With mercury we measure pain
as we measure the heat of bodies and air;
but this is not how to discover our limits–
you think you are the center of things.
If only you could grasp that you are not:
the center is He
and Hem too, finds no love–
why don’t you see?
The human heart—what is it for?
Cosmic temperature. Heart. Mercury.
No area of Catholic teaching is as widely or bitterly contested today as the Church’s teachings on sexual issues [1]. While the great heresies of the past have been largely directed against some doctrine or other of the Faith—culminating in modernity’s invectives against faith in general—the really modern objection to the Church is rooted mostly in the realm of morality in general, and sexual morality in particular. To be sure, there are still quite a few Protestants whose objection stem from Protestantism, or modernists who object on grounds of “rationality,” but by and large most people in our secularizing and modernizing West who revile the Church do so on the grounds of morality [2]. Indeed, this has been true for some decades now, to the extent that Bishop Sheen could write, quite honestly, that “Atheism, nine times out of ten, is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin, nor reason.”
While some of the basis of the Church’s teaching on morality is divine revelation, much of that moral teaching can also be approached by reason [3]. The Catholic Church has adopted one particular tradition of moral reason, which is called Natural Law (see CCC 1955-1960 and 1978–1979). Saint Thomas Aquinas is the most well-known expounder of this philosophy, and Aristotle planted some of its theoretical seeds. Today, its most well-known (American) proponents include Robert P George and John Finnis (“new” natural law) as well as Hadley Arkes, Russell Hittinger, and the late Ralph McInerny (“old” natural law).
Among its various proponents, theorists, and even popularizers, Professor J Budziszewski [4] stands out as being particularly good to read, in that his writings are especially clear, and yet also profound. He writes at a level which is easily understood by the average college student—or, indeed, a high school student—yet also manages to not feel “dumbed down” for it. His What We Can’t Not Know (or else the shorter The Revenge of Conscience) should be on any short list of “must-read” books pertaining to morality, especially for college students.
In his latest book, On the Meaning of Sex, Dr Budziszewski walks the reader through the reasoning behind Christian sexual morality. This, in seven well-organized chapters: the first, to consider whether sex must mean anything, the last to consider the specifically religious implication, and the middle five on the sexual powers, the sexual difference, sexual love, sexual beauty, and sexual purity.
He begins every chapter of this work with an excerpt from St John of the Cross’ Spiritual Canticle, thus weaving the chapters together and slowly leading them to the final chapter, which is about transcendence, and thus about God. Yet early in the book, he makes the promise to leave God out of the conversation (at least by explicit mention) until the end, a promise which he largely keeps. Indeed, he pulls up just short of discussing God a number of times throughout the book, sometimes in dramatic fashion reminiscent of the style which C.S. Lewis uses in some of his apologetics works. Whether this decision was a good decision on Dr Budziszewski’s part may be a matter of taste to the reader. I originally found it annoying (and can’t imagine that an atheist would feel particularly appeased by it), but then I saw that it was a way of building some anticipation for the last chapter, and for that matter a lesson in self-discipline, much as abstinence can build anticipation for marriage, and yet also discipline for those times of marriage during which intercourse is impossible.
The practical result is that for the first six chapters, he builds a largely secular case for the meaning of sex, albeit one which draws from saints like Thomas Aquinas. This case begins with—and may in part grow from—the observation that a large swath of people who insist that sex has no meaning in particular [5] are actually appalled by the logical consequences of this position. Thus, the book begins with a conversation that Prof. Budzisewski had with one of his students about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the young man describes his horror at the idea of people’s being manufactured in test tubes. The student in question was, however, intent on maintaining that sex has no meaning and no purpose. This bit of cognitive dissonance is reminiscent of the professor in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, though in a world where test-tube babies (in vitro fertilization) are a reality, in which cloning is possible though largely outlawed, and in which three-parent test-tube babies enjoy support in the country that used to be England, it would seem that there are more extreme instances of this student.
Unfortunately, it is not so clear that such cognitive dissonances give enough people pause in their continued support of the sexual revolution. We’ll take the revolution, but not the aftermath—and barring this, we’ll keep the revolution despite the aftermath. Professor Budziszewski strikes a hopeful tone in writing that “Looking over the sexual landscape of our time I see a terrain of unutterable sweetness, despoiled by unmentionable pain. Yet who knows? Perhaps it is not too late to redeem the unutterable sweetness.” Despite this germ of hope, much of the book is rather a sad commentary on the tragedies of our day. There are passages borne of the sadness and tears of watching the slow change in generational attitudes:
Somebody has to pay for the revolution. Upheaval has consequences.“Let me tell you about my students. In the ’80s, if I suggested in class that there might be any problem with sexual liberation, they said everything was fine—what was I talking about? Now if I raise questions, many of them speak differently. They still live like libertines, sometimes they still talk like libertines, but it’s getting old. They are beginning to sound like children of third-generation Maoists. My generation may have ordered the sexual revolution, but theirs is paying the price.
I am not speaking only of medical price. To be sure, that price is ruinous: At the beginning of the revolution most physicians had to worry about only two or three sexually transmitted diseases, and now it is more like two or three dozen. But I am not speaking only of broken bodies. Consider, for example, broken childhoods. What is it like for your family to break up because dad has found someone new, and then to break up again because mom has? What is it like to be passed from stepparent to stepparent? What is it like to grow up knowing that you would have had a sister, but she was aborted….
For the generation coming over the horizon, I wish ease from their burdens, for unfortunately, the errors of my generation and the one after it have already been compounded. I used to lead my students through an exercise that parallels the argument of Aristotle’s classic work, the Nicomachean Ethics. Like him, I asked, ‘What is happiness?’ Like his, my students used to give answers like ‘pleasure,’ ‘friendship,’ and ‘success.’ Like him, I encouraged them to scrutinize each of these common answers more deeply. In recent years, however, the exercise has started to fail. The last time I asked my students, ‘What is happiness?’ the first half-dozen all gave variations on the answer, ‘freedom from pain and suffering.’ The negative element so filled their eyes that they were completely unable to suggest anything positive that happiness might mean.”
This is truly one of the great tragedies of our time, and of my generation and the one which is following it. There is no shortage of people who asks, “what went wrong?,” but far fewer people are willing to honestly diagnose the problem—or offer a corrective to fix it.
Each of the middle five chapters involves a discussion of some of the errors—and truths—concerning the meaning of each of five aspects of sex: the sexual powers, the sexual differences, sexual love, sexual beauty, and sexual purity. Indeed, he often discusses the truths by way of the errors, since many an error involves either an exaggerated truth which excludes other truths, or a truth diminished to the extent of being ignored.
Thus, for example, in the chapter about the meaning of the difference in sexes, he begins with a brief ode (in prose form) rejoicing in the sexual differences. He then counters that ode with a discussion he had with a student—these discussions pepper the book, and give it a sort of real-life perspective. His student in this case takes the line that there are no real sexual differences between men and women, that any difference is socially conditioned, that even those differences which span across far-flung cultures are due to social conditioning and not anything innate. After the good Professor gives an example of a non-conditioned difference—women can bear and nurse children, which men cannot do—his student changes approach, insisting that in the body men and women are different, but in the brain they are not. Budziszewski then switches from dialogue mode to show that this is simply not so, which he does relatively seamlessly.
Actually, this ability to switch seamlessly between monologous prose and dialogue discussion is well done throughout most of the book—it did not have the jarring transition in style of, for example, Peter Kreeft’s switches between “dialogue” and “monologue” [6]. Whereas Prof Kreeft’s dialogue at times make the reader feel like he is being put unfairly into a particular position with which he does not agree, Prof Budzisewski’s entire style manages to seem conversational without forcing the reader to be on the “wrong” side of the conversation.
The exaggerated truth in this chapter is that men and women are equal—equally human, equal in dignity—which is exaggerated into “men and women are the same.” This exaggerated truth causes us to miss four other “large truths”:
- Duality of nature: “Manhood and womanhood reflect the same human nature, and with equal fidelity and dignity, but they reflect different faucets of it.”
- Duality of path: “The developmental trajectories of men and women are different at both ends—not only in what they start with, the susceptibilities and tendencies that each sex must discipline and prune, but in what they end with, what each sex ripens into when all goes as it should.”
- Body and soul unity: “Human beings aren’t one thing but two things together, composites of physical body and rational soul, each element equally personal and equally part of what we are.”
- Polaric complementarity: “Men and women aren’t just different, but different in corresponding ways. They are complementary opposites, alike in their humanity, but different in ways that make them natural partners. Each sex completes what the other lacks, and helps bring the other into balance.”
For each of these truths, he gives two ways in which it might be ignored, then concludes this analysis by showing why these truths matter:
“I hope it is clear that repudiating any of these four large truths is asking for trouble. By ignoring the duality of nature, we make it impossible for men and women to honor each other for what they really are. By failing to understand the duality of path, we persuade them to view themselves as either male and female beasts or sexless angels. By denying body and soul unity, we confuse them by making their bodily differences seem either irrelevant or all-important. By Denying polaric complementarity, we undermine their union and destroy their human solidarity.”
He then applies this analysis back to the conversation and to the original error, along the way discussing such ideas as the soul (and how it is different from the mind), potentiality, and some of the more “cliche” differences (that is, differences which do exist broadly, such as that men are more abstract and women more concrete).
His discussion of sexual love is a thing of beauty, and the arrangement of sexual love as a hierarchy from charity to erotic charity to romantic love is somewhat reminiscent of Blessed Pope John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body. His discussion of enchantment as being a sort or imitation romantic love is in turn reminiscent of Venerable Fulton Sheen’s contrast of love as being in the will, attraction in the glands. Professor Budzisewski’s analysis of sexual purity also complements Bishop Sheen’s, indeed it almost seems to build on it. In in his chapter about purity in Three to Get Married, the bishop writes,
“The mystery of creativeness is surrounded by awe. A special reverence does envelop the power to be co-creators with God in the making of human life. It is this hidden element that in a special way belongs to God, as does the grace of God in the sacraments. Those who speak of sex alone concentrate on the physical or visible element, forgetting the spiritual or invisible mystery of creativeness….In youth, this awesomeness before the mystery manifests itself in a woman’s timidity, which makes her shrink from a precocious or too ready surrender of her secret. In a man, the mystery is revealed in chivalry to women, not because he believes the woman is physically weaker but because of the awe that he feels in the presence of mystery.”
And here is Prof Budzisewski, applying purity to men as a way of perfecting masculinity:
“When we teach men to perfect their masculinity through the discipline of chivalry, two kinds of men result. The most masculine and spirited will accept the discipline and become knights, but the least masculine and spirited will refuse the discipline and become cads. Impatient with such failures, our age pursues a different ideal. Instead of encouraging men to become knights, it discourages them from becoming men at all. But this works no better; in fact it works worse. Again two kinds of men result, but the pattern is different. The most masculine and spirited reject the discipline and become cads, and the least masculine and spirited accept it and become poltroons.”
While Bishop Sheen describes purity in relationship to the mystery of our being co-creators with God and concludes that purity is expressed through chivalry, Budszisewski looks at what happens when purity is devalued and chivalry discouraged. The result is not better men, but worse men, indeed “men without chests,” to quote C.S. Lewis. Purity is built on the virtues of temperance, modesty, and decorum, writes Budziszewski. Absent these, the world is not a better place, nor do the practice of these virtues make on “ignorant”–a point emphasized by both Bishop Sheen and Dr Budziszewski.
Budzisewski’s book is well-organized—albeit with long and broad chapters—and like his other books parts of it are conducive to being summarized in list form: yet it does not so much feel like reading a list (or a catechism) as being party to a conversation. If the book itself is not complete [7], then this is neither a knock against it nor against Professor Budziszewski, who admits up front that it may not be a complete work in the sense of answering every objection or attending to every little nuance. He writes charitably and tactfully, but this does not mean that he ignores or downplays the “hard truths.” Early in the book, he lists his motives for having written it, and concludes these with
”The final motive for [my] writing such a book [as this] is that my eyes are so full of the pain that I see around me that if I did not have the relief of writing, they would be full of tears instead. Errors about sex cause such terrible suffering, in our day more than most. The worst is the suffering of those who no longer know they are in torment, for it is simply a lie that everyone is happy who believes himself happy, a slander that nobody is suffering unless he thinks he is. I would wish these sufferers joy, but if by writing the book I could do no more than dip the end of my finger in water to cool their tongues then that would be wish enough.”
Reading through this book, I can see that this last motive is genuine. Professor Budzisewski offers an approachable book written with are the clarity Sheen, the charity of Chesterton and the tact of Lewis.
From this moment my ignorance
closes behind me like the door
through which you entered, recognizing
all I do not know.
And through me you led many people in silence,
many roads, and the turmoil of the streets.
—Footnotes—
[0] The opening and closing poems are both written by Blessed Pope John Paul II and are taken form The Place Within: The Poetry of Pope John Paul II.
[1] Abortion is not as widely contested, and proscriptions against things like usury or doing evil for good to result are not so bitterly contested
[2] The sex-abuse scandal, incidentally, is really notwithstanding. In that case, a very small percentage of priests a few decades ago abuses a large total number though a small percentage of Catholic children and (more frequently) teens or even adults. In so doing, these priests were acting against the morals of the Church, and for that matter against the vows they had taken. That so much harm and hurt has been done by neglecting the Church’s moral teachings would, in a saner world, count as an argument in favor of those moral proscriptions. Instead we see increasing efforts to legitimize pedophilia as just another sexual orientation, much as homosexuality and bisexuality were legitimized as sexual orientations over the last few decades. In the meantime, rather than noting that maybe the Church is on to something with her moral teachings—even if about 3% of her clergy acted against these teachings—we see claims that these very moral proscriptions against things like extramarital sex and disciplinary prescriptions such as celibacy are to blame.
[3] Indeed, reason and revelation are not opposed. In fact, if a revelation is believed to be given by an all-knowing and benevolent God reason insists that it must be held as true.
[4] Pronounced “boo-gee-shevf-ski”
[5] Which is another way of saying that sex has no intrinsic meaning, or that sex means whatever I want it to mean.
[6] For an example of what I mean, see Professor Kreeft’s Making Sense Out of Suffering, which is all-in-all a fairly good but somewhat flawed book.
[7] Neither John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” nor for that matter St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is a complete work, either. The greatest philosophers are those who realize that they have some but not all of the answers, and that a really completed work is not possible, because philosophy is not a system per se but rather a quest for truth.
