Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Some have asked, so I thought I would pass along to those who might want the warning.  Yes, tonight is the fourth episode in our TV/radio series on Theology of the Body.  If you are not in San Antonio, you can catch it streamed live on Guadalupe Radio Network at 8pm Central.   Select the South Texas option.  If you do happen along to listen, how about giving us a call…we get kind of lonely in the studio all by our lonesomes…

Last Monday night’s Theology of the Body class brought up a short discussion on a topic of some recent interest to me.  I have been developing my thoughts on this topic for a number of years, however at Monday’s class I was not able to recall all of them.  This post is a first attempt to jot down the main thread of my thinking for future development and share it with whomever might still be happening by CLS.

A number of years ago, I recall hearing what at the time I considered to be an extremely fanciful theory about what exactly the act that comprised Original Sin entailed.  In a class, one of my students mentioned that they had heard Christopher West say that the original sin of Adam and Eve was contraceptive sex.  Now it is true there is a very old tradition, dismissed by most because of the way it is characterized, that their sin was sexually based.  This tradition is reflected in the (humorous?) adage, “it wasn’t so much the apple in the tree but the pair on the ground.”  But I wondered, how could one seriously move from this tradition to suggest that it was really contraceptive sex by which they sinned?

I have not read or listened to much of Christopher West, so I have never heard this myself and so I do not know how he might justify his theory (though the theory was confirmed to me by someone who knows West’s work well).  Nevertheless, to my surprise the more I considered it, the more sense it began to make to me.  Now I have not adequately fleshed it out in my thinking in order to begin teaching this as a cogent theory, but several of my classes have heard my current thinking on the subject.  Unfortunately, I think that I gave my best description of it during last year’s theology of the body class but I never did document it and cannot now recall all of my points.  Thus, I thought I might start to document them here.

Of course, we ought to begin with what Genesis has to say.  In sketch, Genesis 3 describes God’s proscription against Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  I don’t intend to do a thorough exegesis of the text here.  Nor will I try to draw correspondences of all of the mythical language to this theory.

What I would like to look at first is the use of the terms “fruit” (periy) and “knowledge” (technically yada` is the verb form, while Gen 2 uses the noun form da`ath).  These terms certainly are used in a variety of ways  in Scripture but here the terms have a decidedly procreative meaning.  Anyone who has studied JPII’s Theology of the Body catecheses will understand the procreative significance of the term “knowledge.”  From a hylomorphic hermeneutic, knowledge encompasses cognitive knowledge but it extends to a more comprehensive exchange of persons and is completed in its most intimate visible manifestation in the marital act in which there is a complete body-soul exchange of gifts of one to the other in life-giving, fruitful love.

Fruit likewise, is a key term.  Adam and Eve were told to be “fruitful and multiply” as were the animals, but they had the additional charge to self-determination…to subdue the earth and have dominion over its creatures.  Choice, necessitating a free will, are fundamental to authentic human fruitfulness (i.e to go beyond simply animal procreation).   In these terms, the fruit of Adam “knowing” Eve was first Cain.  It would seem that there is warrant at this point to at least considering the possibility that the mythical language about “knowledge” and “fruit” in Genesis 3 could be a reference to the marital act.  But of course, we must go much further.

The next thing to consider is the adjectival phrase “good and evil” modifying “knowledge.”  One must ask the question how one might know evil.  Metaphysically speaking, evil can only exist parasitically in some good.  That is, evil exists by depriving the good of some necessary aspect of its existence.  Thus, evil is a state and not a created entity.  Evil has only a privative existence.

If we are consider what this primordial knowledge of good and evil might be in the context of our theory, we must recall that authentic knowledge must be an act where the form of the act manifests a potentially fruitful, complete exchange of persons in the most intimate of all self-giving.  This act is good but it can be experienced also as evil if it is deprived of some essential aspect of its being.  Any time the form of the act is altered from its archetypal structure, it is evil.  If the man does not cling to his wife as the two become one flesh (e.g. adultery or premarital sex) it is evil.  If it is not open to the two being fruitful and multiplying it turns into an evil (i.e. contraceptive sex).  Both cases lead to the “eating” of a deficient “fruit”,  however, it would seem that the text suggests that they are created as man and wife, called to consummate their marriage and so the latter option is left.

A reasonable question that could be asked would be about the significance of contraceptive intercourse as the act by which all of creation would be torn from its relationship with God.  This is indeed a significant question and I think that the theology of nuptial mystery provides the rationale for it and for a second question.  That is, why Satan would choose deforming the marital act as his first (apparently) attack against man.   The nuptial mystery understands Trinitarian Communion as the archetype of nuptial love.  The narratives of man’s creation in both accounts (Gen  1 & 2) focus on man’s creation as complementary selves who are called to be fruitful (Gen 1), to be one flesh (Gen 2) which by nature can be seen as ordered to the same goal.  Some strands of nuptial theology understand the marital act to be the one, par excellence, which hylomorphically manifests the life-giving, fruitful love of total-self gift which is the eternal Trinitarian Processions.  Man images God relatively (as St. Thomas says) more perfectly than the Angels, than Satan himself, in this act.  Where else would this prideful, fallen angel choose to attack man than in the act that allows man to image God, in one way, more than does Satan with all of his perfect intellectual nature.  That is, in the capacity to beget (recall the first Procession).

Recall also the tradition in which Satan is said to reply: non serviam when given the knowledge that he was made to serve man, this lowly vile creature with a body like the sub-personal animals.  Not only that, but that he would have to worship one of them whom God was to join to Himself.  What better way for Satan to prove to himself that he is superior if he can deform, and thereby pervert, the very act by which these (rational) animals superiorly image God?

But one would have to ask why Adam and Eve would be tempted into this?  It wasn’t like they would be afraid that college costs for their progeny would require them to give up the winter home in Aspen.  The Genesis text says that Eve saw that it was good for food, a delight to the eye, and desirable to make one wise.  Certainly knowledge, especially this marital knowledge is a good but Adam and Eve would have had to have been able to see that somehow this act without its procreative fruitfulness was preferable to the authentic act.  I think that the answer here is to realize that they were tempted into falling into Satan’s prideful sin.  They tried to achieve their destiny, to become God-like, without God.  I suggest that they thought that “knowing” one another on their own terms, without God’s “interference” (i.e. His law and the law of the order of nature) was the only way to really authentically experience their “freedom to choose.”  Isn’t this the continuing problem today.  We can often be so blinded by our need to freely choose, and this is a real human need, that we are drawn to ignore the structure by which this choosing leads to authentic human happiness.

Adam and Eve ruptured the integrity of God’s creation by abusing the gift of self-determination.  Instead of following the divine archetype in Whom, through Whom, and for Whom they were created–that is returning themselves to the Father in love, trust and thanksgiving–they tried to take the gift and use it for their selfish ends at the expense of the good of the sacred order.  A final thought.  If it were contraceptive sex that led to this, would this not perhaps by why it is pointed out that while God did not take away the gift of the possibility of fruitful self-giving, the fruit would now be more painful for the woman?

Ok, these are my thoughts thus far.  Thoughtful comments, critiques solicited.

The third part of our 8 part series was last Wednesday night.  Don’t forget that it is being streamed from grnonline.com at 8pm Central; you can call in and let us know that we are not just talking to ourselves (though we know that is a distinct possibility).  Let us know what you think:

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