Contraception, Part II

Part I
Our look at the moral theology of contraception continues.

Therefore, if we accept that sex is the necessary physical element of this divinely ordained self-giving reflection of God by man, we can begin to draw some concrete and logical conclusions about it.

I) Sex is not self-centered; it is not, and cannot ever be, about me. It has to be about my spouse, about my act of giving of myself.

II) Sex is not about pleasure. It is pleasurable, and it was created as such by God, but that is one of its qualities, not its purpose. Pleasure is inward-looking, self-centered – the same things we just established sex isn’t. God has attached pleasure to things that are good and necessary for us to do: eating, sleeping, having sex, etc. But God attached that pleasure to these things because He intended life to be joyful and to encourage us to do them because they were good; they aren’t good because they are pleasurable. We’re supposed to derive pleasure from sex, and that’s not precluded by this point or its giving nature. But we do need to remember that sex, like any other human action, has pleasure as a quality, not a purpose.

III) Sex is appropriate only in the context of a permanent relationship: marriage. Because it is a reflection of God’s eternal – and therefore very permanent – self-giving love, it would be entirely inappropriate, and entirely inaccurate, for us to attempt to reflect that love in any kind of transitory or impermanent fashion. As a temporal being, I can’t match God’s perpetual and eternal love: but I can bind myself to the utmost of my capacity, I can have permanence in my love, even if I can’t have perpetuity.

IV) Sex is appropriate only in instances in which its mutually self-giving quality is fully expressed – God’s love has no reservations, holds nothing back, and has no barriers. Therefore, our loving imitation of that love shouldn’t either.

So that’s brought us quite definitively to sex itself. So let’s start into this section by asking, “what, exactly, is sex?” We might think we know the answer, but it’s actually worth looking at. The soul’s side to sex has been outlined above – marriage has a sacramental, spiritual side, of course. The physical side, for our purposes, requires a very precise and slightly graphic definition: the deposition, through the conjugal act, of seminal fluid in the “appropriate receptacle” of a woman.

So right away we can eliminate things like in vitro as not actual sex: no conjugal act.

Also, we can exclude from being sex all non-coital acts: no deposition and no conjugal act, either. As a note, nobody’s outlawing foreplay, but these sorts of activities aren’t sex, and should not be used to take the place of the sexual act itself. There’s a reason it’s called “foreplay.”

Third, and this is the one that will surprise people, we have to exclude anything involving condoms: this can’t be real sex. It has a conjugal act, but there’s no deposition. It renders the sexual act impotent, thus frustrating its very purpose and nullifying it. Thus, we lump condomistic sex with non-coital sexual acts in the category that some have termed “psuedo-sex.”

So let’s backtrack for a second now: we know what sex is, but what is it for? We’ve discussed the theological importance of sex, and we’ll need to bear that in mind, but sex has practical purposes as well, which can be summarized as “babies and bonding” – sex is for reproduction, and sex is for married persons to share and express their bond of love. You need to have these two elements, the procreative and the unitive, to have rightly-ordered sex. You might technically have a full sexual act while frustrating one of these elements (rape and contraception are the two standard respective examples), but it won’t be good sex. What you have then is more akin to Bullemia, where someone forcibly extirpates the nourishing quality of eating while maintaining some of the other qualities in its nature.So we have a seamless garment, in which the these unitive and procreative natures are interwoven. And together, they form what is really just the opposite side of the self-giving-image-of-God nature of sex. These are just two ways of describing the same reality, and they both entail the same things and they have the same prerequisites.

Contraception, Part I

Several weeks ago, I gave a presentation to our John Cardinal Newman Community on the Church's teachings on contraception. I'll present it here in a series of posts over the following days.

This talk is ostensibly about contraception, but there’s a good deal of ground we’ll have to cover before we get there – what I’m going to say about contraception is really a conclusion, which won’t make any sense unless we have first established the correct set of premises. To talk about contraception, you obviously have to talk first about sex. But to talk about sex, you first have to talk about man, and to talk intelligently about man, you have first to talk about God. So, let’s start with God.

What do we know about God? We know a variety of things about God, but I’d like to focus on one of His overarching and unifying qualities: God is love, Deus caritatis est. This well established principle was, of course, the topic of Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which came out last year.

We can see how this works in practice by considering the Holy Trinity: The Father creates the universe and sustains it out of love, and His instrument in that loving act is His word, the Son, the consubstantial and eternal Logos. The Son, in turn, gives Himself entirely to the Father in love, dying on the cross as the perfect sacrifice of perfect love. The love between the Father and the Son is so great that it manifests itself as a third person, the Holy Spirit

God proceeds, as Genesis tells us, to make man in His own image – and not just in the image of the Father, but in the image of the entire Godhead: “let us make man in Our image.” And although it is primarily in our souls that we possess this image of God – which makes sense, since God is a spiritual, and not a corporeal being, the Incarnation withstanding – God creates us body AND soul.

Therefore, just as God exists fully in the self-giving act of love, so too is man made to give of himself in love, and in so doing he most fully realizes his status as being a reflection of God’s image.

Man has as his final cause God – union with God is our purpose, our end. We have been created to be united in love with something outside ourselves. We have, then, what John Paul II referred to as a “spousal nature,” by which we will most fully realize our purpose by being united with God following the resurrection.

But man can’t enjoy bodily or even spiritual union with God here on earth – this has been rendered impossible by the fall. We have a connection with God through the sacraments, but not this spousal union.

Therefore, God, in His love and wisdom, created man in such a way that he can partially fulfill his call to give of self, partially fulfill his spousal nature, within the confines of our earthly existence.

For this reason, God created man “male and female” and gave them marriage to unite them spousally, and sexuality, the bodily component of that union.

Thus, man most fully reflects God’s image when a man and a woman are united in the marital embrace – they share a union in both body and soul that mirrors the union among God’s persons: they share a spiritual bond by virtue of the sacrament of which they have partaken, and they share a physical bond by virtue of the realities of man’s physical nature. Because we are a union of body and soul – not merely a haphazard jumble of the two, and not merely animated bodies, but a real union – we could not in this life most completely reflect God’s image without the union and giving of one of these aspects. God the Father gives perfect love without corporeal existence, but this is because He transcends it while giving completely of Himself. We have bodies, and so if we attempted to give of ourselves entirely without doing so bodily, we could not – we would be withholding something that we have. Thus, both body and soul are required to be called upon in marriage, because we have both to give.

Furthermore, because people so united are giving entirely of self – as God gives entirely of Himself – in love, they are drawn close to God: by choosing and partaking in love, they grow in their imitation of the perfect love, God Himself. Thus, marriage has in reality a triangular quality: the two spouses united with each other, and each united with God. This is why Archbishop Fulton Sheen entitled his book on marriage Three to Get Married. The whole affair is about more than just husband and wife: it’s about God. It also reinforces the manner in which marriage is a reflection of the Trinity by making the relationship triune.

Griswold Delenda Est

The Alito confirmation will once again have us discussing precedents, decisions, and things Supreme Court and legal. A lot of attention focuses on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that forcibly legalized abortion everywhere within the United States. However, while abortion remains a highly controversial topic, Roe is predicated entirely on a previous case, Griswold v. Connecticut, dealing with something we today regard as far more mundane: artificial contraception.

Griswold created the "privacy" language that so many judicial conservatives detest in Roe. It declared that the Constitution, in addition to its explicit provisions, embodied other rights that "emanated" from it and were found in the "penumbras" of the text. In the words of former law professor, "I have many times taken the Constitution into a dark room, and have never on any occassion seen any penumbra, or anything else for that matter, emanating from it."

In short, the emanations and penumbra language of Griswold, which "found" (read: "invented") in the Constitution a completely nonexistent right to privacy, are the basis for the social and legal madness that we are afflicted with today. Griswold gave us Roe. It gave us Lawrence, which gave us the fiasco in Massachussets. And just as importantly, it pushed an already beseiged Catholic teaching, that the purpose of human sexuality is inherently and inextricably tied up in the procreative nature of the act, to the far outer fringes of society. Catholics should go beyond opposing Roe and voice their disapproval with Griswold not simply because the language there, when taken to its logical conclusions, necessitates Roe, but because this case itself has its own moral abominations. There is very significant statistical evidence that demonstrates the damage that widespread contraception has done to our society's moral fabric. Griswold isn't solely responsible for this -- but it serves to insulate the trend from reversal.

People like to disregard the Church's teachings on contraception because they find it inconvenient. Because they find it inconvenient, they don't bother to educate themselves as to why it is important -- and you can bet that nobody is going to bother to disabuse them of the notion that it is not. There are lots of people out there, even as within such close reach as the rest of the Catholic blogosphere, who write far more effectively on the Church's teaching on "pelvic issues," and why these teachings are integral to our Catholic understandings of the person and human relationships with each other and with God. So, if you're interested, and especially if you're a Catholic who doesn't understand or who disregards the Church's contraception teachings, I encourage you to poke around the Catholic blogosphere at places such as Mark Shea and The Shrine of the Holy Whapping, as well as to take a look at John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

As for myself, I say Griswold delenda est!

File Under: Doctrine, Law