Saving Sex: Love and Responsibility Revisited
Editors’ Note: This is the first essay in a two-part series on Love and Responsibility.
First published in 1960, Love and Responsibility by Karol Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II) remains one of the best books ever written on human sexuality. It seems almost providential that the book was published in the same year the FDA approved the “the Pill,” which opened the floodgates to the cultural tsunami known as the sexual revolution and forced the Christian world to reexamine its traditional teachings on sexual morality.
In light of the fierce polemics that followed the sexual revolution and continue to this day, it is easy to miss how revolutionary Love and Responsibility really was. Eight years before Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed traditional Christian teaching against artificial contraception over considerable internal and external opposition, Wojtyła offered an original and powerful moral argument in support of that teaching.
But he also defended the unitive, and not just procreative, good of the conjugal act, the use of natural family planning (what he called “periodic continence”), and the legitimate role of sexual desire and pleasure in marital intercourse. Remarkably, none of these was simply a given in traditional Christian sexual ethics. Indeed, it seems possible that a contrary teaching, found in thinkers as diverse as St. Augustine and Immanuel Kant, was at least tacitly, if not explicitly, taught in seminary training, catechesis, and spiritual direction. This would help explain a common and persistent, although false, claim made by defenders of the sexual revolution, and reflected in the personal experience of many individuals, that Christianity is based on a negative view of the human body and sexuality.
From the beginning, Christianity has always defended the goodness of the body, marriage, and procreation, but the grounds for that defense have not always been clear or consistent. Moreover, how one understands those grounds can profoundly affect how these goods are experienced.
Despite its density, Love and Responsibility has been an immensely popular and influential book, for both Catholic and non-Catholic readers. But having taught it for many years in my course at Hillsdale College on the Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Marriage, I have encountered some tangles, areas that are either incomplete or unclear, which prevent my students from appreciating the full depth of Wojtyła’s argument. My goal in this essay is to help readers identify and perhaps unravel some of these tangles.
The value of this endeavor hardly needs stating. Never an easy topic to understand, much less live well, human sexuality has become one of the most contested, confusing, and consequential subjects of our time. There is great need for a sound and persuasive account of sex and sexual ethics, and Love and Responsibility is one of the best resources for supplying that need. But in light of all that has happened in the almost seventy years since it was first published, it is time to revisit, and even revise, Love and Responsibility so that its full value shines even brighter.
The complexity of the subject requires care and patience. Therefore, I have divided this essay into two parts. In Part One I give some reasons why Love and Responsibility is so valuable and provide some necessary background to its argument. In Part Two, I turn my attention to the tangles, clarifying and in some cases proposing ways to develop some of the arguments.
The Value of Love and Responsibility
There are a number of things that make Love and Responsibility especially valuable. In the first place, unlike his later catechesis on the “Theology of the Body,” Wojtyła’s treatment in Love and Responsibility is largely philosophical in nature. Although he does not hesitate to identify biblical and theological support for his arguments, he does not rely on them. Thus, Love and Responsibility offers powerful natural reasons for the soundness of Christian ethics that can be understood and appreciated by nonreligious readers.
Second, the philosophical approach of Love and Responsibility is not principally argumentative but elucidatory. That is, Wojtyła does not approach his subject with dialectical reasoning or formal logic. Rather, he seeks to draw his readers’ attention to, to bring to light (literally e-lucidate), what most people already in some sense, deep down, know. The authors of the introduction to the first English edition express this well:
This work is open to every echo of experience, from whatever quarter it comes, and it is at the same time an appeal to all to let experience, their own experience, make itself heard, to its full extent, in all its depth. . . . Love and Responsibility, with this sort of methodological basis, fears nothing and need fear nothing which can be legitimated by experience. Experience does not have to be afraid of experience. Truth can only gain from such a confrontation.
It is difficult to overstate the value of this approach, especially for young people today who see around them so much deep confusion about sexuality that it is easy for them to lose confidence in the truth. I see this anxiety often in my students. These same young people are especially sensitive to the value of experience, and they are suspicious of abstract and formal “rules” or “systems” that do not reach the heart.
Love and Responsibility is philosophical in another way. As Wojtyła puts it in his introduction, the aim of the book is not “to give ready made prescriptions or detailed rules of behavior,” but to “create a view of the problem in its entirety.” Wojtyła aims to identify the foundation of sexual morality that gives moral rules their meaning and value. This foundation is the good of the human person, which moral rules exist to protect and promote, like a frame around a painting.
Most importantly, Wojtyła gives primacy in the moral life to love for the good over fearful obedience to rules. It is not that obedience to the moral law and fear have no place in the moral life, but when they are divorced from a clear perception of the good, they risk becoming a pathological source of anxiety, misplaced guilt, scrupulosity, even anger and resentment. Responding to the alleged (but false) “sex positivity” of the sexual revolution by demanding obedience to authority for fear of the consequences is not the most effective way to persuade young people today, if it ever was. It is more often counterproductive.
Instead, we need a more positive, beautiful, complete, and attractive account of the good that exposes the small and false promises of the sexual revolution. This is the essential shift in moral perspective that Wojtyła provides, and is the source of the transformative hope and healing that so many people have found in the Theology of the Body more broadly.
Third, and relatedly, the ethical framework of Love and Responsibility is ultimately rooted in an integral understanding of the human person. It firmly opposes influential but corrosive dualist tendencies in our tradition that, in one way or another, set up a division and opposition between reason and the will on one hand, and the body and its desires on the other. The result is what Walker Percy called “angelism-bestialism,” in which human beings alternate between false views and expectations of themselves as pure angels on one hand and irrational beasts on the other.
Human beings are rational animals. But in the integral view the human person is a dynamic and integral unity of reason and embodiment. Our rationality does not sit on top of and apart from our animality like frosting on a cake. Rather, our rationality has roots deep within our animality, just as our animality is permeated and transformed by our rationality.
In the integral view, therefore, sexual morality is discovered and enacted in and through the body. In sex, human beings can never “do it like they do on the Discovery Channel,” as the vulgar ’80s song hoped. Sex for human beings can never be like what animals experience, but it can be, and often is, worse. For this reason, Wojtyła gives close attention to human affectivity, to sexual desire, sensuality, attraction, sympathy, and sentiment, which are not merely animal or biological drives that reason must rule, but semi-rational orientations toward, and responses to, real goods that reason must guide and shape. Wojtyła does not hesitate to call these love, though by themselves they are incomplete and even prone to the disorders caused by original sin. They require an “education of love,” which “aims not only at integration ‘within’ the person but at integration ‘between’ persons.” As he reminds us: “The Latin word ‘integer’ means ‘whole’—so that ‘integration’ means ‘making whole,’ the endeavor to achieve wholeness and completeness.” This is the core thesis of Love and Responsibility.
Having identified what I think are the valuable elements in Love and Responsibility, I now turn to some competing background views that provide important context for fully understanding and appreciating it. Wojtyła touches on these views in Love and Responsibility but does not fully develop them. They can be divided into two categories: sexual desire and pleasure, and sexual ethics. The first involves a moral evaluation of the feelings of sexual desire and pleasure. The second involves a moral evaluation of sexual activity.
Sexual Desire and Pleasure
Early in Love and Responsibility Wojtyła identifies two erroneous “interpretations” of sexual desire and pleasure, what he calls the “libidinistic” interpretation and the “rigorist” interpretation.
The libidinistic interpretation, as the term suggests, is basically a hedonistic account of sexuality. Wojtyła, not without reason, traces this interpretation to the new “naturalistic or empirico-sensualist” view of nature that first arose with the modern scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. It is associated with the pioneers of the sexual revolution, men such as Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, and Alfred Kinsey.
This view holds that sexual desire is simply a bodily desire homogeneous with other natural desires. As Roger Scruton describes this view, sexual desire is a
bodily state, common to man and animals, which so irritates the subject that they can find relief only in the sexual act. The sexual act, it is thought, “discharges” or “releases” the tensions of arousal, and so quietens it. . . . Sexual pleasure is then the pleasure, felt largely in the sexual organs, that accompanies the sexual act and which steadily accumulates to the point of discharge and release.” (Sexual Desire, 16–17.)
According to the libidinistic view, most traditional ethical concerns about human sexuality are really concealed attempts to exert power and control over others, which results in “repression” and warps the psyche.
There are many problems with the libidinistic interpretation. The main one is that it does not accurately describe the experience that most people have that sexual desire, and sexual activity, are in fact heterogeneous with other desires and activities, that they are somehow special. There are many clues to this specialness. For example, if the libidinistic interpretation is true, other persons are not necessary. Self-stimulation should be a perfectly good substitute. But, in fact, for most people this is not true. They want another person involved in their sexual lives. And why the demand for privacy in sexual matters? Why exactly is the regulation of sexual desire and sexual activity a nearly universal feature of all human societies? Why does sexual assault have a special classification, whereas, say, “face” assault (surely a valuable human feature!) does not? Why do people feel especially traumatized and violated by sexual assault? Why do so many people feel used and dirty after a voluntary “hook-up”? Why is sex so often associated with jealousy and why is sexual betrayal so deeply wounding?
Sentiments like these are not necessarily conservative or Christian; they are the basis for the MeToo movement, as I have argued elsewhere, and they are reflected in numerous recent books critiquing the sexual revolution, such as Louise Perry’s The Case against the Sexual Revolution and Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. As Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World shows so well, a purely libidinistic world is not “natural,” but requires much violence against human nature, including drugs, indoctrination, hypnopaedia, and social pressure to establish and sustain.
The libidinistic interpretation therefore seems implausible, and perhaps never was the dominant interpretation underlying the sexual revolution. This suggests another possible interpretation of sexual desire and pleasure that Wojtyła does not consider. I will call it here the “romantic interpretation.”
Unlike the reductive libidinistic interpretation, the romantic interpretation regards sexual desire and pleasure, and the experiences that follow upon them, as somehow “special,” but refuses to think about how or why this is the case. Whereas libidinists tend to flatten sexual desire and pleasure by reducing them to mere bodily states, romantics are prone to worship them as the highest, most intense, and most meaningful human experience, which somehow offers release from the body. This romantic interpretation is a common theme in popular music and film, but it can also take more vitalistic, darker forms. It has a deeper influence on sexual revolutionaries like Marcuse and Brown than the libidinistic interpretation does, and it helps explain the almost religious attachment progressives have to sexual autonomy.
Like the libidinistic interpretation, the romantic interpretation can appear life-affirming and “sex-positive.” But as Denis de Rougemont shows in Love in the Western World, the opposite is true. The love of passion (whose root meaning is “suffering”) that underlies the romantic interpretation is actually profoundly escapist in nature and contains within it a hidden drive toward violence, as I have argued in different ways. It is no accident that most romantic literature ends in suicide and death. Both the libidinistic and romantic interpretations share a commitment to subjectivism and even egoism that is in deep conflict with the internal dynamic of sexual desire and pleasure, as I will argue in Part II.
Wojtyła also criticizes what he calls the “rigorist” interpretation, which holds that “conjugal life and sexual intercourse are good only because they serve the purpose of procreation.” The rigorist interpretation appears to be nearly the opposite of the libinidistic interpretation, but Wojtyła argues they share a hedonistic understanding of sexual desire and pleasure. They differ only in their evaluation. For rigorists, sexual desire, and the pleasure associated with it, are always intrinsically disordered and evil, always lustful or concupiscent, though there are occasions when it is morally permissible to engage in sexual intercourse. I treat these in the next section.
Wojtyła speculates, wrongly I think, that the rigorist interpretation first arose as a Puritanical reaction to the libidinistic interpretation. I think the reverse is more likely. In fact, the rigoristic interpretation is very old. It finds considerable support in the writings of St. Augustine, and in a somewhat different way it can also be found in Immanual Kant. Wojtyła is clearly influenced by both of these thinkers, in Love and Responsibility and elsewhere, and yet remarkably he never explicitly treats their views of sexuality, which are contrary to his own.
The rigorist interpretation has much to be said in its favor. Here are four reasons why sexual desire and pleasure might be considered intrinsically disordered and concupiscent:
First, sexual desire is involuntary and resists control. Whereas reason should be the guide in authentic human action, sexual arousal is always spontaneous and often against one’s will. Not only does it often overwhelm one’s reflective judgment in particular circumstances, it can sometimes completely falsify one’s perception of reality. Being aroused by another can even be experienced as coercive. Sexual attraction can be used to manipulate others by arousing them against their reason and will and eliciting from them actions they would not otherwise perform.
Second, sexual desire always wrongly objectifies others. The object of sexual desire is the body of another, and so it always involves treating persons like objects or things. The body of other persons is desired as a means to one’s own sexual pleasure, or one’s vanity and pride.
Third, sexual desire always wrongly objectifies the self. In objectifying others, one also objectifies oneself by subjecting one’s own reason and will to the instinctual urge for pleasure. Even voluntary sexual acts are always transactions of mutual use and manipulation. They are always egoistic, even when they appear to be other-regarding. In sexual acts, one objectifies another, and makes oneself an object for the pleasure of another. For the sake of sexual pleasure, both persons become like non-rational animals.
Fourth, sexual pleasure overcomes the person. At the climax of sexual pleasure the body completely overcomes reason and volition, and so dissolves, if not completely destroys, the person as a rational agent.
Who can deny the power and plausibility of this account? It explains the sense of guilt and shame many people experience, even in morally permissible (e.g. conjugal) sexual activity. This experience is so common it cannot simply be the result of a bad theory. Rather, the theory seems to account for the experience. And this experience is one reason why Gnosticism, which holds that embodiment itself is intrinsically evil, will always be a human temptation, whether as an explicit doctrine, or, more often as a tacit operating assumption. Any competing theory will have to account for this experience. I will suggest a way in Part II.
Sexual Ethics
The basic ethical norm for the libidinistic interpretation is mutual consent, to which the romantic interpretation adds the quasi-religious passion of “being in love.” But it is doubtful whether either of these is sufficient to justify sexual activity. They certainly do not account for the deep dissatisfactions of many who live by them.
The ethical norms for the rigorist interpretation are more interesting. Although Augustine and Kant share a similar view on the intrinsically disordered nature of sexual desire and pleasure (at least after the Fall), they propose very different ethical solutions. Nevertheless, in both cases the solution does not involve any change in the desire itself. Rather, they both involve conditions extrinsic to lust in which lustful desire and action based on it might be permitted.
Augustine’s views on sex and marriage are the subject of some debate. In selectively focusing on negative elements here, I recognize the possibility of a more nuanced and positive account. My purpose is only to highlight certain influential and unresolved problems which trouble the Christian tradition, and which the Theology of the Body, beginning with Love and Responsibility, seeks to resolve.
Augustine’s solution to disordered sexual desire and pleasure (as set forth in The City of God and more fully developed in Of the Good of Marriage and On Marriage and Concupiscence) is pegged to the biological function of sexual intercourse: procreation. In his view, sexual intercourse between spouses is without moral fault only insofar as the spouses intend—and not merely allow for—procreation (and so long as the spouses are Christian and therefore intend their children for heaven; pagan sex exclusively for procreation is not morally licit, even when intended). As Augustine puts it, “Conjugal chastity makes a good use of the evil of concupiscence in the procreation of children.”
Augustine is consistent in this view, holding that spouses who are no longer fertile should abstain from sexual intercourse, and that they always commit at least a venial sin when they engage in it. And even Christian couples who intend procreation are in some sense morally inferior, since heaven does not require any more human beings, although it permits them. Augustine even speculates that this intrinsic infection of conjugal intercourse by concupiscence after the Fall is the means by which original sin is now transmitted to human nature.
Given this account, it is fair to ask why Augustine thinks marriage is good at all. One influential answer, which Augustine at times seems to endorse, is based on a plausible—but I think flawed—interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:1–9. It asserts that marriage serves an essential purpose in providing a remedium concupiscentiae, a “remediation of concupiscence.” Thus St. Paul writes that “it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” In this interpretation, marriage provides a legitimate outlet for concupiscence, which otherwise would be expressed in worse ways. Two damaging consequences follow from this interpretation: first, marriage is for weak people who lack self-control. And this is why celibacy is superior to marriage. Second, it flatly endorses concupiscent conjugal relations, so long as they are not contraceptive.
Now there is a legitimate interpretation of remedium concupiscentiae, which is that marriage serves as a remedy against concupiscence by providing sacramental grace for spouses to resist and overcome concupiscence. But the former interpretation of remedium concupiscentiae has persisted, and it is no accident John Paul II dropped the problematic term in the 1983 revision of canon law.
There are evident problems with this defense of marriage. For example, since non-married couples can intend to procreate, why is marriage morally required? And why would polygamy for the sake of procreation be wrong? (In fact, Augustine gives a long and enthusiastic defense of the polygamous patriarchs.) Is it really the case that sexual intercourse between infertile married couples is always sinful? The argument also appears to commit the naturalistic fallacy: how can biological functions generate moral obligations?
It is notable that Augustine’s dark description of sexual desire is written in response to the Pelagian denial of original sin. His Pelagian adversaries plausibly responded that if Augustine is right about sexual desire and pleasure, then marital intercourse must be wrong. Augustine’s most developed thoughts on sex and marriage, therefore, are intended to rebut that Pelagian charge by defending the goodness of marriage and conjugal intercourse even though it necessarily involves sinful desire and pleasure.
Although Augustine affirmed against the Manichaeans the goodness of both marriage and procreation, there seems to be some merit to the claim that he did not fully abandon the Manichaeism of his youth in the areas of sexual desire and pleasure. Significantly, for Augustine, although marital friendship is a good, marital intercourse is not a unitive expression of that friendship.
Augustine’s was not the only Christian view on marriage. As John Finnis shows, Thomas Aquinas (whom Wojtyła also never mentions in this context) affirmed both the good of pleasure within sexual intercourse and the unitive good of marriage. But Augustine’s voice is deeply influential in the Christian tradition, and is still very alive in the hearts, and even the voices, of many people today. It lends some plausibility to the common misconception that Christianity regards sex as dirty and evil.
As mentioned earlier, Immanuel Kant shares Augustine’s view of sexual desire and sexual pleasure as intrinsically disordered. His solution to the problem, however, is quite different. Since Kant, unlike Augustine, abandons nature as a moral guide, the intention to procreate cannot save sexual desire. In fact, remarkably, he never even mentions procreation in the context of sexual desire.
His solution, not easy to understand, is something like this: because sexual desire is intrinsically directed to the sexual parts of the person and never to the whole person, it always involves treating the person as an object or thing. But this also suggests a way out, by placing the partiality of sexual desire and activity into a larger framework or context that includes the whole person. He is worth quoting in full:
The sole condition on which we are free to make use of our sexual desire depends on the right to dispose over the person as a whole—over the welfare and happiness and generally all circumstances of that person. If I have the right over the whole person, I have also the right over the part and so I have the right to use that person’s sexual organs for the satisfaction of sexual desire. But how am I to obtain these rights over the whole person? Only by giving that person the same rights over the whole of myself. This happens only in marriage. (Lectures on Ethics, Pages 166-67)
Although there is something to Kant’s “personalist” defense of marriage (which has some influence on Wojtyła), many readers will find Kant’s utter silence about procreation in his treatment of sexuality troubling. And most people will find his description of marital intercourse—“the right to use that person’s sexual organs for the satisfaction of sexual desire”—distasteful and unpersuasive. Marriage may be necessary to justify sexual intercourse, but is it enough? Certainly there is reason to think that the kind of transactional egoism in sexual intercourse that Kant identifies is still immoral, even when the persons are married.
Still, it is notable that both Augustine and Kant defend very traditional conclusions about sexual morality. Sex is reserved exclusively for marriage, and masturbation, fornication, prostitution, incest, rape, and concubinage are all morally wrong. It is therefore easy to miss the deeply problematic ways in which they arrive at those conclusions. Those ways are not merely premises and arguments that can be kicked away once the conclusions are reached. They continue to exist within their conclusions, deeply informing the way the moral life is understood and lived.
This background should prepare us for a more positive account of sexual morality that not only supports the right conclusions, but does so in a way that allows us to affirm the intrinsic goodness of sexual desire and sexual pleasure while connecting them to the great goods of marital friendship and procreation. It is only from this perspective that we can rightly understand the disorders of sexual sin. This is the account Love and Responsibility seeks to provide.
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