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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Recent declarations by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have disallowed any effort to rethink the tradition's negative evaluation of homosexuality. Citing Thomas Aquinas, the CDF appeals to eternal law as an important warrant for its position. Homosexual orientation is an objective disorder. It is an inclination to intimacy which violates God's design for human sexuality. This claim excludes further consideration of the topic. This study examines Aquinas' claim to know God's eternal law. At the heart of Aquinas' argument is the simile that creation is like a human artifact and God like an artist. When we know the work we know the Artist's intent. Heidegger's hermeneutical account of the work of art suggests that Aquinas has overlooked the historical grounds for the relationship between artist and artifact. Aquinas has the simile wrong. If Heidegger's approach is a reasonable alternative to that of Aquinas, then a space is opened within Catholic discourse to rethink the question of homosexuality.
1 The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” (1986), 3.Google Scholar
2 Ibid.
3 The citation within this quotation comes from Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae, 3. The same text is cited by Paul, Pope John II in Splendor of Truth, 43.Google Scholar
4 As Coleman, Gerald puts it, homosexual acts “attack a fundamental ontological order” (Human Sexuality: An All-Embracing Gift [New York: Alba House, 1992], 23).Google Scholar
5 Burrell, David, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 102.Google Scholar
6 Summa Theologiae, 1.14.8.3 (hereafter ST).
7 “Although the eternal law is unknown to us according as it is in the Divine Mind: nevertheless, it becomes known to us somewhat, either by natural reason which is derived therefrom as its proper image; or by some sort of additional revelation” (ST, 1-2.19.4.3). See also ST, 1-2.19.9 and 1-2.93.2. Or as William May puts it, “Natural law as it exists in the rational creature is distinct from the eternal law that exists in God the superintelligent Creator, but it is not separate from this eternal law. It is this eternal law itself mediated to or shared by the rational creature” (May, William, “The Natural Law and Objective Morality” in Curran, Charles E. and McCormick, Richard A. S.J., eds., Natural Law and Theology, Readings in Moral Theology, 7 [New York: Paulist, 1991], 340Google Scholar).
8 Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate 2.8.
9 ST, 1.2.3.
10 ST, 1.16.1.
11 ST, 1.79.4
12 ST, 1.14.8.3.
13 ST, 1-2.91.1.
14 Ibid.
15 ST, 1-2.91.2.
16 ST, 1-2.93.5. The requirement that law be promulgated is met by the fact that God has made it possible for the human mind to know the law through the natural light of human reason (ST, 1-2.90.4.1).
17 Augustine, , De Libero Arbitrio, 1.6Google Scholar, quoted by Aquinas at ST, 1-2.93.1.
18 Aquinas' treatment of sexual questions reflects a physicalism untypical in his discussion of other topics. The physical and biological serve as a kind of blueprint, a “maker's instructions” which determines the morality of acts. See Gula, Richard, Reason Informed by Faith: Foundations of Catholic Morality (New York: Paulist, 1989), 225–27.Google Scholar
19 Augustine, , De Bono Conjugali, xvi.Google Scholar
20 ST, 2-2.153.2.
21 Coleman, , Human Sexuality, 23.Google Scholar See also Coleman's, Homosexuality: Catholic Teaching and Pastoral Practice (New York: Paulist, 1995), 76.Google Scholar
22 Aquinas, , Summa Contra Gentiles, 3.122.9Google Scholar
23 ST, 2-2.154.12; Gula, , Reason Informed by Faith, 228.Google Scholar One ought note that in this article Aquinas is ranking sins insofar as they violate the virtue of temperance. Rape is an act of violence against another human being. The depth of its evil is more rooted in this assault on another than in its relationship to lust and temperance.
24 ST, 1-2.93.1; Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, 1.6.
25 sr, 1.16.1.
26 ST, 1.14.8.
27 Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Hofstadter, Albert in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17–87.Google Scholar
28 Ibid., 26-30.
29 Ibid., 28-29, 31-33.
30 Ibid., 28.
31 Ibid., 46.
32 Ibid., 46 and 56; Kockelmans, Joseph J.On the Truth of Being: Reflections on Heidegger's Later Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 176–80, 189–90.Google Scholar
33 Heidegger, , “Origin of the Work of Art,” 33–34.Google Scholar
34 In Being and Time Heidegger argues that primordial truth occurs in-the-world in which human beings always already find themselves. We are thrown into a world, a context of coherent relationships which uncovers what things are. The explicit knowledge that this is a pen or a desk is derived from the more primordial world of education. The worlding of world which uncovers things for what they are generally goes unnoticed. The craftsman's projects, designs, and products are already set forth by the world in which he finds himself though this primordial truth is overlooked. The work of art is uniquely an event of truth in that in the work the world announces itself. The worlding of world occurs in the work. See Pöggeler, Otto, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, trans. Magurshak, Daniel and Barber, Sigmund (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1987), 171.Google Scholar
35 “In the work, the happening of truth is at work” (Heidegger, , “Origin of the Work of Art,” 58Google Scholar).
36 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Heidegger's Ways, trans. Stanley, John W. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 103.Google Scholar
37 Heidegger, , “Origin of the Work of Art.” 40.Google Scholar
38 Ibid., 48-49, 55.
39 Gadamer, , Heidegger's Ways, 103–5.Google Scholar
40 Heidegger, , “Origin of the Work of Art,” 41.Google Scholar
41 Kockelmans, , On the Truth of Being, 187–95.Google Scholar
42 Heidegger, , “Origin of the Work of Art,” 74.Google Scholar
43 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G., 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 443.Google Scholar
44 Ibid., 457.
45 Ibid., 235-58 and 397-431.
46 Bonsor, Jack, “Creatures of Truth,” Thomist 56 (10 1992): 647–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
47 Augustine, Sermon 126.6.
48 One can find this approach in the papal magisterium as late as 1903. See Pius, X, Fin dalla prima, a motu proprio of 12 18, 1903Google Scholar, AAS 36:339-45.
49 The closed character of ecclesial discussion on the question of homosexuality contrasts with Alasdair MacIntyre's description of the character of rationality implicit in the Summa Theologiae. “Every article of the Summa poses a question whose answer depends upon the outcome of an essentially uncompleted debate. For the set of often disparate and heterogeneous arguments against whatever position Aquinas' enquiries so far have led him to accept is always open to addition by some as yet unforeseen argument. And there is no way, therefore, of ruling out in advance the possibility that what has so far been accepted may yet have to be modified or even rejected. In this there is nothing peculiar to Aquinas' procedures. It is of the nature of all dialectic, understood as Aristotle understood it, to be essentially incomplete” (Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988], 171–72Google Scholar). But, when it comes to homosexuality, this model of rational dialectic is short circuited in ecclesial discourse, in no small part, by an appeal to immutable, eternal law.
50 ST, 2-2.153 and 2; Augustine, , The City of God, xiii.13.Google Scholar
51 Jung, Patricia and Smith, Ralph, Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 30.Google Scholar
52 The common condemnatory texts are: Genesis 19:1-29, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, 1 Timothy 1:8-11, and Romans 1:18-32. In regard to the Sodom story cited earlier, Jung and Smith point out that Scripture itself offers a variety of interpretations of Sodom's sin: “The (biblical) texts describe those sins variously as inhospitality (Wis 19:13-14), lack of repentance (Mt 11:20-24), indifference to God (Lk 17:28-29), pride and stinginess (Ezek 16:49-50), adultery and deception (Jer 23:14), or insolent pride and brazen arrogance (Sir 16:8; Isa 3:9)” (Jung, and Smith, , Heterosexism, 70Google Scholar). Significant scholars do not interpret Sodom's sin to be homosexuality. E.g., see von Rad, Gerhard, Genesis: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1922), 217–18Google Scholar, and Brueggemann, Walter, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox, 1975).Google Scholar
53 John Tuohey argues that CDF's call for discrimination, without supplying proportionate reasons, amounts to a “rewriting” of the Roman Catholic moral tradition (Tuohey, John, “The C.D.F. and Homosexuals: Rewriting the Moral Tradition,” America, 09 12, 1992, 136–38.Google Scholar
54 CDF, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” 10.