I apologize for posting so many comments in a short time -- I'm one of those who hadn't caught up with the new service, so received 14 articles at once a few days ago.
As a past doctoral student of Catholic theology I greatly appreciate your sensitive commentary on this 19th century text. I have one minor cavil. I think the passage on the liceity of a woman "of colder nature" touching herself before sexual relations refers to foreplay (though self-administered), not masturbation.
I am the proud owner of a copy of "Fundamental Marriage Counseling" by Denis Cavanagh, M.D., published in 1957 with an Imprimatur from Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle of Washington D.C. (Archbishop O'Boyle is known to history for two things: Integrating the Catholic schools in D.C. when public schools were still segregated, and suspending diocesan priests who publicly dissented from Humanae Vitae in 1968. Liberal or conservative? Actually, devotedly Catholic.) This copy was signed by Dr. Cavanagh and given to the Archbishop to thank him for his support. Cavanagh was of course writing before Vatican II and committed to Catholic morality, but benefited from the knowledge of sexual physiology of that time (often quoting the consensus of secular medical experts). So, for example, regarding sexual positions he says it is a matter of what is comfortable and desirable for both partners, and for a woman whose hymen is intact he recommends "woman on top" so she has more control and can minimize any discomfort. (For "man on top" he tells the guys to help support their weight on their elbows.) Freed from any imagined correlation between position and likelihood of conception, this very traditional Catholic account of sex is both frank and less subject to real or imagined sexist overtones. Fascinating.
"I'm one of those who hadn't caught up with the new service, so received 14 articles at once a few days ago."
Sorry about that! I didn't even know the old service had subscribers (it was REALLY bad at tracking data) until a friend complained to me about the same thing.
"touching herself before sexual relations refers to foreplay (though self-administered), not masturbation."
I agree that it's foreplay, but the mode of foreplay is manual touch. Do you think that's not genital touch? In context, it seems like it would include that, but I could be misinterpreting.
"This copy was signed by Dr. Cavanagh and given to the Archbishop to thank him for his support. Cavanagh was of course writing before Vatican II and committed to Catholic morality, but benefited from the knowledge of sexual physiology of that time (often quoting the consensus of secular medical experts). So, for example, regarding sexual positions he says it is a matter of what is comfortable and desirable for both partners, and for a woman whose hymen is intact he recommends "woman on top" so she has more control and can minimize any discomfort."
I love this!
Unfortunately, this book is obscure enough that the Internet Archive doesn't have a copy, so I'll have to check it out next time I'm down at the seminary library!
I think masturbation, in Catholic teaching, refers to proceeding to climax (to "sexual pleasure" in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2352) without the marital act. So the Catechism refers to it as a "deliberate use of the sexual faculty... outside of marriage," which I believe doesn't mean that it is only committed by single people but that it substitutes for the union with one's spouse. I think perhaps any difference of opinion we may seem to have is only semantic, having to do with the definition of the term.
"Unfortunately, I found his footnotes utterly inscrutable (my man, my bish, Your Excellency Frank: “L. vi. n. 199.” is not a citation! It’s a cipher!), so I don’t know where most of those quotations came from, but they are all from sources Bp. Kenrick considered weighty."
I can solve this one. The L stands for Liguori (you misspell his name as Ligouri). I figured this out because I did a search online for the quote in the work that was attributed to "L. vi. n. 199".
Well, actually, it's not 199. The quote is actually found in 909; the 199 appears to be an error of citation or typo. 199 of Book VI can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Rv3P_Wp43BYC/page/301/mode/2up?view=theater and it says absolutely nothing about it; indeed, 199 is about the Eucharist. I am not sure how many of the footnotes include typo errors like this. The other citations we see attributed to "L, vi." on the prior page which mentions in footnotes "L. vi. n. 918" and "Ibidem, n. 919") seem more accurate, as they come from the actual section on sexual ethics.
So anyway, that's what that footnote means. These kinds of abbreviated footnotes are very annoying indeed. While I can understand a desire to save space, there was plenty of room in these particular footnotes to simply write out "Liguori". Indeed, looking at the earliest pages of the work, he does write out the still abbreviated but nevertheless more comprehensible "S. Alph. l." in the footnotes. So perhaps the reader is supposed to figure out the L is in reference to that, but it makes it confusing because when he writes "S. Alph. l." he has the L be lowercase, but then when he defaults to simply L, he does it uppercase, making the connection harder to figure out.
I am THRILLED that you figured this out. In retrospect, OF COURSE L is short for Liguori (you're right, I misspelled it, and always have), but I spent this whole time thinking it was a Roman numeral. (Even then, with the author in hand, finding the book the old-fashioned way would have been hard. Thank goodness for search!)
Thank you very much, my good man (or woman, as the case may be; nobody knows you're a dog on the internet).
I meant to ask about this before, but forgot, and while it's rather late, I might as well try. Concerning this statement:
"The manuals were discarded en masse after the Second Vatican Council (for some good reasons and some bad ones), and have largely dropped out of general awareness..."
I was a little vague about this in the article because this whole controversy is a little beyond my knowledge. My parents were in grad school in the aftermath of the abandonment of the manuals, and I heard bits and bobs over the years.
At a verrrrrrrrrrry high, maybe somewhat inaccurate, level:
Good reasons: the manuals were too summary, too corrupted from the original texts, and nevertheless were treated as authorities rather than, well, summaries. It was time for ressourcement to replace the manuals!
Bad reasons: post-Vatican II much of the Catholic world rebelled against the idea that there could be any such thing as objective moral laws, or absolutely true doctrines, or that there was anything of value in the tradition. (The late '60s/early '70s were *nuts* by all accounts I've ever heard.) It was time for the Age of Aquarius to replace the manuals!
In those early days ressourcement-ers & New Agers were, in many cases, comrades (all part of the nouvelle theologie) who had not yet realized that they were deeply at odds in important ways, so they were doing the same things for what turned out to be very different things. This is one of the reasons the Traditionalist movement arose and rejected the whole thing as a bad job.
Awesome post! I'd like to ask a very important question here. I think Catholics might have perverted - or perfected? - Aristotle's original version of teleology:
"For example, the purpose of eating is nutrition. If a Catholic eats a delicious feast, then uses ipecac to vomit it all up, so that he can have the pleasure of yet another feast without the natural consequence of nutrition, that is a sin."
I think Aristotle never said that there is moral duty to use things according to natural telos. It is just that we have to consider the causality of the natural telos in our rational considerations. So the telos of sex being procreation simply means if we want kids, we do PIV sex. If we do not want kids, we can do oral sex or gay sex. I think that is what Aristotle meant?
Furthermore, I think the only normative claim that Aristotle meant is that not using our bodies for the natural purpose at all can be bad. like our legs are for walking, if we do not walk, exercise, we will be unhealthy. but Aristotle obviously did not claim that using our legs for dancing or kicking a ball is wrong because walking should be the only telos. similarly, one may argue that people should have kids, otherwise they leave an important dimension of their lives undeveloped, I agree with that, being a father made me a better person and partner. But not that ALL sex should be procreative. When you have enough kids, you do non-procreative sex.
I would like if you could answer because it is personally important to me. Catholic attitudes on sex are a big block for my conversion. At 47 with a 48 years old girlfriend we are not planning any kids. (I have one from an ex marriage.) I feel like it is just St. Paul's sex-negativity, which ultimately was about preventing rape, as in the Roman Empire approximately all non-marital sex was rape. But if you can prove Aristotle already meant ALL sex must be procreative, I will have something to think over...
This is a very, very big question that goes to the roots of both ethics ("what is right?") and metaethics ("why should I do what is right? what if I don't wanna?"). My post didn't even try to answer either question, but merely presented and explained how Catholics apply their answer to sex. A full answer is probably too big for a blog post -- much less a comment.
So I must ask you to forgive a very short, incomplete answer, both to your direct philosophical question and to your implied questions about conversion.
On Aristotle, it has been a long while since I read any of his work on individual ethics, but you are right that, at least from what I remember, he never says, "People ought never pervert their faculties as a matter of moral duty." On the other hand, I think that's a distinctly modern question to even raise. If Aristotle had described a perfect circle, and then showed how some circles were imperfect, I think it never would have occurred to him to ask, "Are the imperfect circles better circles?" By definition, they were not. Likewise, having described how human nature operates, I think if never would have occurred to him to ask, "Is it better to act against this nature than in accordance with it?" For Aristotle, eudaimonia (happiness) *just is* acting in accordance with one's nature. The emotions you might develop of euphoria and/or contentment are merely side effects of the activity, which is the actual act of happiness.
Thus, the metaphysics gives you the ethics and buys you a lot of the metaethics as well. It is only with the modern turn (which made epistemology more fundamental than metaphysics) that you can even express questions like, "Sure, you've described what *is*, but how do you get from that *is* to an *ought*?" I dunno, David Hume, do you not *want* eudaimonia?
Now, this doesn't mean that our faculties can't be used for fun, but I do think Aristotle would say that any use of our faculties that deliberately thwarts their natural ends is unnatural and therefore harmful (to yourself, to others, to virtue, to eudaimonia, take your pick). Thus, a use of the sexual faculty that was not open to life would be, well, bad.
There are a lot of lines to draw here, of course, and I myself am quite fond of Ed Feser's "In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument," which is brief enough to read in one sitting and tracks my thinking on the sexual faculty pretty closely. Also, as a bonus, he more or less directly speaks to your question, more robustly than I, on pp381-386: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4SjM0oabZazWC1SRmN0WXVpYkE/view?resourcekey=0-mEl0wIXhM8qd4ieiCuosvQ
Now, it *could* be the case that we are building epileptic trees atop Aristotle (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EpilepticTrees). It *could* be that Aristotle would neither have thought as the Catholic Church thinks nor endorsed it when he heard about it. That is okay. I am extremely fond of Aristotle, but he was neither a divine prophet nor was he infallible, even in metaphysics. The arguments that the Church's great thinkers built atop Aristotle are nevertheless, in my view, sufficiently convincing to get me to believe I ought to refrain from sexual activity that is not open to life.
On the other hand, I can't help remembering that, for the first thousand or so years of Church history, these arguments did not exist. (For the second thousand years of history, they were somewhat lamed by their legalism; JP2 and the theology of the body were really important developments, IMO, and we are only now coming into a fuller understanding of Christianity's ancient sexual teachings.) (If you're unfamiliar, it's been years since I read it, but I nevertheless commend Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners as a valuable introduction to this area of Catholic thinking, which tends to humanize the correct but somewhat hollow-feeling legalism of Scholastic natural-law theorizing: https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Body-Beginners-Rediscovering-Meaning/dp/1635820073 )
So what did Christians do *before* the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle and the building-out of natural law theory? Or, indeed, before the development of JP2's TOB?
Pretty much the same things. It's not like Christianity was all about contraception and non-procreative oral sex until the 1250s and then suddenly we discovered Aristotle and went, "Oh, shoot! That was a mistake!" The Christian Church had been stalwartly opposed to all that from the very start. Christ had told them in Matt 5:18 to continue following the Law, and the Jewish Law on sex was the basis of Christian sexual morality.
In fact, Christ had made the Law significantly *harder* when He demanded close adherence to not just the letter, but the spirit, saying that even looking at a woman with lust was adulterous. He forbade divorce absolutely, the Apostles *freaked out* and said, "Geeze, man, why even marry if we have to be soooo sexually perfect and restricted?" and Christ replied, "Yep, it's 100% better not to get married at all. Write that down." Like, this is not a Messiah who came to announce sexual liberation from Jewish constraints, y'know?
The Apostles certainly seemed to get that message; when they met at the Council of Jerusalem to discuss dispensations from the Mosaic Law, the only three things they positively reaffirmed were the ban on idolatry, blood, and "sexual immorality" (I'm aware the precise translation of porneia is obscure and controversial).
The entire body of Christianity stood foursquare behind this -- all of it -- even long after the Reformation. From the Resurrection of Christ until the Lambeth Conference of 1930, Christianity was united in teaching what is now considered "Catholic" sexual ethics. But that's only because Catholicism refused to abandon the teaching when everybody else .
So, although I think the Scholastics' teleological theory of ethics is very good and I've built my whole life around following it, I don't think you actually *need* it to reach the conclusion that fellatio to completion is immoral. We have it from the Law. We have it from Christ. We have it from the Catholic magisterium. We have it from the witness of the Christian churches across history (until basically a century ago). These are all arguments from authority, which are unsatisfying and non-explanatory, which is why I prefer the Aristotelian-informed view... but, when the authority is God, it remains a solid argument. So if you suspect that any of these entities have some divine authority -- which I assume you do, if you are even *considering* conversion -- then it seems to me that you're already most of the way to recognizing the traditional sexual ethic, even if the reasons why God apparently requires it remain elusive or oblique.
We've all been there, at some point. I spent fifteen years thinking intellectually that the idea of free will was ridiculous, because determinism was obviously true, actually couldn't NOT be true, and determinism ruled out free will. But I also knew the Church taught that free will was real, and I believed (for entirely different reasons) that the Church could not possibly be wrong about this, so I deferred to the teaching, even though it seemed insane to me. I might say I "took it on faith," except I despise that phrase because it's been so watered down by sentimentality and appeals to blind emotion. I did take it on faith, but for good solid reasons that outweighed my doubts. If you find that you can't get your head around the traditional Christian sexual ethic, but you do find yourself persuaded about the Resurrection, the magisterium, and so forth, then I encourage you to do the same here.
As a practical matter, it's not clear to me what that would cost you. To be perfectly blunt: you are a 47-year-old man hoping to have sex with a 48-year-old woman, perhaps 49 by the time you've wed. Even if you had marital relations every single day (not that easy at 47 for many men), even twice on the "fertile" days, the odds of her becoming pregnant by you are very small. If you practice even limited fertility-awareness birth control, remaining open to life but making use of the woman's entirely natural monthly cycle, then the odds of pregnancy become negligible. (If you become pregnant anyway, at that point, then God *really* wanted you to get pregnant, and you should embrace it, because His surprises usually turn out to be some of His best gifts.)
There is, I concede, a certain attraction -- quite aside from the contraceptive benefits -- toward doing fellatio to completion, or climaxing somewhere other than the vagina. This attraction can feel quite strong, especially when one has long habits around it or when one feels that Big Bad Momma Church is banging at the bedroom door trying to take it away from you. But my own interior observation has been that this attraction is fundamentally lustful. Some of the attraction is the very fact that it's transgressive and "naughty", but this isn't valuing the bond as highly as it deserves to be valued. Losing it is no great loss, even though it may feel like it in the moment.
All my best to you and your girlfriend, whatever may happen on your road ahead. I hope I have not pushed too hard (or too gently) here. Once you mentioned this as not just a philosophical question but a potential obstacle to your conversion, I got rather nervous, because I do not want to get to my particular judgment and have the Lord tell me, "You, James, are personally the single specific reason Carlos never found Me on Earth. You said the wrong words, you dingus." So I hope I said at least a few right words, one way or another. Thanks for reading!
Thank you for your excellent answer. WRT perverted faculty, I think sex is a special case because Paul clearly considered celibacy better than marriage, and that is one reason priests and monks are celibate, certainly not the only reason, a vow of poverty would be really unfair to one's children for example. So if not having children through not having sex is okay, I don't really see how non-procreative sex can make things worse.
However, I can tell you, that when I was married (civil only), actually trying to conceive gave sex a whole new dimension. All previous non-procreative sex felt like fake at that point, like flying a flight simulator. And there was no zanutah at all: https://eliasmeraz.substack.com/p/why-you-feel-like-sht-after-sex
However, because we were actually trying to conceive, there was a feeling of hope. Trying to not conceive and replacing hope with anxiety would feel worse, even when the chance is now.
I also hope Lewis was right, when he called the sins of the flesh small sins, still, one could at least make some sort of an attempt to not sin, it is okay to fail, but not even trying is, I guess, not.
I think it is important to remember that the heart of the perverted faculty argument is that it is evil to *pervert* a faculty -- which means using it while deliberately intervening to frustrate its natural end. If you don't use it at all, you aren't frustrating it, so you aren't perverting it, so you aren't doing anything evil. Thus, celibacy is (clearly) a higher calling than marriage, and contraception is a serious sin, even though both lead to the same place: not having kids. The difference is that the priest or monk has given up sex entirely (both the pleasure and the children), but the contraceptor is trying to keep the pleasure for himself while actively *preventing* the children. That's the messed-up thing. Again, the Theology of the Body humanizes this considerably, putting flesh on some dry philosophical bones, but that's the key distinction.
I have experienced the same thing with non-procreative vs. procreative sexual activity. I've never heard "zanutah" before, but it does seem fitting. That you've noticed it is good; many do not. I think you overestimate the anxiety that comes from being open to God's plan. I've always heard that "anxiety is simply a measurement of the distance between you and God," and proposing your plan to Him (no more kids) while accepting His plan in return (which might be different) can be rather freeing. Especially when His plan and yours are very, very likely to be the same!
It is not quite right to say that Lewis thought the sins of the flesh were "small sins." He considered lust the least intrinsically bad of the capital sins -- but it is still a capital sin! Submission to it can still destroy you. The sexual sinners found themselves in the first circle of Dante's Inferno, which is the least punishing and painful region of Hell... but it is still Hell! Because our culture has such an intense, confused relationship with sex, it is hard to treat sexual sin with appropriate gravity. We tend to swing between overselling it as the deadliest thing ever and then underselling it as not really deadly at all. The truth is that it's not nearly as deadly as some other sins -- but still quite deadly if left unchecked.
Fortunately, as you note, we are not finally judged on our success at defeating sin, but on the sincere effort we put forth in doing so. Only through the intercession of Jesus and the Holy Spirit can we finally conquer any given sin. Until that day comes, we must fight on. Most of us screw up, but then we repent, we confess, we try to avoid whatever triggered our sin the last time, and we move forward. As you said, failing is unfortunate but not fatal, as long as we're trying.
Thank you, very interesting thoughts! One nit to pick: please never argue from Dante, we already have a big problem with Dante influencing people’s thoughts of afterlife more rather than Catholic doctrine. This whole “soul as ghost body” just does not mesh with Thomism: in Thomism, only the abstract thinking part of the soul is supernatural and thus survives death.
I apologize for posting so many comments in a short time -- I'm one of those who hadn't caught up with the new service, so received 14 articles at once a few days ago.
As a past doctoral student of Catholic theology I greatly appreciate your sensitive commentary on this 19th century text. I have one minor cavil. I think the passage on the liceity of a woman "of colder nature" touching herself before sexual relations refers to foreplay (though self-administered), not masturbation.
I am the proud owner of a copy of "Fundamental Marriage Counseling" by Denis Cavanagh, M.D., published in 1957 with an Imprimatur from Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle of Washington D.C. (Archbishop O'Boyle is known to history for two things: Integrating the Catholic schools in D.C. when public schools were still segregated, and suspending diocesan priests who publicly dissented from Humanae Vitae in 1968. Liberal or conservative? Actually, devotedly Catholic.) This copy was signed by Dr. Cavanagh and given to the Archbishop to thank him for his support. Cavanagh was of course writing before Vatican II and committed to Catholic morality, but benefited from the knowledge of sexual physiology of that time (often quoting the consensus of secular medical experts). So, for example, regarding sexual positions he says it is a matter of what is comfortable and desirable for both partners, and for a woman whose hymen is intact he recommends "woman on top" so she has more control and can minimize any discomfort. (For "man on top" he tells the guys to help support their weight on their elbows.) Freed from any imagined correlation between position and likelihood of conception, this very traditional Catholic account of sex is both frank and less subject to real or imagined sexist overtones. Fascinating.
"I'm one of those who hadn't caught up with the new service, so received 14 articles at once a few days ago."
Sorry about that! I didn't even know the old service had subscribers (it was REALLY bad at tracking data) until a friend complained to me about the same thing.
"touching herself before sexual relations refers to foreplay (though self-administered), not masturbation."
I agree that it's foreplay, but the mode of foreplay is manual touch. Do you think that's not genital touch? In context, it seems like it would include that, but I could be misinterpreting.
"This copy was signed by Dr. Cavanagh and given to the Archbishop to thank him for his support. Cavanagh was of course writing before Vatican II and committed to Catholic morality, but benefited from the knowledge of sexual physiology of that time (often quoting the consensus of secular medical experts). So, for example, regarding sexual positions he says it is a matter of what is comfortable and desirable for both partners, and for a woman whose hymen is intact he recommends "woman on top" so she has more control and can minimize any discomfort."
I love this!
Unfortunately, this book is obscure enough that the Internet Archive doesn't have a copy, so I'll have to check it out next time I'm down at the seminary library!
I think masturbation, in Catholic teaching, refers to proceeding to climax (to "sexual pleasure" in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2352) without the marital act. So the Catechism refers to it as a "deliberate use of the sexual faculty... outside of marriage," which I believe doesn't mean that it is only committed by single people but that it substitutes for the union with one's spouse. I think perhaps any difference of opinion we may seem to have is only semantic, having to do with the definition of the term.
"Unfortunately, I found his footnotes utterly inscrutable (my man, my bish, Your Excellency Frank: “L. vi. n. 199.” is not a citation! It’s a cipher!), so I don’t know where most of those quotations came from, but they are all from sources Bp. Kenrick considered weighty."
I can solve this one. The L stands for Liguori (you misspell his name as Ligouri). I figured this out because I did a search online for the quote in the work that was attributed to "L. vi. n. 199".
See, that particular citation is found on page 311 (https://archive.org/details/theologiaemoral01kenrgoog/page/n332/mode/2up) and the quote in question it refers to is "si morbus esset diuturnus, et non proxime tendens ad mortem, nempe quod non soleat de brevi et facili mortem inferre" and so on. So I do a search online for the start of it ("si morbus esset diuturnus") and viola, https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_4zOmww5CU68C/page/n337/mode/2up?q=%22si+morbus+esset+diuturnus%22 pops up. This also explains the numbers, as L means Liguori, vi means Book vI, and the n. 199 is that it's number 199.
Well, actually, it's not 199. The quote is actually found in 909; the 199 appears to be an error of citation or typo. 199 of Book VI can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Rv3P_Wp43BYC/page/301/mode/2up?view=theater and it says absolutely nothing about it; indeed, 199 is about the Eucharist. I am not sure how many of the footnotes include typo errors like this. The other citations we see attributed to "L, vi." on the prior page which mentions in footnotes "L. vi. n. 918" and "Ibidem, n. 919") seem more accurate, as they come from the actual section on sexual ethics.
So anyway, that's what that footnote means. These kinds of abbreviated footnotes are very annoying indeed. While I can understand a desire to save space, there was plenty of room in these particular footnotes to simply write out "Liguori". Indeed, looking at the earliest pages of the work, he does write out the still abbreviated but nevertheless more comprehensible "S. Alph. l." in the footnotes. So perhaps the reader is supposed to figure out the L is in reference to that, but it makes it confusing because when he writes "S. Alph. l." he has the L be lowercase, but then when he defaults to simply L, he does it uppercase, making the connection harder to figure out.
I am THRILLED that you figured this out. In retrospect, OF COURSE L is short for Liguori (you're right, I misspelled it, and always have), but I spent this whole time thinking it was a Roman numeral. (Even then, with the author in hand, finding the book the old-fashioned way would have been hard. Thank goodness for search!)
Thank you very much, my good man (or woman, as the case may be; nobody knows you're a dog on the internet).
I meant to ask about this before, but forgot, and while it's rather late, I might as well try. Concerning this statement:
"The manuals were discarded en masse after the Second Vatican Council (for some good reasons and some bad ones), and have largely dropped out of general awareness..."
What were the good reasons and bad reasons?
I was a little vague about this in the article because this whole controversy is a little beyond my knowledge. My parents were in grad school in the aftermath of the abandonment of the manuals, and I heard bits and bobs over the years.
At a verrrrrrrrrrry high, maybe somewhat inaccurate, level:
Good reasons: the manuals were too summary, too corrupted from the original texts, and nevertheless were treated as authorities rather than, well, summaries. It was time for ressourcement to replace the manuals!
Bad reasons: post-Vatican II much of the Catholic world rebelled against the idea that there could be any such thing as objective moral laws, or absolutely true doctrines, or that there was anything of value in the tradition. (The late '60s/early '70s were *nuts* by all accounts I've ever heard.) It was time for the Age of Aquarius to replace the manuals!
In those early days ressourcement-ers & New Agers were, in many cases, comrades (all part of the nouvelle theologie) who had not yet realized that they were deeply at odds in important ways, so they were doing the same things for what turned out to be very different things. This is one of the reasons the Traditionalist movement arose and rejected the whole thing as a bad job.
Awesome post! I'd like to ask a very important question here. I think Catholics might have perverted - or perfected? - Aristotle's original version of teleology:
"For example, the purpose of eating is nutrition. If a Catholic eats a delicious feast, then uses ipecac to vomit it all up, so that he can have the pleasure of yet another feast without the natural consequence of nutrition, that is a sin."
I think Aristotle never said that there is moral duty to use things according to natural telos. It is just that we have to consider the causality of the natural telos in our rational considerations. So the telos of sex being procreation simply means if we want kids, we do PIV sex. If we do not want kids, we can do oral sex or gay sex. I think that is what Aristotle meant?
Furthermore, I think the only normative claim that Aristotle meant is that not using our bodies for the natural purpose at all can be bad. like our legs are for walking, if we do not walk, exercise, we will be unhealthy. but Aristotle obviously did not claim that using our legs for dancing or kicking a ball is wrong because walking should be the only telos. similarly, one may argue that people should have kids, otherwise they leave an important dimension of their lives undeveloped, I agree with that, being a father made me a better person and partner. But not that ALL sex should be procreative. When you have enough kids, you do non-procreative sex.
I would like if you could answer because it is personally important to me. Catholic attitudes on sex are a big block for my conversion. At 47 with a 48 years old girlfriend we are not planning any kids. (I have one from an ex marriage.) I feel like it is just St. Paul's sex-negativity, which ultimately was about preventing rape, as in the Roman Empire approximately all non-marital sex was rape. But if you can prove Aristotle already meant ALL sex must be procreative, I will have something to think over...
This is a very, very big question that goes to the roots of both ethics ("what is right?") and metaethics ("why should I do what is right? what if I don't wanna?"). My post didn't even try to answer either question, but merely presented and explained how Catholics apply their answer to sex. A full answer is probably too big for a blog post -- much less a comment.
So I must ask you to forgive a very short, incomplete answer, both to your direct philosophical question and to your implied questions about conversion.
On Aristotle, it has been a long while since I read any of his work on individual ethics, but you are right that, at least from what I remember, he never says, "People ought never pervert their faculties as a matter of moral duty." On the other hand, I think that's a distinctly modern question to even raise. If Aristotle had described a perfect circle, and then showed how some circles were imperfect, I think it never would have occurred to him to ask, "Are the imperfect circles better circles?" By definition, they were not. Likewise, having described how human nature operates, I think if never would have occurred to him to ask, "Is it better to act against this nature than in accordance with it?" For Aristotle, eudaimonia (happiness) *just is* acting in accordance with one's nature. The emotions you might develop of euphoria and/or contentment are merely side effects of the activity, which is the actual act of happiness.
Thus, the metaphysics gives you the ethics and buys you a lot of the metaethics as well. It is only with the modern turn (which made epistemology more fundamental than metaphysics) that you can even express questions like, "Sure, you've described what *is*, but how do you get from that *is* to an *ought*?" I dunno, David Hume, do you not *want* eudaimonia?
Now, this doesn't mean that our faculties can't be used for fun, but I do think Aristotle would say that any use of our faculties that deliberately thwarts their natural ends is unnatural and therefore harmful (to yourself, to others, to virtue, to eudaimonia, take your pick). Thus, a use of the sexual faculty that was not open to life would be, well, bad.
There are a lot of lines to draw here, of course, and I myself am quite fond of Ed Feser's "In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument," which is brief enough to read in one sitting and tracks my thinking on the sexual faculty pretty closely. Also, as a bonus, he more or less directly speaks to your question, more robustly than I, on pp381-386: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4SjM0oabZazWC1SRmN0WXVpYkE/view?resourcekey=0-mEl0wIXhM8qd4ieiCuosvQ
Now, it *could* be the case that we are building epileptic trees atop Aristotle (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EpilepticTrees). It *could* be that Aristotle would neither have thought as the Catholic Church thinks nor endorsed it when he heard about it. That is okay. I am extremely fond of Aristotle, but he was neither a divine prophet nor was he infallible, even in metaphysics. The arguments that the Church's great thinkers built atop Aristotle are nevertheless, in my view, sufficiently convincing to get me to believe I ought to refrain from sexual activity that is not open to life.
On the other hand, I can't help remembering that, for the first thousand or so years of Church history, these arguments did not exist. (For the second thousand years of history, they were somewhat lamed by their legalism; JP2 and the theology of the body were really important developments, IMO, and we are only now coming into a fuller understanding of Christianity's ancient sexual teachings.) (If you're unfamiliar, it's been years since I read it, but I nevertheless commend Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners as a valuable introduction to this area of Catholic thinking, which tends to humanize the correct but somewhat hollow-feeling legalism of Scholastic natural-law theorizing: https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Body-Beginners-Rediscovering-Meaning/dp/1635820073 )
So what did Christians do *before* the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle and the building-out of natural law theory? Or, indeed, before the development of JP2's TOB?
Pretty much the same things. It's not like Christianity was all about contraception and non-procreative oral sex until the 1250s and then suddenly we discovered Aristotle and went, "Oh, shoot! That was a mistake!" The Christian Church had been stalwartly opposed to all that from the very start. Christ had told them in Matt 5:18 to continue following the Law, and the Jewish Law on sex was the basis of Christian sexual morality.
In fact, Christ had made the Law significantly *harder* when He demanded close adherence to not just the letter, but the spirit, saying that even looking at a woman with lust was adulterous. He forbade divorce absolutely, the Apostles *freaked out* and said, "Geeze, man, why even marry if we have to be soooo sexually perfect and restricted?" and Christ replied, "Yep, it's 100% better not to get married at all. Write that down." Like, this is not a Messiah who came to announce sexual liberation from Jewish constraints, y'know?
The Apostles certainly seemed to get that message; when they met at the Council of Jerusalem to discuss dispensations from the Mosaic Law, the only three things they positively reaffirmed were the ban on idolatry, blood, and "sexual immorality" (I'm aware the precise translation of porneia is obscure and controversial).
The entire body of Christianity stood foursquare behind this -- all of it -- even long after the Reformation. From the Resurrection of Christ until the Lambeth Conference of 1930, Christianity was united in teaching what is now considered "Catholic" sexual ethics. But that's only because Catholicism refused to abandon the teaching when everybody else .
So, although I think the Scholastics' teleological theory of ethics is very good and I've built my whole life around following it, I don't think you actually *need* it to reach the conclusion that fellatio to completion is immoral. We have it from the Law. We have it from Christ. We have it from the Catholic magisterium. We have it from the witness of the Christian churches across history (until basically a century ago). These are all arguments from authority, which are unsatisfying and non-explanatory, which is why I prefer the Aristotelian-informed view... but, when the authority is God, it remains a solid argument. So if you suspect that any of these entities have some divine authority -- which I assume you do, if you are even *considering* conversion -- then it seems to me that you're already most of the way to recognizing the traditional sexual ethic, even if the reasons why God apparently requires it remain elusive or oblique.
We've all been there, at some point. I spent fifteen years thinking intellectually that the idea of free will was ridiculous, because determinism was obviously true, actually couldn't NOT be true, and determinism ruled out free will. But I also knew the Church taught that free will was real, and I believed (for entirely different reasons) that the Church could not possibly be wrong about this, so I deferred to the teaching, even though it seemed insane to me. I might say I "took it on faith," except I despise that phrase because it's been so watered down by sentimentality and appeals to blind emotion. I did take it on faith, but for good solid reasons that outweighed my doubts. If you find that you can't get your head around the traditional Christian sexual ethic, but you do find yourself persuaded about the Resurrection, the magisterium, and so forth, then I encourage you to do the same here.
As a practical matter, it's not clear to me what that would cost you. To be perfectly blunt: you are a 47-year-old man hoping to have sex with a 48-year-old woman, perhaps 49 by the time you've wed. Even if you had marital relations every single day (not that easy at 47 for many men), even twice on the "fertile" days, the odds of her becoming pregnant by you are very small. If you practice even limited fertility-awareness birth control, remaining open to life but making use of the woman's entirely natural monthly cycle, then the odds of pregnancy become negligible. (If you become pregnant anyway, at that point, then God *really* wanted you to get pregnant, and you should embrace it, because His surprises usually turn out to be some of His best gifts.)
There is, I concede, a certain attraction -- quite aside from the contraceptive benefits -- toward doing fellatio to completion, or climaxing somewhere other than the vagina. This attraction can feel quite strong, especially when one has long habits around it or when one feels that Big Bad Momma Church is banging at the bedroom door trying to take it away from you. But my own interior observation has been that this attraction is fundamentally lustful. Some of the attraction is the very fact that it's transgressive and "naughty", but this isn't valuing the bond as highly as it deserves to be valued. Losing it is no great loss, even though it may feel like it in the moment.
All my best to you and your girlfriend, whatever may happen on your road ahead. I hope I have not pushed too hard (or too gently) here. Once you mentioned this as not just a philosophical question but a potential obstacle to your conversion, I got rather nervous, because I do not want to get to my particular judgment and have the Lord tell me, "You, James, are personally the single specific reason Carlos never found Me on Earth. You said the wrong words, you dingus." So I hope I said at least a few right words, one way or another. Thanks for reading!
Amazing ty!
Thank you for your excellent answer. WRT perverted faculty, I think sex is a special case because Paul clearly considered celibacy better than marriage, and that is one reason priests and monks are celibate, certainly not the only reason, a vow of poverty would be really unfair to one's children for example. So if not having children through not having sex is okay, I don't really see how non-procreative sex can make things worse.
However, I can tell you, that when I was married (civil only), actually trying to conceive gave sex a whole new dimension. All previous non-procreative sex felt like fake at that point, like flying a flight simulator. And there was no zanutah at all: https://eliasmeraz.substack.com/p/why-you-feel-like-sht-after-sex
However, because we were actually trying to conceive, there was a feeling of hope. Trying to not conceive and replacing hope with anxiety would feel worse, even when the chance is now.
I also hope Lewis was right, when he called the sins of the flesh small sins, still, one could at least make some sort of an attempt to not sin, it is okay to fail, but not even trying is, I guess, not.
I think it is important to remember that the heart of the perverted faculty argument is that it is evil to *pervert* a faculty -- which means using it while deliberately intervening to frustrate its natural end. If you don't use it at all, you aren't frustrating it, so you aren't perverting it, so you aren't doing anything evil. Thus, celibacy is (clearly) a higher calling than marriage, and contraception is a serious sin, even though both lead to the same place: not having kids. The difference is that the priest or monk has given up sex entirely (both the pleasure and the children), but the contraceptor is trying to keep the pleasure for himself while actively *preventing* the children. That's the messed-up thing. Again, the Theology of the Body humanizes this considerably, putting flesh on some dry philosophical bones, but that's the key distinction.
I have experienced the same thing with non-procreative vs. procreative sexual activity. I've never heard "zanutah" before, but it does seem fitting. That you've noticed it is good; many do not. I think you overestimate the anxiety that comes from being open to God's plan. I've always heard that "anxiety is simply a measurement of the distance between you and God," and proposing your plan to Him (no more kids) while accepting His plan in return (which might be different) can be rather freeing. Especially when His plan and yours are very, very likely to be the same!
It is not quite right to say that Lewis thought the sins of the flesh were "small sins." He considered lust the least intrinsically bad of the capital sins -- but it is still a capital sin! Submission to it can still destroy you. The sexual sinners found themselves in the first circle of Dante's Inferno, which is the least punishing and painful region of Hell... but it is still Hell! Because our culture has such an intense, confused relationship with sex, it is hard to treat sexual sin with appropriate gravity. We tend to swing between overselling it as the deadliest thing ever and then underselling it as not really deadly at all. The truth is that it's not nearly as deadly as some other sins -- but still quite deadly if left unchecked.
Fortunately, as you note, we are not finally judged on our success at defeating sin, but on the sincere effort we put forth in doing so. Only through the intercession of Jesus and the Holy Spirit can we finally conquer any given sin. Until that day comes, we must fight on. Most of us screw up, but then we repent, we confess, we try to avoid whatever triggered our sin the last time, and we move forward. As you said, failing is unfortunate but not fatal, as long as we're trying.
Thanks for the tip on "zanutah"!
Thank you, very interesting thoughts! One nit to pick: please never argue from Dante, we already have a big problem with Dante influencing people’s thoughts of afterlife more rather than Catholic doctrine. This whole “soul as ghost body” just does not mesh with Thomism: in Thomism, only the abstract thinking part of the soul is supernatural and thus survives death.