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Alasdair Maclntyre
as Help
for
Rethinking Catholic Natural Law Estimates
of
Same-Sex
Life Partnerships
William
McDonough
Abstract
Christian ethics struggles to articulate a method for thinking about homosexuality
and the sexual acts of same-sex oriented persons. In 1988, Hanigan suggested a
promising "social import" approach and then judged homosexual acts deficient.
Maclntyre's
Dependent Rational Animals
(1999) articulates a fuller social import
approach to morality. Although he does not address homosexuality, Maclntyre
rejects narrow understandings of family and of "disinterested friendship": we
need "communal relations that engage our affections" to grow in "the virtues of
acknowledged dependence." How do gay people grow in these virtues? What if
Hanigan got
the
method
right,
but the evaluation wrong?
Introduction
Do homosexuality and homosexual sex prove that what Stephen Pope recently
referred to as a "wall between natural law theory and narrative ethics" is
permanent and impassable?1 Catholicism's natural law proscriptions and the
narratives of homosexual persons, it would seem, have no possibility of meeting.
Against such a thesis this paper argues that in his latest book Alasdair Maclntyre
provides a rationale for why the Catholic Church, precisely because it is
committed to natural law
thinking,
must re-think homosexuality.
Annual
ojthe Society of
Christian
Ethics, 2\ (2001): 191-213
192 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
Before I introduce my main argument that Maclntyre's recent work should
lead to deepened Catholic natural law thinking about homosexuality, I briefly lay
out a commonly accepted, and I think wrong, view that has set natural law and
narrative approaches to ethical thinking in opposition. Here, in its baldest form, is
the opposition that is often set up between narrative and natural law moralities:
natural law is "an impersonal system of law applied abstractly to the individual
[while narrative ethics prizes] a consideration of the person and his or her acts as
the moral standard."2
According to this view, natural law theories "typically propose some set of
basic principles as definitive of the moral law. Then they propose a method for
applying those principles to cases."3 What both proponents and opponents of
Catholicism's evaluation of homosexuality seem to agree on is that natural law
thinking leads almost inexorably to the rejection of homosexuality. The 1994
English edition of The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes such a
natural law approach
to
homosexuality:
(T)radition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically
disordered." They are contrary to the natural law .... The number of
men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not
negligible. They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of
them it is a trial.... Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the
virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the
support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace,
they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian
perfection.4
Natural law moralities, it would seem, exhibit compassion for homosexual
persons but can never accept homosexual sex.
On the other side of the wall there are narrative approaches to ethics. In his
own earlier writing, Maclntyre proposed narrative as the best alternative to what
he called, first, the "social conservatism" and, then later, the "metaphysical
biology" of
natural
law thinking influenced by Aristotle.5 In his 1981 work
After
Virtue,
Maclntyre proposed that ". . . all attempts to elucidate the notion of
personal identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative,
intelligibility and accountability are bound to fail.... What is better or worse for
X depends upon the character ofthat intelligible narrative which provides X's life
with its unity."6
Maclntyre's emphasis on "narrative unity" was then taken up by gay writers.
Gay Catholic Andrew Sullivan is a case in point. He wrote that, for homosexual
persons, Catholic natural law thinking is "... an unethic, a statement that some
people are effectively beneath even the project of an ethical teaching."7 Sullivan
even over-optimistically extended his argument by saying that the narratives of
gay lives had
to
affect Catholic natural law thinking:
Alasdair Maclntyre as Help 193
What finally convinced me of
the
wrongness of
the
Church's teachings
was not that they were intellectually so confused, but that in the
circumstances of my own life—and of the lives I discovered around
me—they seemed so destructive of human love and self-realization
This truth is not an argument; it is merely an observation. But
observations are at the heart ... of the Church's traditional Thomist
philosophy (S)uch
Uves
as those of countless gay men and lesbians
must ultimately affect the Church not because our lives are perfect, or
without contradiction, or without sin, but because our lives are in some
sense also the life of the Church.8
But appeals by gay people to the "narrative unity" of their lives have not (yet)
affected official Catholic thinking in the way Sullivan hoped. They have had the
opposite effect. Against appeals to gay experience, Catholic teaching has invoked
natural law thinking to reiterate, even to strengthen, its rejection of homosexual
sex. So, when the Catechism was given final form in 1997, Rome added the
following italicized phrase into the text of
its
earlier rejection of homosexual sex:
"This inclination, which is
objectively
disordered,
constitutes for most of them a
trial."9
Now Catholic natural law thinking has always made room for the distortion of
human experience by original sin. Garry Wills recently summarized the tradition:
". . . there is something kinky or askew in ordinary human nature."10 Meta-
phorically, then, Catholic natural law thinking has always known that there are
stumbling stones on
the
path all human
beings
must travel to understand their own
experience. "Narrative" does not translate easily to "nature" for any human being.
But, in the last decade, official Catholicism has claimed more than this for
homosexual
persons:
not only stumbling stones, but an impassable wall separates
homosexual persons from their own experience.
In shoring up its teaching against homosexual sex in this way, official
Catholicism is in danger of undermining its own natural law tradition. To
construct a wall between narrative and nature is to leave natural law thinking
behind. Gregory Baum, in an article on "Homosexuality and the Natural Law,"
put it this way:
The natural law tradition
(holds)..
.that human beings are by their God-
created nature oriented toward the
bonum—toward
their personal good
as well as humanity's common good .... Some theologians have
insisted that this natural law is discoverable by unaided human
reason....while others, more conscious of the confusion sin has
produced in the human mind, have proposed that reason needs God's
gracious help to discover the inner structure that guides people toward
the bonum (But) rejection of natural law is rooted in the conviction
194
The
Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
that the original sin that weighs upon us has damaged the human nature
in
us
and weakened our intelligence so that we inevitably go astray if we
presume to follow our own wisdom or our own inclination."11
In short, my introductory argument is that natural law thinking knows there is
a stumbling stone between narrative and nature, but it cannot tolerate a wall. I
have two aims in this paper. First, I want to contribute to a more general re-
thinking of natural law methodologies in morality through the test case of
homosexuality. My general point is that Catholic natural law thinking never was
intended to be "an impersonal system of law" or "some basic set of principles ...
applied to cases."12 A better theological understanding of natural law was given
by Walter Kasper:
What is already given and laid upon human freedom as the condition
which makes it possible is what we call
nature.
Nature is God's creation.
It is not made by human beings and cannot be made by them. It
therefore has its own dignity. It has to be cultivated by human beings,
but it must not be manipulated arbitrarily and at will. This suggests that
the idea of natural law ought
to
be creatively renewed.13
My more particular aim here is to contribute to the dismantling of the wall
separating natural law and narrative methods of thinking about homosexuality.
This essay argues that a "creative renewal of
natural
law," and not just narrative
ethics,
requires the Catholic tradition to re-think its position on homosexuality.
Specifically, I want to demonstrate that the Catechisms labeling of the
homosexual inclination as "disordered" coupled to its invitation to homosexual
persons to accept the support of "disinterested friendship" and so move "toward
Christian perfection" is incoherent.14 I will show that the Catechisms idea of
"disinterested
friendship"
rests on a mistaken idea of the Stoics; it does not rest on
the best of the Catholic tradition of natural law thinking.
In making my particular argument I rely on Alasdair Maclntyre, both
substantively and methodologically. Substantively, this paper argues that natural
law morality can and should recognize the sanctity of the life partnerships of
homosexual persons. I am claiming here that Maclntyre's new book
Dependent
Rational Animals
provides exactly what Stephen Pope claims is necessary for an
adequate moral assessment of homosexuality, namely "a more precise and
comprehensive account of genuine human flourishing."15
Methodologically, I am beginning to do here what Maclntyre said a decade
ago one must do if
one
wishes to argue with a tradition. I am suggesting how we
might move beyond the impasse—what Maclntyre called an "epistemological
crisis"
—in Catholic thinking about homosexuality. Maclntyre says three things
must be done to move through such a crisis:
Alasdair Maclntyre as Help 195
(First, one's proposal) must furnish a solution to the problems which had
previously proved intractable in a systematic and coherent
way.
Second,
it must also provide an explanation of just what it was which rendered
the tradition, before it had acquired these new resources, sterile or
incoherent or
both.
And third, these first two tasks must be carried out in
a way which exhibits some fundamental continuity of the new
conceptual and theoretical structures with the shared beliefs in terms of
which
the
tradition of enquiry had been defined up to this point.16
My paper proceeds in three steps, corresponding to the three tasks Maclntyre
lays out
above.
First, I outline the contribution of Maclntyre's new
book,
seeing in
it a breakthrough toward an adequate notion of human flourishing. Second, I
suggest that the failures of
the
natural law tradition on homosexuality flow from
its too close association with Stoicism, particularly the mistaken Stoic
understanding of disinterested friendship. Third, I point to twentieth century
Catholicism's revised understanding of marriage as a totius vitae communio as
already a demonstration of continuity-within-change in its thinking about
sexuality. My conclusion comes back to the logic for recognizing the sanctity of
same-sex life partnerships.
Dependent Rational Animáis 'Account of Human Flourishing:
Breaking Down the Wall between
Narrative and Natural Law Moralities
In another place I have argued that Alasdair Maclntyre's new book
Dependent
Rational Animals is his best and most coherent.17 There I emphasize that
Maclntyre's admission of error at the beginning of the new book constitutes a
significant, though under-noticed, revision in his own thinking. On this book's
second
page,
Maclntyre
writes:
"In After
Virtue
I had attempted to give an account
of the place of the virtues... within social practices, the lives of individuals and the
lives of communities .... I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics
independent of biology to be possible."18
In another paper, I argued that Maclntyre's shift signals a move from a
"sociologically grounded" morality of communal practices to a "biologically
grounded" morality of human nature. Though not precise enough, those
categories describe a real and helpful shift in Maclntyre's thought: in recognizing
his own need to connect "social practices" and "biology," Maclntyre is naming
moral theory's need to re-connect personal narrative and natural law.
Maclntyre's new book offers the more precise account of human flourishing
contemporary morality needs, a "culturally neutral" and "pre-conventional"
account of human goodness.19 Here is one more piece of evidence for the
important shift taking place in the new book. One of the oddest assertions of
196 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
Maclntyre's "sociological" period of moral theorizing came in his 1988 work
Whose
Justice?
Which Rationality?
There, he wrote that "facts, like telescopes
and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention .... There are in
fact no nontrivial statements which have appeared evidently true to all human
beings of moderate intelligence."20 But Maclntyre has abandoned this view, for
his new book is full of references to facts. His first chapter opens with such a
reference: "(T)wo related sets of facts ... are so evidently of singular importance
that it might seem that
no
account of the human condition whose authors hoped to
achieve credibility could avoid giving them a central place."21
What, to go now to the substance of Maclntyre's view, are these facts that
ground human flourishing? There are two of them, "those concerning our
vulnerabilities and afflictions and those concerning the extent of our dependence
on particular others."22 The most basic truth about every human being is that
"from the outset she or he is in debt," for the "facts of affliction and dependence"
are given in all our lives.23
Maclntyre's singling out of vulnerability and dependence as determinative for
morality certainly is an interpretation of given facts, but as Jean Porter says this is
what natural law thinking has always done: it involves an "interpretation of
universal principles of moral action, which therefore apply to all persons."24
Maclntyre proposes his two facts as the central, morally relevant ones because
they reveal our "initial directedness to certain goods .... Having been cared for,
(we) care for others."25
Maclntyre's facts add up to a twofold view of human flourishing,
encompassing both an account of goodness and of the virtues that support that
goodness. A good human being has "learned to act without thought of any
justification beyond the need of those given into (her) care."26 Maclntyre says
three times in the book that the facts of vulnerability and dependence require that
a good person must come to be able to give to another human
being,
after herself
having first received, unconditional love.27 Over a lifetime of being cared for and
caring, I will have become good when one can see in the way I
Uve
that "the good
of the individual... (is neither) subordinate to the good of the community nor
vice versa."28
The facts about us and the moral goodness that stems from them give
Maclntyre what he calls his "central thesis . . . that the virtues we need .. . (are)
the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals, whose dependence,
rationality, and animality have to be understood in relationship to each other."29
These are "the virtues of acknowledged dependence," and Maclntyre emphasizes
two of them: "just generosity" and "elementary tmthfulness."30 Just generosity
summarizes three patterns of giving and receiving that I must learn in my life:
affective relationship, hospitality, and openness to urgent need. Tmthfulness
demands that I allow the other to learn what he needs to learn, that I do not
conceal my own need to learn, and that I do not withdraw from the circle of
learning in what Maclntyre calls "ironic detachment."
Alasdair
Maclntyre as
Help
197
Γη sum, we have in Maclntyre's new book a fuller account of human
flourishing
than
he has ever given. This is a natural law ethic of care in which
"flourishing... is in
itself
a
question of fact": a good
human
being is one who has
learned to
give
and receive a love that is disinterested in the sense of
unconditional.31
My argument here is that this account should lead us to recognize the sanctity
of same-sex
life
partnerships.
But before I come to
that,
I need to show both what
has blocked the Catholic tradition from reaching this deeper vision of
the
good
and
that
the
tradition
has
the
resources to move toward
it.
First,
the
blocks.
Either
Maclntyre
and
Plutarch
or the
Catechism
and the Stoics:
What
is
"Disinterested
Friendship"
and How Does One
Come
to It?
Many
have shown
the
Stoic influences on
Catholic
Church
thinking about sex.
John
Noonan
says
that early on Western Christianity accepted "the Stoic ideal"
about sex, adding:
The
Stoics sought
to
control bodily desire by
reason,
to the end of being
rationally self-sufficient, dependent on
no
external force .... In fact, the
Stoic
view
of
marital
intercourse, the stress on procreative purpose, the
failure to connect intercourse and love, were profound influences on the
Christian
approach; the doctrine of
contraception,
as it was fashioned,
largely depended
upon
[Stoicism].32
Jean
Porter
says
Christian natural law thinking transcended the impersonal,
fatalistic Stoic understanding of natural law in most areas, except sex: "(The)
Stoic
view
(is) that the
wise
person
will
engage in sexual acts only for
the
sake of
procreation
(T)he actual negative evaluation of sexual desire (in Christianity)
seems to owe more to the Stoics than to Scripture."33 In the next section of this
paper, I
will
show
signs
of
the
waning influence of Stoicism in Catholic sexual
morality.
In
this section, I show that Stoic thinking is
very
much
alive
in Catholic
thinking about homosexuality.
I
am interested in one Stoic mistake about sex, more precisely in a mistake
about human friendship, because it has carried over into the
Catechism's
treatment
of homosexuality. My claim here is that the
Catechism's
offer of
disinterested friendship to homosexual persons is an offer of Stoic friendship,
disembodied and lacking in affective content. It is not an offer of the kind of
friendship Maclntyre knows all of us to need, an "unconditional care for the
human
being as such."34
Maclntyre shows us this Stoic mistake about friendship by citing a text from
Plutarch
(c. 47-120 CE), "the most valuable of the opponents of Stoicism."35
198 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
Plutarch is cited within Maclntyre's own argument that human beings must not
neglect our animal identities:
To become an effective independent practical reasoner is an
achievement, but it is always one to which others have made essential
contributions. The earliest of these relate directly to our animal
existence, to what we share in our development with members of other
intelligent species. We owe to parents . . . that care from conception
through birth and infancy to childhood that dolphins also owe to elders
who provide maternal and other care. And in human as in dolphin life
there are patterns of receiving and giving, enduring through and beyond
the life-span of particular individuals. Dolphins, having been cared for,
care for
others,
sometimes extending such care beyond their own species
to human beings. So Plutarch, in a dialogue comparing the excellences
of sea creatures to those of land animals, ascribed to dolphins . . . "that
virtue so much sought after by the best philosophers: the capacity for
disinterested friendship."36
Plutarch's text is from his dialogue "Whether Land or Sea Animals are Cleverer,"
and is spoken by an advocate for the superiority of sea animals.37 The dialogue,
however, is not intended to decide this question and ends with neither position
winning the
day.
Rather, it ends with the narrator making an anti-Stoic
point:
"For
by combining what you have said about each other, you will together put up a
good fight against those (Stoics) who would deprive animals of reason and
understanding."38
Plutarch's anti-Stoic point is not lost on Maclntyre, who uses the text to argue
for the essential animal identities of human beings: "Both dolphins and humans
have animal identities and animal histories. (But) human beings are able on
occasion to ignore or conceal from themselves this fact."39 Human animality and
the necessary grounding of morality in that animality is the central point of
Maclntyre's book, and just here a brief look into Plutarch's anti-Stoic writings
helps with why this point is so important. For Plutarch already argued against the
very error I see in
the
Catholic
Catechism's
approach to homosexuality.
Plutarch's anti-Stoic polemic perhaps reached its height in "Beasts are
Rational," a short dialogue whose protagonist is a pig speaking to Odysseus on
how mistaken the Stoics are 'to consider all creatures except man irrational and
senseless." 40 So Plutarch chides the Stoics for forgetting the animal identities of
human beings. This chiding does not appear in the three dialogues Plutarch
specifically entitled as attacks on the Stoics.41 I make a brief foray into one of
these dialogues, though, because what does appear in Plutarch's dialogue
"Against the Stoics on Common Conceptions" is a fuller argument against the
Stoics'
"stale"
notion of the good.42
Alasdair Maclntyre as Help 199
What is stale for Plutarch is the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus' (280-206 BCE)
paradoxical use of the most "common conceptions," including the concept of
nature. For Plutarch, the Stoics' understanding of nature became unhinged from
human beings' "common experiences" in the world. Plutarch quotes Chrysippus
as writing: "... the standard by which Ufe must be measured is not goods and
evils but the things in conformity with nature and contrary to it." To defend the
wise person as alone living kata physein and as essentially self-sufficient,
Chrysippus and the Stoics had to say that all other goods a person seeks, except
that of living kata physein, are indifferent
(adiaphora).
Plutarch comments wryly,
"This is the way they save common experience for men and philosophize with a
view to the common conceptions."43 In fact, Plutarch thinks the Stoics have not
saved common experience at all. They have obfuscated and undermined any
connection between the philosophically "natural" and the good of persons in the
real world. Plutarch continues:
Consider straight away, then (whether the doctrine of the Stoics itself
is
in accord with the common conceptions . .. [and is] in agreement with
nature). Is it in accord with the common conceptions to say that they are
in agreement with nature who believe indifferent
(adiaphora)
the things
that are in conformity with nature and who hold health and vigour and
beauty and strength not to be objects of choice or beneficial or
advantageous or constitutive of natural perfections and their opposites—
mutilations, pains, deformities, diseases—not to be injurious and objects
of avoidance? . . . While making life in conformity with nature a goal,
they believe the things that are in conformity to nature to be
indifferent.44
By the time the Stoic
finishes
defending this "nature" there is no content left to
it other than conforming to duty. In concluding this attack on Stoic natural law,
Plutarch summarizes and provides a metaphor. The summary: ". . . the Stoics in
their works and acts cling to the things that are in conformity with nature as good
things and objects of choice, but in word and speech they reject and spurn them as
indifferent and useless and insignificant for happiness."45 And the metaphor: to try
to Uve this morality is to be like ''those who are leaping from the ground and
tumbling down on it again."46 Stoic natural law turns out to be separated by more
than a wall from the narratives of persons in the world; it is separated from
narrative by a magic trick. All one has to do to Uve the Stoic natural law is defy
gravity.
I read Maclntyre's insistence on the moral significance of human animality as
a gloss on Plutarch's critique of the Stoics. As Plutarch critiqued the Stoic natural
law for its ungroundedness, so Maclntyre critiques the "blandly generalized
benevolence" of too much contemporary thinking about moral goodness:
200 The Annual of the
Society
of
Christian
Ethics
What such benevolence presents us with is a generalized Other—one
whose only relationship to us is to provide an occasion for the exercise
of our benevolence, so that we can reassure ourselves about our own
good
will—in
place of those particular others with whom we must learn
to
share
common
goods,
and
participate
in ongoing relationships.47
Blandly generalized benevolence is a perfect summary of
the
Stoic notion of
"disinterested friendship." What the Stoic achieves is not a friendship that has
calmed
self-seeking
by ongoing and shared
life.
If Stoic friendship is
disinterested, it has become so by considering all
human
relationships indifferent.
It
has
not
become so by finding in
them
the
movement toward
unconditional
love.
It
is an ersatz
friendship
without
affective
content
and
commitment48
It
is this ersatz Stoic account of friendship that has rendered the Catholic
tradition
incoherent on homosexuality. The account of
human
flourishing offered
by Maclntyre
offers
an alternative to Stoicism's friendship: having been cared for,
we
will
then care for others; we
will
learn to act toward them without any other
reason
than
that
they are
given
in our
care.
In
this paper's next section, I show
that
Catholicism is already moving toward this
Maclntyrean,
non-Stoic
understanding
of marriage as a committed partnership moving outward in love; this opens the
way for our reconsideration of same-sex
life
partnerships.
Vatican
Π and the
Development
of
Catholic
Thinking
about
Sexuality:
Evidence
for the
Continuity-in-Change
of
Acknowledging
the Sanctity of Same-Sex
Life
Partnerships
British theologian Kevin Kelly said a while ago that although at Vatican
Π
the
Catholic
Church articulated a profound theology of
marriage,
this was not yet a
profound theology of
sexuality.49
But there is another perspective. Without
pretending that it summarizes all Catholic thinking about marriage and
sexuality,
the
following
generalization is accurate: the twentieth century saw a Catholic
flight
from Stoicism in its sexual morality. That this
flight
has not yet affected
Catholic
thinking about homosexuality is an
indication
that
the
flight
has
not
been
far and
fast
enough.
Giuseppe Baldanza's recent historical-critical study of the development of
official Catholic thinking on marriage claims that twentieth century Catholic
thinking here comprises a '^progress in continuity" leading to an understanding of
marriage "as a state of sanctification."50 I
briefly
summarize Baldanza on the
profoundly non-Stoic development in Catholicism's understanding of marriage
and
summarize this development by connecting it to one systematic theological
view
of love.
Baldanza
says
Catholics are so used to reading their tradition on marriage and
sexuality for its "juridical-moral focus" that they are in danger of missing the
Alasdair Maclntyre as Help 201
more essential development of the church's theology of marriage in the just
completed century.51 Though Baldanza sees "a serene and positive vision of
marriage and sexuality" in the documents of the sixteenth century Council of
Trent, he says Trent's assertion that in marriage gratia perfidi
amorem naturalem
risked an "extrinsicist conception" of God's workings in the lives of married
couples.52
He highlights two twentieth century changes in Catholic teaching that
transcend this extrinsicism. First, the 1930 encyclical
Casti connubii
(usually read
only for its condemnation of birth control) should be read for its definition of
marriage as "the blending of life as a whole," a totius vitae communio.53 The
encyclical introduced into the tradition an anthropology of marriage which
"encompasses the affective and sexual life of
the
spouses." Casti connubii is the
first teaching of the Catholic Church to include sexual love in marriage's
sacramental symbolism.54 Baldanza summarizes the change:
Casti connubii signals progress with respect to scholastic theology and
that of the manuals. In a general way, there is in those earlier theologies
a distinction between matrimony as a state and conjugal acts as an
exercise of matrimony. This distinction was made to account for
marriage's concrete structure being conditioned by original sin ... .
Even St. Thomas, who accepted the three bona of
St.
Augustine, added
the distinction that these goods were excusing because they brought an
equilibrium to the conjugal act, there being a iactura (a losing of
oneself) in that act ever since the first sin.... Even though sexual acts
were considered as meritorious if performed in the state of grace and
according to the divine law, nevertheless, those acts were not
encompassed into marriage's signification.55
A second essential development in twentieth century Catholic thinking about
marriage was necessary to overcome the juridical-moral perspective that had
prevailed for centuries. It came when Gaudium et spes claimed that "conjugal
love is assumed into divine love" in marriage.56 Baldanza thinks a revolution is in
the making in the change of a Latin verb from Trent's perfidi to Vatican ITs
assumiti
The difference between the traditional perspective and that of
Gaudium
et spes can be summarized in this way: in the first, divine action is
directed at
healing,
empowering, elevating the love of the spouses, and
giving them the spiritual helps for the various duties of marriage. In the
second perspective, without excluding all that, the emphasis is that
Christ goes out to the spouses to encounter them, to assume their own
love into his spousal love for the church. And this in force of the
202
The
Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
incarnation
and
the paschal mystery that constitutes
the new and
eternal
covenant, an alliance of communion and salvation
for
all.57
In
sum, two
changes occurred
in
Catholic thinking about marriage
in the
twentieth century: first, sexual love
is
seen
to be of the
essence
of
marriage;
second, that sexual love itself is assumed into
God and
becomes sacramental
of
God's love. Certainly this
is not the
whole story
of
official Catholic teaching
about marriage
and
sexuality58
But I am not
trying
to
tell that whole story here.
Instead
I am
showing an unmistakable move
by
Catholicism away from Stoicism
in
the
last century. Something very different from Stoicism's rescuing
of
sexual
acts
by
their procreative purpose
is
underway when Gaudium
et
spes repeated
Casti
connubiVs
new
definition
of
marriage,
and
added: "Even
in
cases where
despite
the
intense desire
of the
spouses there
are no
children, marriage still
retains
its
character of being
a
whole manner
and
communion
of
life
(totius
vitae
communio)
and
preserves
its value and indissolubility."59
Where
is
this history leading?
In his
magisterial article "Love,"
in the New
Dictionary
of
Theology,
Enda McDonagh systematizes
the
point made
in
Baldanza's history. McDonagh rejects
as
"specious"
the
strict separation Anders
Nygren
and
others
see
"between
the
spontaneous unmerited creative love
of
agape
and the
responsive, desiring love
of
eros
.... In
Nygren's version such
love
of
desire turns
the
beloved into
a
means
of
satisfaction
for the
lover."60
McDonagh instead says
all
human love
is
imperfect
and
has
its
beginnings
in an
ambiguity that can open itself out
or
close itself down. Says McDonagh:
The movements
of
desire
for the
good, essential
to a
material historical
being,
can be
distinguished
in
their ambiguity
as
they open
the way to
concern
for the
good
in
itself
or
simply
to the
good
for the self.
Grace
and power
of
agape
may
develop
and
transform
the
movement
to the
good
in itself.
Eros
in
that positive sense provides
the
substrate
for
human agapeic regard with
its
responsive recognizing
of
value
in its
creative letting-be of the other. Of course,
no
human movement entirely
sheds
its
ambiguity,
so
that elements
of
self-centered
eros
persist.
It was
perhaps
the
distinction within
the
ambiguity
and the
inevitable
persistence of selfish elements which misled Nygren and others.61
From within
the
ambiguity
of all
human loving
(and not
from outside
of it),
McDonagh tells
us to
find
the
signs of a love that
is
being assumed into God.
He
offers two criteria:
The first
is the
concrete
and
inviolable value
of
the
divine other
and of
the human other.
It is
this which provokes desire, recognition
and
response whether
for its own
sake
or to
satisfy
the
desire
of the
Alasdair Maclntyre as Help 203
recognizer. And it is this 'independent,' inviolable value of the other
which exposes the movement of simple desire as
finally
inadequate
(The second is that) only in the reciprocity of communion is the other-
regarding, self-giving of
authentic
loving able to provide the ... shared
flourishing which is the thrust of the divine love for and in human
beings The communal thrust of Christian loving is already apparent
in its demand for communion, once it is clear that such a communion
cannot
be
confined to some
égoisme
à
deux
but must incorporate each in
all her or his ramifying relationships .... One imagines a God-given
love as a field of forces within which human beings seek to orient
themselves.62
McDonagh gives systematic definition to Baldanza's history: a love being
assumed into God is one that both does no harm to the beloved (that lets the
beloved be) and is joined with the beloved in a "shared flourishing" that widens
more and more to include others in the circle. What both Baldanza's history and
McDonagh's systematics highlight is that the Catholic tradition is moving further
and further away from its (Stoic derived) schematized division of marriage's "two
ends"
of procreation and interpersonal love.63 Instead of speaking of
those
"two
ends,"
an adequate theology of sexuality will talk of the two mutually dependent
and mutually enhancing characteristics of authentic love: love lets be, and it
enables the partners (and others) to be. Let McDonagh again give voice to these
two characteristics of authentic love:
Letting be and enabling to be between God and human beings, as well
as between human
beings
themselves require reciprocity for continuance
and fulfillment. To continue to give oneself in true regard for the other
requires the development of the self
also,
so that there is more to give. It
is part of the rich paradox of divine creation and giving that human
beings develop through giving, in the end through unconditional
• · 64
giving.
Again, here, love's "disinterest" is in its move toward unconditionality, not in its
indifference. We have, almost, come full circle. McDonagh's two characteristics
of
love
(letting be and enabling to be) correlate nicely to Maclntyre's two virtues
of acknowledged dependence (elementary truthfulness and just generosity).
McDonagh and Maclntyre meet to provide an account of human flourishing
adequate for a natural law recognition of the sanctity of same-sex Ufe
partnerships.
204
The
Annual of the
Society
of
Christian
Ethics
Conclusion:
Toward
a
Maclntyrean
Ethic
of Same-Sex
Life
Partnerships
I
end this paper by returning to Maclntyre's twin virtues of acknowledged
dependence
to sketch a case for acknowledging the sanctity of same-sex
life
partnerships. I take elementary tmthfulness
first
because its three qualities
(allowing the other to learn,
allowing
myself
to learn, and not withdrawing in
irony) correlate so
well
with the "letting be" that McDonagh labels the
first
characteristic of love. Both Maclntyre and McDonagh
give
homosexual persons
room
to
rest long enough in their desire to see what it might
mean,
room for what
the
tradition has called desire's needed complacency: the acknowledgment of
some "presence already of
the
good and hence (allowing) a state of rest." 65 The
biggest
problem with the Catholic
Catechism's
labeling of homosexual desire as
intrinsice
inordinata
is that it
gives
a homosexual person no room to rest, to let
desire be. It achieves "disinterested friendship" only by a Stoic leap
away
from
desire. This
cannot
be the way
to
truthfulness.
But can same-sex
life
partnerships embody elementary truthfulness? The
common
objection to (male) homosexual
sexuality's
ability to instantiate
tmthfulriess is that such sexuality almost inevitably becomes eroticism. Jean
Porter,
for example, writes that "there do appear to be some characteristically gay
lifestyles
....
(that)
are typically characterized by a celebration of
the
erotic, as
expressed through a cult of personal beauty and
the
practice of widespread sexual
activity." 66 Such eroticism would not meet the test of Maclntyre's virtue of
truthfulness: it lacks an acknowledgment of
human
vulnerability.67
Porter
herself envisions the possibility of "an argument for the naturalness of
homosexuality precisely in terms of its intelligible purpose," though she does not
develop
one.68
J. Michael Clark does develop such an argument, "oppos(ing) the
commoditization
of
our
gay male sexuality and any eroticization of peoples which
might encourage their exploitation" and "celebrating) relationships, especially
our
human coupled commitments."69 On what (non-Stoic) grounds could we
judge
such relationships to lack elementary tmthfulness?
Vatican Π acknowledged that marriage partnerships are where some human
beings learn to
live
an ever-deepening truthfulness. Their
totius
vitae
commitments
are the place where their imperfect
love
and their imperfect
lives
are gradually "assumed" into God. Why would not physically embodied
commitment
also be
the
place where homosexual persons
grow
in
love?
What of Maclntyre's second virtue,
just
generosity, and its three patterns of
affective
relationship, hospitality, and openness to urgent need?
Can
the
"enabling
to
be"
that
just
generosity
allows
be
lived
in same-sex partnerships? Just
to
phrase
the
questions in this way is helpful.
Twelve
years ago, James Hanigan tried to re-
Alasdair Maclntyre as Help 205
articulate
the
tradition's
procreative
concern
as one about the "social
import"
of
same-sex
life
partnerships:
We must ask
whether
homosexual
unions
can
and
sometimes
should
be
understood
to be graced callings oriented to the service of
God's
people
When
married
couples
engage in sexual
intercourse
they are
exercising and realizing
both
the personal and social meaning of
their
calling,
to be for one
another
and thereby to establish and secure
that
center
of life and love
around
which family develops and grows and
serves society. While homosexual couples can
certainly
mirror
some of
these
characteristics
in
their
life
together,
why is sexual activity essential
to
their
efforts? Their sexual activity undoubtedly has personal and
private
significance to
them,
but what is its social
import?
Γη
what way
does
it edify
the
community,
or
sustain
its
unity,
or
add
to
its
numbers?70
Hanigan's
"social
import"
criterion
melts
right
back
into the
procreative
principle.
But
this is exactly the move
that
Gaudium et
spes
refused to make when it
claimed
infertile heterosexual couples can
live
the same totius vitae communio
that
couples
with
children
live.71
What
Maclntyre's
three
qualities of affective relationship, hospitality and
openness
to urgent need offer the
tradition
is a
non-Stoic
understanding
of
the
outward
movement
of
love.
Thirty-five years ago
Rosemary
Haughton
responded
sharply
to a bit of Stoicism she saw in Bernhard Häring's assertion that "The
stronger and purer the sense of family is, the more is the directly sexual love of
the spouses subdued, but also the freer are their charitable impulses." Haughton
shot back:
But this "subduing" of sexual love means that the relationship is
developing naturally, growing and opening outwards as it should
do.
It is
not "subdued," but empowered, and the "charitable impulses" are the
natural and proper result of sexual love that forms and expresses and
increases a true community of
the
Spirit, which is of course
diffusivum
sui.... There is no should about it. If this human love is real then it
does come from God and lead back to him72
I am asking that we look harder than Hanigan does for the "opening
outwards" of same-sex life partnerships. A first place to see the evidence of such
opening is in adoption of children by same-sex partners. In her latest book
Haughton is busy "reirnagining the meaning of family in terms of hospitality,"
and writes that this makes it "easier to accept the existence of 'unconventional'
households...of homosexual partners .... In (such) households we can envisage
children growing up."73 My home county (Hennepin County, Minnesota—
including Minneapolis) is one of a limited number of counties nation-wide openly
206 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
encouraging homosexual persons to adopt children. Firm data are not yet
available, but anecdotal evidence suggests that single and partnered homosexual
persons make up a significant and increasing number of the adoptive parents in
my county.74 Yet, just generosity's three patterns of affective relationship,
hospitality, and openness to urgent need do not only manifest themselves in
raising children. In claiming that partnerships are where gay persons can move
toward "human love and self-realization" and away from "solitary eccentricity,
frustrated bitterness, and incapacitating anxiety," Andrew Sullivan is making a
natural law argument for the just generosity of same-sex life partnerships.75
To be sure, whether same-sex life partnerships can embody and encourage the
virtues of acknowledged dependence is not Maclntyre's concern. He is concerned
rather to challenge a "social environment" that does not support the care of its
most vulnerable and dependent members and in which "we ourselves will
continue to lead distorted lives."76 I link Maclntyre's concern to my own because
the distortion he points out is the Stoic flight from animality, the same flight I
claim
is
distorting Christian understanding of homosexuality.
Maclntyre does write this: "All happy families are not alike and only a very
great novelist could have gotten away with telling us otherwise."77 It is time for
my religious tradition, which now sees that God comes down into the lives of
married persons and assumes them into God's own life, to see that families
established by same-sex life partners can also be happy families. Not
to
do so is to
continue asking homosexual persons to live the Stoic mistake about
friendship
in
their lives; it is to ask them to find unconditional love by becoming indifferent to
their deepest desires. But indifference does not bring unconditional love; it brings
distortion. Simone Weil names both the distortion and the way out of it: "We
cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a
vertical direction. If, however, we look heavenward for a long time, God comes
and takes us up."78 The Catholic natural law tradition should celebrate the totius
vitae communio of same-sex partners, just as it celebrates it for heterosexual
partners, as a place into which God can come and "take us up" into God's own
life.
NOTES
Stephen Pope, "Scientific and Natural Law Analyses of Homosexuality: A
Methodological
Study,"
Journal
of Religious Ethics 25 (1997): 117.
2 Thomas Shannon, "Gaudium et spes: Its Prologue and Legacy," The Eighth Annual
Lecture in Catholic Studies Sponsored by the Edmundite
Trust
Fund for Catholic Studies and
Ministry at
St.
Michael's College (Colchester, VT: St. Michael's College, 1996), 11.
See my critique of this understanding of Catholic morality: McDonough, "The Church in
the Modern World: Rereading Gaudium et Spes after Thirty Years," in Anthony Cernera, ed.
Vatican
II:
The Continuing Agenda
(Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University Press, 1997), at 116-
117.
Alasdair
Maclntyre
as
Help
207
3
Jeffrey
Stout,
"Truth,
Natural
Law and
Ethical
Theory,"
in
Robert
Ρ
George, ed Natural
Law
Theory
Contemporary
Essays
(New
York
Oxford
University
Press,
1992), 84
4
Catechism
of the
Catholic
Church
(Citta del
Vaticano
Libreria
Editrice
Vaticano,
1994),
paragraphs
2358-2359
5
Maclntyre's
rejection
of
Aristotle's
"social
conservatism"
is
found
at
Alasdair
Maclntyre, A Short History of
Ethics,
reprinted
(Notre Dame, IN
University
of Notre Dame
Press,
1998) 80, his
rejection
of
Aristotle's
"metaphysical
biology"
is in Maclntyre,
After
Virtue,
revised
ed (Notre Dame, IN
University
of Notre Dame Press, 1984)196-197
6
Maclntyre,
After
Virtue,
218,225
7
Andrew
Sullivan,
Love
Undetectable Notes
onFriendship,
Sex,
and Survival (New
York
Alfred
A
Knopf,
1998), 45
Gerald
Schner says "The
appeal
to
experience
is a
negative
moment
which
alerts
us to the
unexpressed,
that
is, to the
fact
that
the
speaker
is
absent,
is not
represented
by the
conversation
partner"
Schner, "The
appeal
to
experience,"
Theological
Studies 53
(1992)
45
g
Sullivan,
"Alone
again,
Naturally
The
Catholic
Church
and the Homosexual," The New
Republic
28
(November
28,1994) 55
9
Catechism
of the
Catholic
Church,
revised
m
accordance
with
the
official
Latin
text
promulgated
by Pope
John
Paul
II (Città del Vaticano Libreria Editrice Vaticano, 1997),
paragraph 2358 Two studies summarize the addition of the obiective inordinata text to the
catechism Jack Bosnor, "Homosexual Orientation and Anthropology Reflections on the
Category Objective Disorder,'" Theological Studies 59 (1998) 60-83, and Peter Black,
"Revisions of Homosexuality The Catechism and 'Always our Children," Louvain Studies 25
(2000) 72-81
The addition of obiective inordinata is curious, given the principles expressed by Cardmal
Josef Ratzinger for what was to be included m the text "The methodology of
the
catechism was
a tricky problem Should we follow a more 'inductive' method or should we start from the
faith itself
and
argue from within its own logic, that is, testifying rather than reasoning9 In
the end, we agreed that analyses of our time always involve an element of arbitrariness and
depend too much on the point of view adopted in advance (T)he Catechism avoids tying
itself
too
much to the circumstances of
the
moment, since it aims to offer the service of
unity
not
merely synchronically but also diachronically
"
Cardinal Josef Ratzinger,
"The
Catechism of
the Catholic
Church
and the optimism of
the
redeemed "
Communio
20 (1993) 475-476
10
Garry Wills,
Saint Augustine
(New York Penguin Books, 1999), 131
11
Gregory Baum, "Homosexuality and the Natural Law," The Ecumenist 1/2 (January-
February, 1994) 33
12
Shannon,
"Gaudium
et spes Its Prologue and Legacy," 11, Stout, "Truth, Natural Law
and Ethical Theory," 84
13
Walter Kasper, Theology and
Church,
trans by Margaret Kohl (New York Crossroad
Publishing Company, 1989), 52-53, 92 Maclntyre defines natural law in a similar way "The
precepts of the natural law are those precepts promulgated by God through reason without
conformity to which human beings cannot achieve their common good
"
Maclntyre, Dependent
Rational
Animals,
111
This understanding of nature is misunderstood in Bosnor's article Bosnor thinks
Aquinas's "metaphysical anthropology" consists m "the notion of
a
stable human nature (which)
might itself contradict objectivity If one accepts Aquinas's anthropology, the data about
sexual orientation from other disciplines are irrelevant [In this view judgments about
homosexuality are] a priori declarations [m which] new evidence is irrelevant
"
Bosnor, 64-65,
80 Stephen Pope better summarizes what the Catholic tradition on nature indicates "
scientific findings and theories about the naturalness of homosexuality will be held to be
relevant to but not definitive of the kind of moral assessment of sexual activity among
homosexual that is appropriate to natural law ethics
"
Pope, "Scientific and natural law analyses
of homosexuality," 90
208
The
Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
14 Paragraph 2359. Here is the Latin editio typica text of that paragraph published five
years after the first edition of the catechism appeared simultaneously in French and Italian:
"Personae homosexuales ad castitatem vocantur. Ipsae, dominii virtutibus quae libertatem
educant interiorem, quandoque amicitiae gratuitae auxilio, oratione et gratia sacramentali,
possunt et debent ad perfectionem christainam gradatim at obfirmate appropinquare."
Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997).
The Latin "amicitiae gratuitae auxilio" actually seems to be a softening of language used
in the original versions. The Italian offers homosexual persons "il sostegno di un'amicizia
disinteressata . . . . " Catechismo della Chiesa Cattolica (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice
Vaticana, 1992). Though "gratuita" is not precisely "disinteressata" the revised English
translation has not been changed with the publication of the Latin text.
15 Pope, "Scientific and natural law analyses of homosexuality," 120.
16 Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1988), 362.
17 See William M. McDonough, "On the theoretical demands of real life: A review essay
on Alasdair Maclntyre's Dependent Rational
Animals:
Why Human
Beings Need the Virtues,"
in New Theology Review (Forthcoming, 2001).
18 Alasdair Maclntyre, Dependent Rational
Animals:
Why Human
Beings Need the Virtues
(Chicago, IL: Open Court Press, 1999), x.
19 The first term is Anne Patrick's in Liberating Conscience: Feminist Explorations in
Catholic Moral Theology (New York: Continuum, 1996) 58. It has resonances with Jean
Porter's view that natural law is an attempt to give a theological interpretation of the "pre-
conventional givens" of human life. Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law (Grand Rapids, MI:
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 216.
20 Maclntyre,
Whose Justice? Which
Rationality?,
357,251.
21 Dependent Rational Animals, 1. Maclntyre speaks of such "facts" at least four other
times in the new book, at pages, 6,64,
82,101.
22Dependent Rational Animals, 1.
23 Dependent Rational
Animals,
100,6.
24Porter, Natural and Divine Law,\A5. It is relevant to notice here that Porter's
understanding of natural law theory contains a subtlety missing in Stout's approach. Stout 's
"principles" are sui generis, where Porter's are "an interpretation." See Stout cited above in note
three.
25 Dependent
Rational
Animals,
72, 82.
26 Dependent Rational Animals, 159.
27 "(Parents') initial commitment has to be in important respects unconditional." And:
"The kind of care that was needed . . . had to be . . . unconditional care for the human being as
such." And: "What analysts are sometimes able to provide for those whose early childhood
experiences were defective is ... unqualified trust." Dependent Rational Animals, 90,100, 85.
28 Dependent Rational Animals, 109.
29 Dependent
Rational
Animals,
5.
^Dependent Rational Animals, 119, 126-129 (for just generosity), 150-152 (for
elementary truthfulness).
31 Dependent Rational Animals, 64.
32John Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians
and Canonists, Enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 46,49.
33 Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law,\9l, 199. Porter summarized Stoic natural law as
"willing acceptance of one's fate." Natural and Divine Law, 141.
I stress Stoicism's fatalism because it is especially evident in Catholic teaching on
homosexuality. Stoic fatalism is well summed up by John M. Cooper: '"Living in agreement
with nature' as the Stoics understand it involves modeling one's thoughts in deciding on and
doing one's actions, on nature's own thought in designing the world (i.e., itself), establishing the
physical laws, and causing the events that happen within it .... So one has to accept as
reasonable, and benevolent, what one often cannot know the reasons for—though, one knows,
Alasdair Maclntyre as Help 209
there are reasons. This gives emphasis to the idea that in living virtuously one lives in obedience
... to the koinos nomos or the law of
the
universe, or universal and right reason. This obedience
involves two fundamental things: (1) acting so as to pursue or avoid the things that can be seen
normally to accord with or go against our physical constitution and the social circumstances that
naturally suit beings with the constitution, and (2) pursuing or avoiding them always with the
idea that it may turn out that achieving those objectives on that occasion was not after all what
we or anyone else truly needed, because it does not fit in with the needs of the whole universe of
which we are organic parts." John M. Cooper, "Eudaimonism, the Appeal to Nature and 'Moral
Duty' in Stoicism," in Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed.
Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 277.
34 See note 26 above.
35 ". . . il faut ranger les opposants .... Le plus précieux est assurément Plutarque."
Michel Spanneut, Permanence du Stoïcisme: De Zenon à Malraux (Gembloux, Belgium:
Editions J. Duculot, 1973), 19.
36 Dependent
Rational
Animals,
82.
37 The Loeb Classical Library Edition translates the text a little differently, but with the
same sense: "To the dolphin alone, beyond all others, nature has granted what the best
philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage." Plutarch, De Sollertia Animalium, in Moralia,
vol.
12, trans. Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 473.
The relevant Greek is to philein aneu chreias uparchei. Both Maclntyre and the Loeb
translators understand Plutarch's "chreia" here to describe a property of friendship; the
friendship Plutarch describes here is one without "use, advantage, or service." See Henry
George Liddell and Robert Scott, "Chreia," in A Greek-English Lexicon, revised with a
supplement (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1968), 2002. I am grateful to my colleague
Vincent Skemp for help with the Greek text of Plutarch.
38 Plutarch De Sollertia Animalium, in Loeb, vol. 12, 479. Plutarch's translators say: "The
real point of the dialogue seems to be... that all animals of whatever provenance are
intelligent.... The last small section, while refusing to award first honors in the debate, appears
to contain Plutarch's exhortation to his pupils to continue the fight against the Stoics." Cherniss
and Helmbold, "Introduction (to Plutarch's De Sollertia Animalium)," in Loeb, vol. 12, 312-
313.
39 Maclntyre, Dependent
Rational
Animals,
82.
40 Plutarch,
Bruta
ammalia ratione uti, in Moralia, Loeb, vol. 12, 529.
41Spanneut says three dialogues of Plutarch are especially important for their anti-
Stoicism: De Stoicorum repugnantius, De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos, and Stoicos
absurdiora petis dicere. See Spannuet, 123-124. I do not claim expertise in either Plutarch or
Stoicism, and remain open to correction of my brief summary statements here.
42 ". . . everyone is said to have had his fill of arguments against the Stoic paradoxes
concerning those who alone are opulent and fair and alone are kings, citizens, and judges and
these notions are dismissed as 'stale goods.'" Harold Cherniss and O'Neil, "Introduction to
Compendium argumenti Stoicos Absurdia Poetis Ducere, in Plutarch's Moralia volume 13.2.
trans.
Cherniss and O'Neil. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1976),
608. Plutarch's dialogue Against the Stoics on Common Conceptions begins with a
declaration that the Stoics offer "stale and wilted goods." Plutarch, De communibus notitiis
adversus Stoicos , in Loeb, vol. 13.2, 671.
43 Plutarch, De
communibus
notitiis adversus
Stoicos,
in Loeb,
vol.
13.2,
693-695.
44