On Contraception

[This subject, momentarily displacing abortion, has actually managed to make it onto the public square this past fortnight, in the context of the American Presidential campaign.  That arena, with its lies and hysteria, is hardly the place for judicious contemplation.  Hence we offer our own few observations  here.]

C.S. Lewis, lecturing the troops on spiritual matters during WWII, quickly found that discussing sins of fornication was utterly pointless.  The men had no sense of sin in this regard, so there was no point examining how to resist such temptations.  Much more fruitful, he found, was to take   as his starting-point  some sin that he himself had committed  that very week.   -- Since the sort of sins he was personally given to, tended to tend towards such matters -- or so I imagine -- as the Breaking of Promise in the matter of overdue library books, and (horresco referens) Pride, in the matter of witty little zingers he’d let fly in acerbic book-reviews, it is unclear how the troops would have related to these; but let it pass;  I hope to discuss the matter with him more at length, in another world.

Anyhow.

A fortiori  is the Church’s position on contraception   just … incomprehensible, to almost anyone, Catholic or not.   That does not mean at all that it is mistaken;  but it is so deeply lodged in an intricately reticulated world-philosophy, that to extract it from that context  is to kill the thing.   I suspect, indeed, that the Church is deeply right on this -- or rather, if she be right at all, she can only be deeply right, since  to every surface evidence of the senses, she is grievously in error -- and this, from the standpoint, not of the scoffer with nothing at stake, but of the ordinary Catholic:  compare such works as The British Museum Is Falling Down, by the excellent Catholic novelist  David Lodge.

Once again, we are confronted with an obvious analogy in Theologia mathematica:  So very much, from algebraic topology on up, is True but Incomprehensible (save to a few).  -- This observation is not, obviously, by way of proving any incomprehensible thing (be it the teachings of the Church, or of Grothendieck), but simply of refuting the notion that, if a thing be incomprehensible, in our lifetime, to the man in the street, it must needs be  baloney.

Note:  By coincidence, I am currently re-reading, for the first time since high school, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  It is a dystopian fantasy about a society that has carried birth control to its logical limits: there are no more births in the usual sense at all;  babies are synthesized in test-tubes.   Those acculturated into this system  shudder at the way things were before;  their historians explain:

There was something called Christianity.

Women were forced to be viviparous.

[Update]  Debate about contraception -- and, a fortiori, abortion -- tends to be so polarized, that neither side can hear the other.

A refreshing exception is this, from our friend and colleague Dr Massey.  He is Christian  down to the marrow of his bones -- and also a keenly logical thinker:

    http://magnaliadei.blogspot.com/2012/02/really.html

Excerpt:

What Christians should do is continue to challenge society to explore the logical basis for differing attributions of human life, liberty, and dignity.

(Emphasis added.)