Summary
1 The theological ethics of sexuality and human existence
2 The theological status of the ethics of sexuality
2.1 The fully human character of sexuality
2.2 The Christic character of sexuality
2.3 Sexuality: between the sacramental and the sacrament
3 The ethics of sexuality and dogmatic theology
4 The ethical task of the theology of sexuality
4.1 The enigma of sexuality and ethics
4.2 The Law and the values of sexuality
5 Ethics and morals of sexuality
6 Bibliographical references
1 The theological ethics of sexuality and human existence
For a long time, the Moral of the Person dealt with issues concerning sexuality and the category of person stood out as structuring the framework of Christian praxis reflection. However, with the great advances of the so-called human sciences and their impact, especially in recent decades, on moral theology, it has become more common to call it Theological Ethics of Sexuality. This is due to the care that has been taken to shift attention from the “person”, taken in the essentialist sense to insist on human existence in its dynamism (SALZMAN; LAWLWER, 2012). Around human existence are synchronized the subjective, intersubjective, and social character of sexuality, aided by knowledge from psychoanalysis, sociology (FOUCAULT, 1977), anthropology, political philosophy, and other fields of knowledge that focus on the phenomenon of the body and human sexuality (BORRILO, 2002).
In this sense, the Theological-Christian Ethics of sexuality is anchored in the lived experience of the concrete human being or the incarnate subject (HENRY, 2012), as well as in the knowledge that this same experience occurs and is expressed through the knowledge of the sciences of life and the body. The centrality of sexual existence makes the ethics of sexuality opposed to the view of the abstract subject and its respective consideration regarding the body and sex. It is assumed, therefore, an anthropology in which the human being is body and not someone who merely has a body (HENRY, 2012).
In this vein, body and sex do not oppose each other, they are not in competition, and, therefore, reject any dualism between body and soul. The immediate consequence of this approach is that sexuality no longer appears as being of the order of mere contingency and the sphere of the necessity of incarnation due to the individuation of the self as subjectivity or pure consciousness or spirit.
The human being is made, expresses, and speaks of itself in the body as a sexed subject. For this reason, the view of sex underlying this anthropology is not limited to the body-object approached by empirical-formal sciences, but is linked to the body-subjective and the ontology of the body conveyed by the philosophy and theology of human carnality. From this perspective, sexuality is not an amorphous given nor something ready and finished, as it is always referred to the coming of life in man with others in society. It is, therefore, from the phenomenological point of view, an event while sexuality already is and is yet to be built as carnality places the human being in the arc of existence, that is, it inserts him in nature, in history, in culture, finally, in the bosom of relations with and for others in the world, in the city (polis). In this sense, there is no way to distance oneself from the phenomenon of sexuality to thematize it. It is of the order of appearing and manifesting itself in such a way as to escape the theoretical knowledge that dispenses with the co-involvement of what appears.
2 The theological status of the ethics of sexuality
Due to an anthropology that claims to be unitary and the human condition in its uniqueness in diversity (SALZMAN; LAWLER, 2012), Theological Ethics of sexuality takes into account the fact that the human-Christian experience is inseparable from the incarnation. That the Son of God assumed flesh in the history of the narrativity of his body, this makes this Christic event immediately reverberate in the human condition cast into Existence. Thus, the following of Christ as an ethical category incorporates a differential or novelty concerning the experience of sexuality (FUCHS, 1995). Namely, it highlights the impact of (Christian) revelation on human life and the way Christ is followed thanks to corporeality and sexuality, both assumed as a gift of creation and grace of salvation in Christ.
2.1 The fully human character of sexuality
The ethics of sexuality presupposes the fact that body and sex are not considered mere means or springboards to another end (spirit), but the way by which one concretely has access to sexually humanized life, said and experienced, in Christ. In this way, the (Christian) reflection on sexuality takes place at the interface between Fundamental Theological Ethics and Theological-Christian Ethics of the body. Without a theological anthropology of the body, the ethics of sexuality runs the risk of being aseptic and without incidence in the incarnate existence of people who live with the horizon of Christian faith.
On the one hand, Fundamental Theological Ethics includes in the horizon of its reflection the universal character of human action. What Christ reveals of and to humanity from his history (SESBOÜE, 1982, p.227-68) concerns, first of all, the meaning of human existence as referred to creation. Thus, this theological category can be translated, in secular terms, as “finitude” and this, in turn, appears inseparable from the creativity of the existential condition of the human being. In this case, Christianity does not claim to be a “regime of exception” regarding the experience of sexuality (AZPITARTE, 2001). From the perspective of the proper body, theology advocates the humanization of the human being in consonance with carnality and fully realized sexuality and not in tow of them. Therefore, Theological-Christian Ethics of sexuality is not built on the margins of the eminently “creaturely” condition of Christian existence, shared by and with humankind.
2.2 The Christic character of sexuality
On the other hand, Theological Ethics contemplates in its work the uniqueness of the Christian experience according to its specific difference. This refers to the peculiarity of carnality that carries within itself the Christic character. Thanks to the incarnation, the Christian does not understand himself except intrinsically associated with Christ, so as to weave and shape his life in the flesh in constant contact and confrontation with the Paschal Mystery.
Explicitly, the experience of Baptism, the celebration of the Eucharist, and ecclesial life are concrete ways in which the identification of the Christian with Christ is gestated. Thus, the configuration of Christian life is woven in the interpellation or clash of body to body with various alterities. Namely, in listening to the Scriptures, in the complicity of life of the community of belonging, in celebration, in Liturgy, and in the constant encounter with the face/body of the other human being, the Christian life is retroalimented, and the meaning of sexuality in Christ is discovered and realized.
From the perspective of specifically Christian life, these alterities instigate the Christian to live sexuality as a human event associated, in turn, with the “Christian Fact” that inspires it. This relational dynamic is translated and fulfilled in the continuous incorporation of the Christian into the Body of Christ. Thus, body and sex are not dissociated from a certain spousal metaphor that, in turn, is translated into the loving complicity between Christ and the Church (humanity).
As a result, sexuality from a Christian perspective also assumes a sacramental character. It is lived by Christians as a testimony and sign of Christ’s loving self-giving for his body (ANATRELLA, 2001). The sacramentality of sexual life, in turn, takes on multiple forms in the diversity of the Christian community embedded in the world.
There are those who feel called to contract a loving bond through marriage, whose union is expressed in the carnal relationship driven by desire and love, thanks to the experience of the body and sex that sustains, maintains, and drives it. There are others who have chosen to consecrate themselves to religious life as a way of serving the Kingdom of God. In it, sexuality assumes the modality of a celibate consecrated life. Others opt for clerical life in which, specifically, priestly celibacy takes on a disciplinary character. But there are also those who live a stable union whose corporeal-sexual experience aims to translate the experience of communion of life between homoaffective partners, whose significance stems from the desire to witness the following of Christ and expressed in some “sacramentals” of Christianity (GALLAGHER, 1990, p.31-8).
All the modalities of Christian life in which sexuality assumes a very particular configuration, depending on the type of lifestyle, share, however, the same fruitfulness of love inspired by Christ’s love for humanity.
2.3 Sexuality: between the sacramental and the sacrament
In turn, the sacramental character of Christian life opens the ethical-theological reflection of corporeality to the pneumatic dimension of sexuality. By humanizing humanity by assuming it from within – from the mystery of the incarnation and its unfolding in creation, salvation, and sanctification – the Christian is sanctified in and by sexuality, thanks to the divine filiation instituted by Christ. Being the Son, the incarnation of the Word inaugurates for humankind the possibility of living in deep communion with God and incorporating into the Trinitarian life (VIDAL, 2002).
Once inhabited by the Spirit of Christ, the human being is granted the gift and task of sanctifying his life from his own body and sex. Sexuality, therefore, read in the light of Christian Theology of the body, asserts itself as a path to an authentic and fruitful spiritual life. Thus, the dualism between body and spirit in vogue in the Greco-Roman tradition, which in a certain sense influenced some depreciative approaches to sexuality by Christianity over the centuries, is once and for all abandoned (BROWN, 1990). This avoids falling into two extremes, either the naive and idealistic spiritualism of the sacralization of sexuality, or the depreciative view of the body to the detriment of the overvaluation of the spirit, for which incarnation is of the order of existential contingency.
Life in Christ, moved by his Spirit, ensures the desacralization of sexuality (it is of the order of creation and holiness and not of the sacred). And, at the same time, it elevates sexuality to the stature of an authentic path of humanity of bodies existentially lived in affective-sexual relationality. The spiritual life is no longer alien to the experience of human sexuality. This, in turn, is considered as a place of the experience of tenderness, love, gift, and mutual self-giving and, therefore, associated with the fruits of the Spirit.
3 The ethics of sexuality and dogmatic theology
Thanks to the anthropo-theological reasons mentioned, it must be kept in mind that Christian Ethics of sexuality is inseparable from Dogmatic Theology. Depending on how the various treatises of Theology – Fundamental Theology, Christology, Trinity, Pneumatology, Ecclesiology, etc. – address corporeality, this determines the ethical-theological vision of sexuality and vice versa.
From this relationship is deduced a stoic Christian ethics, a gnostic ethics of sexuality, or, on the contrary, a Christian ethics of love and desire based on the positivity of human carnality as a place of the salvific experience mediated by the body and sex. Therefore, from this finding, two perspectives emerge that, in a certain sense, seem antagonistic: either desire, eroticism, and pleasure are emphasized as inalienable characteristics of the human condition and life in Christ or, on the contrary, they end up being underestimated to the point of compromising even the novelty of the Christian view of the body and sex (SALZMAN; LAWLER, 2012).
This implies that the great challenge for a Theological-Christian Ethics of sexuality in contemporaneity lies in the pressing need to rearticulate Love, Grace, and Desire from the relationship between human beings and their relationship with the God of Christianity; and between Pleasure and Gift of the flesh (Eros), which humanity received in creation, and the fullness of the incarnation, in revelation and redemption, consummated in sanctification (AZPITARTE, 2001).
4 The ethical task of the theology of sexuality
Due to the framework of theological ethics, its work concerning the promotion and protection of human sexuality in its respective dimensions must be kept in mind. This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that sexuality refers to the human being, either as a subject in relation (with the other), or as a member of the human community, while it inserts him into public life or coexistence in society (LACROIX, 2009).
4.1 The enigma of sexuality and ethics
On the other hand, the ethics of sexuality deals with the original fact that sexuality is of the order of the “enigma” (RICOEUR, 1967) and, consequently, of the regime of ambivalence, as it articulates desire (for others) and pleasure. While desire arouses in the individual an insatiable hunger for the other with whom erotic love is lived, the internal dynamic of pleasure, in turn, is in search of satiety, fruition, and enjoyment of the bodies that are given in the sexual relationship. In this case, the meaning of sexuality oscillates between transcendence and immanence, between the closeness and distance that desire and pleasure arouse in partners who propose, in consent, to enter into a loving bond of lives and bodies. This means that the ethics of sexuality is articulated around these anthropological assumptions, without which there is a risk of legalizing sexuality and compromising its original ethical character.
Now, following this dynamic of love and desire, it is up to ethics to promote the values that sexuality itself gives as a human-Christian event. The ethics of sexuality aims to cultivate and ensure self-care, care for others, care for the relationship “as” third, and care for the “third” of the relationship within the scope of sexual life.
4.2 The Law and the values of sexuality
Around desire and pleasure, ethics assumes a primarily positive character due to the goodness of sexuality according to its eminently relational tenor, in the sense of guiding individuals to embody, in their sexual life, tenderness, gift, promise, oblation, fruitfulness, loving self-giving, fidelity, etc., as a way of fulfilling the humanization of sexuality lived in Christ. This applies to any and all forms or styles of sexual life freely chosen and assumed by Christians.
However, as sexuality also carries within itself the possibility of fixation on enjoyment and, consequently, the risk of dehumanization – the theological category of sin has its ethical correspondence in the disfigurement of sexuality – due to the real possibility of the subject being involved in himself, the objectification of the other’s body and/or the privatization of the relationship, closing it to social life, it is up to the ethics of sexuality to formulate prohibitions based on the original human-Christian meaning of sexuality.
As the meaning of the Law that orders sexual life assumes a positive character thanks to the very interpellation that comes from the word of the other, the ethics of sexuality is not imposed from outside as a code of legal norms, which, in turn, are emptied of their ethical character founded on the relationship. Rather, the Law that governs the protection of sexuality is that of the sphere of ethics, while it intends to prohibit only that which leads to the denial of desire and love that derives from the first.
5 Ethics and morals of sexuality
The normative character of the ethics of sexuality aims solely to protect sexuality from the threats of the “tyranny of pleasure” (GUILLEBAUD, 1999). This tends to empty the original meaning of the body-subject and the sex-subject. Therefore, it is understood that laws and prohibitions concerning autoeroticism (masturbation) (CAPPELI, 1986, p.255-367), prostitution, pedophilia, pornography, etc., intend to protect individuals against that which compromises the genuine and original meaning of sexuality. Hence the requirements to associate care with the obligations of respect for one’s own body/sex, respect for the other’s body, and respect for the third body of the relationship and in the relationship. Thanks to this, ethics is articulated based on two fundamental dimensions, namely, that of the “meaning” of sexuality (its end) around care and esteem and that of the “obligations” of sex, structured around the respect of individuals and human groups.
Based on the structure of the ethics of sexuality, it is possible to formulate the ethical judgment on the various expressions of the experience of sexuality. Now, if sexual life is inseparable from the relational character of existence, there is no way to think about the meaning of sexuality without evoking the question of chastity (THEVENOT, 1982, p.35-90). This concerns the sexual condition of every human being, as the experience refers to what the word itself suggests – namely, sex translates from Latin as castus, which means to cut, to separate. From a symbolic point of view, it means that human sexuality is intimately associated with castration.
Therefore, it is up to ethics to ensure that sexuality distances itself from any kind of fusion between human beings, so as to preserve and promote one of its founding values. In other words, chastity emerges as a requirement for maintaining the humanizing character of sexuality, aroused by the lived experience and not alien to it. In these terms, chastity is an intrinsic value of human sexuality (GONZÁLEZ-FAUS, 1993).
This also allows distinguishing chastity from celibacy. Chastity functions as a kind of “incarnated condition of possibility” for celibacy, although the latter always presupposes the free adherence of those who embrace it as the suspension of the exercise of sexual faculties. The ethics of sexuality insists that the experience of celibacy be the result of a truly ethical choice and, therefore, be nurtured by the meaning of chastity so that it is not lived as mere deprivation of sex or motivated merely by an ascetic sense (VIDAL, 2002). This could compromise the fruitfulness with which celibacy should be expressed from the point of view of the concrete sexual life of those who assume it.
Another consideration from the point of view of moral judgment seems significant due to the nature of desire. As sexuality is of the order of human relationality, and this is only explicit in the search or incessant pursuit of the other, it is proper for sexual experience to sediment itself around the temporality of the relationship. The ethics of sexuality insists on the structuring character of desire so that the responsibility implied in the relationship between the people who desire each other passes through the sieve of habit and constancy. Once they intend to realize the values of sexuality due to the incarnation of this concrete relationship, it is urgent to take care, assume and respect the rhythm of each one, the maturation of both involved in the relationship, and the commitment to the gradual construction of the effective loving self-giving implicit in fulfilling desire.
From this perspective, pre-conjugal sexual relations receive differentiated ethical attention according to the degree of commitment that the people involved maintain with each other. The morality of sexual relations between boyfriends will have to be discerned in the light of the assumption of the meaning of sexuality (LACROIX, 2009), that is, the degree of humanization of those involved, according to the greater or lesser realization of the values of sexuality according to the two moral dimensions of sexuality: self-care and respect for oneself, the other, and the third.
Finally, the moral judgment on the multifaceted experiences of human sexuality (pre-ceremonial relationships, extramarital relationships, homoaffective relationships – affective-sexual diversity: transsexuality, transgender, bisexuality) must take into account two fundamental aspects of sexual human existence: the internal intrigue between the individuation and socialization of sexuality, as the intertwining of these poles occurs due to human relationality and the indissoluble values of commitment between partners (CORAY, JUNG, 2005). The theological ethics of sexuality considers that the normative dimension of sexuality assumes an “ancillary” character in relation to the primacy given to the human and Christic meaning of sexuality.
Human sexuality is of the order of gift, grace, salvation. Although one cannot deny the contingency, the fall, sin, and death implicit in the human experience of sexuality, this, however, does not allow hiding and dulling the life-giving and liberating, aesthetic and mystical character of human sexuality re-signified when referred to the horizon of life in Christ.
Nilo Ribeiro Junior, SJ, FAJE, Brazil. Original text in Portuguese.
6 Bibliographical references
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HENRY, Michel. Incarnation. A philosophy of flesh. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
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To learn more
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