Sex Au Naturel (14 page)
Authors: Patrick Coffin
Birth control causes, and is caused by, a schizoid attitude toward life. It loves journeys, the wild seas, and jokes—and hates destinations, safe harbors, and conclusions.
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By spurning the example of our divine Bridegroom, it
puts asunder
the twofold meanings of love and life that God has joined together in the marital act. It throws each spouse back upon self, instead of outward in generosity. The best it can say for itself—the banner it marches under—is, “I love you, but …”
One woman who knew the Trinity on a “first Names” basis was Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, she described how birth control epitomizes the Pyrrhic victory of Me over We. “In destroying the power of giving life through contraception,” she told the rapt audience of world leaders, “a husband and wife are doing something to self. This turns attention to self, and so it destroys the gift of love in him or her.”
1
^
In his work
De Trinitate
, Saint Augustine points out that the word “person” is derived from our imperfect knowledge of creatures, and is used to describe the Trinity because it’s the least inaccurate one to be used.
2
^
A few more examples: Hebrews 1:8 identifies “the throne of God” in Psalm 45 as the Son. In Isaiah 6:8 we read, “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’” Isaiah 48:16 is spoken by God, who says, “And now the L
ORD
God has sent me and his Spirit.” Elihu tells Job, “The Spirit of God has made me; the breathe of the Almighty gives me life” ( Job 33:3). In Acts 13:33, Paul tells his hearers that “the Son” mentioned in Psalm 2:7 refers to Jesus. Threeness is embedded everywhere in nature: three primary colors; three modes of time (past, present, and future); protons, neutrons, and electrons make up the atom. Examples could be multiplied.
3
^
Full clarity does not mean perfect understanding. While the dogma crystallizes a revealed truth, it remains essentially and always a mystery of faith. Would a God who can be fully understood be worthy of worship?
4
^
Even the famous shamrock image for the Trinity is misleading because it separates the three Persons, as if the Father could look over and wave at, say, the Son or the Holy Spirit.
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^
Other key texts include: “Through these, he has bestowed on us the precious and very great promises, so that through them you may come to
share in the divine nature
…” (2 Pet. 1:4); “For God did not call us to impurity, but to holiness” (1 Thess. 4:7); “Strive for peace with everyone, and for that
holiness
, without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14); “He chose us … to be
holy
and without blemish before him” (Eph. 1:4); “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit, making
holiness
perfect in the fear of God” (2 Cor. 7:1,
The New American Bible,
emphases mine).
6
^
Only after the creation of man does God describe His work as “very good,” i.e., exceedingly like Him.
7
^
The idea of procreation is closely tied with creation itself in many ancient languages, including Hebrew, the Old Testament’s mother tongue. The verb
banah
(to make or construct, per Gen. 2:22) is connected etymologically with
ben
(son); the verb
qanah
can mean both “create” (Gen. 14:19) or “procreate” (Gen. 4:1).
Bara
(technically, “to create”) is related to the Aramaic
bar
(son). Cf. P. van Imschoot,
Theologie de l’Ancien Testament
, vol. 2, 204–208, cited in Pierre Grelot,
Man and Wife in Scripture
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 18.
8
^
This also applies to the Pill, by which the woman chemically stops her generative faculty.
9
^
Kimberly Kirk Hahn,
Life-Giving Love: Embracing God’s Design for Marriage
(Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 2001), 93.
10
^
Christopher West,
Theology of the Body for Beginners
(West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2004), 87.
11
^
From the perspective of generation within the Trinity, the title of child is appropriated to the Incarnate Word, the Son. But from the perspective of procession, the child role also is appropriated to the Holy Spirit, who “proceeds from the Father and the Son.”
12
^
Saint Augustine of Hippo,
Sermo Suppositus
, 120, 8.
13
^
Peter Kreeft, PhD,
Catholic Christianity: A Complete Catechism of Catholic Beliefs Based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 330.
14
^
The “condom nation” culture, sown in a constant and fruitless search for “more” (hotter sex, cheaper Viagra, better silicone, etc), has reaped a harvest of impotence, sub-replacement population levels, and a high divorce rate, proving once and for all that “free love” not only costs—it collects.
Chapter Six
Contraception and the Natural Law
What the law requires is written on their hearts.
—Romans 2:15
From the Trinitarian heights we return to
terra firma
to examine a very concrete idea that nourishes the mind of the Church in many moral disputes.
The arguments traditionally employed against contraception (while strongly attested to by Scripture) are not exclusively dependent upon Revelation, and in fact have nothing directly to do with a particular religion. This is partly why, compared with other papal encyclicals,
Humanae Vitae
cites relatively few Bible verses. The Church’s opposition to contraception is based mainly on what is called the natural law. What is the “natural law”?
Natural law is sometimes mistaken for the laws of nature, such as the growth of plants, the birth of stars, or the migration of moose. It really means the rule of conduct prescribed to us by the Creator in and through the way He made us. It sounds a bit abstract at first, but it’s simple and practical. Natural law refers to that which rational beings must do in order to perfect their natures.
Take an example from the inanimate world. To properly operate a toaster according to its nature, you must insert sliced bread, not a cardboard fake. The cardboard may look like toast, and inserting it may feel so right, but the result will be decidedly untasty. Or say you’re baking a cake and, owing to your fondness for the word “strychnine,” you add a pinch into the cake mix. All positive feelings for the poison are cancelled by its actual presence in one’s food.
As the nature of toasters and strychnine must be respected in the culinary sphere, so the nature of human actions—particularly, for our purposes, sexual intercourse—must be respected in the moral sphere if things are to go well for us.
The leading expositor of natural law theory is Saint Thomas Aquinas (+1274). According to Aquinas, the natural law is “nothing else than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law” (Summa I-II, Q. 94). This eternal law is God’s wisdom, and He lovingly willed that we should somehow participate in it through conscience in the way we live our lives; its supreme rule is that what is genuinely fulfilling for human beings must be respected (cf.
Summa
I-II, Q, 94, art. 2.).
Extending the teaching of his ancient mentor, Aristotle, Saint Thomas starts from the premise that goodness is what our human nature naturally seeks; so, the first principle of moral action must have the Good as its main idea—not what feels good, looks good, or smells good, but what is really good for us. (Tequila may keep my back pain at bay for a while, but I really need a chiropractor.)
Natural law refers to “the right thing to do,” the moral rule of right and wrong we cannot not know. Actions that respect the basic goods to which our nature inclines us, and thus cooperate with God’s wise plan for creation, are right and morally good; those that in one way or another denigrate a basic good, and thus thwart God’s directives, are wrong and morally bad.
Two main impediments prevent people from clearly seeing the workings of the natural law in human affairs; and much of society has adopted both, almost by osmosis. The first is dualism.
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The other is relativism.
According to dualism, the “true self ” is identified solely with the mind or with consciousness. The body is seen as an extrinsic add-on, like a sock to a foot. It’s valid to speak of
my
body, as opposed to yours, but the dualist sees the body more as inert property, something radically separated from the “real” inner person.
An old TV ad warned, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” A dualist culture wants every day to be April Fool’s Day on Mother. For we no longer look upon our bodies and see evidence of a Designer—only a blank slate on which to write ourselves, edit ourselves, or, if need be, delete ourselves by euthanasia. We indelibly (and painfully) paint ourselves with tattoos. We stick rings into our nostrils and navels, and create specialized cosmetic surgeries to fix imperfections that were not so long ago thought to be assets. We nip and tuck because we can. (As a description of the influence of dualism, this is a short list.
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)
The vision of Scripture is far from such a mechanized, imperialistic view of our bodies. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you … you are not your own; you were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). Classical philosophy itself, rooted in a Judeo-Christian anthropology, has always held that the body is an integral aspect of the person. On this view, in the words of John Paul II, “The body, in fact, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer in the visible reality of the world, the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial, and thus to be a sign of it” (General Weekly Audience, February 20, 1980).
Our society holds a schizoid view when it comes to protesting human tampering with nature. The environmental movement lectures aggressively that nature is inviolable when it comes to the earth’s resources, to pollution, or global warming, and to the environment. Why doesn’t the same principle apply to the environment of the human body? Who lops off a healthy finger or gouges out a functioning eyeball?
Another obstacle to seeing natural law as a workable theory of morality is relativism, the belief that right and wrong are either (a) matters of opinion; or (b) such bendy concepts that they can have no fixed meaning, such that what’s right for you can be simultaneously wrong for me. While it’s fashionable in college cafeterias, newsrooms, and discotheques to talk the “you have your truth, I have mine” talk, in the real world, no one really believes it. If you cut the movie theater line in front of an ardent relativist, he responds, “Back of the line, buddy!” not, “Golly, who’s to know what’s right or wrong?”
The natural law (sometimes called the moral law) applies not to animals or non-living things—only to mankind. “If a rock falls from a cliff and hits us on the head we do not punish it. We do not blame the pig for being greedy or reproach the leopard for its cruelty. It is in their nature to be that way. It is the law of their being. But when a human strikes us, or is greedy or cruel, we blame him and say he should act differently”
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In other words, there’s a certain standard of behavior human beings instinctively apprehend, even without having read a single line of high-flown philosophizing about it. This is as true of atheists as of daily communicants.