Rebellion or Resignation

A great deal of fervent controversy has circulated, and no doubt will circulate, round the encyclical Humanae Vitae. I do not remember the same controversy about Progressio Populorum, though there the issues were even more radical.

Perhaps this is because our way of life in the affluent countries is not page 628 threatened by poverty, whereas it does appear to be threatened by the command to cease the practice of artificial contraception. Self-preservation is a stronger motive than the preservation of the lives of others. And this no doubt is only natural.

I have already cast my vote deliberately in favour of the Pope’s statement and in favour of obedience to his directive; and I do not now intend to repeat the difficult arguments for and against that conclusion. But since my happiness springs primarily from a desire for full obedience to the will of God as expressed in the teaching authority of His Church, I am genuinely interested in the views of those who feel that their happiness is going to spring from an opposite desire.

I put the hypothesis in the future tense, because it seems to me that those who wish to make their own decisions on a matter that is now beyond private judgment are motivated by a trust in the future.

They expect that ‘things will change’; they are essentially ‘progressive’; they are moved perhaps by that same spirit of mingled impatience and idealist confidence which contributes meaning to a romantic love affair or a strike in a steel works. Those who do not agree with them should still be able to sympathise.

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We know that in a year’s time the love affair will leave only an area of spiritual scar tissue; we know that three weeks after the strike has ended by negotiation or bulldozing, the workers will no longer feel an ideal communal afflatus but will have resumed their ordinary mutual grievances and feuds and dislikes.

But we also know that without the recurring dream of the Earthly Paradise the human race would lack a stimulus to hope and charitable action.

Rebels are necessary. Even to have one original thought is an act of implicit rebellion against a hundred inherited stereotypes. And this is so even if the thought is an obvious fallacy.

A few months ago I wrote a comic play in which the main character, a staid New Zealand paterfamilias, gives birth on stage to a tractor. People obviously don’t give birth to tractors. But on stage it is quite possible for them to do so, because the stage is an intellectual universe and because the best satire is well salted with absurdities.

In the moral universe, the one we walk about in, there is a difference. An act of rebellion may also be a sin. You could say that a sinner is a person who has gravely muddled the moral and the intellectual categories. A sin is an absurdity transferred from the realm of the intellect to the realm of the will; and where there is sin the sun is darkened, because moral absurdities are also monstrosities.

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There are, of course, several types of moral rebel. There is the familiar adolescent rebel who may flower into an adult Bohemian, the person who rebels against the norms of his society chiefly because he thinks those norms are wrong. His rebellion will be advantageous to himself and others as far as his original intuition is correct; and indeed many forms of adolescent rebellion are in themselves morally good or morally neutral.

The boy who dresses in a sheet and paints flowers around his eyes may scandalise his relatives, but you will not find his behaviour described as a sin in any book of moral theology. He may live on potatoes and milk and paint pictures instead of learning to be an accountant; and his rebellion may even be beneficial to others because he presents them with an example of legitimate human freedom.

If he is also deliberately drunken or unchaste, the picture is altered by the introduction of sin. But finally, a person is not a sinner because he rebels against the social norms; he is a sinner because he rebels against the laws of God.

Rebellion against God is human, in the sense that most human beings do so deliberately rebel. It is also satanic, in the sense that it imitates and serves the purposes of the Father of Lies. We have no right to excuse or condone this kind of rebellion in ourselves or in others.

At the same time, we have to recognise that the tendency is deep-rooted in all of us that progress rather than perfection is the common road we must travel on, and that sinners are equally distributed among those who conform to social norms and those who rebel against them.

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The avaricious factory owner is hardly in a position to condemn violently his Bohemian neighbour who has three mistresses and gets drunk every day; nor has the Bohemian good reason to take a similar view of him.

The fact that one has chosen to abandon a morally malignant form of rebellion does not mean that one has to become respectable. This notion of unnecessary austerity is not uncommon among reformed drunks. To be without the booze may well be a moral asset for the man who cannot drink without becoming irrational.

But to put on a collar and tie and shave regularly and cease all punting on the T.A.B. and avoid even the mildest of swear-words is a neutral personal choice which may have a symbolic value but may also cramp the ex-drunk’s style unduly. It is essential for an educated conscience to distinguish clearly what is sin from what is not sin. If we do not so distinguish we may end by misrepresenting the laws of God to others.

There is, however, a third kind of rebellion. A man may rebel on God’s behalf against every alliance and compromise which seems to him contrary page 630 to the will of God. On the face of it this radical rebellion is no more than obedience; and it contains one of the deepest paradoxes of the Faith.

I remember how, not long before I became a Catholic, I was reading an encyclical in which one of the Popes had stated that the only freedom man had was to obey the will of God. I found it a hard pill to swallow; much less digestible, I am sure, than the notorious Pill round which a good deal of modern controversy is circulating. But I have swallowed it.

This is the paradox which lies behind the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Pope Paul is asking us to begin a fundamental rebellion in the name of God against the tyrannical norms of modern society. Understandably, many of us are bewildered. We had associated virtue with a sheep-like obedience, not only to the Church, but also unconsciously to the habits of thought and conduct cherished most dearly by the modern world. To be asked to rebel on God’s behalf strikes us as a theological contradiction.

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But some of us (an increasing number, I trust) have caught a glimpse of what the Holy Father means. And we might perhaps address him in these terms:

‘Dear Holy Father – We were in doubt for a while. We observed you sitting somewhat uneasily in the Chair of Peter, and we wondered whether God had not unkindly given us a conservative leader to fill the place of that great revolutionary Pope John. Some of your injunctions struck us as both prolix and rhetorically pious. We feared that you were just another man of our age; a good man but a bureaucrat; a hobnobber with statesmen and diplomats; a peg from which the Church would hang suspended during your time of office. We ask you to forgive us now for these doubts and fears.

‘Now we know who it is that is speaking to us. It is the lionlike and revolutionary voice of the Church herself speaking through your lips, caring not a fig for fashions and currents of opinion, caring only that God should be obeyed and souls be saved.

‘First in Progressio Populorum, when you applied a fatherly scourge to the capitalist nations equally with the Communists on account of their time-serving dithering and their neglect of the suffering poor; then in this new message, Humanae Vitae, in which you have told us plainly to put off the shackles of our luxurious and tyrannical customs and stand up again as free men and women, obedient to God and to no other master – in these pronouncements we have discerned, with terror and joy, the voice of our only Liberator.

‘More progressive than the “progressives”, more revolutionary than the Marxists – since each of these have made their own tedious alliances with sin disguised as custom – you have told us that the modern world is another den of thieves, no more holy in itself than the Jerusalem of the Master or the page 631 Rome of the early Popes; that whatever light it has comes from outside itself, from the Father of Lights, conveyed in the supernatural deposit of revelation; that whatever value it possesses comes from the fact that Christ died to save it.

‘When you spoke to us, tenderly, but sternly, the martyrs and matriarchs of the Church sat up in their tombs and shouted with joy. Margaret Clitheroe was glad, because her child was killed in her womb by invincible ignorant torturers and accompanied its mother into Heaven, whereas her descendants, without your voice, might have fallen blindly into a condition where they would kill their own children in their own wombs in the name of therapeutic abortion.

‘We are particularly grateful for your solitary and courageous defence of human sexuality. We are not Puritans. We had valued these faculties and the joy they gave us. The bureaucrats and doctors and chemists were steadily leading us into a shadow world where sexuality became a jingling together of what might as well have remained apart, a barren juxtaposition of bodies signifying neither obedience to God’s will nor in the long run even personal tenderness, but rather a way of hiding from whatever might disturb us, as your first ancestors hid themselves from God’s eyes in the thickets of the garden.

‘You will have seen, if you have the time to look at films, the perfect expression of this erotic nullity in the opening sequences of that depressing film Hiroshima Mon Amour. There sexuality divorced equally from nature and from God, is seen as the meeting of aesthetically conceived masses of flesh in a void. You have delivered us from that nightmare.

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‘Dear Holy Father, we are above all grateful for the service you have done for the young. Now, even though for generations they may use the drugs cynically foisted on them by our avaricious culture, though their ears will be hammered by advertising that tells them that luxury is the only attainable good, though they will cower like frightened animals in the bedrooms of our psychiatric wards, driven to a desire to kill themselves by stimuli that can only stupefy them and experiences that dismember their souls – still they will learn that one door has been left open, that the Church who has the power to exorcise demons has also the courage to outface the demonic culture they were born into.

‘Some of them will see the light shining beyond that door, and make the final act of beneficent rebellion that will bring them into a world where substance is holy and God is obeyed. We thank you, Holy Father, on their behalf.

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‘We thank you most of all because you have given us back the Cross. Thinking we could escape the poverty and the suffering of Christ, many of us – lacking a clear directive – had begun to set that reality aside in favour of a different suffering that came from our sense of unreality at the centre of our own lives, because those lives were twisted aside from the purposes of God.

‘You have rectified this evil for us. We may seem slow to follow. Custom is the greatest of all tyrannies and hard to escape. But at least we know the road. We know the voice of the true Shepherd when we hear it; the One who is prepared to suffer with the sheep while the false guardians run away and let the wolves savage them.

‘Now that this holy revolution has begun – this decision to obey God and not the mesmerising voices of a self-blinded civilisation – do not cease to instruct us. We know that the poor must be clothed and fed. We know that the marriage act becomes evil if it is deliberately infertile. But there are a hundred other issues on which you have not yet spoken, where we must think clearly and act justly in order to obey God.

‘We would like to hear more from you. Now that you have spoken, we know that we have a Father who knows the truth and is minded towards the times. The times are as troubling as they have ever been for the sons of men. We are going through the Red Sea – not red because of the shallower issues of Communism, but red with the blood of a million innocents killed every week in the name of culture and progress – and you must keep your arms upraised until we have made that journey.

‘We know that your heart is torn apart by disunion in the Church; and we promise not to make disunion an occasion for factionalism and uncharity; but you also have our daily prayers to support you, in which we thank God for having sent us a holy and courageous Pope. Remember us and speak to us again whenever you are able.’

These words may not please all who read them; but I think they are as true as any I have ever written. And I feel frequently impelled to thank God for having sent us a Pope who is not a conservative but a holy rebel.

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