By Anthony Esolen.

"This is my geopolitical fiction," Jesus did not say, when He broke the bread at the Last Supper. "The group, though it has many members, is still one group," Paul did not say, when he sought, gently, to lead the fractious democracy-leaning Corinthians back to their responsibilities toward one another and their submission to the truth. "Every man is an island," John Donne did not say in his meditations on death, so that if you hear the church bells ringing, he did not continue, "you need not ask for whom they toll, so long as they do not toll for thee."

It is almost impossible, in our time of social alienation, family breakdown, self-imposed detachment, radical sexual individualism, and loneliness, to ask people to consider what a society is; a prerequisite, one might think, for considering the social teachings of the Church, or the social good or harm to be expected from a proposed policy.

It is as if we were to ask a shepherd on the steppes to build a fleet of ships, when he has never seen one in his life. Or, perhaps more to the point, it is as if we were to entrust our health to a mad doctor for whom an organ in the body is an isolated thing-in-itself, and therefore neither a true organ, nor a member of a true body. Such a doctor would kill the patient to save the spleen, and end up doing good to neither, failing to understand that an organ is what it is only by its incorporation into the whole.

Such unreality, I believe, characterizes many an approach to Catholic teachings, including teachings that are aimed at the good of a society. They are treated as isolated instances, as elements of a mere set. Their relations to one another, outside of a narrow area of common concern, are unsuspected, unacknowledged, uninvestigated, ignored. They are not incorporated.

Take the liberal call to have homosexual relations normalized within the Church. I have made the point before that such a thing is deeply antisocial, as it further undermines the much-battered walls of family life. It takes for granted that fornication is no big deal. It sows confusion in the minds of children. It has disrupted and abused their much-needed period of sexual latency. Someone with a keen social conscience ought to note that our prisons are full of men who grew up without a married father in the home. Why make a dreadful situation worse?

But that is still to remain in the vicinity of the matter in question. What the irresponsible experimenters do not acknowledge is the whole body of Catholic teachings as a body. The whole question of creation itself is intimately bound up with these teachings about sex.

"For since the creation of the world," says Saint Paul, "his invisible attributes are clearly seen - his everlasting power also and divinity - being understood by the things that are made." (Rom. 1:20) But the idolatry of the pagans, "who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator," is made manifest most obviously in their "shameful lusts," their having "exchanged the natural use for that which is against nature." (25-26)

It will not do to try to sidle past the physical absurdity of such lusts, by saying that the actions feel "natural" to those who engage in them, since Paul already notes that the desires of the heart are unclean; they are not to be trusted, much less to be taken as having been created by God. The Father does not create our fantasies.

To read the created world as what the philosopher Russell Hittinger has called "the first grace," that is, the first book of God, is not to explore the labyrinthine caverns of human imagination and passion. It is to see what is right in front of our eyes.

What we see is that male and female are meant for one another, and indeed are what they are, only because they are for one another; otherwise they have no meaning at all. If this is not obvious, then nothing in Creation is; and if nothing in Creation is, we may as well give up on ...