Thomas Aquinas 2
Saint Thomas Aquinas, as a philosopher, wrote several works that justified Christianity in a philosophical context, taking cue on Aristotle's old writings. Naturally, Aquinas took up on the Church's "ultra-conservative" views on sexuality and worked to rationalize them through his own theory of natural law. Aquinas argues against any form of sex where the intention to produce children is not involved. He explains this through his theory of natural law, where sex is purely for the purpose of reproduction to ensure the continuance of the human race, only in the context of a monogamous relationship, and not for simple physical pleasure. There are many laws that Saint Thomas Aquinas speaks of, such as eternal law, human law, divine law, and natural law.All humans are part of "God's plan" and therefore subject to eternal law, where we are guided to God's "supernatural end in a higher way" (Bobik, 33). According to Aquinas, humans in particular follow God's eternal law through a natural law, and inborn instinct to do good. Something is said to be part of natural law if "there is a natural inclination to it" and if "nature does not produce the contrary," (Mcinerny, 74). Natural law includes such ideas as self-preser
According to Mcinerny, if we turn to Freud, we see that virtually everything we do has an underlying sexual purpose. By Freud's logic, any contact we make with the opposite sex has some underlying sexual motive, no matter how sublime it is. The only way someone can put aside his or her sexual aggressions is by finding another outlet for such passions. Sports, music, art, and virtually any hobby that we can enjoy works as an outlet for sexual aggressions. For those who work for the Church, that passion is obviously channeled into worshiping the divine. Obviously, there are times when people must "relieve" themselves (92). Aquinas goes on to define more serious mortal sins which he refers to as indecent sex. This includes homosexuality and bestiality. He quotes bestiality from the Bible: "'[Joseph] accused his brothers of the worst sin... they had relations with cattle'" (Jenkins, 95). Perhaps he is right, but homosexuality, on the other hand, was accepted in societies even before Aquinas' time. For instance, the ancient Greeks accepted intercourse between a younger and older man as a higher form love. Even if Aquinas tried to invoke the "natural law" argument, he could have shown evidence of homosexuality in nature, even though it is not very common. This is interesting in the sense that considering animal's lack of reasoning, they are not capable of sin because they have no real knowledge of distinguishing between moral right and wrong. In that case, there seems to be a loophole in Aquinas' theory, if natural law seems to prove homosexuality not to be a mortal sin. vation, union of the male and the female, and education of the young, which is easily found in nature. Humans also have a unique knowledge of God and were meant to live in a society. Aquinas explains that even though concepts such as slavery and personal possessions are not found alone in nature, they were created by human reason, and in such cases "the law of nature was not changed but added to" (Burrell, 39). Because we can do such things, we are separated from the rest of God's creatures. Fortunately Aquinas did classify the severity of such mortal sins; bestiality being the worst, and "uncleanness" being the mildest (Macinerny, 68). Ther
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Approximate Word count = 1500
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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