Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: A Catholic and Antitotalitarian Theory of the Body

Chapter 4: The Law of the Flesh

Chapter Four THE LAW OF THE FLESH For ultimately the priority of the mystery of Christ over the mystery of the Antichrist is the real inner meaning of all things. —E. Przywara, SJ1 The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom. —VS, para.  It has been a source of some concern for a long while now how exactly to ground Thomas’s natural law theory most effectively.2 It is commonly thought that once Thomas’s biological teleology, inherited from Aristotle, became nothing short of an embarrassment, his natural law theory became unmoored and fatally weakened. That Thomas barely ever spoke of biology seems to have been missed by many. Thomas, unlike his teacher Albert or other thirteenth-century scholastics, never wrote any commentaries on Aristotle’s biological works, and although he does on occasion note the need to find some natural reason for a phenomenon—the rebellion of the penis, for example—such explanations are always secondary to the philosophical and theological. Thomists were quick to point out, of course, that Thomas’s theory was independent from (whatever might have been) his biology; it really relies upon either a rationally derived description of moral norms that do not depend upon any anthropology, or on a specification of human ends that does include an anthropology but transcends biology. The first approach has been attacked for its Kantianism, and thus for being PAGE 61  ................. 11244$ $CH4 03-18-05 08:27:48 PS  Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics anachronistic, or, for some, polluted by simply being drawn too close to Kant; the second approach is questioned for surreptitiously relying on a biologism. That is, if evolution is true, the human ends described by Aquinas in the thirteenth century and those still identifiable today may well—indeed, likely as not will—change, or so it is argued. Some of those who make this latter critique do not wish to abandon natural law but do want to point out that Aquinas synthesizing with Darwin might not be what every Christian wants to accept.3 In this chapter, I will begin to defend something of a synthesis of the two typical interpretations of Aquinas—that his natural law relies on a specification of human ends based upon an anthropology that is itself an expression of an ‘‘autonomous morality’’ (Mayo)—and I want to do this by linking Thomas’s natural law and his metaphysics of the body. The argument is begun in this chapter that flesh is structured by a law of diffusion, an ecstasy which is normative for sexual politics—a metaphysics which, I think, will not change no matter what evolutionary advances, regressions, or technological transformations might come about, but certainly assuming that we remain animals with bodies. What is proposed is something akin (though more explicitly theological ) to MacIntyre’s retrieval of an ethics linked to a ‘‘metaphysical biology.’’ In chapter , I will argue that at least one effort to diminish the sense in which this last is still true—Donna Haraway’s celebration of our putative cybernetic status—does not help us to move beyond our central problematic: how to think of the body without a constitutive violence. Basic objections to natural law come from within theology and philosophy . These will be addressed in turn. The theological critique amounts to nothing less than a rejection of natural law and has a long lineage, although Milbank is perhaps its most recent promoter. Despite all protestations to the contrary, Milbank is a liberal theologian and this appears quite clearly in his scattered comments on ethics. Against Thomas (but also against Augustine) he writes: ‘‘It is the whole desiring person who sins or does right, and the measure of right desire is not the rule of reason over the body, but the external relation of person to person in the community of peace, under God.’’4 Thomas never argues that the measure of right desire is the rule of reason over the body, PAGE 62 ................. 11244$ $CH4 03-18-05 08:27:48 PS The Law of the Flesh  only the rule of persuasive reason over sensuality (which is not the body). But, of course, Thomas’s ethics is act based and does not collapse into ideas of social sin and social justice. This approach remains basic in papal teaching. It...