Sexual intercourse is, obviously, necessary for the continuation of the species, so it would be false to say that sexual intercourse itself is immoral. But as an expression of lust, it inevitably becomes immoral. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, sex is justified first and foremost as an expression of love. Specifically, of marital love. This is a theological point, not a conservative value judgment. Love transforms the economic model of sexual relations, I’ll-do-this-to-you-if-you’ll-do-that-to-me, into an experience of sacred mutuality, a quickening of mortal commitment, a coming together that transcends coming together. The Latin word for love is caritas, the root of the English word “charity”—one of the theological virtues, according to Catholic teaching, along with faith and hope. To grasp the theologically transformative power of love, you need to bear in mind the sense in which love, or caritas, involves not only strong and abiding affection but reflexive selflessness.
Also, finality: “Love is not love,” Shakespeare assures us, “which alters when it alteration finds.” Circumstances change; love does not. A declaration of love, thus, must not be made lightly, and certainly not as a pretext to justify sex. Saint Anselm defined God as a being “than which none greater can be thought.” So too love is a conceptual absolute, an avowal of emotion “than which none greater can be thought.” There’s no going beyond it without recourse to qualifiers—“I love you a lot” or “I love you more than sushi”—which strain the seriousness of the declaration. In logic, the law of intension and extension states that the more widely a word is applied (the broader its extension), the less it signifies (the emptier its intension). If, for example, I say “All men are poets,” what’s the significance of the word when used to describe Shakespeare? To say “Shakespeare is a poet,” in that case, is only to say again “Shakespeare is a man.”
Consider, in this light, Barney the Dinosaur’s pre-school warbling: “I love you, you love me….” Sounds great, but toddlers are being taught that the word isn’t special, that it needn’t be reserved for specific individuals. The child is likely to hear the message as, “Sure, I love you. I love everybody. But if you tickle my Elmo, I’ll punch you in the eye.” So too the usage on trashy afternoon talk shows: Host: “You cheated on your wife, robbed her, set her trailer on fire. Now you want her to take you back? Why?” He: “Because I love her.” She (nodding): “He does. He loves me.” Host: “So you’re going to take him back?” She: “I have to. I love him.” But an affirmation of love isn’t a speech act, a statement whose mere utterance renders it true, like “I declare this bridge open.” It can be called into questioned, judged false. If our talk show couple are in love, what word remains to describe the bond between the medieval philosopher Abelard and his student, and eventual wife, Heloise—which continued, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, even after her enraged uncle had him castrated?
I dwell on the abuse of the word love because it’s tempting, once you hear that love constitutes a moral justification for sex, to profess love promiscuously in order to engage in sex promiscuously. But this is a cartoon view of the relationship between the two. The mere declaration of love to a partner no more affects the morality of sexual relations than the mere recounting of sins to a priest accomplishes the sacrament of confession. Unless the words are accompanied by a spiritual resolve, the words are worthless. You can fool a partner, you can fool a priest, but within the Judeo-Christian worldview, you cannot fool God.
The idea that genuine love carries transformative, sanctifying powers is a common theme in scriptures. Perhaps the most familiar instance comes in John’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life (3:16).” The world is changed because God loves it; according to Christian belief, the world is redeemed. God gains nothing from the sacrifice of Jesus or from the redemption of the world. The sacrifice is for our sake, not for His.
As strange as it sounds, we can begin to grasp the full sense of John 3:16, and of the transformative nature of God’s love for the world, and indeed of the transformative nature of love in general, by way of an overtly sexual analogy. During intercourse between two loving partners, whatever is done is done for the sake of the beloved. In that strict sense, sex is the purest expression of love, the least compromised of marital acts. Both partners bestow pleasure out of a selfless desire to please, not a selfish desire to be pleased in return. The greatest pleasure of sexual love is knowing that your efforts are directed toward pleasing whom you love; the greatest satisfaction of sexual love is knowing that whom you love desires to please you. The communion of souls is prior to the communion of bodies. For that reason, nothing in the sexual encounter is alien. It is a return, not a venturing forth; a verification, not a discovery. The physiological effects are trivial compared with the spiritual effects.
Now imagine, for a moment, if the spiritual dimension of love expressed during loving sex were channeled, with no loss of intensity, toward the entire world rather than toward an individual partner. What would be the outcome? Love brings whatever is Other into mystical union with the self; it opens up the self, inclines the self to a de facto selflessness that embraces the Other. The Other is no longer alien. If the intensity of love experienced during loving sex could be brought to bear on the entirety of creation, then nothing in creation would ever be alien. The world itself would become the thing beloved, and charitable acts would follow as a matter of instinct—as natural as the desire to please whom you love.
This is perhaps what saints feel, an annihilation of self, and of selfish impulses, and an all-in embrace of the Other, which seems to compel them to charity. Because she loved them, it was easier for Mother Theresa to wash the feet of lepers than it was for her to allow lepers’ feet to go unwashed. The selflessness aroused in us by the presence of whom we love is unconditional. Saints experience this unconditional love writ large. For them, it embraces the entire world.
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