Choosing Sex: Freedom, Deliberation, and Natural Family Planning

IN THE ENCYCLICAL VERITATIS SPLENDOR, John Paul II summarily remarks that at the root of our difficulties concerning the moral life today is "the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth" (VS, 4). Objective truth, it seems, has receded from the horizon of human freedom and decision making. And when those decisions come to bear upon issues of human sexual activity, it seems to have vanished entirely from the scene. How, precisely, truth and moral freedom are intimately connected is not easily grasped. This article seeks to draw upon the resources of St. Thomas Aquinas, with the aim of providing—for those of us involved in the issues of marriage and sexuality—a way of getting to the truth of the matter at the heart of human freedom and our choice for sex.

Sometime around the year 1271A.D., St. Thomas Aquinas drafted the first twenty or so questions of the prima secundae of his Summa Theologiae. In these approximately one hundred pages one finds a psychology of the human person that was to bear his name for the next eight hundred years, a psychology that—though virtually abandoned in contemporary academies today—offers to us a certain comprehensive sense of human action and decision making.

For St. Thomas, following the inspirations of his predecessor St. Augustine, human beings are primarily lovers. We "hit the ground, running," so to speak. To be a human being is to be a being on the move. You don't need to encourage a child to explore, to run endlessly in search of the next fascination. Indeed, a child who is said to lack all curiosity is one who needs some attention; something must be wrong. Like children, we are all first and foremost people of desire. All human actions begin from desire, from the impulse at the very core of our existence to reach beyond ourselves in whatever way possible. To be a human being, St. Thomas would assert, is to be a being in motion, a constant becoming of something more than itself. Like the toddler who has just been snatched by an attentive father, the legs continue to flail through the air, as if being removed from the earth is not enough to stop the desire, the impulse to move forward. We are in our adult lives not much more than that flailing toddler, forever drawn in a steady pace to reach toward what is before us.

In this fundamental impulse of desire, the human person is no exception within the broader universe of existence. All of reality is an expression of both being and—more important for our discussion—becoming. Nature and the created order is never so much of a stasis as it is an orexis, never so much a mere thing as a thing desiring. Animals, plants, even rocks themselves, St. Thomas asserts, have at their core a dynamism of desire toward their own perfection, toward fullness of life. All of creation has been made, to borrow from John the Evangelist, in order to have life and have it to the full.

The simple consideration of a tree in the middle of a field might help. Caught in the penumbra of an evening twilight, such works of nature seen in silhouette reveal an incredible symphony of activity, an intensive strategy of action, a coordination of complex efforts organized around the single goal of gathering for itself the absolute most of what lies within the range of its own perfecting existence. Stretching to near breaking point in a desperate attempt to reach out to all, the tree unabashedly announces the mandate of existence: be all you can be!

Amidst this symphony of cosmic desire, the human person is no exception, as he or she tenaciously...