An incarnational ethic: listening to one another.

Sex, as John S. Dunne has written, is initially "experienced as a terrible purpose at work in one's life, a purpose that is not personal but somehow impersonal in its aims." Dunne continues: "We fear both our sexuality and our mortality for the same reasons, it seems, because they are forces within us that drive beyond all personal goals, that threaten our personal existence by leading beyond it" (Time and Myth, 1973). Sex retains that numinous quality, the mixture of fascination and dread, until we develop what Dunne calls a "relationship" to our sexuality, a way of "being a man, or being a woman," that mediates that impersonal, terrible purpose.

One suspects that most people, regardless of what they think about the moral or theological status of homosexuality, recognize the abiding truth of Dunne's description. Presumably this experience is much the same for heterosexuals and homosexuals. The search for love, for that person who in her or his gift of self returns us to our own, truest self, usually constitutes the central drama of our lives. How perplexing that the force compelling us toward our most intimate and meaningful encounters seems so opaque to rational inquiry, so fraught with moral ambiguity.

That seems especially true when trying to judge the moral and religious status of homosexuality. One school of thought dismisses traditional Catholic objections to homosexuality as mere prejudice and self-deluding irrationality. Christians should encourage loving, monogamous relationships however they are incarnated. Homosexuality, the argument goes, is a fact of life---even an incontrovertible datum of "nature"--and it is unjust to discriminate against people who are, through no fault of their own, "born that way." Isn't the important thing how people treat and love one another, not what they do in bed?

This demand for justice and moral parity is powerful, especially at a time when the homosexual community has been devastated by the AIDS epidemic. But if that demand is resisted, as it has been even in churches more liberal on questions of sexual morality than Catholicism, it is not necessarily because of small-mindedness or irrational bias. Clearly, for the church the full social and moral enfranchisement of homosexuality is a profound challenge to any coherent notion of the meaning of revelation or the authority of tradition. Luke Timothy Johnson, in this issue (page 11), suggests that the warrant for such a reversal of traditional Christian sanctions against homosexuality might be seen in the similar upheaval caused by Paul's extension to the Gentiles of the promises once made exclusively to Israel. Even if one finds this analogy a bit slippery, it probably gets the proportions of the challenge about fight.

How we frame the question is crucial. Appeals to "experience" or "the signs of the times" will not suffice, for the experience or the signs read by those on one side of the argument tend to cancel out those on the other side. Moreover, appeals to an inarticulate sense of either the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality are hardly unmediated testimony. Just as the "homophobia" of past and present can be linked to specific social and cultural contexts and interests, so too can the modern demand for sexual emancipation. While this sociological and epistemological fact helps explain our attitudes, it cannot provide us with moral justification. Similarly, as Dennis O'Brien suggests (page 14), even if homosexuality is not a "choice," that does not place it beyond moral valuation. Sexual expression and identity, whether it is homosexual, heterosexual, or something in between, owes as much to culture as to biology, as any examination of its various expressions across disparate cultures readily demonstrates. "The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived," the anthropologist Mary Douglas has written (Natural Symbols, 1970). "The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society."

A discussion of this question must begin at a more fundamental level than where demands for equality emerge. We must examine the cosmological presuppositions in which our ideas about the proper use of the body originate. The difference between men and women, even the difference between self and others, is thoroughly implicated in a culture's attitude toward the proper use of sexual organs. It is precisely the ability of sexual acts to blur the boundary between individuals--"and they shall become one flesh"--that creates their power and ambiguity. What is a man and what is a woman, whether like can lie down with like, brother lie down with sister, are classifications that expose the very scaffolding upon which reason itself is built. As the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel has observed, incest is almost universally regarded as forbidden and polluting because it threatens to destroy the boundary between the self and our surroundings, especially those closest to us (The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, 1991). "As any victim of parental child abuse must know," Zerubavel writes, "such sexual contacts are absolutely detrimental to one's self-hood." According to Zerubavel, such categories though varied are not irrational but "fundamentally cognitive," providing the self with the first building block, the "mental gap," that allows us to detach ourselves from others and establish a distinct identity. For better or for worse, "a somewhat similar need to avoid blending with 'one's own kind' underlies the homophobic taboo," Zerubavel acknowledges.

For Catholicism, disassembling the cognitive scaffolding that renders homosexuality taboo will attenuate a good many other moral boundaries and distinctions. Whether that is desirable can be debated, but it cannot be ignored. Obviously gender lines and sexual morality have changed a great deal in the last fifty years, and the new openness to homosexuality is as much a sign as a cause of that reality. But whatever accommodation we need to make in justice to help ensure the dignity of homosexual people, the prior question is whether Catholicism should dismantle the moral categories that sustain its particular concepts of gender, the meaning of sexual love, and marriage. The challenge homosexuality presents can be put simply: Catholicism teaches that the conjugal act, by its very nature, both unites man and wife and ties sexual love to procreation. Homosexual acts, by definition and in principle, sever the connection between sexuality and procreation. Can that be reconciled to Catholicism's sacramentalization of sexual love in marriage?

I don't think so. Such a development seems neither likely nor sound. Nor can I envision how it might be made theologically coherent. Incarnational faith, as I hope to expand upon below, has a logical interest in a sexual metaphysics. Paul Ramsey was right about the transcendent implications of sexuality for biblical religion: "To put radically asunder what God joined together in parenthood when he made love procreative...means a refusal of the image of God's creation in our own." Perhaps Luke Timothy Johnson is prescient; our views of homosexuality may prove as provisional as the cultic objections of Jewish-Christians to the Gentiles. But it is difficult to imagine how this transformation might occur. Sexual differentiation and intercourse seem more intractable facts of life than ethnic identity. Gentiles, after all, could become Jews by submitting to circumcision and the Torah. It is much harder to imagine how incarnational religion might accommodate the moral marginalization of procreation.

Working out the theological status of homosexuality begins by making fundamental presuppositions explicit. How exactly, then, do we mirror God's image? That is notoriously hard to explain. But as Dunne suggests, understanding the meaning of human sexuality at the very least requires that we understand what end, what "beyond," what seemingly "impersonal purpose" sexual life can be seen pointing to, is measured against, or can be understood to be a sign of in any sacramental vision of creation. If we affirm a faith in a personal God who intends a purpose for us and whose creation evinces a design intelligible to reason as well as disclosed by revelation, it is only logical that we see that design manifest in the act that makes us. In other words--and no matter how one views the question of artificial contraception--there remains a teleology to human sexuality, namely its procreative end, that Catholicism is fight to emphasize--even if it too often overemphasizes it.

Insisting in principle on the inseparability of the unitive and procreative aspects of sexuality can be seen as a profound realism, one that defends the psychophysical unity of the human person while resisting both biological reductionism and a gnosticizing dualism of spirit and matter. On the other hand, homosexuality in principle renders the connection between sexuality and procreation arbitrary, if not meaningless, in a way even the prudent use of contraception cannot. I suspect that holding on to the ontological truth of procreative sex is behind the deep-seated resistance to homosexual marriage in churches that have little difficulty with the use of contraception, the possibility of divorce, or even abortion.

Dennis O'Brien illuminates this point from a slightly different perspective (page 16): "Heterosexual marriage as a cultural institution...has a special, larger-than-life meaning that cannot be captured even by loving, stable homosexual couples. Heterosexual marriage connects the couple to humanity's longest saga, connects the family from which every homosexual emerges but to which he does not finally return, connects back as symbol to the ultimate fecundity of nature. Heterosexual marriage as a cultural symbol is larger than a life which is just mine (and thine)....It is Adam and Eve again in every age and day." Even childless heterosexual couples can be seen to strengthen the symbolic and poetic validity of this "saga"; for every heterosexual marriage, even if its ultimate end is frustrated, remains a sign and symbol of humanity's foundational acts.

True, Catholicism's rigid stance against any and all forms of artificial contraception often buries this essential metaphysical and moral insight, this necessary cultural symbol, under a crude physicalism. But binding sexual feeling to the creation of families and children, and in so doing strengthening the irrevocable covenant between man and woman, remains a great humanizing value, not an archaic superstition.

Discussing the social and ethical implications of this understanding, philosopher Roger Scruton has elucidated concerns raised by a complete relativization of Christianity's traditional procreative ethic. "If children can be made in laboratories, and by methods which bear no relation to the love-making of their parents, what remains of those commitments which tie the generations each to each, and give us a motive, in our most urgent ventures towards the Other, to safeguard the world for those who have not yet entered it?" (The Philosopher on Dover Beach, 1990).

As Scruton adumbrates, many subtle benefits flow from the biblical vision of love and life that takes our embodiment in two distinct sexes as morally defining. The reciprocal design inherent in creation is of course laid out in Genesis 1:27: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." According to the Bible, sexual differentiation actually partakes of the very mystery and wholeness of God. As Saint Paul writes in Ephesians 5:32, the mystery of the union between man and woman is a sign of the mystery of Christ's relationship to his church.

For incarnational religion the intrinsically nonprocreative nature of homosexual acts is a metaphysical dead-end. In this symbolic or metaphorical context, severing the sexual expression of love from generativity negates the connection between matter and spirit. On this point, Luke Timothy Johnson suggests (page 12) that the Christian understanding of sexual sin is not fundamentally so explicit or concretized, but "defined convenantally rather than biologically." He warns against any reduction of sexual morality to talk of body parts. That is a useful corrective to the kind of extreme physicalism that has made the church's teaching on contraception unpersuasive. Catholicism has certainly been guilty of such a literalism. But agnosticism about the ontological and symbolic character of the sexually differentiated body moves too far in the opposite direction. Positing a severe dichotomy between biology and covenant, body parts and personal commitments, opens too wide a door to subjectivism. The logic that substitutes "commitment" for explicit prohibitions would seem to collapse the tension Catholicism seeks to create between body and spirit. How can the body retain its power as a symbol if sexual acts are rendered merely instrumental? Johnson acknowledges this concern in suggesting that homosexual marriage may be incompatible with the "social symbolization of the community."

Saint Paul, as Johnson points out, was no friend of rigid cultic or moral categories. Still, he insisted that "The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body (1 Cor. 6:13) .... Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? (15) .... Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body" (19-20).

As Paul's regard for the body indicates, the God-given purposes of sexuality, even under the freedoms of the new dispensation, are not abrogated. While it is true the gospel relativizes gender differences as well as the command to procreate by judging them and all other things in the "freedom of the children of God," it is equally true that those sexual realities remain part of God's created order. Christians must take a new stance toward the world, but the intrinsic good of creation has not yet passed away. Bodily resurrection implies as much. There may be no giving or taking in marriage in the Kingdom, but presumably those resurrected are men and women, not some third kind of human being. While it is certainly true that Paul used the scandal of the cross and the inclusion of the Gentiles as warrants for innovation, that warrant was not a license to remake what God had done in making humankind male and female.

An ethic that welcomes homosexual acts by elevating relational values over embodied reality is suspect. Classically, the etherealization or overspiritualization of sex characterized the gnostic eagerness to exalt spirit over matter. Catholicism, in its defense of Christ as true God and true man, has eschewed such otherworldly ambitions. Body parts count, and they signify. The mystery of sexual differentiation is fundamental to the appropriation of the biblical story. Karl Barth noted that, like Christ, we cannot transcend gender. Only as gendered creatures do we mysteriously mirror the creator: "That God created man as male and female, and therefore as his image and the likeness of the covenant of Grace, of the relationship between himself and his people, between Christ and his community, is something that can never lead to a neutral It, nor found a purely external, incidental, and transient sexuality, but rather an inward, essential, and lasting order of being as He and She, valid for all time and also for eternity."

Still, the case for eliminating the censure of homosexuality demands serious and respectful attention. The New Republic's Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic with a deep regard for the tradition, has written compellingly on the moral and spiritual benefits of gay marriage. He argues that it is hypocritical to complain about the immorality of homosexual people while denying them the social stability and moral encouragement of marriage. In an interview in America (May 8, 1993), Sullivan said that "to deny [marriage] to gay people is not merely incoherent and wrong, from the Christian point of view. It is incredibly destructive of the moral quality of their lives in general .... You can't ask someone to suppress what makes them whole as a human being and then [expect them] to lead blameless lives. We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others--in order to be good Christians."

Sullivan also contends that the extension to homosexuals of the right to marry is fundamentally a civil rights issue, and that the liberal state's commitment to equality requires that it remain neutral (that is, accommodating) on the question of same-sex marriage (New Republic, May 10, 1993).

Homosexuals do suffer harm because of the stigma attached to same-sex love. No Christian can excuse or tolerate hateful behavior. Nor should the church in any way close its doors, its heart, or its helping hand to homosexuals. But, as I hope I have in some way demonstrated, the church's traditional prohibition against homosexual acts is not as morally incoherent as Sullivan suggests. Moreover, Sullivan's ontological assertions are questionable. Ordered toward the "mind of Christ," individual sexual fulfillment has been relativized for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike--we have been bought with a price, our bodies are not our own. For a Christian it is not even the love of one's spouse that makes one ultimately whole, but the love of God. No homosexual Catholic should be without such love, as neither should any heterosexual Catholic. Priests and religious have traditionally forsaken the "right" to sexual expression as a sign of that reality and consolation.

The neutral state, moreover, values equality because it first values other things. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has written, equality depends not on state neutrality or mere freedom of choice, for they cannot justify themselves, but on larger conceptions of what it means to be a human being. Respecting people's individuality and rights contributes to that larger end but cannot be an end in itself. Working for the common good within a democratic state still means working to value some things more than others--a decent provision for all over absolute economic liberty for some, unborn life over a woman's absolute autonomy, two-parent families for children over individual freedom, and, at least traditionally, heterosexual marriage over homosexual relationships. Individual autonomy, even sexual autonomy, is not absolute. As Taylor specifically argues concerning homosexual rights, such an expansion of our notions of human possibility must be measured against a pre-existing "horizon of significance" and must take into account "homoand heterosexual experience and life" or it risks rendering the meaning of sexuality trivial and thus defeats its own purposes (The Ethics of Authenticity, 1992).

Doubtless the "horizon of significance" for secular society and for Catholicism will differ. The neutral state presumably might find it valuable to encourage monogamous same-sex relations. Catholicism's refusal to equate homosexuality and heterosexuality, however, cannot be understood except as the logical flip side of its strong affirmation of the place of procreative sexuality in God's creation and plan of salvation. Incarnational Christianity, after all, is the story of how God became man, spirit became matter, the divine became human. For Catholics this sacralization of flesh, this ultimate commingling of the human and the divine, took place in a woman's body. The relativizing of procreation inherent in the demands for homosexual marriage can be seen as an expression of what Jean Bethke Elshtain suggests is contemporary culture's subtle hostility toward women in their unique capacity to create life. Same-sex marriage, Elshtain wrote in Commonweal (November 22, 1991), is "hostile to the regenerative female body and to the symbolism of social regeneration to which this body is necessarily linked and has, historically, given rise."

A reverence--many say an exaggerated reverence--for the natal body is at the center of the Catholic cosmology. Consequently, it is not surprising that the antinatal instinct manifest in same-sex marriage might be viewed with deep suspicion by those who believe God himself was born of a woman. Admittedly, the celebration of woman's unique capacity to create life chafes against the contemporary resistance to the idea that sexual differentiation might entail some cultural expression as well as some distinction in social roles. This is not unrelated to the status of homosexuality. As the philosopher Jeffrey Stout has written, the homophobic taboo is most plausible in cultures where masculine and feminine roles are sharply defined and have a large social significance (Ethics after Babel, 1988). Obviously that is less and less the case in modern technological society. Given that fact, contemporary culture, with its conception of equality and individual rights and its view of gender as a suspect, if not archaic and superfluous characteristic, cannot make much sense of the church's position on sexual questions. That is why the Catholic abomination of sexual "sin" clashes so loudly with secular culture's abomination of "discrimination."

Already the everyday social and sexual experience of Catholics, not to mention the new technologies of reproduction, reflects less and less the cognitive categories inherent in the biblical story. Yet, dispensing with the moral distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality would require a profound reimagining, or a good deal of creative retranslating of Scripture and tradition. That may happen. God surprises us, as Luke Johnson says. Catholicism has reversed itself on slavery and usury, among other things. We live between times, after all. In his interview in America, Andrew Sullivan quite candidly and appealingly admitted that he could not reconcile his homosexuality with his Catholicism, that he could only try to live with the contradiction. That is honest and intellectually responsible, and a stance that recommends itself to the church as a whole at this point. Yes, there is at least a seeming inconsistency in the church's refusal to condemn homosexual orientation while denying homosexuals the moral right to express that orientation. But one way or another, the church places much the same burden of conscience on the divorced, the widowed,I the unmarried, and the contraceptively inclined, even, in a sense, on the preternaturally ambitious, irascible, and acquisitive. And if the final measure is love, success in living virtuous lives surely varies little among heterosexuals and homosexuals. Most of us seem to be in the same boat.

My argument comes down to this. Catholicism's vision of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman remains a compelling way for people to mediate the "terrible purpose" of sexuality at work in their lives. We should think long and hard before throwing out the principles behind love- and baby-making with the bath water of changing social and gender roles. No one of plausible authority suggests that homosexuality excludes one from the church. Luke Timothy Johnson offers excellent advice when he writes that it is incumbent upon the church to open itself to "narratives of homosexual holiness." As part of the body of Christ, homosexuals have shaped and will continue to shape that corporate reality for the better. For finally, regardless of which side of this tortuous question we come down on, we must, each one of us, continue to listen.

Paul Baumann is the associate editor of Commonweal.