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Firsts and Seconds in Sex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Thomas Gilby O.P.
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Research scientists and manufacturing chemists lighten many of the burdens of existence, yet sometimes, as when they produce the means for individuals to make love and nothing more, they shift them from body to soul. Only a pill; all the same the weight may prove unsupportable when, leaving behind the world which has been given to us, we launch into another of our own making. The first is a harsh school, exacting recognition of our subordinate place in the scheme of things and acknowledgment of the established rules. Still there are compensations: we can know where we are and where to lay the blame, we can pit ourselves against resistance, we may be broken but at least we have belonged, and to something that was not us. Whereas if we rebel against our limits and adventure according to our merely personal wants, we lose all pattern, for each person as such is an original; we grasp for one shadow after another projected from ourselves, yet, being what we are, we keep our guilt-sense, no longer, however, with an object to prevent it turning morbid. It is as though we have strained to become pure persons and have ceased to be human beings, as though we have set ourselves the goal of absolute freedom and, having reached it, found ourselves empty.

I

Strip ideas and you simplify the opposition between the anarchism which stirs at the root of personality and the subjection to law which is the consequence of having been born into human nature as a specific kind of thing.

Type
Original Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 41 , Issue 482-483 , August 1960 , pp. 272 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © 1960 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The Times report, May 5, 1960.

2 Summa Theologia, 2a‐2ae, lvii, 3.

3 See T. Gilby, Morals and Marriage, Longmans, 1954, pp. 37–49.

4 Sunday Times, May 15, 1960.

5 c. 1013, i.

6 Gen. i, 27‐8.

7 For the distinction between the good of each and all and the good of the group, see Summa Theologiae, Suppl. xli, 2. St Thomas is considering marriage. For a fuller social development, see T. Gilby, Between Community and Society, Longmans, 1953, pp. 105‐23, 194–202.

8 Gal. iv, 27.

9 Suppl. xlix, 3 gives a classical compression. See also G. Le Bras, Mariage. Formation de la doctrine classique. DTC, IX, ii, 2162–2223.

10 Thus in the admirable course of moral theology by the Redemptorist, Fr Bernard Häring, Das Gesetz Christi (Wewel, Freiburg; 1957), now translated into French, La Loi du Christ (Desclée, Paris; 1959). Marriage is treated in the third volume, pp. 381–510. It is to be hoped that this work will be made accessible to English readers, who at present have to make do with more legalistic manuals. Fr Häring draws on the living springs of the Scriptures and proceeds in the true temper of the science of theology.