Saving Sex: Love and Responsibility Revisited, Part II
Editors’ Note: This is the second essay in a two-part series on Love and Responsibility.
In Part I of this essay, I gave some reasons for the importance and popularity of Karol Wojtyła’s Love and Responsibility. I also asserted that there are some “tangles” in the book, places where the argument is confusing, unclear, or incomplete. Love and Responsibility, I wrote, needs to be revisited, and to some degree, revised.
To support this claim, I began by giving some historical and philosophical context for Love and Responsibility. In particular, I identified several influential but in my view problematic conceptions of sexual desire and pleasure, and of sexual ethics, giving special attention to St. Augustine and Immanuel Kant. Here, I will describe and evaluate Wojtyła’s competing view on these topics.
Sexual Desire and Pleasure
Recall that for both St. Augustine and Immanuel Kant, sexual desire and sexual pleasure (at least after the fall) are intrinsically disordered. Both of them, for different reasons, permitted marital intercourse, but their arguments sought to justify intrinsically and necessarily lustful marital intercourse for reasons extrinsic to that lust, whether procreation (Augustine) or a mutual exchange of property in persons (Kant).
Wojtyła, on the other hand, argues that there is a natural “sexual urge” that “permeates the whole existence of man,” especially his “sensual and emotional life.” This urge is “a property of the whole of human existence and not just one of its spheres or functions.” Nested within this urge is the whole domain of sexual affectivity, including sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Although this urge is tainted by original sin and prone to disorder, it always retains its original orientation and purpose. How to take responsibility for this urge, whether through marriage or celibacy for the kingdom, is a central part of the drama of the human person.
What is the purpose of this urge?
On this point Love and Responsibility is a bit confusing. On one hand, Wojtyła argues that this urge “in the natural course of things” is directed toward another concrete human person in his or her “totality.” When the sexual urge is directed merely to the “sexual attributes” of the person, Wojtyła writes, it is “an impoverishment or even a perversion.” To desire a person in his or her “totality” is to desire a comprehensive union with that person, a union of hearts, minds, and bodies.
We might call this the “unitive” good of the sexual act, following the language of Humanae Vitae (1968). This union is a special form of friendship we call marriage, and although it includes more than sexual intercourse, without sexual intercourse it is incoherent. In the traditional language, whereas the exchange of vows to lifelong and exclusive mutual fidelity “ratify” the marriage, conjugal love “consummates” the marriage. This rich and significant term (from the Latin consummatus) means much more than merely to “finish” or “complete” the marriage; it also means “to perfect” the marriage, to actualize its highest expression. Not only does sexual intercourse “perfect” marriage, but sexual intercourse outside of marriage damages the persons who engage in it. I will give the reasons for this in my treatment of sexual ethics below.
Wojtyła’s treatment of sexual desire differs from Kant’s, who only acknowledges its “libidinistic” form, and does not consider the possibility that it might be directed to a whole person of the other sex. It also differs from the romantic interpretation, whose subjectivism and egoism prevent the natural fulfilment of the sexual urge in marriage. Wojtyła’s treatment is similar to that of Judge Wilhelm in Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: the “aesthetic” (his term for the romantic) requires the “ethical” (in this case, marriage) for its completion. The romantic refusal of marriage results in futility, despair, and even violence.
But Wojtyła also writes that the sexual urge has an end different from the unitive good: “The proper end of the urge, the end per se, is something supra-personal, the existence of the species Homo, the constant prolongation of its existence.” Again following Humanae Vitae, we might call this the “procreative” good of the sexual urge. Both Wojtyła and Augustine identify procreation as a good of the conjugal act. But for Augustine procreation is the only good of the conjugal act, whereas for Wojtyła the conjugal act includes both unitive and procreative goods. “Intercourse is necessary to love, not just to procreation,” Wojtyła writes. “And marriage is an institution which exists for the sake of love, not merely for the purposes of biological reproduction.” He further asserts, against Augustine’s view, that “we cannot . . . demand of the spouses that they must positively desire to procreate on every occasion when they have intercourse.”
I will return to the relationship between the unitive and procreative goods of the conjugal act in my treatment of sexual ethics. For now we should consider how the unitive good of conjugal intercourse puts sexual desire and pleasure in a new light. Recall that for St. Augustine and Kant, sexual desire and sexual pleasure (after the fall) are intrinsically disordered. They are always egoistic and reductive, and the loss of autonomy that they involve is always depersonalizing. Now hear Wojtyła:
Since in marriage a man and a woman are associated sexually as well as in other respects, the good must be sought in this area too. From the point of view of another person, from the altruistic standpoint, it is necessary to insist that intercourse must not serve merely as a means of allowing sexual excitement to reach its climax in one of the partners, i.e. the man alone, but that climax must be reached in harmony, not at the expense of one partner, but with both partners fully involved.
Even more, “There exists a rhythm dictated by nature itself which both spouses must discover so that climax may be reached by both the man and the woman, and as far as possible occur in both simultaneously.”
This is a sharp departure from both Augustine and Kant. But it seems to raise the question: How can the loss of autonomy, of rational control over the processes of the body that sexual desire and sexual pleasure involve, be good? For if the desire and pleasure are not themselves good, then it is not good even to seek them for others. Clearly Wojtyła believes sexual desire and pleasure are not themselves bad, but why not?
I think an answer exists in Wojtyła’s framework, though he never makes it clear. The problem, I suspect, is a misguided anthropology that both Augustine and Kant tacitly adopt, in which proper human acts involve full rational control of the body. Augustine is unclear about what sexuality would be like before the fall, but his comments suggest that it would not involve bodily desire. Instead, when spouses intend procreation, they would simply command their bodily members to be disposed to the procreative act without the mediation of bodily desire.
One wonders whether a troubling body–person dualism is lurking here. Does it not involve an undue, even prideful, attachment to the rational control of one’s body? What if instead fully human acts, at least sometimes and in some contexts, involve a voluntary surrender of complete rational control over one’s body? This would seem to be justified in those cases, like childbirth, where the body itself is immanently directed to some good. Sexual desire, and the pleasure of sexual climax which crowns it, seems to be just such a good.
That is, sexual climax, when properly ordered, just is fully embodied self-gift. In this case the loss of bodily autonomy in sexual climax is exactly the point. Sexual climax is quite literally “ecstatic,” drawing persons out of themselves. Not without reason has it been called la petite mort, a “little death,” for it truly involves a kind of death to self. In mutual sexual climax spouses fully give themselves to one another in their bodies. What an amazing and significant thing that God made this death to involve maximum pleasure, and perhaps to signify the meaning of the real death all human beings must eventually experience.
One advantage of the argument above is that it accounts for Wojtyła’s demand that husbands seek the sexual climax of their wives. What is the basis for this demand? Female sexual climax, unlike male sexual climax, has no biological connection to a procreative end. To say that the goal is simply to give pleasure begs the question. But in the view I am proposing, the meaning of sexual climax is not hedonistic or procreative, but personal: it serves the fully embodied personal union of spouses in sexual intercourse.
This is no place to treat the difficult practical and moral questions of how this can be done. I certainly do not mean to endorse marital concupiscence. Nor is it the case that marital sexual intercourse without female climax is immoral. As I shall argue below, it is the organic bodily union, and not sexual climax, that is the morally significant act in conjugal love. But sexual climax seems to play an important, if secondary, role in the full meaning of that act. For some women climax is difficult, even impossible. It is also difficult, and perhaps impossible, for spouses to fully know when disordered desire has become the ordered desire of self-giving love. Doubtless this requires a good bit of work, renunciation, patience, prayer, and grace.
Wojtyła’s understanding of the sexual urge allows for a different understanding of sexual ethics, to which I now turn.
Sexual Ethics
In the first part I outlined some alternative theories of sexual ethics. According to the libidinistic interpretation, mutual consent is the necessary and sufficient condition of sexual activity. The romantic interpretation adds a feeling of love. For the rigorist interpretation, sexual activity is justified by a condition extrinsic to the desire itself, whether the intention to procreate (Augustine) or a reciprocal exchange of property in persons (Kant).
Wojtyła’s “integral” account of sexual ethics is sensitive to both the procreative concerns of Augustine and the personalistic concerns of Kant, but both concerns are modified by his synthesis. To some, such a synthesis may seem improbable, if not impossible, since Augustine appeals to nature (procreation) as a moral standard, while Kant repudiates nature as a moral standard and instead appeals to the person. But this synthesis is the genius of Wojtyła’s, and later John Paul II’s, moral philosophy.
To show this well is beyond the scope of this essay, but the reader will get some sense of it from the following summary of Wojtyła’s argument in Love and Responsibility, which I break down here into three steps. Doing this will show more clearly an inadequacy in Wojtyła’s argument that I hope to correct.
Wojtyła’s core premise is this: “Sexual morality and therefore conjugal morality consists in a stable and mature synthesis of nature’s purpose with the personalistic norm” (italics in the original). What does this mean?
Step 1: The Personalistic norm
According to Wojtyła, the “order of nature” includes two basic kinds of entities, persons and things. All human beings are persons. Wojtyła follows Boethius in defining the “person” as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” As rational, human beings have an inner, spiritual life that “revolves around truth and goodness.” That is, both reason and freedom are intrinsic to the person.
The nature of the human person generates what Wojtyła calls the “personalistic norm,” which is similar to Kant’s second categorical imperative. Most simply, it states that “the person is the kind of good that does not admit of use and cannot be as an object of use and as such the means to an end.”
It is easy to appreciate the value of this norm. Most human beings know how it feels to be “used” as a mere tool for someone else’s purpose or pleasure, and they regard it as morally wrong. But human beings often seem to “use” one another in ways that do not seem morally problematic, such as in ordinary economic transactions. How can we tell the difference, then, between moral and immoral “use”? Clearly the norm excludes both force and fraud, but this would leave untouched all voluntary sexual activity. How does Wojtyła differentiate voluntary sexual activity from ordinary economic exchanges?
Step 2: Human sexuality is uniquely linked to the whole person. Sexuality is a special place where nature meets the person. I believe this is the most important step in the argument, the foundation on which everything else implicitly rests, and yet Wojtyła suggests it only one time, and almost in passing: “There certainly exists a very special connection between sex and the person in the objective order, which at the level of consciousness has its counterpart in a special awareness of the right of personal property in one’s I.” What is this “special connection”?
Importantly, it must affirm more than mere person–body unity, which is not quite enough to make the argument work. It is true that human beings are in some sense indissolubly united to their bodies, even are their bodies. But ordinarily this does not prevent human beings from instrumentalizing their bodies in morally permissible ways. Sometimes people intentionally and uncontroversially “block” their vision by closing their eyes to avoid seeing something or to concentrate their minds, or they artificially “enhance” their vision to see different things, or to see things differently. I have already mentioned economic relations, which typically involve people unproblematically exchanging and renting parts of their bodies—their minds, their hands, their strength—for all kinds of purposes. An exchange at the grocery store does not typically make people feel “used.” But if people can rent or exchange the use of their hands, why can’t they similarly rent or exchange their sexual parts?
One common answer, suggested by Augustine, is that sexual parts are “naturally” ordered to procreation, and therefore to use them for any other purpose is immoral. Wojtyła at times suggests something like this argument, which comes out most clearly in his argument against artificial contraception.
The basic premise of the argument seems to be, “Nature cannot be conquered by violating its laws” (italics in original). Rather, “Man must master ‘nature’ by exploiting more and more effectively possibilities latent within it.” And further, “Man cannot triumph over ‘nature’ by doing violence to it, but only by understanding the laws which govern it, adapting himself to its immanent purposes and making use of its latent possibilities.”
And so, the argument goes, since procreation is “natural,” and since artificial contraception does violence to nature, therefore artificial contraception is wrong. “Sexual relations between a man and a woman in marriage have their full value as a union of persons,” he writes, “only when they go with conscious acceptance of the possibility of children. This is a direct result of the synthesis of the natural and the personal order.” Wojtyła condemns those who “deliberately rule out parenthood. For the value of the person is fully brought out by fully conscious activity which is completely in harmony with the objective purposes of the world (‘the order of nature’), and by excluding the possibility of exploitation of the person.” And again, “If there is a positive decision to preclude this eventuality [procreation] sexual intercourse becomes shameless.”
Thus Wojtyła affirms the traditional Christian teaching against contraception. But the premise of the argument seems problematic. Since human beings live by artifice—by manipulating and invading and controlling nature, cutting down trees for shelter, killing animals for food and clothing, burning fossil fuels for energy, “blocking” nature in one way to harness its power in another—how or why is artificial interference with procreation in the conjugal act, with the intention of marital union, different from these other acts? Are there any other kinds of human acts outside of the sexual domain that are similar to this one? What does it mean to do “violence” to nature as opposed to “making use of its latent possibilities”? I do not mean to deny that there is a difference between the legitimate use and the abuse of nature, but discovering the clear principles for distinguishing them is not easy.
Wojtyła asserts that “If the possibility of parenthood is deliberately excluded from marital relations,” the personalistic norm is violated and the act is vitiated. But he also acknowledges that sometimes “love” requires that spouses forgo having children. Love and Responsibility does not say much about this, but it seems fair to say that for Wojtyła children are a natural fruit of marriage, and procreation should only be avoided for just reasons. But in those exceptional cases, Wojtyła does not require complete abstinence. Instead, he encourages spouses to make use of “periodic continence” (what today is called Natural Family Planning, or Fertility Awareness Based Methods), whereby spouses limit their conjugal acts to infertile periods. “Man, as an intelligent being,” he writes, “can arrange things so that sexual intercourse does not result in procreation.” This, unlike the use of “artificial methods,” is “fundamentally ‘in accordance with ‘nature.’” But how does periodic continence not involve the deliberate exclusion of parenthood? Readers of Love and Responsibility are right to be confused.
A better premise, hinted at but not fully developed by Wojtyła, is that the sexual organs are uniquely and specially connected to the whole person in ways that other parts of the body are not. How could one prove such a claim? Here is one place where experience plays a critical role. Why does sexual assault seem uniquely traumatizing, and why do people often feel “used” even in voluntary sexual relations? Why do people feel a certain shame about their sexuality? What accounts for the vulnerabilities of nakedness and desire, which Wojtyła treats with unparalleled insight? Notably, even most opponents of traditional sexual morality acknowledge the specialness of sex, although they fail to think it through to its natural conclusion. Finally, this claim helps explains why sex continues to be at the center of today’s cultural wars. The fact that sex is somehow central to the human person was in the Bible well before it was in Freud, although they give very different explanations for it.
Step 3: Sexual intercourse is a uniquely organic bodily union.
This is basic biology. We owe a great debt to Robert P. George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis for highlighting its moral significance. Sexual intercourse is a reproductive-type act in which the sexual “organs” function as part of an organic whole, even when this act does not actually result in reproduction. Wojtyła does not explicitly rely on this fact in Love and Responsibility, but I think it is a necessary premise in his argument. It is precisely the reproductive nature of sexual intercourse that makes it uniquely unitive.
Putting the Steps Together
By itself, the unitive nature of sexual intercourse has no moral significance. What for human beings would be incest, infidelity, and sexual assault are regular and unproblematic practices in the animal kingdom. But combined with the other steps above, it becomes deeply significant. In conjunction, these premises support the claim that sexual intercourse is a real, singular, two-in-one flesh union of whole persons that can only be actualized in marriage. As Wojyla puts it, “there can be no question of a sexual giving of oneself which does not mean a giving of the person—and does not come in one way or another within the orbit of those demands which we have a right to make of betrothed love.”
Thus Wojtyła makes the striking claim that “even if there were no other people around them” the institution of marriage would be required. “An actual sexual relationship between a man and a woman,” Wojtyła writes, “demands the institution of marriage as its natural setting, for the institution legitimates the actuality above all in the minds of the partners to the sexual relationship themselves.” This means that all sexual activity outside of marriage—solitary, heterosexual, or homosexual—is intrinsically alienating and depersonalizing, since it necessarily involves divorcing sexuality from the whole person, thus treating persons as things.
But these principles also apply to sexual intercourse within marriage. Marriage does not legitimize concupiscence, as Kant thought. Rather it combats concupiscence by affirming and directing the natural goodness of sexual desire and pleasure to their proper good: the embodied personal union of a man and a woman. And as a comprehensive union of persons, marriage involves much more than conjugal intercourse; but as I stated above, conjugal intercourse should be the base or “platform” of that loving union.
In conjugal intercourse spouses say to one another in and through their bodies, as Christ said to mankind from the cross, “I give my whole person to you.” Thus direct (and not merely artificial) contraception is not wrong because it is against the good of procreation. Rather, it is wrong because it destroys the unitive language of the body, turning it into a lie.
The argument therefore reaches a different conclusion than Augustine did. Recall that Augustine gives priority to the procreative good of conjugal intercourse. Wojtyła of course does not deny this good. But he in fact argues that to make procreation the sole end of the conjugal act is wrong because it violates the personalistic norm, transforming what should be an act of personal love into an act of mutual “use.” Nor is it sufficient for spouses merely to intend mutual pleasure. Although both of these intentions can, and I think ordinarily should, play some role in healthy conjugal intercourse, they are not always necessary and can easily become disordered. The necessary requirement for every legitimate act of conjugal intercourse is not to intend children, or even mutual pleasure, but to intend embodied personal union in and through a procreative-type act.
Finally, this argument gives a positive meaning to chastity. There is not space here to summarize Wojtyła’s wonderful treatment of this virtue in Love and Responsibility, but the core insight is that for him chastity, like all the virtues, is determined above all by a right and positive attitude toward some good. The “no” of chastity, always required both in and outside of marriage, is not Stoical self-denial, but a “yes” to the truth, goodness, and beauty of the human person.
I conclude with one final reservation about Love and Responsibility. Despite the obvious attractiveness of its philosophical approach, there is a danger that its limited theological approach makes too much of conjugal love. Just as romantic love when it denies marriage is futile, so is marriage when it ignores heaven. The loving union of persons in even the best marriage is imperfect, temporary, partial, and prone to failure. To expect more than mortal love from marriage is to put a strain upon it that it cannot, and was not intended, to bear. The Christian teaching on heaven, a wedding feast where although earthly marriage ceases, intimate love is fully realized, relieves this weight and allows marriage to be more fully itself. This is the central argument of C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves, and it is also the reason he perhaps irreverently recommends “a roar of old-fashioned laughter” about sex. The reason? “We must not attempt to find an absolute in the flesh. Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess.” Conjugal laughter, it seems, is an essential feature of conjugal love.
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