Catholics, Contraception, and Conscience

Now that we've had — and are still having — the brouhaha over whether quasi-religious institutions — Catholic-run schools, hospitals, universities, charities — ought to be exempt from the federal mandate to provide employees with health insurance that covers contraception without copays or deductibles, I'd like to look at what the brouhaha was all about in the first place.

Particularly, why do Catholic bishops oppose contraception? I've seen little in the standard news coverage and opinion writing that tells that story at its fullest.

Unfortunately, I myself am no authority on the matter. I can offer but a partial answer to readers, so check me on all I am about to write.

As a person who came into the Catholic Church in middle life from a Protestant/secular background, I was not immediately affected in 1968 when Pope Paul VI issued his famous encyclical Humanae Vitae (literally, "On Human Life"), whose alternate title is "On the Regulation of Birth." Humanae Vitae (pronounced Who-mah'-nay Vee'-tay) reaffirmed the Catholic Church's traditional view of marriage and conjugal relations and condemned (not for the first time!) artificial methods of birth control. Catholics were not permitted to use the then-new oral birth-control pill. Nor were condoms allowed — which reaffirmed the existing teaching on those devices.

According to Wikipedia's discussion of Pope Paul VI's various encyclicals:

Paul VI teaches in the first sentence of Humanae Vitae that the transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. This divine partnership [between a married couple and God] ... does not allow for arbitrary human decisions, which may limit divine providence.

Later on, the same Wikipedia discussion adds:

Pope Paul was concerned but not surprised by the negative reaction [to Humanae Vitae] in Western Europe and the United States. He fully anticipated this reaction to be a temporary one: "Don't be afraid," he reportedly told [Canadian Cardinal Édouard Gagnon] on the eve of the encyclical, "in twenty years time they'll call me a prophet."

It has, quite obviously, taken more than twenty years for that to happen. We're still up in arms over contraception and its concomitants as they affect women's rights and women's health insurance coverage.

The Catholic Church's Reverence for Conception

What, from a Catholic perspective, underlies this dispute? It needs to be noted, first of all, how very, very highly the Catholic Church reverences conception. Conception is more than just the uniting of a man's sperm with a woman's egg, even more than the start of a human life. In addition to those, it is an occasion for calling to mind and honoring the entire gamut of joys, interpersonal relationships, and lifetime commitments that the idea of biological conception is meant to activate within us — including the consecrated relationship of a loving couple to God.

For the married couple, conception (once the pregnancy test turns out positive and an embryo is known to be present in the womb) is meant to be an occasion for great joy. In anticipation of the possibility of conception and pregnancy, each conjugal union is meant to be an act of physical pleasure and spiritual affirmation. Once a child is on its way, the couple is meant to reaffirm in attitude, thought, and deed its commitment to bringing him or her into the world and raising him or her to adulthood with mutual dedication and love.

The demand on the woman who must carry the pregnancy to term; go through the prolonged gestation period; then endure labor and childbirth; and then provide nutrition and nurture to the newborn child is a great one. The man has less to do early on, but he must faithfully persevere in supporting the family unit and being true to his marriage vows. Dad's contribution to the child-rearing process will increase as time goes on, and the youngster becomes less dependent on Mom.

That's the ideal. I think the insistence of the Church on the sacredness of human conception is meant to bring the whole of that ideal, including but not limited to biological conception per se, into the sharpest possible focus.

Put bluntly, then, sexual gratification all by itself is never front-and-center. Sex severed from reverence for conception is, the Church says, "intrinsically disordered."

We need to keep in mind that this reverence for conception does not limit sex by married couples to couples who are capable of conceiving a child. Married couples in which the woman is past the age of menopause can legitimately enjoy sex, as can married couples in which a partner is infertile. The same is true when a mother, breastfeeding her baby and not ovulating each month, cannot get pregnant.

The Catholic Church Says All Acts of Conjugal Love Must Be "Open to Conception"

The Catholic reverence for conception is why it is said by Catholic authorities that every sex act engaged in by a married couple must be "open to conception." That phrase echoes "open to the transmission of life" in paragraph 11 of this translation of the Latin in which Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for its part, uses the phrase "openness to fertility" to head sections 1652-54.

How exactly is this phrase "openness to conception/fertility/transmission of life" to be construed?

In Humanae Vitae, Paul VI expressly insists on "safeguarding both ... essential aspects [of conjugal love], the unitive and the procreative." These two aspects of conjugal love, unitive and procreative, are said by the pope to be crucially bound up with one another. The pope writes:

11. These acts, by which husband and wife are united in chaste intimacy, and by means of which human life is transmitted, are, as the [Second Vatican] Council recalled, "noble and worthy," and they do not cease to be lawful if, for causes independent of the will of husband and wife, they are foreseen to be infecund, since they always remain ordained towards expressing and consolidating their union. In fact, as experience bears witness, not every conjugal act is followed by a new life. God has wisely disposed natural laws and rhythms of fecundity which, of themselves, cause a separation in the succession of births. Nonetheless the Church, calling men [and women] back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by their constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act ... must remain open to the transmission of life.

12. That teaching, often set forth by the magisterium [the teaching authority of the Church], is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, capacitates them for the generation of new lives, according to laws inscribed in the very being of man and of woman. By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination towards man's most high calling to parenthood. We believe that the men [and women] of our day are particularly capable of seeing the deeply reasonable and human character of this fundamental principle.

It's fair to assume that "openness to conception/fertility/transmission of life" is, in the papal view, the procreative meaning of sex. Put simply, it can never be legitimately severed from the unitive aspect by which sex binds two spouses closer together, thereby "expressing and consolidating their union." If the two inseparable aspects of sex are in fact distanced from one another by means of artificial birth control, the married couple fails (per paragraph 10 of Humanae Vitae) to "conform their activity to the creative intention of God, expressed in the very nature of marriage and of its acts, and manifested by the constant teaching of the Church."

In paragraph 13 of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI adds to that:

To use this divine gift [of conjugal love] destroying, even if only partially, its meaning and its purpose is to contradict the nature both of man and of woman and of their most intimate relationship, and therefore it is to contradict also the plan of God and His will.

So conjugal acts which are "foreseen to be infecund" do not destroy the "meaning and purpose" of the conjugal acts themselves, "since they always remain ordained towards expressing and consolidating" the union of the married pair. That's why natural family planning — the "rhythm method" — is legitimate. But, in the view of Paul VI, if the infecundity is artificially produced, the "meaning and purpose" of the conjugal acts is illicitly corrupted.

The Ongoing Dispute within the Church over Contraception

"Contraception," says Fr. Richard P. McBrien in his thick compendium of the Catholic faith, Catholicism, is what Church teaching specifically forbids — not "birth control" per se. Natural family planning (formerly called "the rhythm method") is allowed, after all, and clearly it counts as a method of "birth control." "Contraception" per se, though, is "the intentional placing of a material obstacle to the conception of a child: e.g., a contraceptive pill, an intrauterine device, contraceptive foam, a condom" (p. 982), and it is what is not allowed.

I gather that a pharmacological method such as the well-known oral birth-control pill counts as "a material obstacle" in this respect, and it is officially deemed as objectionable as a condom is.

McBrien talks (pp. 982-992) about the strict official teaching of the Church concerning contraception, and also about "the other side" in this debate, which

... argues that contraception may not only be legitimate under certain circumstances but even mandatory. This side speaks in terms of "responsible parenthood."

The "other side" consists of faithful Catholics who dispute the position taken by Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. Non-Catholics reading this should accordingly realize that there does exist within the Church an ongoing internal dispute about contraception. However, the strict official teaching of the Church insists that contraception, as McBrien has specifically defined it, is forbidden to Catholics.

McBrien alludes to three main areas of dispute. He says the two sides differ in their respective understandings of:

• natural law
• the binding force of official Church teachings
• the development of Church doctrine

Non-Catholics who are reading this simply to comprehend the current controversy over federally mandated contraception coverage need not examine the two sides' respective cases in depth. They represent an "internal family dispute" among Catholics, after all. The "official" position of the Church is what counts, I'd say, in the mandated contraception coverage debate. Why? Because the bishops' objection to such coverage is that it forces them to violate their Church's official position — and thus it violates the "conscience" of the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church's Heavy Reliance on "Natural Law"

Still, some of the basic ideas fueling the internal dispute are important for anyone trying to see what underlies the current argument over federally mandated contraception coverage. First, and most importantly, the teachings and doctrinal history of the Catholic Church place heavy emphasis on "natural law." According to Wikipedia:

The Roman Catholic Church holds the view of natural law set forth by Thomas Aquinas particularly in his Summa Theologica ... 

The Summa Theologica was written by Thomas Aquinas in 1265–1274. It established a theological/philosophical basis by which most imaginable questions about God-given human nature could be answered. The Summa Theologica, says Wikipedia, "presents the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West."

According to Aquinas's formulation of natural law, says Wikipedia:

Humans are capable of discerning the difference between good and evil because they have a conscience. There are many manifestations of the good that we can pursue. Some, like procreation, are common to other animals, while others, like the pursuit of truth, are inclinations peculiar to the capacities of human beings. 

"Common to other animals"? How is this commonality important? Well, notice that in reasoning about natural law, we can understand our human capacity for conjugal love, at least in part, by examining what animals use sex for: reproduction. Accordingly, if we humans use artificial means of contraception to sever sex from reproduction, then the sex act can be called intrinsically disordered: against God-given human nature, as ordered by the principles of natural law.

To the best of my understanding, this appeal to natural law is a peculiarly Catholic way of discerning right from wrong. I am not aware that any other religious denomination considers its faithful to be bound by Aquinas-style natural-law reasoning in this way. I do not mean that all other faiths endorse artificial contraception, but if they do not, they may have other ways of reasoning to that conclusion.

Lay Catholics Respond to the Mandated Contraception Controversy

In her letter to the editor of The Washington Post (Feb. 5, 2012) Falls Church, Virginia, resident Mary Clare Murray states the official Catholic view of contraception in this elegant way:

In her Feb. 12 column, “A new front in the culture wars,” Lisa Miller said that “birth control is noncontroversially good for families and children.” Since this conversation arises because of the Catholic Church’s reaction to current events, this might be a good time to explain what the church teaches regarding birth control. 

It is not just that using birth control closes a man and woman off from sharing in God’s creation of life, it is also that using birth control closes the couple off from a full expression of love, which is total self-giving and the commitment to stay together, regardless of what life brings. 

Sexual intimacy is not meant to be entertainment. It is meant as something beautiful that will bind two people in a permanent union of selflessness, which is really what is “good for families and children.” The misuse of this is not “noncontroversially good” but rather a sound explanation for the devastating divorce rate, sexually transmitted diseases, depression and other illnesses; the couple’s bodies are sharing a commitment, but their minds aren’t. That’s not good for anybody.

I'd say this expresses quite beautifully the official teaching of the Catholic Church about marriage, sexual union, birth control, pregnancy, and the mutual sharing of long-term family responsibilities. The basic point is that sex should open us up, not close us off. A "permanent union of selflessness" on the part of the married couple is a sine qua non of sex ... but so too is the sex act's fundamental "openness to conception."

I would add that the couple's underlying attitude toward conception is a litmus test for the quality of the marital union, or so the Catholic Church would say.

But not all conscientious Catholics agree. This published response to Ms. Murray's letter came from Angela Corigliano Murphy of Bowie, Maryland:

Ms. Murray stated that contraception, which is a temporary inducement of infertility, “closes the couple off from a full expression of love, which is total self-giving and the commitment to stay together regardless of what life brings.” Let’s carry this idea through to its logical conclusion. What happens when infertility is biological and permanent, such as when the wife goes through menopause? Are the husband and wife now closed off from a full expression of love? When I went through menopause, some 20-plus years ago, should my husband and I have stopped expressing our love for each other physically because we could no longer have children? I find that notion highly risible.

No, sexual intimacy is not entertainment, but neither does it cease to be “a full expression of love” when it cannot result in procreation, whether temporarily or permanently. 

I myself would argue that Ms. Murphy is somewhat mistaken in her logic, in that the official position of the Church carefully distinguishes between natural and artificial inducements of infertility. Menopause is natural, and post-menopause sex between husband and wife indeed serves the remaining — i.e., unitive — purpose of conjugal relations. For natural reasons, "a full expression of love" after menopause cannot produce a baby. Yet it is fully in accord with natural law for husbands and wives of post-fertility age to continue to relish sex.

It's not just about the physical possibility of conception, then. It's about all the things associated with conception, when conception is possible and is taken in its broadest, most abstract sense — and it's especially about what those things "truly mean."

The Church endorses natural family planning methods (the rhythm method, which amounts to abstaining from intercourse during certain parts of the menstrual cycle) since they take advantage of what Humanae Vitae calls "a faculty provided by nature." As with post-menopause sex, this is a case in which conjugal sex is legitimate, even if apart from the possibility of purely biological conception.

I have to conclude, then, that the Church wants Catholics to reverence conception in the abstract — even when "faculties provided by nature" happen to prevent the biological union of sperm with egg.

So, when the bishops balk at covering contraception in health insurance paid for by Catholic-run institutions, they're standing fast for a time-honored worldview that Pope Paul VI in 1968 thought would reassert itself "in twenty years time."

The Official Catholic Teaching vs. Pro-Contraception Belief

It's a worldview that is quite clearly at odds with the one that predominates in our culture today. In today's dominant worldview, women have the right to contraception, to free coverage thereof in their health insurance plans, and even to discretionary abortions when needed and as desired.

There are excellent arguments to be advanced in favor of this dominant worldview. One is the who's-fooling-whom argument: the vast majority of Catholic women use artificial contraception at some point in their lives. I've read that the figure is fully 98 percent, but this article in The Washington Post says it's lower.

I dug into the matter and found that, according to "Countering Conventional Wisdom: 
New Evidence on Religion and Contraceptive Use," an April 2011 report by Rachel K. Jones and Joerg Dreweke for the Guttmacher Institute, 68 percent of Catholic women "at risk of unintended pregnancy" use "highly effective methods" of birth control — sterilization, the pill or other hormonal pharmaceuticals, or IUDs. Fifteen percent rely on condoms. Two percent use natural family planning/the rhythm method. Four percent use other means of birth control. And eleven percent use no method at all.

That data can be found in the table "Supplementary table to Figure 3. Current contraceptive use among women at risk of unintended pregnancy, by religious affiliation, 2006–2008 NSFG" at the very end of the report, and can also be seen as the second table here. ("NSFG" refers to the National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The controversial 98 percent figure comes from the first of the two tables on that same page, and is shown as derived from "Unpublished tabulations of the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth." It refers to surveys of all women who have ever had sex, not just women who are "at risk of unintended pregnancy."

However the numbers are to be parsed, one argument in favor of mandated contraceptive coverage is that large numbers of Catholic women use contraceptives. Contraception-tolerant arguments are also heard, within the Church itself, from a number of its opinion leaders both ordained and lay. Father Richard P. McBrien notes in Catholicism that a "Papal Commission for the Study of Population, the Family, and Birth" produced, in 1966, just two years prior to Humanae Vitae, two reports: a majority report favoring a reconsidered view of contraception and a minority report insisting on the traditional view that artificial contraception is intrinsically disordered.

When Pope Paul VI promulgated Humanae Vitae in 1968, he sided with the minority, not the majority.

The promulgation of Humanae Vitae triggered a hue and cry from liberal Catholic opinion leaders who had imagined that the pontiff's much-anticipated encyclical was going to affirm the perspective of the commission's majority, not that of the minority. Per McBrien:

According to the majority opinion, the argument [of the minority] in favor of the traditional teaching based on [the Church's longstanding] authority fails to recognize the evolutionary character of that teaching.

The Catholic Church has traditionally maintained that its hierarchy possesses a magisterium — a teaching authority — that illuminates what Catholics believe. In addition to dogma, opposition to which constitutes heresy, there is a much vaster body of official doctrine which the magisterium urges on Catholics. The teaching of Humanae Vitae is a matter of such doctrinal teaching, and must be taken very seriously by Catholics — yet it is not to be considered the infallible teaching of the pope. Catholics may dissent from it in good conscience.

The dissenting faction against Humanae Vitae in 1968 asserted that Paul VI had failed to recognize that Catholic doctrine has evolved significantly in the past and must be allowed to evolve concerning contraception in the present. For example, in the past, usury — the lending of money at interest — had been disallowed. Times changed, and modern banking emerged. Lending of money at interest became the norm in secular society ... and the Church changed its doctrine to permit it.

In the modern world, the liberals' thinking went in 1968, the traditional doctrine against contraception needed to change. Why? In part, because (as the liberals writing the 1966 majority report had urged) a principle of totality dictates that (per McBrien):

... the conjugal act itself must be viewed not as an isolated reality but in the larger context of human love, family life, education, etc. ... Sexuality is not ordered only to procreation. Sacred Scripture says not only "Be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28) but also "they become one flesh" (2:24), portraying the partner as another helpful self (2:18). [The majority report stated that] "In some cases intercourse can be required as a manifestation of self-giving love, directed to the good of the other person or of the community, while at the same time a new life cannot be received. This is neither egocentricity nor hedonism but a legitimate communication of persons through gestures proper to being composed of body and soul with sexual powers."

McBrien says that the liberals' posited principle of totality was flatly "declared erroneous" by Paul VI in Humanae Vitae.

Looking back at Angela Corigliano Murphy's objection to the traditional view of contraception expressed by Mary Clare Murray in the Washington Post opinion section, I'd say it implicitly endorses the principle of totality. Crucially, to Murphy, sexual intimacy does not "cease to be 'a full expression of love' [even] when it cannot result in procreation." Her letter to the editor would seem to show that the liberals' posited principle of totality in 1968 is still at work in Catholic lives and minds, even today.

Yet, the ghost of Paul VI would argue, the liberal position actually fails in its mission to ensure complete "totality." If a married couple is fertile, then, by our very nature as human beings, conjugal intimacy and openness to conception must go together, Paul's ghost would say. Breaking that natural link by artificially suppressing the procreative aspect of sex goes against God's plan and imperils society's good order.

A Woman's Right to Contraceptive Coverage?

I don't know whether theological-moral disputes of this sort make any sense whatever to non-Catholics, especially secular ones who do not profess faith in a religion. Let me try to put the issue under a slightly different microscope, instead. I think a fundamental question here is whether women have a right to sex without costs and consequences.

Costs: the monetary outlays just for using the oral contraceptive pill can be up to $600 a month. But the dollar costs of having a baby and raising it to adulthood are vastly more huge.

Consequences: specifically, pregnancy, childbirth, and, barring adoption, motherhood. The sacrifices and sheer difficulties inherent in raising a child for X number of years, perhaps with no father around to share the burden. Also, possibly having to give up a career to become a full-time mom, meaning taking big-time hits to life plans and economic prospects.

Is there, then, a right justly claimed by American women that they must not be forced to bear the costs and consequences of having sex? At least, not if human ingenuity and artifice can have anything to say about it.

This question may be the linchpin of this whole debate. If you think women do have such a right, I can pretty well predict how you would answer all the other questions surrounding the issue. For example, if you think such a right exists, you would typically say that women's health insurance plans must, all of them, cover birth control with no extra premiums, deductibles, or copays.

On the other hand, if you deny that such a right exists, you are likely in sympathy with the pronouncements of the bishops on the matter — even if you yourself are not a Catholic.

The Catholic Church denies that there is such a right, because the Church has always taught that there can't be such a right. Catholic doctrine says flatly that all conjugal acts (a) must be between married partners of the opposite sex and (b) must be open to the transmission of life. The idea that sex can and ought to be freely engaged in while blocking its expectable natural consequences is "gravely disordered." End of discussion.

When the Obama administration announced its original policy making free contraceptives universally mandatory in women's health insurance, it included a carve-out to the effect that churches per se were exempt. The carve-out was a narrow one, since it applied strictly only to religious congregations and their immediate employees. Then, Catholic bishops and others howled in protest. What about, they asked, our various hospitals/schools/charities that aren't included in the exception?

The administration was forced to broaden the carve-out to include those semi-secular institutions.

When that happened, some liberal Catholics felt relieved. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, though, did not. On the other side of this issue, some pro-choice groups called the modified rule a sell-out, because women employees of Catholic institutions who are not themselves Catholic or those who use contraception despite the Church's teachings would now be left without coverage — an unacceptable situation if you believe women have the right to have sexual intercourse freely, without putting themselves in line for undesired consequences and costs.

Widening the Scope of the Discussion

One can cast the discussion narrowly as a contrast between two competing values:

1. A woman's proclaimed right to sex without consequences, and therefore to contraceptives at no cost.
2. The Church's proclaimed right to act within the dictates of its official conscience.

Put that way, it's hard for me personally to decide which value ought to trump the other.

Arguments from within the Church and outside it to the effect that Church teachings on contraception ought to be updated, since they've "evolved," don't really help me settle the matter. Whether or not it's so, the fact remains that right now the Catholic Church bans contraception as a matter of moral and theological principle. Until that changes, I don't see how it's right for the government's agenda to trample over the Church's religious teachings.

Then again, so many Catholics do in fact use artificial contraception that it's hard to think of "the Church" as being united on this issue. Meanwhile, two generations of American women of whatever religious background have been raised to believe that there's nothing whatsoever wrong with using contraception, and it cannot be denied that they feel a great deal more free than their grandmothers did, simply because they understand that sex can, if they choose, be without consequences.

But what's missing in what I have said so far is, I think, the question of the consequences of widely available contraception as they pertain to the larger society.

You might think that oral contraceptives' introduction in 1960 would have led to a state of affairs in which there were fewer unwanted pregnancies and (post-Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion) almost no need for abortions — that, in the famous words of President Clinton, abortions would be "safe, legal, and rare."

Abortions are safe today, and they are legal, but they're not rare. According to "United States abortion rates, 1960-2008," there were over 1.2 million abortions in the United States in 2008. Most of them were, I assume, due not to medical necessity but to the fact that prospective mothers declined, however regretfully, to carry their fetuses to term. That abortion rate, admittedly, was somewhat down from over 1.6 million in 1990.

Prior to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion in 1973, abortions in the United States rose from a paltry 292 in 1960, the year the Pill was introduced, to 586,760 in 1972, the last pre-Roe year.

This useful graph represents the statistics:

Ratio = the number of abortions per live births; % = abortions as percentage of total pregnancies (live births + abortions).

Then there's the question of babies born out of wedlock, mothers who aren't married, and single-parent families. Columnist George F. Will writes recently in The Washington Post that

... now more than 50 percent of all babies born to women under age 30 are born to unmarried mothers. ... In 1965, [the late Senator] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, published his report on the black family’s “crisis,” which was that 24 percent of black children were then born to unmarried women. Today, 73 percent are. Forty-one percent of all children are now born to unmarried women.

How could the wide availability of birth control have led to more, not fewer, post-Roe abortions and more, not fewer, fatherless children today?

If the Catholic bishops are right, the crux of the problem is that contraceptives unhinge sex from its procreative aspect. And if Paul VI was right in Humanae Vitae, that undesirable result was apt to be accompanied by another one: the unhinging of sex from its unitive aspect as well. The procreative and unitive aspects of conjugal sex are intrinsically inseparable, Paul VI wrote. Sex both produces new life and unifies prospective parents in a deeper bond of mutual commitment.

Sever sex from its procreative aspect and — given that widely available contraception so often fails to prevent unwanted pregnancies — you get abortions numbering in seven figures nationally. Sever sex from its unitive aspect and you get an epidemic of single motherhood.

These are, however, social pathologies and have no clear remedy in the realm of public policy, George Will writes. For example:

The entitlement state can be reformed by various known — if currently politically impossible — policy choices. But no one really knows the causes of family disintegration, so it is unclear whether those causes can be combated by government measures.

The Pill is not a direct cause of (paradoxically) high abortion rates, nor is it a direct cause of family disintegration. No one is saying that it is. Yet it is clear (to me at least) that contraception's wide availability has contributed to those social pathologies — while in its more positive aspect it has contributed to the justly applauded liberation of women in our society.

Also clear to me is that we need to strike the proper balance between legitimate public policy concerns — e.g., women's access to contraception under their health plans — and legitimate expressions of religious conscience such as the Church's principled refusal to be accomplices in same. Only out of the careful balance between these competing world views can come the next evolutionary step in the culture wars.

Rededicating This Blog

This blog is being renamed and rededicated! Once named "In Search of Solidarity," it is now called "In Search of Maturity." (It also has a new look.)

The change is fitting for several reasons. One is that this blogger will turn 62 this year. Quite obviously, if he doesn't gain some sort of maturity at this point in his life, he never will.

Second, I have, finally, in fact turned a corner on my own personal maturity. The maturity I am in search of is actually more that of others in the society and culture, particularly younger people.

Third, as a result of that indefinable something finally falling into place for me personally, in the last few months — as if a capstone has at last been dropped into a waiting arch — what has come into focus for me is the idea that our culture presently suffers from a massive "maturity gap." I'd like to do what I can to help close that gap.


To close the gap is hard, in part because defining the gap and demonstrating that it exists is hard. I would like to begin by citing Don't Eat the Marshmallow!, an earlier post to this blog. The thrust of that post was that an article recently in The New Yorker, "Don't!", furnishes evidence about something I consider to be a near-synonym of maturity, self-control.

Specifically, science has found that self-control is a thing that we can develop, but often fail to. We're not stuck with however much or little we are born with.

Scientists have experimented with children as young as four and found wide disparities in their ability to delay eating a marshmallow or Oreo cookie placed before them while their adult supervisor attends to an errand outside the room. When told to ring a bell if they can't wait any longer, some do and some don't speed up the instant of gratification, with those who don't ever ring the bell and who thus duly put off eating the goodie getting the promised reward of an extra goodie, once the adult returns.

And some children not only don't wait, they don't even bother to ring the bell. They just snatch the goodie and consume it. Some even find a way to (seemingly) fool the adult: lick the cream filling out of an Oreo and reassemble it to escape detection.

Experimenters have looked into the later lives of the impatient "low delayers" (these experiments were originally conducted in the late 1960s) and found that some have become "high delayers," and that these lucky individuals have had more successful lives than the perennial snatchers and grabbers who never learned to postpone gratification.


I would argue that the ability to postpone gratification is the essence of maturity, by whatever name you wish to call it: self-control, self-discipline, self-denial, etc.

I would further suggest that another name for the same phenomenon is "chastity." Here is a word, I know, that immediately rings bells and sounds loud buzzers in the culture, for the first thing it brings to mind is sexual forbearance. Isn't that type of forbearance something the culture gratefully laid to rest in the 1960s? Isn't it the general (and proper) understanding today that sex by and between consenting adults is perfectly fine, whatever the circumstances of those adults?

My response:

First of all, chastity, properly understood, is more than sexual forbearance. It is (as is forbearance per se) a word that means "a refraining from something; patient endurance; self-control; an abstaining from the enforcement of a right." To be chaste is to be pure and virtuous, stainless and undefiled. Obviously, abstaining from the wrong sorts of sex is a big part of chastity, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of ways for someone who is totally celibate, sexually speaking, to offend against chastity.

Second, I may as well say this right out loud, right now, rather than tiptoe around the issue: I no longer believe in the Sexual Revolution.


In fact, I have this confession to make: the recent arrival of the capstone in my arch of maturity coincided with my giving up masturbating, a practice which the Sexual Revolution said was as natural and healthful as eating and breathing.

As I indicated in God of Chastity, Part II and earlier posts in my Theology of the Body series about an important theological outlook espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, my church preaches chastity. This past Lenten season, I began practicing it by stopping masturbating.

Specifically, I gave up looking at porn on the Internet and doing what comes naturally when one looks at porn ... a thing one also tends to do many times, as well, when not looking at porn on the Internet.

More specifically yet, the kind of dirty pictures I favored when looking at online porn were not "normal," but oriented toward a particular fetish or perversion. I'm not going to say what it was ... it's a preoccupation that a lot of men have, and not a few women as well, in which something bodily that is not intended to provoke lust does anyway. I now realize that entertaining such preoccupations, though no one is really harmed by it, is nothing if not immature.

And this is now a blog against immaturity!


I bring these personal things up because I believe a lot of the sexual behavior that goes on today without any stigma of illicitness is just the acting out of immaturity and the inability to postpone gratification. It has been so since very early in my life — I was born in 1947 — but the pace picked up with the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. And, as the young people of my Baby Boomer generation threw off the old shackles of sexual repression, they also gave evidence of being notably less mature in other ways.

I witnessed this in my own young life in the form of the cataclysmic violence that erupted in the late 1960s as college and university students tried to "tear down the walls" and summarily enact a political revolution.

I was a junior at Georgetown University in 1968 when opposition to the war in Vietnam turned ugly. Students who were "clean for Gene" early in the year — for Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran as an antiwar candidate against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson — watched as the hope engendered by his positive early results in the New Hampshire primary and elsewhere were doused by the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. King was the crucial link between the civil rights movement and establishment politics, and Robert Francis Kennedy was the man most likely to translate McCarthy's quixotic crusade into a successful peace Presidency.

With their snuffing out, leaders of the "movement" for civil rights and peace descended on Chicago during the week of the Democratic National Convention bent on goading the police into starting a riot — which is what actually happened. Young self-styled radicals defended what they had wrought in terms of no longer being willing to wait for peace and justice.

No longer being willing to wait ... that, par excellence, is a recipe for the victory in one's soul of the precipitous and the immature.

Did their coming to prevail have anything to do with the Sexual Revolution? The question answers itself when you consider that the old order of sexual propriety was based on the notion that sex before marriage is a sin. When sex before marriage is a sin, sex outside of the duly sanctified bridal chamber is out of the question entirely. Throwing such notions aside, I believe, was manifestly a recipe for the onset of radical immaturity in other avenues of life.

Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. I wish we could have our marshmallow and eat it, too: that we could be faultlessly mature in other areas of life while not reining ourselves in sexually in the least degree. But my experience is that we are not built that way, and the world does not work that way.

I don't plan to say all that much about sex in my rededicated "In Search of Maturity" blog, though. I know of no better way to turn what I would hope to be a reasonable discussion into a food fight than to become a scold about the kind of behavior I know people want to hear nothing negative about.

Besides, there are any number of topics related to maturity and self-control that don't ask people to give up such a mainstay of their present lifestyle as "illicit sexuality" ... until they're ready to do so, that is. Lord knows, that was literally the last thing I myself wanted to give up!

* * *

Before I shut up, a few words about the quotation at the head of my blog. "Use the Force, Luke!" are words that echoed in the thoughts of new-minted Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker as he led the rebels' attack against the Death Star of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars movie in 1977. Luke had learned them from his mentor, old Ben Kenobi, when being trained in the ways of the Force.

Using the Force is, I'd say, a metaphor for the wisdom taught by all our religions, a wisdom that comes down to the values of self-control, discipline, and chastity in the broad sense in which that word is spoken of above. Luke had, or developed, such virtues as a Jedi knight-in-training, in contrast to the gruff dissolution of the lifestyle of Han Solo. Han was by no means evil like Darth Vader; he was good, but as a cynical hothead he was clearly no candidate for Jedi knighthood.

The character of Obi-wan Kenobi made manifest such wisdom and maturity as young Luke was in need of en route to his knighthood. Often, those in the presence of Ben Kenobi would automatically do as the Force would have them do, no matter how much they were customarily in thrall to the Dark Side. That's why I hereby make "Use the Force, Luke!" the epigraph to this blog.

Spiritual Stances and Sexual Libido

One of my ongoing concerns in this blog is the question of where each of gets our worldview.

Each one of us has a worldview, and, furthermore, I think each of us has a spiritual worldview. At some level, every worldview is a spiritual stance. True, in the case of many people the spiritual stance they take is couched in negative terms, as in "I don't believe in any of that spiritual claptrap that other people waste their time pursuing. Nor do I believe in God or religion."

But what these people don't do, when you ask them about their religion or spiritual life, is say, "I really haven't given it any thought." They say instead, "I don't have a religion, and don't much care to." Which means they have thought about it and opted for atheism, agnosticism, or what some people call "apatheism," which is an intentional apathy toward religion.

Apatheists may or may not believe in God. When asked why they are apathetic about religion, apatheists may just tell you they think religion teaches the wrong values: intolerance, bigotry, even hatred.

Or, their response may be more nuanced — see "Let It Be" by Jonathan Rauch in the May 2003 Atlantic Monthly. Rauch calls apatheism "nothing less than a major civilizational advance." He says it is "the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement."

The world needs "people who feel at ease with religion even if they are irreligious; people who may themselves be members of religious communities, but who are neither controlled by godly passions nor concerned about the (nonviolent, noncoercive) religious beliefs of others." It needs them to offset the countervailing "fanatical religiosity (al Qaeda) and tyrannical secularism (China)" that today imperils world peace and harmony.

This is, I claim, a spiritual stance. So is atheism. So is agnosticism. So is secular humanism. If a practitioner of any of these irreligious positions were forced by a cruel dictator to act contrary to its dictates, the person would die a spiritual death.

If a devout Catholic were forced repeatedly to desecrate a crucifix, spiritual death would ensue. If a devout atheist were forced over and over to kiss a rosary, again the expected result would be his or her inward death.

On the other hand, our inner beings can survive being forced to do stuff that does not immediately contradict our spiritual stance, whatever that stance happens to be. If I am an observant Jew but don't normally keep kosher, being forced by my oppressor to eat pork is spiritually survivable. Being forced to spit on the Torah daily might not be.

Our spiritual stance is crucial to us, whether or not we're pious or atheistic, observant or apatheistic. We'd die inside if we were forced repeatedly an flagrantly to go against our spiritual stance.

So, where do our spiritual stances come from? Why is this person an apatheist and that person a pious Baptist? Why is one Muslim a fundamentalist and another a modernist? Why do some Catholics consider a politician who supports a woman's right to choose an abortion to have sacrificed his eligibility to receive communion, while other Catholics vigorously oppose such politicization of the sacrament?

To be sure, most or all of us can defend our spiritual stance with rational arguments that tend to make some sense. But the arguments tend to make best sense to those who share the same core beliefs. To those whose core beliefs are slightly different, the arguments fall flat.

For instance, it is one of my core beliefs that women should be in control of their own fertility, take charge of their own reproductive lives. Unsurprisingly, I'm radically opposed to the doctrine that an embryo has a human soul from the moment of conception on, for then abortion would be murder. But abortion opponents equally unsurprisingly believe in "early hominization," the doctrine that a just-fertilized human egg cell has a soul.

Even deeper core beliefs are often at work. One of mine is that the true nature of womanhood is not as represented in the Bible and in Judeo-Christian tradition. Her fertility is not the sacred possession of (depending on her particular life situation) her husband, her father, her brothers, or her God. That axiom affects my spiritual stance as to the true nature of manhood, heterosexual sex, marriage, procreation, homosexuality, birth control, and on down the line.

Thus the question for me becomes, why do I feel so committed to a spiritual stance that depends on a belief that so fundamentally flies in the face of the outlook of my Church?

The answer has to do with sex.

Speaking as a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool sexual repressive, I have become a true believer, at the bottom of my "stack" of deep core beliefs, that what represses the sex drive is wrong.

And my Judeo-Christian religion definitely represses the sex drive.

Having said that right out loud, I might possibly be expected next to go into a long dissertation justifying my saying it. That would take more time than I have. Rather, I'm just going to mention briefly some of the things I feel go along with the proposition that my Judeo-Christian religion gets sex wrong. My idea is that if you go along with me on any or all of these, you may want to think about agreeing with me that Judeo-Christian religion is too sexually repressive.

One of my main arguments is that our culture today is schizophrenic about sex. We uphold chastity, monogamy, heterosexuality, and fidelity, and we readily castigate anyone who doesn't practice all the above, and gets in trouble for it — unless they're film stars or celebrities, in which case we eat up all their exploits and gossip about them endlessly. We lap up raunchy, crude TV shows and movies like they're going out of style, while we discipline our teenage kids if they emulate them. We claim to aspire to higher things, but there never seems to be time for them — yet there's plenty of time for getting those tummy tucks and boob jobs that increase our sexual allure.


Why I think our religion promotes all that schizophrenia about sex, and why it matters to me (independently of whether I am objectively correct about it or not), I learn from the theory of the unconscious that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had.

Jung extended Freud by discovering in the unconscious certain preexisting images which he called archetypes. Images that occur in our dreams, visions, myths, and religions — not to mention our popular culture — make the archetypes visible. For example, when there is a fish symbol in mythology or religion, it expresses an archetype. The underlying content picks up on the fish's ability to survive in water, thus thwarting death. Hence the fish as a Christian symbol.

Some archetypes are yet more abstract. One of the most abstract is "wholeness," which expresses itself in images such as a circle or a cross. A circle represents entirety. A cross divides a circle into four quadrants, à la the four points of the compass or the four corners of the earth. Four seems to be the number that crops up in dreams when we are trying to symbolize wholeness.

There is an archetype for the number four, in fact, which ties in with the archetype Jung pointed to most often: the Self. The Self, to Jung, "signifies the coherent whole, unified consciousness and unconscious of a person," according to this Wikipedia article.

Unless and until the psyche becomes fully "individuated" or "self-actualized," the Self does not function as it should as the center of consciousness. Rather, it remains largely unconscious, while the conscious ego functions as the center. This is the experience most people have and continue to have throughout life.

Not only is the archetype of the Self unconscious. So, too, are a great many other archetypes that presumably would function at a more consciously accessible level if self-actualization occurred.

Bringing all the unconscious archetypes, including the Self, to consciousness is threatening to the ego's status quo, for many reasons. One reason is that full integration of the psyche implies a reunification of potent opposites: light/dark, masculine/feminine, good/evil, etc.

The second terms exist in the unconscious as the Jungian "shadow" of the first terms, which the ego is proud to trumpet as belonging exclusively to it. (That the feminine is the "dark side" or "shadow side" of masculinity may simply reveal Jung's sexism, or it may reveal something deep about the human soul.)

In Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein shows how Christianity, in Jung's view, has difficulty integrating the shadow into its image of God, Christ, and man. This is why its God-image is a Trinity, based on the archetype for three, rather than a quaternity, enshrining the archetype for four.

But the soul ultimately wants four-ness, not three-ness. The shadow side, "dark," "evil," and "feminine," must be reconciled with the light/good/masculine side.

For me personally, this seems to augur a reunion with my libido. Now, libido is a vexed term, since Freud and Jung seemed to identify it with the sex drive per se and then go on to say that all of our creative energies are at base libido. I'm thinking of it now in that former sense: the urge to have sex.

In that sense, libido is one of three categories of "lower" drives that spirituality at first seems to abandon as dross or slag. We hear of the soul or spirit leaving the body behind, along with its baser needs: eating and elimination; sex; aggression. These three, to the extent that they can each overwhelm us with pleasure, tend to get relegated to the Jungian shadow or the Freudian id, at least as far as our spiritual lives are concerned.

Of the three, the one that is most relegated to the shadow side, in my case, is the sex urge or libido.

Which I think explains why, in my search for integration, wholeness, and self, I have hit upon the Jungian "one-sidedness" of the Church's views on sex as Exhibit #1.

Creation and Eternity

In The Sacred Feminine Today I mentioned the ceaseless creativity of the cosmos, endlessly moving as it does from the "present actual" into one version after another of the "adjacent possible" — one of the central ideas in Stuart A. Kauffman's important new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. I presented the book as a pointer to a way in which we might recapture humankind's ancient devotion to the "sacred feminine," the mythic representation of the Mother Goddess that was symbolized primarily through images and events connected with fertility and reproduction.

In so doing, my intent was to open Kauffman's scientific worldview out onto that of the late explainer of myth, Joseph Campbell, author of such wonderful classics as The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

To Campbell, myth teaches us that there is, beneath the ceaseless creativity of the cosmos as it generates the numberless forms of the reality we consciously perceive, a deep but hidden generative power. This power can be referred to in many ways, all of them suggestive of, but ultimately inadequate to, the invisible reality behind what we see and know. This deep, hidden power can properly be described as "the ineffable," but it can also be called, with equal accuracy, "being" or "the void" — even if those two terms would ordinarily seem to us to be antonyms.

As Campbell points out, Freud, Jung, and the other psychoanalytic theorists of the early 20th century gave this ineffable power, particularly as it is manifested in the vast unconscious workings of the human psyche, the name libido — a designation that many of us lay persons suppose to be synonymous with our sexual urges. Nothing wrong with that slight misapprehension, Campbell would say: myth's understanding of creation and creativity is, after all, fundamentally sexual in character.

Within the human mind, Campbell notes, the Freudian, Jungian, psychoanalytic unconscious is analogically equivalent to the ineffable being-void out of which arises all creation, all worldly phenomena, in all their multifarious forms ... presumably including the higher-order realities Kauffman celebrates: life, agency, intention, will, value, meaning, and (yes) consciousness itself.

But to Campbell, the consciousness we are so proud of represents, in truth, a constriction of the "superconsciousness" which is our true birthright. "Superconsciousness" means an unimaginably-to-us direct awareness of the ineffable being-void whose power makes the cosmos. It is lost at the universe's very moment of Creation, though its trace remains alive in the Freudian unconscious and gives us our dreams and myths.

Campbell sees in the Christian doctrine of the Fall, properly reinterpreted, a reference to this constriction of superconsciousness into the consciousness-unconsciousness dyad, a narrowing that inevitably happens whenver a world emerges from the power of the void. The true purpose of religion, spirituality, and myth is to clue us back into superconsciousness.

To Campbell, our anthropomorphic God (along with the gods, plural, of non-monotheist religions) properly functions as a pathway back to our lost superconsciousness: our birthright awareness of the transcendent reality from which springs forth our cosmos with its own marvelous and ceaseless creativity. Redemption is, in his view, but a word for our return to superconsciousness. When Jesus teaches us in the Gospel of Luke that "the Kingdom of God is within you," he is referring to the fact that our psyche's unconscious realm already knows of the Kingdom and is in fact superconscious.

In Campbell's worldview, God is, like all the pagan and primitive gods, a mask of eternity. Owing to how our no-longer-superconscious minds work, we need at first to view the eternal being-void as if its masks were "final," meaning that we think the anthropomorphic visage we see as we gaze upon the mask of God is truly the ultimate supernal ground of all reality.

That the divine mask is not actually the ultimate truth of all reality is something that non-monotheist traditions uphold quite readily, however, for those seekers who are ready to look behind the mask. The monotheist religions are much more circumspect about this. Only so-called "mystics" have permission to explore behind the mask, and what they find there is deemed far too esoteric for the masses. Hence most believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not encouraged even to speculate that God's "face" may in truth be a mask.


As I ponder such ideas as these, I find myself asking my Roman Catholic faith some "embarrassing questions." I would like to know why traditional Christian belief and practice holds itself so aloof from what Joseph Campbell calls the "perennial philosophy." Why are we ordinary, everyday, non-mystical Christians not encouraged to look into (if we want to) the ineffable being-void behind God's eyes? Why does insisting on the "face" of God as being final strike me as in some subtle way underwriting, not eliminating, some of the great problems in our culture today?

I speak principally of such problems as war, the rightful roles of women, and the rights of gays.

Compare women's roles in the West with those in the East. The Eastern cultures, as represented by the non-monotheist societies of India, China, and Japan, don't seem to be able to generate the sort of feminist movement we in the West have created, but neither is there any great anti-woman backlash in the East, as there is in Muslim lands, against Western feminism. There seems to be, rather, a sort of benign tolerance of so-called women's liberation in us Westerners.

By the same token, while the East is not particularly concerned with advancing the gay and lesbian cause, there is again a sort of benign tolerance of those in the West who insist on so doing — as if to say, "This concern with who has what 'rights' is only a mind game, and true enlightenment strives to get beyond such games."

Monotheism seems to have given the culture of the West a tendency to bifurcate: to develop splits and schisms between those who advocate this or that worldview and those who think the same worldview is the work of the devil.

So we fight with each other. We go to war over belief systems. Oh, people make war in the East, too, but not over idea systems — except in cases where a Western idea system, Islam, has taken root in places like the modern state of Pakistan. When India, following Gandhi's lead, succeeded in convincing the British to leave, Indian Muslims and Hindus made bloody war on one another, to Gandhi's chagrin. The two sides had to be separated, at the expense of abandoning hope of unity on the subcontinent, and Pakistan was born.

It seems there has to be a connection: monotheism of the type we know today was invented by nomadic Semitic tribes who invaded the settled, agrarian, peaceful, Goddess-worshiping Neolithic communities of the Fertile Crescent in the third and second millennium B.C. The nomadic conquerors' principle deities were male tribal patrons, the forerunners of Yahweh, who empowered their favored peoples' acts of conquest.

Joseph Campbell, in his lifetime, called on us to recognize the peculiar intrinsic bias of Abrahamic monotheism toward war, and particularly Holy War. He showed that the antidote was not to abandon monotheism in favor of atheism, but to revise it by recognizing its God as but a mask of eternity. As such, God is real ... but not final. Hence we need to put an asterisk by those aspects of our religion that do not comport with the perennial philosophy revealed to us by ancient myth. The asterisk should serve to remind us that where God seems to want us to make war on heathens and infidels, the dispute (like all disputes) is meaningless and foolish to the eternal source of all being behind the mask of our Creator God.

The Sacred Feminine Today

Dan Brown's hugely popular, terribly controversial suspense thriller The Da Vinci Code takes as one of its themes the idea of the "sacred feminine": from the earliest times in human culture, the mythic representation of the Mother Goddess, symbolized through images and events connected with fertility and reproduction.

Brown's novel contends, counter-factually, that Jesus of Nazareth married Mary "Magdalene" and fathered a daughter, the truth of whose existence was suppressed by the Early Church. Jesus's putative wife and daughter, as vessels of ongoing human devotion to the sacred feminine, had to be blotted out from history by a church bent on establishing a patriarchal male priesthood and clamping down on female sexuality, not to mention sexual freedom in general.

The facts of history are all against Brown. Jesus had no wife and daughter, the church did not hide them from the eyes of the world, Leonardo Da Vinci coded no secret information about the sacred feminine in his paintings, and no one buried in Westminster Abbey — neither Sir Isaac Newton nor anyone else — was in on this secret. And, whatever the Holy Grail was, it was not a stand-in for the fruit of Mary of Magdala's fertile womb.

Still and all, the sacred feminine has been and remains a real desideratum of human spirituality, which I expect partly explains the massive impact of The Da Vinci Code despite its odious historical errors. Never has the vaunted "willing suspension of disbelief" been more willing on the part of millions of Brown's readers — myself included.

These thoughts cross my mind as I ponder the thrust of Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, the new book by Stuart A. Kauffman, implications I first dealt with in Reinventing the Sacred, Part 1. Kauffman's stated mission is to establish a new scientific paradigm, that of emergence. Emergence lies "beyond reductionism," which is the longstanding assumption that nothing in the universe is really real but the fundamental particles of physics — or, below them, the theoretical "strings" of string theory — along with, of course, the particles' or strings' motions and interactions.

Emergence recognizes, above and beyond the dance of particles, the hard reality of higher-level entities that somehow arise from that dance. These realities include life itself, on earth and possibly elsewhere, plus abstract realities such as functions, actions, and intentions; agency; consciousness; values and meanings.

It also recognizes the ceaseless creativity of the cosmos, endlessly moving from the "present actual" into the "adjacent possible" ... and the next, and the next, and the next, on and on and on. Each "salient" or bubble at the edge of advancing actuality spawns new items to be added to the list of "furniture" of the universe, items whose advent was impossible to have predicted in advance.

This ceaseless creativity has nothing to do, says Kauffman, with the Creator God of Abrahamic tradition, whether Jewish or Christian. I'm not all that certain of that, but I still find Kauffman's ideas about reinventing the sacred compelling.

When I put Kauffman's ideas together with what little I know about the sacred feminine as alluded to ceaselessly by The Da Vinci Code, I have to think that what Kauffman means when he extols "reinventing the sacred" might in fact be a renewal of devotion to the sacred feminine.


I do know that the late explainer of myth Joseph Campbell taught that ancient cultures personified gods as masculine father images and goddesses as various feminine incarnations of the Earth Mother Goddess.

Every mythic hero figure, Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, has to undertake a perilous journey outward/downward to unknown realms and back again home with some sort of material or spiritual boon in tow, a precious prize or elixir that will feed his needy people.

During the course of the adventure, between his departure and his return, the hero typically undergoes an initiation. Two of the six canonical parts of the hero's initiation, not all of which are necessarily present in any particular hero myth, are his "meeting with the goddess" and his "atonement with the father."

In the former, there is "a mystical marriage ... of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World" (p. 109, in my edition of the book) — a personage who may be seen as gentle and benign, or hostile and castrating. In either case, the hero typically succeeds in passing her test:

The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. (p. 118)

Yet the initiation, at least in some hero myths, is as yet incomplete. The hero must still achieve atonement with the male personage who represents his father figure. If Stuart Kauffman would like to reinvent the sacred, he must accommodate not only the Mother Goddess but also the Heavenly Father. In the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity, Yahweh, the Creator God whom Kauffman does not believe in, fills this role.

Usually the mythic hero's biological father is unknown to him, having disappeared from the scene prior to, or not long after, the hero's birth. At some point the now-grown hero begins to ask, Where is my father? No one really can answer his question, and so his mythic journey, full of peril, is motivated specifically as a father hunt.

If on this journey there is along the way a sacred marriage between the hero and the Queen Goddess of the World, it is merely a preparatory step for his ultimate encounter with the Father who lives outside the world and is fully transcendent of it. Clearly, in these father-quest myths, the hero's difficulty in going to his transcendent, supernal Father patterns with his inability to find and be reconciled with his actual, biological father.

The questing hero, of course, finds his path inevitably leads him to his transcendental father's house — the difficulty in finding it having proved surmountable — where he has no choice but to seek admission if he wants to complete his journey. But the father rebuffs him, demanding that he perform certain impossible feats first.

Here is where the imagery Campbell alludes to — "the arrow, the flames, and the flood" (p. 129) — take a decidedly Judeo-Christian, Old Testament turn. The supernal father first appears to the hero as a wrathful ogre bent on punishing him for (among other things) having succumbed to the blandishments of "woman as the temptress," the stage of the initiation process that canonically comes between "the meeting with the goddess" and the "atonement with the father."

Some of the ancient hero myths involve the hero's failure to satisfy the unapproachable father, in which case the hero must turn trickster and steal the father's elixir, so to bring it home to his, the hero's, expectant community as the requisite boon.

Other myths have the hero properly perform the set tasks — often with the mother-wife-goddess's secret or not-so-secret aid. In succeeding in performing the tasks the hero can be said to be, in words familiar to Christians, born again:

The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate the key knot of his limited existence.

The problem of the hero going to meet his father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands — and the two are atoned.

To be born again at the end of a father quest is to attain atonement ("at-one-ment") with the father. Of course, the mythic hero is a stand-in for all of humanity: for each one of us, whether male or female.

Accordingly, Campbell (who was a lapsed Catholic) sees Jesus Christ as a consummate hero whose death and resurrection brings the boon of his own perfect at-one-ment with his heavenly Father to each of us. To be born again is, for the Christian, an act by which we recapitulate Jesus' trials and accept this boon.

So, whether from the Jewish or from the Christian point of view, Yahweh/God represents an essential piece of the human spiritual puzzle: the yearning for atonement with a distant and/or judging father figure. The real question is, How can we harmonize devotion to the Earth Mother (which Kauffman's reinvention of the sacred puts on a scientific footing) with the equally important need to locate and be reconciled with an at-first-missing (because he transcends the physical world) Heavenly Father.


Campbell finds throughout his writings that the monotheistic religions we have today descend from incursions starting around 2400 B.C. into the Fertile Crescent — the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — by Semitic tribes originally from the Syro-Arabian desert to the south. Among the monotheistic religions that originated with the Semites in the Near East are Judaism and Christianity.

These religions differ in their foundational mythology from those of other prehistoric cultures. In the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods prior to the invasions, in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere in Europe and Asia there lived the earliest sedentary humans. These people were agrarian, depending for their livelihood on planting, not hunting or slaughtering animals. To them, the primary deity was the Goddess.

The invaders and, ultimately, conquerors who came into the Fertile Crescent from the south were nomads whose lifestyle depended on animals for both transport and food. Their main gods were tribal deities whose principal function was to support the tribes in conquest. By contrast, the Goddess of the conquered agrarians was a universal deity whose principal function was to bring all humans into harmony with the natural forces inside themselves, as well as in the external world.

In Transformations of Myths Through Time, Campbell shows that ancient gods were indeed of two orders, ones representing the universal powers of nature that operate externally and internally within each of us, and ones that are "specific patrons of the tribe" (p. 54). With the coming of the Semite conquerors, then, the latter became preeminent over the former ... and the latter were the principal gods of a "patriarchal warrior people," while the former were "earlier mother goddess systems."

Complicating the mythological history of the human species, however, is a third ancient system of mythic understanding: the Indo-European. In the same general time as the one in which the Semites were mounting their incursions into the domains of settled farming communities in the Fertile Crescent, the Indo-Europeans (sometimes referred to as Aryans) were moving into and taking over the agrarian settlements from the north.

The Indo-Europeans, like the Semites, were nomads dependent on animal-derived energies rather than on sustenance derived directly from plants. They were hunters and domesticators of the horse — while the Semites domesticated the dromedary/camel and slaughtered the goats and sheep they herded for food, rather than hunting wild animals as the Aryans did.

The Indo-Europeans, like the Semitic tribes, no longer worshiped the Earth Goddess as their principal creator deity, owing their primary allegiance instead to a male god who was held to be the direct source of supernatural power.

While the Semites were responsible for generating the monotheisms of the Near East, the Indo-Europeans were influencing what would become the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, and also shaping the religious atmosphere of India, the continuing home of Hinduism and the original source of Buddhism.

The Indo-Europeans and the Semites were alike in having moved the Mother Goddess out of the limelight in favor of a male gods or God. But they differed in terms of the ways in which, once the male deities' preeminence was established, they allowed (or refused to allow) the Goddess back into the picture.

The flavor of the discrepancy can be gleaned from an essay by Campbell, "Of Harmony and of Discord," which appeared in his book The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987. (The essay may be read here.) In the essay, Campbell alludes to "the Heroic Age":

... those centuries of barbaric invasions and wiping out of cities that we find celebrated in the Indo-European Iliad and Mahabharata, as well as throughout the Old Testament, [in which] there were brought onto the historic stage two sorts of nomadic, herding, and fighting peoples bearing analogous, though significantly differing, sociologically oriented systems of mythology inspired by notions of morality wherein the high concern was not of harmony with the universe in its mystery but of the aggrandizement and justification of some local, historical tribe or cult. The whole character, as well as function, of mythology was thereby transformed; and since the myths, ideals, and rites of the new orders of justified violence overlay wherever they fell the earlier of an essential peace at the heart of the universe, the history of mythology in a great quarter of the world for the past three thousand years has been of a double-layered continuum. In some parts, notably India, the mythology of the Goddess returned in time to the surface and even became dominant.

In India we have an example of a culture in which the Indo-European mode of re-harmonizing the primordial Goddess with the usurping male deities established a preference for harmony rather than discord as a way of life. The same sort of thing happened in ancient Greece. But in the Near East, the cultures influenced by (or constituted by) the Semites produced a negative take on the rightful place of Goddess worship. Thus, per Campbell, we read in 2 Kings 23 in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament of the "very good King Josiah of Judah (ca. 640-609 B.C.), when he":

... deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens.

Deposing "idolatrous priests" who "burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens" was a way of not coming to terms with the Neolithic Great Goddess whose place (or places, plural) Yahweh usurped.

Campbell summarizes:

As a consequence of ... truly unspeakable violence and barbarity over an immense part of the already civilized portion of Europe and Asia (only Egypt on its desert- and god-protected Nile remained through those millennia unbroken), what the historian of mythologies everywhere uncovers, from the British Isles to the Gangetic Plain [the area of the River Ganges in India], is a consistent pattern (retained in religions even to the present day) of two completely contrary orders of mythic thought and symbolization flung together, imperfectly fused, and represented as though of one meaning.

The first and elder of the two orders of mythic thought is that of the Great Goddess who embodies "the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of life itself as motherhood and as birth, as growth and as transformation terminating in a return to the mother in death, out of which source appears new life."

Campbell does not in this essay completely characterize the follow-on orders of thought, whether Indo-European or Semitic, in which the Great Goddess was succeeded by a male deity ... and then found her way back into the mythic traditions in positive and negative, overt and hidden forms.

In fact, Campbell seems bent on showing how, even in the Near East where the worship of the Goddess was officially deprecated by the Hebrew champions of the male God, Yahweh, the Goddess reasserted herself in various ways:

Thus the force of the underlying layer, even where officially suppressed or apparently forgotten, worked its influence, often in subtle ways; as for example, in the instance already recognized, of the number 86,400 concealed in the length of years of the biblical antediluvian age.

(Apparently, 86,400 was a number associated in some way originally with the Goddess cult.)

On the other hand, in The Power of Myth Campbell makes clear how odd the religions of today that bring forward the early monotheistic orders of myth — principally Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — are with respect to the religions of the "perennial philosophy" whose antecedents are more in the Indo-European, rather than Semitic, mold.

Responding to a question from his interviewer, Bill Moyers, about the (Judeo-)Christian idea of the Creation and the Fall, Campbell said (p. 66):

I once heard a lecture by a wonderful old Zen [Buddhist] philosopher, Dr. D.T. Suzuki. He stood up with his hands slowly rubbing his sides and said, "god against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature — very funny religion!"

Our "very funny religion" has a creation myth of Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall, in which Adam's temptation by Eve (after Eve was tempted by the Serpent) is the root source of sin. It is not likely that such a religion would easily come to comfortable terms with the Great Goddess whom Eve is the stand-in for.

In my own analysis — I have no reason to be sure Campbell would have agreed with this — I come to the conclusion that we in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition are heirs to the ancient Hebrews' designation of the fecundity of the female womb as being the property of male humans — fathers, brothers, husbands, the male community in general — and ultimately of the male deity, the Lord God of Hosts, Yahweh.

Female fecundity is, of course, the focus of Goddess worship, what devotion to the Goddess was all about. When the energies of the female side of the cosmic equation reappear in a specifically Christian guise, they revolve around the Virgin Mary, whose son Jesus was the Son of God ... and was himself God.

Campbell in The Power of Myth shows how Mary's virginity ought to be interpreted, in his estimation: as a model of sacred (re)birth out of the physical body and into the life of the spirit. The question of how Mary physically got pregnant is of no importance here.

Campbell compares this idea of the Virgin Mary's instrumentality in all sacred birth and rebirth with ideas found in India about the spirit's ascent, above the bodily centers associated with physical urges and desires, to the level of the compassionate heart. Here again are found images of being "born again of water and the spirit," just as in Christianity.

In fact, Campbell has ways of harmonizing just about all the images and symbols of Christianity with the underlying images and symbols that derive, often stealthily, from modes of myth less inimical to the Great Goddess, for whom Mary becomes, again, the stand-in.

For Campbell, it is possible to map Christian and Jewish (not to mention Islamic) symbology back to that of the "perennial philosophy" of the rest of the world and thus rescue monotheism as we know it from being a "very funny religion."


A case in point is found in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in the chapter titled "The Keys." In the pre-Vatican II rites of Holy Saturday in the Catholic Church — the book was published in 1949 — are found, says Campbell, echoes of the making of fire in the belly of the whale, a motif found in hero myths around the world.

The hero is consumed by a monstrous whale and enters the realm of the dead. In Christian belief, on the day before Christ's resurrection, Jesus descends to hell and rescues the souls imprisoned there. The resurrection is Easter. The vigil on the Holy Saturday preceding Easter Sunday commemorates Christ's final victory over hell and death.

In the canonical belly-of-the-whale legend, the hero brings about the whale's death and his own release by making a fire in the gut of the monster, using two sticks (see p. 248). He rubs together a socket-stick, which represents the female sex organs, with a phallic spindle-stick. The flame which is thereby sparked "is the newly generated life," and the motif as a whole is "a variant of the sacred marriage."

So when on Holy Saturday the Catholic priest blesses and lights a paschal candle, then carries it to the baptismal font whose waters he blesses and makes holy, the fact that he touches the candle to the "immaculate womb of the divine font" three times and thrice calls the "virtue of the Holy Ghost" to come into and inhabit the symbolic womb echoes the spindle-and-socket pattern of all fire-making myth. Here, Jesus Christ is the male hero who slays death ... with the transformation attendant upon baptism in blessed water, a symbol of the waters of the female womb.

Similar symbology is found in India, where the male organ is represented ir religious symbology as the lingam and the female as the yoni. But in Christianity, "the popular interpretation of baptism is that it 'washes away original sin,' with emphasis on the cleansing rather that the rebirth idea" (p. 251). The latter idea brings too close to the surface of awareness the realization of the paschal candle as a phallic symbol and the font as a womb symbol.

Since The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written some sixty years ago, our culture has striven mightily to rid itself of such overweening delicacy. Indeed, we have grown not just frank but coarse. Meanwhile, the life of the spirit has become a closed book to many of us, partly in consequence of our incessant "keeping it real." A hefty minority, meanwhile, is fighting a rear-guard action against anything which threatens the old-time religion ... with its core values that, at the extreme, demand that we denounce whichever of the Teletubbies happens to be gay.

Somewhere in the middle, between cynicism and fundamentalism, most of the rest of us find ourselves. We long to reinvent the sacred, we yearn to participate in the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of regeneration and rebirth that our Earth Mother teaches and embodies, and we also struggle for atonement with our Heavenly Father.

Stuart Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred can help us here. Though it's not yet clear to me how his viewpoint might foster atonement with the Father, it does seem to furnish a ready antidote to this gloomy pronouncement by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science or history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

Only a few years after Campbell wrote that, Watson and Crick discovered DNA, and human characteristics seemed to be reduced to genes. Now Stuart Kauffman gives ample reason to look beyond that reductionism (and to believe that DNA and genes were latecomers to the party of life). In a universe that ceaselessly creates itself through the processes of emergence, there is more to reality than the dance of particles. There is life, consciousness, value, meaning. On our way to atonement with our transcendent, supernal Father, we need to enter once again into sacred marriage with our eternally fertile cosmic Mother.