On the Meaning of Sex

by J. Budziszewski - published by ISI Books, 2013

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

Rarely have I read in so few pages (145) a book as thought-provoking and compelling as J. Budziszewski's On the Meaning of Sex (ISI Books). Budziszewski, a Yale Ph.D. and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, has clearly grappled for years with the sad effects of our era's shallow understanding of sex on the lives and psyches of the young people he teaches. This book represents his effort to convey the significance of the human sexes and sexual relationships to young people largely persuaded (but not satisfied) that sex is a momentarily intense but largely casual kind of pleasure. I will leave it up to the reader to decide how well he convinces.

While the author is clearly a Christian, God's presence discreetly occupies the background through interspersed quotations from the extraordinary verses of the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. In the forefront, Budziszewski presents arguments largely drawn from the natural law and set out in a finely honed use of the Socratic teaching method.

Clearly this is the method he follows at the University of Texas in Austin, where his students for the most part (judging from their reactions as recorded here) have trouble thinking clearly on a topic that does not so much concern them as obsess them.

Budziszewski's book is an attempt to restore to sex what has been tragically and shortsightedly lost by our culture, and that is "meaning."

Lacking any significance other than lust, animal instinct, and the desire for conquest, inevitably contemporary sexual relations produce the sorry results of abortion, internet pornography addiction, rocketing divorce rates, so-called same-sex marriage, plunging birth rates, high levels of illegitimate births, distribution of condoms in public schools, epidemic levels of venereal diseases, declining fertility rates. Add to all this a general debasement of morals and culture that has rendered most popular entertainment virtually unwatchable.

What was once known as obscenity now is virtually inescapable, whether experienced virtually or "live" in women walking down the hot summer streets in so little clothing that they could have been fined for public indecency only a generation ago.

Yes, sex matters, and therefore it matters if we do not get its meaning right in law and practice. Our culture treats sex as an uncontrollable urge that must be satisfied at all costs (and to do so, we need to deny or frustrate its natural purpose as a possible means to bring new children in to the world). However, previous cultures have disrupted the connection between sex, marriage, and children at their peril. Ancient Rome, for instance, accelerated its fall with the sexual deviations and marital breakdowns of a disastrous collection of Caesars. The pattern is being replicated in our own era some two millennia later.

In the first chapter of his book, Budziszewski explains why he wrote it:

Various motives commingle. A great one is gratitude because the experience of love is the great redeeming experience of my life. I am referring to all sorts of loves, the love of parents, teachers, friends. But I am especially referring to love of my wife, which reawakened me when I was lost in a solipsistic maze and had lost what Dante calls "the intelligence of love."

…Another motive for writing this book is the desire for a certain kind of beauty, the beauty of understanding.

…The final motive for writing such a book is that my eyes are so full of the pain I see around me that if I did not have the relief of writing, they would be full of tears instead.

…For the generation coming into its power I would wish the ability not to compound the mistakes that mine has made, and perhaps even the ability to discern some of the mistakes for what they are.

…Looking over the sexual landscape of our time I see a terrain of unutterable sweetness, despoiled by unmentionable pain. Yet who knows? Perhaps it is not too late to redeem the unutterable sweetness."

In Chapter 5 the author addresses "The Meaning of Sexual Love." Simply put, the author believes (as the Sinatra song had it) that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, i.e., that spouses must make a true commitment "till death do us part." As Budziszewski puts it:

…[N]ot only do the lovers make various promises that spring from love, they promise love itself. From the instant of pledging till the parting by death they vow to love and cherish. Even more pointedly, they promise this love not only if things work out, but even if they don't: "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health."

The key to all of this is the greatest of the theological virtues: charity, the only virtue from a Christian viewpoint that is eternal as it will continue in Heaven, though not expressed carnally there. The author writes:

Charity is an attitude that exults in the sheer existence of the other person… Moreover, because charity is not a feeling but an activity of the will, it is something that one decides to do, and it can be promised… To be sure, such love costs me something, makes me spend myself, even makes me want to spend myself… In its perfection, the person whom I love becomes another self to me.

Although Budziszewski never mentions Pope John Paul II in the book, he is clearly familiar with John Paul's "Theology of the Body" writings and the ramifications of "the sincere gift of self to others." In other words, love means being selfless and not selfish. And if the marital act is intentionally closed to life, it is by definition selfish, despite the "good" in the act's signification and expression of marital union and commitment until death.

Making copious use of the Divine Comedy, the author distinguishes four aspects of love.

Enchantment, the first, is the lovely emotional infatuation in which a particular man and a particular woman can't get enough of each other… Charity, the second, is the attitude that exults in the sheer existence of the other person, and which entails a permanent commitment of the will to the other's true good. Erotic charity, the third, is the mode of charity that is particularized toward a single person of the polar, corresponding sex, and consummated by the union of their bodies. Finally, romantic love… is the mode of erotic charity that enchantment imitates—though enchantment is a matter of the feelings, romantic love a matter of the will.

In his penultimate chapter, Budziszewski examines "The Meaning of Sexual Beauty." Naturally he concentrates on womanly beauty:

The beauty of a lovely woman has three elements. One element is the beauty of her humanity, of that which makes her a rational being. Another element is the beauty of her femininity or womanliness, of that which makes her a woman. The last is the beauty of her personality, of that which makes her who she is. The first is common, the second polaric, the third particular to herself… In turn, although womanliness is a single thing, I may admire it in two different ways. I may exclaim, "How wonderful it is in itself, that such creatures exist!" But as a man, I may exclaim, "How wonderful it is for such creatures as me, that such creatures exist!" The first is delight in the beauty of women per se; the second is delight in the difference, the correspondence, the complementarity of their sex to my own.

…the essential difference between men and women, the underlying reality that gives rise to all the other differences, is that men are in potentiality to be fathers, and women in potentiality to be mothers. All those things about a woman that arise from this difference, such as warmth, tender-mindedness, and sensitivity to the emotions of others, are signs of this potentiality. The more fully they are developed, the more intense and beautiful her womanhood, and the deeper its complement to manhood.

The last chapter deals with "The Meaning of Sexual Purity," probably the topmost misunderstood aspect of human sexuality. The author explains:

There two modes of sexual purity—for unmarried persons, continence; for married ones, faithfulness. If sex itself were impure, there couldn't be a married kind of purity… On the contrary, the sexual powers are good, but only when exercised by the right person, with the right person, for the right motives, in the right way, and in the right state, which is marriage.

…There is also a temptation to think of purity as though it were merely negative, a no, or not lacking character of its own. Again, not so… By living as they do, they are pursuing goods of beauty and integrity that impurity undermines and sullies.

With this magnificent book on the most confused and misunderstood issue of our age, J. Budziszewski enters the pantheon of living Christian writers such as Anthony Esolen and Peter Kreeft (disciples of the masters C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton). This book is a master of apologetics that convinces not through the authority of Scripture alone but more effectively in this undoctrinaire age through the use of reason and the natural law.

My hope is that this seminal book could be "dumbed down" sufficiently to be taught to and understood by youngsters from an appropriate early age.

First appeared in Chronicles, April 2013.

http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/on-the-meaning-of-sex.html