The Personal Significance of Sexual Reproduction

615 The Thomist 79 (2015): 615-39 THE PERSONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SEXUAL REPRODUCTION CHAD ENGELLAND University of Dallas Irving, Texas “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying ‘I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.’” (Genesis 4:1, RSV-CE) N ONE OF THE MORE colorful incidents recorded in philosophical biography, on October 15, 1634, Descartes fathered a child with a maid named Helena Jans.1 He made notations that day predicting the conception of a child as a result of the act, and nine months later his daughter Francine was born. His adventure in biological experimentation had a lasting personal significance, and the untimely death of Francine at the age of five proved to be a cause of great sorrow for her devoted father.2 In the Third Meditation, Descartes says that parental efficient causality is limited to the production of the body. He writes that “insofar as I am a thinking thing, [my parents] did not even make me; they merely placed certain dispositions in the matter which I have always regarded as containing me, or rather my mind, for that is all I now take myself to be.”3 In this way, the personal significance of his fathering Francine lacks theoretical support in his writings. He was merely one of two biological contributors to Francine’s 1 A. C. Grayling, Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius (New York: Walker Publishing Co., 2006), 149-50. 2 Ibid., 153. 3 Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 35. I 616 CHAD ENGELLAND impersonal biology. In what follows, I wish to overcome this dualism of the personal and the biological and to spell out the personal and composite meaning of human sexual reproduction and, in doing so, explain why we are justified in speaking of human sexual reproduction in personal terms as procreation. The two interrelated beliefs that denigrate the significance of human sexual reproduction are (1) thinking of human biology in impersonal terms and (2) thinking that parents are the cause of the body and not the soul.4 I argue that, rightly understood, human biology and divine creation in fact enrich the personal significance of parental causality. In making my case, I restrict my consideration to the meaning of sexual reproduction. I do not discuss the meaning of sexuality in its own right, nor do I discuss related topics such as love and marriage. Looking at reproduction, I cast a backward glance at the sexual act that led to it. While reproduction has ethical ramifications, I limit this article to an investigation of its intrinsic meaning as an issue for philosophical anthropology: What is distinctive about human sexual reproduction that warrants us calling it “procreation”?5 4 In a footnote to a text originally published in 1927, Dietrich von Hildebrand links these two challenges to the personal meaning of human reproduction. He writes that the personal meaning of procreation “is not affected by the fact that only in his body is man the product of union between the semen and ovum; the soul, on the contrary, is always God’s immediate creation. For it remains true that the parents procreate a human body destined for the most intimate union with an immortal soul, and from which it actually receives its ‘form’ (anima forma corporis; the soul is the form of the body).” See In Defence of Purity: An Analysis of the Catholic Ideals of Purity and Virginity (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1935), 26. In the present article I aim to spell out a solution to the apparent draining of parental causality that comes from biology on the one hand and the immediate creation of the soul on the other hand. 5 Among contemporary authors, I have benefitted especially from reflections on the nature of the human person by Kenneth Schmitz, Leon Kass, and Robert Sokolowski. See Kenneth Schmitz, The Texture of Being: Essays in First Philosophy, ed. Paul O’Herron (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007); idem, Person and Psyche (Washington, D.C.: The...