cultural implications of the skin, see Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971).

 

[8] Strictly speaking, sexual intercourse is in a different category from what I am calling "touching", because when two people have sex, the outer boundaries of their skin actually penetrate each other. This is more than just touching; calling it "the touch of touches" would be a good way to express this element of transcendence.

 

[9] See, for example, Matt. 8:3,15; 9:20-1,29; 14:36; 20:34; Mark 1:41; 3:10; 5:27-34; 6:56; 7:33; 8:22-25; Luke 5:13; 6:19; 8:44-48; 22:51.

 

[10] I have adapted this description of love from an essay by John McMurty entitled "Sex, Love, and Friendship", in Alan Soble (ed.), Sex, Love, and Friendship (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 169-183. Many of the other articles in this book provide an impressive range of philosophical viewpoints on issues closely related to our present topic.

 

[11] In my opinion, there is far less biblical basis for such exclusivity than many Christians assume. The Old Testament often assumes a person may have more than one spouse (see e.g., Deut. 21:15). Christians nowadays typically treat the seventh commandment (against adultery) as forbidding any sexual contact outside of a monogamous marriage relationship; the question of whether any genuine love or fidelity exists between the two people in question is often thought to be irrelevant. Yet this interpretation superimposes foreign cultural presuppositions onto the text, whereas I believe the commandment was originally intended to treat adultery as fundamentally a question of the heart: that is, it forbids sex without fidelity. A few New Testament texts do recommend a "one spouse each" policy; but these are presented as cultural accommodations whose purpose is to avoid becoming a stumbling block (see note 12). Thus Paul suggests this policy in 1 Tim. 2:3,12 and Titus 1:6 as a rule of prudence to be followed by church leaders because of their public position. Likewise, Paul's comments in 1 Corinthians 6:12-7:6, concerning the acceptability of marriage for those who cannot live a purely celibate life, come immediately after his quotation of the "Everything is permissible" maxim and are immediately followed by his confession that "I say this as a concession, not as a command." Without going into detail here, let it suffice to say that I believe a case could be made for defending multi-partner relationships (or "polyfidelity", as it is sometimes called) as in some cases not contrary to biblical principles.

 

[12] In Romans 14:13-21, Paul firmly warns against being a stumbling block, making it a virtual prerequisite for the exercise of radical Christian freedom that we must take care to be sure no one is being led astray by our actions. Likewise, Jesus himself ominously warns that a person who touches inappropriately, or in a way that leads others to touch inappropriately, is better off without (for example) hands and eyes (Matt. 5:29-30; 18:6-9).

 

 

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This etext is based on a prepublication draft of the published version of this essay.

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