more 'spiritual' than the spirit itself

"The modern world in its ignorance of the past believed that it had discovered sex, had rescued it from the grip of 'Puritanism'; but what had really happened was that sex for the first time had come to be seen as an avenue of communication rather than simply as a means of mutual pleasure. By insisting that sex was in fact the highest form of love, the highest form of human discourse, the modern prophets of sex did not so much undermine the prudery against which they appeared to be in rebellion (itself a comparatively recent development) as invert it. In effect, they took the position that sex, far from being 'dirty', was more 'spiritual' than the spirit itself, having its ultimate sanction in the communion of souls which sex alone, it was now thought, could provide." - Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (1889 - 1963): The Intellectual as a Social Type​