Biological Ethics

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Chapter 16. Human sexuality.

A. Ruiz Retegui

a) Human sexuality in general

Extent of the phenomenon

The sexed condition of man is a phenomenon of extraordinary breadth, characterising in a peculiar way all the strata and components of the complex unity which constitutes man. It is not, therefore, a mere morphological or anatomical determination, nor is it a characteristic that can be reduced to physiological categories.

In a recent court ruling on a transsexual surgery procedure, the judge declared himself incompetent to definitively determine a person's sexuality. The justification he gave for his incompetence was precisely the complexity of human existential spheres on which judgements about a person's sexuality can be based. Indeed, mere physiological considerations did not seem to be sufficient, as reasons based on psychological or social considerations often stand in opposition to them. Thus the judge concluded that he did not know whether sexuality was a matter of chromosomes, or morphological, or psychological, or social, or legal, or affective.

Indeed, sexuality affects all the wide variety of layers or dimensions that constitute the human person. The human person is male or female, and carries this condition inscribed in his or her whole being. It would be difficult to find a human dimension, from the most spiritual, psychic or psychological, to the most Materials or physiological, that is not marked by a person's own sexuality.

"Human "constant

Sexuality is not only a broad phenomenon in the constitution of the person. It is, moreover, an extraordinarily profound phenomenon, insofar as it decisively affects the way of being of the person as such. By this is meant that it is not a trivial determination, but that it reaches to the very core of humanity in what is most proper to it. This is why the sexed condition of man appears in all cultural forms as a decisive aspect of man's self-understanding. It can be said that questions related to the division of humanity into men and women constitute a human "constant".

The language of human love is so closely linked to the very being of man as such that wherever the human phenomenon is found, the expression of the sexual condition appears in one form or another, and consequently this language is perfectly understood there. Along with political power and food, the broad topic of sexuality is an issue that has always interested and understood every culture and every form of human self-understanding. It may be that some forms of cultural construction may be difficult for some cultures to understand; it may be that understanding why some issues or problems were of interest to people of distant cultures or times requires a prior understanding of the process that gave birth to those issues; and it may even be that, in some cases, we may not be able to get a fully adequate picture of them. This is perhaps because these issues are so much a part of the free activity of the people in these societies result that they are only intelligible through an understanding of this history. They are therefore unnatural questions, not closely and immediately connected with man's own condition as such, i.e. with human nature. On the other hand, dramas of passion or love poems performed in cultures that are historically or geographically distant from us are perfectly intelligible to us at their root. This is why we say that they constitute a human "constant", and that they are a "classical" reference letter , that is to say, that they deal with matters that transcend the concrete cultural determination in which they take place and, therefore, are questions that are universally significant for man.

Human depth of sexuality

Sexuality does not present itself only with the aforementioned characteristics of breadth. In addition to this breadth, sexuality has a decisive characteristic which is its importance. The basis of this importance could be found in the vehemence of the impulses that it unleashes in the person, but, ultimately written request, the density of the human significance of sexuality must be found in the link between sexuality and the empirical origin of each human person. Every man exists, takes his origin, in the exercise of sexuality on the part of his parents. The importance of sexuality is thus closely linked to the awareness of the uniqueness of the person, and depends on it. It is the awareness of the mysterious uniqueness of each person, more or less explicit, more or less expressed, that claims for its origin a mysterious and, at final, transcendent form. If each person is presented as endowed with freedom, that is to say, as an unprecedented being, unique and indeducible from previous circumstances, then the person is not a mere piece of nature, he or she is something else, and his or her origin cannot be understood as completely immersed in the mere natural processes by which the subject multiplies, and natural causes act. Of course, not all cultures have given a sufficiently adequate and accurate expression of human dignity. They may even have had very ambiguous explanations of the reality of human freedom. However, the implicit awareness of the peculiar human uniqueness is undeniable. It is precisely for this reason that the origin of the singular human being had to be endowed with a mysterious character, which transcended purely worldly causality and called for the intervention of higher forces. Since, on the other hand, it was evident that the origin of the person was caused by the exercise of sexuality, sexuality itself had to be considered as a manifestation of a transcendent force. Evidently, sexuality is a power existing in man, but it is not a power created by human rationality; hence the origin of the religious or divine consideration of the natural human forces contained in his sexual potential.

It can be argued that the divinisation of eros in some cultural forms constituted a sometimes manifestly aberrant deformation of sexuality, but it is equally clear that these deformations and aberrations were not a banal glorification of pleasure. Even the cultural exaltations of amorous passion were far from being mere materialistic hedonism. They were quite the opposite. These exaltations did not glorify man in his blind pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure was not significant in itself; if they were glorified, it was because they implicitly or explicitly recognised that the person was possessed by a transcendent power: precisely the power to which the origin of a human being refers.

The trivialisation of sexuality in today's culture

In contrast to this conception of sexuality charged with mystery and transcendence, the cultural status of our time presents a striking contrast. It is clearly not a question of the de-divinisation of eros. This de-divinisation was definitively achieved in the victory of Christianity over paganism. It is rather a question of the trivialisation that sexuality is undergoing in a progressively accelerated way in our cultural world. There are several ways in which this trivialisation is taking place. I will limit myself to two: scientific trivialisation and playful trivialisation.

Scientific trivialisation: The scientific trivialisation of sexuality goes hand in hand with the scientistic reduction of man, as a consequence of the method of positive science. By virtue of his corporeality, man is a part of the material world and, therefore, can be the object of research, experimentation, explanation and manipulation by scientific and technical rationality. By virtue of the unity of the person, alien to any dualism, human phenomena have a bodily dimension, by means of which they are not only expressible according to the scientific knowledge , but are consequently manipulable by the technique derived from this science.

It is not necessary now to consider in detail the reduction of perspective implied by the scientific method and the absence of proper meanings and natural purposes in scientific explanations. Suffice it to recall that as long as the scientific method is absolutised as a way to knowledge reality, reality will present itself to the human gaze in a curious mixture of knowledge and ignorance: knowledge exact, experienced and verifiable quantitative dimensions of reality; ignorance of any proper meaning or natural purpose. Positive science achieves a knowledge of the laws of regularity of empirical behaviour, but by methodologically ignoring any meaning of its own it necessarily refers to a different, broader, more tensioned form of knowledge towards the totality of the real, and therefore deeper. If these forms of extra-scientific knowledge are denied by scientism, the natural meanings themselves disappear, and there remains only the meaning and purpose that man imposes with his unconditioned decision, with no other limits than the possibilities found in the material, neutral of signification, offered to him by Science.

It is clear that in this perspective human sexuality is deprived of its importance and transcendence. The phenomena which refer to sexuality can be described by science, with all precision and accuracy, but from this point of view there can no longer be that veneration which we found even in more primitive forms of culture. That there has been an impoverishment here, need not be insisted upon. It is not simply a deepening that puts the human phenomenon of sexuality in its proper perspective. It is about a change of perspective that methodically, and therefore radically, ignores any meaning that transcends the scientific knowledge .

Sexuality is thus a set of biological phenomena with particular operational properties which offer scientific and technical possibilities from a wide range of perspectives, i.e. scientists and technicians are given the ability to manipulate and use human material in their sexuality to do with it as they wish. These possibilities, which until recently were relatively limited, now appear to be of a disturbing breadth: from genetic manipulations to the most diverse fragmentation of the natural processes of human generation and the use of the corresponding human substances for various commercial purposes.

In the scientific perspective, sexuality is reduced to a biological phenomenon which does not essentially differ from the assimilation of nitric nitrogen by plants, or of proteins by animals. The only difference concerns the possibilities offered to technical reason. With scientism, sexuality, like man and the world itself, has lost its mystery, but not through a profound unveiling, but through an a priori and voluntarist refusal.

To defend Science from the assault of scientism requires a particularly vivid awareness of the limitation imposed by method, and of the consequent risk that method breeds a supposedly all-embracing mentality. In other words, it requires a constant and intense exercise of knowledge at the highest level. Today more than ever, the scientist needs to be a man.

Playful trivialisation: Playful trivialisation depends, to a certain extent, on scientific trivialisation and is a consequence of it. Technical interventions in the processes of generation, and in particular the development of contraceptive pharmacology, allow an almost total separation between generation and the use of sexual Schools , both bodily and affective. The question of abortion is a warning that this separation has not been completely achieved. But the effort to impose it sample shows the extent to which this separation is intended to be total. Sexuality has thus come to be divided into two practical aspects: on the one hand, the capacity to engender, and on the other, completely separate, the capacity to enjoy specific pleasures, detached from any other human significance. The intensity and attractiveness of these pleasures can be used at will as one of the most powerful elements determining human behaviour. But it is no more than an element of the "physiology" of society which, insofar as it is known and masterable, can be as useful for the mastery of people as metallurgy is useful for the construction of artefacts.

Undoubtedly, the increasing eroticisation of society, the unbridled prochasticity, the impudence almost imposed by fashion, in many cases, have nothing in common with some aberrant forms in primitive societies. In primitive societies, these manifestations reflected a transcendent vision of sexuality. Nowadays, this reference letter to mystery has disappeared and there remains only an impoverished vision of sexuality as a capacity for enjoyment and, derivatively, as source of domination by those who have in their hands some form of power over speech and forms of conduct.

Human sense of sexuality

As noted in commenting on the scientistic reduction, sexuality is not an isolated case in terms of the loss of meaning. Nor has playful trivialisation affected sexuality exclusively. The basic question is precisely the relationship with reality and, above all, the relationship with man's own humanity, that is to say, with man as such, as a person. It is this relationship that determines the importance or seriousness of this trivialisation when it affects dimensions of human existence.

It is evident, on the other hand, that in the complex unity of man there are various dimensions which affect the person himself in different ways. The value or dignity of the person is expressed, or involved, in a different way in each of its dimensions. In a certain sense they are incommensurable, but it is also clear that there are dimensions that involve more deeply the very being of the person. Therefore, in order to see the importance of each of these dimensions and, consequently, to detect the particular gravity of their violation, it is necessary to adequately grasp the way in which this dimension involves the dignity of the person. This means that it is necessary to carefully consider each of these dimensions as a dimension of the human person, that is, to study these existential dimensions as expressions of the very being of the person and as a concrete articulation of the life of an absolutely dignified being.

On sexuality, descriptive programs of study and phenomenological and cultural analyses abound almost excessively. Here, too, the onslaught of scientism and its passion for describing facts, disregarding all evaluative considerations, can be felt. But this basically leads to disregarding whether something is meaningful or not, i.e. to abandoning the significance or interest of questions to the emotional sphere or to cultural relevance. Descriptions of the phenomenon of sexuality, if they are made abstract, i.e. detached from the source of significance, can constitute scientific material that is of no more interest than a "scientifically" ordered and rigorous collection of facts whose significance is in no way scientifically founded.

It is now necessary to enter into the study of the human significance of sexuality. We will then be able to answer the questions which, in this respect, are the decisive ones: in what way does the trivialisation of sexuality entail a trivialisation of the person? Or, to put it positively, in what way is the absolute dignity of the person expressed in the human dimension of sexuality?

This is not primarily a moral reflection, but an anthropological consideration. To the extent that the truth of man is a challenge to freedom, these reflections will lead to properly moral questions.

b) Sexuality as a dimension of giving

Sexuality as a dimension of peculiar giving

The abundant and detailed analyses and descriptions that phenomenology offers us about sexuality show it to be an extraordinarily complex reality, but at the same time profoundly unitary. It is not a matter of dispersed phenomena, but of profoundly coherent ones, since they are like the articulation of a dimension of donation staff. Sexuality can be defined, at a still very general level, as that determination of the human person by virtue of which the person is capable of a specific interpersonal self-giving. Sexuality is, in fact, a dimension of donation, of peculiar donation. This gives us a first warning of the human importance of sexuality, for self-giving is not an accessory, secondary or derivative aspect, but the most proper aspect of the person as such.

If sexuality is a peculiar endowment of the person to give himself in a specific way, it is necessary to consider carefully how the gift of sexuality is involved in the gift that is proper to man as such. Although it is linked to this radical human dimension, it is not identified with it, since it is a gift or quality of the person that is ordered to a peculiar, characteristic gift.

The peculiarity of the mutual self-giving of which two persons are capable by virtue of their sexual qualification as male and female is evident in general, and obviously distinct from the capacity for self-giving that persons have by virtue of their own human condition. For an articulate and precise determination of the donation proper to sexuality, a description, even a cursory one, of the donation staff proper to the same human condition is required.

Donation as a human dimension

Human beings as such are capable of mutual self-giving. This self-giving is expressed in all the horizontal dimensions or component strata of the human being, from the most intellectual to the most bodily gestures. Its core lies in the will, insofar as it is through this spiritual power that people are capable of affirming the being of the other person. The love staff proper to man, as such, expresses itself nuclear in the joyful affirmation of the very being of others: to will in the purest form of love staff is the love of benevolence, which is distinct from the love of domination or the love of concupiscence. The love of benevolence is like the reflection of Creator Love, which affirms the human creature for its own sake, and turns upon it, giving it a share in its own good. This is why benevolent love, good love between people, cannot be conceived as a neutral affirmation of their existence, but necessarily connotes a self-giving staff. And for that very reason it includes the signs of a union staff in the bodily aspects or strata of the person. Love between people has a sphere, or a language of its own, in the field of bodily expressions, from the gaze or the smile, to the forms of physical union, by the contact of bodies, by the inclusion in the staff sphere of the home, and so on. There is a rich phenomenology that describes in great detail this language of the body, in which bodily gestures acquire a meaning that transcends purely mechanical significance and reaches a properly human level. Thus, even when the mechanical significance of a slap is identified with the friendly slap, we do not identify its meaning.

Interpersonal forms of love cannot be considered only as wanting the best for people, but as wanting the best for the person himself. It would not be good love to affirm a person's being in a status of misery, hunger or ignorance: love that affirms the person implies love for his or her truth, for his or her fulfilment: "I love you" does not simply mean "how good it is that you exist", but implies "I love you happily". In this sense, love truly staff includes the desire for the fullness of the person loved and, insofar as that fullness can be considered as a universal - for there is a peculiar "truth of man" in universal - loving a person better can mean wanting the best for that person.

This donation, submission from a doctor to his patients or from a teacher to his disciples, or more generally, submission from a person to his friends, is limited only by the physical possibilities of space and time.

Characteristics of sexed donation

The capacity for self-giving which men have by virtue of their sexed condition is expressed in a form of love which is altogether peculiar. This peculiarity does not consist in the fact that it is addressed to the person in his or her singularity, for, as we have seen, this is proper to truly human love. Nor does this peculiarity consist in the mere fact that it involves corporeality. The specific love of sexuality cannot be expressed exclusively by stating that it is a love that includes singularity staff and corporeality.

In order to characterise the form of human self-giving expressed in sexualised love, it is necessary first of all to have recourse to a description of this form of love as we find it in the realm of human life. Secondly, it will be necessary to go to resource to the ontological and anthropological foundations of this peculiar form of love, which we could call love of infatuation or sexualised love.

Exclusivity: The first grade in which the love of infatuation expresses itself is its peculiar exclusive character. The phenomenon of "jealousy", although it may have a pathological dimension, is rooted in the very nature of sexual love. Certainly, one sometimes speaks of jealousy when referring to the feeling of a student who is hurt because his teacher pays more attention to a fellow pupil, or when referring to the artist who suffers because another has managed to capture the public's favour. But in these cases we should speak more properly of vanity, and only figuratively of jealousy. Jealousy in sexual love points to a property that appears to be intimately claimed by that love that does not only ask to be staff but to be exclusive. Thus, sexual love between two persons appears as a form of donation by virtue of which one of the persons belongs exclusively to the other, and to want in the form of sexual love for one of them by a third person appears as an unjust intrusion.

This implies a radical distinction with respect to non-sexual human love. In fact, although the demands of love may cause a certain limit to the "issue of friends", non-sexual human love does not impose exclusivity; indeed, it demands speech of friendship. Any person pretends, in a certain way, that his friends, or, in general, the people he loves, are also loved by his friends, and suffers when he notices the contempt or indifference of others towards his friends. Sexed love, on the other hand, creates a kind of community of love which is naturally reduced to the two persons of opposite sex.

Fertility: The second grade is reference letter to fertility. It would certainly be a reductionist and functionalist vision of sexuality to convert it simply as a means of reproduction. Sexuality is not only a means that can be understood, and consequently regulated, from the end. Sexuality, as will be explained in these pages, is a human dimension: its measure comes not from its efficacy but from the person; its rule is not instrumental but staff. Nevertheless, there is something profound that is expressed in saying that sexuality is a means of reproduction, because the human dimension of sexuality institutes a form of submission that opens itself to the gift of life as an expansion of its own dynamic. It is not only that the sexed condition of bodies gives the capacity and inscribes the instincts to carry out the acts that make possible the birth of new life. The reality is deeper and affects in a more profound way the very persons who give themselves in their sexed condition. The child that is born is not seen by its parents as a mere biological product or consequence of their cohabitation, but truly and properly as the fruit of their love. This warning is not given exclusively a posteriori, but is present from the beginning. Sexed love between a man and a woman carries with it the implicit desire, or at least the prospect, of fertility. A love that explicitly closes this perspective would be an incomplete love. The love of falling in love reaches its full dimension when it also explicitly includes an openness to the gift of life. The suffering of an infertile marriage is a sample that, despite biological or physical bodily difficulties, human love is the sphere of generation of new life. The experiences of this reality could be multiplied, but suffice it to recall the phrases that are sometimes used to designate the person who is the object of this particular love: "I love you", "I want you to be the mother/father of my children", which is like saying: "I love you" is the same as saying "with you I give myself to beget life".

Sexuality and corporeality

Corporeality as a condition of possibility of fecundity: The openness to the transmission of life presupposes, as its biological condition, a certain bodily endowment. We could say that just as the existence of the laughing muscle is a condition of possibility for the human smile, so also the organic endowment of the organs disposed for reproduction are the condition of material possibility for the fecundity of sexed love. But to explain the profound nature of human fecundity in simple terms of physiology would be as grotesque as trying to explain the profound meaning of the smile on a human face in simple terms of the contraction of the laughing muscle. Certainly, the scientific description of human fecundity is far more complex and interesting than the elementary description of a muscular movement, but that is only a possibility of misunderstanding about which we must be wary.

The question, then, is to determine the human meaning of the bodily union proper to the sexed body and open to generation. We find this human meaning in the fact that, as we have said, the donation staff becomes fruitful through the mediation of corporeality, which is the condition of possibility, in the same way that the joy of the soul is expressed in the face staff through the material mediation of the appropriate muscle.

Priority of meaning of fecundity: Human sexuality implies fecundity, and it is this fecundity of human love which gives meaning to the existence of bodily sexuality. The complex constitution of the sexuality of the human body can only be properly understood from the perspective of the loving donation proper to the sexed condition of the human person, and not the other way round. The bodily phenomena receive their proper human significance from the dimension of self-giving.

Here again a warning is called for with respect to scientism, which is precisely the explanation of all phenomena from the point of view of corporeality considered, moreover, in its simple quantifiable material dimension. The scientistic perspective tends to see sexuality from materiality; it tends, philosophers would say, to conceive of formality as an addition or mere consequence of subject, and, therefore, to understand meanings as secondary or derived, i.e. sexuality would be a reality, ultimately written request, corporeal, and all meaning would have to be deduced from physiological components or processes.

Proper meaning of bodily gestures: Human sexual self-giving is not exclusively a bodily matter, but its openness to the transmission of life includes the body in particular as a condition of possibility for its fulfilment. Corporal expression is not exclusively a matter of sexual love, but it requires its own characteristic bodily expressions. The expressions of sexual love in corporeality receive their significance not simply from the fact that they are manifestations of self-giving staff, nor from the fact that they are expressions of love staff singular, but from the fact that they are the fulfilled expression of self-giving staff fruitful. It is precisely for this reason that the bodily displays of affection staff sexed acquire their proper significance in relation to the bodily union proper to generation. The bodily gestures of properly sexualised affection are always a part of, a path, an ordination to the fruitful bodily union.

The endowment of the sexed human body for fertility is very complex and is not limited to the bodily organs immediately available for generation: the human body is not sexed exclusively by its genitality. The extent of sexual dimorphism is only one sample of the tenacity with which sexuality is inscribed in the human body. This amplitude of the sexual characterisation of the body originates a great amplitude in the possibilities of specifically sexual gestures that are an expression and vehicle of sexualised affection. But all this very wide range of sexually specific affective gestures only attain their significance from the perspective of full bodily union. The sexed bodily gestures - the caresses or kisses proper to the sexed condition - can be described in their mechanical occurrence as concrete and closed facts, but human significance cannot be obtained in this way. The only significance that they receive from the complete bodily union is either its simulation or its initiation. The possible interruption is due to their material extension, not to their significance, which is unitary and unique. The sixth commandment in its old formulation, "thou shalt not commit fornication", was fully expressed and had the same material extent as in the new formulation, "thou shalt not commit impure acts".

Human dimensions affected

Human sexuality could be described as a dimension of human self-giving characterised by its fruitfulness. Sexuality is a human dimension of fruitful self-giving. This makes that in the human dimension of sexuality, corporeality has a peculiar and in a certain way principal importance: human corporeality is involved in sexuality in a determinant way. This does not mean that sexuality is an exclusive quality of the body like weight or height. Sexuality is a properly human dimension that affects all layers of being and is linked to the very being of the person as such: from intelligence and will, which are determined by peculiar aspects in their knowing and loving, to the more properly bodily dimensions.

What is decisive is that all the determinations that sexuality inscribes in the human person have, directly or indirectly, reference letter to corporeality, and more explicitly to the fruitful bodily donation; or, in other words, sexuality is a peculiar dimension of the human person precisely as a person, who exists in a bodily and fruitful way. We thus connect again with sexuality as a means of reproduction, but now we will reach further implications of this reality. Sexuality is so strongly inscribed in corporeality because sexuality is the principle of plurality.

c) Sexuality and creation

Human generation as procreation

Human fecundity makes sexuality appear as closely related to the creative love by which God has a direct creative intervention in every person who is born. Precisely in order to account for the absolute dignity of the human person, it is not enough to say that man is the only creature who has been willed for himself. It is absolutely necessary to add that each person is the object of an explicit act of Love that constitutes him or her from his or her deepest being something absolutely willed by God: this implies that each human person is individually created, is result of an individual creative act. This is what the Christian tradition affirms when it says that every human being has an individual soul created immediately by God. The Christian dogma of the creation of the individual soul of each person allows us to see a close relationship between sexuality and God's creative love. Christian anthropology, alien to all dualism, prevents us from the simplistic explanation that affirms that the parents generate the body while God creates the soul. The term of human generation is not the body but the person of the child: if the parents did not beget the child, we could not speak of generation. That is to say, the parents do not beget an animal being who will receive a spiritual soul created by God; the parents actually cause man who nevertheless receives his human determination through the creative intervention of God. It could be said that the parents arrange the subject in such a way that they materially cause the soul created directly by God, while the soul, being created directly by God, formally causes the arrangement of the subject. For this reason it can properly be said, not figuratively, that the parents who beget a child participate in the creative power of God: human generation is properly called pro-creation.

Sexuality and transcendence

The unique contest with God that the parents have in engendering the child allows us to characterise sexuality as that human dimension by virtue of which two human persons, characterised by sexuality as male and female, become capable of participating in the creative power of God who creates. The covenant is between two poles: on the one hand God and on the other hand the parents who constitute a single element in this covenant. It is not therefore a peculiar concurrence of three - God, the father and the mother - but, as we have said, of two elements, one of which is the unity constituted by the father and the mother by virtue of their sexual self-giving.

The unity constituted by the father and the mother in their fruitful union is thus like the efficacious symbol of the love with which God intervenes in creating the soul of each person.

In any case, it is decisive to understand that, precisely because it is a real symbol of God's creative love, the union which man and woman bring about by virtue of their sexual condition cannot be fully intelligible except at reference letter to God. This is not to say that, as long as an explicit knowledge of creative love is not attained, sexual union remains opaque and meaningless for the human knowledge , as a reality of which only its material occurrence can be attained. The fruitful sexual union is not a reality inaccessible to human reason, it is not a lack of significance that it presents, but rather the opposite, an excess of content, an excessive richness that cannot be exhausted by the knowledge that stops at a closed consideration of the pure sexual donation in itself. There is such a disproportion, such an imbalance between the facts of the union in its physical occurrence, on the one hand, and the person of the child, with absolute dignity, which is caused, on the other hand, that it can only be properly understood if this imbalance can be levelled out. This can only be achieved: either by denying the dignity of the person begotten, and the child is reduced to a "physiological product of gestation", or by recognising that the act of generation itself involves transcendent forces that go beyond purely mechanical or physical processes.

The Christian tradition, by virtue of a supernatural revelation, establishes with unsuspected depth the nature of this transcendent reference letter , but it can by no means be said to be a merely gratuitous affirmation. The news that Christian faith gives us about the contest between God and parents is a supernatural clarification of what is detectable by reason in its natural exercise. When primitive forms of culture present manifestations of divinisation of eros, they are showing us that men, even in situations of very rudimentary knowledge , are inclined towards the second of the possibilities indicated. In this sense it can be affirmed that these cultural manifestations of divinisation of sex constitute a vague and imprecise intuition of what revealed faith communicates to us.

On the other hand, when a rationalism closed a priori to transcendence denies any explicit reference letter to God the creator, the cadence of thought, according to its own logic, will inevitably lead to the first possibility. No matter how solemnly the dignity of the rights of the person is affirmed, the force of scientistic logic will end up qualifying these declarations as a foreign element in the worldview of the culture that science creates, and the person at birth will end up being considered an element of nature just like any other product subject to technical domination.

Radicality of sexed donation

Since creation is an act of divine love, the concrete person is essentially a fruit of love, an inhabitant of the realm of love, someone who is essentially sustained, who sinks his deepest ontological roots in love and from it draws strength, air for living and his very life, his very existence. But this means that its empirical origin must be the love of its parents. Indeed, sexuality does not exclusively endow man with biological mechanisms for material reproduction; sexuality inscribes in man a structure of fruitful loving self-giving. Through it, man and woman are enabled to collaborate, by means of loving self-giving, with the creative love of God in order to give birth to a man, to a fruit of love.

In the first place, it must be pointed out that it is not an individual person who participates in God's creative power, but the peculiar community constituted by two persons by virtue of their sexual condition, and, moreover, this community attains its participatory efficacy in the act of engendering. The specifically sexual act of bodily union ordered to generation is thus of decisive importance for understanding the multiple dimensions of human community based on sexuality. Here again the importance and depth of that definition of sexuality as a means of reproduction appears, but now we are in a position to see its implications more fully.

Indeed, if we ask ourselves what it is that man and woman properly do when they unite bodily in order to generate, a material, mechanical or scientific description would not be a satisfactory answer. Such an explanation cannot be sufficient because it says nothing about the relationship between the fact whose meaning is being asked and the source of real significance which is the human person. When we ask what a man and a woman do when they unite bodily, we are asking about the human content, about the affection for the person. The appropriate answer can only be: they make a peculiarly full, total gift of their own person. In that union a form of communion is instituted by virtue of which each of the persons gives himself submission fully to the other, to the point of forming an express communion, which is a symbol of the power of God's creative love.

Evidently, in the process of generation there is a material speech that is observable with the observational methods of the subject, but it would be a reductionism to affirm that when two people, man and woman, unite bodily, the donation that exists is simply a material donation of gametes; the human condition of living being that exists in a sexed body allows that, through these bodily gestures, a peculiar donation of the person itself is carried out.

Uniqueness of the sexed donation: The case is thus radically different from any donation by which something is submission possessed. It is essentially different from the donation, also peculiar, by which a person may donate an organ for transplantation to another person. In it, the person, in donating a part of his body, does not give something he has, for man does not have or possess his body, but is it. However, the donation of an organ is only the donation of an organ, and not the donation of oneself. He may express the donation of himself by the generous and even heroic love that induces him to do so, but this donation does not presuppose, does not express, does not in itself realise the donation staff, it is only a consequence or sign of it.

However, sexed bodily donation is in itself the realisation of donation staff.

The peculiar role that corporeality has in the sexual submission makes it totally different from the submission from one person to another according to the fundamental dimension of openness that we have seen before. Certainly, corporeality counts in the submission of the teacher to his pupils, but it is not expressed in it: materiality is only the vehicle of speech of realities that are not this concrete corporeality, that is why it can be given to many without being spent. However, the self-giving of sexuality is essentially singular, because the very medium and substance of self-giving is the person in his or her sexualised corporeality, and corporeality is precisely the principle of sexuality. Hence, a bodily submission that is not at the same time submission staff would itself be a lie, because it would consider the body as something merely external, as a thing available and not as the reality itself staff.

Therefore, we can affirm that sexuality inherently inscribes in the person a structure of donation to the person of the opposite sex in his or her singularity staff and in order to a form of union staff which, potentially including sexual bodily union, is the principle of human life. Derivately it also presupposes forms of openness which are a consequence of it: the relationship of maternity and paternity are forms of openness staff, based on the sexed structure of the person, which cannot be reduced to mere fundamental self-giving, but derive directly from sexuality, but are not the primary and direct form of self-giving, which remains inscribed in the person as male or female.

Because sexuality is a structure of self-giving inscribed in the person in order to collaborate with God's creative act, the self-giving proper to the sexual condition does not end at the mutual submission between man and woman. If sexual union is a peculiar and proper image of creative love, the parents of the new human being in some way signify or reflect, make God's creative love present in an experiential way. For this reason the home, and more specifically maternal love, is recognised as an existential sphere proper to existence staff, especially in the time of the maturing of the person.

Meaning of the sexed donation

It is the human significance of sexual union that gives the core topic of how these acts challenge freedom, i.e. how the human person is involved in these acts.

We have already said that this significance is expressed in terms of donation staff. However, the bodily reality of the act requires further analysis. The fact that a specific bodily union includes such a full donation staff calls for a peculiar ethical evaluation of the organs arranged for that union, for in them it is expressed in a particularly dense form of human significance. If sexuality is inscribed in the whole body, in the organs arranged for the union, sexuality is more intensely condensed. And since sexual bodily self-giving is so humanly significant, it follows that the requirement of fidelity to the truth of the person has a special expression. The human sense of modesty is inscribed in the whole body, not in its pure dimensions Materials, but in its human significance; that is why modesty has always been considered to be particularly demanding with regard to these organs. These bodily organs are not to be considered as mere producers of cells for reproduction, or as the material medium that facilitates the physical union of these cells. Their human reality is union staff. It is precisely for this reason that the bodily union is inseparable, in its full dimension, as the realisation of union staff, and that same union insofar as it biologically makes possible the fecundity proper to the community. It is inseparable, we have said, and by this we mean that the real possibility of mechanical separation by virtue of the mastery of technology entails a violation of the human meaning of this act and, therefore, a violation of the person. Because of the materiality of the process, a fragmentation becomes possible: that is to say, it is possible to separate sexuality from generation and exercise from genitality and fertility, but this separation requires an effective factor that directly breaks up what is in itself a unique process, which constitutes a unity of human and therefore moral significance.

The bodily submission is an essential element of the beginning of human life. To strip the generative School of its bodily submission dimension, in artificial fertilisation - or, as it is sometimes euphemistically called, "assisted fertilisation" - would mean making generation independent of the peculiar submission that is inscribed in the sexed dimension, which is submission staff singular. Therefore, providing cells for a possible generation is essentially indistinguishable from donating blood to someone who needs it to survive. It is not enough that this donation is made "out of love" - which could be admitted in many cases. The point is that what in that respect is donated out of love is only a product of one's own body, and would not be an exercise of donation staff peculiar as a man or a woman. And it would certainly not be acceptable to claim that the bodily submission has been performed on other occasions, for this is not a submission in the abstract, but a submission which, because it includes materiality, not only transcends time but also includes the singular acts contained therein: the concreteness of the acts is not insignificant for human value, and the acts cannot be dispensed with by virtue of a supposedly participatory purpose. In that case, the bodily, sexual submission would have no meaning of its own and would be confused with any subject of "generous" giving in which one can give oneself to many.

Likewise, to use these organs in which bodily donation is expressed indiscriminately, with the aim of obtaining the pleasure inherent to sexual union, is a disorder in one of the most peculiar and humanly meaningful dimensions of the body and therefore a serious attack on the dignity of the person, with an ethical qualification that is exclusively its own, distinct from that which protects or expresses other human dimensions of the body.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the openness to the special gift which sexuality inscribes in the person is result of the divine design to will man not alone or in isolation, but in the constitution of a human family. Through sexuality, the singular person is inscribed in the chain of generations and human multiplication. It is not surprising that, having lost the transcendent sense and having reduced the person who is born to a pure product of the blind processes of physiology, the positivist mentality views the growth of humanity with dismay and suspicion. It is not only a matter of reservations about the fear of a future overpopulation of the earth - such "foresight" contrasts too much with the waste of non-recoverable natural resources: it would be a suspiciously partial generosity - it is a matter of final that those who do not have a deep sense of the good of life, and reduce it to physical life, lack the courage to bring new beings into this materially threatened world.