If human desire, in its inner core, is authentically good and oriented towards all that is good, then what does the maturation of human desire look like? I spoke previously of the disordered tendency present in the Church, particularly in the last five or six hundred years (though reaching back, regrettably, even further), to cast the desires of the heart into a state of constant suspicion. This has led, ultimately, to an almost complete loss of the authentic evangelical meaning of ethics as understood and expressed by the Fathers of the Church—those writers of the early centuries in which Christianity experienced its springtime and its blossoming expansion, and in which the foundations were laid for the growth and development of theology and Christian life throughout the centuries. What occurred, instead, was a decay into a state of impersonal legalism that based the whole of the moral life on the fulfillment of external commands, and relegated personal uniqueness, human flourishing, and the “mystical” life of experiential intimacy with God to an alternative realm inaccessible to the so-called ordinary believer. I would like to speak a little about this matter here, though I can by no means offer an extensive commentary in the limits of these reflections. I would refer you to the superb book by the moral theologian Father Servais Pinckaers, O.P., who has done so much to reestablish the authentic meaning of ethics and liberty in their inextricable union with happiness and our God-given desires.
To begin, let me note two primary degradations or diminutions of the authentic meaning of human life that occur in this unhealthy movement from the fullness of the Gospel. First, the very foundations of the ethical life become divorced from the soil of humanity and from an understanding of the innate goodness of our nature and its orientation towards God and towards the whole of being. The essential connection is thus lost between human action, on the one hand, and the orientation of such action towards human happiness and personal flourishing. One loses sight of the very end or purpose of choice and activity, and instead begins to live fundamentally on the basis of obligation. Let me allow Pinckaers himself to contrast these two approaches to ethics and morality:
The concept of obligation is obviously an important one in moral theory, and in Christian theology it would be unthinkable to attempt the construction of any kind of moral system emptied of obligations and duties. However, the problem I want to emphasize here, at the very heart of Catholic morality, is this: Is the idea of obligation, as viewed almost unanimously by all the moralists since Janssen, really all that central and basic? For many, actually, the notion of obligation is so primary and decisive that it sets the boundaries of the whole field of morality. From this viewpoint, moral theology is about human actions that are obligatory, regulated by law. Actions transcending obligation are referred to other sciences such as asceticism or spirituality. In this context, ethics is reduced in practice to the question of obligation.
Certain problems discussed by ethicists are revealing, by the very fact of their predominant, even excessive, emphasis on obligation. There is, for example, the question of how many times a Christian is obliged to make an explicit act of charity in the course of a lifetime. [!] … The same problem arises in regard to prayer. … [These questions] witness to the dangers inherent in a concept of morality that focuses excessively on obligation. We could miss what lies beyond and above obligation, could overlook the life-giving principles of the Gospel such as the power of love to animate all of a Christian’s actions, or the Savior’s advice to “pray always,” which is the origin of the development of Christian prayer, liturgical as well as personal. Thus the core of the Gospel teaching could be overlaid by an ethics of obligation.
… In this view of morality, the question of obligation is not simply one among others; it is the question, even the only question. Morality becomes exclusively the science of obligations or duties. The moralist is, then, the guardian of law, the interpreter of commands, the judge of obligations. Originating in manuals intended for the education of the clergy, this idea of morality spread to the people during recent centuries through homilies and catechisms. It created an image of the priest as one who taught what we should and should not do, with the accent on sins to be avoided. This was its outstanding feature.i
Let me note, and emphasize, that this approach to morality is not harmful only because it is minimalistic, though it is certainly this (for the ethics of mere obligation and law can only ever set a “bottom line” for human action). Rather, it is harmful even more so because it pays little or no attention to the very purpose of human life or activity. It seems to presuppose that human freedom is at odds with commandments, rather than commandments facilitating human freedom and setting the person free to live in authentic liberty of heart, mind, body, and existence. This presupposition stretches its roots back in history to the theological revolution perpetrated by William of Ockham. This man formulated a novel concept of morality precisely in the basis of commandment and obligation, and did so through redefining the nature and purpose of human freedom. As we will see in a moment, the traditional (and authentic) understanding of human freedom is that of a freedom for goodness, beauty, and truth, for true human flourishing in contact with reality in its fullness, and above all with God. But Ockham reduced the definition of freedom to a freedom to choose between alternatives. Indeed, he claimed that the less “influenced” a human choice was by any external forces—whether commandments or pressures, etc.—the more free and human it was. Human freedom was free precisely because it was “indifferent” to any given direction and divorced from any teleological purpose (i.e. it was not given and ordained towards particular ends). Thus this concept of freedom came to be called “the freedom of indifference.” And in such a concept of freedom, the commandments of God cannot be understood in any other way than as militating against human freedom. Thus, man and woman are free insofar as God has not impinged on their freedom through imposing commandments upon them, and are not free insofar as they must obey God’s superior will. And the only reason that man and woman must obey God is because he is stronger, because his will has the ability to overpower our own and demand obedience of us.
We see here just how deeply such a concept of freedom is diabolical. Indeed, this understanding of freedom is the very lie of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the lie of sin that has perpetuated itself in fallen humanity ever since. It is the lie that God is not a loving Father who gives all things to us in gratuitous generosity, and who gives us commandments and directives only to help facilitate the maturation of our desires in accordance with what with authentically bring us happiness—and thus directs us ultimately to the freedom that surpasses the law while super-fulfilling it. Rather, it presents God as mere will, mere power, who commands what he wishes with little or no regard for meaning and purpose—indeed, there is no innate need for a God such as this to have any intelligibility or reason at all, as the will reigns supreme. Thus is born the terrible philosophy of voluntarism, in which the only thing of any significance is will (voluntas is the Latin word for “will,” for the faculty of choice). Here man and woman look not to the intelligibility of the universe, to discerning the ravishing beauty, the attractive good, and the radiance truth inscribed in all things as the directive for their desires, choices, and actions. Rather, they look only to the explicit commands of the will, as expressed in the laws of God, the Church, and the state, etc.
On the one extreme, this philosophy has found expression in the writing of Immanuel Kant, as Michael Waldstein explains:
Kant’s starting point in his moral philosophy consists in the thesis: “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.”ii What is a good will? A good will is a will that follows duty rather than the inclination toward pleasure or happiness. In fact, “inclination” and “happiness” are the main competitors of a good will. A morally good will is clearest and most certain when there is a clash between duty and inclination, when devotion to duty overcomes a contrary inclination to pleasure.iii Inclination does not belong to the order of reason but to that of sense-data. As such, however, sense-data are without order. They are radically individual and accidental.iv
Here morality is defined as precisely that which is not desired or felt, but merely willed in response to duty, and it is more ethical, more morally upright, to the degree that it “chafes” against our natural inclination. As a side note, I want to emphasize that this negative attitude toward inclination, desire, and pleasure is present not only in philosophers such a Kant, but also has seeped deeply into many places in the life of the Church. If anyone has studied the way of life practiced in monasteries and convents, particularly in the fourteenth through twentieth centuries, one will encounter the profoundly inhuman and deeply destructive way of living and acting that this dismissal of the goodness of humanity and human inclination creates. Sadly, these tendencies still persist in many sectors of religious life, and of the Church itself, to this very day. And whenever all becomes “law” then there is no place for the dignity of the individual, for their desire for happiness, nor for any unique and incomparable expressions of love, self-gift, and intimacy that do not fit into what is “always obligatory for everyone, everywhere.” As Kant says, “Act only according to the maxim by which you can will at the same time that it becomes a universal law.”v
To turn to the other extreme, however, this understanding of “pure will” gives birth to rebellion. Indeed, it has rebellion at its very root, since it is, after all, diabolical. In response to it, a person either submits to the yoke of external obligation and represses human desire and natural inclination, or, in the opposite movement, rebels against any external obligation or any “calls” spoken from the outside as an invitation to the human persons freedom of cooperation and surrender. This is manifest, in perhaps the most pointed case, in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the one who famously claimed that “God is dead, and we have killed him,” and that the time had come to move “beyond good and evil,” and to create a new world through the sheer will-to-power of the super-man, the man who would determine the nature of his own reality through the unhindered exercise of his own choice. If this is not diabolical, nothing is. And we need only look at Adolf Hitler and the holocaust of millions of innocent human lives to see what this philosophy of will-to-power, when combined with racist and nationalistic ideology, brings about. Or rather, what is destroys.
By now I suspect we can sense quite deeply, and painfully, the havoc that a legalistic morality of sheer obligation has wrought in human lives. And all of this is rooted, as I have mentioned before, in the loss both of the authentic face of God and of the authentic face of man. And this is precisely why John Paul II spoke so passionately, and repeatedly, of the interrelationship of these two mysteries: of the meeting of God and man in Christ, the God-Man. As Vatican II expressed it: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
Only in the rediscovery of the Father and his love—and thus of the entire universe, with its ethical importance inherent in its very nature, as God’s pure and loving gift—can we understand what it means to be human. Only when bathed in the light of God’s gratuitous love, and understanding that the whole universe, and our own natural inclinations, have been fashioned by this love and as a manifestation of it, can we understand human life in truth. We come to understand that God is not sheer will-to-power without regard for reason or love; rather, we come to understand that, in God, reason and love are one. God is pure intelligence, pure reason; he is the Word of wisdom that is the origin of all things, and who sustains all things precisely in the gaze of his all-seeing wisdom. The very etymology of the word “recognition” expresses this well. Whenever we come to recognize something, to understand it as it is, we are merely re-cognizing, thinking-again, what God has already thought into existence from the heart of his own uncreated wisdom. Thus, true wisdom consists in the insertion of our own vision into the vision of God, our own mind into the mind of God, our own choice and action into the choice of God. As Saint Paul says, “Have this mind in you which was in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5). And again, for God, truth and love are one, wisdom and benevolence are one. In God, all things are one: all things are Love. And this love is all-wise, all-knowing, arranging all things for our good and for the good of the entire universe. To live an ethical life, therefore, is precisely to walk the path of healing and integration that makes our humanity whole in its espousal with the wisdom and love of the Trinity.
In order to make all of this a little more concrete, and to bring this reflection to a close, let me quote some words from Servais Pinckaers, contrasting authentic Christian morality with the morality of obligation about which he spoke above. And in this, he depends in particular on Saint Thomas Aquinas (who for his part is a faithful voice of the Fathers of the Church who preceded him). Indeed, Thomas Aquinas has continually been recommended as the “common doctor” of the Church, meaning that, perhaps above all others, his teaching is to be trusted to help illuminate and safeguard the authentic understanding of the Gospel. And his teaching does so precisely because it safeguards all of the realities we have spoken about in these reflections: the all-wise and all-loving presence of the Trinity at the origin and foundation of all things; the innate goodness and beauty of humanity, in the inseparable union of body and spirit, as well as the goodness of human emotion, desire, and natural inclination; and the centrality of the Incarnation of Christ, and of the Paschal Mystery, at the origin of all human and Christian existence, etc. In other words, Thomas Aquinas is an excellent safeguard of the realism of the Gospel, which takes with utter seriousness both the mystery of God and the mystery of man, and thus also the mystery of the whole creation. In particular, as concerns us here, Thomas Aquinas spoken on behalf of the whole tradition for the understanding of morality, and all of human existence, in its orientation towards happiness. As Pinckaers explains:
St. Thomas gives priority to the question of happiness in his treatise on beatitude. And this treatise is by no means a preamble: it is the keystone of the whole moral edifice; it determines the ultimate end and general orientation. The entire structure of the second part of the Summa depends directly on the answer to the question of happiness discussed in this first treatise. The stress on happiness over obligation is confirmed when we look at St. Thomas’ sources, the currents of thought preceding him. For earlier thinkers, whether they were philosophers with Aristotle as their principal mentor or theologians following the Greek and Latin Fathers (notably St. Augustine), the question of happiness or “the good life” was beyond any doubt the principal concern of morality. Aristotle devotes the first and last books of his Nicomachean Ethics to the study of happiness. St. Augustine, countering the Manichean heresy, did not hesitate for an instant about the reasonableness of his opening thesis: “Everyone wants to be happy. There is no one who will no agree with me on this almost before the words are out of my mouth.” He then went on to show how the Gospel offers the true answer to what is our highest happiness (hominis optimum), the leitmotif of morality. Later, in the brief treatise on prayer addressed to Proba, St. Augustine in three words answered the difficult question about what we should ask of God: “Ora beatam vitam”—“Ask for the happy life.” This is how he related prayer to the desire for happiness; prayer utters the desire to God. …
To anyone with an open mind, one huge fact stands out in the history of morality: for the ancients, Christians and pagans alike, the question of happiness was primary. As they saw it, morality in its totality was simply the answer to this question. … The massive historical evidence stands out in bold relief against the kind of morality conceived by modern philosophers and theologians. Concentration on obligation does away completely with the question of happiness, perhaps “inadvertently.” We can accurately point to two main periods in the history of morality, the first dominated by the question of happiness, and the second by the question of obligation.vi
So much for the radical dichotomy between the two approaches. I would like now to give some specific circumstances in which the confident embracing of the desire for happiness (and thus of the goodness of humanity and of creation) brings about abundant fruit in human existence. Pinckaers walks through a number of domains in which this applies:
1) The first, and in a way the foundation for the others, is an acknowledgment of the so called “natural inclinations” as the very foundation of morality and human action. In other words, it is the acknowledgment that the very “fabric” of the beauty, goodness, and truth of human existence is present inside of us, fashioned by God’s creative hand, and seeking only to be set free so that it can blossom and mature to its full flowering. As the Foreword to The Sources of Christian Ethics says: “natural, human inclinations actually belong to the spiritual order”, as opposed to being “merely biological mechanisms or psychic impulses,” or, on the other hand, mere manifestations of carnal concupiscence. “Inclinations to truth, goodness, and life in society are at the heart of our freedom. They are its dynamic, life-giving source. We are not required to confront and dominate our natural inclinations so as to subjugate them. Inclinations,” rather, “make the man.”vii When this is acknowledged, then it is not necessary—and in fact never healthy—to do violence to our own nature in order to attain to holiness.* We are rather invited to walk a path of discernment of the authentic good—in the prudence which is but a marriage of love and humility—so that our inclinations may find their authentic fulfillment according to the plan of God. In this respect, every “no” pronounced in this life—whether our “no” to sin, or the “no” inherent in sacrifice for the sake of a greater good, or due to the circumstances of life—finds its meaning only in serving, making possible, and giving way to a greater “yes.” In truth, God desires all of human life to reflect his own life in being a ceaseless “yes” to beauty, goodness, and truth—in other words, in being ceaseless love, the affirmation of all things in him, from him, and for him. Even when marked by pain, love affirms goodness, and never rejects or condemns anything—that is, anything but evil itself, which is but the sheer privation of good, the privation of being.
Let me give an example of this affirmation of the natural inclinations in practice, and what happens when this affirmation is not given. I am referring to the goodness of human communion, and its importance for a happy human life. As Pinckaers explains: “Several important themes of ancient moral thought have disappeared from modern ethics precisely because of the latter’s emphasis on obligation.” I would add that, in addition to the emphasis on obligation, there is also a constant—I am inclined even to say, at least at times, paranoid or neurotic—fear of the spontaneous manifestations of human desire, such that morality and the Christian life becomes fueled, for all practical purposes, by fear—the fear of sin or the fear of scandal. And this becomes, in practice, the rejection of the vulnerability and risk inherent in all authentic love. Let’s return to Pinckaers: “[T]here is the theme of friendship, discussed by Aristotle in Books 8 and 9 of his Nicomachean Ethics. This is how he introduces it: ‘[Friendship] is absolutely indispensable: even though one possessed every other good thing, without friends a person would have no desire to live.’ According to him, the whole point of law and the political life, over and above justice, was to provide for friendship among citizens. The theme of friendship was prominent among the Greek Fathers, even those who lived in the desert, as Cassian attests in his sixteenth conference. It reached its climax in St. Thomas, who defined charity as friendship with God (IIaIIae, q 23), and who described the work of the Holy Spirit in the world as a work of friendship (Summa contra gentiles, 1.22-23.)”viii
In certain periods of the history of the Church, particularly of religious life—and also in the wider ecclesial culture today, which is terrified of incurring further scandal—the possibility of intimate human friendships has been all but excluded from consciousness. This is particularly true for those persons who have chosen celibacy for the sake of the kingdom—those persons, to be entirely honest, who have devoted their lives precisely to fostering virginal friendships of the deepest and most intimate kind as the very raison d’etre of their state in life. But whenever human intimacy is seen as innately dangerous, or as tinged by sexual desire (whether between persons of the same sex or the opposite sex), then the celibate life—if not Christian life altogether—becomes a life of sheer service or mission. And this leaves the deepest aspirations of the human heart unfulfilled, and the person empty, used and discarded, in their own desire for happiness, for the good of others. And sooner or later it becomes painfully apparent that it is impossible to serve the authentic good of others unless one’s own good also is fulfilled, unless the gift of love is given from a heart that itself experiences the joy of love—of gratuitous love in the intimacy of persons who draw close to one another within the embrace of the Persons of the Trinity. This is the great need and call of human and Christian life today: to rediscover and live the authentic meaning of love in its inseparable connection with intimacy, both human and divine.
2) Only a morality of the desire for happiness is able to confront the question of suffering and to give it meaning, a meaning that is able to affirm the goodness of humanity and its ultimate significance and final destiny in the face of the evil and pain that threaten to destroy it. For it is precisely our deep-seated orientation towards what is good, beautiful, and true that sustains us in the face of difficulty and suffering, and gives us the foundation for hope in final victory. Without this, there is very little or no room for grace to take root and to bring to full flowering within us the primal dispositions of faith and hope, nonetheless of love.
3) Love itself is only possible on the basis of the freedom of desire—for love is, of its essence, desire. If love were to try to reject desire, it would cease to be love, for all love is ultimately grounded in the aspiration towards the good, towards being (as John Paul says, “being and good are convertible” [TOB 2:5], i.e. all that exists is good, and thus desirable). Even when I direct love at another person “for their own sake,” and desire what is best for them, I am precisely desiring happiness, desiring human fulfillment, for another person, just as I desire it for myself. All love is grounded, in other words, on the foundation of God’s own primal affirmation of the goodness of the whole created order, and, in particular, of each incomparable human person. And if love consists in a living participation in God’s own affirmation, in his own “yes” to being and existence, and to the value of the person, it is impossible for this affirmation to remain alive if it rejects the desire for happiness and fulfillment—whether for myself or for any of the children of God.
4) Only this approach can do justice to the mystery of beauty, for, as Thomas Aquinas says, beauty is the first and specific cause of love. Beauty awakens love within the human heart; and a constant and living contact with beauty keeps love alive. If contact with beauty dies, love dies, and if love dies, suffering also loses its meaning and becomes the defeater of human happiness. It is only love, born of beauty and ceaselessly pursuing beauty, that can give meaning to sacrifice, not as a harming of created being, but precisely as part of the path to its wholeness. For again, in the legalistic understanding, sacrifice is understood as mere renunciation, as mere obedience; but in truth, sacrifice is nothing but the expansion of the heart in response to the call of Love, its dilation from the isolation of enclosed self-protection and into the orbit of loving relationship, in poverty and vulnerability, with the “Thou” of the Beloved. Yes, beauty is the great epiphany of Love, the radiant manifestation of Being, essentially one with goodness and truth. Indeed, Beauty is ultimately God himself—God who, as eternal Love, is also the fullness of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. As Saint Augustine exclaimed: “Too late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new, too late have I loved you!” (Confessions, 10.27). The words of Saint Basil also help us here: “In receiving God’s commandment of love, we immediately, from the first moment of our existence, possess the ability to love. The command does not come from outside of us…, it is a part of our nature to seek what is beautiful… Now what could be more lovable than divine beauty?” (Moralia, q 2). As Pinckaers himself comments:
It is surprising that modern ethicists have lost the sense of beauty to such a point that they no longer attribute a moral dimension to it. As for love, they are suspicious of it, pausing, among other things, on the problems that artists pose. It is always for the same reason: they do not see how to include beauty among obligations, nor how the latter may flow from divine beauty. In connection with this I am led to wonder if the frequent loss of the sense of beauty in religious art in recent centuries is the sign of a profound, very regrettable rift between the life of faith and beauty, between charity and artistic sensibility, for which theologians may be in part responsible. Surely in our times theirs is a special call to rediscover with us the beauty of God and creation.ix
5) Finally, let me conclude this section by referring to a final dimension of human life—and indeed the central one—which only the reality of love as I have tried to illumine it makes possible. The following reflections are going to plunge deep into this central mystery, for it is precisely here that full human happiness flourishes. I am referring to what Pinckaers calls “mysticism.” He says:
If we understand the word “mystical” in its original sense we will discover that all love is by its nature mystical. The Greek word mysterion means something hidden, secret. It is a property of love to enter into the secret depths of the beloved, to establish a certain communication between persons on the plane of the mysterious and unfathomable. The preoccupation of Christian mysticism has always been love, its growth, and the different stages leading to its perfection, as well as its most concrete manifestations. Unfortunately, mysticism has been excluded from Christian ethics, as if it were intended only for the elite and as if morality could forego this dimension without cutting itself off from the very strength and dynamism of charity.x
The parallels with everything I have said thus far in these reflections is striking. The “stuff” of mysticism is precisely the “property of love to enter into the secret depths of the beloved, to establish a certain communication between persons on the plan of the mysterious and unfathomable.” This is also the great project of the Theology of the Body, which, of course, seeks to express, not some optional avenue for those persons who happen to wish to live “spirituality” in a more “incarnate” or “bodily” way, but rather to unveil the very heart of the Gospel itself. As John Paul says as the very thesis statement of the TOB: “The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it” (TOB 19:4).
Thus, mysticism is not defined fundamentally by being secret or hidden, by being invisible or spiritual, but rather by being an experiential and lived contact with the person. And this does not happen by withdrawal from the body or from incarnate existence, but rather by letting one’s heart be purified, renewed, and made capable of penetrating to its very core and inmost meaning: the meaning that is precisely the intimacy of the Trinity. And this gives meaning to everything, from the slightest ethical choices, to the daily experiences of beauty, goodness, and truth, to suffering, to hope, to our eternal destiny in heaven. And in fact, even the word mysterion refers, in Christian understanding, not primarily to what is “hidden,” but to what is revealed, what is communicated in love even while surpassing the limits of human comprehension. Thus mysticism actually means a contact something ineffably profound, beyond the grasp of mere reason, while nonetheless also being revealed in a tangible and visible way to human consciousness and experience: in mind, will, emotions, spirit, and body. This is why, in the ancient Church, the Sacraments were referred to as mysterion: as visible manifestations of the invisible mystery, and as a path into the heart of God, not just for an elite few, but for all.
Thus it is entirely proper to speak of a “mysticism of the body,” just as it is proper to speak of a “mysticism of the everyday.” This is because the entire universe is utterly saturated with the presence of the Trinity, and what classifies something as mystical is not whether it is elevated or out-of-the-ordinary, but rather that it is a truly personal contact, in the directness of mutual loving self-surrender, between God and the human person. Thus I would describe mysticism, and the goal of all human and Christian life, in the following way: as the permeation of subjective consciousness by the objective mystery of God and his love—of the Trinity—and also the full conscious living of human existence, particularly human communion, in the likeness of the Persons of the Trinity. This, and this alone, brings us into the living heartbeat of the whole of reality, and allows us to make contact with the deepest core of God’s plan for the entire universe. Thus, it opens up for us the path of true happiness, begun already in this life, and finding its eternal consummation in the next.
+ + +
*I have written extensively about the emotional and spiritual disorders that result from a lack of adequate affirmation and integration of the human inclinations and desires, and also of their healing. In this, I rely in a particular way on the wonderful work of Conrad Baars. See my book, Home for the Restless Heart: Creating a Space of Authentic Affirmation, and all of the books published under Baars’ name. (See the end notes.)
i. Servais Pinckaers, OP, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, OP (The Catholic University of America Press: Washington, DC, 1995), 15-17.
ii. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals], Gesammelte Shriften, vol 4, 393.
iii. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 87. (Gesammelte Shriften, vol 5.)
iv. Michael Waldstein, in the Introduction to Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Pauline Books and Meda: Boston, MA, 2006), 48.
v. Kant, Groundwork of Morals, 421.
vi. Ibid., 18-19.
vii. Ibid., xiii. Words by Romanus Cessario, OP.
viii. Ibid., 19.
ix. Ibid., 31. The previous paragraphs, and the included quotations, have been taken from 24-31.
x. Ibid., 32.