This essay was originally published in the second issue of New Polity Magazine, a journal that aims to do the philosophical and theological “heavy lifting” necessary to build Christian societies after the demise of political liberalism.
“For the whole of man should be assessed from that which holds the principal place in man and which distinguishes him from the beasts. Though the other things in man are beautiful in their own order, man has them in common with the cattle, and for that reason they should be lightly valued in man.” (Augustine, Against the Manichees, par. 60)
Thomas Aquinas describes sexual differentiation as a part of man’s animal nature. But he does not mean that human beings have sexual differentiation as the other animals have it. This is a mistake that comes from a too-literal understanding of the classical description of man as a “rational animal,” where “rational” merely modifies, adds to, or is otherwise extrinsically related to “animal.”
The best intention in this view is the desire to ground the beliefs and behaviors that concern our sexual difference firmly in “nature,” orientating them towards reproduction. The logic works like this: Sexual difference, in animals, is clearly orientated towards the reproduction of their species; man is an animal; therefore man ought to orientate his sexual difference towards the reproduction of the human species, rather than indulge in acts contrary to this natural end.
This conflation of animal and human sexual difference serves the Christian reaction against the transgender movement through a similar line of reasoning. It is obvious that the body of the animal, understood as tending towards a unique role in reproduction, confirms its particular sex. It would be absurd to speak of a female squirrel trapped inside of a male squirrel’s body, because sexual differentiation is simply a description of the embodied being—not some complex relation between that being’s body and its internal sense of self. If man is an animal, the same logic can be applied. The body can be seen as giving total evidence of one’s mode of being, male or female, and all confusion in this regard can be reduced to an inability for the “rational” mind to properly understand the “animal” body. There is a certain apologetic, pragmatic usefulness in describing man’s animal nature, and thus his sexual difference, as equivalent to the other animals.
But like most simplifications, it comes at a cost. We stand over the other animals, and their sexual difference, as something higher. Our rational status allows us to licitly manipulate animal sexual difference for procreative or non-procreative ends. Most grave sins that the Church condemns in human persons are licitly imposed on the bodies of animals—castration, contraception, artificial insemination, selective breeding, and so forth. Animals are given in their sexual difference, and so in their procreative potential, to the rationality of man, who orders their lower nature through his own, allowing animals to participate in his creativity, intelligence, and ultimately, his worship. But by apologetically collapsing human sexual difference into animal nature, without distinguishing what “animal nature” means for human beings, the Catholic apologetic remains unconvincing at best, and at worst, lends a framework of support for such acts of illicit technocratic control: If man is a rational animal, and that which is higher directs what is lower, why not treat man’s animal nature as we treat the particular animals of nature? Why not contracept, castrate, and artificially inseminate; asserting a rational mastery over the animal part by tending it towards rational ends?
Human beings do not reproduce
Man is not sexually differentiated as the other animals are sexually differentiated. Only man is described as being created “male and female” in the first creation account of Genesis, as opposed to the “cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth,” which are created “according to their kinds” (Gen. 1:24). Aquinas interprets this as signifying an essential difference between the two: “animals and plants may be said to be produced according to their kinds, to signify their remoteness from the Divine image and likeness, whereas man is said to be made to the image and likeness of God” (Summa Theologiae I Q. 72 a. 1).
Aquinas argues that “[m]an’s excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field” (ST I Q. 93 a. 2). The “image of God,” throughout the Christian tradition, has been consistently placed in man’s intellect, his mind. Beasts created “according to their kind” do not contain the image of God. They are subordinated to their species: “[I]n things corruptible none is everlasting and permanent except the species, it follows that the chief purpose of nature is the good of the species” (ST I Q. 98 a. 1). It would be more proper, from this perspective, to think of other animals as being instances of their species. Individual cats do not exist for themselves; they exist for the preservation and continuation of this species, cat, in the world. The species, for its part, is that divine idea of “cat” which remains mysterious to us, but which is incarnated and revealed in every particular instance of cat—a kind of window into the mind of the Creator. Because they enjoy this mode of being as non-identical repetitions of a divine idea, individual animals do not do anything new. Rather, “all animals of the same species operate in the same way, as though moved by nature and not as operating by art; every swallow builds its nest, and every spider spins its web, in the same manner” (Summa Contra Gentiles II Ch. 82 p. 2). This is also why, for Aquinas, animals have “no desire for perpetual existence, but only a desire for perpetuation of their several species” (SCG II Ch. 82 p. 4).
This manner of existence is improper to the possession of an intellectual soul. “The souls of brutes are not self-subsistent, whereas the human soul is; so that the souls of brutes are corrupted, when their bodies are corrupted; while the human soul could not be corrupted unless it were corrupted per se” (ST I Q. 75 a. 6). The intellectual soul, naturally ordered towards the intellectual vision of the eternal, incorruptible God, neither corrupts nor passes away. It cannot be said that “the chief purpose of nature is the good of the [human] species,” because the individual human being himself is “everlasting and permanent.”
In fact, while the animal species is a divine idea, instantiated in several individuals, the human species is only a “species” in an equivocal sense. God does not create the human species and then allow it to reproduce itself through time. God creates each, unique, particular human being, in every act of human generation. The creation of Adam and Eve is not simply a recounting of what happened then. The story is a teaching, to those steeped in sin and far from their Creator, of what occurs in every act of human generation, in which God takes determinate matter and breathes into it “the breath of life.” As Aquinas says, “the rational soul can be made only by creation; which, however, is not true of other forms” (ST I Q. 90 a. 2; ST 1 Q. 118 a. 1). God creates every rational soul ex nihilo, and this soul in-forms the matter that human procreation arranges. This is simply not the case with the other animals, and “[t]his truth is implied in sacred Scripture, for in speaking of other animals, it ascribes their souls to other causes, as in the text: ‘Let the waters bring forth the creeping creatures with a living soul’ (Gen. 1:20), and so it is with other things” (SCG II Ch. 87 par. 7).
The unity of individual animals in their species, insofar as they are reproductions of a divine idea, is not the same as the unity of the human “species,” wherein each individual is uniquely created in the image of God, with an intellectual soul communicating its form to his individual body. In fact, it is more properly called the human race, or family, for it is the society of uniquely created human beings, joined by nature insofar as they are all destined for the same end, the intellectual vision of God, achieved in His Church.
Aquinas describes the story of Eve’s creation from the rib of Adam as a revelation of this unique difference. In an objection to whether the woman ought to have been made from the man, Aquinas postulates: “things of the same species are of the same matter. But male and female are of the same species. Therefore, as man was made of the slime of the earth, so woman should have been made of the same, and not from man” (ST I Q. 72 a. 1). This argument hinges on the Scriptural tradition that male and female animals are produced from a common, determinate matter. Aquatic creatures are produced from the waters, and thus the Genesis text reads: “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures” (1:20). Land creatures are produced from the earth, and thus the Scripture reads “let the earth bring forth living creatures” (1:24). But the male and female human beings are not produced from a common, prior, determinate matter: “But the life of man, as being the most perfect grade, is not said to be produced, like the life of other animals, by earth or water, but immediately by God” (ST I Q. 72 a. 1).
Aquinas argues that though “created nature has a determinate principle…[and] therefore from determinate matter it produces something in a determinate species, [nevertheless] the Divine Power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man” (ST I Q. 92 a. 2).
It is clear, then, that the original man and the original woman are of the same species, not as a result of what we might call the natural course of things, but by a special act of Divine Power—“as for the dead to be raised to life, or the blind to see: like to which also is the making of man from the slime of the earth” (ST I Q. 91 a. 2). Following the principle that “in describing man’s production, Scripture uses a special way of speaking, to show that other things were made for man’s sake” (ST I Q. 91 a. 4), we must ask—what essential difference between man and the other animals is revealed in this unique mode of sexual differentiation?
In the unique, twofold creation of Adam and Eve, the Scriptures reveal what experience bears out (and what political and theological liberalism must stringently deny in order to create a homogeneously governable subject): male and female human beings are not two modes of a common, pre-sexed human species. They are not instances of a human type which is neither male nor female, as we might argue that male and female cats are instances of the species “cat,” their material sexual difference ordered to the reproduction of that species. God does not create Eve as an instance of the idea of human; her being-female is not, as the Aristotelean description goes, a lesser mode of the unitary production of the human being, which would otherwise tend towards the production of the male, if not for intervening material conditions. Such ideas can be found in Aquinas, but they are in fruitful conflict with this theological insight: that the first man and woman are created by two, unique acts of Divine Power; that ever after, in every act of human procreation, a new act of Divine Power creates a new intellectual soul, destined for the contemplation of Truth and forming new, determinate matter into an intellectual body.
The sexed body is intellectually formed
Man’s body, in its sexual difference, is not some animal thing that is then invested with rationality, the capacity for intellectual operation, and thus the capacity to see God. Rather, man’s body, in its sexual difference, is intellectual—it is formed by the intellectual soul. This can become unclear. Thomists will often speak of man’s “sensitive soul,” or the “sensitive part of the soul” in a univocal sense, as that thing which he shares with the beasts; that operation which offers up bodily sense-perceptions to the intellectual; a sort of animal-in-man which produces the building blocks of man’s universal knowledge, collecting the material fuel necessary for the immaterial intellect’s operation of abstracting the universal from the particular. Against this naive description, Aquinas states:
[A]lthough the sensitive souls in man and brute are generically alike, they differ specifically, as do the things whose form they are; since, just as the human animal differs from the other animals by the fact that it is rational, so the sensitive soul of man differs specifically from the sensitive soul of the brute by the fact that it is also intellective. (SCG II Ch. 89 par. 12)
The intellectual soul is the form of the human body. The body is for the intellectual soul as the means whereby the human person achieves his intellectual end of seeing God, as Aquinas says:
The end of man, therefore, is to arrive at the contemplation of truth. It is for this purpose, then, that the soul is united to the body, and in this union does man’s being consist. ... the soul is united to the body so that it may acquire knowledge. (SCG II Ch. 83 par. 28)
Man is an animal, but “it is by the same principle...that one is a man, an animal, and a living thing” (SCG II Ch. 58 par. 3)—and this principle is the intellectual soul. Man can be called an animal because, like the animals, he is animated, but, unlike them, it is the intellectual soul that animates him. His animation, then, is specifically distinct from the animation of all other animals, just as his having life is specifically distinct from all other forms of living in the plant and animal kingdoms. The intellect is man’s soul, and this soul alone is the form of the body, which means that the body cannot but be an intellectual body. “Rational” does not modify “animal” to produce a certain kind of animal. Rather, animation is a particular form of being that the intellectual soul gives to that which it forms in order to achieve its end, namely, the intellectual vision of God. It can be truly said of man that we live for God, that we move for God, and this means our living and our moving is constitutively unlike the living and the moving of the other animals, who live and move for the reproduction of their kind—even while it bears a generic similarity that allows us to use the same words to describe man, animals, and plants.
Thus, Aquinas provides a metaphysical ground for the theory of Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist who stressed the primacy of perception in the apprehension of being:
[W]hen I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. The ontological world and body which we find at the core of the subject are not the world or body as idea, but on the one hand the world itself contracted into a comprehensive grasp, and on the other the body itself as a knowing-body. (Phenomenology of Perception [Routledge, 2002], 474)
But, while Merleau-Ponty treats the body from the point of view of subjectivity, Aquinas looks at the body as an object in the world, constituted in its particularities by the intellectual soul.
Sex is for contemplation
Similarity between human bodies is derived from the common end of the human person, which is to see God in an intellectual vision, an end imparted to the body by the intellectual soul, which is its form. Once we understand the body as an intellectual body, it is obviously not the case that just any body could be “inhabited” or “informed” by an intellectual soul. Because “the proximate end of the human body is the rational soul and its operations...[and] since matter is for the sake of the form” (ST I Q. 91 a. 3), the body is disposed towards the intellectual operation.
While the full breadth of Aquinas’ epistemology is not at issue here, it should suffice to recall that the body, for Aquinas, is the human person’s primary engagement with the world, through which he senses particular things—this tree, that neighbor, the heat from the sun, and so forth. The human person’s capacity to contemplate things in truth depends on this primordial engagement with them, through the sensing body. Therefore, a body formed by a soul for the purpose of this body-soul-unity’s contemplation of Truth itself, God, must be uniquely sensitive, that is, uniquely capable of sensing the world in its particularity so as to be able to contemplate the truth of things in their universality.
Again, it is important not to conflate this sensing-body with the bodies of other animals; to argue that man uses an unequivocally animal body to gather the materials necessary for the intellectual operation. That which is formed by a distinct final cause is a distinct being; a body formed for the contemplation of God is a distinct body. The human body is a body-transcending-itself towards its end of contemplation:
“Therefore, in the soul of the brute there is nothing supra-sensitive, and, consequently, it transcends the body neither in being nor in operation; that is why the brute soul must be generated together with the body and perish with the body. But in man the sensitive soul [which operates in and through bodily organs] is possessed of intellective power over and above the sensitive nature and is therefore raised above the body both in being and in operation . . .” (SCG II Ch. 88 par. 12)
Man’s body can be described as quantifiably more sensitive (that is, excellent at sensing) than the bodies of other animals. And to some extent, this is true: “The sense of touch, which is the foundation of the other senses, is more perfect in man than in any other animal; and for this reason man must have the most equable temperament of all animals. Moreover man excels all other animals in the interior sensitive powers...” (ST I Q. 91 a. 3). But such generic comparisons should not lose sight of the fact that they exist for the sake of man’s specific difference. The body of man is not merely quantifiably more sensitive and temperate than the other animals, as a cheetah is faster than a man, but qualitatively different, insofar as he senses for the contemplation of truth, and finally, God.
Aquinas, in establishing that the body is a body-transcending-itself towards contemplation, views the uniqueness of the human body—its upright posture, its soft skin—as being for that end. Because these traits are necessary for the end of the intellectual soul, it is clear that “an intellectual substance is not united as form to such a body except a human one, (SCG II Ch. 90 par. 2), which simply is matter transcending itself towards the contemplation of God. One could imagine an intellectual soul forming a different body, say, that of a wolf, but as the form of that body, the intellectual soul would tend its body towards intellectual contemplation, and thus cause the body of the wolf to be the body of a man: “[T]he most evenly tempered body is the human, so that, if an intellectual substance is united to a mixed body, the latter must be of the same nature as the human body . . . there would be no specific difference between the animal so constituted and man” (SCG II Ch. 90 par. 2).
But it is not merely the traits of the body shared by men and women that are for the sake of the intellectual operation. Sexual difference itself is for the sake of the intellectual operation, and thus can never be equated with the sexual differentiation of the other animals, which is for the sake of the reproduction of the species. To show this, Aquinas relies on a hierarchical vision of the first Genesis account, in which the increasing complexity and nobility of the living creatures that God creates are marked by an increased sexual differentiation. From the non-living world, in which things are only “male” and “female” by rough analogy, plants are the first to spring forth. Plants, according to Aquinas, “possess the active and passive [that is, the male and the female] generative power together.” The reason for this androgynous state is that the telos of the plant is its fruit. Because “the noblest vital function in plants is generation” — because plants are for being fruitful and multiplying — it makes sense that they are in, as it were, a constant state of coition, their entire being, from root to leaf, absorbed in the busyness of generation.
Next, the animals are created. In the animal, the constancy of androgynous reproduction is cut short by the separation of the powers of generation into the two sexes: “Among perfect animals the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, and the passive power to the female.” The reason for this separation is that, for the animal, the noblest function is no longer generation: “there is a vital operation nobler than generation, to which their life is principally directed; therefore the male sex is not found in continual union with the female in perfect animals, but only at the time of coition.”This vital function is sensation, by which the animal moves towards what is desirable for the preservation and continuation of its species.
Finally, man and woman are created through two acts of Divine Power, from two pieces of unique, determinate matter; created and called “male and female” as opposed to the animal kinds. This is because “man is yet further ordered to a still nobler vital action, and that is intellectual operation. Therefore there was greater reason for the distinction of these two forces in man; so that the female should be produced separately from the male; although they are carnally united for generation” (ST I Q. 92 a. 1).
Though it comes as a dry matter of fact, Aquinas is making an extraordinary claim. It is not the case that man is a rational animal who, like the other animals, comes in either a male or female form for the sake of the reproduction of the human species. Man is distinctly male and female for the sake of the intellectual operation. Being sexually differentiated, in the distinct manner in which man is sexually differentiated, allows for rationality, intellect, mind. Even while man does generate offspring in and through sexual difference, in the particular, co-creative manner we have described, Aquinas describes this as a carnal unity that does not exhaust the reason for sexual difference. Indeed, it is precisely insofar as the meaning and raison d’etre of sexual difference is not limited to carnal unity or reproduction that carnal unity can be a free gift and reproduction can be a moral act, governed by justice and charity towards all. A stone does not give itself to the ground as it falls towards it; a male animal does not freely give itself to a female animal by tending towards the natural end of reproduction, in which their sexual difference terminates. But a person, for whom sexual difference is for the sake of the intellectual operation; for whom sexual difference can be freely orientated towards virginity without forsaking its purpose and final cause of contemplation; indeed, a person whose sexually differentiated body is for the sake of the contemplation of God, the end of the intellectual operation that sexual difference enables and disposes the body towards; such a person can offer up sexual difference for the sake of carnal unity and reproduction as a free gift.
The other who causes there to be a world
Aquinas provides us with the theoretical and metaphysical grounds necessary for synthesizing two theological claims on the manner in which man is “in the image of God.” First, is the idea that man is in the image of God because he is rational, a participant in the wisdom of God, potentially related to everything that is. Second, is the idea that man is in the image of the (Trinitarian) God because he is communal, and that, in the love of a man and woman which conceives a Third there is an image of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Aquinas says that man is in the image of God as a knower only because he is already created in the image of God as a community of persons. His intellectual operation requires his distinct male and female twofoldness; indeed, his bodily twofoldness is the necessary result of his intellectual soul disposing matter towards contemplation. It is not only “not good for man to be alone,” it is also not possible, except as an abortive thought of a human person not destined for and ordered towards the contemplation of the truth.
As we have already discussed, matter could not be formed by an intellectual soul to produce anything but the human body, in its sexual difference. This would make sense out of the nearness of the two phrases in Scripture, which breathe as one: “In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them,” the latter being the dispositive cause of the former, and the former being the formal cause of the latter.
Aquinas does not articulate the precise manner in which sexual difference disposes the body to the intellectual operation. This will be the task of any genuinely postliberal philosophy of sexual difference, which no longer presumes a neutered androgyne as the fundamental unit of anthropology, but the male-female society itself. Some of the preliminary steps have already been made: In a late work, translated asThe Human Place in the Cosmos (Northwestern University Press, 2009), the early German phenomenologist Max Scheler argued that “the animal has no objects.” Animals only perceive things insofar as they have importance to “the organism’s survival and prosperity.” Aquinas, speaking in his own idiom, argues the same. In distinguishing that which we share with other animals from that which do not, he says that “the operation of the apprehensive power is completed in the very fact that the thing apprehended is in the one that apprehends: while the operation of the appetitive power is completed in the fact that he who desires is borne towards the thing desirable” ( ST 1 Q. 81 a. 1). Both men and animals are borne towards things desirable, but only men apprehend things in an intellectual mode, having them within themselves as intellectual objects, universal, nameable, and knowable in truth.
By this logic, an animal has no “world,” only an environment (from the French environ, “to surround”). The animal is encircled by a limited number of drive-objects that fulfill a corresponding number of drives. Man apprehends beings as being, rather than as simply desirable, and is thus potentially open to the revelation of any and all beings. This thesis helps to explain Aquinas’ observation that no animal seems to do anything qualitatively new—a giraffe will not study the moon, because the moon does not appear as the possible fulfillment of a drive aimed at the giraffe’s survival and prosperity. Scheler uses the example of a lizard that will run at the sound of a rustle in the grass, but will not flinch at the sound of a gunshot. We might consider the spider that does not “see” the fly until the fly wriggles in its web. Higher animals may “learn,” not in the sense that a human being learns in a world of things open to exploration, but by including some new object or routine as a help or hindrance to the fulfillment of some drive. Whatever success we have in teaching apes, dolphins and pigeons to “use language” or “perform sums” is predicated on human researchers giving these acts some importance to the life of the animal—like giving the ape a piece of fruit when he selects the correct word, scratching a dog behind the ear when it sits, or administering electric shocks to chimpanzees when they choose the wrong door.
The human being, Scheler argues, is the animal who says ‘no’ to its drives, attaining object-consciousness. When the drive is refused, the drive-object is seen, not as for-me, corresponding to my drives, but as containing multiple possible uses, angles, sides; appearing to consciousness irrespective of its possible usefulness to the life of the animal.
In all likelihood, Aquinas would have disagreed with the description of man as the animal that says ‘no’ to its drives, as it suggests a kind of creation sui generis of man from the animal. Rather, he would have argued that the human being, by its nature, already has the potency to relate to objects outside of the constraints of appetite. Nevertheless, Aquinas might very well have argued that, while every human being has the natural potency to transcend a life limited to drive-fulfillment, this potency must be activated; this seems to be a great part of childhood.
Instead of positing the production of intellectual objects through the mere negation of the animal drive or desire, there is another tradition which argues, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, that the “ontological structure of ‘my’ world demands that it be also a world for others.” The object is distinguished from the drive-object, not just by being a thing “cancelled-out” but because it appears as a thing “for another,” as being given over to other possible uses, angles and views. The moment I know the body of the other, not simply as a drive-object in my environment, but as a “zero point of orientation;” another view; another perspective; another set of projects and goals; only then do the drive-objects of my environment begin to relate to the other and to myself, and thus take on the quality of “objects” proper; appearing to consciousness irrespective of its possible usefulness to my life. In order for objects to appear, the other must appear. To say that man is by nature social and by nature rational is not to describe two different qualities that inhere in an individual animal, rather, neither specific difference is conceivable without the other. In the human person, intelligence is always also linguistic; what it means to know things as universal is to be capable of sharing those things with another; to be united with them in the common medium of the word.
This is not separate from the former tradition’s theory of the appearance of the intellectual object in the ascetic suppression of the drives. In order for the other to appear, he cannot simply be the fulfillment, help, or frustration of my drives. He must be seen as his own, a genuine other point of orientation—a conscious subject who causes there to be a world. This is impossible for the plant, which is, as it were, in a constant state of coition in which no other appears, as it is for the animal, which only has “things” in its environment insofar as they are objects of its appetite. The male animal, to the female animal, does not appear as a subject which gives all things their detachability from drive-life, for the simple reason that the male exists as male for the sake of the reproduction of the singular “kind.” He appears as the drive-object par excellence—all individual animals are driven to preserve their species.
But the original woman is created by a separate act of Divine Power. Her femaleness cannot be reduced to a function that serves the species, because it is not merely a modification of the species, nor of some common determinate matter, but a definite something created immediately by God, which must be dealt with in its own right. In the Genesis text, the unity of man and woman does not follow naturally, as does the unity of a male and female dog. Rather, God ordains the woman to the man, bringing her to him, and him to her, and the man accepts her in freedom, as she accepts him. The human race which results from their unity is not equivalent to another animal species, which reproduces a kind. Rather, the human race describes the real, historical unity of individuals related to the same parents and destined towards the same fulfillment of their intellectual natures in the contemplation of God.
The first woman, to the first man, can appear as a subject which gives all things their theoretical detachability from drive-life, because she does not exist for the sake of the reproduction of a singular kind, but for her own sake—an unique, individual creation of God. Likewise the man unto the woman: because man is male and female, man can be rational, for the rational apprehension of an object requires that it appears as an object-for-others, and the other is only truly revealed in one who is unlike me, irreducible to a common origin and detached from the finite limit of my desires, and yet like me, insofar as we are created for each other and destined towards the same end of the contemplation of God.