Fr. Roger J.

Landry
Introduction to the Theology of the Body
Mini-course for the Sisters for Life
Villa Guadalupe
December 27-30, 2011

Love & Responsibility

• Introduction to Present Edition

• The prehistory of the book
o Book arose to a perennial need.
o The pre-history was written by the experience of many people, which through their confidences
became KW’s experience and enhanced his own.
o KW felt a need to testify to this knowledge. LR gives voice to this witness.
o First expression were lectures at Lublin in 1958-9; first published in 1960.
• Subsequent history of the book
o Work began to live a life of its own afterward and write its own history. This history is a
confrontation between experience discussed, the book’s witness, and various other conceptions and
propositions. The intention of the book was to provide an opportunity for continuous,
uninterrupted confrontation, to test experience by experience.
o Take and read — but above all see! KW wants a co-authorship; those who put its theories into
practice will be making a creative contribution to it. This work is open to every experience, in every
dimension of them. Experience is the “sole source of information and the basis of all reliable
knowledge on whatever subject.” LR fears nothing legitimated by experience. Truth gains from such
a confrontation.
o The vitality of LR has been in provoking this confrontation. Many have lived by its inspiration. Not
just “human voices” heard in this testimony. LR lives still. Even editions that didn’t make it in
certain languages shows it has transcended these “illusions of defeat.”
o The context of its history involves, on the one hand, the central problems of HV. First stage was the
“debate” looking at both sides. Second stage looked more profoundly to the means by which moral
norms are established (teleological, deontological). An intermediate position was possible and
necessary. Only solutions that will be fully accepted must have an honest anthropology and a
profound insight into the act itself. Cannot separate the legitimacy of the act from interpersonal
relations, from love and the enhancing of the dignity of the person.
o LR was written before the animosity and polemic, to ensure a hearing for truths that experience can
furnish for a love worthy of the person. The notes in this edition link LR to its later context and is
indispensable.
• Understanding it more fully
o Since LR, KW has written many articles referring to it and developed its themes in terms of family
ethics and the philosophy and theology of the body.
o There is a need to integrate these, as well as “The Acting Person,” which contains the fullest account
of KW’s anthropology. That anthropology (RAP) and responsible love (LR) are very closely related.
The person, through its action and that of another, becomes the object and subject of responsible
love. He is an actor in the drama of the history of love or its negation. Unless LR is connected to
TAP and KW’s “Treatise on man” it would be impoverished. Hence the commentary.
o The notes are a challenge to debate, with others’ works but most importantly with the experience of
interpersonal love.
o Real love reaches the highest point of affirmation of the dignity of both the object and the subject.
o KW (and the other “authors”) hope that reading LR will, by opening up this debate, lead the reader
to satisfaction, not just intellectual.

• Introduction to First Edition (1960)

• The fonts and purpose of this work
o To talk about marriage, and love between a man and a woman, it must be based on personal
experience. Some say because a priest is celibate, he therefore has nothing to say, even though they
do speak and write. Their lack of direct personal experience is no handicap, because they have a
great second-hand pastoral experience. This different type of experience, less immediate, is
simultaneously much wider. He also has factual material at his disposal to synthesize.
o LR came about to synthesize this experience, the incessant confrontation of doctrine with life
(the task of a spiritual director). The Church’s doctrine is based upon NT, is brief and sufficient.
These texts — Mt5:27-28; Mt 19:1-13; Mk 10:1-12; Lk 20:27-35; Jn 8:1-11, 1Cor 7, Eph 5:22-33)
touch on the problem at its crucial points. These will be a frame of reference throughout LR.
o The need to validate the “rules” of morality in sexual morality is felt. The rules encounter greater
difficulties in practice than in theory. The spiritual director, concerned above all with the practical,
must try to justify, interpret and explain them.
o This work was born to put the norms of Catholic sexual morality on a firm basis, as definitive as
possible, relying on the basic, incontrovertible moral truth and most basic values or goods. The
person is a good, and the moral truth most closely bound to this is the commandment to love, for
love is a good bound to personal world. The most fundamental way of looking at sexual
morality is “love and responsibility.”
• Method
o The purpose of the book is to synthesize, but much analysis needs to be done:
 Of the person as affected by the sexual urge
 Of the love which grows on this basis between man and woman
 Of the virtue of purity as an essential factor in that love
 Of the question of marriage and vocation.
o Analysis, not mere description, needs to be done to elicit the basic principles that ground the
rationale of Catholic sexual morality.
o The book is philosophical, because ethics is part of philosophy.
o The book is meant to be practical, without being casuistic or giving detailed rules of behavior.
o Its main concern is to view the problem in its entirety rather than give solutions to particular
instances.
• Introducing love into love
o The title summarizes the view: “sexual morality” is really the domain of “love and responsibility.”
o Most important concept is love, which will occupy much (if not all) of our analysis. There is the
problem of “introducing love into love.” The first love is the subject of Christ’s command; the
second means what occurs between man and woman on the basis of the sexual urge.
o Manuals of ethics and moral theology deal with these types of love separately, discussing agape
within theological virtues and eros within continence and purity. There may be a gap in our
understanding, as if the second cannot be reduced to first or an ignorance of the way to bring it
about. Human life shows that there is a great demand for the practical knowledge of introducing
love into love. The Gospel seems to provide an inspiration for doing so.
o The command to love is the kingdom of the supernatural order for believers, but even non-believers
can discover there the affirmation of a great human good, which must be the portion of every
person.
o In this work, we will emphasize the second love (eros).
• The role of physiology and medicine in the discussion
o Problems of sex are more than merely problems of the “body,” and hence physiology and medicine
do not have an exclusive right to speak on these matters. Psychology is important. These sciences
cannot generated ethical norms unaided.
o LR puts the problem of sex and sexual morality within the domain of the person. Therefore, there is
first a need to understand what the person is. The personal order is the only proper plane for debate
on sexual morality. Physiology and medicine can only supplement, because they do not provide a
complete foundation for the understanding of love and responsibility, which matters most.
• (ONE) The person and the sexual urge
o Analysis of the Verb “to use”
o The Person as the Subject of Object and Action
 Every subject exists as an object, an objective “something” or “someone.”
 Free will makes a person his own master. No one else can want for me, to substitute act of
will for me. All human relations are posited on this fact.
o The First Meaning of the Verb “to Use”
 A person must not be merely the means to an end of another person.
 A person who treats the other as merely a means to an end does violence to the other’s
essence.
 God doesn’t use us. If God intends to direct man toward certain goals, he allows him to
know those goals, so that he may make them his own and strive toward them independently.
o “Love” as the Opposite of “Using”
 When another person desires the same good that I do, there is a special bond established of
a common good and aim. This common good and aim constitutes the essential core around
which any love must grow. This common aim puts them on equal footing.
 Man’s capacity for love depends on his willingness consciously to seek a good together with
others, and to subordinate himself to that good for the sake of others, or to others for the
sake of that good.
 Love begins as a principle or idea that people must live up to in their behavior.
 The sexual relationship presents more opportunities than most other activities for treating a
person as an object of use.
o The Second Meaning of the Verb “to use”
 Use can be “utor” (instrumental) or “fruor” (enjoyment)
 The belief that a human being is a person (with independent aims) leads to the acceptance of
the postulate that enjoyment must be subordinated to love.
o Critique of Utilitarianism
 Utilitarianism puts the emphasis on the usefulness of human activity. The useful is whatever
gives pleasure and excludes its opposite, for pleasure is the essential ingredient in human
happiness.
 Its error is in thinking that pleasure is the sole or greatest good, either for myself (blatant
egoism) or for another (whose pleasure becomes my pleasure).
 Pleasure is essentially incidental, contingent, something that may occur in the course of
action. It cannot be the only factor affecting my decision to act or not to act.
 Doing the moral good often involves some measure of pain or renunciation of some
pleasure.
 An objective common good is the foundation of love, and individual persons who jointly
choose the common good, subject themselves to it. Thanks to it they are united by a true,
objective bond of love which enables them to liberate themselves from subjectivism and
from the egoism subjectivism conceals. Love is the unification of persons.
 If I treat someone else as a means and a tool in relation to myself I cannot help regarding
myself in the same light.
o The Commandment to love and the personalistic norm
 Negative aspect — The person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot
be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end.
 Postive aspect — The person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude
is love.
 The value of the person is always greater than the value of pleasure.
 It is easy to go from the experience of pleasure to the quest for pleasure, to the quest of it
for its own sake, and to accepting it as the superlative value and proper basis for all human
behavior.
  This is the essence of the distortions that occur in the love between man and woman.

o The interpretation of the sexual urge

o Instinct or urge?
 Instinct is more often used in descriptions of animal behavior.
 Man is by nature capable of rising above instinct in his actions — in the sexual sphere as
elsewhere.
 Sexual urge in man denotes a certain orientation, a direction in man’s life implicit in his very
nature.
 The sexual urge in this conception is a natural drive born in all human beings, a vector
of aspiration along which their whole existence develops and perfects itself from within.
 Man is not responsible for what happens to him in the sphere of sex (the awakenings of the
natural drive born within him) since he is obviously not himself the cause of it, but he is
entirely responsible for what he does in this sphere.
o The sexual urge as an attribute of the individual
 Sexual attraction makes obvious the fact of the complementarity between the sexual
attributes of a man and a woman, so that a man and woman can complete each other.
 The human sexual urge is always in the natural course of things directed towards another
human being.
 If it is directed towards the sexual attributes as such, this must be recognized as an
impoverishment or even a perversion of the urge.
 The human sexual urge has a natural tendency to develop into love simply because the two
objects affected, with their different sexual attributes, physical and psychological, are both
people.
 The sexual urge does not fully determine human behavior, but leaves room for the free
exercise of the will.
 Love between persons is essentially a creation of human free will.
o The sexual urge and existence
 The species could not exist if it were not for the sexual urge and its natural results.
 Existence is the first and basic good for every creature.
 Man’s multifarious words, the creations of his genius, are only possible if the man comes
into existence. I can only act while I am.
 Man often accords the sexual urge a merely biological significance and does not fully
realize its true, existential significance — its link with existence. It is this link with the
very existence of man and of the species Homo that gives the sexual urge its objective
importance and meaning.
o The religious interpretation
 The man and woman who use the sexual urge in sexual intercourse enter into the cosmic
stream by which existence is transmitted.
 They are rational co-creators [with God] of a new human being.
 Love owes its fertility in the biological sense to the sexual urge, but it must also possess a
fertility of its own in the spiritual, moral and personal sphere. It is here that the full
productive power of love between two person, man and woman, is concentrated, in the
work of rearing new person.
 Man is capable of knowing the objective end of the sexual urge and his place in the order of
existence and the role the sexual urge plays in that order. He is even capable of
understanding his role in relation to the Creator as a form of participation in the work of
creation.
o The rigorist interpretation
 Merely procreative. A duty which is not to be enjoyed.
o The “libidinistic” interpretation
 If the sexual urge is understood as fundamentally a drive for enjoyment, this inner life of the
person is almost totally negated.
o Final Observations
 Marriage, objectively, must provide:
• The means of continuing existence;
• A conjugal life for man and woman;
• A legitimate orientation for desire
 The Church in ordering the objective purposes of love emphasizes that procreation is
objectively, ontologically, more important than that man and woman should live together,
complement and support each other; both are more important that the appeasement of
natural desire.
 This is not to oppose love to procreation or to suggest that procreation takes precedence
over love.
 These aims can be only realized in practice as a single complex aim.
 Those who cut themselves off absolutely from the natural results of conjugal intercourse
ruin the spontaneity and depth of their experiences, especially if artificial means are used to
this end.
 Lack of mutual understanding and lack of rational concern for the partner’s well-being even
more certainly ruin that spontaneity and depth.

• (TWO) The person and love

• Metaphysical analysis of love
o The Word “Love”
 Many meanings, all of which belong to the essence of love.
o Love as attraction
 The feelings or attraction that one person feels toward another often begins suddenly and
unexpectedly, but this reaction is in effect blind.
 The value of any attraction … depends on whether the good to which it is directed is really
what it is thought to be. (Truth)
 There must be a direct attraction to the person.
 Response to the qualities inherent in a person must go with a simultaneous response to the
qualities of the person as such, an awareness that a person as such is a value, and not merely
attractive because of certain qualities which he or she possesses.
 A human being is a person, a person whose nature is determined by his inwardness. It is
necessary therefore to discover and to be attracted by the inner as well as the outer beauty.
o Love as Desire
 Desire belongs to the essence of love that springs up between a man and a woman.
 This results from the fact that the human person is a limited being, not self-sufficient and
therfore — putting it in the most objective way — needs other beings.
 The subject in love is conscious of [desire’s] presence, knows that it is there at his or her
disposal so to speak, but working to perfect this love, will see to it that desire does not
dominate, does not overwhelm all else that love comprises.
o Love as Goodwill
 Love is the fullest realization of the possibilities inherent in man.
 A genuine love is one in which the true essence of love is realized — a love which is directed
to a genuine (and not merely apparent) good.
 It is not enough to long for a person as a good for oneself; one must also, and above all,
long for that person’s good.
 The love of man for woman and of woman for man cannot but be love as desire, but must
as time goes by move more and more in the direction of unqualified goodwill.
o The problem of reciprocity
 Love is not just something in the man and something in the woman — for in that case, there
would be properly speaking two loves — but is something common to them. (Trinitarian
point here).
 Love is by its very nature not unilateral but bilateral, something “between” two persons,
something shared. Fully realized, it is essentially an interpersonal, not an individual matter. It
is a force that joins and unites.
 A person who desires another as a good desires above all that person’s love in return for his
or her own love. He desires the other above all as a co-creator of love, and not merely as the
object of appetite.
 The “selfishness” of love would seem then to lie only in seeking a response, a response
which is love reciprocated. But since reciprocity is in the very nature of love, we can hardly
speak of “selfishness.” The desire for reciprocity does not cancel out the disinterested
character of love.
 To be able to rely on another person, to think of that person as a friend who will never
prove false, is for the person who loves a source of peace and joy. Peace and joy are fruits of
love bound up very closely with its essence.
 It is impossible to trust another human being when you believe the other’s sole aim is utility
or pleasure. It is equally impossible to trust another if that is your main object.
 Mere pleasure, mere sensual enjoyment, is not a good which binds and unites people for
long.
 Sharing their lives gives them a continuous opportunity to test their good faith and reinforce
it by virtue. Life together becomes a school for self-perfection. People should always
carefully “verify” their love before exchanging declarations.
o From Sympathy to Friendship
 Sympathy is a manifestation of experience rather than activity. People succumb to it; the will
is captured by the pull of emotions and sensations that bring two people closer together
regardless of whether one of them has consciously chosen the other.
 Sympathy often takes possession of one’s feelings and will, irrespective of the objective
worth of the person for whom it is felt. The value of the emotion is what matters rather than
the value of the person.
 Sympathy is weak because it isn’t objective. But its subjective force gives human love
intensity.
 Mere intellectual recognition of another’s worth is not love.
 Sympathy is not the whole of love — it’s only one element among others. The most
profound and most important element is the will, in which the power to create love in a
human being and between people is vested.
 Love between a man and a woman cannot remain on the level of mere sympathy, but must
become friendship. In friendship, unlike sympathy, the decisive part is played by the will.
 Friendship brings out the benevolence or good will — “I want what is good for you.” There
is a “doubling” of the subject: my “I” and your “I” become a moral unity, with the will
equally well-inclined to both.
 A mistake is often made in love between man and woman to leave their relationship at the
level of sympathy with no conscious attempt to mold it into friendship. Consequently, when
sympathy breaks down, love is also at an end. Love cannot be a matter of “consuming”
sympathy. The emotions are rather fickle, and cannot lastingly and exclusively determine the
attitude of one human being toward another.
 Comradeship rests on the objective foundations such as joint work, common goals, shared
concerns.
 Comradeship gives man and woman an objective common interest, whereas sympathy links
them only in a subjective way. Comradeship favors the development of love’s objective side,
without which it is always incomplete.
 Love is by nature creative and constructive. People capable of creating and living in a milieu
of their own are probably well-prepared to impact the character of a closely knit community
to the family, and to create a good atmosphere for family life.
o Betrothed love
 Love is not just an aspiration, but rather a coming together, a unification of persons.
 The decisive character of betrothed love is the giving of one’s own person to another. The
essence of betrothed love is self-giving, the surrender of one’s I. (This distinguishes it from
other types of love, in which there would be a willingness perhaps to lay down one’s life for
another, but not a concrete choice to have done so).
 When betrothed love enters into this interpersonal relationship, something more than
friendship results: two people give themselves each to the other.
 The fulless, most uncompromising form of love consists precisely in self-giving, in making
one’s inalienable and non-transferable “I” someone else’s property.
 This is doubly paradoxical:
• It is possible to step outside one’s own “I” in this way;
• Far from being destroyed, the “I” is enlarged and enriched.
• In giving ourselves, we find clear proof that we possess ourselves.

• Psychological analysis of love

o Sense impression and emotion
o Analysis of sensuality
 In the immediate contact between a man and a woman, there is an impression, which is a
sort of “external” image of the other person. It is not a reflection merely of a “body,” but of
a “human being” of the other sex.
 When awareness of the other only stirs sensuality, the body is commonly experienced as a
“potential object of enjoyment.”
 Sensuality in itself has a “consumer orientation” — directed primarily and immediately
towards a body. It touches the person only indirectly and tends to avoid direct contact.
 This orientation of sensuality is spontaneous, and as such is “natural” not evil. Sensual
excitability, as a natural and congenital characteristic of a concrete person, is not in itself
morally wrong.
 But the sensual reaction in which the body and sex are a possible object for use threatens to
devalue the person.
 Sensuality by itself is not love, and may very easily become its opposite.
 When man and woman come together, sensuality (the natural reaction to a person of the
other sex) is a sort of raw material for true, conjugal love.
 The yearning for a sexual value connected with the “body” as an object of use demands
integration: it must become an integral part of a fully formed and mature attitude to the
person, or else it is certainly not love. Sensuality must be open to the other, nobler elements
of love.
 An exuberant and readily roused sensuality is the stuff from which a rich — if difficult —
personal life may be made. It may help the individual to respond more readily and
completely to the decisive elements in personal love.
o Sentiment and love
 Sentiment is the susceptibility to the sexual value residing in the whole person of the other
sex, to “femininity” or “masculinity.”
 Idealization of the object of love is a well-known phenomenon.
 The ideal is more powerful than the real, living human being, and the latter often becomes
merely the occasion for an eruption in the subject’s emotional consciousness of the values
for which he or she longs with all his heart to find in another person.
 Sentiment shows a characteristic ambivalence:
• It seeks to be near the beloved, seeks proximity and expressions of tenderness;
 •Yet it is remote from the beloved, in that it does not depend for its life on that
person’s true value, but on those values to which the subject clings as to its ideal.
• This is why sentimental love often leads to disillusionment.
• Sentiment is insufficient. It, like sensual desire, needs to be integrated.
• If love remains just sensuality, just a matter of “sex appeal,” it will not be love at all,
but only the utilization of one person by another, or of two persons by each other.
• If love remains mere sentiment, it will equally be unlike true love, for both persons
will remain in spite of everything divided from each other.
o The problem of integrating love
 Psychology, the science of the soul, confirms that the most significant characteristics of
man’s inner life are the sense of truth and the sense of freedom.
 Man’s ability to discover the truth gives him the possibility of self-determination, of deciding
for himself the character and direction of his own actions. This is what freedom means.
(Link between freedom and truth).
 A man finds in sexual love a concentration of energies which he did not know he possessed
before this experience. For this reason, the experience is one of pleasure and joy, of living
and acting.
 However, although love is dependent upon the body and the senses, it is not the body and
not the senses alone that form its peculiar base and character. Love is always an interior
matter, a matter of the spirit. To the extent that it ceases to be an interior matter and a
matter of the spirit, it also ceases to be love.

• The ethical analysis of love

• Experience and Virtue
o Freedom of the will is possible only if it rests on truth in cognition.
o This is where duty comes in. It is man’s duty to choose the true good. Duty most fully displays the
freedom of the human will. The will “ought to” follow the true good.
o There is no possibility of psychological completeness in love unless ethical completeness is attained.
o Love as experience should be subordinated to love as virtue. Without love as virtue, there can be no
fullness in the experience of love.
• Affirmation of the Value of the Person
o Every person possesses value in the first place as a person, and only secondarily possesses sexual
value.
o The sensual and emotional reaction to a human being of the other sex must be somehow adjusted to
the knowledge that the human being concerned is a person.
o The fundamental ethical characteristic of love — it is an affirmation of the person or else it is not
love at all.
o Love in the full sense of the word is a virtue, not just an emotion, and still less a mere excitement of
the senses.
o Love does not neglect the “sexual” values to which the senses and emotions react, but binds these
values tightly to the value of the person, since love is directed not towards the “body” alone, nor yet
towards a “human being of the other sex” but precisely toward a person.
o It is only when it directs itself to the person that love is love.
o When it is directed toward the body, it becomes the use of another person, which is incompatible
with love. When it is merely an emotional attitude to a human being of the other sex, neither is it
love.
• Membership of one another
o The gift of self does not diminish and impoverish, but enlarges and enriches the existence of the
other person.
o The lover goes outside the self to find a fuller existence in another.
o In betrothed love, two persons belong to each other. This is the only satisfactory description of
betrothed love.
 o Betrothed love finds its fulfillment in marriage. In the absence of these characteristics of mutual
belonging through the gift of self, love is by definition impossible, and mere use takes its place.
o Love finds its proper expression in the union of persons, which results in their mutual belonging.
This reality expresses itself in various ways, among them full sexual intercourse in marriage (which is
the only proper place for it).
o The unification of two persons must first be achieved by way of love, and sexual relations between
them can only be the expression of a unification already complete.
o Betrothed love has within an inner need to make a gift of one’s own person to another.
o Take away from love the fullness of self-surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and
what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.
o A woman is capable of truly making a gift of herself only if she fully believes in the value of her
person and in the value as a person of the man to whom she gives herself. A man can accept fully
this gift only if he is conscious of its magnitude, of which he cannot be unless he affirms her value.
o Realization of the value of the gift awakens the need to show gratitude and to reciprocate in ways
which would match its value.
• Choice and Responsibility
o There is a particular responsibility in love — responsibility for a person.
o One also has a responsibility for one’s own love: to make it mature and complete enough to justify
the enormous trust of another person.
o Responsibility for love comes down to responsibility for the person, originates in it and returns to it.
o The greater the feeling of responsibility for the person, the more true love there is.
o Only if it is objectively good for two persons to be together can they belong to each other.
o The choice of a person of the other sex as the object of betrothed love, and as the co-creator of that
love by way of reciprocity, must depend to a certain extent on sexual values. Unless both parties
respond to sexual values there is no possibility of all this.
o The choice of the person is a process in which sexual values cannot function as the sole motive, or
even as the primary motive. This would be at odds with the very concept of “choosing a person.”
o Love is put to the test most severely when the sensual and emotional reactions themselves grow
weaker, and sexual values as such lose their effect. Nothing then remains except the value of the
person, and the inner truth about the love of those concerned comes to light. If their love is a true
gift of self, so that they belong each to the other, it will not only survive but grow stronger, and sink
deeper roots.
o Whereas if it was never more than a sort of synchronization of sensual and emotional experiences it
will lose its raison d’être and the persons involved in it will suddenly find themselves in a vaccum.
o The love for a person which results from a valid act of choice is concentrated on the value of the
person as such and makes us feel emotional love for the person as he or she really is, not for the
person of our imagination.
o The strength of such a love emerges most clearly when the beloved person stumbles, when his or
her weaknesses or even sins come into the open. One who truly loves does not then withdraw his
love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other’s shortcomings and faults, and
without in the least approving of them.
• The commitment of freedom
o Love consists of a commitment that limits one’s freedom.
o Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it
a positive, joyful and creative thing.
o Freedom exists for the sake of love.
o If freedom is not used, is not taken advantage of by love, it becomes a negative thing and gives
human beings a feeling of emptiness and unfulfillment.
o Love commits freedom and imbues it with that to which the will is naturally attracted — goodness.
o Man longs for love more than for freedom — freedom is the means and love the end.
o The will is a creative power capable of bestowing goods from within itself, and not only of
appropriating goods which already exist. Willed love expresses itself above all in the desire of what is
good for the beloved person.
 o From the desire for the “unlimited” good of another I springs the whole creative drive of true love
— the drive to endow beloved persons with the good, to make them happy.
o To desire unlimited good for another person is really to desire God for that person.
o The great moral force of true love lies precisely in this desire for the happiness, for the true good, of
another person. This is what makes it possible for a man to be reborn because of love, makes him
aware of the riches within him, his spiritual fertility and creativity: I am capable of desiring the good
for another person, therefore I am in general capable of desiring the good.
o True love compels me to believe in my own spiritual powers.
• The education of love
o Love is never something ready made, something merely “given” to man and woman.
o It is always at the same time a “task” which is set before them.
o Love should be seen as something which in a sense never “is” but is always only “becoming,” and
what it becomes depends upon the contribution of both persons and the depth of their
commitment.
o What develops from “promising” raw material in the form of emotions and desires is often not true
love, and often indeed is sharply opposed to it, whereas a truly great love sometimes develops from
modest material.
o But such a great love can only be the work of persons — and the work of Divine Grace.
o There is no need to be dismayed if love sometimes follows tortuous ways. Grace has the power to
make straight the paths of human love.

• (THREE) The person and chastity

• The Rehabilitation of Chastity

o Chastity and resentment
 We have minimized the significance of chastity because we realize it demands a greater effort
of will to attain it. We have denied it the respect it deserves. Some evil see chastity as evil.
 The exuberance of emotions born of sensuality may conceal an absence of true love, or
outright egoism.
 Sensual reactions to another which arise before and develop more quickly than virtue are
something less than love. They are often misunderstood to be love. Chastity is considered to
be hostile and an obstacle to this type of “love.”
 Since sensations and actions springing from sexual reactions and the emotions connected
with them tend to deprive love of its crystal clarity — a special virtue is necessary to protect
its true character and objective profile: chastity.
o Carnal concupiscence
 As soon as sensual concupiscence achieves its ends, its attitude to the object changes
completely, all “interest” in it disappears.
 A serious moral danger arises when that happens.
 Carnal concupiscence impels, very powerfully impels, people towards physical intimacy,
towards sexual intercourse, but if this grows out of nothing more than concupiscence, it
does not unite a man and a woman as persons.
 When carnal concupiscence is left to itself, there is a serious possibility not only that love will
be deformed, but that its raw material will be squandered. Sensuality furnishes love with
“material,” but material which can only be shaped by the appropriate creative activity on the
part of the will. Without this there can be no love, there is only the raw material which is
used up by carnal concupiscence as it seeks an “outlet.”
 Complete security against carnal concupiscence is something we find only in the profound
realism of virtue, and specifically the virtue of chastity.
o Subjectivism and egoism
 The integration of love requires the person consciously and by acts of will to impose a shape
on all the material that sensual and emotional reactions provide.
  It’s impossible to free love of emotion (as Kant and Stoics wanted to). But emotion can be
excessively subjective.
 Emotion diverts the “gaze of truth” from the objective elements of action, from the object
of the act and the act itself, and deflects it towards what is subjective in it, towards our
feelings as we act.
 Emotion of its very nature is biased in the direction of pleasure.
 Pleasure is a purely subjective good. It is not trans-subjective or even inter-subjective. At
most we can want another’s pleasure “besides” and always “on condition of” our own
pleasure.
 The fixation on pleasure for its own sake is necessarily egoistic.
 This doesn’t mean that pleasure is evil — pleasure in itself is a specific good — but only
points to the moral evil involved in fixing the will on pleasure alone.
 Emotion favors concentration on one’s own “I.”
 The egoism of the emotions is not so transparent and it’s easy to be confused by it.
 Both persons involved, while cultivating as intensively as they can the subjective aspects of
their love, must also endeavor to achieve objectivity. Combining the one with the other
requires a special effort, but this is unavoidable labor if the existence of love is to be
assumed.
o The structure of sin
 Concupiscence is a consistent tendency to see persons of the other sex through the prism of
sexuality alone, as “objects of potential enjoyment.”
 Neither sensuality nor concupiscence is a sin in itself, since only that which derives from the
will can be a sin — only an act of a conscious and voluntary nature.
 In any normal man, the lust of the body has its own dynamic, of which his sensual reactions
are a manifestation.
 When the will consents to wanting what is spontaneously “happening” in the senses and
sensual appetites, it is no longer something “happening” to a man, but something the man is
actively doing — beginning internally, for the will is the first place of interior acts or deeds.
These deeds have a moral value, and if they are evil, we call them sins.
 No one can expect that he will have no sensual reactions or that they should immediately
yield if his will does not consent or comes out against them. This is a point of great
importance to those who seek to practice continence.
 The affirmation of the value of the person, the aspiration to the person’s true good, to union
in a common true good — none of these things exist for a will subjectivistically fixed upon
emotion as such.
 Sin arises because the human being does not wish to subordinate emotion to the person and
to love.
 Sin is a violation of the true good.
 The true good in the love of man and woman is first of all the person, and not emotion for
its own sake or pleasure. These are secondary goods, and love — which is a durable union of
persons — cannot be built of them alone.
o The true meaning of chastity
 Chastity is not best understood in relation to moderation, but in association to the virtue of
love.
 Chastity’s function is to free love from the utilitarian attitude.
 To be chaste means to have a “transparent” attitude to a person of the other sex.
 Chastity is often misunderstood as a “blind” inhibition of sensuality and physical impulses,
pushing the values of the “body” and sex into the subconscious. If “chastity” is practiced in
this way, it could lead to eruptions later. This is why some people think it is negative, that it
is one long “no.”
 Chastity, rather, is a “yes” from which certain “no’s” flow.
  The essence of chastity consists in quickness to affirm the value of the person in every
situation, and in raising to the personal level all reactions to the value of “the body and sex.”
 Chastity involves a special interior, spiritual effort to affirm the value of the person. This
effort is positive and creative “from within.” It is a difficult long-term matter.
 Chastity does not involve annihilating the values of “body” and “sex” into the subconscious,
but in a long-term integration. The value of body and sex must be grounded and implanted
in the value of the person.
 Only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. Chastity frees
their association, including their marital intercourse, from that tendency to use a person, to
find the “savor” of love in above all in the satisfaction of carnal desire.
 Chastity does not lead to disdain of the body, but to a certain humility of the body. Humility
is the proper attitude toward all true greatness, to one’s greatness as a human being and
toward the greatness of the other person. In the person resides the true and definitive
greateness of man.
 The “body” must show humility in the face of human happiness achieved through chastity.
The body alone doesn’t possess the key to happiness. If the body is not humble to the full
truth about man’s happiness, it can obscure the vision of true happiness of a person in union
with a personal God.
 This happiness of union with God illuminates the value of human love, a union between
man and woman as two persons.

• II. The metaphysics of shame

• The phenomenon of sexual shame and its interpretation
o The experience of shame flows from the fact that the person has an interiority, from which arises
the need to conceal (retain internally) certain experiences or values.
o Sexual modesty is not a flight from love, but the opening of a way towards it.
o The spontaneous need to conceal mere sexual values bound up with the person is the natural way to
the discovery of the value of the person as such.
• Law of the absorption of shame by love
o To say that shame is “absorbed” by love does not mean it is eliminated or destroyed. In fact, shame
is reinforced by love, for only where it is preserved intact can love be realized in full.
o Shame is a natural form of self-defense for the person against the danger of descending or being
pushed into the position of an object for sexual use.
o True love is a love in which sexual values are subordinated to the value of the person.
o Emotion (misunderstood as love) doesn’t give men and women the right to physical intimacy and
sexual intercourse, because even reciprocated emotional experience (misunderstood as love) is far
from being love completed by the commitment of the will.
o If the feeling of shame readily yields to the first emotionally-affective experience, this would be the
negation of shame and sexual modesty. True shame gives way reluctantly (and as a result it does not
ultimately leave the person in a shameful situation).
o There is the need to develop sexual shame by education.
o “Healthy customs” have nothing to do with puritanism in sexual matters. Exaggeration easily leads
to prudery.
o Shame is a tendency, uniquely characteristic of the human person, to conceal sexual values
sufficiently to prevent them from obscuring the value of person as such.
• The problem of shamelessness
o Shamelessness is the absence or the negation of shame.
o There is a physical shamelessness which is behavior in which the values of sex are given such
prominence that they obscure the essential value of the person and allow the person to be used.
o Emotional shamelessness occurs when one rejects being ashamed of feelings tending toward making
another the object of use.
• III. The problem of continence
• Self Control and Objectivization
o The dignity of the person demands control of concupiscence.
o If the person does not exercise such control, it jeopardizes its natural perfectibility, allows an inferior
and dependent part of itself to enjoy freedom of action, and subjects itself to this lesser self.
o Control of concupiscence has as its objective not only the perfection of the person who attempts to
achieve it, but also the realization of love in the world of persons.
o Continence has something to do with “containing.” It contains the person against the forces based
of sensuality and carnal concupiscence, which threaten its natural power of self-determination.
o Continence is not an end in itself. It curbs the lust of the body by the exercise of the will.
o Continence allows the value of the person to take command — and is therefore not blind. It goes
beyond self-restraint and interdiction, permitting the mind and will to open to a value both genuine
and superior.
o The practice of self-control and virtue initially is accompanied by a feeling of loss or renunciation of
sexual values. This feeling is natural and tells us how powerfully the reflex of carnal desire acts upon
the conscious mind and will. As true love of the person develops, this reflex will grow weaker and
the values will return to their proper places. The virtue of chastity and love of the person are
conditional upon the other.
o Man must deploy the energies of sensuality and sentiments in striving for authentic love. They can
often be his foes. The ability to make allies of potential foes is perhaps an even more decisive
characteristic of self-mastery and the virtue of chastity than is “pure” continence.
• Tenderness and sensuality
o Tenderness is more than just an inner capacity for compassion, for sensitive awareness of another
person’s feelings and state of mind.
o Tenderness is the tendency to make one’s own the feelings and mental states of another person.
o Tenderness springs from an awareness of the inner state of another person. The tender person
actively seeks to communicate his feeling of close involvement to the other person.
o Tenderness demands vigilance lest its manifestations become merely forms of sensual and sexual
gratification.
o Genuine love for and between persons must combine tenderness and a certain firmness. Otherwise,
it will lose its inner soundness and resilience, and turn into sterile sloppiness and mawkishness.
o Exterior manifestations of tenderness may create an illusion of love, a love which in reality does not
exist.
o Premature tenderness in the association of a man and a woman quite often even destroys love, or at
least prevents it from developing fully, of ripening both internally and objectively into a genuine
love.
o Without the virtue of moderation, without chastity and self-control, it is impossible so to educate
and develop tenderness that it does not harm love but serves it.

• (FOUR) Justice towards the Creator

• Marriage
• Monogamy and the Indissolubility of Marriage
o We will consider marriage in the light of the personalistic norm, which bids us to treat a person in a
manner appropriate to his or her essential nature.
o This principle is fully compatible only with monogamy and the indissolubility of marriage.
o Marriage is strictly a feature of man’s physical and terrestrial existence, so that it is naturally
dissolved by the death of one of the spouses.
o Although remarriage after the death of a spouse is justifiable and permitted, to remain a widow or
widower is nonetheless altogether praiseworthy since it emphasizes more fully the reality of the
union with the person now deceased. The value of the person, after all, is not transient, and spiritual
union can and should continue even when physical union is at an end.
 o If we adhere consistently to the personalistic norm, we must admit that where there are serious
reasons (like infidelity) why husband and wife cannot go on living together, there is only one
possibility, separation, but without the dissolution of the marriage itself.
o Thus marriage preserves its character as an institution facilitating the personal union of man and
woman, and not merely sexual relations between them.
o The personalistic norm demands that the union be maintained until death. Any other view of the
matter in effect puts the person in the position of an object “for use,” which amounts to the
destruction of the objective order of love.
o Without integration of love, marriage is an enormous risk. A man and a woman whose love has
not begun to mature, has not established itself as a genuine union of persons, should not
marry, for they are not ready to undergo the test to which married life will subject them.
• The value of the institution
o The inner and essential raison d’etre of marriage is not simply the eventual transformation into a
family but above all the creation of a lasting personal union between a man and a woman based on
love.
o Marriage serves love more fully when it serves the cause of existence, and develops into a family.
This is how we should understand the statement that “procreation is the principal end of marriage.”
o If their love is already more or less ripe, procreation will ripen it still further.
o The institution of marriage is necessary to signify the maturity of the union between a man and a
woman, to testify that there is a love on which a lasting union and community can be based.
o The institution is needed for this purpose not only in the interests of society, of the “other people”
who belong to it, but also, and mainly, in the interests of the persons who enter into a marriage.
Even if there were no other people around them they would need the institution of marriage.
o Sexual relations outside marriage automatically put one person in the position of an object
to be used by another. Which is the user and which is the used? It is not excluded that the man
may also be an object to be enjoyed, but the woman is always in that position in relation to the man.
o A “marital” sexual relationship outside the framework of marriage is always objectively a wrong
done to the woman. Always — even when the woman consents to it, and indeed even when she
herself actively desires and seeks it.
• Procreation and parenthood
o In the sexual relationship, two orders meet: the order of nature (with its object of reproduction) and
the person order (which aims at the fullness of love between persons).
o We cannot separate the two orders, for each depends on the other.
o In particular, the correct attitude to procreation is a condition of the realization of love.
o Becoming a mother or father has a personal and not just biological significance for a human being.
Inevitably it has profound effects upon the “interior” of the person which are summarized in the
concept of parenthood.
o Acceptance of the possibility of parenthood is so important and so decisive that without it marital
intercourse cannot be said to be a realization of the personal order. Instead of a truly personal union,
all that is left is a sexual association without the full value of a personal relationship.
o Neither in the man nor in the woman can affirmation of the value of the person be divorced from
awareness and willing acceptance that he may become a father and she may become a mother.
o If the possibility of parenthood is deliberately excluded from marital relations, the character of the
relationship between the partners automatically changes. The change is away from unification in love
and in the direction of mutual, or rather, bilateral, “enjoyment.”
o In the order of love, a man can remain true to the person only insofar as he is true to nature. If he
does violence to “nature,” he also violates the person by making it an object of enjoyment rather
than an object of love.
o Acceptance of the possibility of procreation in the marital relationship safeguards love and is an
indispensible condition of a truly personal union.
o Willing acceptance of parenthood serves to break down the reciprocal egoism — or the egoism of
one party at which the other connives — behind which lurks the will to exploit the person.
 o A man and a woman may “be afraid of a child:” often a child is not only a joy but a burden. But
when fear of having a child goes too far it paralyses love.
o There is a solution to this problem, which conforms to the laws of which we known, and is worthy
of human persons: continence, which however demands control over erotic experiences. It also
demands a profound culture of the person and of love.
o We cannot demand of the spouses that they must positively desire to procreate on every occasion
when they have intercourse.
o Marital intercourse is an interpersonal act of betrothed love, so that the intentions and the attention
of each partner must be fixed upon the other, upon his or her true good. They must not be
concentrated on the possible consequences of the act, especially if that would mean a diversion of
attention from the partner.
o The positive exclusion of the possibility of conception deprives marital intercourse of its true
character as potentially an act of procreation, which is what fully justifies the act, especially in the
eyes of the persons taking part in it.
o When a man and a woman who have marital intercourse decisively preclude the possibility of
paternity and maternity, their intentions are thereby diverted from the person and directed to mere
enjoyment: “The person as co-creator of love” disappears and there remains only the “partner in an
erotic experience.”
o Man, as an intelligent being, can arrange things so that sexual intercourse does not result in
procreation. He can do this by adapting himself to the fertility cycle — having intercourse during
infertile periods and abstaining during fertile periods. If he does this, procreation is excluded in the
natural way.
o Deliberate prevention of procreation by human beings acting contrary to the order and laws of
nature is a quite different matter. Since these means are artificial, they deprive conjugal relations of
their “naturalness” which cannot be said when procreation is avoided by adaptation to the fertility
cycle.
o Man must not forget that he is a person.
• Periodic continence: method and interpretation
o Continence is a condition of love, the only attitude toward a partner in marriage, and particularly
towards a wife, compatible with affirmation of the value of the person.
o The mutual need of two persons for each other expresses itself also in the need for sexual
intercourse. This being so, the idea of refraining from intercourse inevitably runs into certain
difficulties and objections.
o The personalistic value of periodic continence is not just because it preserves the “naturalness” of
intercourse, but even more in the fact that in the wills of the persons concerned it must be grounded
in a sufficiently mature virtue.
o The utilitarian interpretation distorts the true character of what we call the natural method, which is
that it is based on continence as a virtue and this is very closely connected with love of the person.
o Inherent in the essential character of continence as a virtue is the conviction that the love of man
and woman loses nothing as a result of temporary abstention from erotic experiences, but on the
contrary gains: the personal union takes deeper root, grounded as it is above all in affirmation of the
value of the person and not just in sexual attachment.
o A determination on the part of husband and wife to have as few children as possible, to make their
own lives easy, is bound to inflict moral damage both on their family and on society at large.
o Acceptance of parenthood also expresses itself in not endeavoring to avoid pregnancy at all cost,
readiness to accept it if it should unexpectedly occur. This acceptance of the possibility of becoming
a father or a mother must be present in the mind and the will even when the spouses do not want a
pregnancy.

• II. Vocation
• The concept of “justice towards the Creator”
 o Man is just towards God the Creator when he recognizes the order of nature and confirms to it in
his actions.
o Man, by understanding the order of nature and conforming to it in his actions, participates in the
thought of God, becomes particeps Creatoris, has a share in the law which God bestowed on the
world when he created it.
o The value of the created person is most fully exhibited by participation in the thought of the
Creator, by acting as particeps Creatoris in thought and in action.
o Man can only be just to God the Creator if he loves his fellows.
• Mystical and physical virginity
o Within man’s relationship of love with God, man’s posture can and must be one of surrender.
o This total and exclusive gift of self to God is the result of a spiritual process which occurs within a
person under the influence of grace. This is the essence of mystical virginity — conjugal love
pledged to God Himself.
o Man has an inborn need of betrothed love, a need to give himself to another.
o Marriage, and still more spiritual virginity combined with betrothed love, must in the general belief
be the result of that “first love.”
o The need to give oneself to another person has profound origins that the sexual instinct, and is
connected above all with the spiritual nature of the human person.
o Considered in the perspective of the person’s eternal existence, marriage is only a tentative solution
to the problem of a union of persons through love.
o Spiritual virginity, in the perspective of eternal life, is another attempt to solve the problem. The
movement towards a filial union through love with a personal God is here more explicit than in
marriage, and in a sense spiritual virginity anticipates the final union in conditions of the physical
and temporal life of the human person. In this lies the great value of virginity.
o Spiritual virginity, the self-giving of a human person wedded to God himself, expressly anticipates
this eternal union with God and points the way toward it.
• The problem of vocation
o The word vocation indicates a proper course for personal development to follow, a specific way in
which he commits his whole life to the service of certain values.
o Every individual must plot this course correctly by understanding on the one hand what he has in
him and what he can offer to others, and on the other hand, what is expected of him.
o A person who has a vocation must not only love someone but be prepared to give himself or herself
for love. This self-giving may have a very creative effect on the person: the person fulfills itself most
effectively when it gives itself most fully.
• Paternity and maternity
o Parenthood is something more than the external fact of bringing a child into the world and
possessing it.
o Physically, a woman becomes a mother thanks to a man, while paternity in its psychological and
spiritual aspects, is the effect on a man’s interior life of a woman’s maternity.
o For this reason, paternal feelings must be specially cultivated and trained.
o That man can give life to a being in his own likeness makes plan his intrinsic value.
o Spiritual paternity and maternity have a much wide significance than physical parenthood. Spiritual
paternity and maternity transmit personality.
o Spiritual parenthood as a sign of the inner maturity of the person is the goal which in diverse ways
all human beings, men and women alike, are called to seek, within or outside matrimony. This call
fits into the Gospel’s summons to perfection of which the “Father” is the supreme model.
o Human beings will come particularly close to God when the spiritual parenthood of which God
is the prototype takes shape in them.
o Any attempt to diminish human beings by depriving them of spiritual paternity and maternity, or to
deny the central social importance of maternity and paternity, is incompatible with the natural
development of man.
• Sexology and ethics
• Introductory remarks
• II. The sexual urge
• III. Marriage and marital intercourse
o Love is the ambition to ensure the true good of another person.
o Love is the antithesis of egoism.
o The good of the other must be sought in sexuality too.
o Intercourse should not serve merely as a means of allowing sexual excitement to reach its climax in
one of the partners (man), but must be reached in harmony, with both partners fully involved.
o Sexual arousal in a woman rises more slowly and falls more slowly.
o The man must take this difference into account, not for hedonistic but altruistic reasons.
o The spouses must discover the rhythm dictated by nature itself so that climax may be reached both
by the man and woman simultaneously, as far as possible.
o Non-observance of these teachings of sexology in the marital relationship is contrary to the good of
the other partner to the marriage and the durability and cohesion of the marriage itself.
o There is a need for harmonization, which is impossible without good will, especially on the part of
the man. If a woman does not obtain natural gratification from the sexual act there is a danger that
her experience of it will be qualitatively inferior, will not involve her fully as a person.
o A woman finds it very difficult to forgive a man if she derives no satisfaction from intercourse. It
becomes difficult to endure this and can lead to a collapse of the marriage.
o The natural kindness of a woman who (so the sexologists tells us) sometimes “shams orgasm” to
satisfy a man’s pride, may also be unhelpful in the long run.
o Sexual education, to create the conviction that ‘the other person is more important than I’ is needed.
o There needs to be a “culture of marital relations” that goes beyond technique.
o Sexologists focus on technique, but this is secondary. There is a natural knowledge of how to make
love, whereas artificial analysis and techniques spoil spontaneity and naturalness . The natural
knowledge needs to mature into a culture, based on disinterested tenderness, before and after.
o Tenderness on the part of the man for the arousal curve of his wife becomes an act of the
virtue of continence, and indirectly, of love.
o Love makes sexual education within the couple possible. Man must get to know the woman’s world
and vice versa. They must help the other learn.
o It is quite certain that marriage, as a stable institution that protects woman in the event of maternity,
liberates her from the fear of having a child, the main source of female neuroses.
• The problem of birth control
o A man and a woman who have marital relations must know when and how they may become
parents and regulate their sexual life accordingly. They have a responsibility for every conception,
not only to themselves but also to the family which they are founding or increasing by that
conception.
o The woman can observe her cycle and determine the beginning of her fertile period with ovulation.
o Psychological factors, particularly fear, can destroy the natural regularity of the female sexual cycle.
o Fear of pregnancy also deprives the woman of that joy in the spontaneous experience of love which
acting in accordance with nature brings.
o All this implicitly shows the decisive importance of two elements:
 readiness during intercourse to accept parenthood (“I may become a mother” or …
“father.”),
 and that readiness to practice continence which derives from virtue, from love for the closest
of persons.
o This is the only way in which a woman can achieve the biological equilibrium without which the
natural regulation of conception is unthinkable and unrealizable.
o One basic method underlies all natural methods of regulating fertility: the “method” of virtue (love
and continence).
 o Contraceptives harm health. Biological methods causing temporary barrenness may bring serious
and irreversible changes in the organism.
o The only natural method of regulating conception is that which relies upon periodic continence. It
demands precise knowledge of the organism of the woman concerned and of her biological rhythm,
and also the peace of mind and the biological equilibrium of which a great deal has already been
said.
o Man, in addition to adapting himself to the woman’s biological cycle, needs to create the favorable
psychological climate for the successful application of the natural methods.
o If a man and a woman use these methods with full understanding of the facts and recognizing the
objective purpose of marriage, natural methods leave them with a sense of choice and spontaneity in
their experience, and the possible of deliberate regulation of procreation.
• Sexual psychopathology and ethics
o Many believe that to go without sexual intercourse is harmful to human life in general and to men in
particular. No one has ever given a list of morbid symptoms.
o Most sexual neuroses come from abuses of the sexual life and a failure to adapt to nature and its
processes. They come not from continence but from the lack of it.
o Man must welcome the sexual urge as a source of natural energy (otherwise it may cause
psychological disturbances). Sexual arousal is to a large degree independent of the will, and failure to
understand this can cause sexual neuroses.
o The indispensable requirement of correct behavior and health is training from childhood upwards
in truth and in reverence for sex, which must be seen as intimately connected with the
highest values of human life and human love.
• Therapy
o The sexual drive is not something naturally bad that must be resisted in the name of the good.
o Sexual reactions are perfectly natural, and have no intrinsic moral value. Morally they are neither
good nor bad, but morally good or bad uses may be made of them.
o People must be persuaded of the possibility and necessity of conscious choice. We must, as it
were, “give back” to people their consciousness of the freedom of the will and of the fact that the
area of sexual experience is completely subject to the will.
o Every man is capable of self-determination with regard to the sexual urge and the impulses born of
it. This is the starting point of sexual ethics at large.
o A thorough knowledge of biological and physiological sexual processes is very important, very
fitting, very valuable, but it cannot, either in education or in sexual therapy, achieve its proper end
unless it is honestly grounded in an objective view of the person and the natural (and supernatural)
vocation of the person, which is love.