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Contraception fails to allow human life
to conform to and
mirror the action of the Trinity.
The Trinity and contraception
By Adam A. J. DeVille
Many of the professional heretics of the last thirty years have made much of a spurious (and self-invented) distinction in Catholic theology by telling the faithful that it is acceptable to dissent on such matters as contraception or other areas of sexual ethics as long as they hold to what they regard as “core” Catholic doctrine, such as a belief in the Triune God. As long as people believe in the Trinity, try to get to Mass occasionally, and do a few good deeds, their practicing contraception does not allow anyone to impugn their Catholicity or to suggest to them that they are not the Church, too.
Frequently such a distinction is cloaked in the language of “infallible” versus “non-infallible” teaching, a technical distinction used with considerable precision by the Magisterium, and considerable dissimulation by the Magisterium’s enemies, that is, the dissenters. To be sure, the Trinity, as the universal Catechism makes clear, is the source and summit of the Catholic faith, the axis mundi, the most foundational and fundamental of all our beliefs.1 It is, in a word, infallible teaching in a way that, say, clerical celibacy in the Latin Rite is not. From this, however, it does not follow that there is a separate department marked Theology:Other into which we can consign teachings like that of Humanae Vitae —or any other we find difficult or disagreeable. What I will attempt to do in this essay is to defeat the dissenters on their own grounds, by showing that one cannot claim to be a good Catholic if one does not believe in both orthodox Trinitarian theology and orthodox moral theology on contraception. To do this, I will draw on the Trinitarian theology of the Church and I will then show how this is intimately and directly connected with the teaching on contraception by drawing on the theological anthropology of the “total gift of self” as taught by Pope John Paul II. In sum, I will argue that the human person, properly considered, is an icon of the Trinity, and should therefore in all his actions reflect the constant dynamic of Trinitarian self-giving—a self-giving which, of course, contraception prohibits in the most intimate areas of human life.
Modernity’s fragmenting,
Gnosticizing impulse
To suggest that there is a direct connection between the inner life of the Most Holy Trinity and the intimate practices of couples in the bedroom is to provoke not a little discomfort in many. Why is that? Two reasons suggest themselves at once. In his masterful 1952 book The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin taught us the extent to which Western modernity has been both victim and participant in the “immanentization of the eschaton” and the “Gnosticisation” of politics, philosophy and theology. Thus it seems, in the first place, that we are not without some Gnostic impulses buried within our theological subconscious, impulses which make us feel a bit ashamed that something such as sexual union could have meaning and implications beyond merely human pleasure and procreation and could even be a reflection of something so transcendent, so mysteriously and purely holy as the very life of the Godhead.
In the second instance, most of us are creatures of modernity, and to just that extent suffer from what both Alasdair MacIntyre and Cardinal Newman diagnosed as modernity’s fragmenting impulse to divide and compartmentalize knowledge into discrete units. In this light, many people have been schooled to believe that Trinitarian theology is one thing —a religious matter—while contraception is quite another—a “private affair.” If the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1969—the year he introduced an omnibus bill to approve divorce, abortion and homosexuality—uttered the famous phrase that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,” many of us have altered that only slightly to believe that “the Church has no place in the bedrooms of the faithful.”
This unhappy tendency has in recent decades infiltrated the Church to the extent that many people think “moral” theology consists in little more than a series of usually negative rules (don’t have premarital sex, don’t lie, don’t eat meat on Fridays) which have little, if any, bearing on the larger questions of “dogmatic” theology, such as the nature of God and the life of the Trinity. In other words, many people fail to see what difference the Trinity makes to their everyday life. Sure God is Three-in-One, but what does that have to do with whether I am a good worker, whether I give to the poor or whether I practice contraception?
Such a mentality, however, is not a genuinely Catholic way of thinking cum Ecclesia. As the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman put it in his Idea of a University, “all knowledge forms one whole.” Genuinely Catholic thinking means seeing the whole and grasping the universal connections. Dissent and division are repugnant to Catholic Tradition, the Fathers of the Church, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and all the other great doctors, who knew that moral and dogmatic theology were part of one seamless whole. In addition, this notion is repugnant because it in effect posits divisions in the Triune God—between who he is and what he would have us do. To the theology of the Trinity we must therefore now turn to correct these misunderstandings.
The trinitarian economy
What becomes clear in the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers in particular (St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Gregory Nazianzus) is that the theologia (roughly, the inner life) of the Trinity is infinitely bound up with the oikonomia (the outer creative working): in God, there is neither division nor separation, because those are characteristics of created being while God of course is uncreated. The universal Catechism captures this well in saying that
“theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the blessed Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions (s.236).
As the Catechism notes repeatedly, this dogma is a “mystery.” As such, a mystery is something not ever fully comprehended by human reason. It can, at best, be partially understood, for we are mortal, fallible, imperfect and sinful creatures, incapable of grasping the flawless and blessed perfection of God; we see through a glass darkly, as St. Paul reminds us.
While it is true that we can never fully grasp or comprehend the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, there are truths about God which we can, and indeed do, know. And the most central and profoundly important truth about the mystery of the Triune God is simply this: God is love. While we can never fully grasp the entirety of the mystery of God, we can come to understand something of both his nature and his working in creation. The key to that understanding, as the Catechism succinctly puts it, is that “God’s very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange” (CCC 221). The love of the Trinity is pure love which knows no grasping, no hording, no withholding. The love of the Trinity consists in an “eternal exchange,” an endless procession of self-giving. The Father holds nothing back from the Son, who holds nothing back from the Spirit, who holds nothing back from the Father. There is neither beginning nor end to the love of the Trinity. As Bishop Angelo Scola, a von Balthasar scholar, member of the International Theological Commission and appointed by Pope John Paul II as rector of the Lateran University in Rome has recently said:
first of all, there is the Father’s giving of himself (Fons totius divinatis) to the Son, in which he bestows on him everything that he is (in God there is only being and not having). The Son responds to the Father’s total self-giving. And the love which unites the two is so perfect as to spirate the Person of the Spirit, the fulfillment of the co-being of the Father and the Son. . . . To the total gift of self by the Father and by the Son, the Spirit responds by making his own equally total gift of self.
Thus, in addition to knowing that the mystery of the Trinity finds expression in love, we come to know further that this mystery of complete love itself finds expression in the total gift of self. It is this gift of self which is at the heart of the Trinity. Neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Spirit, hold anything back: all is given, freely, fully and forever in love. As the great Swiss theologian—beloved friend of Cardinal Ratzinger, and destined for the red hat from Pope John Paul II—Hans Urs von Balthasar has said:
God’s gift of being is fullness and poverty at the same time: fullness as being without limits, poverty in archetypal fashion in God himself, because he knows no clinging to himself, no poverty in the act of being, which is given as a gift, because this act exposes itself without defense to finite beings (because, here too, it does not cling to itself). The beings invented by God are likewise fullness and poverty at the same time: fullness in the power of sheltering and guarding the gift of the fullness of being (as “shepherd of being”), albeit poorly, because in limited fashion; poverty again . . . [because] . . . it understands “letting go” of being —ie., letting be, letting stream, passing on the gift—as the inner fulfillment of the finite being. It is here that, through the greater dissimilarity between finite and infinite being, the positive face of the analogia entis shows itself which makes of the finite a shadow, trace, simile and image of the infinite.
What von Balthasar is pointing to here is the connection—the analogia entis—between the total self-giving which is the Trinity, and the corresponding total self-giving which is our gift and calling as human beings created in the image and likeness of the Triune God. In other words, von Balthasar has felicitously drawn the connections between theology proper and a proper theological anthropology. The Trinity is not some obscure mystery, some distant dogma, with no relevance or applicability to our “everyday life.”
On the contrary, the Trinity is both origin and goal of human life, even in its “everydayness.” We were created by God for life in God: in the words of the Catechism, “the ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity” (CCC 260). We are thus, here and now, on our earthly pilgrimage, to imitate the God in whose image we were created, and to travel more and more deeply into communio of the Three in One. We can do this in many ways depending on our state in life. For married couples, the most felicitous way to do this is by living the Sacrament of Marriage in a way which is completely open to the gift of self and consequently the gift of life. Marriage, modeled on the Trinity, is not to be a fortress. In von Balthasar’s words,
God is not a sealed fortress, to be attacked and seized by our engines of war (ascetic practices, meditative techniques and the like), but a house full of open doors, through which we are invited to walk. In the Castle of the Three-in-One, the plan has always been that we, those who are entirely “other,” shall participate in the superabundant communion of life.
What we have here is an understanding of human moral conduct as a response to the gratuitousness of God, to the sheer gift of life in and from him: we are “invited to walk” into the Castle of the Three-in-One. Our walking is our response (itself the gift of God) to God’s gift of himself, and our response to this gift is to make the total gift of self in our own right. Life in and from God is not to be “attacked and seized” but to be received as a gift. And if freely received, so it must be freely given, without attachment or qualification, without let or hindrance, without opposition or contra-ception—that is, without any barriers to the gift of life as it comes to us above all in the union of man and woman in the conjugal act (a union which mirrors the consummation of the relationship between Christ and his Bride, the Church). This connection between the gift at the heart of the Trinity and the total gift of self which man is called on to make is clearly set forth in the theological anthropology of Pope John Paul II in Familaris Consortio and his 1994 Letter to Families, to which we turn now.
The theological anthropology of gift
In its pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council reflected on human life and its connection with the communio of life in the Trinity. Man, the Council taught, “is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake, [and] man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself (no. 24). This would prove to be a pivotal phrase for the unfolding of the thought of Pope John Paul II, whose pontificate has been very much a pontificate of the Council. All his writings bear witness to how much he has taken this nascent theological anthropology of personalism and of the gift of self and developed it extensively in his encyclicals, apostolic exhortations and constitutions, and other documents of his pontificate, including his 1994 Letter to Families. This anthropological vision makes unmistakably clear the connection between human life properly understood and the divine life of the Trinity: one can only understand the former in the light of the latter. As the Holy Father put it in Centesimus Annus, “the Church receives ‘the meaning of the person’ from Divine Revelation. ‘In order to know man, authentic man, man in his fullness one must know God,’ said Pope Paul VI. . . . Christian anthropology therefore is really a chapter of theology” (s.55). It is especially in Familaris Consortio (1981) and in his Letter to Families that his Christian anthropology of self-gift becomes wonderfully lucid and compelling.
Section 11 of the Letter to Families is entitled “the sincere gift of self.” It contains a succinct description of the giftedness of human life as such. Beginning with the sacrament of marriage, the Holy Father notes that marriage comes from, and finds its essence in, “the gift of one person to another person. This reciprocal giving of self reveals the spousal nature of love.” At once the Holy Father goes on to link this with the first Person of the Trinity, the Father, before whom the couple kneels to receive their “fatherhood and motherhood” and in recognition that “they have been ‘redeemed’ . . . [and] purchased at great cost, by the price of the most sincere gift of all, the blood of Christ” (emphasis in original). The Holy Father goes on to note that “it is the Gospel truth concerning the gift of self, without which the person cannot ‘fully find himself’ which makes possible an appreciation of how profoundly this ‘sincere gift’ is rooted in the gift of God, Creator and Redeemer, and in the ‘grace of the Holy Spirit’” (emphasis mine). Thus we see the connection: the total gift of self in marriage is analogically the same total gift of self which the members of the Blessed Trinity constantly offer to one another. The gift in the Trinity is total, and the gift in marriage must be as well.
A little later in the text, the Pope draws a second connection. He goes to the heart of the matter in saying that “all married life is a gift; but this becomes most evident when the spouses, in giving themselves to each other in love, bring about that encounter which makes them ‘one flesh’ (Gen 2:24)” (s.12). This encounter of loving union is the highest expression of the total gift of self, linking affective, physical and spiritual components of the human person in a complete offering of each to the other. This offering, precisely in order to be complete and total, must be open to new life at all times.
In the conjugal act, husband and wife are called to conform in a responsible way the mutual gift of self which they have made to each other in the marriage covenant. The logic of the total gift of self to the other involves a potential openness to procreation. . . . Certainly the mutual gift of husband and wife does not have the begetting of children as its only end, but is in itself a mutual communion of love and of life. The intimate truth of this gift must always be safeguarded (s.12).
Thus, we come to see why contraception cannot be approved: firstly, it does not allow for the total gift of self proper to the sexual union of marriage; and secondly, it fails to allow human life in its moral acts to conform to, and mirror, the action of the Trinity, which, as we have seen, consists in a constant, continual and total giving of self in mutual and eternal love.
The teaching of the Church on contraception is not today widely accepted or understood. It is a difficult teaching, a “hard saying,” but with the help of grace, it is once more being heard by couples and people of good will whose hearts are open to the Spirit of Truth who comes to lead them into the fullness of love life and which is God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Let us pray, always and everywhere, that this Spirit, of truth and love, the Spirit whose being is generated as a result of the total gift of self in love between the Father and the Son, will convince the sons and daughters of the Church, and men and women of good will everywhere, to again open their hearts and receive Christ by receiving the other in a spirit of hospitality, and giving to the other in a spirit of total openness signified above all by the gift of a child. For, 2000 years ago, it was the birth of a human child to Mary Immaculate and her most chaste spouse, Joseph, that our human nature, wonderfully created, was even more wonderfully redeemed. On the eve of the third millennium, pray that we may once more offer ourselves to Christ through Mary in total giving and obedience and so come to build strong marriages and families and thus to restore to our world a “civilization of life and love!”
1 “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.
It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of the faith’” (CCC 234).
Mr. Adam A.J. DeVille is a convert to Catholicism. He has recently completed his M.A. at St. Paul University in Ottawa, Canada, on the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and its implications for theological ethics. This is his first article in HPR.
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