The Tree of Jesse

Lately I read some of Malcolm Muggeridge’s outspoken comments on that arrogant clinical view current in the West which advocates family planning as the cure-all of the Eastern population explosion. It is rare indeed to hear any man suggest publicly that birth control may not be the best thing the twentieth century has to offer. I would like to add a few comments of my own on the same subject, though stressing at the outset that I do not mean to take sides absolutely in this difficult dispute. If the points I raise may happen on the whole not to be in support of widespread family planning by Catholics or non-Catholics, I would plead that all points in favour of family planning have already been thrashed to death throughout the world, and so I am not being unduly partisan in digging up a few facts which may tentatively support the more conservative view held by the Church herself. Often the Church seems blind simply because she lacks apologists who are prepared to argue from experience; and I suggest that there are in fact layers of experience in the modern Western community which indicates that birth control has deep and real disadvantages as a fence or foundation stone of Matrimony.

There is a passage in an article by Julio Neffa in a recent issue of Pax Romana which has, I think, some bearing on the whole difficult problem: ‘It is a new type of civilisation essentially urban in character, and with all the modifications this implies in social relations (conditions of work and life, the role of women, the function of social services, depersonalisation, centralisation, etc. . . .)’.

The article is rather sombrely entitled ‘Progress and Desacralisation’; and essentially it seemed to me to offer us a description of the modern bureaucratic society.

For Catholics their inevitable membership in such a society may raise very thorny issues, since they cannot merely take the directive of the bureaucratic State or the climate of popular opinion as their guide in moral and social matters, but must ultimately defer to a conscience guided by the magisterium (teaching authority) of the Church. This is not to be out of touch with the times we live in; yet there are often occasions when the Church can illuminate what the times have obscured. I have sometimes suspected that the miracle of the Incarnation itself is more likely to seem genuinely impossible to a modern computer whose job it is to feed and nurse computers than it would to his grandfather who had the job of shoeing horses; and this is not because he is ethically more dilapidated (his grandfather may have been a drunk and a wife-beater) but because the whole social climate has been drained of ‘nature’, of – let us say – an unconscious creative energy. To the alienated person whatever can be done without obvious moral collisions looks more or less all right. Thus, too, when a modern housewife decides to wear a diaphragm, no alarm bell is going to ring in her mind; she is not being obviously cruel or dishonest; page 294 and in a sense she may be glad to be free of her grandmother’s conditioning which would have regarded ‘those things’ as a sign of immorality. Yet her new freedom may lead her perilously close to that abstract void in which anything that can be thought of can also be done, since the voice of ‘nature’ has been silenced. The factors I now mention, in regard to family planning, are hidden ones which the bureaucratic planner would probably brush aside as so much rubbish; yet I offer them in sincerity for the consideration of my fellow Catholics.

At the very beginning of the Gospel according to St Matthew, Our Lord’s genealogical tree is set down in detail. Some may see this simply as a traditional Judaic practice here used by the narrator to demonstrate that Jesus was in fact the Messiah; but I think it has meaning and depth beyond this, and even a relevance to our own lives.

The medieval writers commonly represented this genealogical list pictorially as an actual tree growing from the loins of Jesse growing up ancestor by ancestor and eventually flowering into an image of the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord Himself. Now, we are familiar with the fact that the actual assent of the Blessed Virgin was necessary in order that the Second Person of the Trinity should become a man. But do any of us ever consider what might have been the result if the mother of the Blessed Virgin had decided (for reasons of health or economic convenience or some equally normal and honourable cause) to limit her family precisely at the time when the Blessed Virgin would otherwise have been conceived?

We must grant that though Our Lady in her conception was miraculously exempted from Original Sin, that conception itself occurred through natural generation. Thus, if her mother, or any ancestor or ancestress of Our Lord, had elected to use even a licit form of birth control at the wrong time (wrong from the point of view of the purposes of God in regard to the Incarnation) then neither Our Lady nor Our Lord would have been born at all. I make this suggestion realising that it may appear irreverent and grotesque; yet surely the apparent irreverence and grotesqueness lies chiefly in my attributing the practice of birth control to Our Lady’s mother, or to any of the ancestors of Our Lord. We may of course argue that our circumstances are different; that they were saints and patriarchs whereas we are not. Yet I think this argument may beg the question – namely, that we have in our muddled bureaucratic way forgotten the meaning and existence of the Tree of Jesse, and if it were growing in our day we would probably inadvertently chop it down.

The prime argument of the Church in regard to birth control is that the marital act which is potentially fertile is a different act from one which is deliberately separated from fertility. I consider that this argument is by no means merely a matter of barren scholastic dispute; that it is intimately related to the realities of the marriage situation.

There are two subjective facts in the physical expression of spousal love page 295 – the first is a wholly natural desire for those who love one another to be as closely united as possible; the second is the realisation that the marital act joins man or woman, through the body of the spouse, to nature itself. This second factor is the sexual as distinguished from the personal element in Matrimony. If a wife, disappointed by her husband’s lack of amatory initiative, were to say to him, ‘Of course, Jack, I know what it is; I’m growing older’, and he were to reply to her, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bertha; I love you just as much as I ever did’, and she replied in turn, somewhat sadly, ‘Yes, I know; but it’s not the same thing’, the couple would have skirted round this basic distinction between the personal and the sexual element in the love of man and wife. The second factor does not need a lengthy interpretation. It has been expressed in a thousand poems and works of art, which represent the sex relation as a beneficial encounter with a natural force. Our own society tends naïvely to suppose that this natural force is youth; and so the picture houses of the world are plagued with an endless procession of nymphets. But I suggest that we are mistaken; that the natural force is in itself fertility; and that a preparedness to be fertile is in turn closely connected with abandonment to the will of God as it was originally expressed to our first parents: ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’

If this natural force is deliberately banished from the marital relation, then the sole remaining meaning of the act is personal. In some degree personal love can be just as well expressed by a wife brushing her husband’s coat or a husband making his wife a cup of tea. I do not despise this kind of love; it may be more lasting than sexual love. But I think it is distinct from sexual love, in which the husband regards his wife as woman, and the wife regards her husband as man. It is this kind of love that birth control tends to amputate, since part of the meaning of man is ‘one who can impregnate’, and part of the meaning of woman is ‘one who can be impregnated’. The change is not merely a change. It is also a loss of function. The loss of this specifically sexual love is like the loss of the ability to see colours. The new black-and-white world is not only novel; it is also less complete; it is not quite the world God made for us. The Puritans do not mind the diminishing or annihilation of sexual love in marriage, since they regard sex anyway simply as a source of guilt and pain. But the ordinary husband and wife do mind; they feel obscurely that they have been robbed of something. Is the young husband mad who leaves his wife alone at night and prowls round the parties; and who, when he does find a partner, uses no contraceptives and runs the risk of fathering an illegitimate child? The syndrome is common enough. I do not think the young man is actually mad, though his protest against the loss of the masculine role of impregnator may be wholly unconscious. And is the young wife mad who takes the Pill and then becomes peculiarly frigid, with no fear of pregnancy to refer to as a cause of it? I do not think so. They may both be more natural and love one another a great deal more than they tragically suppose. Their page 296 society is inflicting on both of them a kind of psychological amputation. This, I think, is the hidden crux of the whole problem, unfortunately obscure to the clinical mind.

Married people are not dealing with abstractions – ‘contraception’, ‘population control’ – but with one another’s bodies and souls. The Church recognises this. She is very realist. The Church may often urge her members to be ascetic; but it is one of her glories that she is never basically Puritanical; and I think that in safeguarding the integrity of the marital act, she is safeguarding for her members the wholeness of the sex relation itself. On the other hand the modern bureaucrat is a Puritan to his bootsoles.

I have heard many talks and read many books about the state of marriage, and I think the possible attitudes of husbands are too often neglected. The husband’s assent to contraceptive practice may be taken for granted, when actually it is given with deep unexpressed reservations. Naturally very few husbands are prepared to express these reservations if the argument for contraception is put to them in terms of their wife’s mental or physical health. Yet such a presentation may be uncandid; and a husband so pressurised may not be at ease in mind or conscience.

Granted the practice of birth control in a given home, the wife’s matriarchal dignity as child-bearer will still remain more or less intact, even if she has three children instead of six. But if the marital act is almost always deliberately infertile, then the husband is demoted from a patriarchal status – indicated in the Scriptures by phrases such as ‘the horn of Abraham’ – to one of personal comforter and pleasure-giver; not an ignoble role, but undoubtedly a different one. Such changes are particularly disruptive when our civilisation swallows up tribal communities whose view of the marital relation may be more integral than our own.

Moreover, where birth control is regularly practised, the initiative for the marital act will tend to originate invariably with the wife; and thus the husband becomes the one who is wooed rather than the wooer. This may seem to the modern mind no more than a rather charming reversal of roles. But in fact the husband’s loss of initiative may become apathy or even impotence; and the situation is often secretly galling to the wife as well as the husband, since it upsets a pattern of male dominance which many women basically prefer to have, if not in the affairs of the household, at least in the bedroom. But where the husband has lost both his patriarchal status and the headship of the family it is extremely difficult for him to retain a dominant and aggressive role in this one area. It is difficult to express the exact nuances of the situation without becoming indelicate.

It is perhaps sufficient to say that the use of birth control may often strike both partners, at a semi-conscious level, as a deeply frustrating event, and this in turn may lead to a gradual abstention from the marital act. Thus, curiously, a decision originally taken for hedonist reasons may lead to an page 297 ascetic terminus. In modern life most people assume that their emotions are their own property, and that if Joe Blake and Fanny Adams decide that something is so, then it is so – this is a curious derivation from the democratic principle of majority rule. Yet if the whole human race were to decide that something – let us say, cannibalism – was right, and God had already decided otherwise, then democracy would be no help at all; the whole human race would be in the wrong, and in their honourable conformity to the doctrine of healthy and ethical cannibalism would not prevent them from suffering the subconscious backlash of emotions that failed to support their decision to be cannibals. We are created by God; not by ourselves. And if – as the Church has taught us – we were created to be fruitful in Matrimony, then our own natures will obscurely revolt if we make an opposite decision. I think that this does happen. Thus one may consider two possible views of the womb – as ‘the house of life’ from which children enter the world, or as ‘the house of death’ where this possibility is obviated either by the killing of spermatazoa or the killing of fertilised ova – the views are different, and the people who hold these different views will be different people. If sexuality becomes symbolically an entry into the house of death, then there will be much unconscious protest against sexuality itself. I think this is happening among us today. The deepest cause of many separations, divorces and infidelities may be disturbances at this level. The unfortunate protagonists are not looking for new sexual experiences; they are in fact looking for deliverance from the wheel of a sexuality which has become negative, not only – as in the past – among those who do not keep their marriage vows, but also among those who have tried to be faithful and live a good life according to the norms of their society. I do not think God intended marriage to be a seedbed of neuroses; and I do think that the practice of birth control is one negative factor which must be taken into account.

I am well aware of the facts on the other side of the fence – women crippled by the fear of pregnancy, families that fall apart because they are too large – yet I wonder if the reason why child-bearing has become a curse does not spring more from social conditioning than from the objective situation. There are undoubtedly slums in the world where it might seem a crime to have any children at all; but these are not present in our country; and the actual crime rests squarely on the backs of those who build up armaments instead of building houses.

In the past fifty years we have seen in New Zealand [a degree?] of gradual and no doubt positive emancipation of our women from what may have been for many of them a grinding bondage to the biological cycle of child-bearing. I do not dispute any woman’s right to follow her own reason and conscience in this matter; though plainly a woman who is a believing Catholic has to take into serious account the teachings of the Church to which she belongs. All our women are caught up in the current of emancipation. Yet a not too restricted knowledge of our social life has often made me wonder whether the page 298 emancipation may not have been more imaginary than real.

Among many women who are practising family planning I have seemed to detect a profound dissatisfaction and tension. Their new freedom has not in itself made them joyful. There may be a genuine conflict between the decision to remain partly infertile and a less conscious but very strong wish to bear more children; and even where this conflict does not reach the surface, one finds often among them a sense that emancipation has certainly changed their lives but has left those lives curiously lacking in substance and direction. It is as if only one woman in a hundred has actually been able to grasp and use the difficult new freedom; for the rest, they are not free, because they do not feel inwardly free.

I have noticed, too, a sense that the ideal companionship which they hoped to share with their husbands as a result of the emancipation had been in subtle ways prevented by the very circumstances of the emancipation itself, and a further sense that the double burden of housework and another job is an obscure imposition. Most of all, one gets the impression that for emancipated women the spiritual and psychological disturbances ordinarily associated with menopause had come to them before the change itself. This impression is one of long standing with me; I do not know what the psychiatrists have to say about it; but it has occurred to me that a deliberate infertility may have some resemblance to the infertility that naturally comes about at the menopause. Thus the biological bondage may have been replaced by another bondage harder to identify and impossible to eradicate. Obviously this subjective situation may have further effects on the mental and spiritual well-being of children.

Women in these circumstances deserve our wholehearted sympathy and help in coping with their problems. Yet how often will one not be tempted to say with a cruel bluntness: ‘You know, you’re just unlucky your grandmother didn’t think it a crime to have ten kids, even if only six of them grew up. She had all the objective worries in the world. But she didn’t have your worries. You’re just unlucky to be born in an age where you are bound to consider it a crime to be fertile.’

There are of course some exceptions. I remember a woman I met once, a devout Catholic, with an alcoholic husband who gave her only an unpredictable financial and emotional support. She had already had six children and was expecting a seventh confinement from which her doctor had told her she had little prospect of emerging alive. Yet she was in no sense an emotional cripple. She was immersed in an atmosphere of vigorous and even cheerful femininity. Her extraordinary serenity, her bottomless spirit of prayer, her warmth towards her children, her unfortunate husband and her neighbours, made her seem to me a creature from another planet. She had in fact accepted the whole biological burden as the will of God for her. I think her choice had been basically a free one.

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In the event, the God in whom she trusted preserved her life and carried her on to the performance of further works of mercy. Perhaps she had accepted the basic insecurity of the human condition, and so, whatever real dragons she met, she was in no danger of being devoured by imaginary ones; whereas her sisters, in their different situation, had perhaps been unable to accept it, and so were driven to create their own impossible private security, by various means, including birth control. She had a curious appearance of permanent youth. Her approach to God, as I remember it, was profoundly Marian.

I trust I am not idealising her situation, which might have been unbearable without the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit. At the time, having newly entered the Church, I thought naïvely, ‘Ah well, of course Catholics are different; they are a royal race, and their lives are different from those of their neighbours. . . .’ Since then I have seen, with sympathy, many Catholic women pass through psychological crises and adopt, not without compunction, various forms of birth control which the Church forbids. Possibly it would have required heroic virtue for them to have done otherwise. But I would like to stress that it has never looked to me, from the outside, like a choice between unhappy obedience or the happy practice of birth control; it was the fertile ones, not the deliberately infertile, who had the unlined faces and the appearance as if they had just had a swim. They were also more attractive sexually. But that is a man’s comment, and therefore in a sense irrelevant.

Personally, I think the only arguments in favour of rigorous family planning which really hold water are those that apply to the countries where starvation is frequent. Yet even there I can remember how, when I was in New Delhi, an unmarried European woman of good will arrived to attend a family planning conference and advocate the planting of birth control clinics in every Indian village; and how her view seemed to me peculiarly statistical and bureaucratic in contrast with that of the local Indian village women who, despite their tribulations, regarded each child as the gift of God.

It is not India, however, with which we are personally concerned; and it is an interesting exercise of the imagination to contrast the life of a Wellington suburb with that of a Neapolitan slum. We in our under-populated country practise birth control rigorously and urge our Maori neighbours to practise it too. This might make good though melancholy sense if we were poverty-stricken, or if we were heroically restricting our own population in order to make room for a few million Asian immigrants; but we are not poverty-stricken, and our immigration laws let in only a meagre trickle; and there is no reason why we should practise birth-control except that perhaps we may think it is good for us. And perhaps in a narrow sense it is good for us, since our children may each spend in a week on confectionary and unnecessary clothing twice as much money as an Indian labourer would need to support himself and his family in modest affluence, and since our men work overtime and worry about income tax and our women feel that the stress of life is page 300 considerable; and all this should lead us logically to despise riches and long for poverty. But does it actually have this effect?

One has in our suburbs a curious sense of vacant unoccupied spaces; spaces not only between the houses, but spaces inside the houses, and spaces within the hearts of those who inhabit the houses. The metaphysical void is very close to us. This void provokes a hidden anguish in the souls of those who encounter it, especially in the souls of the young. And this may be why our children, though well looked after, seem often to hate their homes. In a Neapolitan slum, on the other hand, there is a hunger and perhaps overpopulation – there is also life, colour, activity, a non-hygienic vitality that might horrify us and yet show that the human race was fully present there. And where the human race is fully present it is easy for the Church to be present too.

It is interesting to remember that in the Middle Ages women actually visited shrines in great numbers to be cured of barrenness. They were daughters of the Church. Today our women in equally large numbers visit birth control clinics to make sure that they will be at least partly barren. They are daughters of the bureaucratic age, the depersonalised new civilisation that Julio Neffa describes. Both groups are undoubtedly children of God. Yet I feel that birth control may be a central factor leading to the desacralisation of our society.

Since I am a man, I can make these comments safely from the sidelines, knowing that I am unlikely to influence the course of events in any significant way. It is our women who are engaged in the difficult labours of self-emancipation. And it is our women who will make the final decisions in matters of birth control, acting, I hope, in accord with their reason and conscience, and with a due acknowledgement that a Higher Power exists who is capable of helping us to make difficult decisions. It is the women who have the inner shape of our society in their hands. I hope they do not choose to obey only themselves.

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