OVERVIEW OF MORAL THEOLOGY

Anthropology of Sexuality
Prof. Brian Johnstone, C.Ss.R.

A Christian ethic of sexuality has to start from the sufficient knowledge of the meaning of sexual
conduct for the human species. It seems evident that sexuality constitutes an essential dimension
of the human conduct. However, this necessary knowledge is not that easy to comprehend. Serene
access to the understanding of that reality is difficult sometimes due to misunderstanding and
manipulation. However, the bigger difficulties come precisely from the wealth of meanings that
surrounds that human phenomenon.

I. Human meaning of Sexuality

The human person is a sexual being. Sexuality is not something extrinsic to the person. It belongs
to his/her very constitution as a human person. No can person exist if he or she is not a sexual
person. However, the person is not for sexuality but sexuality is for the person.

It is important to underscore at the very beginning of this discussion that personal orientation of
human sexuality. In this light, it is easier to judge the tendency to objectify the concept in terms
of sexual appetite than to look at it in terms of being personal, that is, it is personalized and
personalizing.

In the human reality, sex cannot be reduced to the field of instinct or impulse. If we do this we are
to remain in the realm of biology. For the human person, the instinctive impulses are full of
meaning. Thus, many words need to be used to refer to those different levels.

Eros will allude to the psychological and human aspects of personal relationship. The erotic
dynamic pushes the person toward the object of love, desirable and attractive. The philia will
qualify a type of love in friendship wherein complementarity, companionship, fidelity, mutual
support acquire prominent places.

In the Greek culture where these two concepts are known, the first Christian preachers would
introduce the concept of agape. It is the type of love marked by gratuitous oblation or offering.
Agape denies making the person as pure object, rather it perceives and treats the person as a person.
Agape has religious resonance. This love comes from God and it is manifested in human
relationships characterized by personal offering. This love gives meaning to the appetites of eros
and the relationship in philia. Both of them can be transformed and assumed by agape love.

Sexual behavior in every person has two causal sources: sexual hormones and acquired habits
through realized apprenticeship. Sexuality, therefore, has something natural and something
cultural. If sexuality oftentimes reduced to its genital manifestations in the past, personalist
anthropology considers human sexuality today in the field of interpersonal meaningfulness and
communication.

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II. Between Body and Spirit

Both history and our own experience teach us that the human person is hard to understand and
encompass in his/her totality and oneness. The human person is psychic and organic in his/her
substance. In other words, he/she is system intrinsically unitary and structural of some material
notes we can call the body and the psyche or spirit.

The difficulty to understand the human phenomenon so complex like human sexuality arises from
the temptation to consider only one of the aspects, body and spirit, that shape him/her.

Obviously, sexuality includes an inevitable physical aspect which has to be considered in all its
importance in a coherent theory human sexuality. It is good that the contemporary culture has
overcome the fear of physicality. However, on the other hand, it is not good that it is not good that
contemporary culture falls into facile optimisms. These optimisms give rise to sexual liberalism,
oftentimes, reifying sexuality and persons.

A good theory of sexuality has to be related to all levels of human existence, both physical
(biological) and personals (social). From the more recent statements from the Church dealing with
the complementarity of the physical and the spiritual, we can find this assertion regarding the
Education Guidance in Human Love: “Oriented sexuality, elevated and integrated by love acquires
true human quality. In the framework of biological and psychic development harmony between
the two increases. This harmony can only be fulfilled in affective maturity expressed in
disinterested love and in total self-surrender.”

This ideal is not always easy to reach in practice. But the anthropological understanding of
sexuality ought not to remain minimized by concrete difficulties of the experience of the ideal of
integration.