A few weeks ago, on @aladetres_, Fabrice Hadjadj, the French philosopher and writer who recently moved to Madrid to lead the project Incarnatus Est, gave his first interview in Spanish to the young Lluis Gracia. If you listen to it, you will realize that Hadjadj is now ready to be wise in Spanish.
The question of sex
The presentation ends and a question pushes, bluntly, wanting to be the first: «Is sex a sin?». The question about sex opens the interview alone while all the others wait. Questions about love, commitment, intimacy, family and children, transhumanism and digitalization, the meaning of life, death and hope... are asked one after the other, chained to the question about sex (or sin). In a certain way, the theology of sex is at the head of the theology of the body and the theology of the body leads the theology of man.
The mystery of the flesh at the heart of the Christian mystery
Our interviewee, Fabrice Hadjadj, respectful of the religious concerns of the questioner, answers the question about the sinfulness of sex in Christian: «No, our religion is a religion of the flesh».
We tend to think that Christianity is a spirituality. «Yes, but no,“ Hadjadj says, ”because Christianity is the spirituality of the Incarnation (»The Word became flesh") (...) In a world of disincarnation, of spiritualized realities, the flesh is very important: the mystery of the flesh is at the bottom of the Christian mystery. I do not have a body, I am my body.
The image of God in visible bodies
At this point, Hadjadj turns the whole question upside down and contemplates the reality of sex not from the perspective of religion but from that of anthropology. From this perspective, the philosopher plays the role of theologian because his is a theological anthropology, a biblical anthropology that sounds like John Paul II in his Theology of the Body.
Referring to Genesis (Gen 1:27), Hadjadj states: «God created man in his own image and created them, not male and female, he created them male and female (animal determinations). The image of God appears in the sex: he created them male and female».
Man is the only creature that has been created in the image of God. The core of the divine image in man is in his sexuality. Sexuality articulates his filial, «gift», communional and fruitful essence. The dynamic of sexual difference makes possible the truth of love. Genesis points out the sexual difference in man, but not in animals.
And the body expresses and manifests it. «The body, and only the body, is capable of making visible the invisible: the spiritual and the divine» (these are the words of John Paul II at the General Audience, February 20, 1980). The language of the body makes visible the image of the invisible God: either the bodies do it or there is no image.
Christian view of the body vs. Christian view of the body
Certainly, Fabrice, who is up to his eyeballs in paradise, looking Adam and Eve face to face, contemplating man from the mystery of his creation, universalizes the response to sex. In this way, the vision of the Christian body - of the body of every baptized person - reaches the body of every man and every woman - Christian or not - and becomes the Christian vision of the body, of every body. The Christian vision of the body and of sex is the human vision of the body and of sex.
We need only bring to mind «the face we have in orgasm, in the sexual embrace,» Fabrice illustrates. This is not an official face; it might even seem to us a humiliating face because it is the face of a body given to another body, of a person given to another person. Sex is an exposure, it is a vulnerability, it is a place of fragility, not of power: it is a vulnerability of the man who is going to expose himself in an intimate environment, who can lose his potency; and it is also a vulnerability of the woman who can get pregnant from that relationship", or can be used. Our faces speak to us of a universal meaning of sex and the body.
Sex is a place of intimacy, surrender and search of the heart.
In this manifestive framework, our bodies do not hide their strengths: «sex is a place of pleasure,» says Fabrice. And only for men and women (for every man and every woman, not for animals), in the depths of their sexes, sex is a place of intimacy, of vulnerability, of self-giving, of donation, of giving life: «sex is a reality of intimacy, of giving your heart, of searching for the other heart,» notes Hadjadj.
And in another moment he reminds us: «Sex is a relationship and it is a carnal relationship». If there is no relationship - if there is no edge that gives form to the surrender of oneself and the search for the other, to intimacy - the sexual relationship is not a relationship, it is only sex, it is only pleasure.
And he continues: «Your sex speaks. Your sex says: “I am here to meet a woman who will always be incomprehensible -first mystery-, and I am here to give birth to a new generation -second mystery-” (...) And one does not want to give life, but my sex tells me: “You have to do it”. My sex goes ahead of my reason and tells me: “Go ahead, give life!” (...) Because the meaning of life - our philosopher will say in another moment of the interview - is not a question of duration (of prolonging life); the meaning of life is a question of donation, of giving life and of giving birth (and cross) to a new life».
Rephrasing the sex question
In the face of this integral vision of sex, the question of the sin of sex is revealed as a reductionist question; as a question that starts from a fragmented sex, from a conception of sex that keeps pleasure and throws away everything else.
In this case, the question about sex could be: is sex for pleasure a sin? A question that needs no answer because it answers itself.
Still, the first formula is repeated from generation to generation. «Is sex a sin?» is an echoing question, with an echo that never ends. Truly, generations succeed one another and the bodies of men and women continue to speak the same language. Young people ask (loudly) the questions dictated to them by their bodies.
The meanings of the body and the language of the body
And people are wearing the answers, they just have to look at their bodies: the answers have been inscribed in the meanings of their bodies.
The meanings of the body tell us that life has been given to us (filial meaning), that we live it to give it away (spousal meaning) and to give life to others (fruitful meaning).
These meanings, docile to a grammar - the carnal grammar of the gift - construct the language of our bodies. The language of the body is a language that is spoken in the bodies and that, through them, speaks to us of God.
Sex makes theology
«Within a deep embrace you have to meditate on what your sex says, and the answer cannot be other than a response of theological hope, a theological response. This is the mystery: my sex does theology,» Hadjadj says in this interview. Our bodies are theological. «The first sign (referring to sexual desire) is a subject of theology (...), it is a sign of hope that gives life to another, that resumes the history of humanity. Under your pants is the ability to resume the whole history of humanity (...) The most metaphysical in the most physical,» says Hadjadj.
Sex in God's plan for human love
However, Fabrice places the question of sex in the perspective of a «proper anthropology», the anthropology of the Theology of the Body. In this perspective: the partner is divine; space is paradise; time is the sixth day of creation; the couple is the first couple, that of the first man and the first woman (and in it, every couple).
In these coordinates, sex is «very good»; it is part of God's plan for human love. To respect it is to ensure that «the train of love» does not derail from «the tracks of marriage and childbirth».
On this path of happiness, married couples breathe the atmosphere of paradise - the same one that two bodies retained, for our inheritance, before having to leave it. And sex is a joy.
Pharmacist. Expert in Sexual Affective Education.
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