Question:

I really enjoy your blog, and I am writing to get your help and advice.  Someone I know who rejects the Church’s teaching about sexuality wrote to me as follows.  He is a candidate for a theology degree.

"Augustine is clearly the determinative person for western Christianity's thoughts on sex and marriage. There are two places I began my questioning:

“1) Augustine's understanding of desire.  He thinks sex is only good when it makes a child; he does not see a difference between desire and lust (the drive to satisfy particular physical urges with another person).  That is, if non-procreative sex can still have a good as its end, namely the fulfillment of desire which teaches us something about God's love for and desire for us, then there may be space for same-sex and non-procreative sex within marriages.

“2) Augustine's understanding of marriage.  He thinks marriage is the discipline of sexual moderation for the mediocre Christian.  If the celibate is the holier Christian, then marriage is the place of mediocrity.  Yet, there is no mediocre expression of gay sexuality.  So, while celibacy is understood to be a gift from God, it is also understood to be a requirement for those who are gay, and a requirement for Christian faithfulness.  But that suggests that there is something that God may not gift someone with that they must nevertheless exercise on their own, namely celibacy.  That starts to sound like the Pelagian heresy, in which one's own goodness is determinative for the capacity to save oneself.  That does not add up."

I would appreciate your thoughts and advice about how to respond.

Reply:

It seems to me that your friend’s arguments are a series of non sequitur, but this isn’t just about same-sex attraction.  Arguments like his are frequently used to justify heterosexual misbehavior, which is much more widespread.

First faulty argument, concerning the Church’s teaching:

1.  Augustine had more influence on the Church’s teaching about sex than anyone else.

2.  Therefore, we may treat Augustine’s view of sex as though they were the Church’s teachings about sex.

Invalid, because even if premise 1 were correct, the conclusion does not follow.  We cannot substitute an influence on the Church’s teaching for what the Church actually teaches.

Second faulty argument, concerning the good of marriage:

1.  Celibacy is a higher calling than marriage.

2.  Therefore marriage serves no positive good, but only a negative good, restraining lust.

Invalid, because from the fact that the celibacy is even better, it does not follow that marriage is not very good in itself.  In fact, August explicitly declares that marriage serves several positive goods, each of which depends on the difference of sex.  As he writes in On the Good of Marriage, “concerning the good of marriage ... there is good ground to inquire for what reason it be a good.  And this seems not to me to be merely on account of the begetting of children, but also on account of the natural society itself in a difference of sex.”

Third faulty argument, concerning lust and desire:

1.  Augustine keeps warning about bad sexual desire.

2.  He must not think there is any such thing as good sexual desire.

Invalid, because Augustine vigorously denies that the Creator of the attraction of the sexes could have created anything evil.  In the treatise I quoted above, he smiles upon the “gravity of glowing pleasure, when in that wherein husband and wife cleave to one another, they have in mind that they be father and mother.”  What else is it to cleave to each other, but to be united in the coital embrace?  Sure, Augustine puts a lot of energy into warning about lust – about disordered sexual desire which rages against nature and reason – but only because the Fall has so deeply wounded us.

Fourth faulty argument, concerning the meaning of temperance:

1.  People who are attracted to the opposite sex are allowed to temper disorderly sexual desire by getting married.

2.  Therefore, people who are attracted to the same sex should be allowed to temper disorderly sexual desire by indulging it in some way.

Invalid, because temperance requires limiting the sexual embrace to its proper occasion.  Desire which is directed to an unnatural object has no proper occasion.  Therefore, indulging it is intrinsically incapable of tempering it.

Fifth faulty argument, concerning the remedy for lust:

1.  People who are attracted to the opposite sex have a legitimate way to relieve their desires.

2.  Therefore everyone should have a legitimate way to relieve their desires.

Invalid, because there is no right way to relieve a desire directed to a wrong object.  People who are attracted to the same sex can do the same thing that people attracted to the opposite sex can do when marriage is not possible:  They can practice the discipline of abstinence.  To many persons today – heterosexuals too -- this seems impossible because their desires are so fierce.  But their desires are made fiercer by continual indulgence.

Sixth faulty argument, concerning consecrated celibacy:

1.  Not every single person is called to consecrated celibacy.

2.  Therefore not every single person is required to be abstinent.

Invalid, because although not every single person is called to the consecrated religious life of which abstinence is a part, every single person, irrespective of calling, is called to be abstinent.

Seventh faulty argument, concerning moral discipline and salvation.

1.  Augustine thinks we are able to practice abstinence.

2.  Therefore Augustine thinks we are able to save ourselves, which is the Pelagian heresy.

Invalid, because as Augustine explains in On Marriage and Concupiscence, even unredeemed persons can abstain from unchaste acts, even if only to avoid trouble.  However, this is not enough.  Salvation requires not just abstention from things that are forbidden, but the transformation of motive by charity, which is a gift of grace.

Remain your friend’s friend, because the mere refutation of his excuses is unlikely to reach his heart.  But to reach his heart, you may have to get past his excuses.

“But to a Being absolutely in need of nothing, no one of His works can contribute anything to His own use.  Neither, again, did He make man for the sake of any of the other works which He has made.  For nothing that is endowed with reason and judgment has been created, or is created, for the use of another, whether greater or less than itself, but for the sake of the life and continuance of the being itself so created ....

“Therefore, ... it is quite clear that although, according to the first and more general view of the subject, God made man for Himself ... yet, according to the view which more nearly touches the beings created, He made him for the sake of the life of those created, .... For to creeping things, I suppose, and birds, and fishes, or, to speak more generally, all irrational creatures, God has assigned such a life as that; [but not] to those who bear upon them the image of the Creator Himself, and are endowed with understanding[.]”

I am quoting from Athenagoras of Athens, On the Resurrection of the Dead, Chapter 12.  Immanuel Kant wrongly gets credit for this insight because he wrote that we are always to be treated as ends, not as means.  But even apart from the fact that he came sixteen centuries later than Athenagoras, Kant meant something quite different, and I think he was confused.

In my grandparents’ day, cigarettes were sold to children.  By my day that was mostly a thing of the past, but I am old enough to remember how groceries and other merchants used to hawk candy cigarettes to children in the check-out lines.  Think of sugary little Camels, Marlboroughs, and Lucky Strikes.  What’s the big deal?  They were only candy, right?  Right, but the purpose was to generate future cigarette users.  For the grocery stores, and for the tobacco companies which allowed candy manufacturers to use their trademarks, it was an investment.

Eventually public opinion turned against the sale of candy cigarettes, and most grocery stores stopped carrying them.  But the stores have adapted.  For example, the H.E.B. grocery store chain encourages children to play the lottery instead.  Hey, kids!  Now you can play the slots too!

Children don’t actually use money; they use “buddy bucks” which their mommies and daddies get along with their grocery receipts.  Think that makes it harmless?  Think again:  Like candy cigarettes, this too is an investment.  H.E.B. and other merchants get kickbacks from the state for selling lottery tickets to adults.  The more children they suck into the idea that throwing away money is wonderful fun, the more future customers they have for this racket.  Maybe Mom and Dad haven’t thought of that.  Count on it, the company executives have.

I am not a Puritan.  I don’t think it is a sin to place a little wager.  This is not about placing a little wager.  Perhaps it doesn’t bother many people any more that an amoral government colludes with greedy merchants to prey upon the poorest and most foolish adults of the community by encouraging them to throw away their money in games of chance which are rigged against them.  But must they make it glamorous to children?  For shame.

I wasn’t planning to post today, but some of you may be interested in the new review of my book On the Meaning of Sex, just published online in Humanum Review, the journal of the John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and the Family.  This joins previous reviews in Catholic Culture, in CatholiCity, and in other places.

It’s a highly intelligent review, and an author is always happy when the reviewers understand what he is trying to do.  Matthew and Michelle Kuhner do seem to think I say too little about God, which is interesting because another reviewer, in The Public Discourse, criticized me for saying too much about God.  Though he was gracious and generally favorable, he was concerned that no one longs for God except believers.  So by mentioning Him, I tempt today’s young people to tune me out.

I guess I would rather be criticized in the former way than in the latter.  It seems to me that today’s young people have the same Godward longing that everyone does, but many of them resist thinking about it because they have so badly abused their consciences.  The art is to get past their defenses.  So although the book is based mostly on natural law, I leave a trail of bread crumbs.

Something else needs to be said too.  How can we expect natural law to be plausible to people who experience only the humiliation of their nature, and not the touch of grace?  The philosophical method of our day is minimalist.  It assumes that people can consider propositions about reality only in small doses, one dry pill at a time.  But at least sometimes, the very opposite is true.  The reason the pill goes down so hard is that it is only a pill, for the mind, in its hunger, desires a meal.

A certain school of scholars is devoted to seeking out esoteric teachings the great political philosophers supposedly concealed behind a glossy surface of conventional opinions that only a few insiders could see through.  Far be it from me to suggest that no thinkers ever conceal their meanings, but the search for esoterica is taken a bit too far.

Once, at a conference, I presented two talks. The gentleman assigned to comment on the talks, himself of the esotericist school -- an erudite man whom I like very much, and whom I have been teasing about this for years -- drew the entirely mistaken conclusion that since I had made nine claims in the talk on liberalism, but only eight in the talk on conservatism, I must have been hinting that the most important thing I wanted to say about conservatism was hidden between the lines of claims four and five.

Why would I hide it?  Because, he reasoned, it must not be stated openly.  He then proceeded to tell us all what he took it to be.