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Chapter One Sexual Morality in the Catholic Tradition A Brief History HUMAN SEXUAL ACTIVITY and the sexual ethics that seeks to order it are both sociohistorical realities and are, therefore, subject to historicity, the quality of the human animal that follows inevitably from his and her situation in real time and space and ‘‘provides him with a [human] world that he must accept in freedom.’’1 Before we embark on a presentation of contemporary Catholic sexual anthropology and ethics, therefore, it behooves us to look at their past history. In this chapter we do that in two stages. First, and briefly because it is already well known and well documented, we consider the pre-Christian history that helped to shape Western understanding of human sexuality, sexual activity, and sexual ethics. Second, and more extendedly because it is central to our project, we consider their understanding in specifically Catholic history. This historical conspectus is offered here for readers who do not already understand it and may therefore be surprised by it. Readers who believe they already know this history may skip this chapter and proceed immediately to the meat of the book in chapter 2. Before embarking on the history, however , we must first say a word about historicity. Historicity Bernard Lonergan delineates what he calls ‘‘the theoretical premises from which there follows the historicity of human thought and action.’’ They are as follows: ‘‘(1) that human concepts, theories, affirmations, courses of action are expressions of human understanding; . . . (2) that human understanding develops over time and, as it develops, human concepts, theories, affirmations, courses of action change; . . . (3) that such change is cumulative; and (4) that the cumulative changes in one place or time are not to be expected to coincide with those in another.’’2 From these 6 Historicity  7 premises flows the conclusion that the articulations of the meanings, values, moral norms, and moral actions of one sociohistorical era are not necessarily the articulations of another era or, indeed, of different groups in the same era. The world—both the ‘‘already, out, there, now real’’3 world free of every human intervention and the human world fashioned by socially constructed and interpersonal meanings—is in a permanent state of change and evolution. It is essentially for this reason that Joseph Fuchs argues, correctly in our judgment, that anyone wishing to make a moral judgment about any human action in the present on the basis of its givenness in the past must keep at least two facts in mind. The first fact is that those living in the past simply did not know either the entire reality of the human person, from its emergence to its full development in the future, nor its individual elements, from the mysterious powers of the physical universe to the long-hidden possibilities of human biology and human sexuality considered physiologically, psychologically, and sociohistorically. ‘‘If one wishes to make an objective moral judgment today,’’ Fuchs points out, ‘‘then one cannot take what Augustine or the philosophers of the Middle Ages knew about sexuality as the exclusive basis of a moral reflection.’’4 The second fact is that ‘‘we never simply ‘have’ nature or that which is given in nature.’’ We know ‘‘nature,’’ rather, ‘‘always as something that has already been interpreted in some way.’’5 The careful attention, understanding, interpretation, judgment, and responsible decision of rational persons about ‘‘nature’’ and what it demands is what constitutes natural law, never simply the pure givenness of ‘‘nature’’ alone. In the Catholic moral tradition, argument is never from ‘‘nature’’ alone or reason alone, but always a question of ‘‘nature’’ interpreted by reason. For the human person subject to historicity, moral decision making and action are always the outcome of a process of hermeneutics controlled by reason. They are never the outcome of merely looking at the facticity of ‘‘nature.’’ (As we discuss in chapter 2, because ‘‘nature’’ is not pure uninterpreted ‘‘nature’’— because it is, as philosophers and sociologists say, socially constructed—throughout this book we speak of it always within quotation marks, that is, as ‘‘nature.’’) Bernard Lonergan was convinced that something new was happening in history in the twentieth century and that, because a living theology ought to be part of what was taking place in history, Christians were living in a new theological age that required a new theological approach. This new approach, he prophesied correctly, would be necessarily historical and empirical. His distinction between a classicist and an empirical notion of culture has itself...

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