On Humanae Vitae*
I first read Humanae Vitae, of course, when it first came out. At that time everyone, including myself, homed in almost exclusively on the declaration about contraception. Not just the fact of the condemnation interested me. I had indeed feared there was going to be a silent slide, traditional teaching getting abandoned by default; but if there was going to be a pronouncement at all, I was confident that it would condemn contraceptive intercourse. But the precise formulation of the condemnation interested me intensely. The invention of the contraceptive pill had in a way put moral theologians in a difficulty and it often led to the collapse of their former views. There had long been a characterisation of the use of contraceptives as involving a sort of perversion in sexual acts. Now the physical act of sexual intercourse was not itself ‘distorted’, as they put it, if you used a pill. And suppose that sort of pill were prescribed for something else bona fide (for endometriosis, say: I have known it be prescribed for that), it wouldn’t have been thought wrong to use the period of infertility that it gave. So where was the wrong? It became clear that it lay in the aspect of intention. But here again people felt an immediate difficulty because they had not thought enough about intention. The intention, they said at once, was to have intercourse without getting a child. But that intention had long been declared possibly acceptable. It was so declared in Pius XI’s teaching of the allowability ‘for grave reasons’ of confining intercourse to infertile times, quite methodically, with a view to avoiding conception.**
As a professional philosopher, and quite independently of this subject, I had for a long time been very much interested in intention - so interested, indeed, that I wrote a book simply about it in 1956.*** This interest had helped me to concentrate on the aspect of intention in thinking about contraception and the ‘rhythm’ method of birth control.
The first thing to get clear about is that there is a mistake in speaking of ‘the intention’ in an act. Whenever you do anything, there are, as you might put it, lots of things you do. Take an example: you endorse a cheque which someone produces for you to do that. What are you doing? You are depositing ink on a bit of paper, you are writing your name, you are signing a cheque on its back, you are perhaps thereby paying a bill for someone; you are, we’ll suppose, thereby doing a kindness to the person whose debt it is. All these might be comprised in your one act. And all of them would be intentional, though there may be others that you are doing in the very same act, which are unintentional - like marking the table under the cheque as you press down with your pen.
And there is also your objective. You do the kindness, perhaps, in order to improve family relations. That lies in the future: it is a further intention, perhaps the main one, the end or goal, of doing all those other things. But there may be side intentions too, like impressing someone with your gold pen by using it to endorse the cheque.
So we can ask this question about what you do: ‘What is the character, or rather, what are the characters, of the act, as intentional, at the time when it is done?’ What are you doing, and doing on purpose? And there is also the question: ‘What are the further intentions with which your act is done? What is its goal?’ These are different questions. The first always has several answers. The second may have only one.
Suppose a couple’s situation to be one in which it is right and honest to have intercourse but avoid conception. This goal, that there be intercourse but no conception is an intention (a further intention) with which the act is performed, and in the case in hand it is common to two different couples whom we’ll imagine: one couple use contraceptives, the other infertile times. The goal we have mentioned makes no difference between them, and we are assuming their situation to be one in which it deserves no reproach. But the act of the contraceptive pair has a different character from the act of the other pair. For one of the descriptions true of their act is: that it is an act of sexual intercourse deliberately rendered infertile (if it should by chance be fertile otherwise). And this is the immediate significant difference between them and the other pair. For the other pair are performing an act of the generative kind - what the Pope calls an act with procreative significance - nothing having been done in order to change it from that. Now the difference in these characters of the intentional acts, between their intentions at this level, is a difference between wrong and right. Why it is so remains to be seen.
This point, about the identity of goal, but difference in character of the act of intercourse, was made very clear in paragraph 16 of Humanae Vitae. The translation we have is bad. It should run: ‘It is true in the two cases the couples are alike in meaning to avoid children for acceptable reasons’. But it goes on, ‘in the former case they make legitimate use of a natural disposition’.
When considering an action you need to know whether your goal in doing it is all right, but also whether the act itself is all right, and the former might be all right while the latter was not.
This point about intention, which is put so clearly, was the first thing I observed at that time of first reading. The second was the Pope’s exhortation to get more knowledge. This I found truly instructive. (The other only confirmed what was already clear to me.)
In earlier days, when Catholics were generally rather firm and clear in their rejection of contraception, they were not really clear about the status of the permissibility of using the ‘safe period’, the ‘rhythm method’, which was the only way they knew. Was it perhaps divinely ordained that it be uncertain and risky? Was it morally destructive to be secure? Should one’s begettings and conceivings be hardly more within one’s control than intercourse itself? Should they perhaps not be fully voluntary but arise from nature?
When the Pope said: ‘Go to it, get all the knowledge you can, obtain certainty about the times of fertility’, this was very enlightening. We were not to assume that knowledge was impossible, that ignorance was part of God’s plan, we were not to treat involuntariness as a divinely ordained necessity in these matters. Sanctified ignorance was not to be our badge. This was good and instructive news. It is splendid that the knowledge has been obtained.
I have only recently reread the encyclical. Originally those were the two things I saw in it. An encyclical is always full of proper sentiments, generally edifying material together with repetition of familiar points of doctrine. All this I thought of as the ‘blurb’ surrounding the hard definite stuff, and I fear I didn’t pay much attention to it. Rereading it, I find I misjudged it: there is very much material for reflection in it.
First, there is the opening, with its observations on the changes in the world and the new questions that have arisen.
There is surely an implicit acknowledgement that rapid development of population is capable of proving a problem which it can be right to consider in considering how many children to try and have. Note, however, that the Pope was too cautious to commit himself to any views on the existence of over-population anywhere. (Our world has gone mad on this.)
Second, there is note taken of the change ‘in the manner of considering the person of a woman and her place in society, and in the value to be attributed to conjugal love in marriage, and also in the judgement of the meaning of conjugal acts in relation to that love’.[1]
That paragraph could receive a lot of expansion and reflection. Note that it contains no nostalgia for the past, no lamenting in favour of times when women were thought of as obviously not equal citizens, not suitable witnesses in a law court, for example (as St. Thomas remarks somewhere) - let alone judges etc. We are familiar with a kind of nostalgia about former times ‘when women were women’. But no such note is struck here.
The idea of a new valuation of conjugal love is strange to me. But maybe the old great valuations of it in Homer, in Proverbs, in Confucius, which I should think are paralleled in most cultures, are nevertheless exceptional, and standard attitudes have usually been more ignoble.
The changes in the appreciation of the meaning of conjugal acts in relation to the love of married couples might, I suppose, be described like this: formerly such things, so long as they were acts of proper sexual intercourse, not acts done in vile disreputable ways, were just left to take care of themselves. They were part of life; nothing much to do or think about them except to do or abstain. A wife was supposed to be treated with respect, not used like a prostitute. But a man would use his wife, perhaps, without its occurring to him to consider how she felt about it. I don’t know how universally this was so; but it may have been very widespread.
I have heard from young men that it is intolerable travelling with a female companion (not your wife) in Arab countries, because it is apt to be regarded as the most obvious form of politeness, of quite superficial friendliness, to hand her over for sexual use. Unwillingness, and the idea that she might have something to say in the matter, is simply not understood. Well, the whole situation I am describing would very likely be, and would certainly be assumed to be, one of fornication, so it is not so easy to make observations out of Christian morality which speak directly to this point. Nevertheless we can make a sort of transposition of the theme to marriage. The idea that the woman is for use (licit or illicit doesn’t make a difference to the point we are addressing) and that what she may be thinking about it is nothing of which to take much account (her task is to be available and amenable) - that, I suppose, is the attitude that is disappearing; and with that, the assumption that a wife could never have the right to say ‘no’ for sufficient reason. In suggesting this right, I am not denying the teaching of St. Paul. But remember that his doctrine on this point was absolutely symmetrical and egalitarian between the two partners. I take it no one interprets it so that it would be out of the question for a husband to say ‘No’ on a particular occasion too, even though he ‘has not the power over his own body, but his wife has’.[2] Can he be too busy? Think it unwise and be firm? Then so can she.
Pope Paul himself has done much in this encyclical to contribute to the ‘appreciation of the relation of conjugal acts to married love’. The principal way has been by his speaking of the ‘significance’ of such acts. He has taught that conjugal acts have a ‘procreative significance’ and a ‘unitive significance’ which cannot be separated from one another.
This takes a good deal of thinking about. First it is clear that ‘procreative significance’ does not entail that the act be actually procreative. It has the significance of being that type of act, whether it procreates or not: these acts are what we call the ‘generative acts’. It is the same sort of point to say that the acorn is the seed of the oak tree - though most acorns don’t grow into oaks. To take steps to render the act infertile in case it should be fertile is to denature it in your intention.
But not only does a normal sexual act have procreative significance without necessarily procreating - in fact, few of them are actually procreative - but, if the Pope is right about the ‘inseparability’ of the procreative and unitive significance, an act could actually be procreative and yet lack ‘procreative significance’. If it were performed by a man’s squirting his semen into a tube, which conducted the sperm so that conception resulted, that would not have been an act of procreation on his part. He might well say ‘I didn’t beget, I only --’. Begetting is a personal act involving actual union of man and woman. It is not the provision of sperm which then is conveyed to an ovum, even if there should then be conception as a result. If that is so, then equally there can be acts of physical union which lack unitive significance. This deserves much reflection. What it has to do with is not how united people feel themselves to be in the moment, but with the actual profound union of the married state. These are the acts that have a significance deriving from the significance of married life.
Make no mistake: it is the whole Catholic Christian idea of chastity that is under fire in the modern world. It is also under fire from those Catholics who reject Humanae Vitae. I used to think you could argue, sufficiently to convince a Catholic, that no sort of sexual acts could be excluded if once you admitted contraceptive intercourse. But the enemies of Humanae Vitae seem now to embrace that conclusion. Not indeed without any restriction, but at least as far as concerns sexual activity between two people; I suppose adult people. For though I know Catholics who solemnly defend and commend homosexual activity, I don’t know any who make propaganda for bestiality, group-sex or paedophilia. No doubt, however, all that will come as the world at large becomes accepting of these things.
Therefore we need to think very hard about this ‘unitive significance’ of which Humanae Vitae treated. That the unitiveness has to do with marriage, gets its character from marriage, is clear. But more needs to be said about it in order to present the strong and shining virtue of chastity as understood by the Catholic Church. I can’t say more about this here. It is a programme for thought.
Briefly, I will end by pointing to its connexion with human dignity. That conception we used to have called to our attention every day at Mass:
Deus, qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti et mirabilius reformasti ...
and I wish the prayer had not got relegated to Christmas Day only. For the idea of human dignity is a popular one, pro tem., nowadays. A young African friend of mine (not a Catholic) when Humanae Vitae came out, said ‘The Pope has struck a great blow for human dignity!’ and I was glad to learn from him.
Well, but there are two pictures of it. That of the Church, and of the world. In the world’s picture, however, human beings can more and more be killed so that others can have the life they think they want: human dignity is not a fact to make you behave with reverence before any human life, but rather a standard which it is demanded life should reach. And the dignity and honour of human sexuality rightly conducted equally does not enter into the world’s picture of human dignity: this is not, for the world, the place to set up a standard. Then the world and the Church are precisely opposite in their tendency. The Church makes no requirement of a standard before it reverences human life, and sets up a standard to which we must conform in our sexuality if we are to use it to reflect and not blaspheme the dignity of human nature. But the world will set up standards, partly standards of satisfaction (where?), not meeting which human life doesn’t deserve to be respected; while it reveres sexuality unmeasured by standards, as we do life.
* Text of a paper delivered in February 1978 to an International Conference at the University of Melbourne on Humanae Vitae and the Ovulation Method of Natural Family Planning. Published in J N Santamaria and John J Billings (eds) Human Love and Human Life (Melbourne: The Polding Press, 1979), pp.121-27.
** Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical Casti Connubii at §59 speaks of the acceptability of marital intercourse when ‘on account of natural reasons either of time or of certain defects new life cannot be brought forth’; but it contains no teaching about methodically confining intercourse to infertile periods in the woman’s cycle. The relevant teaching which Anscombe surely had in mind is to be found in the Allocution to Italian midwives (29 October, 1951) of Pope Pius XII.
*** G E M Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957).