One Body

Alexander R. Pruss

Description

This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body.

One Body begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by components of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought. Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity, and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Moral Philosophy
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian ethics
• Ethics

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268089849
• Langue: English

Extrait

O N E B O D Y



NOTRE DAME STUDIES IN ETHICS AND CULTURE
series editor, David Solomon

Copyright 2013 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
E-ISBN: 978-0-268-08984-9
This eBook was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam
Contents

Acknowledgments
chapter 1 Introduction
chapter 2 Love and its Forms
chapter 3 Desire
chapter 4 The Meaningfulness of Sexuality
chapter 5 One Flesh, One Body
chapter 6 Union, Commitment, and Marriage
chapter 7 Contraception and Natural Family Planning
chapter 8 Sexual Pleasure and Noncoital Sexual Activity
chapter 9 Same-Sex Attraction
chapter 10 Reproduction and Technology
chapter 11 Celibacy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank David Alexander, Michael Almeida, Michael Beaty, Ron Belgau, Todd Buras, Sarah Coakley, Mike Darcy, Stephen Evans, Ted Furton, Richard Gale, Sherif Girgis, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, Luke Gormally, Germain Grisez, David Jeffrey, Christian Jenner, Daniel Johnson, Christopher Kaczor, Mark Lance, Patrick Lee, Ron Lee, James Lennox, David Manley, Richard Manning, Lawrence Masek, Anthony McCarthy, Mark Murphy, Adam Pelser, Amy Pruss, Richard Sisca, Abigail Tardiff, Nicholas Teh, Eric Telfer, two anonymous readers, the students in my Philosophy of Love and Sex classes at Georgetown and Baylor, and various commenters on my own blog ( http://AlexanderPruss.blogspot.com ) and on the former RightReason blog, for encouragement, discussion, disagreement, comments, and/or suggestions concerning various parts of this project.
Particular thanks are due to Emily Glass, who has stylistically improved just about every page of this book, and has gone over and above the call of duty by contributing important philosophical comments as well. I take full responsibility for the remaining infelicities, some of which are no doubt due to my not following her advice at every point.
Much of this book was written while I was at Georgetown University, and I am grateful to Georgetown University for summer research support.
chapter 1 Introduction
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Gen. 1:24)

1. PROBLEM AND METHOD
Many of the great controversies within Western Christianity in the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have been over sexuality. And while Christianity entered the twentieth century with agreement on a reasonably clear set of rules of sexual conduct, the level of theoretical elaboration of these rules was relatively low, as compared to, say, the amount of theoretical work on the Sacraments or the doctrines of the Creed-despite some notable exceptions such as reflection on the relationship between marriage and celibacy . The reason for this underdevelopment was a relative lack of controversy within the Christian community about much of sexual ethics. Groups outside of mainstream Christianity, like the Albigensians , had widely different sexual ethics, but this did not pose a particularly strong challenge to the dominant lines of the tradition. Within mainstream Christianity, there were particular disagreements on issues such as divorce, but in practice, these appeared to have concerned relatively rare special cases. Typically, it is when significant disagreement begins that the theoretical background for a doctrine begins to be worked out in earnest.
The twentieth century, on the other hand, saw a number of attempts to build a theoretical foundation for sexual ethics. The surface difference between these attempts is in the way they addressed controversies over which of the traditional rules are objectively valid. But disagreement over these rules does sometimes mask an agreement over methodology. A dominant methodological approach has been to distance oneself from biological considerations, such as those connected with reproduction, and to focus on us as persons instead, looking at the interaction between our subjectivity and our sexuality, and focusing on human dignity and the need not to trample on the autonomy of others. And yet an approach like this has led to widely different results, even within a single denomination-producing on the one hand Karol Wojtyla s personalist defense of traditional norms, 1 and on the other hand the American Catholic Theological Association s rather more revisionary approach. 2
The purpose of this book is to defend a particular, coherent Christian sexual ethic. This ethic is influenced by both personalist approaches and older, more biologically-oriented Thomistic ones, and will be developed by starting with some central Christian claims about sexuality and showing the normative consequences of these claims. 3
The approach is both theological and philosophical. For although the central claims can be accepted on the basis of revelation , they are also independently plausible, and can be studied through philosophical methods. Comprehensive engagement with the voluminous literature on sexuality in ethics and moral theology is not the purpose of this book, but rather the development and defense of a particular line of thought.
While I shall cite scripture and the Christian tradition, the central argumentative line of this book does not assume divine inspiration of all the texts of scripture. Thus, I shall not be arguing that normative issues of homosexuality are settled by famously controversial Pauline passages such as 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. Rather, I will argue that deeper and more general New Testament principles of independent philosophical plausibility settle the issue. Thus the argument should appeal to readers who either accept the philosophical plausibility of the principles I will invoke or who believe that, at least, basic principles found in the New Testament are inspired.
2. SCRIPTURE, TRADITION, AND SEMINAL TEXTS
A central part of our approach to scripture will be to take seminal biblical texts to be true in a deep way. Seminal texts lay down the theoretical foundation for a major area of biblically grounded theology. A text is seminal either because scripture itself grounds discussion on a topical area in the text or because the Christian tradition finds the text central to its thinking about the issue (or both). While the context of a text must never be neglected, a seminal text can have a message that transcends the context. A seminal text continually bears fruit on reflection, leading to profound and sometimes surprising conclusions.
A theology on which a seminal text has a trivial interpretation is unfaithful to Christianity: it makes shallow what the lived religion sees as deep. Consider, for instance, an interpretation of the text God is love (1 John 4:8 and 16) that simply says God loves some people very much. The universal is made parochial. The mysterious is rendered unpuzzling. Not only is metaphysical discussion about how God could be identical with one of his properties forestalled, but the text no longer inspires one to sacrifice oneself for every human being in need.
Or consider God s self-description in Exodus 3:14 as I am who I am. This is echoed by the fourth evangelist s Jesus saying I am, and I am was a divine name in Judaism . Eastern Orthodox icons put ho n on the halo of Christ, the who is of the Septuagint translation of this text. The translators of the Syriac Peshitta Old Testament find the text so mysterious that instead of translating it, they simply copy out the Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh in Syriac characters. Grammatically, the Hebrew is compatible with a multitude of interpretations, ehyeh being the incompletive first person singular form of hyh , to be or to become, and therefore capable of meaning I (now) am, I will be, I (timelessly) am, and so on. One grammatically permissible interpretation would cut off the host of meanings and not render the text as implying anything about God s own nature, but as saying simply I will be (for you) what I will be (for you), i.e., I am not telling you what I m going to do for you-it ll be a surprise. But such an interpretation would be shallow. To think that although the Christian community has found great profundity in the text, the text itself lacks that profundity appears implausible given the Holy Spirit s guidance of the Christian community (John 16:13).
A seminal text is typically true in multiple ways, and was quite possibly intended as such by the author. Thus, that God is love can be read as simply saying that God does good things for everyone. But it can also be read as revealing to us something about the nature of God, as indeed 1 John 4:9 makes clear by distinguishing the love of God from its manifestation. Or consider the richness of the first verse of the Gospel of John. The text no doubt uses logos in a way intended to connect somehow with first-century Neoplatonism . In Greek, logos could mean word, discourse, account, argument, or reason. At the same time, the notion of the word of God has a rich history in the Hebrew scriptures , and Philo connects the logos with Neopla-tonic themes. Much of the diversity in meanings is, no doubt, intended by the author of the prologue of John.
A theological methodology based on seminal texts is, however, obviously open to abuse. If a text is so rich, it is probably at least somewhat ambiguous and the exegete might well insert an interpretation completely alien to the intentions of the author. As a check against this, the interpretation should be compatible with the ways in which the text has been fruitful, and should even explain some of that fecundity. When the text is used, say, by scripture to ground some practical conclusion, the interpretation of the text should make that practical conclusion plausible. Thus, t