The Prayer of Lady Macbeth: How the Contraceptive Mentality Has
Neutered Religious Life
Paul V. Mankowski, S.J.
<The following paper was delivered during the national meeting of
the Institute on Religious Life held in Chicago April 16-18, 1993.
The theme of this meeting was "Religious Life and Family Life:
Co-Partners in the Mission of the Church.">
"Unsex me here!" Lady Macbeth's prayer, significantly, was made to
the gods of death _ "you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" _
and we remember with a shudder how completely and vividly her plea
was answered. She was, largely though not entirely, a contrivance
of fiction, and yet Shakespeare's powerful and gruesome anti-
heroine was a forerunner of a species of Christian for whom the
conjunction of prayer, personal resolve, and the negation of life
produced a radically new thing, a third order of sexuality _ a way
of being human that is neither authentically male nor recognizably
female, neither inceptive nor receptive of life, neither ordered
to creation nor designed to nurture: "Unsex me here!"
It is important to notice that when Lady Macbeth prays that she be
unsexed, she is pleading not for a diminishment of libido but for
a freedom from compassion. The juices of sexual frenzy may flow
unchecked; it is the promptings of <motherhood> that must be
ripped clean away.
Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!
The upshot is that it is not lust, but life, that must be
alienated from the votaries of this Third Order of the Unsexed.
The question I have been asked to address is, "Has the
contraceptive mentality affected religious life?" The short
answer is Yes, emphatically. I want to use the prayer of Lady
Macbeth to discuss the paradox of celibate men and women re-
centering their lives on a contraceptive worldview. The
contraceptive mentality is more than the conviction that
artificial birth control is morally licit. It comprises an
extensive fabric of attitudes about sin, religious authority,
human fulfillment, as well as sexuality _ attitudes that are
determinative of choices central to every human life, including
those for whom personal fertility and infertility are utterly
irrelevant issues.
Contraceptive acts, and their moral condemnation, are equally
ancient. As is well known, the contraceptive crisis was brought
into being with the development and marketing of orally
administered anovulants. The Pill (or, as it is irreverently
known in Britain, the Tablet) focussed the moral issues and
polarized the champions of rival solutions decisively and
irrevocably. This is not simply, or even primarily, the
consequence of what is misleadingly called the Sexual Revolution
brought on by the Pill. The Sexual Revolution was no revolution
at all but the normal operation of social laws of gravity. "Folks
done more of what they done before" simply because one constraint
_ fear of unwanted pregnancy _ was eased. The water of sexual
libido ran downhill after a sluice-gate was opened: no surprise
there. No, the real revolution occasioned by the Pill not was not
sexual but religious.
Contraception has traditionally been censured as an instance of
sexual misdemeanor, and sexual sins have generally been treated by
moralists of all traditions as sins of the weakness of will.
Pagan, Christian, Moslem and Jew knew equally well that it's wrong
for the head of the household to sport with the dairy maid, but
recognized that in a moment of weakness a man generally resolved
to live uprightly could succumb to temptation. The understanding
of remorse, penance and reconciliation varied widely, but all
acknowledged the phenomenon of lust mastering the moment. The
Pill changed all that. To contracept by this method involved not
a surrender to the urgent passions of an instant but an action _
better, a series of actions _ clearly foreseen and assented to in
cold blood, passionlessly, with deliberation and resolve. The
majority report of Pope Paul VI's commission on birth control
clumsily attempted to assimilate use of the Pill to the class of
human actions undertaken impulsively, but this concession was
rightly rejected with scorn by Catholic couples who insisted that
they embarked on contraception as a consciously (and, in their
view, conscientiously) studied choice. To those who had made
their peace with the Pill in the early '60s, the shock delivered
by <Humanae vitae> was staggering. It still is.
"Unsex me here!" begged Lady Macbeth,
. . make thick my blood.
Stop up th'access and passage to remorse
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th'effect and it.
This is not a person trying to justify the ill means to a
contemplated good end, or someone asking for pardon after the fact
for an acknowledged wrongdoing. She prays to be rid of the access
to remorse, to get beyond questions of conscience entirely. She
resolves to be fixed on her purpose and on it alone, to the
exclusion of all other considerations. Once the Church included
the choice to contracept by means of the Pill in the class of
morally condemned actions, no Catholic could leave the
confessional in doubt about his capacity to "sin no more" in this
respect (as, say, a penitent might doubt his strength to avoid the
sins of fornication or blasphemy). Contraception involves no
temptation at all in the sense of pressure to yield to an impulse
(Was Lady Macbeth <tempted> to murder Duncan?) but rather the
resolution to lead one's life in defiance of the Church. To
contracept while attempting to remain a Catholic accordingly
required the development of an entirely novel religious stance, a
stance founded on two beliefs: first, the conviction that the
teaching Church is wrong in an area in which she explicitly claims
authority; and second, the conviction that a Catholic can
coherently hold that the Church is wrong in one place and right
(or right enough) in others such that Church membership remains a
conscientious and meaningful choice.1
Even on the pastoral level, very few religious were directly
affected by the face-value content of <Humanae vitae.> Yet the
religious stance that emerged in the rejection of <Humanae vitae>
was of paramount importance to their lives. For it involves the
belief that there is a higher, or deeper, or at any rate more
reliable mediator of God's will than the teaching Church. This
point cannot be stressed too much. If the Church is wrong in
<Humanae vitae>, the judgment that it is wrong can only be made
with reference to some standard. That standard, obviously, cannot
be the Church herself; some contend that it is moral intuition,
others a more academically respectable reading of scripture or of
the history of doctrine; still others some comprehensive system of
ethics or logic. But the crucial point is that whatever standard
is taken as fundamentally reliable, this standard judges the
Church, and is not judged by her. Here is the real revolution
incited by the Pill; next to it the rise in promiscuity is a mere
flutter. As did their lay married counterparts, religious men and
women instinctively perceived (and in many cases, rushed toward)
the breach in the dam of doctrine and discipline caused by
adoption of this new standard. Keep in mind that this new crisis
is of an entirely different order from the classical moral
controversies in Church history, which involved the laxity and
rigor of the Church's treatment of what all parties to the dispute
agreed to be sins. Dissenters from <Humanae vitae> are about
something else entirely, for they maintain that an action
specifically and categorically condemned by the Church may be
contemplated and chosen in good will as a licit option by a
conscientious Catholic.
Suppose for a moment that a Catholic comes to believe that the
teaching Church is wrong in condemning contraception but right
about everything else. How does he judge the Church wrong in the
one case? As we have seen, by reference to some standard that is
more reliable than the Church. But how does he judge the Church
to be right in the other million-and-one instances? Obviously,
only in virtue of the same standard by which he found her
defective. It is absurd, not to say insane, to claim that one
obeys, or is faithful to, the Church in those areas in which he
happens to agree with her _ because "happens to agree" is the
operative phrase. If my pocket calculator has proved unreliable
in one calculation, I might still maintain that it "gives true
answers" for other calculations, but not <all> others: only, in
fact, those which I have some reason to believe to be true. And
my basis for judging the instrument accurate in these other
computations <cannot> be the calculator itself _ but rather some
norm (a mathematical table, my own longhand reckonings) that I
take to be fundamentally sound. Consequently, it is absurd to say
that I can <depend> on my calculator where it gives me true
answers, since my use of the word "depend" expresses nothing more
than a simple convergence between the calculator's answer and the
true one.2 And it is important to stress that once I have found a
more reliable instrument, the less reliable one is superfluous _
worthless, in fact. I can only hold on to it for sentimental
reasons. By the same token, once my paramount theory of ethics or
my personal religious intuition has proved more reliable than the
Church, my continued association with the Church can never be more
profound than a "<mater, si! magistra, no!>" aestheticism. I can
only pretend to let myself be taught by the Church the way I
"depend" on my faulty calculator: my loyalty will be an act of
sentimental affection, not an act of discipleship.
The contracepting Catholic who, for example, claims to be faithful
to the Church on social doctrine is in the position of the Briton
who is summoned by the Queen to be her Prime Minister: his
selection is in reality a matter of democratic political
machinations, ceremonially tricked-out as an act of the Royal
Will. Is he obeying his monarch in answering her summons? Only
in the vacuous sense that a person says Yes to his own invitation.
Institutionalized Catholic dissent on contraception makes the
hierarchical Church into something like the British monarchy: it
is a consciously antiquated ceremonial instrument for injecting a
certain pomp into the solemnization of decisions made on grounds
wholly unrelated to her logic, purposes and history.
For the vowed religious, the first casualty of the contraceptive
mentality is the Church as the focus of religious authority. The
realization, perhaps, was gradual, but when prominent theologians,
bishops, and entire episcopal conferences distanced themselves
from <Humanae vitae> without severing themselves from the Church,
the logic of their dissent could hardly be confined to a single
issue. In an astonishingly brief span of years the Church has
been transformed from the measuring rod to the thing measured; no
longer the guarantor of authentic religious life, she is
everywhere under suspicion. In liturgy, scripture, pastoral
efforts, theology and sacrament, the Church is regarded by entire
congregations as guilty until proven innocent, and proof of this
innocence is (in these circles) seldom forthcoming.
In the days when contraception was an unreliable affair, and
pregnancy was a common consequence of sexual relations, extra-
marital sex involved a clear offense against charity, and the
Church's teachings forbidding adultery and fornication were easily
defended on this ground _ too easily, in fact. Moreover, the
crude mechanical instrumentation of the older contraceptive
devices lent weight (though a specious one) to the argument of
preachers that artificial birth control is contrary to nature.3
Once again, the advent of the Pill obliterated both defenses, and
the Church's teachings on the spiritual significance of marriage,
the body, and sexuality were put into the hands of pastors who
were, for the most part, wholly unprepared to understand or
communicate them.
Dissenters, on the other hand, pounced on this opportunity, and
placed enormous rhetorical stress on the primacy of charity in the
Church's moral tradition. No one could deny the centrality of
charity in this tradition, but on the level of popular controversy
it resulted in the illegitimate derivation of two erroneous
propositions: first, that an act that is not a sin against
charity is no sin at all; second, that any act done with a
charitable intention is for that reason justified. The
application to married life virtually wrote itself: contraception
involves no obvious sin against charity (for neither husband nor
wife is wounded) and therefore involved no sin at all. Or again,
if contraception be employed with a charitable intention (making
life easier for one's spouse; ensuring more advantages for one's
children) it is morally praiseworthy. The theological
justification for these arguments, however, necessitated a re-
formulation of the Christian imperative of charity and of
traditional Catholic moral reasoning. In this new scheme, the
morally preferable option is not one that conforms to a relevant
principle of conduct but the one that results in more good (i.e.,
more "pre-moral good") than its rivals. It takes little
imagination to devise scenarios in which contraception will result
in more pre-moral bounty than other options, and therefore
contraception was handily offered to Catholic couples as a licit
moral choice.
The chasm that separates those dissenters from <Humanae vitae>
that employ this new scheme from orthodox Catholics has been
described with felicity and precision by John Finnis4, who argues
that, while it was the traditional belief of Christians that they
were to serve the good, the dissenters hold that our duty is to
<effect> the good.5 Now whereas the belief that our Christian
duty is to effect the good has been used by Catholic theologians
to justify instances of abortion, euthanasia, threatened
destruction of civilian populations as a deterrent and so forth,
it is contraception that provided the real impulse behind the
advancement of this theory, and indeed it is the justification of
contraception that continues to provided the rallying point of
dissent in the Church.6
Consider once again all that is consequent upon the change from
serving the good to effecting the good. Call to mind the
direction of change in religious communities in their apostolic
involvement over the past 25 years, the de-emphasis on adoration,
catechesis, spiritual works of mercy (even the term has become
comically antiquated); the new stress on consciousness raising,
political action, community organizing, world peace, environmental
awareness. I want to stress that none of these latter activities
need be pursued in a manner incompatible with traditional moral
reasoning, but the fact that this reasoning plays small part in
the motivations of religious men and women who champion these
causes is evidenced by the rationale commonly given for the moral
compromises these tasks ask of them. Call to mind the excuses and
justifications frequently offered by priests and nuns acting as
university officials or appointed agents of state for their
complicity in scandals of political and public life, for their
actions that are contrary to Church teaching. Is it not the case,
almost without exception, that their plea is to a higher
responsibility to effect the good, rather than to serve it? Is it
not the case that those whose aim is to cause a certain effect
regard their more scrupulous brothers and sisters with Lady
Macbeth's exasperation?
Yet I do fear thy nature.
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win. Thou'dst have, great Glamis,
That which cries, 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it';
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.
Translated into contemporary terms, the message runs thus: "Only
weaklings let moral principles stand in the way of social change.
You can accomplish nothing great if you let yourself be trapped by
the snare of holiness. If you're going to succeed, you have to
regard success itself as the only gauge of morality. True
charity, after all, is not serving the Good, but delivering the
goods."
And so it goes, step-by-step, on a gentle downslope, in the lives
of religious: Faith in a provident God gives way to the Faith
That Does Justice, which in turns gives way to the Justice That
Brings Itself into Being, which turns out, in practical terms, to
mean an ideologized justice that must dispense with faith when
faith would hinder its full realization. Thus in the space of 25
years the voices that urged us to follow the patriarch Moses in
his exodus of liberation now urge us to believe that patriarchy _
indeed the very Law by which Moses vindicated himself _
constitutes the final and most formidable obstacle to true human
freedom. The God of the Patriarchs is worse than the bondage of
Pharaoh.
I have pointed to two revolutions in Catholic religious life that
were precipitated by the rise of the contraceptive mentality. The
first was doctrinal: what Vincentian Fr. Patrick Collins has
called (approvingly) the change from "the experience of religious
authority to the authority of religious experience"; the demotion
of the Church from judge to defendant. The second revolution was
moral: the change from serving to effecting the good. The third
revolution might broadly be termed spiritual.
From the earliest days of the Church, Christian life has involved
asceticism: a regimen of spiritual discipline whereby forgoing
the comforts and consolations of bodily life was regarded as
training for holiness leading to fuller communion with God. We
can distinguish two strands within this tradition: what we might
call the asceticism of acceptance or patience, and the asceticism
of renunciation. Asceticism of patience asks us to accept with
tranquil resolve the unavoidable hardships of life, those from
which there is no escape, as a sharing in the blessedness of the
world's poor and as a way of perfection: physical deformity or
illness, the hardships of war, the pain of an infertile marriage
are examples of these austerities. Asceticism of renunciation
involves those hardships that are not inevitable but are
undertaken either in conformity to moral principle or as a wholly
gratuitous means of discipline aimed at holiness. Now the
meaningfulness of the discipline of renunciation is a precarious
thing, because it flies in the face of humanistic theories of
self-actualization and personal fulfillment, theories which see
voluntary renunciation of a human good as not only absurd but
pathological. Noble acceptance of unavoidable suffering (the
early death of one's child, say) can be prized as a "growth
experience" in this scheme, but to court pain or diminishment is
depraved.
Before the availability of reliable contraception Catholic couples
could plausibly be urged to accept the various disciplines of
married love as part of an asceticism of patience. With the Pill,
the ground changed almost overnight. Now couples were required to
make the asceticism of renunciation a part of their married lives,
because the twin hardships of sexual abstinence and provision for
large families became easily, eminently, avoidable. For a while
the question hung precariously in the balance: would Catholic
couples accept the Church's discipline and the new invitation to
an asceticism of renunciation, or would they opt for the techno-
fix and push voluntary asceticism to the margins of their lives?
Not for the first time, they looked to their clergy and religious
_ those set apart and coached in asceticism _ for their clues on
how to respond to these two new offers. Even at this date I find
it impossible to believe that a spirited and joyful embrace of
<Humanae vitae> by clergy and religious, combined with sound
instruction and spiritual aid to the laity, would not have
resulted in a general Catholic adherence to the new mode of
asceticism.
It didn't happen that way. With a vehemence that outdid the most
truculent layman, Catholic clergy and religious led the charge
<against> <Humanae vitae>7, and I would wager that, given an equal
number of randomly selected priests or religious and married
laymen, one would find greater support for the Church's teaching
in the latter group than the former _ by far. Re-enter Lady
Macbeth:
Nought's had, all's spent
Where our desire is got, without content.
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
Was it merely coincidence that the massive dissent from <Humanae
vitae> marched with a near total abandonment of the asceticism of
renunciation in religious life? I can't offer proof for my hunch,
but I doubt it. Even in the crises of the Reformation there was
no sea-change in the religious discipline of communities that
remained Roman Catholic comparable to the disappearance of
fasting, vigils, corporal mortification, penitential labor, and
even time set aside for prayer, from the lives of all but a few
contemporary religious. Certainly there was a variety of forces
set in motion in the aftermath of Vatican II that contributed to
the re-fashioning of religious life, and it would be simplistic to
point to the rejection of <Humanae vitae> as the <fons et origo>
of every ill, but once human sexuality became assimilated to the
number of satisfactions whose exercise belonged to the prerogative
of the self-constituting individual, and was consequently
emancipated from any larger system of meaning and responsibility,
the denial to the self of any and all satisfactions, pleasures,
and consolations seemed precariously close to irrational. The
notion of rigorous training (the <askesis> from which the
classical idea of asceticism is derived) vanished in favor of a
number of developmental schemes of monitored growth in which the
underlying anthropological assumptions were contrary to those
undergirding the older <via perfectionis>. In the new scheme, all
men are born good, naturally holy, and their chief requirement is
opportunities for education, self-expression, and enrichment of
experience in order to become godlike, that is to say fully human.
The banisters and railings and fences and other "boundary
safeguards" of religious life were discarded, inasmuch as their
existence implied notions of trespass and constraint and an innate
human tendency to sin. Gone is the rule of tactus8, the stricture
that sent nuns out of the house in pairs, the early curfews,
mandatory and distinctive religious garb, the manifold impediments
of cloister. Gone are the multitudes of requisite permissions;
gone is all but minimum responsibility for the use of time and
money _ both of which used to be viewed as the common property of
the community, not perquisites doled out to the individual for his
discretionary employment.9 Gone is an entire fabric of sexual
discipline.
"Unsex me here!" It is not, I believe, tendentious to maintain
that the consequence of the obliteration of asceticism in
religious life has been sexual anarchy. The evidence for this is,
regrettably, overwhelmingly abundant. It is a curious paradox,
but even though generally speaking priests were never less
masculine and sisters less feminine than today, the libido is at
the same time all but out of control. Few religious, however,
seem willing to countenance a restoration of the former
discipline. I recently attended a day-long workshop on clergy
sexual misconduct that dealt with the problem entirely in terms of
"professional boundaries." Do you see the irony? Having cast
away the framework of prayerful asceticism assembled by countless
monks, priests and nuns over seventeen centuries, human nature
"actualized" itself in horrifying ways, and we now have to
improvise hastily by tacking in place the <legal> boundaries
appropriate to dentists and high school guidance counselors.
We are frequently invited, sometimes by fellow Catholics, to view
the scandal of priestly and religious pedophilia (and other sexual
abuses) as an occasion to despair, as an assault on our faith.
Now I believe as firmly as anyone that clergy pedophilia is an
abomination and a horror _ but it certainly doesn't rattle my
faith: after all, when the prayer of Lady Macbeth goes up, when
we trade in the multiform protections and incentives of a
responsible tradition of asceticism for the wisdom of Abraham
Maslow and Carl Rogers, one would expect it to breed maggots.
Personally my faith would be more shaken if the contrary were
true, if those who had thrown over the cautions urged by Benedict
and Francis and Ignatius and Teresa found a surfeit of joy and
energy in their apostolic lives, a radiant and unshakeable
chastity, an enviable psychic and sexual tranquility; if they
attracted an abundance of new vocations from the brightest and
most vital of Catholic youth; if their prayer out-shone their
forebears in its vigor, profundity and fruitfulness _ <that> would
unsettle my faith, for it would mean that the wisdom of this world
had proved wiser than the inheritance we have from the martyrs.
True, all the results aren't in yet, but I believe this turn of
events . . . unlikely.
Has religious life remained unaffected by the contraceptive
mentality? The answer may be forthcoming if we rephrase the
question: Have Catholic religious been successful at transmitting
and multiplying the abundance of life they enjoyed before the
crisis of contraception made itself felt in their lives? The only
religious who can say Yes without duplicity are those who failed
to "unsex" themselves doctrinally, morally and spiritually in the
time of struggle. On the other hand, those Third Orders of the
Unsexed are heading remorselessly down the course marked out by
their ancient, and so-very-contemporary, patroness.
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been time for such a word.
ENDNOTES
1 I have unlikely (and unsympathetic) support for these claims
from Charles Curran, who admitted that proponents of contraception
hugely underestimated the negation of the Church's doctrinal
authority entailed by reversal of past teaching. See "Ten Years
Later," <Commonweal>, July 7, 1978, pp. 426-30.
2 Of course, my analogy is crippled by the fact that no one
pretends that a calculator is an ultimate <norm> of reliability
(as is claimed for the Church), nor does the calculator (as the
Church does) make this claim for itself. The parallelism is based
on the fact that for both Church and calculator dependability is
entirely conditional on the <integrity> of its operations and
decisions, since these are not open to direct inspection. If one
answer be suspect, all are.
3 It is, of course; but not because latex and nonoxynol-9 are
themselves "un-natural." An aesthetic and physicalist repugnance
to contraceptive appliances has led to an interest in NFP on the
part of green party and environmental enthusiasts who would
embrace it as a kind of vegetarian ("no added preservatives or
artificial sweeteners") birth control. Where the authentic
discipline of married love is absent, NFP is morally no more un-
natural than the Pill.
4 <Moral Absolutes> (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of
America Press, 1991), p. 49.
5 If my first duty is to serve the good, I will refuse to violate
an exceptionless moral norm, no matter what consequences threaten.
For example: even if I will lose my job and my family will be
deprived of material support unless I perjure myself on a police
report, I must tell the truth and deal with the consequences as
best I can. However, if my duty is to effect the good, I will
choose whatever means produces the greatest aggregate of good
results, irrespective of the moral norms that may be violated in
so doing. If I have to lie so that my children can eat, and the
lie will produce no countervailing harm to other people, I will
choose the advantageous lie.
6 In this opinion I am following John Finnis, op. cit., p. 85.
7 For a candid account of the clerical-academic orchestration of
the assault on <Humanae vitae>, see Charles Curran's contribution
in <Journeys>, edited by Gregory Baum, New York, 1977.
8 It forbade a religious to touch another person.
9 I do not mean to imply that these strictures were equally
valuable, or even that some were not harmful and in need of
replacement. I simply want to call attention to 1) their earlier
comprehensiveness and complexity; 2) the suddenness and
thoroughness of their disappearance; 3) the change in anthropology
that occasioned their fall.
Rev. Paul V. Mankowski, S.J. is Professor of Biblical Studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.
This article was taken from the Spring 1993 issue of "Faith &
Reason". Subscriptions available from Christendom Press, 2101
Shenandoah Shores Road, Ft. Royal, VA 22630, 703-636-2900, Fax
703-636-1655. Published quarterly at $20.00 per year.
Copyright (c) 1996 EWTN
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