To Have and to Hold

Psychology treats of how we experience the world and ourselves in it. Ontology is the study of what is. Are the two connected? Certainly, but not one to one. In fact, what we experience psychologically may be the opposite of what is really happening. Our experience of appearances can be deceiving.

I came across a remarkable example. Robert Spaemann points to the distinction in his treatment of love and sexuality. Our sexual drive is part of the natural world. But persons are human beings in whom reason coexists with but governs nature. Spaeman puts it this way: "Personhood is not the same thing as being governed by reason. Reason together with the nature of animal drives is that human nature in which the person appears. The personal way to have a nature is the governance of reason in life."

This hierarchy of nature and reason applies not only individually but in our relations with others, since, as Spaemann says, "Personhood exists only in the plural. To be a person means to occupy a place in the universal, trans-temporal community of persons."

Sexuality becomes "personal" (and not a symbol of depersonalization) if (and only if) it "is embedded in that unconditional, irreversible, and exclusive mutual self-giving of two persons, indeed of two persons whose different sexual physis is already ordered toward such a union. . . . Embedded in such a personal union, the submersion of the self in the act of intercourse becomes a symbolic realization of personal self-transcendence." Spaemann, "The Paradoxes of Love," at pp. 23-24.

Reasons's governance is needed to orient sexuality to its proper meaning and end. We call this self-mastery. But the outcome is beautiful: "In the concrete unity of love, the lovers do not disappear, but rather are elevated to the highest level of their possibilities."

Love requires self-mastery and self-sacrifice. "We speak of overcoming oneself, of self-denial and of dying with Christ. . . . What we experience psychologically as self-denial is ontologically a self-realization and rising of the person. The Gospel expresses it this way, 'He who wants to save his soul will lose it, but he who gives it up, will save it.'"

And so, when we do battle to maintain self-mastery, we should try to keep in mind that the negative psychological experience (of resisting tempation) is wonderfully positive ontologically: We are becoming real persons!