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The New Testament Concept of Nature in Humanae Vitae

Michael Waldstein
Symposium Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor
November 16-17, 2018
ITI Trumau

The Seven PowerPoint Slides

(neither designed in California nor made in China):

Ear
Eye
Nostril
Mouth
Nostril
Eye
Ear

1. ST. ANNE’S-ON-THE-HILL
THE EAR THAT HEARS THE BEGINNING OF A STORY
St.-Anne’s-on-the-Hill in C.S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength is the residence of,
the great philologist Dr. Elwin Ransom. The name Elwin means elf-wise friend—a name
that would fit Lewis’s friend Tolkien, his elf-wise friend. Cardinal Schönborn loved
comparing ITI with St.-Anne’s-on-the-hill.
In Lewis’s novel, St. Anne’s is the place of resistance against the National Institute
for Coordinated Experiments, abbreviated NICE, nice, which is about to take scientific
technological control of England. It is an unlikely place of resistance, but very likeable.
Stray animals and a motley group of people, apparently assembled by accident, inhabit
the house. It is a house of peace and contemplation. Dr. Elwin Ransom’s mind is
continually turned toward the heavens, especially toward Mars and Venus, both of
which he actually visited. Having his mind turned up toward the heavens does not
prevent acute perception of the circumstances on earth. Quite on the contrary. It
sharpens and broadens his vision for earthly matters.
A central theme of the novel is the narrowing of reason in the scientific and
technological revolution of the sixteenth century, of which Francis Bacon and Rene
Descartes were outstanding advocates. Human power over nature, which implies the
power of technocrats over the rest of humanity, is the true goal of knowledge according
to Bacon and Descartes. This goal leads naturally to the choice of mechanics as the
master science. Mechanics is the road to technological power. Among the writings
attributed to Aristotle, there is one called Problems in Mechanics. The preface begins as
follows.
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We wonder about . . . what comes to be by technology (διὰ τέχνην) contrary to nature

(παρὰ φύσιν) for the benefit of human beings. Nature often does the contrary of what is
useful for us . . . When, therefore, we have to do something contrary to nature, the
difficulty of it causes us perplexity and we need technology. For this reason, we call the
technology that helps us in such perplexities mechanics (μηχανή) [i.e., means].
The words of the poet Antiphon are quite true: “By technē we are powerful
(κρατοῦμεν) even where nature would defeat us.” . . . Mechanical problems . . . have
something in common both with mathematical and with physical theorems; for while
mathematics shows the how (τὸ ὣς), physics shows the concerning what (τὸ περὶ ὃ). 1

Since mechanics relies on mathematics, it does not and cannot think about good and
bad, beautiful and ugly, living and non-living. For this reason, the project of Bacon and
Descartes leads to an image of the natural world as a value-free mechanism. As an
object of power with little no meaning of its own, nature stands below the human
person.
This perception of the natural world as sub-personal has a deep impact on the
understanding of marriage, because the person and the body come together with
particular intensity in the sexual relation between man and woman. C.S. Lewis is quite
right to give an important place to marriage and contraception in the novel. Here is the
novel’s first sentence.
“Matrimony was ordained, thirdly,” said Jane Studdock to herself, “for the mutual
society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.” She had not been to
church since her schooldays until she went there six months ago to be married, and the
words of the service had stuck in her mind. (p. 11).

Jane is quoting from the Anglican wedding ceremony in the Book of Common
Prayer. She feels intense dissatisfaction with the mutual society between herself and her
husband Mark. After an apparently rich shared life during their courtship, this mutual
society collapsed. Mark became absorbed in his own work, she in her own,. Jane does
not dwell on the first of the purposes of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer.
First, it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and
nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.

These are the two defining common goods of husband and wife in marriage: a union
of love within which children can be conceived and educated. The union of love is the
intrinsic common good of marriage, the children, begotten and educated as the fruit of
this union, is the extrinsic common good of marriage. From the beginning, Jane and
Mark used contraception to cut out procreation from their union.
She had always intended to continue her own career as a scholar after she was married:
that was one of the reasons why they were to have no children, at any rate for a long time

1. Aristotle, Mechanics, prologue, 847a10–28.

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yet. Jane was not perhaps a very original thinker and her plan had been to lay great stress
on Donne’s triumphant vindication of the body (p. 14).

In her own life, Jane is far from such a triumphant vindication of her body. A
possible procreative life with her husband appeared to her as below herself as a person.
She did not let biology determine her destiny. She did not let the flourishing of children
prevent her flourishing as a scholar. She enjoyed the union of love expressed by sex
without being burdened by motherhood. Motherhood was mere biology, beneath her.
As Lewis develops the theme of marriage in the novel, he suggests the exact
opposite. The human sexual body and its meaning does not stand below the person.
The nature of the sexual body is deeply personal. Its full vitality comes from above. It
comes down from the gods. The last chapter of Lewis’s book is entitled, Venus at St.
Anne’s. I will turn to that chapter in the seventh point.
Contributors to this conference were told that this room would not be set up for
PowerPoint presentation with slides. An alternative occurred to me. All of us have
seven openings in our head, arranged symmetrically around the mouth: two ears, two
eyes, two nostrils, and then the mouth. My talk is arranged in seven sections, using
these seven openings as slides, more high tech, to be sure, than any projected slides.
Ears: the first and the last section consist of listening to parts of C.S. Lewis’s novel.
Eyes: section 2 focuses on the blindness of the Majority Report of the Papal birth
control commission, while section 6 presents John Paul II’s clear vision of the question.
Nostrils: With our nostrils we sense good and bad smells. Section 3 turns to the
biblical texts about spousal love as a participation in God, who is love (1 John) and the
Fatherhood of God as the origin of all families (Ephesians). God gives to each thing its
nature and “sees that it is very good” (Genesis 1). Section 5 turns to the more specific
good of spousal love.
The central section, section 4, corresponds to the mouth, with which we take in food
and chew it. It reflects on a point implicit in Genesis 1, namely, that goodness shapes
the nature of each thing.

2. THE MAJORITY REPORT

THE EYE BLINDED BY THE PURSUIT OF POWER
The perception that the bodily life of the human animal stands below the person
is stated with particular force in the so called Majority Report of the birth control
commission appointed by John XXIII and Paul VI. The Majority Report emphatically
embraces the Baconian-Cartesian program.
The story of God and of man should be seen as a shared work. And it should be seen that
man’s tremendous progress in control of matter by technical means and the universal
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and total “intercommunication” that has been achieved, correspond entirely (omnino) to
the divine decrees.2

It would be difficult to formulate a more unqualified allegiance to the Baconian-

Cartesian program. Technical mastery over nature corresponds omnino entirely to the
will of God. Compare this optimism with John Paul’s warning in Evangelium Vitae.
Nature itself, from being “mater” (mother), is now reduced to being “matter,” and is
subjected to every kind of manipulation. This is the direction in which a certain technical
and scientific way of thinking, prevalent in present-day culture, appears to be leading
when it rejects the very idea that there is a truth of creation which must be
acknowledged, or a plan of God for life which must be respected. (Evangelium Vitae, §22)

One finds similar statements in his two successors. Pope Francis in particular
draws on the rich thought of Romano Guardini, particularly on two books that may
well be the best books written on these questions, Das Ende der Neuzeit (The End of the
Modern World) and Die Macht (Power and Responsibility). All three popes identify the
blindness of scientific-technical reason to any aspect that goes beyond mechanism. They
show that the subjection of matter is not only a moral and environmental problem. It is
a problem of seeing and of understanding.
Among the various reasons given by the Majority Report for affirming the
legitimacy of contraception, the foremost reason is the duty of gaining power over
nature to improve the human condition.
The reasons in favor of this affirmation are of several kinds: social changes in marriage
and the family, especially in the role of the woman; lowering of the infant mortality rate;
new bodies of knowledge in biology, psychology, sexuality and demography; a changed
estimation of the value and meaning of human sexuality and of conjugal relations; but
most of all (maxime), a better grasp of the duty of man to humanize what is given in nature and
to bring it to greater perfection for the life of man.3

The superlative but most of all deserves attention. Among all the reasons for the
moral legitimacy of contraception, the foremost reason, the reason that is most of all a
reason, is not the liberation of women from excessive pregnancies, not the population
explosion, not a personalist understanding of sex, but the duty of humanizing what is
given in nature. Humanizing is achieved through “tremendous progress in the control
of matter by technical means.”

2. “Majority Report,” in The Catholic Case for Contraception, ed. Daniel Callahan (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 150. Original
Latin: “Schema Documenti de Responsabili Paternitate,” in Contrôle des naissances et théologie: Le dossier de Rome, Traduction,
présentation et notes de Jean-Marie Paupert, ed. Jean-Marie Paupert (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 179–89, at 179.
3. Special Commission on Birth Control, “Majority Report,” 161. Latin, 183 (emphasis added)
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3. THE NEW TESTAMENT CONCEPT OF NATURE IN HUMANAE VITAE 8

THE NOSTRIL THAT PICKS UP A GOOD SCENT
On this background one can understand the importance of the main paragraph in
which Humanae Vitae focuses on the New Testament understanding of nature.
Conjugal love will show us its true nature and nobility most of all when we have
understood it as flowing, as it were, from the highest fountain, from God, who “is love”
(1 John 4:8) and who is the Father “from whom every family, patria [Vulgate: all
fatherhood] in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph 3:15). It is far from the truth that
marriage is born from chance or from the blind course of natural forces. In reality, God
the creator established marriage wisely and with foresight by his mind to realize his
design of love among human beings (Humanae Vitae 8).

This text does not reserve the word “nature” for the sub-human cosmos. It applies
the word to the personal sphere of love between man and woman, which is inseparably
bodily and spiritual. It sees this love as coming from above, from God who already in
himself as God is an exchange of gift and love. One can relate the two texts quoted to
the two common goods or meanings of marriage and of sexual union, the unitive and
procreative meaning. “God is love” and God’s fatherhood “from which every family on
earth is named” are at the root of these two goods.
Behind this passage in Humanae Vitae one can hear the first chapter of Genesis. Six
times the text of Genesis says, “and God saw that it was good.” The seventh and last
time, after the creation of man and woman, it says, “and God saw that it was very good,
tov meod.” It is the first congratulation addressed to a married pair and the human
family, mazel tov, as the Yiddish congratulation says.

4. THE GOOD AS THE SOURCE OF THE NATURE OF A BEING

THE MOUTH TAKES IN AND CHEWS WHAT HAS BEEN SMELLED
We need to chew on Genesis 1 to taste its full meaning. God’s design of love is not
imposed arbitrarily on some indifferent matter. The good which he proposes in his
wisdom shapes the deepest natures of his creatures. In this respect, natural beings differ
from artifacts. They are not divine artifacts, but created beings, each according to its
kind, as Genesis 1 also repeats again and again.
When one asks What is it? about any natural being or human act, the deepest answer
flows from for the sake of a specific good, due to its goodness. For example, seeing is the act
that belongs to human eyes as eyes. It is impossible to understand what eyes are
without pointing to this act, which is their good and end. It is also impossible to
understand what the act of seeing is without pointing to its good and end, namely, the
objects of sight as possessed in the act of seeing. The end allows one to understand from
within what the act and the organ of sight are. The intelligibility flows from the
goodness of the end to the nature. The good is what is most intimate to the eye and to
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the act of seeing, more intimate than they are to themselves. Eyes are most themselves
in seeing; seeing is most itself in reaching the object of sight.
The case of the human mind is similar. It is impossible to understand what the mind
is without pointing to the act of thinking, which is the good the mind is directed
toward. It is, in turn, impossible to understand the act of thinking without pointing to
its good, namely, truth. When we say about what is, It is, and about what is not, It is not,
the statements are true. If this correspondence between thought and being were
impossible, if there were no truth to be known, thought would be impossible from its
very root. Its nature as an activity flows from the goodness of truth. The goodness of
truth is most interior to thought, more interior than thought is to itself. Thought is most
itself in raising the question of truth and in reaching truth. Likewise, the nature of
marriage and of the conjugal act flows from the goodness of union and procreation.

5. PROCREATIVE THROUGH BEING UNITIVE

THE NOSTRIL PICKS UP THE SPECIFIC GOOD TASTE OF MARRIAGE
The reason Humanae Vitae gives for its claim that contraception cuts a wound into
husband and wife is the indissoluble link between the two meanings of the conjugal act,
the unitive and the procreative meaning.
This teaching . . . rests on the indissoluble link established by God, which man on his own
initiative may not break, between the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning, both of
which are inherent in the conjugal act.
The reason is that due to its innermost account (or essence, ratio), the conjugal
act, when it unites husband and wife by a very close bond, also makes them capable of
generating new life, according to laws written into the very nature of man and woman. If each
of these essential accounts (ratio), namely of unity and of procreation, is preserved, the
marriage act fully keeps the sense of mutual and true love and its order to the very high
mission of parenthood (Humanae Vitae, §12)

In his Theology of the Body, John Paul brings out an aspect contained in this text,
but not fully explicit in its formulations. He argues that the two meanings are not only
realized together with each other, but through each other (see TOB 123:6–7). This is the
point on which I want to reflect in more detail: through each other.
The indissolubility of the two meanings is a matter of fact, not of morals. The point
is not that the connection should not be dissolved. It cannot. The two meanings or goods
or ends depend on each other in such a way that they stand or fall together. One cannot
take one away and leave the other standing. Just as each comes to be through the other, so
each is destroyed through the destruction of the other. “When the conjugal act is
deprived . . . artificially of potential parenthood, it also ceases to be an act of love” (TOB
123:6, emphasis added). The conjugal act is by its nature, by what it is as a human act,
procreative because it is unitive and unitive because it is procreative. It is unitively procreative
and procreatively unitive.
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To understand this indissoluble link more clearly, it is useful to look at an objection

raised against it by Luke Timothy Johnson. Johnson is a New Testament scholar whom I
admire. He is sensitive to nuances of the text, learned, and rooted in a deep sense of
faith. All the more surprising to me is his reading of John Paul.
John Paul II recognizes, from one side of his mouth, two ends of sexual love, namely
unitive intimacy and procreation. But from the other side of the mouth, he declares that
if, in an act of intercourse, procreation is blocked, not only that end has been cancelled,
but the end of unitive intimacy has as well. He has thereby, despite his protestations to
the contrary, simply reduced the two ends to one.
This can be demonstrated by applying his logic in reverse: Would we insist that
an act of sexual intercourse that did not manifest unitive intimacy also cancel the
procreative end of the act? The papal position could actually be read as approving as
moral an act of intercourse within marriage that was coerced, even violently, so long as a
contraceptive was not used.4 </EXT>

In its logical form, Johnson’s argument is a reduction to the absurd. He examines

John Paul’s statement about the indissoluble link to see whether a false consequence
necessarily follows from it. If it does, one can conclude that there is no indissoluble link.
According to John Paul, the link is indissoluble from both sides. If removing the
procreative meaning removes the unitive meaning, removing the unitive meaning must
also remove the procreative meaning. The second of these two statements, Johnson
argues, is obviously false. When a man destroys the unitive meaning by raping his wife,
the procreative meaning can still remain. A child can be conceived in marital rape.
As Paul VI and John Paul use it, the word procreation does not simply mean
reproduction. Cows eat but do not dine. Dining signifies a distinctively human or
personal way of eating. In a similar way, cows reproduce but do not procreate.
Procreation signifies the distinctively human or personal way of reproduction.5 There is
a similar difference between the terms sex and conjugal act. Conjugal act is not an
antiquated way of saying sex, or a prudish euphemism for it. It is the name of sex in its
fully human form as a personal act between spouses. Sex is to conjugal act as
reproduction is to procreation and as eating is to dining.
By its innermost energy, the space of love built by the conjugal act is not a space the
spouses want to occupy alone. From the center of the intimate space, from the marriage
bed and the bedroom, a larger space is shaped, in which there is room for guests, above
all for children. It is the space called a home.
If one understands “procreative” in this way, as the fully human way of passing on
life, one can understand how the conjugal act is unitively procreative, that is,
procreative through being unitive. The union it produces is an open union that leads of

4
. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 32.
5. See Donald Asci, The Conjugal Act as Personal Act: A Study of the Catholic Concept of the Conjugal Act in the Light of Christian
Anthropology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2002), 52–53. Asci’s book is the best study of these questions known to me.
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itself to hospitality for children. The wider space of a home that flows from the more
intimate space created by the love of their parents is the space suited for children.
Created by God who is love out of love and for love, a child ought to be conceived in a
space of love. The gift of children completes and fulfills the union of love between the
spouses. The pain of couples who are unable to have children is a testimony to the
greatness of this fulfillment.

6. UNITIVE THROUGH BEING PROCREATIVE

THE EYE THAT SEES THE WOUND INFLICTED BY CONTRACEPTION
The converse is true as well. The conjugal act is procreatively unitive. Here we come
to the question of contraception. The unitive meaning comes to be through the procreative
meaning.
John Paul formulates this point very sharply. “When the conjugal act is deprived of its
inner truth because it is deprived artificially of its potential parenthood, it also ceases to
be an act of love” (TOB 123:6).
The argument seems, on the face of it, outrageously unjust. Johnson’s anger against
it is understandable. Contraception does not stop the affective unitive bonds between
husband and wife as the collapse of a bridge across a river stops of the flow of traffic or
the flick of the main power switch darkens all lights in a house. On the contrary, the
reason why couples use contraceptives is to express their love for each other sexually
even when the conception of a child should for various reasons be avoided.
Contraception gives more room to their union of love.
In thinking through this objection, one needs to focus on the specific form of unity
that arises from the procreative meaning. It is the unity of those who do what men and
women do to become parents.6 This form of unity between a man and a woman can be
realized only by an act that is by its nature procreative. It cannot be achieved by holding
hands or by mutual masturbation. It is a form of unity that is destroyed when the
procreative meaning is destroyed. It is the specifically conjugal form of the union of
love. Other forms of unitive meaning, such as those expressed by caressing or kissing
can still exist. They will not remain unaffected, however, by the disappearance of the
specifically spousal meaning.
Just as human sexual organs are by their nature generative at all times, even when
they are not being used for generation, so a conjugal act is procreative by its nature,
even when no child can be conceived. The nature of the conjugal act, which is
constituted as a specific nature by its inner ordering to the good of procreation, remains
the same on a deep level, whatever the effect of the act may turn out to be.
By performing an act that is shaped in its very nature by the good of children,
spouses say to each other, and say it “according to laws written into the very nature of

6
. See Don Asci, The Conjugal Act as Personal Act, 212–13.
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man and woman” (Humanae Vitae, §12), “You are the one with whom I want to have
children. I want our children to be both from you and from me together, to be formed
by our bodies and minds together, because I love you.” It is in this way that the
conjugal act is unitive by being procreative in its nature. It establishes or re-enacts a
particular kind of unity between a man and a woman, the unity called marriage. It
renews the gift of the male and female body contained in the marriage vow.
This seems to be what John Paul has in mind when he writes, “When the conjugal
act is deprived of its inner truth because it is deprived artificially of potential parenthood,
it also ceases to be an act of love” (TOB 123:6). It ceases to be an act of specifically conjugal
love. Contracepted sex can remain lovemaking in the sense of expressing and fulfilling
a couple’s feelings of emotional closeness. What such lovemaking cannot be, however,
is the conjugal act, and this defect deeply undermines the other elements of unitive
meaning that can still be present.

7. VENUS AT ST.-ANNE’S-ON-THE-HILL
THE EAR THAT HEARS THE CONCLUSION OF THE STORY
John Paul takes great care in his theology of the body not only to clarify the moral
teaching of Humanae Vitae, but also to point to the spiritual sensibility that is needed to
embrace it as leading to deeper happiness in love. He points to the gift of reverence as
central for sexual purity. The agreement with C.S. Lewis is striking. Jane Studdock’s
husband Mark becomes deeply involved in the NICE, but experiences a conversion. At
the very end of the novel, he makes his way to St.-Anne’s-on-the-Hill, where the angel
who rules the planet Venus has descended and (like the goddess Venus) spreads an
intense venereal atmosphere among all animals, both irrational animals and rational.
Mark comes under the influence of Venus. In the following passage, Lewis describes the
first effect of Venus in softening and warming his heart. It is a painful moment, but it
leads to full joy at the very end.
His mind was not at ease. He knew that he was going to meet Jane, and something was
beginning to happen to him which ought to have happened to him far earlier. That same
laboratory outlook upon love which had forestalled in Jane the humility of a wife, had
equally forestalled in him, during what passed for courtship, the humility of a lover. Or if
there had ever arisen in him at some wiser moment the sense of “Beauty too rich for use,
for earth too dear,” he had put it away from him. [The quote is from Romeo and Juliet,
from the words by which Romeo expresses his first impression of Juliet] … Now, belated,
after all favors had been conceded, the unexpected misgiving was coming over him. He
tried to shake it off. They were married, weren’t they? And they were sensible, modern
people? What could be more natural, more ordinary?
But then, certain moments of unforgettable failure in their short married life rose
in his imagination. …How had he dared? Her driven snow, her music, her sacrosanctity,
the very style of all her movements . . . how had he dared? And dared too with no sense
of daring, nonchalantly, in careless stupidity! … Yes, yes—of course, it was she who had
allowed him to pass [the hedge]: …And he had taken blackguardly advantage of that
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noble error in her judgment; had behaved as if here native to that fenced garden and
even its natural natural possessor. All this, which should have been uneasy joy, was
torment to him, for it came too late.

Venus instills in Mark what Plato describes as eros in its fullness, which brings with
it awe and reverence for mysteries of beauty that stand above the human person,
though they become present in man and woman. Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium
both open this dimension of eros, especially in the discourse of the priestess Diotima in
which she explains the mysteries of love to Socrates in the Symposium.
This is where John Paul locates the center of conjugal spirituality and the condition
for embracing Humanae Vitae. It is worth re-reading the last few audiences of his
Theology of the Body, which deal with reverence as the heart of a spirituality of the
sexual body (see TOB 131-132).