Marrying Body and Theology: A Reply to Lawler and Salzman

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal Michael G. Lawler and Todd A. Salzman provide an argument for recognizing same-sex civil marriages between believing Catholics as ‘sacramental’ in some significant sense. Their argument deals with major, perennial themes of Catholic moral theology to advance a quite novel position. Though the position’s underlying rationale is interesting for a host of reasons, the present response will focus on what is, in many respects, its determinative feature: the stance taken towards the theological (in)significance of embodiment. It is argued that Lawler and Salzman overlook the nature of marriage as a one flesh union, a nature taught by Jesus and which is independently credible on philosophical grounds. By sidelining the nuptial significance of one flesh union Lawler and Salzman embark on a path which not only fails to make sense of marriage but which also has disorienting implications for various other theological issues that are likewise inextricably bound up with the question of embodiment.

Lawler and Salzman claim that there are three bonds between heterosexual spouses in a Catholic marriage: ‘Their mutual love binds them together in a bond of love. Their marriage binds them together in a bond of law. Their Sacrament binds them together in a bond of grace.’ ¹ From here Lawler and Salzman (henceforth, ‘LS’) argue that same-sex couples too can be bonded by love and, when their union is recognized as a valid marriage by the civil authority, by law also. The most difficult question, then, relates to the bond of ‘Sacrament.’ They point out that a valid sacramental marriage between husband and wife comes into existence at the freely consented exchanging of vows. ² Yet freely given consent to be committed to one another is possible for same-sex couples, too. ³

Accordingly, ‘[t]here appears to be one genuine fact that could preclude same-sex unions from being designated as marriage, at least in its Catholic definition, namely, the inability of the spouses to propagate the human race.’ ⁴ (Elsewhere in the article LS imply a strict identity between the ability to procreate and the consummation of marriage such that marital consummation equates exclusively to ‘the sexual act of procreation’ and is thereby distinguished from the spouses’ ‘mutual love and communion’). ⁵ Against this seeming obstacle they offer two considerations. First, Catholic teaching acknowledges that procreation is not the primary end of marriage in any sense that would relegate the good of the spouses to a secondary consideration. Both ends are fundamentally important. ⁶ Thus, they ask why should the inability to carry out the procreative end count against the status of same-sex unions. ⁷ Second, and relatedly, LS point out that 20th-century Catholic teaching has made clear that sacramental marriage is not contingent on the spouses being able to successfully procreate. ⁸ They then state, ‘the argument that same-sex unions cannot be called marriage because they cannot propagate is, therefore, an argument with no probative power.’ ⁹

Since the basic dynamic of their analysis involves a positive comparison between ‘traditional’ sacramental marriage and same-sex civil marriages between believing Catholics, it would seem that the natural conclusion for LS to draw at this point is that same-sex unions between Catholics can be sacraments in essentially the same way as ‘traditional’ sacramental marriages. After all, LS have by now outlined two jointly dispositive considerations purporting to show that the supposed sole argument against the marital status of Catholic same-sex unions has ‘no probative power’ (and this in the context of a discussion concerning marriage ‘in the contemporary tradition of the Catholic Church’ ¹⁰ ). Yet, for reasons never alluded to, LS demur from that conclusion and instead affirm a more equivocal position. According to them, in Catholic same-sex civil marriages there can be three bonds corresponding to the three bonds of sacramental marriages: bonds of love, law, and, not sacrament as such, but ‘sacrament growing into Sacrament.’ ¹¹ LS distinguish between upper-case ‘Sacrament,’ one of the seven sacraments which heterosexual unions can co-operate in, and lower-case ‘sacrament,’ the always offered divine presence which homosexual unions can make effective for themselves. The latter is a type of ‘sacrament’ that grows (eventually or asymptotically or analogously?) into ‘Sacrament’ (upper case). It is simply assumed, without justification and against the grain of their argument’s dialectic revolving around their triple bond schema, that same-sex unions are fundamentally distinct in sacramental (‘upper case’) terms from heterosexual unions.

Perhaps LS have reasons they leave unstated for their distinction. Either way, what is undeniable is that they see a very close, positive correlation between ‘traditional’ sacramental marriage and same-sex civil marriages between believing Catholics, and that they employ this correlation at the service of affirming some significant dimension of sacramentality to same-sex civil marriages (qua sexual-type ¹² unions). The present article will now turn towards critiquing an omission from LS’s triple bond schema, an omission that cripples an adequate understanding of sacramental marriage. When the overlooked bond is properly understood and its centrality to sacramental marriage rightfully appreciated, it becomes clear why the sort of close, analogous correlation LS suppose exists between ‘traditional’ sacramental marriages and same-sex unions does not exist.

A Missing Bond: One Flesh Union

Missing from LS’s list of marital bonds is the only bond Jesus directly ¹³ refers to. Urged by some Pharisees to take a position on divorce, Jesus expounds on the divinely ordained nature of marriage and challenges the prevailing theological consensus that privileged human will over the givenness of marital union, ‘Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning “made them male and female,” ¹⁴ and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? ¹⁵ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate’ (Mt. 19:4–6; c.f. Mk. 10:6–9). The bond of marriage, according to Jesus, is a one flesh union: a unique sexual-type union contingent upon the embodied complementarity of male and female. ¹⁶ Overlooking this, LS inevitably misconstrue key elements of sacramental marriage. They associate consummation—the sexual intercourse of one flesh union—solely with the procreative (as distinct from unitive) end of marriage and claim that Casti Connubii’s rationale for why consummation renders a marriage absolutely indissoluble is difficult to comprehend in our ‘interpersonal climate.’ ¹⁷ The implication here is that consummation/one flesh union is not itself an embodiment of the other personal end of marriage, the good of the spouses’ union, and is instead sub-personal in and of itself. Consummation is thereby described in a narrow manner suggestive of how its relevance is restricted to only one marital good: ‘the sexual act of procreation.’ ¹⁸ And further on the authors similarly reduce spouses’ sexual intercourse to the question of their ability (or inability) to ‘propagate the human race.’ ¹⁹ For LS, focusing on sexual acts is misguided: ‘The majority of Catholic ethicists are now agreed that decisions of morality or immorality in sexual ethics should be based on inter-personal relationship and circumstances, not on physical acts like masturbation, kissing, pre-marital, marital, and extra-marital sexual intercourse, both heterosexual and homosexual.’ ²⁰ Again, sexual intercourse is implied to be a sub-personal, merely ‘physical’ act when considered in itself, i.e., it is not an act with intrinsic personal significance and which inherently and directly (non-instrumentally) bears upon human-personal goods. This conception of sex (and by extension sexual embodiment) as in se sub-personal is brought to a logical conclusion: ‘Serious immorality or mortal sin is no longer decided on the basis of an individual sexual act against so-called “nature,” that is, against the natural, biological, physical processes common to all farmyard animals. It is decided on the basis of human goods and human relationships built upon them.’ ²¹ It follows that sex and sexual embodiment, considered in themselves as human realities distinct from whatever intentional states may combine with them, are not inherent in and basic to human flourishing but are rather mere vehicles for, or means towards, actual human-personal goods (like, e.g., marriage).

That idea that sexual acts by themselves are merely physical acts and are therefore sub-personal in se is an argument found in their work as far back as a 2006 article in Theological Studies. Therein they consistently and sharply distinguish between ‘heterogenital and personal complementarity, between body and person.’ ²² It is a thesis of the present paper that LS’s position is unable to make sense of the inherently personal significance of one flesh union, a bodily union foundational for marriage whereby two persons really do act as ‘one body’ in an organically real—and not merely symbolic—way. But in that same 2006 article, LS offer what seems like a conclusive reason in favour of their sub-personal characterization of sex acts qua physical acts. Paraphrasing: if one flesh union (i.e., heterosexual intercourse) in and of itself were truly personal then rape would seem to be legitimized as an act of genuine personal complementarity. ²³ Therefore, one flesh union itself cannot be personal and could only be made so through incorporation into an intentional stance of consensual love. It follows that sex in and of itself really is but a physical, non-personal act. However, their argument trades on an equivocation between (i) ‘personal’ as meaning ‘personally significant,’ and (ii) ‘personal’ as meaning ‘morally good/truly human.’ My proposition that one flesh union is personal concerns, in the first instance, the former meaning of ‘personal.’ One flesh union is inherently a matter of personal significance both because human persons are inherently embodied (as thoroughly integrated mind-body composites) and because sexual intercourse allows for the possibility of comprehensive, multi-levelled inter-personal union across all dimensions of the human person. Becoming one flesh with another is itself, in principle, a union of persons and is thus personally significant. Yet, if either of the persons does not will the one flesh union then the personal significance of the union, which is meaning (i) of ‘personal,’ equates to a violation of their person at the moral level of meaning (ii) of ‘personal.’ (Because the non-consensual foisting upon a person of the most intimate human-personal union is a violation of their moral and bodily integrity—which are both central aspects of personhood.) So from the fact that sex can be deeply impersonal under meaning (ii) it does not at all follow that sexual union qua bodily union is not personally significant under meaning (i). On the contrary, the intrinsic immorality of sexual assault presupposes that sex—as a somatic act—is inherently personal in significance. ²⁴ LS’s argument fails to demonstrate that sex acts in themselves are merely physical and thus essentially sub-personal in significance.

Bodily union with another person is, in principle, a personal-type union and not something whose significance is ever merely ‘physical,’ or simply a matter of reproduction or pleasure, or just a symbol of something that is personally significant. Thus one flesh union can itself be part-constitutive of the personal good that is marriage. LS’s denial of the inherent personal significance of one flesh union unavoidably entails a dualistic conception of sexual embodiment whereby sexual embodiment, and thus sex acts, lack intrinsic personal significance and are only imbued with personal significance through adoption into intentional states of one kind or another. On this view the body is not inherently personal and the personal meaning of sex is determined purely by disembodied intentionality. It thus becomes rational to overlook the idea that there could be a unique, particular bodily bond at the foundation of marriage, which in turn makes appear rational the close equation of sacramental marriage with same-sex civil marriage. The dualistic, psychologistic conception of the person that facilitates this close equation by locating the personal significance of sex exclusively within intentionality will be discussed further in the next section.

With the foregoing in mind it is unsurprising that LS, in their most recent article in this journal, avoid affirming the significance of bodily union in their very brief treatment of sex’s ‘bodily meaning.’ In place of such union they propose three bodily meanings to sex: intimacy of bodily contact, pleasure, and procreation. ²⁵ At this point their argument appears to be in a bind. If it is the case, as LS indicate prior to listing these three meanings, that embodied sexual acts qua physical acts are sub-personal, then ‘intimate bodily contact’ cannot itself inhabit the sphere of personal meaningfulness. And if that is the case, then the personal meaningfulness of ‘pleasure’ becomes that of a purely phenomenological, disembodied experience. If so, it has no somatic good which can root its goodness (which is a problem since pleasure qua experience is not intrinsically good ²⁶ ) and can just as ‘personally’ obtain while at a distance from another’s body. Thus in demurring from the intrinsic personal significance of sexual embodiment and sex acts LS render either groundless or impotent their assertions about the ‘bodily meaning’ of sex. On the other hand, if sex acts qua physical acts are personal as a matter of principle, and if—as LS acknowledge elsewhere in their article ²⁷ —love centrally involves union, sexual love qua physical love must involve real bodily union. Such union is much more comprehensive than ‘intimate bodily contact.’ Contact is not union and cannot itself constitute embodied communion between embodied persons. ²⁸

A similar argument can be made regards LS’s invocation of the ‘bodily meaning’ of procreation. If sexual acts qua physical acts are sub-personal, then reproduction itself—which is contingent upon such acts and inherently biological, and which ‘farmyard animals’ also engage in—must be sub-personal too. On the other hand, if sexual acts are personal in principle (by virtue of having intrinsic personal significance and being inherently, non-instrumentally related to the human good) then reproduction can be a personal activity too, and can truly be called ‘pro-creation.’ So there are two directions LS can take to render their account of sexual embodiment internally consistent: either drop the appendage invoking the ‘bodily meaning’ of sexuality, in which case their sub-personal view of the sexual body becomes consistent and total, or else affirm the central personal significance of bodily union for sexual love, in which case they ought to recognize the central moral significance of one flesh union (and, consequently, acknowledge that one flesh union is not merely a means to procreation but is itself constitutive of the spousal-marital good).

By way of their broadly sub-personal view of sexual embodiment LS can straightforwardly suggest that the Church ought to acknowledge some sacramental reality to same-sex marriage on the basis that it already acknowledges the sacramental marriages of infertile couples. But the argument simply assumes that the one flesh union of infertile spouses is related to marriage only as a sub-personal means to a reproductive end, and is not a distinct, intrinsic, personal good which actually constitutes and renews the marital union. The assumption is contradicted by the teaching that marriage is a one flesh union of spouses, a teaching asserted by a person whose very being as the Word-made-flesh is normative for both theological anthropology and sacramental theology. Hence the reason why consummation renders a valid sacramental marriage absolutely indissoluble: ²⁹ the one flesh union of spouses is the ‘full completion’ ³⁰ of marriage. LS might here object that free consent suffices for a valid sacramental marriage and thus consummation is but a subsidiary bond within a wider, more fundamentally intentional union. What that objection misses, though, is that for free consent to be sacramentally valid it must have in view the intentional object of marriage qua one flesh union. ³¹ Marital consent is by no means formless. It must have in view a specific type of (embodied) union which is the object of intentional consent. (If ‘loving union’ simpliciter were the intentional object then marital union would not be inherently sexual and could be purely platonic.) Furthermore, a perpetual impotence to have sexual intercourse, i.e., to become one flesh with one’s spouse, by its nature renders the marriage null. ³² The triple bond schema proposed by LS is thus inadequate for communicating what sacramental marriage actually involves. By omitting what is a necessary and foundational bond, none of the bonds of love, law and sacrament are sufficiently specified to be intelligible for theological or even philosophical purposes.

Ultimately, LS make a related error to that involved in viewing procreation as a superior end of marriage to the spouses’ good. On that mistaken view, sexual intercourse tended to be seen primarily as a means to the end of procreation. Lost sight of was what Gaudium et spes acknowledges: the unity and fundamental importance of both marital ends (the spouses’ good and procreation). ³³ Similarly, LS picture sexual intercourse in se as a means to further ends (reproduction, pleasure, personal closeness, etc.), and to that extent extrinsic to the spouses’ marital good. Denied is the idea that one flesh union is intrinsically constitutive of the spouses’ marital bond. Unless that idea is affirmed it is not possible to make sense of the unity and mutuality of marital ends espoused by Gaudium et spes. Marriage as one flesh union explains this unity and mutuality: it is both a sexual-personal communion of spouses and one which, of its own nature, is per se oriented towards and fulfilled by the procreation and raising of the spouses’ children. Not only is there nothing in LS’s account of sacramental marriage which indicates any kind of intrinsic connection between marriage and procreation, there is nothing in that analysis which entails (as distinct from asserts) an intrinsically necessary connection between marriage and sexual love.

New Testament teaching holds that marriage is a great good centrally and necessarily involving one flesh union. ³⁴ So to get to sacramental same-sex marriage a bridge must be built between homosexual sex and one flesh union. But a serious challenge to the stability of any such bridge is the oft neglected fact that New Testament normativity around sex ethics reads like a coherent whole animated by the one flesh union principle. From this particular principle there follow various, more specific precepts/rules: marital union is not broken by human efforts at divorce and re-marriage, ³⁵ adultery is a serious kind of sin, ³⁶ and non-marital sex acts more generally (i.e., acts outside of, or otherwise contrary to, marital one flesh union) also constitute a serious kind of sin. ³⁷ (Sometimes the reasoning from principle to rule is operative explicitly, as when Jesus characterizes post-divorce re-marriage as adultery in light of his teaching on one flesh union, ³⁸ and when Paul explains sexual sin as sin against the body. ³⁹ )

In effect, the next section will argue that no stable bridge can be built between homosexual sex and one flesh union. In order to make a serious, scripturally grounded case for same-sex sacramental marriage LS would need to show that that kind of argument is mistaken. It is of no benefit to their case to argue, as they do, that (a) one must never violate one’s conscience, (b) the state ought not coerce persons’ consciences, and (c) subjective factors may limit moral responsibility and thus attenuate one’s responsibility for sin (including as regards ‘grave’ matter, i.e., matter which is in principle constitutive of mortal sin). ⁴⁰ Applying any of (a)–(c) to make a case for the objectively positive moral normativity of homosexual sex is a category error: (a) concerns the wrong involved in acting against one’s conscience, including one’s mistaken conscience; (b) concerns the wrong involved in the state coercion of consciences, even mistaken consciences; and (c) concerns factors that limit moral blameworthiness in cases of mistaken conscience. None of (a)–(c) entail any objective norm (good, principle, rule, etc.) which a conscience formed in the virtue of prudence and attentive to relevant normativity (revealed and natural) can use as a premise to arrive at a sound judgment positively affirming the sexual—and thus marital—dimension to same-sex relationships. Abstract, generic appeal to conscience is entirely question begging unless one presupposes a reductively subjectivist account of conscience. What is required is objective and sufficiently specified normative guidance. And what is further required for a Christian theological position is normative guidance rooted in Scripture.

The Body: A Dualist or Holist View?

The idea that marriage is a one flesh union implies a particular theological-philosophical anthropology as regards materiality and mind. ⁴¹ The philosophical credibility of the one flesh view of marriage is thus importantly contingent on the credibility of a broadly holist, anti-dualist view of the human person. This section will very briefly present the holist view of personal identity before outlining its significance for an adequate account of marriage and sex.

A dualist view of identity holds that the human ‘individual’ is composed of two very different, separate elements: mind (inclusive of self-consciousness, thought, will, etc.) and body (the material, physical aspect). Whether in Platonic, Cartesian, Lockean, or neo-Lockean form, the dualist view associates the personal subject with mind and thus denies the necessary and intrinsic personal significance of embodiment. ⁴² So on these views who we really are is identified with one, or some combination, of our thoughts, consciousness, memory, and so on. The body is but a vehicle for our real selves. It is sub-personal in and of itself, a merely physical appendage to spirit, and has personal significance only insofar as it can carry, serve and honour our real, non-bodily selves. It can serve as a means to personal goods but it is not an inherently personal good itself. One’s body is not oneself.

The dualist thesis of identity has various well-known weaknesses. By insisting on there being two very different, separable aspects to our nature it cannot fully account for the effortless, integrated unity of development, ⁴³ functioning, and experiencing that characterizes human existence. John Finnis speaks to the latter two unities,

[A] dualistic account of personal existence [. . .] sets out to be a theory of one’s personal identity as a unitary subsisting self—a self always organically living but only discontinuously conscious, and now and then inquiring and judging, deliberating and choosing, communicating, etc.—but every dualistic theory renders inexplicable the unity in complexity which one experiences in every act one consciously does. We experience this (complex) unity more intimately and thoroughly than any other unity in the world; indeed, it is for us the very paradigm of substantial unity and identity. As I write this, I am one and the same subject of my fingers hitting the keys, the sensations I feel in them, the thinking I am articulating, my commitment to write this essay, my use of the computer to express myself. Dualistic accounts, then, fail to explain me; they tell me about two things, other and other, one a non-bodily person and the other a non-personal body, neither of which I recognize as myself, and neither of which can be recognized as me by the people with whom I communicate my perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and intentions by speaking, smiling, etc. ⁴⁴

Similarly, dualism also struggles to account for our persistent, subsistent personal identity across cascading and sometimes radical alterations in beliefs, memories and consciousness.

The holist view, on the other hand, can account for real, persistent individuality and identity at the basis of diverse developmental stages, experiences, psycho-somatic functioning, and alterations in memories and other mental operations associated with consciousness. According to the holist view the human ‘I’ is an integrated, unified whole of materiality and rational soul. ⁴⁵ Our bodiliness is not reductively physical but rather always personally us. We are, fundamentally, a particular type of animal body: one informed by a rational soul animating us as having certain rational-type root capacities, capacities that are woven into and constitutive of our embodied nature and are immediately exercisable unless age, disability, illness, or decay prevent them being so. Our bodies are the stable locus of our personal identity and the basis of our individuality. Since our bodies are personal it makes sense to personally care so much for physical, ‘in-person’ contact in preference to remote, disembodied communication, and for the embodied experience of natural beauty in preference to postcard representations. A sub-personal understanding of human embodiment cannot as easily account for the reasonableness of these reactions to what are inherently embodied states/events. For these reasons and others besides the holist view of human identity and embodiment is more philosophically credible than the dualist view of same. ⁴⁶

Real, more-than-merely-symbolic bodily union is actualized in one personal-type ⁴⁷ union: sexual union. Since charity is the form of love, and since charity involves a mutual communion between friends whereby the beloved is, in a manner, in the beloved, ⁴⁸ sexual union can be a loving union. Of course, to be a loving bodily union it must be a real bodily union to begin with. Inter-personal bodily union is actualized when two persons unite to complete each other’s body to form a unified, coordinated whole which acts as one in relation to a single act. ⁴⁹ This one flesh unity is the integration of individually incomplete yet mutually complementary bodies. Each of the act’s singularity, bodily completion, and bodily complementarity is a function of an act that is reproductive in kind. So of its nature the one flesh duality-in-unity is functionally oriented towards and fulfilled by the common bodily end that is the procreation of new personal life (him or herself being, then, the bodily-personal fruit of an inherently life-giving bodily-personal union). Since the union’s locus (as distinct from reach) is the co-operated integration of reproductively inscribed bodies, it is possible only between two persons of differently sexed bodies. However, from being inherently reproductive in kind it does not follow that the union is identical with or reducible to being reproductive in result, i.e., the unity in question is not a matter of per accidens medical possibility at the level of the health of isolatable sex cells and organs. Rather, the unity is a matter of per se sexual integration at the level of embodied persons acting as one. One flesh union remains real bodily union independent of the possibility of reproductive success. (Analogously, genuine dialogue is unifying in principle even if the generation of a common conclusion is per accidens socially or intellectually impossible.) Out of all other possible sex acts, all of which can be performed by heterosexual as well as homosexual persons, none of them accomplishes one flesh union. In one flesh union the persons’ going out of themselves to act together with another is an ekstasis through which a mutually, synchronously given ecstasy occurs in common. ⁵⁰ The pleasure is good because it supervenes on what is, in principle, a genuine good: an action that constitutes genuine bodily and thus personal-type communion between embodied persons.

When he expounds on the nature of marriage Jesus does not explicitly mention the union of love. He did not have to, for full inter-personal union is real love. ⁵¹ On a holist understanding of human identity, whereby the person is a psycho-somatic unity, one flesh union does not comprehensively, morally obtain across the couples’ entire multi-levelled persons if either of their wills is not joined to the other’s good in willing a union befitting their becoming one flesh together, i.e., a union of permanence and exclusivity. Marriage of bodies morally requires marriage of minds and hearts, too. Hence sacramental marriage requires both one flesh union and the moral-spiritual vows befitting the personal significance of that union. LS’s charge of physicalist ‘reductionism’ against the sort of view defended here thus demonstrates their own dualism. ⁵² For the one flesh union view proceeds on the basis that the human person is an integrated unity of mind and body, and by virtue of this acknowledges two necessary elements to sacramental marriage: intentional vows (with one flesh union as an object) and consummation via one flesh union. Such a holistic conception could only appear physically ‘reductionist’ from the perspective of a mind-body dualism that denies the intrinsic personal significance of embodiment.

One flesh union is inherently marital in significance and, on that basis, acts as both a necessary condition for and the ‘full completion’ of marriage. It so happens that marriage is inscribed in human sexual capacity much like truth is inscribed in human intellectual capacity. Wildly pervasive intellectual errors no more vitiate the latter claim than wildly pervasive sexual sins vitiate the former. LS ask, why must (consensual) sexual activity always take place within marriage? ⁵³ They go on to suggest that it is optimum (‘best’) to keep sexual activity within marriage yet are very skeptical of the idea that there is anything intrinsically wrong with sex outside of marriage. But the question Jesus’ teaching on marital union prompts is of a rather different frame: why enact an inherently marital union with one’s body and yet not assent to, or even dissent from, marital union with one’s mind? ⁵⁴ The wrong involved in doing so involves harm to one’s integrity. In communicating communion with one’s body and yet demurring from or even rejecting that communion with one’s mind, one has done something to disintegrate one’s self, who is a composite of mind and body, and thus one’s character. It is a type of lie, one told with one’s body on the topic of one’s commitment towards the other as an embodied person. Not only that, the lie is written in the language of (erotic) love. It is also a type of self-alienation from the meaningfulness of one’s body and its capacity to form personal union. So both Jesus and Paul are correct in their distinct analyses of the attendant sin (whether in the form of porneia or moicheia): it is something that ‘defiles’ one’s heart qua moral intentionality ⁵⁵ and which constitutes sin against one’s own body. ⁵⁶ In a way, all such sins are contrary to the good of and capacity for marital union.

A related case is sexual acts performed to achieve orgasm outside of one flesh union but which are intended as part of a relationship (whether heterosexual or homosexual) governed by some kind of overarching will towards exclusivity and permanence. Since such acts do not instantiate bodily union they cannot rationally be intended to achieve bodily union. Those performing these acts can rationally intend them as (a) a simulation of one flesh/bodily union, and/or as (b) a way of achieving mutual pleasure. And both (a) and (b) can themselves be chosen as means towards celebrating or furthering the relationship between the partners. As regards (a), a real one flesh union is simulated and not actually participated in, and so the sexual performance is of no benefit to the partners in terms of actualizing or renewing bodily union. In fact, simulating real union tends to be disintegrative since it involves a choice for illusion over reality about a matter—interpersonal relationship—in which the distinction between reality and unreality matters profoundly. And so the simulation is a type of self-deception whereby experience of bodily union is pursued absent its reality. ⁵⁷ Something roughly analogous happens when couples choose to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for a wedding celebration in preference to preparing themselves for their marital vows. On one level they make a great deal of their marriage while on another—the level of reality—they are actually undermining it by pursuing an experience of marriage absent its reality.

As regards (b), the partners stimulate genitalia in order to achieve sexual pleasure, with the stimulation itself not constituting a real bodily union. Pleasure is achieved through one body part acting on another body part rather than through the union of two bodies acting as one. Absent real bodily union, the sexual role of the partners’ bodies in their intended choice is to function as a means to the end that is pleasure. In this way they treat their bodies as sub-personal things to be manipulated so to achieve what is judged as the real, personal essence of sex: mutual experience of pleasure. While subtle and not explicitly intended, their actions involve an alienation or divorce of themselves from their bodies. Hence these sorts of acts run against the grain of inter-personal bodily union, and indeed against the grain of self-integration of one’s mind and body. It follows that choosing such acts is not actually compatible with celebrating or furthering their relationship qua genuine personal friendship.

Analogizing to (b) is difficult since sexual union is a uniquely somatic union. The following two attempts may be nonetheless instructive. There is a subtle yet marked difference between choosing to have a child to share life with a new person, and so choosing in order to gain satisfaction from that life, from its achievements and company and so on. In both cases a body, a somebody, is part of choice: in the former the somebody is chosen as an end (as a good-in-herself), in the latter as a means. Only the former choice is congruent with good relationship with one’s child; the latter sets a standard inimical to charity (which is not to say that charity cannot overcome that initial choice). ⁵⁸ And there is a less subtle difference between, on the one hand, socializing with friends over drinks in order to participate in and further the friendship through being together, and, on the other, using the occasion as a vehicle for consuming alcohol and mutually experiencing the resulting pleasure of inebriation. ⁵⁹ In both cases a coming together of friends is chosen: in the former as an end, in the latter as a means for a mutually shared pleasure. Only the former choice is congruent with continued friendship; the latter involves a mindset and behavior inimical to real communion with one’s friends (which is not to say that charity cannot survive instances of this behavior).

The foregoing analysis will appear less probative the more one neglects the guiding principle for marriage/sex ethics affirmed by Jesus and the holist view of human personhood which makes sense of that principle. Under a dualist approach whereby the exclusive guiding principles are human will and the phenomenologies of pleasure and attraction, love corresponds to no bodily union.

Further Theological Implications of the Dualist View

The broadly dualist view of embodiment presupposed by LS’s thesis has implications for theology extending far beyond the issue of marriage. This section sketches three implications that are relevant to the intersection of human and divine life.

The dualist account of personhood entails that ‘mere’ embodiment is of sub-personal worth. What counts for personal status on this view is the possession of immediately exercisable capacities for rational thought, or autonomous choice, or some other activity/suite of activities bound up with self-consciousness and mind more generally. The human being in the womb lacks these capacities. All going well he may develop them, and he already has the radical (i.e., root) capacities that allows for such development; but, at present, there is no way of prompting him whereby he could exercise them immediately. It is on this basis that dualist-inclined moral philosophers deny that unborn children are persons. ⁶⁰ And it is that premise which is key for concluding to the principled moral permissibility of abortion. ⁶¹ Similar logic has also been applied, very convincingly, to the issues of infanticide and the moral status of adults with profound intellectual disabilities, and has been applied, not just by opponents of the dualist logic, but by proponents also. So if a dualist standard for personhood is adopted then newborn children are hardly much more persons than unborn children, in which case there is no objection to infanticide rooted in the moral status of the newborn. ⁶² And if that same standard is applied to adults with profound intellectual disabilities then at least some of them will not measure up to it, and therefore will not count as persons on the dualist view. ⁶³ Being a human being is not sufficient, i.e., it is not enough to say of them, ‘they are embodied humans with the same human nature as you or I.’ That view of human worth is holist, and if dualism is accepted then holism is rejected.

At the other end of life’s spectrum are cases where adults have fallen into unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS). The more widely known term for the condition gives an insight into common metaphysical assumptions surrounding it: ‘persistent vegetative state’ (PVS). In this state individuals exhibit no obvious sign of higher functioning of mind and thus no sign of consciousness. Applied to their moral-ontological identity, dualism entails that they are no longer persons. It is on this basis that many moral philosophers endorse the legitimacy of acts or omissions intended to end their life, i.e., intended to kill them via non-voluntary euthanasia. ⁶⁴ Sometimes the rationale for non-voluntary euthanasia is framed in terms of such individuals’ ‘best interests,’ ⁶⁵ but so framed it really amounts to arguing that the embodied life of the individual is either a burden or of insufficient interest to her to justify allowing her to live. And so the ‘best interests’ rationale for killing UWS individuals proceeds via dualist assumptions. The same assumptions make a ‘quality of life’ approach to the value of an individual’s life appear more reasonable than a ‘sanctity of life’ approach. By viewing the body as a sub-personal vehicle for personal existence the door is opened to judge its (the body’s) poor state as subtracting from the basic worth of the individual life in question. It is largely on the basis of a combined ‘best interests’ and ‘quality of life’ approach that moral philosophers ⁶⁶ and legal jurisdictions ⁶⁷ consider it justified to non-consensually euthanize non-UWS patients with minimal consciousness who have a poor quality of life and who are at the threshold of death. So when dualist-inspired ‘quality of life’ value judgments are admitted as a basis for judging the worth of individual lives there remains no secure foundation for a conception of human dignity whereby the embodied human individual is of basic, inviolable worth. We are thus oriented towards thinking of low-quality life at the threshold of death as violable, sub-personal life. The more decrepit and ‘hopeless’ the life, on this view, the more sub-personal it is. And it is this viewpoint which tends towards morally justifying voluntary euthanasia. The underlying moral-logic of choices for voluntary euthanasia is that one’s life has lost personal value, is no longer worth living, and therefore one would be better-off dead. Hence it is considered morally permissible to intentionally choose biological death, a permissibility that appears rational on a dualist conception of the body as sub-personal. So there is a moral-logical path from the obvious dualism which denies the personhood of UWS patients to the implicit dualism that morally justifies voluntary euthanasia. ⁶⁸

The third part of this sketch concerns an issue that contemporary philosophy shows little direct concern with: life after death. What contemporary philosophy has grappled with in considering personal identity are thought experiments purporting to show that the disembodied, conscious self is the real personal ‘I’ (in other words, purporting to show that psychological rather than physical continuity is what constitutes personal identity across time). In a way these thought experiments proceed by imagining personal life after bodily death. A common thought experiment within the genre is the following. ⁶⁹ Persons A and B are told that they are to undergo a mind-swap experiment. Each of A and B’s minds (inclusive of memory, intellect, will, character, etc.) is to be uploaded, with A and B’s bodies wiped clean of mind, so to speak. Then A’s mind will be downloaded into B’s body and B’s mind will be downloaded into A’s body. At this point one of them will receive a monetary award, the other punished with an extended torture session. The common intuition is that having been told of the plan A would insist that when the time comes his body should be tortured and that B’s would receive the monetary reward. From this it is concluded that psychological continuity exclusively counts for personal identity, which stands in favour of the dualist thesis. The whole argument, however, begs the question in three important respects. First, by supposing that A’s mind subsists in an entirely unaltered state after extraction from A’s body, i.e., that nothing is lost or altered. Second, by supposing that human mind is transferable from one embodied constitution into another, differently constituted body and in just such a way as to make the transfer as seamless and as total as it needs to be for the thought experiment to prompt the desired intuition. Third, by supposing that after the download of minds the body that was initially A’s would remain A’s and not B’s after B’s mind has been downloaded into it. Each of these suppositions begs the question against holism and in favour of dualism. Together the suppositions imply a picture of life after bodily death whereby the personal ‘I’ fully exists qua the immaterial soul. Yet, as Aquinas points out, if only my soul is saved and not my body too, then I am not saved. ⁷⁰

Now theologians oriented towards a dualist view of embodiment on the issue of marriage can always go with the logical implications of that view when they turn their attention to other matters. They could thereby hold that neither unconscious life in the womb nor low-quality, decrepit life at the threshold of death is truly personal life, and could further deny that personal life after death really is bodily life. Hence the analysis hitherto offered in this section may appear rather circular to them. Moreover, theological revisionism within the three areas sketched in this section will have significant sociological support, which seems an important consideration for LS since they end their paper by citing data about beliefs among self-described Catholics. For there is little doubt that many, if not most, people in the West today who self-identify as Catholic are sympathetic to the three dualist views sketched in this section or to something very like them: views supposing the sub-personal nature of life in the womb and of poor-quality life at the threshold of death, and supposing too the non-bodily nature of personal life after death.

Yet adopting those views as regards human life in its unborn, towards-death, and after-death stages is radically unmoored from any theology that can credibly answer to the name ‘Christian.’ For the Christian norm was vulnerably embodied in the womb, hopelessly embodied in a decrepit and abandoned state at the very edge of death, and gloriously embodied after death. The Word made flesh is himself a one flesh personal union of human and divine natures, and was so within Mary, at Calvary and on Easter Sunday. In his incarnation, death, and resurrection Jesus assumes embodied human nature, physically, logically, and soteriologically. At every stage the human body is addressed as centrally significant for personhood. The incarnation was no less personally significant in human terms for the fact that it irrupted into a human nature lacking the immediately exercisable capacity for self-consciousness. And Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross conjoined with his Godhead a suffering, alienated, ‘low-quality’ human life at the precipice of death, and did so precisely by way of that human life being both personal and in personal need of redemption. Unless the flesh that suffered and died on the cross was fully personal up until the very moment of death, the death itself would not have borne supreme personal significance for us. Thus follows the inevitable bodiliness of the resurrection: if only our souls are saved we are not.

Irreconcilable with the hylomorphic dynamic of Jesus’ salvific actions is the view LS espouse in an article pre-dating their one on sacramental marriage, a view directed towards the personal identity of human beings with UWS. Forevermore lacking the (immediately exercisable) capacities for freedom, historicity-biography, and relationality, the UWS patient is ‘personally dead’ according to LS. As they put it, ‘the person has come to an end.’ ⁷¹ They make clear throughout their article that bodily life absent a certain (unspecified) level of consciousness is sub-personal. (This dualist approach to human embodiment therefore coheres fully with that taken by LS as regards their sub-personal understanding of sexual embodiment.) Not adequately appreciated by LS is how UWS patients remain integrated, living unities of body and spiritual soul even when their immediately exercisable capacities for activities proper to rational life are permanently disabled. They still live as spiritually ensouled bodies, still animated by the same soul underpinning the radical capacities proper to rational life that they had at the very outset of their lives—still the same being in terms of their basic identity. Even if those radical capacities are now tragically blocked by illness and disability they themselves remain (severely disabled) persons. ⁷²

Now when the dualist account of personhood is applied consistently it is clear that human life in the womb is at most potentially personal life, and so is, synchronously speaking, sub-personal. But if this is correct then the incarnation takes place through a sub-personal human life, which detracts from its personal significance and renders it foreign to human persons. On the same dualist account of personhood, UWS patients are already personally dead, and so bodily death is not itself constitutive of personal death. But if this is correct then the bodily death of Jesus is extrinsic to his salvific purposes insofar as those purposes are personal, which de-personalizes the significance of his crucifixion and death insofar as they were embodied events. And on the same dualist account of personhood the human person is separable from his body, which de-personalizes the significance of Jesus’ resurrection for us insofar as it is a bodily resurrection. Summing up: on the dualist account of personal identity espoused by LS the personal significance of the incarnation, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus is divorced from embodiment, which in turn makes the historical, concrete, embodied facticity of each of these events appear both redundant and alien to us as (dualist) persons. What was meant to re-create us becomes unrelated to us.

But in the beginning we were created as fleshed bodies ⁷³ and not as dislocated minds. The hylomorphic dynamic of Jesus’ salvific activity speaks to the hylomorphic reality of we who need saving. And in making mankind in his image ⁷⁴ God not only makes mankind ‘male and female’ ⁷⁵ but does so to join them as one flesh. ⁷⁶ It follows, then, that one flesh union is key to understanding what it means to be made imago Dei. As a real, inseparable union of plural persons which of its nature communicates life, ⁷⁷ marriage is ‘a reflection of the Holy Trinity.’ ⁷⁸ And as a life-giving, inseparable one flesh union whereby human nature is brought to a kind of completion, marriage is also a reflection of the one flesh union of the human and the divine embodied by the second Trinitarian person. Human nature’s capacity for inter-personal bodily union prefigures the inter-natural personal union of the Word made flesh. It is no accident, then, that salvation is through becoming one body with Jesus in a way that correlates closely, indeed sacramentally, to the one flesh union of husband and wife. ⁷⁹ So the natural and sacramental nature of marriage correlates to our true identities as embodied persons, to the identity of the Word made flesh, and to the hylomorphic dynamic of our salvation. No credible Catholic sex ethics can overlook these bonds.

Conclusion

Essential to the sacramental nature of marriage is one flesh union, a union that is inherently personal in significance. Omitting the bond of one flesh union from analysis of sacramental marriage can only appear justifiable under dualist presuppositions. But such presuppositions not only obscure appreciation of the nature of marriage as taught by Jesus, they also obscure appreciation of personal identity, the dignity of bodily human life, humanity’s personal relationship to God through the person of the Word made flesh, and Jesus’ redemptive, re-creative activity through his incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. Mind-body dualism vitiates Christian theology wholesale. It turns out that approaches to sexual embodiment and marriage are good indicators of how normative Jesus Christ—Person, words, and activity—is for a given theology.