Human Sexuality: More Than Animal, But Not Less

Over at First Things, both Phillip Cary and Greg Forster are right to remind us that human sexuality is more than animalistic, that “‘male and female’ mean something different, richer, among human beings than among the beasts of the field and the birds of the air.” But in emphasizing the excellence and even the preeminence of human sexual nature, we must never forget that man, though rational, is still an animal. While it is true to say that his sexuality is more than merely animal, still we must remember that it is more but not less.

Following in the tradition of the De Anima, Thomistic theologians have correctly taught that man the rational animal has an intellectual soul that hierarchically incorporates both animal and nutritive powers as well. When applied to the virtue of chastity, this Aristotelian philosophical anthropology instructs that the biological purpose of sex—reproduction—is presupposed and extended in man, this animal faculty being rationally oriented towards the properly human end of sexual relations: in short, the family.

More recently, this sexual telos has been popularly designated—at least in Catholic circles—by speaking of the procreative and unitive dimensions of sex. This labels things accurately enough, though in naming these dimensions separately, we risk suggesting a sort of sexual dualism. Such anthropological heresy would obscure the integrated relationship traditionally understood to exist between the unitive and the procreative. On the classical view, it is not that human sexuality has two independent purposes, but that its rational purpose subsumes and transforms the biological purpose it shares with inferior animals.

For sex to be properly unitive of human persons, therefore, it necessarily has to be respectful of the reproductive aspect of the act, not as a distinct end, but as a lower purpose taken up and incorporated into the single unified end of human sexuality. In what does this unified end consist? Man’s rational soul comprehensively orders his sexual faculties to the common good of marriage, that institution which exists—or at least, existed—precisely because it best conduces to the flourishing of family life, in which both spousal union and the bearing and rearing of children find their home.

I agree with Forster and Cary that we should do our best to combat the pop-cultural caricature of chastity, which presents us advocates for traditional morality as reducing sex to a sub-rational embryo production line. But we must counter that false account with the true one, and, though it does not end there, the true account nevertheless must begin with human animality.