Contraception, Chastity and the Vocation of Marriage*
Let me indulge in a day-dream. The time is 1968. The Encyclical** has just been issued. Everywhere where contraception has got a hold, the bishops speak out boldly and repeatedly. Their message runs something like this: ‘Christian people! The Holy Father requested that this issue not be discussed in this past four years. In that time, the enemies of the Church’s teaching have not been silent. They have done everything to persuade you, dear people, that you could change your minds, forget the former teaching, and be wholly conformed to the world in this matter. But that you cannot be. The times have come again, the times of the ancient world, when it is apparent to everyone that the mere calling of a Christian separates you from the world even though leaving you in it. In the centuries of Christian history, the Church educated your forefathers into at least an acknowledgment of God’s laws. Then open wickedness seldom pretended to be virtue itself, and, what especially affects everyone, the common lot of marriage was generally regular Christian marriage. No wonder, then, that in these times the common calling of a Christian was often hardly perceived as a calling not to be of this world. No wonder that Christian people at large were regarded as a sort of Christian lumpenproletariat. No wonder the entry into a monastic life was characterised as almost a second baptism. No wonder marriage was thought of as belonging to the common worldly life. But now, in these decades of the twentieth century, all that has changed. It has become visible to everyone that a Catholic Christian is called not to be conformed to the world and, though the religious life remain higher, you need enter no monastery to manifest this. Where unchastity is recommended on all sides as the norm, you are to accept a different norm. The law of chastity, which the world hates, you know is this: only in marriage to seek the satisfaction of genital desire; outside marriage your behaviour is to be free. For the conventions of genital solicitation are a sort of slavery in the world, poisoning many relations, rendering us incapable of many gestures and affections, and of all this you ought to be free. Marry if you are willing to have children; then, without anxiety rejoice in one another in the flesh. Performing true marriage acts as mutual inclination prompts you, you will normally have children without having to direct your intention especially to getting them; for they normally will come from this form of life. Do not be immoderate; but then whatever does no harm and that you mutually desire is permitted you, so long as the ejaculation of the man’s seed is only in the woman’s vagina, and you do nothing to render these acts infertile, if they would otherwise have been fertile. You may not marry with the intention of having no children, for that is not marriage but only an agreement in concubinage. If you have a just reason later on to avoid children, you still have rights in the form of married life, rights in one another’s bodies, and you may seek out infertile times for intercourse. But make sure that the reason is a just one and not laziness, love of ease or mere worldliness.
‘Against these laws of marriage the world rages, crying out in particular that this permission is absurd, if you are not allowed artificial contraception. But the very rage of the world is the proof of the difference: for they are angry at the law of holiness, at the different ideal of life that you have before you. Under this law, the obsessive fire of sensual preoccupation need not burn you, running uselessly in your veins. The erotic fire will burn on a domestic hearth: tamed, it will warm you, and you can thank God for it, for so it helps to forge the bond of the first, and still the strongest, society of the human race. But you will not live like your neighbours, defiling your marriages, and above all you will welcome children if you are able to have them.’
This message, so far as I know, was not given. In many places the bishops were visibly taken aback by the encyclical. Poor men, they too had been affected by the great onslaught through the media and otherwise. And the best that was said was ‘No change, after all. So defend, and live according to, the rules as well as you can.’ And pretty heavy hints were given to the faithful that they could find easy accommodation for their vices if they really didn’t want to go along with the Pope.
I accuse the bishops and the parish clergy of failure to teach. Indeed, who would be a bishop? The responsibility is frightful, the danger of hell much greater than for the rest of us. This teaching was needed not once or twice; it was not enough that people should know at the back of their minds that this was the official teaching. They needed to be taught to take it seriously, to be taught in season, out of season. The great Irish Dominican of the English Province, Father Vincent McNabb, who died before these things happened, predicted that this century would see great struggles in the Church, not about dogma, but about morals: he was surely right. As things were, those lay people who were faithful in their lives were, humanly, in a sense alone. I am grateful that I wasn’t put to the test of these times. They had to lean upon God, not upon the encouragement of their pastors. A deathly silence from the clergy, I mean from those who did not actually dissent, was pretty discouraging. And spirituality dried up. All this was perhaps out of fear of driving people out of the Church. Well, it has often meant that the process was accomplished in two stages. First, you decide to reject the teaching about contraception. Then you become more and more watery in the dogmatic content of your faith. Then, very often, it fades out altogether. Or it settles down to a total worldliness.
That cunning and sapient man, Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote: ‘The danger for the degeneration of Protestantism is shallow worldliness; of Catholicism, sanctimonious hypocrisy’. What insight! But see how things have changed: the shallow worldliness, happily identified as very religiousness, is now much more our form of degeneration than formerly. For, note, the degeneration was not supposed to be a falling away, but a degenerate form of religiosity. The cause is the failure to embrace the Papal teaching - to embrace it with real enthusiasm, not grudgingly, and to proclaim it strongly. It was more important than we knew.
How you are paying for it now, you bishops and clergy! How many baptisms are there in your parishes? Have they not in many places declined far more than the birth rate has itself? You were short sighted and cowardly. And how about adult baptisms? In England there used to be 12,000 converts a year; now there are hardly any.
It was in 1963, late I am sure, that I became aware of the peculiar dreadful miasma of the present day that was spreading over the Church. It was then that an acquaintance showed me an article by some quite well-know priestly writer from Europe, in an American periodical. I forget its content, which was boring, except for the way it ended. It ended with a joyful celebration of the fact that the conception of the ‘embattled Church’ was now out of date. This I saw with a sort of numbness, a passive scepticism at what seemed an odd opinion. How could it be? Out of date - just when the formerly Christian world was more and more explicitly rejecting the whole of Christian teaching? How strange if the concept of the embattled Church was appropriate all through the centuries of ostensibly Christian culture! - and just when that collapses it becomes out of date! Hearing of the way the voices of the clergy were going along with the world, the artist David Jones exclaimed: ‘Oh, they should have called out the guards!’ But where were the guards? The analogue of the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation?
What can be done? If you want to repair the situation, you will have to preach chastity, the whole doctrine of the Church: the whole package. For it all hangs together.
They say we are ‘anti sex’: this astounds us at first for we know our war against the Manichees, our unfailing rejection of the loathsome heresy that the flesh is evil.
But the truth is, we are what they call ‘anti sex’. To set a value on virginity voluntarily maintained, and on the religious vow of chastity, to commend abstinence from time to time even for the married - that is to be anti sex. We are accused of thinking that sexual intercourse needs an excuse, and that it is excused only by being for procreation. Of course if you look at it like that, the Papal teaching becomes incomprehensible. And I feel forced to admit that there is a hint of this in the Augustinian tradition. In that tradition, St Paul’s speaking of something as being matter of pardon or excuse, not of command, was taken to mean that intercourse was pardoned or excused; whereas it would seem to me a more natural understanding of that text that deliberate abstentions for a time ‘to give yourselves to prayer’, are permissible, though not commanded.*** If this is the more correct interpretation, then it has to be granted that there is a strain of a false idea that intercourse needs excuse in our tradition. But what concerned St Augustine was really the feeling of a peculiar disorder in our sexuality. And about that, I think he was right. This disorder, he thought, was excused and made up for by the excellence of marriage. The doctrine is more subtle than would be one that ‘intercourse needs excuse’. And the idea that procreation is the needed excuse for intercourse is exactly like the idea that nourishment is the needed excuse for eating. The reason why that sounds funny is that it is the inbuilt teleology of the kind of activity not an external justification. You can see this by asking how you would identify sexual differentiation and genital organs in another species. This inbuilt teleology does not mean that every act must be intended to procreate: rather, engaging in these acts as part of your form of life is what, in people of suitable age, is geared to procreation, and you don’t have to think about that in connection with each act. Responsibility is first of all in making that life a permanent married life, and thereafter it is a matter of detail.
If it were not for the disorder that Augustine perceived, we would not need to guard against anything but excess (and, more rarely, defect), i.e. sins against moderation, in matters of genital activity and excitement. This is how it is with eating. But the strange obsessiveness and the mad pervasive atmospherics of disorderly sexuality as it infects a culture and a place point to something different. This is a reason, though I don’t know whether it is the only reason, why there’s something wrong with treating sexuality just as an appetite that needs regulating according to principles of moderation. I believe the Greek way of classifying chastity - i.e. as a subspecies of temperance - was always inadequate. It would really not account for the mystical value and character of virginity which even the Greeks were aware of.
Failure of moderation - in either direction - on the part of married people is the least of sins against chastity. It is fairly easy to identify by the following criterion: could we do without, if need arose? - as, for example, it very well might in case of illness. The practice of abstinence in natural family planning is of course a practice in moderation.
But the world rejects the whole of Catholic teaching. Here let me remark that the idea that contraceptive practices are alright within marriage, but we should worry about the supply of contraceptives to the unmarried, is quite ludicrous. Contraception is a defilement of marriage. That idea is one of mere worldly respectability: I hope it may disappear.
Rejecting the Church’s teaching on contraception, people have naturally enough come to accept homosexual genital practices, as was warned by the minority report.**** We thought it enough to say: if you reject the teaching on contraception you’ll have no reason not to reject the other teaching too. But it isn’t enough. Now there are Catholic homosexuals making earnest propaganda, and saying ‘We agree it all hangs together, and we reject the whole deal.’
So we are having to consider the whole question of chastity. There are broadly speaking three possible views: one, there is no sense in the idea of such a virtue at all. Sexual pleasure, genital pleasure, need not be restrained; no moral law requires it, there are no forms that are objectionable (unless the sadistic forms are excepted). Let us dismiss this; it seems too crazy. But then there is the view which associates genital union with love, and so sees that it should be between humans, and perhaps is even inclined to think it should be restricted to loving couples. I don’t really know why the latter.
Here we have the Pope’s teaching that there is an inseparable connection between procreative and unitive significance. It is implicit in that that you can have procreation without the act having procreative significance - as when it is dissociated from union or unitive significance. And the other side of the coin is that you can have union without unitive significance - as when it is dissociated from procreation or procreative significance. It will then be essential to the Catholic teaching that the legitimate use of infertile times does not dissociate the act from procreative significance. That of course would not be the case if infertile times were chosen, as they were by the Manichees throughout a marriage, or, I should say rather, throughout an arrangement for concubinage, with a view to avoiding children altogether.
The homosexual will perhaps claim that his unions have unitive significance. We may contemplate the contrast, between the most ideal form of this, and the form of marriage in which the couple are joined in the work of bringing up the children that result from their union to serve and love God. It is not difficult to see that the one is a poor imitation of the other, and that the reason for the particular love to be confined to a pair is lacking. The reason in the married pair is the background of responsible love required for children. Some philosophic speculators now entertain the idea of sexual groups, with wives and husbands in common; but there is an obvious objection: the cry ‘It wasn’t my job’ would be inevitable in connexion with a diffuse responsibility.
All this shows why chastity as understood by the Catholic Church is a useful virtue. For even the unitive significance as described is useful. But there is more to explore, hinted at in our references to the mystical significance of virginity.
Chastity, though a solid, practical, useful sort of virtue, is perhaps not of the greatest worth, perhaps isn’t even the real thing - I don’t know - unless it is one particular form or aspect of purity. I mean purity of heart.
Now this may seem nebulous and difficult to make anything of. One can perhaps practise various virtues, like truthfulness, moderation, hospitality. How would one practise purity of heart? Isn’t it a character which one has or not? ‘Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.’ How credible that sounds! But if one’s heart is not pure, does one just look with helpless admiration, perhaps hopeless longing, at the spectacle of those who manifest purity of heart? I think this is a common frame of mind.
Well, but St Paul says, ‘Purify your hearts’. So there must be something that can be done. Purity is perhaps the end product, rather than a practice. But how does one purify one’s heart?
I suppose that a great part of the training of a religious, if it is a good training, is a training in the purification of the heart. We need instructions from those who know. I cannot say much. But I would think that declining to act from contemptible motives - motives of vanity, for example - must be part of it, together with a lack of enslavement to sensuality, and also a determination to trust God. Trust in God is most constantly derided - it’s indicated that the priest hypocritically said ‘Trust in God’ and the deluded victim tried it and it didn’t work. That is one of the most common bits of propaganda. And I suppose that a priest who is himself rather comfortable and is not humble and not obedient in spirit, is in an awkward position in telling some hard pressed person to trust God. Nevertheless that vulgar attack is an attack on the roots of religion, and the proof of it is this: Everyone knows that the picture of one who continued to suffer greatly, but who continued to trust God, is not a picture of someone trying something that doesn’t work. Rather the story: ‘I trusted God, and see, I got a job promotion!’ demands rather special circumstances not to be a bad joke.
What, then, is needed? Constant teaching - teaching of the whole faith as if to children who have never been taught it. People often haven’t: and those who have it will be built up and not irritated by such teaching. And, in this particular matter: the teaching needs to take the form: Do not be conformed to the world, and: Purify your hearts. Embark upon marriage with a will to have children, and a determination not to defile your marriage with acts which make it a sort of concubinage, a setting for proceedings not unlike those of active homosexuals. And trust God if you are afflicted. It is not for nothing that you are a Christian: you cannot demand that it cost you nothing or that it not separate you from the world you live in.
* Text of an untitled manuscript; no date.
** The reference is to Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter Humanae Vitae.
**** The reference is to a 1966 memorandum by a group of four moral theologians who were part of the Papal Commission for the Study of Problems of the Family, Population and Birth Rate, originally established by Pope John XXIII, and reconstituted with a greatly increased membership by Pope Paul VI.