Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

As I was reading Walker Percy’s, Lost in the Cosmos a couple of weeks ago, his discussion of semiotics and the triadic character of symbol use brought this question to mind. How, you might ask? You more probably would ask what I am talking about with the mouthful: “the triadic character of symbol.” Essentially, that means only one creature, man, uses a sign/signifier to convey meaning about something else—the referent (I would recommend Percy’s book to learn more about this but I would warn that his measured use of profane sexual material to get his point across could legitimately offend some sensibilities which are aimed at purity). I don’t recall if Percy discusses the point but up until William of Ockham introduced the cancer of Nominalism in the 14th century, it was pretty much accepted that there was a real ontological (which means “the being” of something) relationship between the sign and its referent. Ockham insisted that what we called things is completely arbitrary. There is no deeper connection. This Nominalism, having been enhanced by Immanuel Kant at the beginning of the 19th century, is pretty much common thinking today. So how did I get to the topic of sex?

It occurred to me that this Nominalism goes well beyond words and their referents. For anything which we symbolize, we do not think of the symbol as having a very deep, and certainly not an ontological, relationship to its referent. This is the case even for some Catholics with the Sacraments. For them, the sacramental symbols are just material reminders of something spiritual (for other confused souls they function purely on the psychological level). Well, that is not what Christians ever believed prior to Ockham. The Sacraments are symbols par excellence. They are what they symbolize and they convey what they symbolize. That is the case with the priest as a symbol of Christ, the Bridegroom, in Holy Orders. The dissenters against the Church’s dogmatic teaching that only men can be priests suffer from two problems. The first is this rejection of the idea that symbols have a real ontological relationship to their referents. The other is that they do not accept that sex differences are something ontological, that these differences go to the very heart of who the person really is. We are either a female or male person forever; we cannot change our sex without annihilating ourselves as persons (transgender operations are simply surface mutilations of the body and cannot change the sex of the person). This relationship between sex and symbol is cosmological. Sex is a form of relation; it establishes the structure by which we relate to others. What we see as sex differences in creatures is simply a biological (and spiritual) manifestation of the way God relates to His creation and the way other aspects of creation relate to one another and to God.

Peter Kreeft has a masterful article (reading him I sometimes wonder why I bother writing anything) on sexual symbolism which explains this much more profoundly than I ever could. I would recommend reading this article before reading John Paul the Great’s theology of the body catecheses because in it Kreeft summarizes much of what JP the Great presupposes in his anthropology.

So how about the answer to the question? You probably can figure out by now that it is yes and no. No, if you are thinking of corporal copulation. However, there will be sex differences in heaven. Our masculinity and femininity remain with us forever as part of who we are. Furthermore, if one recognizes that sexual copulation is intended not only as a way to reproduce the species but as a foretaste of the universal intersubjective unity we will have with God and every other person in heaven, then I suppose that one might consider that sex—though I restate that it will not be corporal! However, I for one would not use the term because this heavenly unity is so far beyond the intimacy of marital sexual union that using the term would mislead and distort the unimaginable joys which God has prepared for those who love Him.