Heavenly Sex: The Moral Authority of an Impossible Dream

Abstract

Writing out of an Augustinian tradition in which faith is understood as hope for the absolutely desirable, the author presents an argument for the ethical privileging of the sexual couple. The ideality of heaven is unrealizable under the conditions of time and space, in part because of its paradoxicality. Although heaven is not to be thought only in terms of sexual imagery, it cannot be thought asexually. It is because the ‘other’ in a couple is both him or herself and representative of all others that the couple — and by extension monogamous marriage — most closely answers to the ideal implicit in the intentionality of sex, namely, the intensity of the one-on-one and the scope of the orgy. Although he does not develop the argument, because of the representative nature of the spouse, the author has laid the foundations for an appreciation of the sacramentality of the monogamously committed couple.