Sexual Ethics

A Theological Introduction

Todd A. Salzman, Michael G. Lawler

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781589019416
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Two principles capture the essence of the Catholic tradition on sexual ethics: that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life, and that any human genital act must occur within the framework of marriage. In the Catholic tradition, moral sexual activity is institutionalized within the confines of marriage and procreation, and sexual morality is marital morality.

But theologians Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler contend that there is a disconnect between many of the Church's absolute sexual norms and other theological and intellectual developments explicitly recognized and endorsed in the Catholic tradition, especially since the Second Vatican Council. These developments include the shift from a primary static worldview to a historically conscious worldview, one that recognizes reality as dynamic, evolving, changing, and particular. By employing such a historically conscious worldview, alternative claims about the moral legitimacy of controversial topics such as contraception, artificial reproduction, and homosexual marriage can faithfully emerge within a Catholic context. Convinced of the central role that love, desire, and fertility play in a human life, and also in the life of Christian discipleship, the authors propose an understanding of sexuality that leads to the enhancement of human sexual relationships and flourishing.

This comprehensive introduction to Catholic sexual ethics—complete with thought-provoking study questions at the end of each chapter—will be sure to stimulate dialogue about sexual morality between Catholic laity, theologians, and the hierarchy. Anyone seeking a credible and informed Catholic sexual ethic will welcome this potentially revolutionary book.

CHAPTER 1
Sexual Morality in the Catholic Tradition

A Brief History

Human sexual activity and the sexual ethics that seeks to order it are both sociohistorical realities and are, therefore, subject to historicity. Before we embark on a presentation of contemporary Catholic sexual anthropology and ethics, therefore, it behooves us to look at their past history. We will do that in two stages. First, and briefly, we will consider the pre-Christian history that helped to shape Western understanding of human sexuality, sexual activity, and sexual ethics. Second, and more extensively, we will consider their understanding in specifically Catholic history. Before embarking on the history, however, we must first say a word about historicity.

HISTORICITY

Bernard Lonergan lays out “the theoretical premises from which there follows the historicity of human thought and action.” They are as follows: “(1) that human concepts, theories, affirmations, courses of action are expressions of human understanding…. (2) That human understanding develops over time and, as it develops, human concepts, theories, affirmations, courses of action change…. (3) That such change is cumulative, and (4) that the cumulative changes in one place or time are not to be expected to coincide with those in another.”¹ From these premises flows the conclusion that the articulations of the moral values, norms, and actions of one sociohistorical era are not necessarily those of another era or, indeed, of different groups in the same era. The world—both world free of every human intervention and the human world fashioned by socially constructed meanings and values—is in a permanent state of change and evolution. It is essentially for this reason that Joseph Fuchs argues, correctly in our judgment, that anyone who wishes to make a moral judgment about any human action in the present on the basis of its givenness in the past has at least two facts to keep in mind.

First, the past simply did not know the entire reality of the human person from its emergence to its full development in the future or its individual elements from the mysterious powers of the physical universe to the possibilities of human sexuality considered physiologically, psychologically, and sociohistorically. “If one wishes to make an objective moral judgment today,” Fuchs points out, “then one cannot take what Augustine or the philosophers of the Middle Ages knew about sexuality as the exclusive basis of a moral reflection.”² Second, “we never simply ‘have’ nature or that which is given in nature.” We know “nature,” rather, “always as something that has already been interpreted in some way.”³ The understanding, interpretation, and judgment of rational persons about “nature” and what it demands, never simply the pure givenness of “nature” alone, is what constitutes natural law. In the Catholic moral tradition, argument is never from “nature” alone or reason alone, but always from “nature” interpreted by reason. For the human person subject to historicity, moral decision making and action is always the outcome of a process of interpretation controlled by reason. It is never the outcome of the mere fact of “nature.”

Lonergan was convinced that something new was happening in history in the twentieth century and that, since a living theology ought to be part of what is taking place in history, Christians were living in a new theological age that required a new theological approach. That new approach, he prophesied correctly, would be necessarily historical and empirical. Lonergan’s distinction between a classicist and an empirical notion of culture has itself become classical. “The classicist notion of culture was normative … there was but one culture that was both universal and permanent”; the empirical notion of culture is “the set of meanings and values that informs a way of life.”⁴ Classicist culture is static; empirical culture is dynamic. Theology, which is necessarily part of culture, mirrors this distinction.

In its classicist mode, moral theology is a static, permanent achievement that anyone can learn; in its empirical mode, it is a dynamic, ongoing process requiring a free person who is committed and trained. The classicist understanding, Fuchs writes, conceives of the human person as “a series of created, static, and thus definitively ordered temporal facts”; the empirical understanding conceives of the person as a subject in process of “self-realization in accordance with a project that develops in God-given autonomy, that is, along a path of human reason and insight.”⁵ Classicist theology sees moral norms coming from the Magisterium as once and for all definitive; sexual norms enunciated in the fifth or sixteenth centuries continue to apply absolutely in the twenty-first century. Empirical theology sees the moral norms of the past not as facts for uncritical acceptance but as partial insights providing bases for critical understanding, evaluation, and decision in the present sociohistorical situation. What Augustine and his medieval successors knew about sexuality cannot be the exclusive basis for a moral judgment about sexuality today.

The Catholic Magisterium has two approaches to making moral judgments. In sexual ethics it follows the classicist approach enshrined, for instance, in the writings of Pope John Paul II; in social ethics it follows the historical approach validated by the Second Vatican Council. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “the Church’s social teaching proposes principles for reflection; it provides criteria for judgment; it gives guidelines for action.”⁶ This trinity of principles for reflection, criteria for judgment, and guidelines for action came into Catholic social teaching via Paul VI’s Octogesima adveniens in 1971.⁷ It was repeated in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s (CDF) important Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation in 1986,⁸ and underscored again a year later in John Paul II’s Sollicitudo rei socialis. This sociomoral teaching introduces a model of personal responsibility that increasingly emphasizes the responsibility of each person. John Paul accentuates this point of view by teaching that, in its social doctrine, the Church seeks “to guide people to respond, with the support of rational reflection and of the human sciences, to their vocation as responsible builders of earthly society.”⁹ The relationship of Magisterium and individual believer advanced in this teaching merits close attention. The Church guides.¹⁰ Responsible persons, drawing on this guidance, their own intellectual abilities, and the findings of the human sciences, respond responsibly.

The notion of responsibility introduces an important personal and important dimension of human freedom and autonomy to the unnuanced notion of response.¹¹ In social reality, the Magisterium does not pretend to pronounce on every last detail or to impose final decisions; it understands itself as informing and guiding believers, and leaving the final judgment and application to their faithful and responsible conscience.¹² Sociomoral principles are guidelines for reflection, judgment, and action, not unchanging moral imperatives demanding uncritical obedience to God, “nature,” or Church. John Paul adds what the Catholic moral tradition has always taken for granted. On the one hand, the Church’s social teaching is “constant.” On the other hand, “it is ever new, because it is subject to the necessary and opportune adaptations suggested by the changes in historical conditions and by the unceasing flow of the events which are the setting of the life of people and society.”¹³ Principles remain constant. Criteria for judgments and guidelines for actions might well change after reflection on changed sociohistorical conditions and the data of the social sciences.

In social morality, then, the Catholic Church offers principles for reflection, criteria for judgment, and guidelines for action. In sexual morality, however, it offers propositions from past tradition, not as principles and guidelines for reflection, judgment, and action but as laws and absolute norms to be universally and uncritically obeyed. How this can be is, at least, debatable. Since social and sexual morality pertain to the same person, this double and conflicting approach seems illogical. In fact, because the whole personality is more intimately involved in the sexual domain, should it not “be more than any other the place where all is referred to the informed conscience.”¹⁴ The choice between the two moral approaches is neither self-evident nor free from risk, but it is a choice that must be made to find the best theological and pastoral approach to the experience of contemporary women and men.

SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL ETHICS IN ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

Though generalizations about ancient Greece and Rome are fraught with difficulties, both because their histories were in general written by elite males to the detriment of women’s sexual histories and because we know today more about Athens and Rome than about any other Greek or Roman city, we can safely say that in both societies sexuality was generally accepted as a natural part of life and that attitudes toward sex were permissive, especially for men.¹⁵ In both societies, marriage was monogamous and regarded as the foundation of social life, but sexual activity was not restricted to marriage. Judith Hallett demonstrates that, at least among elite men and women, erotic intercourse could be sought with partners other than spouses.¹⁶ And concubinage, male and female prostitution, and male intercourse with slaves were also permitted and common. The ancient aphorism attributed to Demosthenes is famous: “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.”¹⁷ Divorce was readily available in Greece and the later Roman Empire, with both societies legislating for the economic situation of divorced women. Abortion and infanticide were commonly accepted forms of birth control. Marriage was not about love, which is not to say that marital love was never present between spouses. Men were expected to marry to produce an heir, but for them the greatest love was to be had in relationship, sexual or otherwise, with other men, for between men there was an equality that a man could never attain with a woman.

Both Greece and Rome were male-dominated societies in which women were regarded as inferior to men, indeed as belonging to men, first to their fathers and then to their husbands. Male homosexual activity was accepted in both as a function of a patriarchal ethos, and female homosexual activity was regarded as adultery, because wives were the property of their husbands.¹⁸ The approved male homosexual activity was not because some men had an intrinsic homosexual orientation, which was unknown at the time, but because men were considered more beautiful than women, and a man might reasonably be attracted to the more beautiful. It is misleading, however, to speak of sexual relations between men; relations were most often between adult men and boys. Those relations were to cease when the boy reached a certain age, not because homosexual relations per se were problematic, but because adult male passivity was problematic.¹⁹ We will encounter this same problematic later when we consider the biblical texts proscribing male homosexuality.

Greek and Roman attitudes toward sexuality were fashioned in large part by their great philosophers. The Greek dualism between body and soul, with the body being the inferior component, led to a distrust of physical sex and the categorization of sexual pleasure. Both Plato and Aristotle judged sexual pleasure to be a lower ...