This gnostic attitude toward the body has never entirely disappeared. Rather, it mutates from age to age. Our modern version began with Descartes, whose Cogito ergo sum radically separated personhood from the body.
Most people today think like Descartes: they imagine their real self is somewhere inside the body, the proverbial ghost inside a machine, and that what they do with their bodies doesn’t really matter. The body is a thing to be manipulated; it has no essential connection with our spiritual core. This gnostic downgrading of the body is so ingrained that we don’t even notice it. And yet it is going to have to be reversed if we are to build what Saint John Paul II called a Civilization of Love.
The Church offers a radically different reading of the human person. To a large extent, we are our bodies, and we are what we do with our bodies. Which means that our spiritual welfare is intimately bound with our physical acts. And there is no deeper physical act than sex.
Sex is not simply the functioning of a biological appetite. It is a deep bonding between two individuals. It is an exchange of persons, and not simply an exchange of pleasure between consenting adults. The whole person, body and soul, is involved. The Magisterium reminds us in documents like Humanae Vitae and Familiaris Consortio that this bonding is so intimately linked with the creation of new human life that there is no way of artificially separating them without doing spiritual damage to ourselves.
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