Fertility Is Not a Curse

Among the images Jesus presents us with during Eastertide is him as the “true vine” into whom we are engrafted.

Jesus saying he “is” the “true vine” may be prone to misunderstanding by some Catholics, who take it merely as an image or analogy. The problem with such a reading (and, by extension, of Jesus’s other “is” statements in John)—as Fr. Paul Scalia masterfully notes—is that it swaps the reality for the image. We tend to think of a “vine” as real and Jesus as simply providing an image—“vine” “bread,” “light,” “life,” etc. But the truth is that the most real “bread,” “light,” “vine,” etc. is Jesus, not its earthly referent.

As Scalia notes, Jesus is not just talking about any vine. He’s talking about a grape vine—one that bears fruit. Jesus is not some showy, shiny ivy that produces nothing and can even be toxic. He is fruitful.

Fruitfulness is the gospel’s normal and natural expectation. Being engrafted into Christ is to be fruitful, to “bear fruit.” Jesus curses the fig tree that bears no figs (Matt. 21:18-19). He even turns it into a parable (Luke 13:6-9): a landowner plants a fig tree, coming in vain for three years in search of fruit. But instead of succulent figs, he has a barren tree. After three years, he has no intention of keeping it: he even considers it to be cluttering up his garden, wasting good space. Only his vineyard worker’s entreaties earn the tree another year, while “I dig around it and manure it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; if not, it will be cut down.” Even the extension carries an expectation: the tree should be fruitful.

This expectation permeates the Gospels. The “good” seed—the seed not trampled underfoot, eaten by the birds, burnt by the sun, or choked off by weeds—bears fruit. The harvest is different—thirty-, sixty-, or a hundredfold—but fruit is borne. The wheat and tares grow together, but there is a separation: the wheat, which produced fruit, goes to the barn, the tares, which produced nothing, go to the fire.

When Elizabeth becomes pregnant with John, one of her comments is that the “Lord has removed my reproach from among men” (Luke 1:25). Having a child was a sign in ancient Israel of divine blessing, a continuation of your life. That’s why the Psalmist, speaking of God’s blessing, talks of how “your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children like olive shoots around your table” (Ps. 128:3). When God created man and woman, his first blessing was fertility: “Be fruitful and multiply” (1:28). Having just given life to everything, including man, the first thing God says to man is to share in that life-giving work.

For the biblical vision—i.e., the vision of Jews and Christians—fruitfulness is natural, normal, and God’s blessing. That’s why, for Jesus’ disciples, speaking of the true vine and branches makes sense.

Does it make sense to us?

How many people, including Catholics, see fruitfulness as an unalloyed blessing? How many see it as a blessing at all? At best, there is a broad cultural consensus that fruitfulness may be neutral, depending on its usefulness and convenience to you. But there is also a broad undercurrent that sees fruitfulness as bad, an individual curse that ruins life plans (especially when it gets in the way of sexual pleasure), a social curse that amplifies the deleterious human “carbon footprint” on “Mother Earth.”

Let’s not play games. The Christian understanding of the meaning of fertility is diametrically opposed to the mainstream understanding of our culture. And too many Christians think they can somehow just maneuver between the two.

You cannot. Either fertility is God’s blessing, which means it is something good in itself (bonum honestum), or it is merely something useful or not, depending on your desires at the moment—at best a bonum utile.

But fertility is not a “thing.” It is just not some “rhythm” or “biological facticity.” A thing acquires its value and meaning from its end, and what is the end of human fertility? A human being. So is a human being a good-in-himself (bonum honestum), or is he merely useful, depending on his convenience for you (bonum utile)? You don’t even have to be Catholic to answer that one (though love of neighbor helps). Kant talked about persons as being ends and never means, objects of use.

This reduction of a true good to a merely useful good has enormously distorted medicine. We now prescribe chemical compounds to destroy the natural and normal rhythm of a person because it is inconvenient. Fertility is not pathological. Fertility is normal.

Beyond its effect on medicine is an effect on the broader culture. Our times now face a unique phenomenon in human history: an indifference, if not antipathy, to the continuation of life. People are delaying marriage, and they are even more delaying parenthood. Parenthood, far from being a natural and normal aspect of adulthood, is increasingly becoming a hobby for certain classes. Case in point: In his new book, Family Unfriendly, Tim Carney makes a profound observation about language. Our times have invented a new verb: “parenting.” As he notes, it makes it sound like some expert endeavor, reserved to those practiced in the art. He compares it to how previous generations spoke of the phenomenon: “having children.” That doesn’t sound particularly exotic or specialized. In fact, it shifts the focus from you “parenting” to them, the “children.”

The psychologist Erik Erikson identifies various stages of human maturity. One of the more advanced ones is generativity. Generativity, for Erikson, is usually expressed in childbearing, and it usually follows marriage. How is it a marker of advancing maturity? Well, all the steps gradually lead to growing out of myself toward others (sounds like “dying to self”). Marriage obviously involves a stepping out of self to take responsibility for a contemporary peer. Generativity goes it one step further: to take responsibility not just for somebody looking at you, but for someone who currently is not but whose very existence depends on you. Maturity, by the way, is not an “optional” thing for human beings: we want everybody to mature. It’s part of the glory of God in man fully alive (see St. Irenaeus).

Recognizing the blessing of fertility would change our approach to raising children. We fret a lot about their careers. Some parents even worry about whether they’ve gotten into the right nursery school to prepare for Harvard or Columbia. (Check if they have properly sized picket signs.) But we do little to nothing to prepare children to think about being spouses and parents. Somehow, we think that aspect of life—arguably more important than one’s job—will somehow happen by autopilot.

In her new book, My Body for You, pro-life author Stephanie Gray Connors writes that she would initiate the discussion of marriage and parenthood early, so that it’s something “natural” in a person’s worldview. The thoughts “I want to be a husband/wife” and “I want to be a mother/father” should be considered before there is a concrete other in view . . . in part because it may determine whether there will ever be a concrete other in view. Once upon a time, little girls played “mommy” and little kids “house.” In our fear of “gender roles,” we have abandoned that innocent play, which helped socialize the idea that marriage and parenthood are natural adult things. Instead, we allow our teenagers to “play house” (primarily in the bedroom), preferably after being outfitted with the “accessories” and behavioral mindset that teach fertility to be a curse, not a blessing.

Jesus’ words of vine and branches also remind us of another important dimension of fertility: not only is it good and a blessing, but it is God’s work. The life of the branch is not its life. The branch is alive only insofar as it shares in the life of the vine, the life of Christ. Likewise, fertility is also always God’s work, because no human person or human couple can create a soul. As we say we believe every Sunday at Mass, only God is “lord and giver of life.” We parents do not “give” life so much as we “share” the life that has been shared with us by God, “from whom all Fatherhood in heaven and earth takes its name” (Eph. 3:15).

Jesus’ gospel of the vine and branches is extraordinarily rich in terms of its application to marriage and life questions. Let’s plumb its life-giving depths.