The Natural Ordering to Marriage as Foundation and Norm for Sacramental Marriage

41 The Thomist 77 (2013): 41-69 THE NATURAL ORDERING TO MARRIAGE AS FOUNDATION AND NORM FOR SACRAMENTAL MARRIAGE PAUL GONDREAU Providence College Providence, Rhode Island G RACE PERFECTS NATURE, as the oft-quoted Thomist adage goes. If this is true anywhere, it is nowhere more so than in the case of marriage, an institution that belongs to the order of nature as owing to the natural law and which Christ, wishing to grant it its proper share in the economy of salvation, has at the same time elevated to the level of a sacrament. In short, all that belongs to marriage as a natural institution belongs also to sacramental marriage, even if this latter far exceeds the former in what it signifies and in its superadded elements. The intelligibility of sacramental marriage can be retained, then, only with reference to natural marriage as its norm and foundation. More specifically, since sacramental grace—which St. Thomas Aquinas calls the res tantum of the sacraments—has a twofold aim, namely, to heal and to elevate or divinize, we can understand exactly what is being healed and divinized in the particular case of the sacrament of matrimony only if we first gain a sufficient grasp of the proximate and natural ends of marriage (its natural teleology). In what follows, and taking my chief inspiration from Aquinas, I propose to accomplish this on two counts: first, by arguing that marriage (natural marriage) comprises the joint goods of procreation and unitive love as its proximate and proportionate natural ends; and, second, by arguing that the healing and divinizing power of the sacrament of marriage (the res tantum) targets these same joint goods, since both suffer acutely under the PAUL GONDREAU 42 1 This comes from the University of Notre Dame, whose Gender Relations Center, in its 2009 brochure, answers the question “What is sexuality?” with the quoted statement. This brochure boasts that Notre Dame’s Gender Relations Center “is the first and only office of its kind within collegiate student affairs nationwide.” burden of sin. In a word, I shall argue that Christ, wishing that married partners attain the happiness in marriage they desire, has given the natural institution of marriage, of which he is likewise the author, a share in the fruits of his redemption, inasmuch as the grace of the sacrament of matrimony transforms this institution’s intrinsic ordering to procreation and unitive love. Throughout, I shall attempt both to ground myself in the thought of Aquinas and to offer a faithful adaptation of the Dominican Master’s thought. I. MARRIAGE AS A NATURAL, PROCREATIVE-UNITIVE INSTITUTION Human sexuality shares in a special way in our hylemorphic constitution as body-soul composite beings. First and foremost, it is primarily as embodied that we own a sexed nature in the first place. Indeed, the very basis of the sexual differentiation between male and female, obviously the distinguishing mark of sexuality as such, is our animal bodiliness, as seen in the simple biological fact that the sex chromosomal complement determines one’s sex. In brief, without our bodiliness, without our animality, we have no truly satisfactory way of explaining the male-female sexual complement. Human sexuality implies embodied altereity, embodied complementarity. While this point may seem incontrovertible, especially as we consider it in light of the entire animal kingdom, we should not take it for granted, since one would search in vain for references to human bodiliness in certain Cartesian-styled definitions of human sexuality that are in circulation today (e.g., “Sexuality refers to an intimate aspect of identity through which human beings experience an understanding of self and connectedness to others, the world, and God”).1 The point holds as well for those well-intentioned Catholic moralists who are in good standing with the Church but who, representing the “personalist” school of thought, locate the ground of human sexuality not in our embodied animality per se, but in the Trinitarian relations; NATURAL AND SACRAMENTAL MARRIAGE 43 2 This is a very brief summary of what Aquinas argues in De ente et essentia, cc. 5-6. For a fuller treatment of this, see my “The ‘Inseparable Connection’ between Procreation and Unitive Love (Humanae...