God’s laws show his love: they are not burdens but rather are expressions of his mercy. As such they are guideposts to human happiness. I wish to examine this important truth regarding God’s laws concerning sex and marriage.
First of all, what are those laws? There is basically only one such law: sexual release is to be sought only in a potentially generative act between a man and a woman in a relationship that is exclusive, permanent, and consistently open to life—in other words, a marriage.
But this one law pertains to us in different forms, depending upon one’s time of life and circumstances: as a child and beyond, “Do not masturbate”; in young adulthood and beyond, “Do not mutually masturbate” (I.e., no “heavy petting”); in single adulthood, “Do not fornicate or cohabitate”; in marriage, “Do not use artificial contraception” and “Do not commit adultery”; and, in general, “Do not seek release in non-generative sexual acts” (oral sex and sodomy).
Each of these particular laws implied by the one basic law in turn implies also a law about the occasion of sin and a law about scandal. If “Do not masturbate” is a law, then so is “Avoid occasions of masturbation” (for example, avoid looking at erotic or pornographic materials). Likewise, so is “Do not do any action, or make any statement, that suggests or encourages, or which might appear to suggest or to encourage, masturbation by others.”
Laws and prudential precepts
These are quite a lot of laws. And each of these laws implies prudential precepts or rules of thumb, again depending on one’s circumstances. Such precepts mark out what it is to be “wise” about the matter. For example, if “Do not act in a way that might encourage masturbation in others” is a law, then it becomes a prudential precept, certainly in a household that contains children and young adults, that “One should not provide access to the Internet without employing an effective filter or making sure that computers are used only in places and at times where they can be monitored.” It would be wise to put this prudential precept into practice—and foolish not to.
Notice how this sequence of laws has the structure of a legal code. There is a basic law that, we believe, is “given” to us, part of what we call “the natural law.” This basic law logically implies other laws, in the sense that one cannot logically affirm this basic law and deny those other laws. (We should add that each of these implied laws admits of as much additional specification as we wish to give it: if “Do not masturbate” is a law, then every kind, manner, and mode of action by which someone might masturbate is ruled out by an implicit “law” specifically governing that.) Finally, as we saw, implied particular laws suggest many prudential precepts.
It is unfashionable in Catholic theology today to think of faithful Christian discipleship in terms of following laws. We tend to spurn “legalistic” approaches in favor of “pastoral” and “personalistic” approaches. Yet practical reason and prudence have a structure; and that structure—in all domains, not only in the domain of sex—is similar to a legal code.
Aristotle pointed out this truth a long time ago, and it makes sense; otherwise there would be no connection, as there is, between prudence in ordering one’s own life well and wisdom in governing groups of persons, which must involve setting down laws.
Moreover, it is undeniable that, however pastoral and personalistic someone in authority wishes to be, it is unavoidable that anyone on the “receiving end” who is trying to follow this authority is going to look for concrete guidance about what he must do, must not do, and may do. That is, anyone trying to do the right thing and follow someone else’s mind is going to try to identify prescriptions, proscriptions, and permissions. Life for a rational being dependent on others, and under the authority of others, must involve identifying laws and trying to follow them. This truth is inescapable.
Laws direct toward the good
Or consider that all practice involves do’s and don’ts. To see that this is so, next time you hire a coach for something—say, a golf instructor, or a piano teacher—try telling the coach that he must be “pastoral” and “personalistic” and therefore must not forbid anything or command anything. I submit that your lesson won’t go very far. Or imagine how a strictly “pastoral” user’s manual for a new power saw would read.
It is true that those who are intent on any discipline make progress mainly by looking at the best practitioners and trying to imitate them. Similarly, in the Christian life a very holy person might be mainly concerned with the refined following of the counsels of perfection. But most of us in most domains are still at the level of “fundamentals”—actually, even very advanced practitioners find that they must periodically return to fundamentals—and the fundamentals of any practical matter are laws about what you must and must not do.
Of course, a law code has a rationale: the laws of a domain, if they are good laws, are always in the service of the good of that domain. They are designed to promote and protect that good. We see this in God’s choice of wording the sixth commandment, the basic law governing sexual matters. If he had wanted to impart a general law that would rule out, in fact, most illicit forms of sex, he might have said, “Do not masturbate.” After all, masturbation is sexual release entirely disconnected from procreation, which tends to make someone inward-turned and selfish. Illicit forms of sex are masturbatory in fact or tendency.
Instead he gave “Do not commit adultery”; that is, he wished to place our focus on the ultimate violation against the good of marriage—to teach us, through the contrast, that marriage is the good toward which laws concerning sex are directed.
Madly in love
To understand better the rationale for these unavoidable laws about sex and marriage, consider the following. A human life is a sequence of stages of being madly in love. In childhood, a child finds himself cared by parents who are madly in love with him, and he is madly in love with them also, and with his siblings. When he reaches maturity, he enters into marriage with someone with whom he is madly in love and who loves him in the same way in return. In their prime, he and his spouse together are madly in love with the children they beget. And in old age he is madly in love with his grandchildren and everyone dependent on him—children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, even brothers and sisters—are madly in love with him.
Happiness comes from love. The real secret potion and energy of happiness comes from being madly in love. So what I describe is also the sequence that a happy life is meant to follow.
I am using “being madly in love” in an encompassing sense that includes ecstatic romantic love—what we typically restrict ourselves to describing in that way—as only one of its forms. Of course, children are “madly in love” with their parents in a different way from how their parents are “madly in love” with each other. But all forms of being “madly in love” involve one person regarding the other as somehow himself. He takes the other’s life to be and to constitute his own. (Think of how a child mourns the loss of a parent.) He takes as much pure joy in another’s life as he does in his own, and maybe more.
Moreover, being “madly in love” requires a lack of division of affection as well as a coincidence and reinforcement of other motives, so that love is intense and concentrated, not dissipated. A man who has two wives cannot in this sense be madly in love with either, whether he is joined to them at the same time, in typical polygamy, or at different times, as in the serial polygamy (i.e., divorce and remarriage). For similar reasons, a man cannot easily be madly in love with all the children he has from two or more living women.
We may enter this sequence or cycle of being madly in love, which is meant to be the mode of human happiness, beginning with the love of a mother for her child. A mother loves her child to bits. (Remember we are speaking of the ideal, which in this case is common.) The pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, acknowledging this phenomenon, was famous for saying that every child needs and deserves to be raised by a mother who is ecstatic over the child’s every word and movement.
A child who is loved in this way, of course, grows up adoring the mother in turn. Already in this intoxicating bond is the potential for much happiness. The picture of Madonna and Child is a picture that we recognize as the core of human happiness. It is a promise too that, despite our failings, human happiness does and can exist.
But the child results from the husband’s love of his wife, which (again, in the ideal) began as courtship—a “mad” begging and pleading of the man to the woman, involving much praise and many gifts, that he might receive her in her very self as a gift. Courtship (in the ideal) continues in that same way in marriage, which is simply a pact to make the intoxication of courtship perpetual. Marriage (in the ideal) is an ecstatic relationship, consisting not of fulfilled “feelings” (as according to the modern heresy) but rather of a stylized romanticism, capable of converting even mundane tasks such as taking out the garbage into acts of high chivalry.
I am describing the stuff of human happiness, which is not complicated: the love between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, friend and friend: “Lord, our all to Thee we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.” Happiness is in our grasp, if we could but live each of these relationships as “madly in love,” which, as was said, requires that the other be loved with intensity and concentration of affections as “another self.” (I am speaking of natural happiness, not the higher happiness that comes from the redemption of that which we have ruined by sin.) Someone who genuinely loved man would try to foster this happiness. Anyone with authority over others would teach through example and precepts (“laws”) a manner of life which would result in it.
Power put into service
But what role do sexual arousal and desire play in this sequence? These affections are so powerful and intense, and so prone to making us act irrationally, that they need somehow to be put in the service of that sequence. They should exist in our lives as “domesticated” or not at all. Otherwise, they break through, disrupt, and destroy human happiness.
Simple reflection on human experience shows that this is so. The intensity of sexual pleasure is so great that, when sought for its own sake, it corrupts itself, because it forces the seeker to find more and more extreme modes of satisfying it. It corrupts other things as well, because it empties everything else of meaning, except insofar as it increases sexual pleasure. A person’s range of life, and of appreciation of creation, thereby becomes severely constricted. He becomes gradually incapable of recognizing or fostering other goods.
The experience of this intense pleasure can establish a kind of obstinacy against law in someone’s heart. It causes people to fail in matters of simple self-control. In pursuit of these pleasures, people act in ways they otherwise would regard as disgusting and shameful. These pleasures can cause people to change their settled resolutions, break promises, and violate oaths. They can render people incapable of making serious commitments. They lead people to turn inward and become narcissistic. Likewise, they seem to take away self-knowledge, so that people who pursue them easily fall prey to self-deceit, especially the self-deceit of thinking they really care for others when in reality they are simply instrumentalizing them.
I have stated the problem with abstract descriptions, but for specific examples one need only consider the many works of art, stories from the news, or sad examples from one’s own life, where sexual desire breaks through and, in the end, causes people to kill themselves, kill each other, kill their children, burn down houses, ruin their careers, or do other cruel or thoughtless things. My descriptions are not hyperbole.
So we have within us desires that if given scope destroy the sequence of a happy life that I described. Things very dear can be easily destroyed by pleasures that ultimately are transient and meaningless. A reasonable response for someone who properly appreciated the threat would be fear.
Fear is a rational response to a threatening, serious evil, which then leads us to take proper steps to overcome the evil. Those steps would include the cultivation of modesty and chastity, and the eager flying to the laws of the Church for guidance. One sees this attitude every day in converts who have turned away from sexual sin and toward God.
Laws of fear and fulfillment
At the same time one would look for how these desires and pleasures get “domesticated”—that is, guided and informed by reason. Hence the Church has traditionally taught that marriage is “for the procreation of children and relief of concupiscence.” The phrase “relief of concupiscence” does not mean that sexual desire is first allowed a kind of lawless scope, and then marriage is adopted as the lawful means to satisfy it. It means rather that sexual desire in principle is given no scope at all, except as a moderated tag-along to the sequence of preparing for marriage, courtship, and marriage that I have described.
On this picture we hold with confidence that human nature is a teleological system—it has an inherent design—in which sexual desire has an intended role. Its role is to unify and bind human persons as embodied. In marriage, sexual desire so interpreted can be felt to be given full scope and be fully satisfied. It is “fully satisfied” insofar as it involves the husband completely possessing and being completely possessed by the wife (the being “madly in love” shown by husband and wife), which is then realized in the complete unity of their two bodies in one child (the being “madly in love” of parent with child). The intense and undivided love for another, as being ‘another self’ through the body (one flesh), is precisely the realization of the purpose of sexual desire.
The laws about sex and marriage we considered at the beginning divide up into those that forbid giving independent scope and force to sexual desire (do not masturbate, do not commit sodomy) and those that forbid the spending of sexual desire on multiple objects, which hinders its intensity and blocks its purpose (do not fornicate, do not cohabitate, do not have multiple partners, do not divorce).
The former are, so to speak, laws of reasonable fear; the latter, laws of true fulfillment. The former would save us from unhappiness; the latter would guide us to happiness. Both spring from a view which “raises the stakes” about human life.
Greatest human happiness
It is simply not true that Catholic sexual morality consists of series of negations that keep someone from experiencing pleasure and life. Rather, these laws make sense only on the supposition that one is striving for the greatest human happiness over a lifetime. For someone aiming to coast along comfortably and take it easy (an impossible goal, at any rate), they make little sense.
What then of the supposed opposition between law and mercy with which I began this piece? It depends on a false concept of mercy. Mercy (misericordia) means heartfelt compassion (miserum cor) at someone else’s distress, which impels us to succor him to the degree that we can: hence the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
Mercy never takes the form of relaxing the requirements of law. When someone shows mercy by forgiving the sins of his brother, he must of course presuppose that his brother sinned—that is, that the law is in force, and his brother violated that law, harming him. When a public official shows mercy by remitting punishment that is deserved, again, he must presuppose that the law remains in full force and was violated.
We Christians have no authority to relax any law. We have no authority to remit punishments. The only mercy we can show, relative to law, is to forgive someone else’s offenses, which means simply: we stop pressing our case and no longer seek either vengeance or justice for him from God. On the other hand, “instructing the ignorant” about God’s laws, and “correcting the sinner” when a friend is breaking those laws, are serious requirements and high spiritual works of mercy.
If within the safe confines of our “field hospital” (Pope Francis), we look upon the human wreckage around us, and, although we know some simple precepts that will keep people from that wreckage, we instruct no one and soft-pedal the precepts, then “merciful” is hardly the term that suits us. It is more like: to flatter others and out of cowardice, we have become merciless.