The human person’s sex establishes the manner in which he approaches his interactions with God and the cosmos. Interpersonal relations are no different. To have an authentic relationship with another requires the disinterested gift of self. The totality of the gift is dependent upon the relationship. However, sex differences are normative for the manner of interpersonal relationships. In interpersonal relationships, the masculine manner of giving himself in love is as primarily an initiating love, and the feminine is first an active receptive love in order to return love. This complementarity is the sole basis for the most intimate of relationships–the conjugal union. The body testifies to this metaphysical reality.

Conjugal union is authentic only in the context of a lifelong, total, and exclusive self-gift in the marital covenant. The cosmic structure of this union is the complementarity found in sex differences. Again, authentic conjugal union is only possible in the marital covenant and here only when the union is one of total self-gift; that is the giving entirely of one person to the other in an openness to fruitfulness.

Therefore, while complementary sex differences are a necessary precondition for marriage, this is not sufficient for an authentic conjugal union. Openness to fertility rules out any active attempts to squelch the procreative aspect of the conjugal union. Otherwise, the self-gift necessarily devolves into the selfish taking of the other rather than the reception of the other as a gift. This is true even if both parties are in agreement about contraception. Contraceptive sex becomes the taking of the other’s body for the purpose of sexual pleasure. Even if the motivation is not initially libidinous, contraceptive intercourse is still a selfish taking rather than receiving because it reflects the misguided desire for the unitive fruit of marital intercourse in separation from the procreative aspect–in other words, it is a rejection of the gift. Contraceptive copulation is a tacit rejection of the entire person because it rejects his fertility and the possibility of a gift of a third person, a child. The ill fruits of this mentality bear this out.

When the contraceptive pill became available in the U.S. in the early 1960′s the divorce rate soon shot up and a decade later the nuclear family went into “free-fall.” The astronomical increase in the abuse of women and children has tracked this societal disintegration. This is exactly what Pope Paul VI, in Humanae vitae, predicted and given this anthropology it is clear why he was right.

Male friendship with other men and female friendship with other women must necessarily be of a different order than the conjugal relation if there is to be an authentic gift. There is no possibility of fertile fruitfulness. There is no complementary structure required for the total self-gift. Any attempt at simulating conjugal union fails. It fails because it is sterile, there is no possibility of fruitfulness. This is obvious from the anatomy of both. However, it can also be understood at the psycho-emotional level, in fact, at the level of ontology. It fails because there is an inherent conflict in which both are either initiating, receiving, or one is deforming his personal sexual structure to try to be what he is not. The result of trying to live in contradiction to the cosmic order, in contradiction with one’s personal structure, is interior and interpersonal conflict. The faux attempt at consummation results in consumption.

Consumption is sterile; it is self-enclosed. Consumption isolates those who engage in it and leaves them empty. Sexual activity that is not a total self-gift, is not open to the possibility of the gift of a third person, ends up objectifying the other person and so deforms an act meant to be one of disinterestedly giving into an act of self-centered taking. In the act of self-gift, we are satisfied because we enter into Trinitarian love. In the act of selfish taking, one may momentarily be sexually spent but he is never satisfied. And so that is not the end; the need for taking increases and some are tempted into a downward spiral in trying to satisfy the need for increasingly perverse acts of selfish taking that are more and more separated from the natural order of creation. As selfish taking becomes increasingly perverse, the person experiences less and less satisfaction and becomes increasingly disturbed.

One might think here of Uncle Screwtape, toward the end of The Screwtape Letters, describing the demonic motivation to consume the other. Consumption is a manifestation of the disordered attempt to consummate, to complete oneself in the other. I cannot help but think here of the thankfully rare but seemingly exclusive “homosexual” consumption that ends up in cannibalism–even voluntary cannibalism. But interpersonal completion–consummation–is only possible if it is in accord with the Trinitarian structure that man images. Consummation is only possible when the gift is total, complementary, exclusive, irrevocable, and open to the fruitful bringing forth of a third person.

This Trinitarian anthropology is very strongly supported by the empirical data of the medical and sociological sciences. While some like the American Psychiatric Association considers it “unethical” for any of its members to even look into such things, this clearly dogmatic/ideological response comes at the expense of those that the APA should be helping. Nevertheless, the evidence is clear that SSA is a disorder which manifests itself in myriad physiological and psycho-social disorders. Here are some stats again which demonstrate this (see the post “It’s Not So “Gay” After All“):

…homosexuals are four times as likely as their peers to suffer from major depression, almost three times as likely to suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, nearly four times as likely to experience conduct disorder, five times as likely to have nicotine dependence, six times as likely to suffer from multiple disorders, and over six times as likely to have attempted suicide (and it points out that an “extensive study in the Netherlands (published in the Archives of General Psychiatry) undermines the assumption that homophobia is the cause of increased psychiatric illness among gays and lesbians. The Dutch have been considerably more accepting of same-sex relationships than other Western countries — in fact, same-sex couples now have the legal right to marry in the Netherlands”).

Homosexuality and Hope also showed that “compared to controls who had no homosexual experience in the 12 months prior to the interview, males who had any homosexual contact within that time period were much more likely to experience major depression, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia and obsessive compulsive disorder. Females with any homosexual contact within the previous 12 months were more often diagnosed with major depression, social phobia or alcohol dependence. In fact, those with a history of homosexual contact had higher prevalence of nearly all psychiatric disorders measured in the study. Also, a recent study in the American Journal of Public Health has shown that 39% of males with same-sex attraction have been abused by other males with same-sex attraction.”

…physical illnesses associated with homosexual sex: “the diseases found with extraordinary frequency among male homosexual practitioners as a result of abnormal homosexual behavior is alarming: anal cancer, chlamydia trachomatis, cryptosporidium, giardia lamblia, herpes simplex virus, human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, human papilloma virus — HPV or genital warts — isospora belli, microsporidia, gonorrhea, viral hepatitis types B and C, and syphilis. Sexual transmission of some of these diseases is so rare in the exclusively heterosexual population as to be virtually unknown. Others, while found among heterosexual and homosexual practitioners, are clearly predominant in those involved in homosexual activity. Men who have sex with men account for the lion’s share of the increasing number of cases in America of sexually transmitted infections that are not generally spread through sexual contact. These diseases, with consequences that range from severe and even life-threatening to mere annoyances, include hepatitis A, giardia lamblia, entamoeba histolytica, Epstein-Barr virus, neisseria meningitides, shigellosis, salmonellosis, pediculosis, scabies and campylobacter.”

Those who commit themselves to violating the natural order become slaves of their own passions. Instead of giving themselves and receiving the other as gift, they end up objectifying and selfishly taking the other as an object. They damage themselves, others, and the entire social order because they set out in the direct opposite direction from that for which they are really searching, the completion, satisfaction, and peace–true consummation–that only can come by entering into a selfless, giving communion with God.

John Paul the Great, in his theology of the body, explains that the body reveals the person. The body shows that there are two, and only two, ways of being a human person–as a male and female. These two ways complement each other and reach all the way to the dimensions of self-consciousness and self-determination.

Karol Wojtyla, in his book Love and Responsibility, notes that looking at sex from an external, scientific perspective one can see that each sex obviously has features the other does not. The anatomical features themselves suggest a mutual complementarity. In addition, sexual attraction, which is also an urge to mutual completion, shows that the opposite sex has a reciprocal value for the other. However, this complementarity goes much deeper than biology.

Wojtyla goes on to give an example by performing a phenomenological analysis of the complementarity found in the makeup of the human psyche:

The very structure of the male psyche and personality is such that it is more readily œcompelled to disclose and objectivize the hidden significance of love for a person of the other sex. This goes with the relatively more active role of the male in such love, and also imposes a responsibility on him. Whereas in the woman sensuality is as it were covert, and concealed by sentimentality. For this reason she is by nature more inclined to go on seeing as a manifestation of affection what a man already clearly realizes to be the effect of sensuality and the desire for enjoyment. There exists then, as we see, a certain psychological divergence between man and woman in the manner of their participation in love. The woman appears more passive, although in a different way she is more active. In any case, her role and her responsibility will be different from the role and responsibility of the male (Love and Responsibility, 111-12)

This analysis shows the differences between the way men and women experience and manifest love, but in their very differences, they complement one another. Wojtyla makes a significant point that both the man and woman are complementarily active, but in different modes such that one’s activeness complements the other. Their roles and responsibilities must differ or they would naturally conflict. Another example of this is that:

The sexual urge expresses itself in these life processes in such a way that the organism possessing male properties “requires” an organism possessing female characteristics, in conjunction with which it can attain its proper end “that end in which the sexual vitality of the body finds its natural consummation. For the sexual life process is naturally directed towards procreation, and the other sex serves this end. This orientation is not in itself a consumer orientation” nature does not have enjoyment for its own sake as its aim. It is, then, simply a natural orientation in which an objective requirement of existence finds expression (ibid., 106-07).

While the complementary relationship of love transcends procreation, intimate interpersonal love derives its very structure from procreative anthropology. One cannot ignore this truth of complementarity without exacting a physical and psychological price.

Woman and man are two complementary ways of being human and at the same time, two ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body. This complementarity is an important aspect of the man-woman relationship, a relationship, remember, which has its origins in the Trinity.

John Paul finds that these psycho-physical findings are supported by the biblical witness. In the biblical formulation of Genesis 2:23, the woman in her femininity and the man in his masculinity discover themselves in the presence of one another. The subsequent verse shows that this gift of sex difference allows them to become “one flesh” through their bodies. In marriage, they become a communio personarum (community of persons), in the image of the Trinitarian Communio Personarum, through the body. The marital communio is a reflection of the Trinitarian Communio, in whose image man “male and female” is made. The spouses most intimately and completely express this communio in marital intercourse which is open to fruitfulness.

John Paul indicates this when he says that “the unity of which Genesis 2:24 speaks “they become one flesh” is undoubtedly expressed and realized in the conjugal act. The biblical formulation, extremely concise and simple, indicates sex, femininity and masculinity, as that characteristic of man “male and female” which permits them, when they become “one flesh,” to submit their whole humanity to the blessing of fertility.” Again, this complementarity in the witness of the bodies is brought home:

The body which expresses femininity [through masculinity and vice versa masculinity through femininity,] manifests the reciprocity and communion of persons. It expresses it by means of the gift as the fundamental characteristic of personal existence. This is the body, a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and so a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs. Masculinity and femininity namely, sex is the original sign of a creative donation and an awareness on the part of man, male-female, of a gift lived in an original way. Such is the meaning with which sex enters the theology of the body (John Paul II, Theology of the Body, 61-62 [January 9, 1980], the bracketed text above is missing from the English translation, so I have included a translation from the original Italian).

The meaning of the body in marriage reveals an even greater meaning of sex differences for the person. It is a witness of one person’s relation to another and the call to a sincere relationship based on a gift of the self, as a communion of persons imaging the Trinitarian Communio Personarum. Trinitarian Communion, as source and goal for man, has its most perfect corporeal witness through sex in marriage. The body, through its sex differences, becomes the substrate by which the husband and wife form their irrevocable communion. John Paul repeatedly makes it clear that it is the complementarity of the unique masculine and feminine anatomy which reveals sex’s deepest meaning. This view that the body, in both its structure and its actions, can reveal the deepest meaning of gender and its complementarity, is coherent only when one keeps in mind the Pope’s presupposition that the soul is the substantial form of the body.

John Paul II refers to the relationship among femininity, receptivity and love in a text I quoted earlier: “The Bride is loved: it is she who receives love, in order to love in return.”  He states that this phrase has meaning that extends beyond marital spousal relationships. It has a universal meaning that applies to every woman in her relations with all other men and women, regardless of her race, nationality, creed, culture, age, education, spiritual or physical state, marital state, etc. This is because it has to do with her very femininity, which one can now begin to see is deeply rooted in the person’s being. In the context of Ephesians 5, he associates the feminine primacy in the receptivity of love with what he calls “a special kind of ‘prophetism’ that belongs to women in their femininity.”  An analogous statement can be made about men. In other words, masculine primacy in an initiating love also marks his relationships with everyone else as his masculinity is rooted in the depths of his being.

In the end, it is the very complementarity of sex differences that establish the framework for interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, it is the telos, the purpose, of these sex differences which define the sole context for the most intimate communion of persons; namely, fruitful self-giving love. The series will end with the application of these findings to the problem of same-sex attraction.

Sex and the Human Person: Part V – Consummation

John Paul the Great sees in this passage the unity of human beings in one nature–God created him (singular) in the image of God. But immediately the text shows that there is a binary character to this single human nature, as male and female. In terms of relation, human nature is binary. That is, we also image God as male and female together.

In his apostolic letter Christifideles laici, the John Paul the Great links sex differences to God’s plan for each person which “‘from the beginning’ has been indelibly imprinted in the very being of the human person—men and women—and, therefore, in the make-up, meaning and deepest workings of the individual.” While the full meaning of sex difference is deeply interior in the psychology, emotions, indeed in the entire mystery of the person, it also has empirical manifestations. Therefore, John Paul commends the study of the human person and gender to the human sciences and theological disciplines to find and clarify the specific gifts of femininity and masculinity. However, he warns that the findings of science will be partial and so they cannot change the deepest and immutable realities of the person and his sex which are revealed by God.

Fr. Manfred Hauke in his work, Women in the Priesthood?, shows that masculine and feminine physical characteristics are integrated into almost all aspects of a man’s or woman’s physical constitution, respectively. The primary sexual characteristics of men and women (i.e. the genitalia and other aspects of the reproductive system) are obviously oriented toward facilitating sexual intercourse for the purpose of reproduction and in the case of a women, gestating and giving birth. It is also visibly obvious that these primary characteristics correspond to a theme of interiority for women and exteriority for men.

Referencing German author Philipp Lersch, Hauke says that looking at the physiology of the act of coitus, the woman has the natural role of receiving and assimilating which Lersch calls a ‘centripetal’ process. In other words, her physiology directs what comes to her from the “outside inward toward the center of life.” The man on the other hand, has a ‘centrifugal’ function in which he directs “from the center of life outward.” This can be viewed from what he calls the primary sex characteristics.

Hauke goes on to show how secondary sex characteristics, such as skeletal structure, musculature, adipose tissue distribution, epidermal texture, etc. are all organically integrated in accord with these primary sex characteristics. Masculine secondary sex characteristics all serve to facilitate the male’s “reaching out into the world and of overcoming and conquering space.” Female sex characteristics converge in a way in which the woman is more strongly directed toward the inside. Hauke finds that there is a psycho-somatic integration of these functions which is not limited to physiology.

Hauke studies body dynamics, psychological development, differences in experiencing the world—including religious experience, and differing world visions. He calls ‘summary forms’, the terms which generally describe the differences between men and women. These are ‘centrality’ for women and ‘eccentricity’ for men. In every aspect of the human person, secondary sex characteristics are present. These characteristics can be described in terms of centrality and eccentricity. However, like JPTG, Balthasar, and Kreeft, Hauke says that these are dominant modes for each sex. Masculinity and femininity have the features of the opposite sex but they function in a secondary manner.

Even brain studies show an early and marked difference between masculine and feminine brain structure. Stephen Rhoads in his book, Taking Sex Differences Seriously, reports:

Brain research also reveals inherent sex differences. For example, neuroscientists have determined that men have fewer neurons connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This difference may help to explain why women are better at talking about their emotions. (The left brain controls the talking; the right brain controls the emotions.) More important than physical differences between the male and female brains are differences in the way the sexes use their brains and in the effect of their brains’ hormones. Positron emission tomography (PET) scans show that women seem to use more neurons for almost every activity tested. The typical woman’s brain seems to be “networked,” the typical man’s compartmentalized. The woman’s way seems to be better for many verbal tasks and for recovery from strokes, the man’s for spatial tasks (pp. 27-28).

Theological anthropology tells us that our sexual identity is given to us as a gift and is immutable, as either male or female. We are created this way, it comes through no choice of our own. The sciences offer confirmation, to the extent they are competent, that this Christian anthropology is sound. While the sex characteristics serve a telos, a purpose, they do it in such a way that the masculine primary and secondary characteristics are eccentric, he initiates and goes outward. Feminine primary and secondary are integrating and interior. In the context of the previous post, you can already see how this will come together. The next time we will look at the way in which men and women are not just different, but different in a unifying manner. We will discuss complementarity.

Sex and the Human Person: Part IV – Complementarity

I have mentioned before that Peter Kreeft has an excellent article on sexual symbolism that articulates how all of creation is ordered according to the cosmic principles of masculinity and femininity. This is due to the fact that creation is an overflowing of Trinitarian love. Hans Urs von Balthasar provides a very explicit discussion of this in Vol 4 of his Theodrama. John Paul the Great’s theology, though it does not directly address this theme, is quite compatible with Balthasar’s on the point. This discussion will integrate insights from these three thinkers.

God is a Trinitarian Family of Three Persons Who are unified in such a manner that all Three fully possess the one and only divine nature. These Persons are described by the Eternal Processions which John Paul characterizes as the total gift of Self of one divine Person to the Others. The Father’s total gift of Himself to the Son and the Son’s reciprocation of this gift are fruitful. This mutual Love is a Person–the Holy Spirit. Being the Source of everything that exists, this total self-giving establishes the framework for creation and so it is the interpretive key for understanding creation and most especially the human person who is created in the image of this Self-giving God.

Von Balthasar teaches that the eternal Trinitarian Processions have analogical expression in human sexual differences:

. . . the divine unity of action and consent . . . is expressed in the world in the duality of the sexes. In trinitarian terms, of course, the Father, who begets [the Son and] who is without origin, appears primarily as (super-) masculine; the Son, in consenting, appears initially as (super-) feminine, but in the act (together with the Father) of breathing forth the Spirit, he is (super-) masculine. As for the Spirit, he is (super-) feminine. There is even something (super-) feminine about the Father too, since . . . in the action of begetting and breathing forth he allows himself to be determined by the Persons who thus proceed from him; however, this does not affect his primacy in the order of the Trinity. The very fact of the Trinity forbids us to project any secular sexuality into the Godhead (as happens in many religions and in the Gnostic syzygia). It must be enough for us to regard the ever-new reciprocity of acting and consenting, which in turn is a form of activity and fruitfulness, as the transcendent origin of what we see realized in the world of creation: the form and actualization of love and its fruitfulness in sexuality (Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol V. The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998], 91).

Balthasar anchors masculinity and femininity in different modes of ‘act’. For Balthasar, the primary male mode is an initiating act of love. The woman’s primary mode is a receptive act of love. The woman secondarily then returns this love and the man secondarily receives it. Human souls, which are substantial forms of the body, have all that is necessary to human nature. They simply possess it differently. This reading of Balthasar is quite consonant with John Paul II’s morphology of the communio personarum-gift in his theology of the body catecheses, and which he succinctly summarizes in Mulieris dignitatem (MD): “When the author of the Letter to the Ephesians calls Christ ‘the Bridegroom’ and the Church ‘the Bride’, he indirectly confirms through this analogy the truth about woman as bride. The Bridegroom is the one who loves. The Bride is loved: it is she who receives love, in order to love in return” (MD, 29).

As you can see, this relation of love–an initiating love that we refer to as masculine and a receptive, reciprocating love which we call feminine, overflows into Creation. God relates to His creation according to the masculine principle of love. Creation responds to God according to the feminine principle of love. But within creation, the principle of masculine and feminine relation is also found. Kreeft describes it this way:

…we must distinguish “male” from “masculine.” Male and female are biological genders. Masculine and feminine, or yang and yin, are universal, cosmic principles, extending to all reality, including spirit.

All pre-modern civilizations knew this. English is almost the only language that does not have masculine and feminine nouns. So it is easy for us who speak English to believe that the ancients merely projected their own biological gender out onto nature in calling heaven masculine and earth feminine, day masculine and night feminine, sun masculine and moon feminine, land masculine and sea feminine. In the Hindu marriage ceremony the bridegroom says to the bride, “I am heaven, you are earth.” The bride replies, “I am earth, you are heaven.” Not only is cosmic sexuality universal, its patterns are suspiciously consistent. Most cultures saw the sun, day, land, light, and sky as male; moon, night, sea, darkness, and earth as female. Is it not incredibly provincial and culturally arrogant for us to assume, without a shred of proof, that this universal and fairly consistent human instinct is mere projection, myth, fantasy, and illusion rather than insight into a cosmic principle that is really there?

Once we look, we find abundant analogical evidence for it from the bottom of the cosmic hierarchy to the top, from the electromagnetic attraction between electrons and protons to the circumincession of divine Persons in the Trinity. Male and female are only the biological version of cosmic masculine and feminine. God is masculine to everything, from angels to prime matter.

Thus, we have a cosmic structure of complementary relations with binary terms. The first term, masculinity, is an initiating total-gift of self and the second, femininity, is a receptive and reciprocating total self-gift. This is the cosmic structure of creation because it is the structure of Trinitarian love. The next installment will discuss human sex differences based upon this.

Sex and the Human Person:  Part III – Sex Differences

Our society desperately needs to recover the recognition that human nature, as it is visible in the sexed body, defines our sexual identity and in part, constitutes us as persons. John Paul the Great understood that ideas have consequences and in no place is the danger of false ideas greater than in that of understanding who and what we are. That is why he spent so much time studying and teaching on the truth of the human person. His theology of the body is an innovative attempt to providing a compelling arguments for explaining who and what we are. I will use this approach as the foundation for addressing sex differences in a topic we have had occasion to discuss here lately–that of the problem of same sex attraction.

In all of these discussions, in fact in almost every discussion I see, the unsupported presupposition of those who say that their sexual identity is “gay” is that being “gay” is part of who they are. The response to the statements that ‘same sex attraction is a disorder’ is never an argument for why it is clearly a part of human nature (I suppose because there is none). Rather, the responses include the accusations of bigotry, “homophobia” (I’ve never figured this out, is that the fear of sameness or the fear of human beings???), hate speech, fear baiting, and many other attempts to change the subject.

Now if I were to call homosexual pedophilia an affective disorder and an activist from NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) accused me of bigotry most people would see that this was clearly an attempt to change the subject from a discussion of the issue at hand. However, in part, because the MSM has conditioned us to think of SSA as an alternative life style it is not so clear that the same logical fallacy is at play in discussing the “gay” issue.

Over the next week or so, I plan (notice the qualifier) to dedicate a series of articles to showing, using theology and natural law, why SSA is clearly a disorder. I will also show the root reasons that we cannot arbitrarily redefine who we are as human persons and what happens when we try. Many who are personally affected by SSA might see this as a personal attack. It is not. In fact, the very reason for this series is to show why calling SSA a disorder cannot be viewed as a personal attack any more than is saying cancer, or a closer parallel perhaps, alcoholism is a disorder. Let me know what you think…

Sex and the Human Person:  Part II – Sex in Creation?