Contraception: a parable and an argument

This is inspired by recent conversations with Aubrey Spears regarding contraception. See also my previous article on contraception.

The Parable

A master prepared to go on a journey and said to the keepers of his house, “I am going to send a messenger here bearing a treasure of mine, which is worth more than my whole house and estate and everything else that belongs to me, for I wish to place it in the locked safe within the inner rooms of my house. And because of the hostility of the surrounding country, I am going to send him in secret, so that no one will know of his coming and going, not even you.” So he instructed them to leave open a certain small door, so that the messenger would find it open whenever he came.

But after a while wild animals and livestock and vagabonds and highwaymen found their way into the courtyard and the outer rooms of the house by way of this open door, and the keepers of the house had great trouble. Some of them feared, saying “We will be killed, and the house ruined, if this goes on,” and others grumbled against the master’s command. So they gathered together and said to each other, “Our master did not say that we were to keep the door ALWAYS open, did he? Therefore, let us open it for an hour only, every night, and lock it again, that we will not be always plagued by these intruders. And if the messenger desires greatly enough to enter, he will wait by the door until that hour of night and keep trying to enter, and then, when we open it, he will come in.” So they began opening the door for an hour only, at night, and locking it again.

But it happened that soon after, the messenger came, and sought to enter the door, but finding it locked, he stayed by and continued to try it. But when the vagabonds and highwaymen saw him at the door, they came and beat him and stole away the treasure.

Soon after that, the master of the house returned, and going to his safe, he opened it, to make sure the treasure was safe and sound. But he found the safe empty! Then the keepers were quick to say, “My lord, the messenger never came!” But the master investigated the matter, and discovered what they had done.

Then the master said to them, “Wicked servants! Did I not tell you that this treasure was of more importance than all the belongings of my house? Did you not trust me to take thought of all that was mine, and to see to your well being as well, as a good master? And if you feared that the house would be overrun, could you not have left the other tasks appointed to you, and set up a guard at the door? But you did not wish to turn away from your own pursuits enough to hold such vigil!” What then will the master do to those servants? Indeed, only his mercy would keep them out of the dungeons.

The Argument

If a master discloses his general purpose for something to a servant, and the servant acts so as to partially prevent that purpose from occurring, without consulting his master to ask for permission for the exemption, then he always does this out of a fear or doubt in the master, that is, in the master’s goodness or his competence.

Married people do not know whether God will choose any given marriage act as the one through which to bring about children (or, to put this in the case of the use of contraception, they do not know whether he would have intended it had they not prevented it).

If God has made it known to his people that the conception of children is something he generally intends to bring about by means of their marriage acts, and one admits this, and yet, having not obtained any exception from him, nevertheless attempts to avoid God’s bringing about that general intention in a particular marriage act, then it can only be out of fear of God’s goodness or competence.

All things done out of fear of God’s goodness or competence are wrong.

Therefore, contraception is, for those who acknowledge God’s general purpose, inevitably wrong.

Nor would God ever grant such an exception to his children, for a contraceptive act wounds the soul, and he desires our good.

This is true even for those for whom the prospect of having a child is the most daunting; indeed, it is especially true for them. Who are the people whose trauma makes it good for them to engage in sex while saying to God, “we refuse to bear a child through this but we are doing it anyway”? For whom is that kind of sex good? For whom is the secret avoidance of God’s purposes a balm? Who are they for whom selfishness and inward bent is a blessing? Those who are afraid of having a child, and at the same time afraid of periodically giving up sex, are among those who most need their sexual lives redeemed. It is precisely those who have strong reasons to want to use contraception—whether for debt or age or children already—who stand most to benefit from God’s command, for it is against the closure and predetermination of their hearts that his law stands guard. It is precisely these whose sexuality can be blessed by God through obedience, whether through being open to receive a gift from God, or through the self-discipline of periodic abstinence. It is no pastoral kindness to say to people “if it is too hard for you, do not be distressed—go and do this act which carries within it an inevitable disposition away from God’s grace and self-sufficiency.”

So much for the idea of encouraging contraception out of pastoral magnanimity. That leaves only the encouragement of contraception out of pastoral fear—fear of those others who will balk at the message and turn away from our churches if we express this hard teaching, as those who turned away from Christ at his teaching about his body. But “to whom shall we go”? How can we preach tolerance of contraception, the mother-thought of the sexual revolution, when the ideas sprung from her womb are ravaging our culture with ever-increasing violence? May God give us the courage to speak truth in love, without fear of evildoers.

Fixing the suburbs

My wife and I recently visited Brooklyn and spoke with our city-dwelling relatives about how to do community and how to organize human life well. There’s been a lot of back and forth in my thinking between City Mouse and Country Mouse—the vision of the walkable, beautiful, vibrant urban setting vs. the vision of the pastoral existence where one can cultivate a little eden in view of mountains, near a small town that affords community and vibrancy. Which is better? Each has trade-offs. But in between the two is something that tried to have both and ended up with the best parts of neither: the suburb. On that we and our urban relatives agree: it was a failed experiment, having grown into a monstrosity of uniform strip malls and cookie-cutter neighborhoods where it’s remarkably tough to connect. But why?

On the train back I pondered it a lot, and tried to draw some synthesis out of the apparent conflict between city and country. For one thing, I think Andrew Peterson was right, that the City of God is a place where “culture and nature are in harmony.”

I think another key is seeing the good city (of any size) as a complex cluster of neighborhoods, rather than one large thing. You can only have community in a human-size neighborhood, where things don’t take forever to get to, and where you have meeting places and green spaces. Then there’s the economic component, which is tough to crack, but working together and doing church together are maybe the two major ways to build community that catalyze with the neighbor proximity, and so you’ve got to have some sort of economic co-dependence with your neighbors, and some commonality of belief.

These attributes apply even to the small town of yore, where fewer people is offset by a more full life integration. No one is commuting away from that community for any life function so 2,000 people is fine.

One idea to add to the mix is the role of policy in clamping down on corporate greed’s tendency to sprawl: of collectively aspiring to bring harmony between culture and nature through intentional restrictions upon ourselves through our laws (in distributist fashion). I’m thinking in particular of the Greenbelts of the UK. These have kept urban areas more granular, and at the same time in closer proximity to green spaces. I also think incentives to encourage people to operate in smaller community units are appropriate—like credit unions instead of chain banks, for instance, and farmer’s markets that source locally versus Walmart’s produce section.

But ultimately, the methods must be in line with the goals, and you cannot achieve this mainly through big top-down policy. We should be focusing first on creating viable examples of this in miniature—good homesteads and communities—which can grow contagiously. It is foolhardy to attempt to change the whole architecture of our land by theory first. Let’s find a way to live this balance and prove it to a world that has forgotten it.

Is ownership more culpable than trade?

I am planning to write a post soon responding to a very interesting debate between Jacob Imam and Trent Horn, but here’s a teaser.

In Trent Horn’s defense of 401Ks, he asks, “If we can use YouTube, why can’t we buy stock in Google?” In other words, what is morally different about cooperating with Google in the sense of doing business with them through the use of their service, and cooperating with them in the sense of purchasing ownership in the company itself?

It’s a great question, and my answer will hearken back to the Thomistic doctrine of double effect, which I discuss in previous posts, namely, that it is permissible to do an act that one foresees as having both good and evil consequences, if the good consequences outweigh the evil, and are caused with the same immediacy, as a separate byproduct, not as a result of the evil itself.

This principle explains the problem we feel with the logic of most movie villains (at least of those who offer an explanation for their insanity). They always want to correct some wrong in the world (like starvation due to overpopulation) by some wrong means (like killing half of the people in the universe). Why do we hate them? Because they are violating the fundamental moral principle that—even in the most desperate of situations—it’s always wrong to “do good that evil may come,” as St. Paul condemns in Romans 3:8. Why is it always wrong? Because we cause an end less directly than we cause the means to it. By doing evil that good may result, we lose faith in God to provide the means for us to wholly obey him. It’s failing the test of the Sacrifice of Isaac.

The difference between being a user of Google services and being an owner of Google is that the good that one achieves by being an owner is achieved by means of being an owner, as a further result of the ownership (and all the shared responsibility that entails), whereas in the case of being a user of Google services, one causes the good that they intend simultaneously and in causal parallel with the evil that they permit Google to do.

Ownership in Google is a means to that monetary end. (I am assuming one owns stock in Google because they want to make money.) I tolerate that I am an owner of Google and Google is thereby using my capital to do evil things, because by means of Google getting money, I may achieve whatever good I intend to do with my share. No matter how proportionately great the reason—providing for my kids and my elderly relatives, or what have you—the evil is still causally prior.

But when I use a Google service in such a way that Google gets money (from me or from advertisers by my passive complicity), I do not achieve whatever good I intend by means of Google getting money; if anything, I achieve it in spite of Google getting money, as is evidenced by the fact that I could achieve my purposes just as well, or even better, if I gave Google no money at all for their service: then I could browse more efficiently, or listen to music without those contemptible interruptions. Indeed, I would much prefer if their services were entirely free, of both fees and advertisements!

Are we angled mirrors?

The pastor at my church frequently articulates the central purpose of man in the following way: “We are angled mirrors, made to reflect the glory of God to his creation, and to reflect back the praises of creation to God.” So we are priests in the sense that we represent God to earth, and in the sense that we represent earth to God.

I take issue with the second part of this, not that we reflect the glory of God to his creation (which I believe we certainly do, as the only animals who bear his image), but the part where we “reflect back the praises of creation to God.”

For one thing, I am not sure that it is true. Creation does not need us to praise God. It does a better job than us! Deer and rivers do not need us to verbalize the praise they owe to God. Are they not praising him now, on their own? Can we not hear them, when we listen? And if we can hear them, how much more can God their maker hear them, who is attentive to the smallest creature he has made, and sensitive to the glory of everything he holds in existence by the continual lending of his own essence! If we were silent, would not even the rocks cry out?

But my more important objection is that this expression of our primary purpose frames it such that we are the agents, and God the patient. We are made so that we would do X to God. (reflect the praises of creation). This is the same as my objection to the Westminster Catechism’s answer to that same question of the purpose of man: “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” In it too, we are made to do something to or for God, namely, to “glorify him.”

The verb “enjoy” escapes my criticism for the same reason the whole of the Catholic catechism’s answer does: the semantics of the word keep man as a patient. The Catholic answer is:

Of all visible creatures only man is “able to know and love his creator.” He is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,” and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created.”

To “share in God’s own life” is an infinitely more satisfying answer to the question of our purpose. After all, what good reason can any parent give for “why they had their child” except that they wanted their child to share in their love? How much more true of our Heavenly Father!

In discussing this with a friend after church, we came to the conclusion that our priesthood is only one-way, not two-way. We are priests of God toward creation, not priests of creation toward God. What about how priests represent the people before God when they offer the Paschal sacrifices? Perhaps the difference is that, in that, we are not offering anything created, but the uncreated Christ back to God; and thus, our sacrifice and our worship have come from him. That still keeps us as patients.

So the angled mirrors analogy breaks down. Mirrors are two-way reflectors, transparent and imageless; they merely reflect the image of something else to the viewer. But we are ourselves images with substance, imago dei, less like mirrors, and more like tangible paintings or icons. In his great love, he has deemed that we would show forth his glory by our likeness to him, as we follow him into the great journey of theosis, of entering into his divine life.

It’s true that this works out so that we do glorify God, and so that we do order creation in ways that please God (as I am pleased by my children’s works of art). But somehow, this is not our purpose, but the results of it, radiating out from the great love of God which remains relentlessly fixed on us, like a star-crossed lover, without any ulterior motive.

Catholic or Orthodox?

As for the question of whether to join the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox church, both have valid sacraments and priesthood. Both are, in that wonderful sense, true. But, despite the superior beauty of the Orthodox liturgy, and its exemption from the political and theological strife that plagues Catholics today, my heart and conscience can do nothing but desire to choose Catholicism. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the Orthodox can answer the liberal deconstructivist with equal strength, showing that there was an uninterrupted through-line of doctrine between Christ and the early patriarchs on which he anchors his faith. Even then, what would this argument be based on? Would it not be based on man’s knowledge and judgment? Would it not be examining the teachings of Christ, and the teachings of the patriarchs, and then saying, “Look, they are the same”? But the very act of doing so betrays a different epistemological basis: reason! The reason, mind you, not of the patriarchs themselves, but of the later theologians who contend for the connection, and, ultimately, to our own reason. Contemplate it honestly: at the root, is it not revealed to be the same way of arguing for validity than Luther or Calvin used?

But the answer of the Catholic Church against the modern who seeks to sever the line is not one of reason, though it is reasonable: it is one of faith in the promise of God: Jesus prayed for Peter, that his faith would not fail, and gave him the duty of strengthening his brothers, when he had returned from that place of humility and humiliation that would make him, in the inverted ways of God, most fit to be the exalted leader of the church. It is the prayer of Jesus that the Catholic clings to. It is the claim that Jesus promised never to let us go astray.

You asked me why I was convinced about the primacy of Peter, and I talked about the scriptures, yes. I wouldn’t have gotten there without them. (The irony is comforting, by the way, for, one who begins to perceive God’s patterns of irony ought to expect that the Baptist, in rejecting the church for the sake of the Bible, would end up both less like the church and less biblical, while the those who cling to the Church rightly would also turn out to be more biblical. But I digress.) But my reason is not merely one of reasoned argument from the scriptures. It is also one that appeals to my heart with a self-evidential power that I hope you see too: Jesus was to be taken back up into heaven, and he was to leave his people behind, subject to the constant attacks of the Devil, who would want nothing more, from the moment of Pentecost, than to literally and ecclesiologically tear them to pieces. He is our Good Shepherd. No Good Shepherd would leave his sheep defenseless. He would not leave them to their own devices. They are sheep, dumb and easily beguiled. Easy prey for wolves. No, if the Shepherd had to go way, he would leave a proxy to defend them all. He must, or he is no Good Shepherd!

Perhaps, a long time ago, I would have said, “Yes, yes, the Holy Spirit.” And that is true. But you and I both have come to a place where we find it insufficient that that Shepherd be merely spiritual. He must be of the flesh, because God’s people are of the flesh, and they need a leader who they can, literally, look to. They need a leader who carries a real staff and can smite real, physical wolves on the head. They need a leader who can speak audible words. We need a bodily leader because we are bodily people and we can only know God through bodies.

Now, if the Good Shepherd put a proxy in his place to guard is people from the Evil One, but that proxy denied that responsibility, and said, “I am only the first among the sheep,” or “I have only been put here as an example that the sheep should follow, but they ought to protect themselves,” or “I have only been given charge of these sheep, not those,” then he has shown himself to be a bad proxy, and the Good Shepherd, who knows all things, would not put such a proxy of himself in place, for he knows that he, in appointing such a vicar of himself, has responsibility to ensure that he will be faithful.

And the thing is, that only the See of Peter claims such leadership. Therefore it is not the claims of Peter that convince me, so much as the fact that neither Constantinople, nor Canterbury, nor any other See claims it along side him! They would claim authority, yes, but they soften it; they shrink back; they do not claim primacy to rival Peter, but say that there is no such primacy anywhere. The authority which makes the deviations of Francis so terrifying is also that which is necessary. (It must be theoretically possible for the Shepherd to stray; that is why it was necessary for Jesus to pray for him, that he would not. And that is why we must cling to that prayer in fear, but hope and confidence that through the cross, Christ won perfect efficacy in his prayer, and that, come hell or high waters, come many political scandals and near-collapses, the Church will come out all right, purified, and saved from vital error, safely home). So, you see, it is precisely the fact that the Orthodox and Anglicans and all the rest are safe, that they do not claim primacy, that invalidates them. For it removes the need for Christ’s prayer, and it means that Christ is not with us, in a vicar of his appointing, bearing the promise and power and responsibility of Christ himself to guard us with Christ’s own power while he is gone. It is because I need the protection of Christ himself, because I need him to be with me, bodily, to shepherd my poor and weary soul in a world filled with heresy and doubt and undermining philosophy, and where I sense the weakness and fickleness of my own intellect and reason. That is why I fall, with desperation, at the feet of Christ, and the one whom he charged to feed me. “To whom shall we go, Lord?”

But if this does not yet convince you, I will share another thought that goes alongside it: I see a heavenly vision of the time when all things will be restored, and Christ’s high-priestly prayer will at last come to fruition. It is like the vision in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Revelation” about the woman who realizes she is like the pigs, and in the end sees the train of people going up to heaven, in which the last are first, and the first last. As in that vision, all the schisms that have pained Christ’s church will be healed, beginning with the most egregious–the pentecostal micro-denominations, and then the baptists, then the presbyterians and methodists and lutherans, then the Anglicans, and last of all, the Orthodox will be restored to the full unity of the church. The Orthodox have been least in need of restoration. They are nearest to the fullness. Thus they too will be restored, though as with a lesser urgency. So do not worry, brother: even if you choose wrongly, and choose Orthodoxy (ha!), Christ will have mercy on your good reasons, and we will be drawn together at last.

But let us take care to guard our reasons for doing things, for if we convert to this or that church for the reason that it is “doing Christianity better,” does this not spring from pride? But if we convert, let it be in order to cast ourselves in need at the feet of Jesus our Shepherd, whose grace will prevail.

Reaction to Francis on civil unions

Okay, here are my reactions to a few friends about Pope Francis saying he supports civil unions for same-sex couples:

Firstly, with all due respect, Pope Francis is a dunderhead, and he is wrong about same-sex civil unions. This is Francis’s typical loose-lipped pastoral sappiness and big-heartedness, inviting confusion when he should be leading his flock toward clarity in these times of moral upheaval. I don’t even think he is fully cognizant of the fact that when he says “civil unions” for “legal protection,” this could take no shape in our world today except something that was equivalent to marriage in certain untenable ways. By the way, in 2003 under Benedict the CDF was extremely clear on this:

“Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself…Not even in a remote analogous sense do homosexual unions fulfil the purpose for which marriage and family deserve specific categorical recognition. On the contrary, there are good reasons for holding that such unions are harmful to the proper development of human society, especially if their impact on society were to increase.”

As has been said, thankfully Francis’s opinions don’t matter unless he chooses to promulgate the legitimacy of civil unions ex cathedra, solemnly invoking his authority to interpret Scripture and Tradition. This would be unthinkable and would throw me into an existential crisis concerning my belief about the Catholic Church (which is, as a reminder, that we should all join the Catholic Church whether we like it or not because it is the One True Church). Short of him doing this (which I don’t think he will, for several reasons) what we have is a Pope with wrong opinions, not a Church with wrong opinions.

The real question that we’re asking is, does it follow from the fact that the Pope has the power to potentially go further, to promulgate such an error authoritatively, that we should deny the legitimacy of his authority? Should we, like Dreher implies, take shelter in Orthodoxy (or Anglicanism), who assure us that their patriarchs could not possibly promulgate a wrong opinion ex cathedra, because they do not have the authority to promulgate anything ex cathedra? Should we find comfort as Dreher does in fact that Orthodoxy is not “equally endangered by dodgy progressive patriarchs” because “the opinions of Orthodox patriarchs aren’t binding”?

My answer is that we should reject Orthodoxy and cling to Catholicism for the very reason Dreher perfers Orthodoxy: that it refuses to assert its authority to proclaim truth ex cathedra. I hold that no Church that is the True Church, and thus bears Christ’s promise to guide and protect it and subject the gates of hell to its authority, can ever deny that it has the authority to speak on His behalf, nor relieve itself of the solemn duty of interpreting the mind of Christ in each new age. Contained within this responsibility is the fearfulness of free will: the possibility of error. The radical possibility that the Church will blaspheme is necessary if she is to have the ability to speak Truth in power. That is why we must hold, trembling, to the promise of Christ, that he himself will never let his flock go astray, even when individual human Vicars skirt the edge. The Orthodox church and the rest are safe from this fearful possibility, but only by doing something even worse: denying their birthright and severing the vital connection of heaven and earth. For they deny that the anointing of God can remain on sinful and errant men. But if this cannot be, then we are all like sheep without a shepherd.

Aquinas on forms

The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend recently in discussion of Aquinas’s view of Platonic forms. It is well known that Aquinas assimilated Aristotelian metaphysics into Christianity, often by extending or clarifying the Platonic metaphysics which had sufficed to his day, largely from Augustine, who, as Aquinas says, was “imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists.” However, as I mean to demonstrate below, Aquinas did not do so by abrogating the Platonic “form” (a move that was subsequently made by Enlightenment moderns) but rather by assimilating them, I think more orthodoxly, into Christian doctrine.

I think the work you’re doing with tracing the philosophical origins of modernism back before the traditional period markers is going to be a real vital contribution. I totally agree that “the Enlightenment is the extension of late medieval nominalism,” and I love that you’re roasting the nominalists. Down with Ockham!

But I do wish to save Aquinas from the flames of your roasting. I would draw the line of blame between Aquinas and Ockham; if Ockham and the other Nominalists did “follow him,” it was not as protégés, but as robbers following someone down a dark alley.

I read one of your main lines of argument to be, essentially, that Aquinas deserves at least some blame because his philosophy lent itself, or inherently disposed itself (whether by his express intention or by culpable negligence) to the abuses of the nominalists, because it denied the real existence of Forms. You say that Aquinas “denies the existence of the Ideal Form of which individual material entities share an essence. The form/category is only something we infer from similarities of particular objects—not something actually there.” I agree that Aquinas would have taken an inadvertent first step toward modernism if he had denied the existence of forms (he would have been a sort of materialist, eh?); however, I argue that he did not.

In the Summa, I:15:1, Aquinas deals with “Ideas,” which is the Greek word which equates to the Latin forma. He asks whether there are ideas, and concludes that “it is necessary to suppose ideas in the divine mind,” since “in all things not generated by chance, the form must be the end of any generation whatsoever,” and, “as then the world was not made by chance, but by God acting by His intellect…there must exist in the divine mind a form to the likeness of which the world was made.” (He even goes on to say in Article 3 that “there are ideas of all things that God knows.”)

In his reply to Objection 1 he qualifies that “Aristotle (Metaph. ix) rejects the opinion of Plato, who held that ideas existed of themselves, and not in the intellect,” using this as an explanation for why “God does not understand things according to an idea existing outside Himself.” I sense that the temptation would be to point to this and say, “There. He says ideas do not exist of themselves. Therefore he doesn’t believe they are real, in an objective sense.” However, his statement that forms exist in the intellect cannot be taken to mean that they therefore do not really exist. Rather, the intellect is the part of rational beings which is capable of understanding things, and ideas exist within this dimension, within the “houses” of these parts of rational beings; but that they are relative or not real is ruled out by his claim that they exist in the intellect of God, because, if they exist in God’s mind, then they exist truly, and objectively, being independent of the intellect of any man.

So he says forms exist; they exist in the mind of God. But Aquinas might still be guilty of functionally denying them if he denied that men can know them.

But Aquinas says that men do indeed know the forms, or “eternal types,” when they know anything. In I:84:5 he says:

We must needs say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types. Whence it is written (Psalm 4:6-7), “Many say: Who showeth us good things?” which question the Psalmist answers, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us,” as though he were to say: By the seal of the Divine light in us, all things are made known to us.

Aquinas goes so far as to address Plato’s concept of forms, and how we ought to—indeed, how Augustine did—admit it, and yet modify it to be suitable to Christian thought:

As Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. ii, 11): “If those who are called philosophers said by chance anything that was true and consistent with our faith, we must claim it from them as from unjust possessors. For some of the doctrines of the heathens are spurious imitations or superstitious inventions, which we must be careful to avoid when we renounce the society of the heathens.” Consequently whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their teaching anything consistent with faith, he adopted it: and those things which he found contrary to faith he amended. Now Plato held, as we have said above (Article 4), that the forms of things subsist of themselves apart from matter; and these he called ideas, by participation of which he said that our intellect knows all things: so that just as corporeal matter by participating the idea of a stone becomes a stone, so our intellect, by participating the same idea, has knowledge of a stone. But since it seems contrary to faith that forms of things should subsist of themselves, outside the things themselves and apart from matter, as the Platonists held, asserting that per se life or per se wisdom are creative substances, as Dionysius relates (Div. Nom. xi); therefore Augustine (QQ. 83, qu. 46), for the ideas defended by Plato, substituted the types of all creatures existing in the Divine mind, according to which types all things are made in themselves, and are known to the human soul.

Here again, we see that Aquinas accepts the existence of forms, and holds that when we know anything, it can only be by the participation of our intellect in those forms; but he corrects Plato, or rather cites Augustine’s correction, by saying that forms do not exist in themselves, for then they would be creative substances (taking the place of the Creator God), but rather they exist in the Divine mind.

What do you think? Have I missed something here, or shall we clear Aquinas of the charge?

On Wendell Berry’s ‘God and Country’

Wendell Berry’s essay “God and Country,” in What Are People For?, is an expression of his angst as someone who is “devoted both to biblical tradition and to defense of the earth.” He complains that “Organized Christianity” has chosen to reject the care of the earth in favor of complicity with an ecologically exploitative economic order; it has chosen this perhaps inadvertently, but under compulsion, as a result of the very act of organizing: organizing compels an institution to become “dependent on ‘the economy'” and thus unable to raise a hand against it, even though its ideology may in theory contradict that oppressive order. The error of Organized Christianity is thus not that they have outright rejected ecological stewardship—Berry gives Christianity more credit than that. Rather, our error has been that we have failed to see the danger of organizing: “It is clearly possible that, in the condition of the world as the world now is, organization can force upon an institution a character that is alien or even antithetical to it.” That is why Christianity is now by-and-large hamstrung in the fight for ecological justice.

It is at the end of his essay, when Berry is forced to wonder about “how then we shall live” in light of this utter failure of Organized Christianity, where his angst and confusion are most evident.

I acknowledge that I feel deeply estranged from most of the manifestations of organized religion, partly for reasons that have mentioned. Yet I am far from thinking that one can somehow become righteous by carrying protestantism to the logical conclusion of a one-person church. We all belong, at least, to the problem…. But it is a [problem] we can set our hearts against [and] try with all our might to undo. We can ally ourselves with those things that are worthy: light, air, water, earth; plants and animals; human families and communities; the traditions of decent life, good work, and responsible thought; the religious traditions; the essential stories and songs.

It is presumptuous, personally and historically, to assume that one is a part of a “saving remnant.” One had better doubt that one deserves such a distinction, and had better understand that there may, after all, be nothing left to save. Even so, if one wishes to save anything not protected by the present economy…one is part of a remnant, and a dwindling remnant too, though not without hope…”

In a desire for humility, he hesitates to condemn Christianity, saying, “we are all a part of the problem,” but then, unwilling to compromise the moral unction, he contradicts this by upholding the good, and saying it is still possible to reject what is evil and cling to what is good.

In a desire for humility, he hesitates to separate himself from Christianity, saying, “we should not think of ourselves as a remnant,” and worse still, that there may “be nothing left to save”; but he cannot thus abandon hope, and he contradicts himself, saying, “we are indeed a remnant, and there is still hope.”

It is Berry’s unrelenting moral conscience, and the grace given to his soul by God, that forbids him to relent his wrath against Organized Christianity. Yet it seems that Berry has failed to find among its manifestations one faithful branch who has “not bowed the knee to Baal,” and this makes him most unfortunate, for his faith is thus rendered homeless; he is left adrift, unable, like Noah’s raven, to find any place to alight. Berry would be the first to tell you that without a home—a real, earthen one—one cannot live.

Would that he would hear the voice of God, “I have reserved for myself 7,000 who have not bowed the knee,” for this is the voice of hope—a hope not, as Berry rightly critiques, “disembodied,” but embodied in men. We must believe that God has not left his church. And this is where I believe Berry’s ecclesiology, and his culture, fail him. They have kept him from knowing that there is indeed a branch faithful to ecological stewardship. It is the Catholic Church, who from Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si has preached against ‘the economy’ which he so rightly fears and hates.

This branch, sustained by the grace of the Spirit of God in its faithfulness to all that is good and its opposition to all that is evil, is the spiritual home for all who suffer under that contradiction. May all of us rise to join Berry in his unrelenting moral honesty, and may we together with him find a home and a rest for our souls in the Ark of the Church, that our souls may be protected and cultivated, as we protect and cultivate the earth.

Success before purpose?

A student asked me today, following a reflective assignment, whether it is possible for a person to be successful as if by accident, without choosing to do the right thing with a knowledge that it was the right thing or without a sense of purpose in the choice, but rather as a sort of random choice. In other words, could it be that a person could be successful without knowing his purpose? Here is my reply:

Darren, you are describing a situation like the story I mentioned in class called “It’s a Wonderful Life” (the Christmas story with the old man angel). In this story, the man (George Bailey) made the choice to be successful (to be loyal to his town and raise a family), even though he did not KNOW that this choice made him successful (he was still wishing to travel and felt “trapped” by his town and his family).

So, you are saying, “Wasn’t he successful before he knew his purpose?”

In some way, yes, I believe he was.

But I believe the story teaches a deeper lesson: Although George chose the right thing, he did not LOVE it: He did not see it and accept it as his real purpose. (Because, to love something is to make it your purpose, your dream.) And that refusal to love the good things he chose made him deeply unhappy. Where did that unhappiness lead him? To a bridge on Christmas eve, ready to jump off. Can we say that anyone who kills himself was truly successful?

So I guess that someone can begin to be successful even before they realize it. But if they refuse to want it, to accept it as their purpose…if they refuse to LOVE it…that success will become failure. I think there are times in each person’s life when they have to choose whether to love like that or not, and I think those moments define the person.

[And, a note to self: it is these moments that crop up time and again in Flannery O’Connor stories, and in Dostoevsky, and perhaps in every good story…]

Contraception

Lately I have been forced to confront the outrageous claim of the Catholic Church that an act of contraception is a grave evil.

The Catholic Church teaches in the Catechism (§2366):

“Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment. So the Church, which is “on the side of life,” teaches that “it is necessary that each and every marriage act remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life.” “This particular doctrine, expounded on numerous occasions by the Magisterium, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.”

This stance is based on Pope John Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968). There, he further expounds:

Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15)

Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)

In other words, the Church teaching is that the marriage act (that is, sex) has two purposes or ends: (1) to unite the husband and wife, and (2) to bring forth children, and that, in the performance of each and every marriage act, it is immoral to act against, or direct the act away from, the attainment of either of these ends when it would otherwise occur; i.e. to have as the purpose of any deliberate action the avoidance of either of these ends.

This would exclude things like condoms, temporary or permanent sterilization, the Pill, and all other medical/chemical forms of contraception, even if they would not abort a fertilized egg, but merely prevent the fertilization of the egg. It would also exclude forms of sexual consummation that by their nature are not open to life, such as coitus interruptus (withdrawal method), mutual masturbation, and anal sex.

Notably, it does not exclude “natural family planning,” the avoiding of sex during fertile periods, which is an alternative widely practiced among Catholics. Neither would this exclude any act leading up to, or involved with, the marriage act that is not in itself endowed with the natural potential for procreation. What is prohibited is the performance of the act which is so endowed, and which is the end of sex (both teleologically and, more or less, chronologically), in such a way as to intentionally avoid the openness to life. I am speaking of the man’s climax, and that it must be…well, to borrow a word from the Catechism, “unitive.” My understanding is, it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you don’t end anywhere else.

Nevertheless, this really puts a damper on the modern person’s sex life, doesn’t it? (Or should we say, takes a damper off?) It is a hard teaching. But here is the point: If the Catholic Church is wrong about the fact that openness to children is a purpose of every marriage act, or if it is wrong that to act so as to prevent that purpose is a moral evil, then their argument falls flat, and we are all off the hook.

But if they are right about both of those premises, then it follows quite unavoidably that contraception is a moral evil, and therefore that every Christian must flee from it, trusting in God to perfect their souls through obedience, and to teach them how to more fully love and embrace the good to which that evil is contrary.

Avoiding a Purpose

Now, it is clear that to act in obedience to a command in such a way that one avoids accomplishing the purpose for which the command was given, is not simply the absence of obedience in that particular act, but the presence of disobedience.

Consider Johnny, who is having a birthday party against his will. His mother tells him, “Johnny, go hang some balloons on the mailbox.” Johnny is no dummy and perceives that the balloons are intended to prevent people from missing the entrance to their house, which is wooded and hard to see from the road. However, Johnny doesn’t like parties and would prefer it if none of the guests arrived successfully. Therefore, Johnny takes some uninflated balloons and ties them to the mailbox. They are unnoticeable from the road. When Johnny’s mother discovers what he has done, will she regard him as having simply not obeyed her, or as having deliberately disobeyed her? For if he had done nothing, he still could have said, “I was about to do it.” But since he took definitive action, yet in such a way as to thwart his mother’s purpose, his action was in fact disobedient.

And indeed, when a husband and wife come together, they are obeying God’s divine purpose, for the love of a man and woman does not originate on its own, but “God brought Eve to the man.” Therefore, if a husband and wife have sex in such a way as to avoid his purposes, then they have positively disobeyed God. (This is the essential difference between natural family planning and contraception. Natural family planning simply “does not have sex,” but contraception has sex while thwarting its purpose.)

So, the question remains whether, indeed, the marriage act has this purpose from God, to create an instance of the potential for human life?

Each and Every?

No Christian will deny that one of God’s purposes for marriage as a whole (the sum of one’s marriage acts, if you will), is to be open to children. In Genesis 1-2, when God “made them male and female” and “brought Eve to the man” so that they “became one flesh,” their union was overshadowed by that great first commandment, to “be fruitful and increase in number.” Do not biology and common sense also affirm that sex was created for the producing of offspring?

But the tricky part is whether this openness to life applies only to a marriage as a whole (that is, to at least some marriage acts with that set), or to each and every marriage act with that set?

Let us discuss this is terms of a certain husband and wife. They know that God intends for the set of their marriage acts as a whole to be open to life. And they know that this means God may intend to create life through some particular instances of the marriage act. (After all, marriages do not create pregnancies. Sex does.) Therefore, on any given night when they approach each other, they do not know whether God might intend for that very marriage act to be one which results in a child (or, if they do an act of preemptive contraception or sterilization, whether he might have intended it otherwise).

Now I say that because they do not know how God’s general intention to create life through the set of their marriage acts applies to any particular instance (for God reserves the miracle for himself), their act against the possibility of life in any instance constitutes disobedience.

Consider a man who said to his wife, “I am going away, and I am going to come and stow something secretly in the house. I cannot tell you when I will come, except that it will be some night in December. Therefore, you must keep the doors of the house unlocked at night during the month of December.” If this wife, concerned for her safety or privacy, chooses to lock the doors even one night, then has she not violated the command of her husband as much as if she had kept the house locked the whole time? For who knows whether the messenger would come that very night?

But the reply will come, “God gives a married couple more agency, more right of determination in the conception of new life, than this woman in your analogy.” It is true, man and woman have been given an incredibly noble role in the way that they cooperate with God to create life. The analogy does little justice to that nobility.

But we must not forget who it is who really creates life. Do we view the marriage act as something where the human parents have been given the power and responsibility to create life of their own initiative and accord, and where God dutifully engenders life as an almost necessary consequence of their act? Or do we view the marriage act as something where God reserves the right to create life and gives to human parents the command to create the possibility for him to do so, not revealing when he will actualize that possibility?

The Christian must embrace the view which subjects man to God. As Humanae Vitae says,

But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.

Only if humans have prime agency in the act of creating a new human life do they have the right to exclude certain sex acts from the possibility of doing so. But if it is God who creates life, and has ordained the marriage act as the instrument of possibility which he has commanded us to keep ready for his miracle, then to hamper the possibility is to usurp God.

Only by refraining from contraception in each and every marriage act can we retain the right spirit in our marriage, namely that God remains efficacious in our performance of the command he has given to us to “be fruitful and multiply.”