It occurs to me to add a few specific theological notes to the primer I offered readers earlier today, re: some traditional (and, for many of us, highly antiquated) Catholic notions of human sexuality and reproduction that have been trotting unexpectedly across the public stage in recent days due to the heated debate about contraceptive coverage in insurance plans. I have thought to add this brief theological addendum to what I posted earlier because of the insightful and valuable comments of several readers about the philosophical-theological basis on which traditional Catholic notions of natural law theology rest.
As several readers astutely noted in response to my previous posting, traditional Catholic natural law theology adopted Aristotle's theory that the sperm is an homunculus, a "little man." Aristotle's notion of how human reproduction occurs was, of course, pre-scientific. He and his contemporaries did not have the scientific technology to observe with any precision what happens when human beings reproduce.
And so he imagined the process of reproduction as the male agent implanting in the passive female receptacle, the womb, a "little man" that would, in due course and if nothing went awry with the reproductive process, turn into a full-grown baby--a male baby. In Aristotle's view, when the "little man" failed to emerge from the womb as a little boy, something had gone wrong: women were, he divined, "misbegotten males." And women had nothing to do with the process of reproduction except to provide the gestation place for the little man men implanted in their wombs through intercourse.
This pre-scientific (and gender-skewed) understanding of human reproduction has had significant influence in Catholic theology, since Aquinas, who mediated Aristotle's philosophical thought to Western Christianity, accepted Aristotle's understanding of reproduction and gave a Catholic theological gloss to it. In fact, Aquinas added such interesting twists to Aristotle as the presupposition that masturbation is a graver sin than is rape, since the rape of a woman by a man at least has the possibility of producing a child, whereas masturbation entirely wastes the male seed, the homunculus that has the potential to turn into a human being. (Aquinas also shared Aristotle's view that the homunculus should, in the normal course of development, turn into a male child and that females are misbegotten males.)
Augustine had also previously added his own stamp to the understanding of some of these issues by his fateful identification of concupiscence with sexual desire, and his suggestion that sexual desire was somehow the cause of the first parents' fall. Augustine proposed that concupiscence is transmitted by original sin, generation to generation, and he therefore looked askance at any and all sexual activity not immediately oriented to procreation--and even then, he was dubious about the permissibility of sexuality for Christians at all, because of its association with concupiscence and original sin.
For instance, Augustine was deeply troubled by the fact that males sometimes have dreams resulting in nocturnal emissions (as all of this analysis suggests, little attention was paid to female sexuality by any of these thinkers, because they all assumed that the only important role played in reproduction, the active role, was the male role). Augustine attributed dreams causing nocturnal emissions to lust, and advised Christian men to do everything in their power to purge themselves of the evil urges that resulted in such waste of the sacred seed of life.
Clearly, not many mainstream Catholics accept these premises any longer, particularly after Vatican II gave magisterial approval to the idea that marital sexuality has both a procreative and a unitive dimension. However--and this cannot be overlooked--to a certain extent, John Paul II did, in fact, rehabilitate some of these notions and the Augustinian suspicion that the flesh can be the occasion of evil in a quite specific sexual sense, with his theology of the body.
But even more, the theology of the body is, in my view, primarily about reasserting or continuing to assert in post-Vatican II theology the set-in-stone nature of gender roles and the God-given obligation of males to dominate females. And it is that aspect of the theology of the body that has fatefully attracted the imagination of many Catholics at this point in time--Catholics who have begun to think of gender and gender roles as absolutely central to the whole course of salvation history, to the scriptures, to the Catholic tradition.
So that questioning patriarchy and the arrangement whereby men are on top and women on bottom is to question what is most central of all in Catholic teaching, many Catholics now appear to think, and as they think this, they increasingly cite John Paul II's work on the theology of the body as their primary source. This is to a great extent what makes these debates about contraception and women's right to basic health care that includes contraception so heated and so significant to the sectors of the Catholic church that have now chosen to hinge everything within the Catholic tradition on the maintenance of traditional gender roles.
And it is what binds together Catholics of a certain mindset with other very traditional-minded religious groups whose theological universe also centers on patriarchy (and set-in-stone gender roles) as a central value to be maintained at all cost as their religions interact with the modern world. And need I point out that these ideas appeal above all to men within the religious traditions about which I'm speaking here--though there are also plenty of women in patriarchal-minded religious traditions who are perfectly happy to collude with patriarchy and to accept male dominance as the price of their salvation.
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