Lessons in gay spirituality from Oscar Wilde (MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog)

By Joe Perez, author of Soulfully Gay

Oscar Wilde, creator of epigrams with biting wit. Oscar Wilde, poet extolling the virtues of love between men. Oscar Wilde, adorer of beauty and critic of convention. Oscar Wilde, the Nietzsche of England, destroyer of metaphysical realism. Oscar Wilde, martyr for being true to his art and life in a society scandalized by his sexuality.

This is the Oscar Wilde held up for admiration in today's gay community, but it is not the only side to the Irish writer and poet, nor the side most important to reclaim for all people today -- gay and non-gay. Wilde's unconventional appropriation of Christianity is a model worthy of a fresh look.

Wilde is a hero of postmodernity, but there are neglected aspects of his life that suggest a more Integral embrace. Our culture stands at the cusp of a turning point of post-postmodernity, and there is a thing or two we can appreciate about Wilde more than ever.

The Picture of Oscar Wilde

In today's "Deceptive Picture," Alex Ross of The New Yorker examines contrasting portraits of the famous poet of The Picture, referring to Wilde's classic, The Picture of Dorian Gray. "[N]o work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire," Ross says, putting in context the literary component to the charges which would lead to the writer's imprisonment.

Much that Ross tells us about the most recent three biographies of Wilde bolster the image of the writer in the popular culture: a dilettante and a dandy. But there are other themes that are less well known or appreciated. For starters, Wilde was an eclectic reader with knowledge of classics and contemporary literature:

[Wilde's parents] accumulated mountains of books at their home, in Dublin, and that young Oscar habitually read in bed, his mind ravished by Irish folktales, ancient-Greek texts, Romantic poems, and gothic novels. Wright even suggests that Wilde discovered his sexuality in the pages of Plato...

Wilde's own non-realistic epistemology -- ("There is no reality in things apart from their experiences") is a result of his synthesis of influences from different cultural traditions and his failure to identify a bedrock of reality on which to ground his own perspective. "Experience" guided him to trust his own nature and its desires, even if the world damned him for it. In our world of postmodern philosophy and post-Newtonian physics, Wilde's sensibilities have been vindicated. Among the more educated and reflective thinkers today, they are a given. But Wilde's philosophy is more Integral than is widely appreciated because he embraces all of experience and refuses none.

Wilde, Martyr for the Postmodern Self

Wilde's critique of morality, like Nietzsche's, was severe. ("Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.") Wilde embraced the darker aspects of his nature that psychologists today call the shadow. He called out the blindness of his culture to their true nature.

Wilde was no anarchist, but a savvy strategist who adapted his writings to the demands of publishers. He walked right up to the line of what readers might accept, but kept private what they were not ready to hear. Postmodern critics today largely see this as capitulation, a failure to stick to his guns. I suspect he may have appreciated the compromising because it allowed him to explore the fluid boundaries between conventional and post-conventional.

In the end, Wilde crossed the line in England. Ross says:

in 1895, Wilde chose to face his accusers instead of fleeing to the Continent. It was not an act of martyrdom, or of arrogance or self-delusion, but, rather, an exercise in intellectual consistency. Ellmann writes, "He submitted to the society he had criticized, and so earned the right to criticize it further."

So it was, in a sense, by playing by the rules instead of flouting them that Oscar Wilde may have earned his greatest achievement: revealing the inhumanity and ignorance of those who would imprison him for being authentic to a post-conventional self-sense.

The astonishingly far-reaching and widespread advances of the gay/LGBT rights movement in the past decades has vindicated Wilde's choice, but no more so than twentieth century psychology's identification of "authenticity" and "self-realization" as a developmental peak. There are many resonances between Wilde and an Integral sensibility: epistemology, his focus on identifying the shadow, and his embrace of a post-conventional self capable of integrating insights from diverse cultural influences.

Everything to Be True Must Become a Religion

It is well-known that on his deathbed Oscar Wilde converted to Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholics don't know quite what to think about this fact, whether it vindicates or somehow subverts their own understanding of faith. Simon Critchley leaves no doubt about the centrality of spirituality in Wilde's final days, though it is not a traditional variety of religiosity but something more inclusive and universal.

In Critchley's 2009 article, "Oscar Wilde's faithless Christianity," in The Guardian, he explains:

[Wilde's] De profundis is the testimony of someone who knows that he has ruined himself and squandered the most extraordinary artistic gifts. The lesson that Wilde draws from his ruination is humility, absolute humility. Having initially longed to die when first entering prison and subsequently being resolved to commit suicide on the day of his release, the experience of incarceration teaches Wilde that, "I must learn to be cheerful and happy". Such happiness, however – and this is the key to the text - can only be achieved through suffering.

Here it seems that Wilde has appropriated a central teaching of Christianity -- the virtue of humility -- and made it his own philosophy of life. You can only imagine what Wilde would think of feel-good New Age thinkers who have no room for negativity in their worldview. Happiness is not saccharine, but the sweetness of sublimating existential suffering into beauty. Wilde says:

When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.

All of this sounds Integral enough with its making a space for the neglected parts of himself within a more complex self and its culmination in an aestheticism far removed from unfeeling harshness. But it is also an early predecessor of the contemporary Integral worldview to refuse to exclude spirituality from any area of life, whether it is politics or sexuality or economics or ecology.

In the phrase, "Everything to be true must become a religion," Wilde asks us to imagine a re-sacralized world in which the faithless become one with -- not separate from and subordinate to -- the burning taper, the altar, and a priest with blessed bread and chalice full of wine. Wilde's post-conventional self, it seems to me, did near the end of his life itself transform to an even higher realization of unity with the beautiful.

Faith, Wilde says, must be the ritual of the agnostic. Or, we might say today less artfully, the Cosmic Consciousness or Universal Spirit or God must be the practice of everyone whose faith lies somewhere between belief and disbelief. Let's remember this level of development in Oscar Wilde's life the next time we witness him remembered only by his early self of epigrams and earnestness, a dilettante and a dandy.

Spiritual mentor, author, poet, and scholar. Joe is best known for his 2007 book Soulfully Gay. one of the first memoirs in the tradition of World Spirituality based on Integral principles. Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for World Spirituality, where he works with Director Marc Gafni in providing leadership to the think tank. He also blogs at Gay Spirituality. Arctophile and ailurophile. A little bit country and a little bit "part and whole." Follow Joe Perez Facebook and Joe Perez Twitter.

Comments

A wonderful article by Joe Perez. Thank you for sharing important insights into what we might call the myth of Oscar Wilde.

I struck by a minor point: that Wilde could have fled to Europe and avoided prosecution. In that decision, he became Socrates, accepting the hemlock rather than leaving Athens, and Jesus, not coming down from the cross.

I love Perez's idea that Wilde calls us to see the sacral in faithlessness. In that way of irony and wit that characterizes one face of the Oscar Wilde myth, faithlessness is being faithful to the deep meaning of religion.

To quote Meister Eckhart (again): I pray God to be rid of God for the sake of God. In his own irony and wit, Eckhart pointed out that God doesn't believe in God, and so to be like God we too should not believe in God.

As Joe Perez concludes, we find the Universal Spirit in this our lives right now, just the way it is.

Posted by: Toby Johnson | August 09, 2011 at 08:53 AM

Thank you for the link to Critchley's article; I found it fascinating. It opened up new avenues of appreciation for Wilde's conversion for me, which is something I've often found puzzling about his life.

I'm a heterosexual male, but one of my goals is to promote spiritual and social liberation for all people, including helping my fellow Christians get past seeing gay-related items as an "issue." In particular, I blog about male spirituality. I hope to help men find a healthy masculinity that reflects the image of God in men, but without defining "manhood" in a way that denigrates women or men who are gay, bisexual, transgendered, and so on. It's sort of the anti-Mark Driscoll, if you will.

I will certainly recommend this site to all my friends who are concerned about gay spirituality and related matters.

Peace to you.

Posted by: Jason | August 12, 2011 at 05:18 AM