Dionisio Miranda, S.V.D. holds an MA in Philosophy from the Divine Word Seminary, Tagaytay City, Philippines and a PhD in Moral Theology from the Alfonsianum, Rome.  He has given courses in Paraguay, Samoa and Fiji and has been Scholar-in-Residence at the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. He is a faculty member of the Divine Word Seminary, Tagaytay and a visiting lecturer at Loyola School of Theology and the East Asian Pastoral Institute, Manila.

As currently established, the basic shape of Catholic sexual ethics is configured by natural law, biblical sources, and church tradition (doctrinal teaching and pastoral practice). For many critics the current system arises out of a cosmology dominated by creationism rather than evolutionism, cast in an anthropology of hylomorphism rather than of integrated personalism, guided by an ethics of natural law which is metaphysical rather than historical, and lived in a morality whose anthropology is androcentric, riddled by sexist and heterosexist premises ingrained in patriarchal and procreative models. Against such an assessment and its implied expectations it is clear that a new construct will not be easy to produce.

This article focuses on one of the many themes which are foundational to that quest, specifically that aspect of theological anthropology which can be posed in general as follows, if God delighted in all of creation, and if this presumably includes the human body as sexual, how are humans to express the divinely willed goodness of embodied sexuality? Alternatively, if in Jesus’ view of God’s Reign there was an intrinsic connection between the physical and spiritual, between love of neighbor and love of God, how is this to be expressed in the sphere of sexual embodiment?

The human body can certainly be considered under various formalities. However, despite its importance for human existence in general or for special areas of concern like health, nutrition, reproduction in particular, it continues to be one of the under-written topics of theology and ethics even today. With notable exceptions direct, sustained, widespread, systematic, coherent, and satisfactory discussions of the theological view of "embodiment" as such have been rather difficult to find elsewhere than in Christian "spirituality." In the moral discussions of sexuality at least "ensexed embodiment" has certainly not been prominent at all in such a way as to indicate how the Christian perspective influences the discussion in terms of three sets of implications, namely, at the level of informing paradigm, at the level of systematic ethical construct, and at the level of behavioral norms. In an effort to understand what certain authors are saying about the body philosophically and theologically, and in an attempt to link these more directly with the discussion of sexual ethics, the following notes organize some of those observations under precisely those headings, namely, paradigmatic, systematic-constructive, and normative considerations.

In its barest description, body is the material dimension of human existence; it is the complex of all those physical conditions and attributes which are rooted in spatial extension. An alternative view looks beyond the biological facticity of the body to its social construction, as an entity with a history, and as a cultural phenomenon. In the life-sciences the interpretations of what embodiment means for the human person, whether in health, sexual, or reproduction terms, are rather complex. Religiously one writer claims that "all the major issues agitating the Church today... revolve about the meaning of our bodiedness" (Brungs 1989:698-717). Whatever the discipline which bears on it, the question of paradigms for human embodiment clearly comes to the fore.

For this author, paradigms are conceptual exemplars, ways of grasping models in synthetically intuitive ways, such that the construct virtually functions as archetype or prototype for making cognate concepts cohere organically. Root (also foundational, central, essential) paradigms are those which underpin a whole architectonic of ideas; they are basic symbols which can only be specified in the most general ways. Such paradigms have to do with the most fundamental understandings of human beings, e.i., as persons. Secondary (also corollary, sectoral, explanatory) paradigms are constructs which locate the root paradigm within a particular context or set of interconnected realities (e.g., the world of work and economics, or of health and medicine, or of sexuality as a whole) and in response to certain questions raised by those or complexes, investing them not only with metaphysical but also ethical import. Prima facie root paradigms will be relatively murky (being a rather thin description, by anthropologist’s standards) and secondary paradigms straightforward (being rather thick descriptions); but that is not always the case because root paradigms are usually maximalist rather than minimalist, becoming rather murky than simple.

The Christian tradition has not lacked paradigms of either kind philosophically and theologically. The issue today is twofold; on the one hand, it is encountering particular difficulties in making explicit what kind of paradigm adequately captures its view of the meaning and destiny of the embodied person in view of his or her sexuality; on the other, it is finding difficulties in convincing its followers and other audiences of the validity, relevance, and normativity of those paradigms. In this section we will focus only on root paradigms of the human being as embodied and as sexualized.

1. Body-soul problem. The general concern of the early Greek philosophers was to explain human personality in view of the body’s physical materiality. In Plato’s philosophy, it is the soul which is the real person; the body is only its prison or even tomb, from which it longs to be released in order to return to its original home in the World of Ideas. The Pythagoreans supported the view that the body denied the person its perfection, being only a shadow of the Ideal and the Perfect. On the other hand, Aristotle viewed the body and soul as constituting the single person indistinctly, distinguished only logically; the body is in fact the "extension of the soul"; it expresses the soul as it extends itself into the material world. Thus, in the Aristotelian view the body, even as it remained part of the "animal" or "lower" aspect of life, became an active part in the perfecting process of the soul.

2. Body-mind problem. Is the "mind" ultimately explainable by the body? Is "mind" metaphysically reducible to the body? Or is it the other way around? These were some of the ways in which questions about the relationship between the two were posed in the past and constituted the mind-body issue (Zaner 1978:361-6). Another question asked: Are mind and matter ontologically distinct, self-subsistent, and mutually exclusive substances? If so, why do they interact, as they do, in my own person (Descartes)? Others were to remark that no matter that we understand so little of body or so little of mind, or so little of their interaction, the fact is that their interaction is a reality of our experience (Pascal). This led Spinoza to consider them as mere "attributes" of one personal reality where the body is a mirror of the soul, and mind the idea of the body.

3. Body as locus and center. Bergson was to recognize several important facts about the body-mind union. First, the body is that whereby any person has a locus, a placement in the world. Unlike other objects in the world, the body is "mine," a phenomenon that is truly unique and sui generis. It is physical matter, but it is also my "center," meaning, "My body is uniquely singled out for and experienced by me as mine (i.e., as ‘intimate’)." As "center," it is "that by means of which I am in the world, in the midst of objects, people, language, culture, and the like and is that by means of which the surrounding milieu is presented to me for my thought and action" (Zaner 1978:363). For Husserl the primary phenomenon is the experiential relation of consciousness to its embodying organism. Marcel regarded the "body-qua-mine" experience as the fundamental opacity at the heart of human existence. Merleau-Ponty considered the experience as an essential ambiguity intrinsic to the body itself. Sartre accepted the intimacy of this union in his affirmation of "I am my body." Strauss was to conclude that nothing can be perceived of the world before one has experienced my body as mine. As in the case of mental disturbance, things "belong" to me only to the extent that I can say that my body "belongs" to me. Second, beyond being a geographical center, the body also makes possible my own activities; it is a center not only of experience but of activity. Action does not occur in a linear or logical sequence: I do not first perceive (input), organize (throughput), and then act (output). Rather, action occurs in a more or less reactive or spiraling movement: I act because things are experienced as requiring action.

4. An experiential perspective. The recent focus on the body-mind relationship begins with such insights and thus poses the questions in an entirely different way: not in metaphysical but existential ways. What is underlined is the fact that "embodiment" is a specific phenomenon of human life and experience: persons experience their bodies in specific ways, each of which can be studied in their embodiment. The problem of embodiment is to determine in "what sense" I experience my body as "mine" or "how the body becomes experienced as mine" and in so doing enables me to experience surrounding things. Conversely, which specific experiences are essential for this animate organism to claim experiences as "mine"?

The consensus is that the embodying organism becomes and remains such on the following conditions: (a) it is not just a sheer body (as in Scheler’s Koerper) but an animate organism (Leibkoerper for Husserl), which exclusively owns my fields of sensation; (b) it is the only object "in" which the Ego "rules and governs" without any intermediary, whether in the individual organs or in the organism as a whole; (c) it immediately dictates what "I can" in terms of any activity; (d) it is the means by which I perceive the world, gain access to the world, and focus the world on myself; (e) I experience it reflexively in the same way that I experience other objects in the world.

In essence, embodiment is fundamentally connected with various levels and modalities of cognition (perceptual awareness of things), affection (bodily attitudes, stances, and movements) and volition (personal striving or willing). Only to the extent that activities (wishes, desires, advertences, movements, and so on) are or can be actualized (embodied, by means of corporeal kinesthetic flow-patterns, which functionally determines the many perceptual fields and what appears in them) can one sensibly say that this organism is "uniquely singled out as mine." All such activities constitute the phenomenon of embodiment. They make me "some" "body" rather than just "any" "body."

5. Mine and yet not mine. Surprisingly, Zaner points out, little attention has been devoted to an equally essential theme. The human self’s relation to his or her own body is not only one of claiming "mineness" but also of disclaiming radical "otherness." Each of us can claim "I am my body" but also "I am not my body" or at least "I am not just my body." The relationship is not only intimate and profound but also strange and alien, and this in specific ways. The "am" is not identity, equality, or inclusion; "mine" indicates distance, from which one can claim that something "belongs" to his or her. Experiencing my body as other can in fact be psychically unsettling, in both positive and negative ways. There are times when I feel at home with it; at other times it has a life of its own to which I merely submit. My connections to my body are themselves an aporia, an experiential impasse. This being at home and yet not being at home in my animate organism is the essence of embodiment. It is this distinctive dialectical mineness/otherness that is at the core of the human body-as-experienced. I am, myself, as embodied, my own most fundamental problem. The problem is not about embodiment as such in the abstract, but about my being as embodied, about my body as context, setting and meaning of human life itself. The self-body problem is actualized at every moment of personal existence.

Having examined what it means to be embodied in general, one can ask more specifically, what does it mean to have a sexual body and be a sexual being? For being embodied also means being "ensexed" or having a certain sexuality; it means "experiencing the milieu in ways that both structure and are socially structured in that sexuality" (Zaner 1995:293-9).¹ My uniquely sexual body means that I experience the surrounding world (in its aesthetic, economic, political, religious, and other dimensions) in distinct ways, e.g., in aesthetics (clothing styles), politics (torture and other power relations), economics (certain occupations and professions), and so on in general. In my ensexment I experience the greatest familiarity with and deepest estrangement from my own body. My body as sexual is intimately part of my identity structure, my personal expression, my inviolable value. Sexual embodiment challenges the tenacious conceptual dualities between mind and body, subject and object, sex and gender. Modern challenges and counter-challenges to sexual identity can be grouped around many themes (Solomon and Nicholson 1995:2378-86); insofar as root self-understandings of the sexually embodied human being is concerned, two can be highlighted at this stage.

The question of sexual self-consciousness is intimately bound up with the questions of teleology as well as of sexual normality (e.g., of identity, orientation, preference, etc.), but these can and should be separated at this level since they lead into their own separate discussions. For example, normalcy cannot be defined in a too limited way by singling out factors as biology, intercourse, or heterosexuality. Normal is plural to many cultures and contexts, ranging from the statistically dominant to the morally correct. Neither are paradigms as hermetic as they may seem; they include aspects from each other and contaminate each other. All that this says is that ethics should pay due attention to the many factors which constitute sex and the complex ways these interact together in given wholes.

Prior to the questions of identity, reproduction, and pleasure, what are the basic affirmations being made of the human being as embodied in a sexual fashion? Embodiment is not just a locus of experience but a capacity to relate, and a capacity to do so in distinctive ways: (a) a root paradigm in that context can be called "metaphysical," in the sense that views reflecting it take on ontological connotations. Examples would be understandings related to the Oedipus complex, archetype theories, Plato’s idea of divided and merging selves, romantic and relational meanings, and so on; (b) another root paradigm connected with relationality is the view of sex as communication or as language. Sex physically expresses a person’s emotions and attitudes toward other people. The vocabulary is interpersonal and is constituted by touch, gesture, and position. Its grammar is as wide as the range of emotion and can thus communicate domination, submission, respect, resentment, fear, tenderness, anger, admiration, worship, love, conflict, competition, challenge, etc. Its meaning cannot be found in individual emotions or attitudes but in the totality of the psyches of the partners.

Ethically those root paradigms imply that sex is expressive and valuational. From his study of embodiment Zaner draws the conclusion that human body is thus essentially an expressive phenomenon; as such its language can be direct or opaque whether in terms of personal history, cultural preference, or moral intention. The other point is that expressiveness makes of embodiment an essentially axiological phenomenon. It is such because by embodying me, by belonging to me, by my claiming it to be mine, whatever happens to my body must be considered as happening to myself. Though I rule and govern through my body, I am also subject to its states and conditions. I cannot be indifferent to what can or what does happen to my body. This intimate union explains the intuition of the inviolability of one’s person in one’s body.

1. In contrast to philosophy the scriptural concern was understandably religious. The Old Testament references to the body are translated as either soma (body) or sarx (flesh) [Buttrick et al 1962:276]. There are different levels of use for the terms: literal, synecdoche, metonymy. (a) The literal speaks of the flesh under our skin and above our bones, hence muscles, membranes, and veins. It is flesh which configures our bodies into curves, plumps, bulges, pouts, and the like; flesh contains potentialities to make or remake what we wish our body to appear. In the OT flesh is conceived as the soft, muscular part of the body, whether of man or animal. It is dust which has been made to live (Gen 2:7, 7:22), and even in death is called flesh until it has returned to dust (Eccl 12:17). In a secondary sense flesh is life-giving when used as food (Gen 9:4, 40:19, 2Kings 9:36). (b) Synecdoche makes a part represent the whole or vice-versa. Thus, it is understood as the outward manifestation of the soul, in the sense that the state of the soul can be read in the state of the body. It is thus that the Pharisees and Jewish religious leaders judged the purity of the person on the basis of its bodily status. There must be something wrong with the soul when one feels sick, or when the body suffers some deficiency. Used of the whole person, "flesh" faints (Ps 63:1). It may further denote creaturely weakness (Gen 6:17, 7:16, 21, etc.). (c) Metonymy. Flesh can be used to represent connections where relationship is referred to. Thus, "This one, at last, is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" (Gen 2:23). In the OT this relationship runs from the family (Gen 2:24, 29:14), the township (Judges 9:2), and the people as a whole (2Sam 5:1). In sum, flesh denotes matter and relationship, literal and social dimensions.

So far as sexuality is concerned, the body is the locus of complex regulations related to ritual purity (see Lev 12-15, 18). Bodily discharges (e.g., menstruation, childbirth, seminal emissions) rendered a person ritually impure. Sexuality was carefully regulated, and transgressions such as adultery were severely punished (Ex 10:14). All were expected to marry and produce offspring. Immortality was connected with the body through the belief that one lived on in the blood of one’s descendants.

2. In the New Testament (NT), flesh is used in the elementary sense of substance covering the bones of animals and humans. Kreas (Rom 4:12, 1Cor 8:13) is the term used for the flesh of sacrificed animals, and while sarx may also have that meaning, sarx is the usual word for flesh in the NT. But it also carries numerous figurative meanings. It can denote kinship or blood relationship (e.g., Rom 1:3, 9:3); it can be a metonym for humanity, specifically as frail in relation to God (1 Pet 1:24, Jn 1:14). Put otherwise, although soma is the physical basis of human life destined for God in the resurrection, sarx indicates its moral character as weak, vulnerable to sin, and alienated from God.

Because of the soteriological concern inherent in religion, systematic theology has been understandably partial to the questions of sarx in describing those urges for our own personal righteousness that keep us from God, building, for example, on Romans 8:9, "You are not in the flesh; you are in the spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you." Paul made the connection between the body and sin, but in general. Thus, although flesh in current understanding is associated with "sins of the flesh" and hence with sexual sins like impurity, lewdness, unchastity, Paul’s expression "sins of the flesh" refers to other types as well, as in Gal 5:19-21: "idolatry, outburst of rage, selfish rivalries, factions, envy, drunkenness." In contrast to contemporary English, the NT view of flesh is holistic; it stands for the whole of the person rather than for a single part of the human. The scriptural meaning of flesh is the person considered in its limitations as creature. That explains why creature-liness, particularly in Paul's usage, implies human weakness, proneness to sin, being destined for death. Accordingly sins of the flesh refer to the excessive focus and reliance on our being a creature (nephesh in Hebrew), forgetting that we are likewise more as spirit (pneuma in Greek).

In short one can discern the overlays of meaning in the biblical view as follows. Body/flesh becomes the outward expression of the personality and its inner life. Body/flesh is creaturely and perishable, unable to inherit the Kingdom by itself. Body/flesh underscores the fundamental solidarity that humans have among each other and with the rest of creation. Body/flesh has sacrificial, and hence, redemptive significance in certain contexts.

3. Justin Martyr, one of the Church fathers, uses embodiment in its material meaning (its substance is earth) as well as its moral meaning (as a wicked force which urges spirit to sin along with it). Still it must not be despised as it is destined for resurrection. Jerome sees flesh, as a burden on one’s earthly pilgrimage, burdened further by its sexual character. By resisting the evil desires of the flesh virginity, and abstinence become the virtues of the perfect; they render it more similar to its condition before the Fall and anticipate the Resurrection. John Chrysostom also bewailed the excesses of the flesh, but in the sense of gluttony, which can often lead to carnal laxity. Partly because of its inculturation in a Greek milieu the prima facie view of the Christian tradition is that it became heir to or at least acquired a greater affinity with the Platonic rather than with the biblical view. True existence is verified in the soul, not the body. Gnosticism was to leave its own marks on Christian views of the body. Augustine compounded this by suggesting a connection between human sexuality and the transmission of original sin. Succeeding generations developed an ambivalence towards the body, seeing it as both the locus of sin and the means of salvation. Cited in support are generally negative attitudes to the body like ambivalence, mistrust, fear, discounting. Christians, in effect, are not at home with their bodies, as witnessed by a long tradition of negative dualism and asceticism.

The Christian tradition, of course, was not inculturated exclusively by negative aspects of Greek culture. Where Augustine was influenced by Plato’s idealism, Aquinas chose Aristotle’s theory of the dynamic relationship between matter and form, arguing that if nature revealed God’s activity in the world, this must be true of sexuality as well. He attached metaphysical and moral significance to bodily and sexual difference. This alternative view is expressed in different ways. For example, Christian tradition has strongly regarded the body as constitutive of human identity. (Bultmann asserts that the only human existence there is, is somatic existence; the human does not have a soma; the human is soma; Vergote restates this in saying that the human is someone whose existence is corporal; in some way the body is the self itself. More tellingly, he adds that sanctification must be visceral; indeed moral action must be muscular.) In fact the tradition showed consistent resistance to dualistic tendencies; soma is the basis for the metaphysical unity of the person even if, from another angle, it does set boundaries, which give rise to hygienic/social boundaries under the purity theme. Finally, and in contrast to the Greek view of the body as principle of separation through individuality, it also establishes the possibility of relating with other persons; in fact body is not an individualized entity but an ensemble of diversely qualified relations—with the world, and with God. The human corpus is linked with the social corpus and the ecclesial corpus (as illustrated, for example, by the eating practices of Jesus).

Although never viewed as intrinsically evil, the fact is that throughout Christian spirituality there were practices which demonstrated the body’s subordination to the spirit, such as sexual abstinence among laity and celibacy for clerics, or the attribution of higher holiness to monks than to married people. Moreover, in the later Middle Ages there were subtle associations of bodiliness with sin, and especially with women. But where the Cathars accented the dualism between the body and soul, the mystics appreciated the body as mirror of the soul. This ambivalence and ambiguity continue to the present.

4. Among the challenges to a theology of the body after Vatican II are the following:

a. Christology. To more fully understand body in a Christian way one must consider how Christians viewed the Body of Christ. This can be seen in the various interpretations of the Body of Christ in the senses of Incarnation (in art the Magi verify the humanity of the Christ child through his genitals) and Resurrection (patent in the preoccupation with the reassembling of the human body parts after death). Because of this connection with the Body of Christ, one thing is highlighted: the unity and relationality of the body is both eschatological promise and moral task. That is to say, for theological anthropology, Jesus’ human nature became the model for all humanity; it also became the promise of a glorified humanity (Nelson 1992 and Regan 1979).

The Body of Christ becomes the moral hermeneutic of the human body; it reveals the call to human fulfillment and is the expression of that fulfillment. If it is the whole person who is immortal, then there is meaning in integrating the body and spirit. We are to find in our embodied selves the fullness of the Spirit of Christ. In this sense the Christian ideal becomes that of the "unified self"; it is to bring body and soul together; it is to be a unified composite. Among others this authentic retrieval of the human body would have implications such as the following:

The Christian tradition is extraordinarily physical, as witnessed by its emphases on the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the ecclesial Body of Christ, the resurrection. Its debates are about justice and fidelity but also about gender, sexuality, and reproduction. This "turn to the human body" or turn to the human flesh is a call to encounter the Incarnation generally, rather than to focus on sexuality or reproduction specifically. In sum, at the paradigmatic level the tradition summons human beings to take embodiment per se seriously, before it even considers the specific ways one is embodied. Sexually the gender-specific depictions of Christ underline not so much his gender as his integration. The body of Christ is human flesh in the inclusive and comprehensive sense; it is sacramental, not gendered flesh.

We have seen that the issue of embodiment can be articulated in different ways: body-mind (classical philosophy), body-soul or flesh-spirit (Christian theology), or body-self (modern phenomenology). We have also seen that there are three dominant and different perspectives on the body today. The naturalistic view regards sexuality as part of nature whose own nature is merely discovered; the social constructionist view interprets sexuality in terms of various hermeneutics and argues essentially that it is largely a socio-cultural creation; both are described and expanded by the phenomenological view to other fields of human interest. With regard to the first and second, most authors hold to a moderate position which claims that the body has a substance which is shaped significantly by its social context; for the third this has resulted in new insights in different fields of ethics.

In ways we do not notice, underlying paradigms lay the foundations for the infrastructure of systematic constructs which, from the viewpoint of ethics, are usually built around the core values of the field of concern. The sphere of work, for example, can be structured in terms of its key values of knowledge, skills, and resources, each of which can develop into a specific paradigm. Thus, two authors point to working class experience, boxing, and ballet as specific examples to illustrate the general point that "agents create and mould their bodies in accordance with the field in which they are involved and the demands of those specific fields" (Wainwringht and Turner 2003:29-47). Cast in terms of "physical capital" embodiment can be understood in particularly enlightening ways. For example, the inevitable decline of physical capital due to aging will affect people differently. The impact of aging or injury on the ballet dancer or boxer, for whom body and self-identity are intimately intertwined, will be relatively unintelligible for the academic or lawyer, for whom body is less important in the formation of his or her self-identity.

Similarly in bioethics, issues are grouped according to the themes of bodily life, health, and integrity, each of which can similarly be elaborated into a component hermeneutic. Embodiment thought explains why current discussions of certain bioethical issues are highly charged (abortion, psychosurgery, euthanasia, etc.); the reason is that by definition medicine is a way of intervening into the intimate spheres of the embodied person. Whether planned or potential, whether directed more at the soma or at the psyche, every medical intervention has an impact on both body and mind, on both embodied self and embodied life, and for that very reason, is ethical in character. As much as possible this ethicity must be spelled out in fundamental but also specific terms, precisely through the threefold hermeneutic of life, health, and integrity. Without such an initial contextualization the issue remains excessively abstract and resistant to understanding or solution. In that threefold schema we can begin to understand better the substance of certain questions. Thus, (a) in beginning of life issues, the question is when the human embryo becomes a body that can be informed by a soul. Despite debates about when the embryo actually does become a human body, the consensus is that the condition for ensoulment is the presence of a true human body. (b) With end of life issues ethicists debate the respect due to dead human bodies as well as proprietary rights over their body parts (See Farley and Cahill 1994).

In the area of sexuality one could initially study the ethics of body image(s), body attitudes (being "loose" or strict, at home or alienated), bodily integrity (sense of privacy, rejection of unwarranted intrusions), and so on. "Bodily schemata, attitudes, movements, actions, as well as perceptual abilities are all value-modalities by which one articulates and expresses one’s character, personality, habits, goals—in short, one’s life as a totality" (Zaner 1978:365). An appreciation of embodiment as expressive and valuational demands respect for the vision, values, and decisions of the sexual person as such and in relation. Sexual integrity is intrinsic to sexual relating; it is not a value brought in extraneously. Moral notions by their nature construe the world in certain ways rather than in alternative ways. The ways we construe embodiment as sexual certainly does the same. One way of unifying the issues of sexual ethics is to frame them with the systematic constructs of intimacy, pleasure, and reproduction. We can thus appreciate better the development of these secondary paradigms in response to certain concerns as reflected in recent discussion.

Certain differences, it is claimed, are products not of biology alone or primarily but of society as well.² Societies construct different expectations in terms of role and behavior which form part of the cultural matrix into which an individual is socialized. Psychology is not spared the social construction of "gender" for psychology too does not proceed directly from "biological sex" but also via the culture of "gender," as evidenced by transsexuals who experience their misalignment between physique and psyche. Some even hold that gender is social coding that is attached not only to behavior but also to psychic stances and bodies.

To the question of biological types, there are at least three answers according to cultural historians. Prior to the 18^th century there was a "one sex" view, where the female body was considered as a merely less developed male body so that the vagina was merely an inverted form of the penis. The "two sex" view of the 18^th century began to distinguish the two as fundamentally different, reflecting the same in new terms (ovaries, vagina) and even assigning distinctive traits to other systems (dimorphic skeletal and nervous systems). The modern view of "sexual continuum" sees gradations which scientific research has validated (e.g., the non-absolute biological distinction evidenced by exceptions to the chromosomatic standards of XX as female and XY as male; or physical patterns traceable to the estrogen and androgen hormones).

Till almost the 20^th century the dominant paradigm of normal sexuality was genital-genital intercourse between one male and one female. Sexual practices which do not fit this definition were considered as either "abnormal" or even "perverse:" voyeurism, exhibitionism, pornography, non-genital sex, transvestism, sadomasochism, fetishism, masturbation, pedophilia, zoophilia, necrophilia, incest, and the like. Homosexuality has not only been stigmatized but criminalized and pathologized. In the first half of the 21^st century gays and lesbians organized against social prejudice and civil discrimination. They argued that their condition was neither an illness nor perversion, that it was not necessary to cure or proscribe it, and that it constituted only a different sexual preference. The only related pathology that has survived consists of "ego dystonic homosexuality" or "sexual orientation distress." Some point out that the category "homosexual" arose only together with the construction of "heterosexual" in the latter part of the 19^th century. Before then the concept of "sexual orientation" or the choice of a particular sex as object was not particularly important. Thinking about sexuality depends much on how sexual practices are conceived. The statistically deviant can become socially abnormal, the clinically abnormal can become medically pathological, and the ethically morally wrong can become morally perverse. That is how the "normal" heterosexual paradigm regards homosexuality and its activities: as perverse.

What is essential to or primary in sex? What paradigms are operative here which could be considered as normal and hence ethically acceptable? To answer that one would have to move beyond overt activity to include the aims and goals or desires and purposes of those who participate in sexual practices. Further, sexual paradigms can be minimalist (plain, unembellished sex) or murky. In the first sense sex can be "plain" or "unembellished" or "unadorned" sexual desire and behavior. In the second sense sex inquires into hidden desires or unconscious motivations and complex meanings, such as eros, spirituality, and depth psychology.

The reproductive paradigm, long held by the majority, has come under some attack today. In the reproductive paradigm (or procreationism in its religious nuances), heterosexual intercourse is an inescapable datum, no matter how it is appreciated. In the teleological view reproduction is the purpose of nature itself; in the antiteleological view this is nothing more than the result of chance plus natural selection. In effect, some but certainly not all sexual activity has reproduction in mind. Whatever those other purposes are, they are not immediately self-evident.

Above we discussed the metaphysical and communication paradigms; they connect here with the themes of intimacy and pleasure. Specifically the pleasure paradigm explicitly goes against the reproductive view: sex is for pleasure; there are no particular restrictions on securing that pleasure. What provides maximum mutual pleasure is good sex; failure to satisfy one or both of the partners is bad or mediocre sex. Whatever restrictions which remain are not sexual, and of the moral there are few: secured consent, non-degrading, not malicious, not deceitful. The pleasure and satisfaction involved here is not only superficially physiological but profoundly psychological as well; in fact Freud even distinguished between physical gratification and physical satisfaction.

The Vatican view is a complex of several paradigms, already named in our opening paragraph. Sex is primarily and, in some accounts even exclusively, physical; only secondarily is it psychological, social, cultural, political, or some other dimension. Sexual anatomy clearly points to two sexes, therewith indicating not only ontological essences and corresponding ethical relationships and behavior in accord with the law of nature. Sex is normal and acceptable only in heterosexual unions that have been sacramentally celebrated and intended for procreative purposes. Stated otherwise, for Christians who follow the reproductive paradigm, the essentials of sex are male ejaculation, female receptivity, fertility, and conception. While modern theology has adjusted to include the "unitive" purpose as valid and even integral to marital sex, it has continued to affirm the indispensability of the reproductive intent and its indissoluble link with love.

Elsewhere theologians have begun to take account of other views, such as the recent emphasis on the social construction of the body, in particular the feminine body (Keenan 1994:330-46), putting pressure on the classical theological position. Liberation and feminism have no doubt been influential in this output, given their interests in the themes of alienation, domination, structure, empowerment, and liberation. In contrast theology or ethics seem to have little to say about the male body, notwithstanding the fact that much of the dominant constructs rest on masculine premises. Furthermore, it does not take a seer to foresee that the issues of homosexuality will be the next minefield for sexual ethics of the future. In any case among the more significant views reported about the social construction of sexuality are the following:

1. Peter Brown claims that Christian sexual doctrine ("one heart") challenged the Roman view. The Romans saw the human body as neutral, an indeterminate outcrop of nature whose meaning and uses were thus subject to state control. For example, the corpus of the nobility bestowed pride on the state; reproduction was controlled to ensure the state’s continuity. Provided such norms were respected, barbarians could do with their body as they pleased, with discipline, of course. The Christian view was markedly different; it held that the body was created in God’s image, that it had inherent dignity, and that it had no need to be dignified by the state. The liberation of the body from state control of course meant forgoing many sexual liberties. Chastity liberated the women from state control: as virgins or as widows they closed their womb for reproduction; as benefactresses they practised generosity to the poor in the womb of the church (Brown 1988).

2. In Joyce Salisbury’s view the chaste womb (or denial of all sexual activity) also entailed the silenced mouth (or denial of all social, political, economic, and other secular participation). In effect woman surrendered her voice for the honor of reverence (Salisbury 1991).

3. In martyrdom the focus was no longer on the brutality of combat or slaughter, but the bodies of virgins—attacked and derided by the Romans but praised as beautiful and triumphant by the Christians. In typically Christian paradox the body is claimed to be freed from the body.

4. In medieval and Renaissance Christianity the depiction of women’s bodies was functional to the claims made upon it (Bynum 1987). Eve’s nude body could either be seen as weak and dependent, or beautiful and life-giving. Physicians tried to wrestle midwives away at Caesarean births while clerics tried to prevent them from emergency baptism, effectively moving them away from birth assistants to objects of damnation.³ For Bynum the struggle then became how to reclaim the woman’s body as a subject and to free her from objectification. Women found integration through communion with Christ’s body in their own bodies—through fasting, ascetical practices, stigmata, mystical visions, and mystical union. It was thus that bodiliness was able to provide access to the sacred.

5. With the Enlightenment the focus shifts from the body as someone to be encountered to something to be understood, consistent with the search for universal essences apart from their accidental appearances. This shift from the visible to the invisible represented the recall of Platonism, where now the mind dominated the body. Medicine in particular was instrumental in objectifying the body. The body, conceived like the Cartesian machine, became subject to mechanical interventions. From the view of sex as a single model (genitals were either merely internal or external) gender was materialized. The academics were males and spoke through their bodies; women had no discernible voice. For example, woman-in-labor became a birthing machine rather than a person, a woman, a new mother.

Interesting as all these insights may be, they remain only insights rather than fully fleshed-out systematic constructs able to bear the load of theologizing and moralizing in the area of human sexuality. They do not indicate more precisely, for example, what kind of values and principles they embody which could present a viable contrast to those of natural law theory with regard to human gender. If God has no gender, but humans do, why is it so difficult to pass over to inclusive language? What values decide the issues involving homosexual condition, agency, relationships, gender change, and so on?

Sexuality is not only a physical condition; it is also a hermeneutic. By sexualizing the body in distinctive ways (e.g., by eroticizing or desexualizing it), and by doing so in different degrees (excessively, defectively, or moderately), we make it become not only the medium but the substance of the expression. Ideally concrete sexual activity should be guided by norms drawn from values signified by systematic constructs grounded on more comprehensive paradigms. In the concrete, however, only exceptional persons hold firmly to unitary paradigms, coherent constructs, or consistent norms; most individuals are not even aware of their paradigms, barely articulate their constructs, and sometimes cannot even name their norms or defend their consistency with other norms in related areas.

From this author’s point of view there are at least three important hermeneutics of sexual ethics at the normative level following the systematic constructs just given: an ethics of body as Personal Self-Construction (sexual identity), an ethics of Body as Pleasurable Dialogue, and an ethics of Body as Reproduction. Reflecting its clerical hermeneutics, Catholic theological ethics has had much to say about reproduction. Reflecting its celibate ethos, its output on sexual pleasure consisted mainly of negative warnings against hedonism and sexual excess. Reflecting its male constructs, it has developed hardly anything significant about sexual education for non-males in the primary sense indicated earlier.

The imbalanced development of norms in the different themes and casuistry of sexual ethics traces precisely to those interpretative biases. Unless these paradigms are brought to the surface, and unless the controlling perspectives are more explicitly reassessed, debate on sexual norms will continue to be misplaced, constricted, and sterile. Discussion of norms for concrete sexual action and conduct will be meaningful only if we refer to their fundamental roots.

Notwithstanding the insistence on a holistic view, in practice it seems that the determining principle remains dualist. The body and soul seem to have been created respectively by evil and good divine principles and hence persist in a state of continual warfare, where the ideal is for the soul to overcome the body, especially in the total suppression of all sexual desire and activity. Body does not exist on the same moral plane as the soul; only the soul is the avenue of the good and virtuous life; the body, specially its sexuality, is not. The dualism between body and soul must be reviewed.

In modern culture the sexual body is no longer as vigorously repressed, but it is not clear if it can be really considered as an integral part of one’s moral identity and vocation. The recent scandal on clerical misconduct in sexuality invites us to reflect on how Church teaching about sexual vocation can be credible when those who have been virtually indoctrinated into it nonetheless fail and do so miserably. This rift between morality and the sexual body must be healed.

Furthermore, normative guidelines are needed in areas that have not been considered at all by the moral tradition, although they have been noted by spiritual theology. That point is quickly illustrated by a scientific study which indicates a correlation between body image, sexuality, and health issues. In the case of lesbians the lack of positive body image is unhealthy, making them more prone to heart disease because they are largely unaffected by dieting and other beauty trends. A positive body image has corresponding behavioral effects, which make these morally significant.

Why is there so little theological discussion of body in contrast to the non-theological world’s preoccupation with body in its other dimensions, e.g., sports, dance, cosmetics, etc.? Why does the presentation of a play like Vagina Monologues occasion so much controversy? Why, despite the facticity of our ensexed embodiment do much of philosophical, theological, or ethical discussions still seem to be about a genderless body and genderless spirit?

Neither the theology of the body nor the ethics of sex yet speaks to the ordinary Christian and it is increasingly obvious that neither will ever do so unless ordinary Christians for whom both are crucial are also invited to the discussion, allowed to speak, and taken seriously in their opinions. In a jointly written book, the Whitehead couple attributes religious hostility to the body as the result of complex factors: an abstracted and idealized spirituality; the odd view that holiness and spirituality are incompatible with the body and the flesh; the identification of the ideal as law. Both of these laypersons express the hope of the Christian community for a Christian spirituality of sexuality that is more comfortable with the flesh, in line with the message of the Incarnation where God meets the human in the flesh, stirs God’s power in our bodies, and uses human sexuality as an ordinary medium through which God’s love moves, touches, creates, and heals (Whitehead and Whitehead 1989). One can only join them in that hope.