C.S. Lewis on contraception (and bulimia)

The following is an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. The quote is from the mouth of Mr. Sensible, a sort of worldly sensualist who likes discussion but dislikes following logic to its conclusions, so, like the Screwtape Letters, we are meant to take the truth as the opposite.

Note how he equates the bulimia or bingeing-and-purging of the Romans with contraception, “praising” both for their ability to extract natural consequences from a pleasurable act.

C.S. Lewis was not a Catholic, and I wonder if he would have held the same views today, where the common cultural heritage against contraception has eroded so much within Protestantism since the 1930’s. But then, perhaps he would have. He was keen at seeing through to the root issues of culture, and he had a devout Catholic for a friend and fellow Inkling.

The bees have stings, but we rob them of their honey. To hold all that urgent sweetness to our lips in the cup of one perfect moment, missing no faintest ingredient in the flavour of its μονόχρονος ἡδονή [one-time pleasure]], yet ourselves, in a sense, unmoved–this is the true art. … Is it an audacity to hint that for the corrected palate the taste of the draught even owes its last sweetness to the knowledge that we have wrested it from an unwilling source? To cut off pleasures from the consequences and conditions which they have by nature, detaching, as it were, the precious phrase from its irrelevant context, is what distinguishes the man from the brute and the citizen from the savage. I cannot join with those moralists who inveigh against the Roman emetics in their banquets: still less with those who would forbid the even more beneficent contraceptive devices of our later times. That man who can eat as taste, not nature, prompts him and yet fear no aching belly, or who can indulge in Venus and fear no impertinent bastard, is a civilized man.

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.

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.”