Plato, Aristotle, Frogs, and Sexual Ethics

It all goes back to Plato—our theology of sexual ethics, that is. You may recall Plato’s position that a world of ideals exists corresponding to this world. According to Plato, this ideal universe is the true reality, of which our world is only a shadow or copy. Thus, every material thing in our world is a form of the true form or idea, of which that thing only a copy. For example, Plato believes that we recognize various kinds of tables as “table” because they correspond somehow to the idea, “table,” that exists in the ideal universe. So for Plato, the object of life is to rid oneself of the imperfection of this world of copies of forms and understand the world of true forms.

Aristotle, on the other hand, thought that Plato’s philosophy of forms was ludicrous. For Aristotle, a table is a table, not a reflection of the true idea or form, “table.” Aristotle, the father of logic, thought it is illogical to start with an idea and then proceed to interpret the world based on such ideas. Rather, Aristotle would say that we recognize various kinds of table based on their common characteristics—legs, flat surface, and distance from the ground—and categorize them under the rubric “table.”

These differences of philosophy are why Plato is generally thought of as the father of philosophy, whereas Aristotle is the father of science.

Although Aristotle has won the day in science, Plato has dominated in the church, where we tend to interpret the Bible according to his theory of the forms. This Platonic interpretation is not a difficult leap, however, because the Scriptures often interpret themselves according to the idea of forms. For instance, in Hebrews, the temple on earth is thought to be a copy of the temple in heaven. However, I wonder whether the Scriptures interpret all of our world to be a copy of heaven. I lean towards no. I think we can take the Aristotelian approach and say that an apple is an apple, not a copy of the heavenly apple, while at the same time affirming the existence of things outside of our universe (by which I mean the heavenly realm).

Moving towards Aristotle would have some profound significance of our theologies, though. In particular, I’m thinking about our theology of gender. We tend to think of sexuality in Platonic terms of form. There is the form, “masculine,” which we think to be a divinely ordained category, by which we can only mean a form separate from any particular man, and then we judge how well men fit into this category. The same goes for the “feminine” form as well. The problem is, nature is not so precise in fitting into these predetermined forms. There are many animal species that can actually change gender—frogs for instance, which makes for a great plot when you add some frog DNA to some ancient dinosaur DNA and try to create a Jurassic Park. While this doesn’t happen to humans, hermaphroditism, possessing both the female and male anatomies, has been documented. I think this poses a problem for our theology of gender as some idealized form which is separate from each particular individual. The existence of hermaphrodites seems to deconstruct the way we do sexual ethics in church. To follow our traditional theologies of gender, we must either say that hermaphrodite individuals are either an abomination, since they don’t fit into either form of male or female, or we must say that there exists a universal form, “hermaphrodite.” Either way, this seems to undo our gender theology. Particularly, it presents problems for both our theologies of the roles of women and men and our negative view of homosexuality.