Many modern Christians can’t understand why a distinguished man of letters, Vladimir Nabokov, would have written a novel about a man attracted to girls just before adolescence or perhaps just entering that ripening of sexual nature. The answer is as clear as the glorification of Mel Gibson’s gory movie, The Passion of the Christ. We of the post-Englightenment are a numbed people who need extremes to feel even the normal pleasures of human biological nature. Nabokov saw this and depicted this situation though himself disgusted by the sorts of perverse desires he depicted in quite a non-pornographic manner. Nabokov was quite clearly a man of civilized thoughts and feelings who was somewhat horrified by the predominance of barbarian children in the modern West.
Nabokov was right. We modern men are so numbed in our minds and souls and moral characters and — necessarily — even our glands that only perverse forms of love can reach the strong levels once felt in more normal forms by our ancestors, including novelists and poets and philosophers and shoe-makers and founders of evolutionary biology. At best, we are lukewarm inside of our bodies and in our minds. We find it hard to love God in the way of St. John the Evangelist or women in the way of Robert Burns or men and women in the ways found in the novels of Jane Austen. In general, the quiet passions of the Victorian Age or any morally well-ordered age are nearly impossible for us to even perceive in the pages of a great novel or in the memories some of us have of those born in the 1800s.
Then there are religious feelings, not so fully separate from sexual desires. Mel Gibson, in The Passion of the Christ, appears to have explored a view similar to that of Nabokov with the rather important distinction that Gibson wasn’t and isn’t a civilized man trying to make some sense of a disquieting situation but rather a barbarian child who has himself been deformed as he grew up in a morally disordered age. Odd it might seem that such barbarian children feel empty inside, lukewarm in their desires.
Odd it might seem that they can’t appreciate simple pleasures and basic sexual desires so well as can those of ages well-ordered to the brink of outright repression. Is it the case that moral order increases the strength and maintains the proper focus of our normal animal desires? Or is it the case that we modern men are numbed because of the sheer complexity and fast pace of our lives? Or is something else going on?
I can only agree with Nabokov’s artful and highly intellectual presentation, Gibson’s childish and unconscious presentation, of our modern selves as being creatures needing perversions to reach levels of passion which our peasant ancestors met in simple encounters on the marriage bed or in worship services.