On "Humanae Vitae"

In this The Connubial Couch series of posts, I've been blogging about my conversion to believing that heterosexual married couples gain admittance to an inner sanctum barred to homosexual couples. Within this sanctum, I have noted, marital intimacies give birth to an instantiation of something of nontarnishable beauty and universal worth. The "bliss secrets" of the connubial couch are, unlike "ordinary" human secrets, sacred and holy because, of all human secrets, they alone connect with an inner essence of timeless truth.

This was both something I "just knew" intuitively — despite my erstwhile support for gay rights and gay marriage — and something I was able to reason my way to, based on a philosophical analysis of the nature of secrets.

Then, having decided on that much, I asked where such thinking was bound to lead. As I was pondering that question, I picked up the Catholic Review and read the article "Pope urges church to help couples see beauty of natural procreation."

Pope Benedict XVI has, the article says, "asked why is it that the world and many Catholics still have a difficult time understanding the church's teachings 40 years after Pope Paul VI's encyclical on human life and birth control."

Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" ("On Human Life") in 1968, forbidding Catholics to use not only abortion but also artificial means of preventing pregnancy such as condoms and the Pill. Now, on the encyclical's 40th anniversary, the current Holy Father is pointedly reaffirming it.

I didn't do so before reading the article, but I think I now understand why the Church makes such a big deal about artificial contraception:

Pope Benedict said technical responses to "the great human questions" such as life and death often seem to offer the easier solution.

"But in reality (a technical solution such as artificial contraception) obscures the underlying question concerning the meaning of human sexuality" and the need for couples to exercise "responsible control" over their sexual desires so that the expression of those desires may become expressions of self-giving, "personal love," he said.

When talking about love between two people, technical responses cannot replace "a maturation of freedom," the pope said.

As I interpret that idea, the pope is saying that of all the available birth-control strategies, only the one popularly known as the rhythm method encourages couples to abstain from instant gratification of sexual desires at critical times of the month. Only a birth-control regimen consistent with so-called "natural procreation" fosters our learning of marital self-control. And self-control is a necessary constraint, if the intimacies of the connubial couch are to instantiate sacred, timeless truth.

I find that a compelling reason for the Church to counsel against artificial birth control, actually. Unfortunately, I still do not see why the Church forbids it outright, as opposed to merely deprecating it.

Be that as it may, here is what I consider to be a timeless truth: freedom in this world conspires with timeless forms and essences above and beyond this world to produce works of timeless beauty — but only when freedom is hemmed in by appropriate constraints, limits, boundary conditions. Otherwise, the result is chaos.


I have spent a number of years pondering the significance of recent scientific insights into chaos theory and its close ally, the theory of complexity. Scientists have discovered that certain fundamental physical processes are inherently chaotic and have developed ways to understand and model chaos. While those advances were taking place, other scientists looked into processes that, while not literally chaotic, occupy a nearby regime that has been nicknamed the "edge of chaos." The latter include the dynamical processes associated with life on earth as it has evolved, and continues to evolve. Earthly evolution has, of course, produced us.

Systems are capable of moving over and back out of chaos, it has been found. One of the ways to distinguish between truly chaotic systems and living systems that are typically at the edge of chaos is in terms of their "boundary conditions."

Mathematically, boundary conditions apply to systems being modeled by differential equations ... the sorts of equations that are necessary when dealing with nonequilibrium dynamical systems, which all living systems are. A system's behavior can be determined mathematically by means of solving the appropriate differential equations — sometimes not an easy task. But how the equations are to be solved depends also on a set of assumptions about boundary conditions. Change the boundary conditions, and the solutions to the equations change.

In other words, a system's future is determined not only by its equations but also by its boundary conditions.

Metaphorically, the same is true for us as living systems. The limits and constraints that are placed on our behavior shape our destinies.

But we humans are, within externally imposed limits and constraints, free. We have free will. One of the things we can do with our free will is to adopt self-imposed limits and constraints — additional boundary conditions of the soul, if you will.

When the Catholic Church asks us not to use "technical" or "artificial" means of birth control, we are being asked to place boundary conditions on our souls, as it were, as a strategy by which we can perfect our capacity for self-giving, personal love and thereby achieve a true "maturation of freedom."

Rightly or wrongly, the Church sees "Humanae Vitae" as a weapon we can all employ in the struggle against societal and cultural (not just personal) chaos.