At the Heart of Sexual Ethics: Reflections on Aquinas and Wojtyla

 

Dr. Matthew D. Walz
Associate Professor, Director, Philosophy & Letters and Pre-Theology Programs
Director of Intellectual Formation, Holy Trinity Seminary
University of Dallas
St. Vincent de Paul Lecture & Concert Series
November 7, 2025
Video | Audio

 

At the Heart of Sexual Ethics: Reflections on Aquinas and Wojtyla

 

Opening exhortation: the “age of chastity”?

Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. So St. Paul teaches us in Romans (5:20). Sometimes in the midst of abounding sins, it’s hard for us to believe this — and yet, in retrospect, it always proves true: grace was always abounding more, over and above the emptiness of sin. In this respect, Paul states something that is, as it were, a metaphysical necessity. As Christian believers living in a time when sexual sins abound, should we not believe unreservedly, then, that a graced understanding and living out of human sexuality will simultaneously superabound? In fact, were someone to ask me to interpret the signs of the times, I’d venture to say that the Church is entering into an “age of chastity.”

The early Church was an age of obedience, the obedience of faith, manifested in wholehearted responses to the preaching of the Gospel. The medieval Church was an age of poverty, poverty rooted in hope, embodied most dramatically in the rise of the mendicant orders and the voluntary poverty of the Franciscans and the Dominicans. We in the Church today, the “modern” or “contemporary” Church, are being called to usher in an age of chastity suffused with charity, chastity fully and properly understood, revealing itself in a more conscientious and thus freer undertaking of matrimony, on the one hand, and of virginity and celibacy, on the other....

Now, I’m a philosopher — or, more precisely, I’m a philosophy professor, which really means that I’m a philosopher wannabe! ... As a philosophy professor, I’m somewhat allergic to “grand historical narratives” of the sort that I just proclaimed: “three ages of the Church … early, medieval, modern … obedience, poverty, chastity.” God save us from “grand historical narratives,” which are so often superficial, naïve, and only partially true. As a Catholic, moreover, I know that our heavenly Father calls all of us Christian faithful in every age to configure ourselves as much as we are able to the obedience, poverty, and chastity that Christ himself exemplified on earth, having learned them especially from the words and examples of his Mother Mary and his earthly father Joseph. As has been true from the beginning, and as the Second Vatican Council highlighted, our heavenly Father calls every Christian to embody the three evangelical counsels according to his or her state and situation in life — counsels that are practiced most evidently and most signally, of course, in religious life. All this is true, true, true ... and very importantly so.

Yet the signs of our times seem to suggest that, indeed, God is calling the whole Church today — lay, cleric, and religious alike — to get human sexuality right, to reveal in every state of life the full meaning and beauty of chastity, and, as I hope to begin to do tonight, to probe ever more deeply into the reality of human sexuality, a mystery whose profound intelligibility becomes visible by the penetrating and self-reflective light of reason and, even more so, through faith in the authority of the Scriptures.

To be sure, the intelligibility of human sexuality, which lies at the heart of sexual ethics, is worth unfolding in its own right. If you have even just one philosophic bone in your body — in other words, if you are simply human! — then the Delphic imperative is spoken to you: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν; “Know thyself.” And it’s hard to see how one can know oneself in any adequate way without coming to grips with the truth of one’s sexuality, both in a general way as well as individually and personally. Meditating on human sexuality, therefore, is timely, both now and always. It has immediate and direct bearing on our lives, especially if we are called, as our age seems to demand, to bear witness to the value and dignity of the human body and the profundity of human sexuality, as originally intended by our Father-Creator, as redeemed through his Son, Jesus Christ, and as lived out in the Holy Spirit.

Thus I exhort you tonight: join me for a brief time in pondering human sexuality, which is worth pondering for its own sake as well as for the sake of the world. Let’s get started in earnest.

 

A morsel of commonsense: “Primum in intentione ...”

Where shall we begin? Allow me to begin with a morsel of commonsense, captured in a medieval maxim that, in one form or another, is sprinkled throughout various Scholastic texts and treatises, including Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and other works of his. The morsel is this: Primum in intentione est ultimum in executione; “What’s first in intention is last in execution.” This principle captures concisely how human action works teleologically, i.e., how human action works as having an intended end that orients it from its very beginning. The principle helps us makes sense, then, of how and why we plan and carry out any projects that we undertake. Whatever it is that we are aiming at in an action or a project turns out to be the last thing we do.

Examples make this obvious. Consider a future bride and groom — perhaps a young man and a young woman attending a Catholic liberal arts college in Southern California! Perhaps this couple intends to get married and to celebrate this sacrament with family and friends. This requires planning, lots of planning! And after all that planning and all that preparation — meetings with a priest, finding a church, selecting readings and music for the liturgy, booking a reception venue, choosing flowers and a menu, ordering a cake, hiring a photographer, and so on and so forth — after all of that planning and preparation, the thing that this young man and woman first intended — namely, getting married and celebrating it with family and friends — finally comes about. Thus, what was first in the couple’s intention was last in execution.

And it’s crucial, isn’t it, if we aim to be wise and prudent in accomplishing our projects, that we keep our eyes on the prize? And the prize is what we are intending first and foremost! Respice finem! Look to the end! Do not lose sight of what you first intended! This is because the end that we chiefly intend gives meaning to and sheds light on all that we do in order to achieve it. It reaches back, as it were, from the projected future and suffuses all that is leading to that future with intelligibility and goodness. Human action is indeed a beautifully complex reality, especially when carried out prudently!

Now, let’s trace the significance of this commonsense maxim as far back as it can go — in fact, let’s trace it all the way back to the Creator’s original creation of the world. …

 

The Creator’s “first intended”

Let’s begin with this question: according to Genesis, what was the last thing that God carried out in his original act of creation, the last thing that he executed — and thus, presumably, the first thing that he intended? …

In the first account of creation in Genesis 1, the answer is clear: the human is the last thing created, the human made in the image of God, the human created as male and female. And in the second account in Genesis 2 this is specified further: the woman in particular is the last thing that God created. This suggests, then, that in the original creation the human — particularly the female human, the woman — was last in the Creator’s execution and thus first in the Creator’s intention. From the depths of his mercy, his misericordia, his pity-heartedness, which is the ultimate source of God’s creative activity, God brought the cosmos into existence out of nothing, and “arrang[ing] all things by measure and number and weight” (Wisdom 11:20), all along what he wanted to create, as the finale of his original creative activity, was ... the woman.

As Genesis tells it, the woman is created as a human, of course, as is the man, and upon first laying eyes on her, the man immediately and ecstatically recognizes the woman as “bone of [his] bones and flesh of [his] flesh” (Genesis 2:23). We can gather from Genesis 2, moreover, that in addition to being created as a human, the woman is created also or in addition as a helper. As the story is told, then, the woman is created not just as a human, but, one might say, as a human+. According to what God intended to create in his original establishment of the cosmos, the woman is a human-and-something-more, a human-and-then-some; she is a human-who-is-also-a-helper. Perhaps this suggests something about what it means that God created the woman as the finale of his original creation, as his “first intended” whom he was waiting to create all along?

Now, before the women in the room start declaring their obvious teleological superiority to the men as humans+ — and I for one don’t deny it (and perhaps some of the women here are saying in their hearts, “Finally the lunkhead said it, instead of trying to ‘mansplain’ me!”) — before we go that route, allow me to refine my claim somewhat in order to advance our inquiry.

We should notice that as the story of the creation of the first two humans is told in Genesis 2, sexual differentiation is not explicitly noted until after the creation of the second human — this second human whom afterward the first human calls “woman,” because she was “taken out of Man.” To be sure, as the story goes, it’s clear that the first human out of whom the woman is taken continues on in the story as “Adam,” who is male, while the second human is female, whom Adam eventually names “Eve,” which means “mother of the living.”

Now, “adam,” like “man” in English, is a flexible Hebrew word that can refer to either a male or a female human, or even at times to “mankind” in general, similar to how we are able to think and to speak of “man” when we are trying to distinguish it chiefly from “animal.” Yet “adam” can also refer more specifically to the male human. And, of course, we often think and speak in a similar way when we say “man” as distinguished from “woman.” And in Genesis and in other places in the Scriptures, “adam” also becomes the proper name for the first male human and the first human father, the father of the human race. (We don’t have a great equivalent to this in English, unless we were to give the name of the first human being as “Manny” or something like that. But “Manny” and “Eve” doesn’t seem to cut it as the name of the first couple, huh?) Clearly, then, “adam” is a very flexible, multivalent word.

We should be attentive to these nuances in the opening pages of Genesis. These nuances give us much to ponder in this exquisitely crafted narrative of our created beginnings. I call attention to these details here chiefly for this reason, namely, to make clear that when we think about God’s intention in creating the woman last, we don’t mean — indeed, it would be false to say — that God created the woman last on her own, so to speak. Indeed, the woman is created with the man, alongside the man. And so when we ask the question: “What was God’s intention in creating the woman as the finale of creation?”, we are also asking, were we to pose the question with greater logical precision: “What was the Creator’s intention in creating the human as sexually differentiated?” Or, to spell this out a bit more: “Why did the Creator intend as the goal or telos of his original creation, as that which he had been intending from the beginning and all along, the existence of the human as sexually differentiated, as man-and-woman or, perhaps better, as man-with-woman?” This more general way of capturing the Creator’s first and underlying intention clarifies the question logically speaking, but we must do so without losing sight of the fact that literarily the Scriptures tell the story in such a way the woman specifically is the last thing created. This is of no small pedagogical significance; God chose to reveal it this way for our instruction. We might say, then, that in his original creation God first and foremost intends the human as sexually differentiated, and he chooses to reveal this secret, this hidden truth, this mysterion, of his creative activity by pointing to the woman in particular as a human+ who is created last of all.

 

Thomas’s unfolding of the Creator’s “moral” intention

Now, that’s already a lot to ponder in itself, and yet it also calls us to dig more deeply into this mystery of our beginnings. In order to do so, I want to turn to St. Thomas Aquinas to see how he helps us to unpack and answer this question that we posed. Remember, the question is this: “Why did the Creator intend the human as sexually differentiated, as man-and-woman or man-with-woman, as the goal or telos of his original creation, as that which he had been intending all along? And why did the Creator choose to reveal this secret behind his creative activity by calling attention to the woman in particular as the finale?” Now, Thomas considers God’s productio, his “bringing-forth,” of the woman in the First Part of the Summa theologiae, q. 92, just after considering the bringing-forth of the first human with respect to his soul (in q. 90) and the bringing-forth of the first human’s body (in q. 91). In this set of three questions Thomas offers a reading of the opening pages of Genesis that illuminates God’s causality in bringing-forth the first humans into existence. This set of interrelated questions is, I daresay, an extraordinary tour de force within the Summa theologiae — which is itself, of course, a continuous ordinary tour de force. I encourage you, then, to familiarize yourselves with these three extremely well-crafted questions in the Prima Pars of the Summa. You will see the prudent inquisitiveness and insight of the Angelic Doctor on full display in a unique way. I hope to bring out some of this in what follows.

Now, q. 92, as I said, addresses the bringing-forth of the woman, and in its first article Thomas looks immediately to God’s intention in bringing forth the woman. In fact, Thomas articulates his query in what may appear to be a provocative manner: “Whether the woman ought to have been brought-forth by God in the first bringing-forth of things.” This is an odd and perhaps jarring way for Thomas to state his query, or so it may seem to the first-time reader of this question. There’s much more that could be said about the way that Thomas words this question, but let’s just file most of that away for now. The essential thing that we can gather from this wording of the query is in this article Thomas is considering God’s creation of the woman through a moral lens. He is asking: “Ought God to have done this in his original creation, namely, bring-forth the woman?” This is a moral question. By posing his query in this way, though, Thomas is not being presumptuous or haughty; rather, he sees himself as simply following the lead of the Scriptures themselves. We have to be attentive to Genesis 2 in order to see this.

In Genesis 2, God is presented as responding to a situation that, in God’s own estimate, is not good, namely, that the human exists alone. “It is not good that the Human exist alone,” God says to himself. In response, God undertakes to ameliorate the situation, to improve it, to make it better — in other words, God undertakes to help the situation. And he does so precisely by providing a helper for the human, for “adam.” Such a helper will, presumably, fill in the gap or the lack, the “not good,” that God perceives in the aloneness of the Human.

No doubt you recall how the narrative runs at this point: at first God offers a possible helper from among already-existing animals, but the Human does not find a fitting helper there. Then, making the Human fall into a deep sleep, God takes a rib from the side of the Human and builds it into a woman, who turns out to be just the helper whom the Human needs and wants: the woman is the sleeping Human’s dream come true! Notice that this whole narrative is presented as God’s undertaking a moral action in response to a situation in need of improvement, in need of help. Thomas is very attentive to the fact that Genesis describes this act of creating the woman as a moral act, and this is why, in order to figure out what’s ultimately behind God’s moral decision-making and action in this story, Thomas asks: “Ought God to have done this?” — which is a more formal way of asking: “What the heaven was God thinking when he created the woman?”

Keeping all that in mind, let’s consider Thomas’s answer:

I answer that it was necessary that the female [femina] come-to-be, as Scripture says, as a helper [adiutorium] to the man [vir] — indeed, as a helper in generating, and not as a helper in some other work, as some have said, since with regard to any other work a man could be helped more fittingly by another man.

Thomas opens with  a concise, simple, but profound answer right from the start: if the last thing God carried out in the original act of creation was to bring about sexual differentiation among humans by bringing-forth the woman, he did so precisely because he wanted the work of human generation to be exist in creation. And to this work both a man and a woman have to contribute; they have to help each other in this work in complementary ways. If the work of human generation is what’s intended, then creating the same sort of human — presumably another male human, as the story suggests — obviously wouldn’t get the job done; it wouldn’t have been prudent, even though humans of the same sex can collaborate in all sorts of other works very fittingly. But what God ultimately wants is the work of human generation, and this calls for sexual differentiation.

Let me call attention to two things at this point.

A first point: Christians believe that, rightly understood, generation takes place within God himself. Within the inner life of the Three-Personed God, generatio, generation, names the mode of processio, the procession or going-forth, whereby the Son exists from the Father. This is never far from Thomas’s mind in the Summa theologiae — let alone in his life in general! — and it clearly present in his mind at this moment when he is unfolding God’s creative causality in relation to the first humans. In the Summa up to this point, and in Christian theology undertaken in a principled manner, generatio is attributed to God first, foremost, and paradigmatically, and one considers God’s act of creating only after having explored God’s inner Trinitarian life. Indeed, this is evident in the order of the Summa theologiae itself. In the Summa, the processiones, the goings-forth, within God are to be understood prior to the processio, the going-forth, that is God’s creation. We should keep this Trinitarian-rootedness of Thomas’s treatment of the creation of man and woman ever in mind.

A second point: It is imperative that we not constrict our conception of generatio, generation, as a human activity merely to the sexual act itself and the subsequent birth of a child. In this context, generatio refers not only — and perhaps not even primarily — to the conjugal act and the natural reproduction and birth that sometimes results from that act, but it refers also — and, I daresay, chiefly — to anything and everything that goes into bringing a new human being to full maturity in his or her rational animality. And, as we all know, this may take a loooooong time. In fact, I venture to say that in this life such generation of a child by a parent never ceases. [Some people say that such generating of a fully mature human being is taking longer and longer nowadays! And, indeed, a quickly aging father like myself sometimes finds himself praying the beginning of Psalm 13: “Usquequo, Domine?”; “How long, O Lord?”!] I should add that it becomes evident rather quickly in q. 92 that Thomas means generation in this full sense, and so when talking about this human work of generating by man and woman, he encompasses the conceiving, birthing, feeding, raising, educating, and perhaps even the eventual full befriending of the child. All of these activities, taken together as a whole, constitute the generatio of a human, the bringing of a human to full maturation in his or her rational animality.

We can see right away, then, that the activities that constitute generation understood fully take place all the time and in all sorts of way beyond the boundaries, so to speak, of natural parenthood. Indeed, once one sees the full meaning of generation in the human case, then this short paragraph that opens Thomas’s response opens up not only to the entirety of family life, but also the entirety of the moral life in general as well as the entirety of political life and life in the Church. Indeed, all of these dimensions of human existence are undergirded and suffused, as it were, by sexual ethics and, in turn, by what God original intention in creating the human as sexually differentiated as the telos of his original creative activity. What Thomas is exploring here, then, is the intelligible seed, the intelligible DNA, of the entirety of human existence as God originally intended it. I will be focusing here primarily on what takes place in a marital setting, but we Christians cannot leave aside the ways that all of what I’m going to say illuminates, mutatis mutandis, priesthood and religious life in the Church as well. Perhaps that is something that could be pondered in our conversation later.

Now, how does Thomas unpack God’s intention in bringing-forth the woman? He does so in a very Aristotelian fashion, by laying out the full array, as it were, of generative activity in creation, beginning from plants and moving upward to higher animals. So, picking up where we left off in his answer:

This can be seen more manifestly if one considers the manner of generating among living things….

Some living things … have a conjoined active and passive power of generating, as happens in plants that are generated from seed. For among plants there is no operation of life nobler than generation. Hence the active power of generating is fittingly joined together with the passive power all the time.

It suits complete animals, however, that the active power of generation correspond with the male sex while the passive power correspond with the female sex. And because among animals there is an operation of life nobler than generating to which their life is principally ordered [i.e., sense-perception], among them the male sex is not joined together with the female sex all the time, but only at the time of sexual intercourse, such that we may imagine that through sexual intercourse there comes-to-be something one out of the male and female [ut imaginemur per coitum sic fieri unum ex mare et femina] — just as in plants the male and female powers are joined together all the time, even if in some plants one abounds more than the other, while in some the other abounds more.

The highest activity of a plant is generation; indeed, generation characterizes them as plants. So plants have present within themselves both an active and a passive power of generation. Like plants, animals also generate; but in addition, they engage in an activity that surpasses generation, namely, sense-perception, which characterizes them precisely as animals. Thus in a complete animal (by which Thomas means an animal with all five sense powers), the active and passive powers of generation are not always conjoined. Rather, at certain times, when such animals sense or feel the sexual appetite or urge, the male and the female come together and the activation of distinctively animal generation ensues.

Allow me to call attention to a couple of details that may help us understand what Thomas accomplishes in these paragraphs.

The first is this: When it comes to generation, a complete animal’s participation in this act includes sense-perception; it passes through it, one might say. The generative act of a complete animal is not “one-dimensional” in the way that a plant’s is. The generative act of a complete animal is, as it were, “two-dimensional”; for it includes the dimension of being simply a living thing that reproduces itself, just as plant generation does, and this is enveloped, so to speak, by the dimension of what is specific to the animal, namely, sense-perception. The animal’s act of generation is still just one act, but it a more complex act, a layered or nested activity, in comparison to a plant’s act of generation. And if you watch any nature shows, you can see just how complex animal generation can get when it has to be triggered and carried out within the dimension of sense-perception! [Perhaps this is something you’ve also seen during dances and parties here at TAC, especially when the males try to impress the females!] ...

A second thing is this: In what at first sight might seem to be an offhand remark, Thomas articulates a nuanced observation and a crucial point when he writes that male and female animals are joined “only at the time of sexual intercourse, such that through sexual intercourse we may imagine that there is made something one out of the male and female.” We may imagine that animals become one in the act of generation. But, oh, what imaginative fools we mortals be! Thomas is inviting us to be penetratingly realistic and insightful in looking at animal generation straight-on and then probing what is actually, really, objectively going on there. What animals do may look a lot like what happens between a man and a woman, but in fact it is very, very different — no matter how much we may be prone to romanticize or anthropomorphize it. And at least in a context when we want to nail down precisely what lies at the heart of sexual ethics, which is the living-out of human sexuality, we must not allow romanticism or sentimentalism to cloud our philosophical vision. No matter how crazy and complex things get in the animal world, we must not think that animals are “in love” with each other or that they “choose” to have a family or any other such “cute” ideas. Objectively speaking, the reality of the situation seems to be this: animal generation is a meeting between a male and a female in which each is responding individually to its own felt desire and instinctual need. Hence there is not something one brought about between these two animals in their sexual activity. They are two animals, male and female, seeking pleasure or release in response to an urge, and many times an offspring comes of this going-together, their coitus.

What our sometime romantic or sentimental hearts may be inclined to attribute to the two animals — but what is in fact not there — is a measure of interiority to the act, some recognized significance or meaningfulness to the act, on the part of each animal. We have to be candid and precise about what we are observing, though; and it’s just true: the two animals do not know what they are about.

Humans, however, do know what they are about — or at least can and should know what they are about. And so Thomas contrasts this realistic description of animal sexual activity with distinctively human sexual activity. Listen to what he writes next:

A human [homo], however, is ordered even further to a nobler operation of life, namely, understanding [intelligere]. And so with greater reason there ought to have existed in the human a distinction between both powers, so that the female would be brought forth apart from the male, and yet they would be joined together in a fleshly way into something one for the work of generating [carnaliter coniungerentur in unum ad generationis opus]. And for this reason, immediately after the forming of the woman, it is said, “They shall exist as two in one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

There’s a lot in this passage — in fact, way too much to unpack here. What’s evident, though, is that in the human case, interiority is at play in the act of generating. A truly human act of generating is enveloped and suffused by intelligere, by understanding. And, indeed, this sort of generation is precisely what the Creator intended. The Creator wanted rational creatures, intellectual substances, to exist as participants in the natural world of generation, and to that end the Creator created a sexually differentiated animal endowed with reason who can undertake intelligently the work of generation — and who can and should know what he or she is about when doing so.

Were I to sum up briefly, then, why God brought forth the human as sexually differentiated, my answer would be this: in creation, God wanted there to exist an act of “intellectualized” generation, an act of generation enveloped and suffused by intelligere, by the activity of understanding. Or, to put it more fully and compellingly: in creation, God wanted there to exist an act of animal generation that was simultaneously an act of friendship. In other words, God willed “friendshipified” generation to exist in the cosmos. I call it “friendshipified” because the activity of friendship consists chiefly in “living together” and “thinking together” — or, to put it more precisely, “co-living” and “co-thinking.” That at least is what Aristotle identifies as the proper activity of friendship, and he seems spot on to me. In this passage Thomas indicates how properly human generation exists as a work that can be “co-undersood” and “co-thought,” and thus “co-intended” and “co-chosen,” by man-and-woman together, who co-decide freely to be “joined together in a fleshly way into something one for the work of generating.” Notice that man-and-woman, unlike male and female animals, are truly something one — or, perhaps better, man-and-woman is one — in carrying out this work, precisely because they unite interiorly, in the realm of intelligere, when engaging in a human act of generating. Man-and-woman freely “co-think,” “co-intend,” and “co-choose” to generate.

Now, if we step back a bit and scan the whole of creation, trying to enter into the Creator’s overall vision and intention, we might surmise that the last thing the Creator brought about, and thus the first thing he intended, was that two microcosms of creation — i.e., two human beings in whom every level of creation exists — could come together freely in friendship in order to be generative, in order to dispose themselves to receive the gift of procreative fruitfulness, namely, a child, who in turn comes-to-be as a new microcosm of creation. In fact, the way that Thomas builds toward human generation in this article points to the way in which the human act of generation includes the lower dimensions of plant and animal generation and suffuses them with an intellectual and spiritual interiority that allows them to be recapitulated in a self-conscious, free, communal manner. This most physical and natural of activities in the world of the living, the act of generation, takes on a metaphysical and theological profile precisely because it can be caught up into the realm of intelligere, the realm of thought, understanding, and freedom. And, remember, as the last thing carried out by the Creator, this was his secret intention from the beginning, fully revealed in the beauty of the first woman received so joyfully by the first man as his dream come true ... after a very deep sleep! If we are to understand God’s creation and our place within it, we must all wake up to this secret intention of our Creator.

 

Wojtyla’s personalistic appropriation

If the Christian faithful are being called to witness to chastity in our age in a renewed way, as I suggested at the start, then, I daresay, this call came in no small way through the prophetic witness and teaching of Karol Wojtyla, also known, of course, as Pope St. John Paul II. When it comes to Wojtyla’s relationship with the Catholic intellectual tradition, and especially with the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, we discover an intriguing sort of continuity, one that I like to call a “hermeneutic of integration.” Wojtyla undertakes not simply to recapitulate Thomas’s teaching in new and attractive ways, i.e., not simply to continue his teaching along the exact same lines; rather, Wojtyla undertakes to bring Thomas’s teaching into a wholeness, an integrity; he aims to complement the teaching of Thomas through a personalistic lens that places the consciousness, freedom, and dignity of the human person in the foreground and allows nature and its ends to be refracted through the prism of personhood. This is an inspiring intellectual project in which John Paul invites us, and in the remainder of my remarks I will offer a glimpse into Wojtyla’s integrating Thomistic project when it comes to human generation.

We just carefully followed the path of Thomas’s objective metaphysical-theological approach to human generation, in which human generation exist in a “meta-,” a transcending, manner in relation to the natural acts of generating observed among plants and animals. This is because human generation operates in and through thought, intelligere, and thus exists within the domain of freedom — although it does so in a manner that does not negates or diminish, but rather affirms and elevates the physical and natural dimensions of this activity. In Thomas’s unfolding of generation in the world, the intellectual dimension comes at the end of a story that progresses from the physical toward the metaphysical. But what if, by contrast, we were to start straightaway from the higher end of this spectrum, so to speak? What if we were to begin at the level of intelligere, the level of self-aware thinking, at the level of consciousness and personal experience, and see generation through that lens? It’s at this level, after all, where distinctively human relationships truly live and have such significance for us? Starting from this higher end, in the realm of conscious human experience, may allow us to arrive at the same heart of sexual ethics, though by a complementary and perhaps more compelling route.

Such a route is, I think, the sort that Wojtyla lays out, a route that runs along the terrain of personal consciousness and responsibility, which pervade human love as we experience it. I am speaking of the consciousness that a man and a woman in love have of one another and, in turn, the responsibility they consciously bear toward one another, striving to express this consciousness and responsibility through expressions of love that reveal that they accept and affirm the other in his or her personal wholeness. And, indeed, this human person whom I love also is — and, in fact, concretely is — her body. Conscientious and responsible love, therefore, allows thought and the freedom that flows from it to diffuse, as it were, into the order of nature, the order in which real human bodies are embedded and in which they live and are inclined toward certain ends, including that most physical and natural of ends, reproduction.

In light of then, then, let’s consider what Wojtyla says in Love and Responsibility, a book in which he shares the priestly wisdom he gained as a conscientious and prudent pastor of young men and women who were falling in love, marrying and being given in marriage, and undertaking their lives and families together. Wojtyla writes:

[R]esponsibility for the love of the person is complemented [in the conjugal act] by responsibility for life and also for health — it is a whole nexus of fundamental goods that together determine the ethical value of each fact of conjugal intercourse….

A man and a woman who as spouses unite themselves in full sexual intercourse thereby enter into the orbit of the order that should be rightly called the order of nature. [Earlier] we observed that the order of nature cannot be identified with the “biological order,” for the former is first and foremost the order of existing and becoming — of procreation. Now, we have in mind the word procreatio in its full meaning when we state that the order of nature tends to reproduction by way of sexual intercourse. This is the natural finality of conjugal intercourse — every fact of sexual intercourse between a  man and a woman stands intrinsically in the orbit of that finality. Thus, the conjugal act considered with complete objectivity is not only a union of persons, of a man and a woman, in their reciprocal relation, but also is by its nature (essence) a union of persons in relation to procreatio….

Thus a meeting of two orders takes place in the conjugal intercourse of a man and a woman, namely, of the order of nature, which aims at reproduction, and of the personal order, which is expressed in the love of persons and strives to realize this love as fully as possible. It is impossible to separate these two orders; one depends on the other, and particularly the relation to reproduction (procreatio) conditions the realization of love.... When a man and a woman within marriage consciously and freely choose sexual intercourse, then together with it they choose at the same time the possibility of procreation; they choose to participate in creating (to apply the proper meaning of procreatio). Only then do they place their sexual intercourse within marriage on the truly personal level, when they consciously unite in their conduct the one and the other. [trans. Ignatik, pp. 210-12]

It’s not an altogether new phenomenon, of course, that humans engaging in sexual intercourse have wished not to be conditioned by the act’s natural finality. There is, of course, that troubling story fairly early in Genesis about Onan and his attempt to avoid procreation. It is evident, however, that the advent of artificial birth control and other technologies has made it much easier and more convenient for sexual intercourse not to be so conditioned, and that it has opened up for more space or for a wider gap to exist between the natural order and the personal order as we experience them. And, of course, isn’t this the promise of so many technological interventions in the realm of sexuality, namely, that they will free us to one degree or another from natural conditions and trajectories that apparently diminish a couple’s ability to choose consciously to become parents?

Beneath the surface of sexual ethics and disagreements about what’s morally good or bad in this realm are, of course, foundational disagreements concerning the nature and constitution of the human person. And Wojtyla, to be sure, is very much aware of these disagreements. He was also aware of the potential rupture between the natural order and the order of personal consciousness that artificial birth control was making. Wojtyla was intent on engaging in ethical inquiry, therefore, about the sexual realm precisely through the lens of personal consciousness. Or, to put this perhaps too simplistically, Wojtyla seems to be asserting that we follow the more conscious path and thus, in turn, the more responsible path precisely by undertaking, appropriating, and deploying our natural potentiality freely for generation and the natural end of sexual activity. For he realized, as he articulates in the passage above, that the denaturing of the sexual act that artificial birth control attempts to bring about is simultaneously a depersonalization of that very act. A man and a woman deliberately become less conscious by engaging in the sexual act in that way. Any form of contraception, therefore, diminishes not only their nature, especially as sexual beings, but also their personhood as rational animals.

Now, those who refrain from using artificial birth control were sometimes categorized precisely as the ones who are naively unaware of the progress that birth control in its various forms represents, technologically, scientifically, and otherwise. Faithful Catholics, in other words, were the dinosaurs, the troglodytes, the old-fashioned ones. Wojtyla turn this line of criticism on its head, maintaining that those who use artificial birth control are in fact the ones who put their heads in the sand, so to speak, when it comes to full intellectual awareness of the sexual act — scientific, biological, psychological, ethical, and otherwise. Indeed, ignorance is ignorance, and so technologically-enabled deliberate ignorance is … well, it’s still just ignorance. And thus the deliberate use of artificial contraception turns out to be a consciousness-diminishing activity and thus a irresponsible form of immaturity precisely as a person.

 

Humanae vitae and “conscientious parenthood”

Wojtyla published Love and Responsibility in 1960, just four years prior to Pope St. Paul VI’s watershed encyclical Humanae vitae. In this encyclical, it seems to me, the Church herself articulates an integrated vision of sexual ethics in light of the question of artificial birth control. The underlying teaching of Humanae vitae, stated negatively, is the prohibition of artificial birth control when engaging in sexual activity. But that is only half of the story — in fact, probably the more boring half. The teaching of Humanae vitae, stated positively, actually gets to the heart of sexual ethics, in a way that accords with what we’ve seen in Thomas’s metaphysical-theological approach to human generation wedded to Wojtyla’s personalistic approach to responsible love. For in Humanae vitae Paul VI affirms and encourages paternitas conscia, “conscious” or, as I prefer translate it, “conscientious parenthood.” Indeed, conscientious parenthood — which, I should say, is not “helicopter parenting” or anything like that, but in many ways just the opposite! — is a principal duty that Catholics must undertake in an age of artificial birth control and other technologies that blur our awareness of the full meaning of human sexuality. Indeed, listen to what Pope St. Paul VI wrote in Humanae vitae:

[T]he love of spouses requires from them that they know their task properly and thoroughly, carrying out conscientious parenthood [paternitas conscia]. And this should be understood rightly, since for good reason it is so much insisted upon today. Hence one has to consider it in its various and legitimate interconnected aspects.

If we first reflect on biological processes, conscientious parenthood means recognition and respect of the tasks [munera] belonging to those processes, inasmuch as in the ability to procreate, human reason apprehends biological laws that pertain to the human person.

Furthermore, if we look at inborn impulses and the soul’s affects, conscientious parenthood makes clear the necessary dominion that reason and will must exercise over them.

Beyond this, if we regard physical, economic, psychological, and social conditions, those spouses should be said to exercise conscientious parenthood who either, guided by prudent consideration and a large spirit, determine to undertake a greater number of children, or, for serious reasons and respecting moral precepts, move themselves in such a way that for either a determinate or an indeterminate amount of time they do not bring forth another child.

The conscientious parenthood of which we are speaking, moreover, chiefly bears with it an interior aspect that pertains to the moral order (which is called objective) established by God, of which an upright conscience is the true interpreter. On account of this, the task [munus] of conscientious parenthood demands that spouses acknowledge their duties in relation to God, to themselves, to family, to human society, preserving rightly the order of realities and goods. [§10]

It’s unsurprising (at least for a Catholic believer) that here in Humanae vitae, along with so many magisterial documents, the Church proves herself to be like that wise and prudent householder whom Jesus describes in Matthew, “a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (13:52). The perpetual teaching of the Church concerning sexual ethics, namely, that the unitive and procreative dimensions of the sexual act ought never to be deliberately severed from each other, reaches a beautiful new expression as an altogether affirmative and encouraging call to conscientious parenthood — the ecclesial equivalent, I would say, to the notion of “friendhipified generation.” It is, moreover, a timely teaching, a teaching well-suited to an age that is demanding of us an increasingly conscientious form of motherhood and fatherhood, especially among Christians. Indeed, only in this way, by affirming and encouraging conscientious motherhood and fatherhood, will we understand what lies at the heart of sexual ethics.

Speaking from my own experience, I can say that so far my trying to fulfill this call to conscientious parenthood alongside my beautiful wife has involved me in more heart-expanding, heart-rending, joy-giving, sorrow-inducing, pleasure-evoking, and pain-inducing tasks and privileges than I could have ever imagined…. And especially on special occasions, like our family feast on Christmas day or a first Communion celebration on New Year’s Day, my wife and I know that we are truly blessed to have been called to conscientious parenthood and to be inheritors of the Church’s wisdom and prudence in striving to fulfill our marital vocation.

 

Concluding thoughts: the call for all of us

If I may test your patience a little more, I’ll add just a few closing comments.

Many of you in this room tonight are, undoubtedly, being called to “friendshipified” generation — indeed, an entire life of “friendshipified” generation. Thus many of you in this room tonight are being called to unite in your sexual lives the personal order of responsible love with the natural order of generation — for this is what “procreation” means — and you are being called to bear witness to this distinctive, integrated human activity. Many of you in this room tonight are being called, in other words, to exercise conscientious motherhood and fatherhood right now and for the rest of your lives. If you are being called in this way, it is the Creator who is doing so, the Creator who from the first intended the woman as the crown of all creation, the feminine “grand finale” (Think of a fireworks show!), the woman whom the Creator himself built into a home for his own ongoing special creation of human persons.

If you are being called in this way, it is St. Thomas Aquinas who beckons you, helping you to see how that most natural of living activities, generation, finds its sublime end in the one-flesh union and domestic life of man and woman. If you are being called in this way, it is Pope St. John Paul II who encourages you, that prophetic man of God who, just as he did during his lifetime, encourages you not to be afraid, but rather to undertake a thoroughly personalistic mode of marriage and family life whereby you in your own small way begin to heal a broken world that seems hell-bent on tearing asunder the human person from his or her bodily nature. And if you are being called in this way, it is the Church who is calling you; is is Mother Church who is inviting you to a more faithful and more conscientious form of mothering and fathering — authentic mothering and fathering that might, just might, help to usher the People of God into an age of authentic chastity.

In communion with St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope St. John Paul II, and the whole Church, I, for one, will pray that each one of you respond wholeheartedly to this call, the call to usher in a new “age of chastity.”

Thank you for your kind attention.

 

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