c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Youngsters were once traumatized by warnings that if they masturbated they would go blind. Now oldsters are being traumatized by warnings that if they use Viagra or other impotence drugs they, too, will go blind.

The Food and Drug Administration recently reported “partial vision loss in 38 men taking Viagra … and among four men taking Cialis.” Soon after, the stock of Viagra maker Pfizer dropped 1.9 percent.

It fell to a stock analyst, David Moscowitz, not theologians and scientists, to be the chief explainer. “It may not be the drug at all,” he said. “It may just be the patient population that’s experiencing this blindness. We think this was an overreaction today.”

Feel better now?

Perhaps only in America could the stock market’s reaction be more important than the reaction of ordinary human beings who, far more than politicians or celebrities, keep the world going every day.

These ordinary humans already shoulder the burden of the alerts, alarms, misguided trends, and scientific and theological misinformation generated almost daily about the sexuality that is the molten core of being human.

In almost the same news cycle, under the headline “More Sex, Less Joy,” The New York Times tells us about the booming market in “increasingly racy … how-to sex books which employ provocative titles and slang _ sometimes vulgar _ to capture new readers.”

For high moments in low rationalizations, you can’t beat this: “Despite contents that seem to be ever pushing taboos _ even including bestiality in some volumes _ publishers maintain that these are service books at heart, maybe even beneficial.”

Don’t you like the “maybe”?

What we have here is a rich irony of human history and a re-enactment of the story of Eden.

Stock prices, sales and fraudulent benevolence now constitute the goal. Blighted vision and a taste for bestiality are mere possible side-effects. So is it any wonder that the average person, longing for someone to make a life as well as make love with, may also be blinded by these merchants who market sensation more than human sensibility?

Line them up with the theologians who spent centuries treating sexuality as a sinful temptation rather than a healthy attribute, something that was explained by monks as the original sin committed by Adam and Eve that earned them and us exile from the Garden of Eden.

Sex became the preoccupation of the saintly, and we read of some of them heading into the Mojaves of their age to bake out the sensual heat they felt inside themselves. It was almost as if they felt the heat would remove the defiling impurity in their otherwise 24-karat gold personalities.

During these great ages of distortion, ordinary people were made to feel guilty about being human and having sexual feelings. As if life weren’t hard enough already, they were told that their very salvation depended on avoiding, banishing or suppressing perfectly normal and healthy sensual responses to the wonder, beauty and terror of life.

Today’s Eden has a lending library of riotous new sex manuals with such titles as “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not an apple offered from Eve to Adam. Now it’s a pill sold to both by the Happy Days Drug Complex. There is a warning label not pasted to the biblical apple: Eat this and go blind.

The root myth of Eden is being re-enacted anew in this confusion that oppresses ordinary men and women who need sympathy _ not hyped-up sophistication _ to understand and reclaim their wholeness as human beings. The hot new sex manuals divide men and women into separate parts, just as the ancient theologians pitted flesh and spirit against each other.

Man’s fall at the Tree of Eden, Joseph Campbell explains, “represents the passage from the eternal into the realm of time.” When man ate the fruit of this Tree, he passed “from the sacred to the profane” and “discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity.” Where he once saw the unity of creation, he now saw it divided.

In short, that is just where we find ourselves now, outside Eden. It is where impotence _ an inability to respond in a healthy, human, sexual way _ is addressed by sex manuals that may diminish our humanity by claiming to enlarge it, and impotence drugs that may make us blind.

Those who live only for “the latest” and “the thing of the moment” confess that they are trapped in time. The way out of this exile from our unity, symptomized by exaggerated sex manuals and the fear of blindness, is through a return to the eternal that Campbell says is always “flashing … through the latticework of time.”

That is the pilgrimage that good people will make if theologians and sex experts stop dividing them so they can regain their wholeness again.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/PH END KENNEDY