God made us that we might become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ and sharers in eternity, and so that we might come to be like him through deification by grace. It is through deification that all things are reconstituted and achieve their permanence; and it is for its sake that what is not is brought into being and given existence.
These are the words of the great Father of the Church, St. Maximos the Confessor, and they have everything to do with the matter of artificial contraception. But just be patient and I will explain how. This may not be an approach you would expect in the discussion of this issue, but after fifty years of widespread (and continually growing) dissent from Bl. Pope Paul VI’s teaching among the faithful and—alas!—even among their pastors, it may be time to look at the question from a fresh but also ancient (the most ancient) point of view.
Back in the ’90s, or perhaps the early 2000s, I was asked by the religious studies chairman of a local Catholic high school to give a talk on witchcraft and demonology. It seemed that some of the students had an interest in the question, and the faculty wanted sound answers about our Catholic understanding of the occult and the work of the fallen angels.
I obliged and put myself to study the topic. After looking at a number of treatments of these questions by the classic moral theologians, such as St. Alphonsus Liguori, I came across a book that really provided the key to understanding how and why Christians would have had recourse to witches and occult practices over the centuries, especially in the ages of faith when the existence and activity of angels and demons was pretty much a universal conviction.
The name of the book was Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”). Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican friar, wrote it at the end of the fifteenth century. The book was a manual for inquisitors whose job it was to detect and try those who practiced witchcraft. It held a great insight for me.
Practically the whole work of witches, their spells, and their contacts with the demons was in order to manipulate the processes of procreation—to cause impotence or sterility or to overcome them, to prevent conception, to cause abortion, or to conceive outside of natural marital intercourse. The witches often functioned as legitimate midwives but also served their clients with magical arts. Looking deeper into the matter, I read some academic studies of the history of contraception and found that, in the ages of faith, the Latin word for a witch’s spell, maleficium, was often taken as synonym for contraception and abortion.
Wow. It dawned on me that medical craft has now taken the place of magical craft. Both are technologies for getting something done building on natural realities; but the one is proportionately human, and the other is occult and preternatural. What we accomplish now—contraception, abortion, artificial means of conception, genetic manipulation—by our natural scientific means they accomplished by personal dealings with demons, powerful beings who were capable of manipulating the processes of nature.
Of course, these methods were not as precise or effective as our modern medical science, because they were farther removed from the actual effects they intended to produce. That is why they are dismissed as outmoded superstition. Think of trying to motivate your dog to do something. You are not able to be as to the point and precise as another dog, but even so, the dog will respond when it is in the dog’s interest.
Now at this point, go back and read over the opening quotation of this article and remind yourself there is much more to come and much more that is both inspiring and clear.
I am not going to focus on the spooky, witchcraft elements of the question. We can leave these aside, since nowadays people go to CVS for all that: potions, pills, devices to restrain conception, all of which are even more lurid and creepy than descriptions of demonic abuses of human seed and coupling. What I want to emphasize is the following:
Human procreation has everything to do with the immense struggle between God and the Evil One over the destiny of our human race, which is described in Genesis and is still being lived out in our culture in palpable ways.
Why should the fallen angels be so interested in the human race, and in particular the procreation of new individuals of the human race? After all, we are so far beneath them as individuals that it would seem there is little or no proportion that would incite them to an interest in us.
In point of fact, they have an impassioned and ardent desire to disrupt the principles and processes of human life, and for very concrete and personal reasons.
Let us consider that in the traditional Christian view of the nature of the cosmos, the ordered universe created by God, human nature played a pivotal role in establishing the unity of things. St. Thomas Aquinas beautifully summarizes this view in several places. It goes something like this:
The universe descends from its first principle and cause, the Blessed Trinity, through the ranks of angels, each one of which is a species or kind of its own all the way to the lowest of spiritual creatures, man. Man in his turn stands at the apex of all the natures that are material, starting at the lowest from the merest elements through all inanimate and animate being, vegetative and sensitive. In the human body, material nature takes on such a perfect complexion that his organs of sense, both internal and external, can collate and unite the sensible, material beings beneath him and know their natures by the approximations that his spiritual and rational nature can elaborate. In this way, man comes to the knowledge of the natures of things and can use them by analogy as a lever to the knowledge of God.
Man’s spiritual, rational soul then becomes capable of knowing God, both by man’s special role as the highest of the lower creation, summing up everything beneath him in the effort to be united to God. Thus, and most importantly, he is disposed to receive further revelations about divine things from God and the angels, which he may accept on a rationally motivated faith. Man’s rational nature means that he requires both a proper bodily complexion and a refined reason. The two go together.
Now, a thing’s activities follow its nature. So as man has a bodily and a rational nature that are deeply united, so too the activities that flow from that nature are also meant to be both bodily and rational. And the most fundamental activity of human nature, as with any living bodily nature, is procreation. In the original plan of things, human procreation was meant to be both a bodily and a rational activity. Man was not meant merely to follow animal instinct but personal, rational judgment in seeking out the action and union of procreation. In this way he would act in accordance with both his bodily and his rational nature and so in the increase of his kind increase the number of bodily and rational creatures made in God’s image and capable of leading the whole of the lesser creation to a union and harmony with God and his angels.
The envy of the fallen angels sought to disrupt this order by successfully tempting our first parents to disobedience to their Creator. This fall of our first parents as depicted in Genesis, not only in the first chapters but also throughout the whole book, introduced irrationality and disorder in the procreation of the human race. The demons were pleased to make the very means of procreating the beautiful bodily and rational nature of man, made male and female in God’s image, into an occasion of the loss of reason and the misuse of human freedom and right feeling. Let us keep in mind that, in the traditional patristic teaching, the increase of the human race was precisely to replace and even exceed the number of the angels who fell from grace. This provides a motive for the demons’ intense spiritual envy and hatred of human procreation.
All the Fathers without exception, and St. Thomas with the greatest precision and insight, teach that before the fall—or if there had been no fall of man at all—human sexual intercourse would have been without irrational passion and completely within the control of reason. Now, St. Thomas makes it clear that this means that intercourse in that unfallen state would have been more pleasurable than it is now, because it would have been compatible with the use of our higher powers. Imagine, for example, being able to have marital intercourse while meditating on the mystery of the Blessed Trinity and praising it with your spouse, and you will get the breadth of this idea. Not prudish at all—on the contrary!
It is supremely irrational to exclude procreation deliberately, the very end of marital intercourse, from the act of marital union. Yes, the union of man and woman in sexual relations is meant to be pleasurable, but according to reason—that is, according to the essence of the human nature—they exist to bring about through procreation. No one would deny this in the case of another bodily pleasure, taking food. Eating simply for pleasure leads to the thwarting of the very health that eating is meant to produce and conserve. Of course, this does not mean that one should give no attention to the quality and preparation of what one eats, or have no appreciation to the variety of good things that God has given us to nourish ourselves and maintain our lives.
Just so, the rational control of sexual activity is in no way contrary to an appreciation of the delicacy or finesse that lovers may express in uniting themselves to each other. Pleasure is not evil, but it is evil and a disorder to make it the sole end of sexual relations, rendering them irrational and so unworthy of the very rational nature they exist to reproduce.
The Fathers’ and the great Scholastics’ opposition to contraception was not a superstitious attachment to the increase of the human race but rather the result of their intense regard for the rational nature of man and the necessity of a continual struggle with the irrational passions. In this they reflected the view of creation they professed, giving to human nature a pivotal role in uniting the bodily and spiritual natures made by God in his very image, male and female.
In this, human nature prefigures the amazing way in which God, in taking to himself a human nature born of the Virgin Mary (without the irrational passion, unavoidable in some degree after the fall even in lawful marriage), unites most powerfully God, who he is from all eternity; the angels, of whom he is the head and king, as St. Paul showed; and men, reborn from above by the offering of his body on the cross and all creation, of which he is the firstborn.
The demons tremble and are reduced to fury at the spectacle, and so all they can do is to try to extend the results of the first fall by a second painstaking, piecemeal fall that seeks not so much to destroy the life of grace lost in the first as to destroy natural life itself, rendering the terms of divine revelation unintelligible to men. Under this demonic “magic” deception, human beings will be unable to accept their own rational nature as male and female and will utterly separate their bodily pleasure from their rational identities as men and women, as potential fathers and mothers of new rational creatures made in God’s image. All will be “art”—that is, literally “technology.” And even the reality of human nature as a stable form made by God will not only be denied, it will be excoriated as oppressive and evil.
This is where the world stands today in the countries of the West. Paul VI made dire predictions about the consequences of ignoring his teaching on contraception, but not even he saw how far indeed things would go, and with such a relentless, satanic consistency.
How are we to escape from this disastrous situation? There is a solution specific to the problem, which must be taken up by the married, along with the usual and efficacious means of grace available to all of us: prayer, penance, and the holy sacraments.
Ruth Graham, the wife of the late, great Evangelical Protestant preacher Billy Graham, was asked how she felt about being away from her husband for such long periods while he preached his crusades around the world. “I’d rather have a little bit of Bill than a lot of any other man,” she replied. This is a beautiful affirmation of the power of long abstinence and the power of deep, personal marital love of self-denial and the joy of union.
In our time we over-romanticize sexual relations. We easily accept that there are venial excesses in every other area of the moral life, but we avoid the topic when it comes to sexual rapports. “Venial” means “easily pardonable,” and surely excesses in an activity that includes necessarily, in our present fallen state, the suspension of reason, are in that category. None of the Fathers were prudes; they both understood the weakness of human nature and exalted the dignity of conjugal love. This latter value will not be maintained by pretending that the holy pontiff’s discourses on the theology of the body are a theologically veiled “marriage manual” (as those books used to be called when marriage was even part of the picture).
Let us consider that the original motivation for clerical celibacy was for the sake of divine worship, so that the priest or deacon could celebrate free from the distraction of the passions. So true is this that in the traditional eucharistic discipline of the Eastern Churches married clergy abstain from relations with their wives as part of the eucharistic fast. This abstention was traditionally also expected of the laity before receiving. Indeed, the Lenten fast was understood to include foregoing of sexual intercourse. That is why, in traditional canon law, marriage rites were generally forbidden during Lent: because of the prohibition of consummating the marriage during the time of penance. St. Paul recommends this temporary celibacy for the sake of prayer, although he warns that it should not be prolonged and become a burden.
Nowadays it is common to hear of abstaining while using NFP to avoid having children, but rarely is it suggested that one abstain in order to be free of irrational passion for the sake of worship and prayer! I do not suggest that all these disciplines can be imposed at the present time, given our culture and expectations, but only point out that our forebears in the Faith took sexual asceticism for granted, even for the laity. They understood that sex was not just about the minimum requirements of the natural law but also about spiritual struggle and moderating the passions.
I do not mean to be flippant in this matter, but I would like to jog some consciences. After all, the use of our sexual nature is to a great degree the battleground par excellence with the powers of evil. The more refined and reasonable our use of this nature is, the more powerful we will be in applying the force of the sacrament of matrimony against the wiles of the devil. If we are concerned only to avoid mortal sin in sexual matters, we will not avoid even that. Given the human tendency to fall short of our highest goal, it behooves us to strive to avoid even venial faults; not that these can be completely avoided, but that in so doing we will surely avoid grave ones. As St. Gregory the Great, pope and Doctor, taught St. Augustine of Canterbury:
This pleasure cannot be without some fault. For not of adultery or fornication, but of lawful marriage was he born who said, “Behold I was conceived in sins, and in delights my mother bore me.”
In other words, there is more to marital morality than the avoidance of mortal sin and the observance of a minimum of the natural law: there is the struggle with the passions that obscure reason. It is this reason that the demons despise most of all as the image of God in us and so strive to render our marriage relations irrational. It is this embodied spirituality they fear, and it is precisely this power we possess by nature and use as Christians, with the assistance of sacramental grace, that will overcome them and lead us finally to the divine destiny for which we were created, quoted at the beginning of this article. These words of Maximos the Confessor I quote again:
God made us that we might become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ and sharers in eternity, and so that we might come to be like him through deification by grace. It is through deification that all things are reconstituted and achieve their permanence; and it is for its sake that what is not is brought into being and given existence.
Our children are brought into being, and their parents engage in marital intercourse, for this: that they are sharers, in their bodily and rational natures, in the very divine nature. In the end, that is why contraception is wrong and why our observance of the moral law overcomes the powers of hell.
Sidebar: Sins Against Chastity Within Marriage
Catholic married couples, especially those who follow the Church’s teaching on contraception, must engage in a true spiritual struggle to exalt the rational and spiritual ideal of conjugal love. They must never give in to the worldly ideology sometimes presented in Catholic circles as an application of St. John Paul II’s theology of the body that exaggerates the importance of bodily pleasure in the expression of marital love, even to the point of allowing an affection for acts which cannot be rationally—that is morally—completed.
I need not be too explicit on this point, but let us say that the great moralists, who were in no way prudes, never tolerated acts within marriage that simulated too closely the pleasure of the natural marital act, lest an irrational preference be generated in the couple, not to mention the possible occasion of a grave misuse of the marriage act. There is far too much easy moral reasoning nowadays that forgets that it is possible to commit venial sins against chastity within marriage. This was taken for granted by the Fathers, and I mean all of them. The weight of patristic and scholastic evidence is overwhelming.