Anatomy of a Sex Scandal
The shape of a certain kind of scandal is remarkably similar, epoch to epoch. A charismatic, mysterious figure is accused of conducting secret sexual rituals that are threatening and exploitative. The accusation rumbles, then explodes locally, drawing in authorities and prompting an investigation. In retrospect, the accusation may contain no truth, some truth, or considerable truth. But the integrity of the accusation has little to do with the intensity of the inquisition. People who might otherwise bring some skepticism or sense of proportion to the story are intimidated and soon find it too risky to object. The accusation works its way through society, annihilating reputations, deservedly or not. Afterward, the society picks itself up, recognizes the excesses, and regrets them—though too late for those caught in the tempest.
Sometimes, as with the McMartin Preschool “satanism” case, in the nineteen-eighties, there is nothing underneath the hysteria but more hysteria. Sometimes, as with the Salem witch trials, a real, if harmless, substratum of “magic” underlies the panic. Sometimes the accusations have weight, but the context is more complicated than they imply—as with Richard Baker, the Clintonesque San Francisco Zen master accused, in the nineteen-eighties, of sexually exploiting his adepts. Or, as with Oscar Wilde’s prosecution, in the eighteen-nineties, opposing truths can coexist: Wilde was the victim of a brutal inquisition, a great and benevolent comic writer sent to hard labor for desires the state had no business punishing; and his sex partners included working-class teen-agers, sixteen and seventeen, who were too readily exploited by wealthy men like him.
There’s a similar pattern in the crusades launched in late-nineteenth-century America against “white slavery”—the supposed kidnapping of middle-class white girls by evil foreigners. As scholars note, the women involved were treated, so to speak, as both vixens and victims. The sociologist Brian Donovan, in a book on the subject, describes how the hysteria over white slavery served at once as a progressive campaign against prostitution and as a vindication of nativist fear. The trope proved remarkably resilient. It became the engine of the “Taken” thriller franchise, in which the abduction of wholesome American daughters, immediately after landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport, by Albanian mafiosi is presented as a standing risk of foreign travel.
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One of the earliest, oddest, and most instructive of these scandals is now the subject of a fine and detailed book, “A Scandal in Königsberg” (Penguin Press), by Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. The scandal in question erupted in the eighteen-thirties in the Prussian college town of Königsberg—today, after wars and upheavals, the isolated Russian city of Kaliningrad. Immanuel Kant, who had taught and written there, remained the oracle of a previous generation, and his ideas still fertilized argument, creating an atmosphere dense with permissions and prohibitions. Kant’s work, as the townspeople understood it, seemed to suggest that only disciplined rationality could guard religion against irrational enthusiasm. The furor that greeted the appearance of irrational enthusiasm plays like Anthony Trollope rewritten by Henrik Ibsen: a college-town dispute, turning first sour and then sinister. The cast includes figures with names out of Mel Brooks, among them Count and Contessa Finck von Finckenstein, yet the stakes were high, and the consequences grave.
The story begins in 1810, when Johann Wilhelm Ebel, a young cleric who had studied at the University of Königsberg, returned to the city as a teacher and preacher. Exceptionally sincere and curious, Ebel had been startled, as a student, by the rationalist theology prevalent among Prussia’s educated élite. This was the dawn of the “higher criticism,” when German scholars began to read the Bible as a historical text, touched by myth and marked by the conditions of its making. The tendency found its most explosive expression when David Friedrich Strauss’s “Life of Jesus” appeared, in 1835. To many believers, the approach invited atheism; Clark compares the outcry over Strauss’s book to the Muslim reception of “The Satanic Verses.”
Like William F. Buckley, Jr., or any other Catholic kid arriving at Harvard or Yale in the late nineteen-forties to find himself among jeerers and doubters, Ebel searched desperately for authority. He discovered it in the appealingly mushy teachings of Johann Heinrich Schönherr, an eccentric, self-taught theosophist fourteen years his senior. Schönherr’s ideas, as best one can understand them, began with a glimpse of water lilies illuminated by the sun. From this, he inferred two primordial forces, one a fiery light and the other cascading water, whose collision explained everything from the creation of mankind to the origin of evil. These forces could be imagined as two beings and, by metaphoric extension, as male and female. (The idea still appears, in a transmuted form, in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” where Joyce, who had absorbed theosophical ideas before leaving Dublin, took up the notion of water as woman and mountains or minerals as man.)
More broadly, the effort to reconcile reason and romantic instinct was central to the era: on one side, there was the seeming proof that everything was susceptible to mechanical explanation; on the other, the powerful intuition that life remained mysteriously sublime. In Schönherr’s teachings, Ebel saw a means of harmonizing the two. This was an earnest, Germanic kind of resistance to reason by way of more reason. It’s a familiar move. People still use science to prove that religion was right all along. The design of the eye, the flagellum of the bacterium, the leap of the quantum, the supposed free will of the electron—in every modern period, some fragrant scientific metaphor is seized upon as evidence of a discoverable divine order. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, John Updike wrote an entire novel, “Roger’s Version,” about another excitable young cleric, much like Ebel, in the grip of this delusion. (Predictably, he is also in the grip of sex.) Science kills superstition but seems to take the soul with it. It became the task of the educated cleric to put the soul back in.
Theosophy’s principal binary, though on the surface abstract, lent itself rather quickly to an erotic interpretation. Soul, left to steep, gets read as sex, and Ebel was nothing if not soulful. He was described as having long, shiny curls parted down the middle “like a lady,” among other “feminine” qualities that made him alluring to women worshippers. He embodied the sensitivo professor, and soon gathered devoted followers, many female, whom people referred to as Ebelians. They naturally inspired gossip in the small college town. “It was fun to be around Ebel—at least for women like Ida von der Groeben,” Clark writes of a wealthy young widow whose melancholy Ebel helped lift, “and she was not the only one of whom it was said that Ebel’s preaching and pastoral advice had awakened them from years of melancholy, rendering them capable of taking pleasure in everyday life.”
Inevitably, rumors curdled into accusations. After Count Finckenstein, a local aristocrat with busybody tendencies, fell out with his Ebelian sister, he started spreading them. In a letter to an Ebelian cousin, the Count accused the pastor of recommending an illicit sexual encounter as a path to sanctification. Ebel had even “urged me by means of hints on a number of occasions to do this in his presence, which I didn’t do, praise be to God!” the Count claimed. “This is Satan’s work on these poor people, this is the rotten fruit, these are the dangers that threaten all girls who join the Ebel group. And this is why only women or male hermaphrodites are interested in joining it.” Women and feminized men, in Finckenstein’s telling, were the natural prey and proof of Ebel’s corruption.
Then a fellow-clergyman within the Ebel circle, Heinrich Diestel, who had been shown the letter, wrote a wrathful protest against Finckenstein’s claims and, as with so many misjudged e-mails of our own day, made things worse. Who could reprimand Ebel, Diestel asked, for promoting a Christianity that aimed to “sanctify every domain of human life without exception, to sanctify and ennoble social and domestic relationships, to sanctify and ennoble not just churches but also houses, not just meeting halls but also bedrooms?” This was an ill-timed and ill-considered sentence. Though Diestel went on to make clear that no one was proposing to turn bedrooms into brothels, introducing sexuality into a sacred context was enough to shake the little world of interconnected townspeople. Soon, the quarrel escalated into both a church disciplinary inquiry and a criminal proceeding.
The prosecution of Ebel and Diestel was as prejudiced as such things typically are. Before Ebel would defend himself, he demanded to see evidence of what he was being accused of, and to know exactly who was accusing him. This, of course, only damaged his case. Someone who wants to know the charges before answering them is always suspected of buying time. And, then, the doctrine of the “two primordial beings,” though meant to bind religion to reason, and piety to history, certainly sounded fishy. It had the ring of a come-on: “My dear, why not retire into the sacristy to continue our discussion of the doctrine of two primordial beings?” It recalls the later wooing of Alma Mahler by Gustav Klimt, in which Klimt, with exquisite high-mindedness, tried to convince her that spiritual and physical love must coexist in every natural relation.
Interrogated, Diestel testified that he and Ebel had talked about sex with married parishioners, and, with what now seems like admirable post-Freudian frankness, had encouraged the “contemplation of nakedness” in discussions of marital relations. Dr. Ebel, Diestel explained, advised husbands who confided doubts about the quality or morality of their conjugal relations to have sex with their wives in the light rather than in the dark, because, as Ebel put it, “the contemplation of nakedness could help to free the fantasy from its images and transform blind lust into conscious affection for the spouse.” Strange as this counsel sounds, it echoes contemporary arguments, spurred by internet pornography, to the effect that fantasy can become tyrannical when left to itself, and that the real body, seen plainly, might become an instrument of moral repair.
Ebel’s professed views seem mostly wholesome, even presciently modern. He distinguished between two forms of shame: a proper moral recoil from perversity or licentiousness, which restrained vice, and a merely conventional shame felt by spouses at being seen naked by each other. The latter, Ebel argued, was false shame, with no rightful place in a loving marriage. For husbands like the Count, the attempts of the pastors to counsel their wives and make sex more acceptable to them were, Clark suggests, an intolerable infringement on masculine privilege.
Yet the wives may well have been genuinely attracted to clergymen they found more sympathetic, and less sexually demanding, than their husbands. Perhaps the Ebelians practiced some kind of ecstatic spirituality. The repressed women of the circle probably found liberation in escaping brutal marriages and communing with the loving pastor, and, if the escape did sometimes take an intimate turn, it would not have been unprecedented, nor necessarily unforgivable.
Still, the question of what Ebel was doing with his adepts swept through Prussia, dominating the newspapers that had only recently begun to emerge from their eighteenth-century chronicling of obligations to a more modern publicizing role. For a while, Clark tells us, nobody in Königsberg seemed interested in talking about anything other than the lurid lives of the Muckers, as the Ebelians came to be called. Obscurity, in such cases, does not dampen suspicion; it gives the imagination room to work.
Then, as so often happens, pseudoscience supplemented sensationalism. It’s astonishing, or should be, that doctors—in an era before antibiotics, anesthesia, or even minimal hygiene, when what they could mostly do was watch, record, and worry—had the same prestige and influence they have now. And so Ludwig Wilhelm Sachs, a Königsberg physician and a former member of Ebel’s circle, embittered by his expulsion, intervened. In a tone familiar to those who have not yet repressed memories of the spurious confidence possessed by the past century’s “repressed memory” experts, Sachs testified that he could offer a scientific account of what really went on among the Ebelians.
Sachs, in the way of pseudo-psychologists, had a fairly monocausal explanation of psychological disturbance: it was due to masturbation. Obsessed with the act as the source of modern moral dissolution, he detected it everywhere, and darkly implied that the circle enacted rituals of masturbation, and perhaps oral sex, under cover of mystical theology. Ebel, Sachs claimed, imagined himself as the “primordial fire entity,” and had turned the group’s doctrine of primordial beings into a rationale for controlled sexual practices, supposedly consecrated by higher spiritual meaning. Being fire, Ebel was free to inflame women.
On further inquiry, Sachs proved to be projecting more than he was reporting. He himself, it emerged, had a long and creepy reputation as a fondler and harasser of his patients, although their testimonies don’t seem to have damaged his credibility. It was the same with the repressed-memory experts of a later age: evidence offered against a claim to authority is taken to confirm the depth of the evil being concealed.
At last, the Royal Cameral Court, in Berlin, issued a judgment. Ebel was found guilty of premeditated breach of professional duty and of founding an “illegal sect.” He was permanently dismissed from his post as archdeacon and barred from holding public office. Worse, he was “to be conveyed to a correctional institution and confined there until his ‘improvement’ could be determined.” The sentence was somewhat lightened by the dismissal of charges of personal irregularity: it was sects, not sex, for which he was blamed.
Ebel and Diestel appealed. In 1842, the appellate court reduced the offense from a premeditated breach of duty to a negligent one, acquitted Ebel of founding a sect, and quashed his confinement. But it upheld the dismissal of both clergymen. Ebel stayed briefly in a small house that his supporters had bought for him, then left Königsberg and settled with Ida von der Groeben in Ludwigsburg, where a few faithful Ebelians eventually joined them. The appeal spared him imprisonment and cleared his name but did not restore his career. Some of his followers—as Clark does not report, the consequence being perhaps too far outside his story—ended up in Brazil, carrying the Mucker spirit into the German Protestant settlements of Rio Grande do Sul. There, in the eighteen-seventies, their millenarian movement provoked a bloody conflict with neighbors and the military—an episode still so alive in Brazilian memory that it inspired two films.
It is possible for an inquisition to be unjust and for its targets to be, in some sense, guilty. Many Marranos persecuted by the Inquisition did secretly maintain a Jewish identity. The persecution of American Communists in the nineteen-fifties remains a source of shame, even if some caught up in it, including Julius Rosenberg and his circle, really did place the interests of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. above those of their own democracy. It is conceivable that Ebel’s women adepts were encouraged to seek sexual consolation in the absence of husbands who knew how to give it. The point is that an inquisition’s social cost is so high that its victims’ guilt or innocence is only part of the accounting. A society in which persecution, and paranoia about persecution, becomes ordinary pays a price often higher than the evil that the inquisition set out to expose and contain.
In his closing chapter, Clark describes how rationalist critics responded to the scandal. It seemed to prove Kant right. Reason had to triumph in all things, or else waves of unreason, of which the Muckers were a model, would insinuate themselves into daily life. The irony, of course, was that Ebel and his followers considered themselves essentially scientific in their cast of mind, reasoning toward revelation by way of nature.
Still, the most potent answer to the inquisitorial impulses emanating from Prussian Königsberg came from the French philosopher Benjamin Constant. Together with his lover Madame de Staël and their circle, Constant arrived at the idea—not in direct response to the Königsberg scandal but in response to the moralizing public absolutism of the age—that liberty required privacy to flourish. No idea of liberty was sustainable without a companion idea of private life. This, Constant explained, was part of what distinguished modern liberty from ancient liberty. The ancients expected citizens to be publicly visible: debating, judging, sacrificing, setting examples. The moderns separated public and private life, and allowed the largest possible sphere for private activity: reading, conversing, dining, listening, even (though Constant and de Staël didn’t say so, they certainly lived it) conducting agreeable liaisons.
Constant had earlier supplied a forceful hypothetical that involved a murderer at the door: whatever the value of honesty, one had no duty to tell a murderer whether his intended victim was at home. The same moral tact might apply, in less histrionic matters, to the ordinary deceptions and silences by which social life is made bearable. Criticism helpful to a stage performer during rehearsal may be unkind on opening night. The most golden of golden rules was not “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but “Feel for others as you would want them to feel for you.”
An indignant Kant offered a rebuttal to Constant’s no-harm-no-foul view: How could you ever know there was no harm if you depended on testimony from those who had committed the foul? If the murderer was at the door, the truth must nonetheless be told, whatever the consequences. (Kant’s admirers insist he didn’t mean it quite this way, but, if he didn’t, it’s hard to see what else he meant.) For Kant, exceptions to truthtelling threatened the basis of moral judgment.
On the whole, modern people are constant with Constant in principle and still say “can’t” with Kant. We want privacy for ourselves, accountability for others. Although no one believes that Anne Frank should have been betrayed to the Gestapo in obedience to an abstract duty of truthtelling, we readily, even eagerly, suspend Constant’s rule of privacy when the private life exposed belongs to an ideological enemy. Republicans, including Brett Kavanaugh during the Clinton years, thought little of cataloguing the intimate details of a sexual relationship between a President and an intern, consensual if shadowed by an inequality of power, for the public humiliation of both. Those of us who despise Trumpism too rarely asked ourselves whether Trump’s efforts to conceal an apparently consensual relationship with Stormy Daniels were the proper grounds for prosecution. The law may have had its claims. The appetite with which the intimate facts were consumed had another character.
Yet without an ethic of truthtelling—and truth-seeking—how can we ever hope to judge morality? It’s fine for the French, the contemporary Kantian might say, to have Presidents who take their motor scooter to their mistresses’ homes and expect it to be kept quiet, but is that how we want to live? Do we prefer to know nothing about the personal lives of our public figures? How do we know the harm being done if we’re not in a position to find out? The extent of harm, after all, can be misjudged by those suffering it, and complaints are not always offered by the frightened captive.
“An abstract isolated idea, independent, inflexible and unchangeable—is it fit to be put into use and circulation among mankind?” Constant asked. In a way recalling the morality of Molière’s “Misanthrope,” the small deceptions and duplicities of ordinary life become more moral for Constant than a categorical insistence on honesty. And so with the Ebelians: we could decide that if no Ebelian was harmed or complained, then let it be, whatever they did and whatever we may think of it.
The Constant reproach to the Königsberg case is that candor and confession can become cruelty by another name. The categorical Kantian, in turn, warns that the cult of privacy can shelter abuse, protecting the powerful from the scrutiny that might expose what they have done. The Prussian within us wants to force everything into the open, insisting that anyone with nothing to hide should be willing to put everything on display. Our inner Parisian wants to protect twilight concupiscence, believing it essential to civility. Between Prussian and Parisian lies a permanent argument of our moral modernity, unresolved and probably unresolvable. We can try to recognize malfeasance while resisting malice, but doing so requires patience, proportion, and case-by-case judgment—qualities made nearly impossible by the modern media, already emerging in Königsberg in the form of newspapers and helping to fuel the scandal there. Meanwhile, the whirlpools of history spin, and ordinary people, good and bad alike, drown in them.
What’s odd is that—as the Muckers should surely have foreseen when they contemplated their primordial beings—a streaking fireball colliding with a cascade of water would produce not creative plenitude but a brief, noisy shudder, and then steam and silence. That should have been a warning to them, as it ought to be to us. It isn’t. ♦