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The Conjugal Act and Procreativity: CORMAC BURKE

(Reprinted by permission of the author)

     [Cormac Burke asks two questions: why must marital sex be open to procreation, and why must procreation be the consequence of marital sex (rather than of various forms of artificial reproduction)? He denies that the procreative and unitive aspects of marital sex are separable: If we deliberately destroy the power of the conjugal act to give life, we also necessarily destroy its power to signify the love and union proper to marriage. Contraceptive sex is disfigured body language; it expresses a rejection of the other. Artificial fertilization ignores the fact that the child is meant to be, not just the fruit of the union, however brought about, of two cells, but of the loving union of two persons, which means the union of two souls and two bodies]

           There are two related questions before us asking for clear and, if possible, simple answers: why must the conjugal act be open to procreativity and why must procreation be the consequence of a true conjugal act?

           Of these two questions, the first is bigger; it is of importance everywhere round the world and of moral significance to practically all married couples. It has been the subject of intense debate for some twenty-five years, and at this stage, I feel that well-matured answers are available.

           The second question is of much more recent appearance. It also is intensely debated, although primarily in academic circles with echoes in the press. It is of practical interest to relatively few couples. Probably it will take some years before its finer points (as in certain forms of homologous artificial fertilization) can be fully seen in satisfactory light. 1 feel that a clear answer to this second question will largely come in consequence of having dearly answered the first, to which most of my remarks will be addressed. My main endeavor, therefore, will be to show why one cannot annul the procreative aspect or the procreative reference of the marital act without necessarily destroying its unitive function and significance.

           There is a modern argument for contraception that claims to speak in personalist terms and that could be summarized as follows. The marital act expresses love; it unites. It has, indeed, a possible procreative side effect, which can result in children. But since this side effect depends on biological factors, which science today permits us to control, the procreative aspect of marital intercourse can be nullified, and its unitive function left intact.

           Until quite recently, the traditional argument against birth control has been that the sexual act is naturally designed for procreation, and it is wrong to frustrate this design because it is wrong to interfere with man's natural functions. The defenders of contraception dismiss this traditional argument as mere "biologism," that is, as an understanding of the marital act that fails to go beyond its biological function or possible biological consequences and ignores its spiritual function of signifying and effecting the union of the spouses. They feel they are on strong and positive ground here. While the marital act is potentially a procreative act, it is actually and in itself an act of love, a unitive act. Although contraception frustrates the biological or procreative aspect of the act, it fully respects the spiritual and unitive aspect and even facilitates it by removing tensions or fears capable of impairing the expression of love in married intercourse.

           This is the contraceptive argument couched in apparently personalist terms. If we are to offer an effective answer to it and show its radical defcctiveness, I would suggest that we need to develop a personalist argument based on a true personalist understanding of sex and marriage.

           The contraceptive argument is built on an essential thesis: that the procreative and the unitive aspects of the marital act are separable, i.e. that the procreative aspect can be nullified without this in any way vitiating the conjugal act or making it less a unique expression of true marital love and union. This thesis is explicitly rejected by the Church.  The main reason why contraception is unacceptable to a christian conscience is, as Pope Paul VI put it in Humanae Vitae, the "inseparable connection, established by God...  between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act".

           Paul VI affirms this inseparable connection.  He does not, however, go on to explain why these two aspects of the marital act are in fact so inseparably connected, or why this connection is such that it is the very ground of the moral evaluation of the act.  Yet I think that serene reflection easily enough discovers the reasons why the connection between the two aspects of the act is in fact such that the destruction of the act's procreative reference necessarily destroys its unitive and personalist significance; why, in other words, if one deliberately destroys the power of the conjugal act to give life, one necessarily destroys its power to signify the love and union proper to marriage.

The marital act as an act of union

           Why is the act of intercourse regarded as the foremost act of self-giving, the most distinctive expression of marital love?  Why is this act, which is but a passing and fleeting thing, particularly regarded as an act of union?  After all, people in love express their love and desire to be united in many ways: they send letters, exchange looks or presents, hold hands.  What makes the sexual act unique?  Why does this act unite the spouses in a way that no other act does?  What is it that makes it not just a physical experience but an experience of love?

           Is it the special pleasure attaching to it? Is the unitive meaning of the conjugal act contained just in the sensation, however intense, that it can produce?  If intercourse unites two people simply because it gives special pleasure, then it would seem that one or other of the spouses could at times find a more meaningful union outside marriage than within it.  It would follow too that sex without pleasure becomes meaningless, and that sex with pleasure, even homosexual sex, becomes meaningful. No.  The conjugal act may or may not be accompanied by pleasure; but the meaning of the act does not consist in its pleasure.  The pleasure provided by marital intercourse may be intense, but it is transient.  The significance of marital intercourse is also intense, and it is not transient; it lasts.

           Why should the marital act be more significant than any other expression of affection between the spouses?   Why should it be a more intense expression of love and union?   Surely because of what happens in that marital encounter, which is not just a touch, not a mere sensation, however intense, but a communication, an offer and acceptance, an exchange of something that uniquely represents the gift of oneself and the union of two selves.

           It should not be forgotten that while two persons in love want to give themselves to one another, to be united to one another, this desire of theirs remains humanly speaking on a purely volitional level.  They can bind themselves to one another, but they cannot actually give themselves.  The greatest expression of a person's desire to give himself is to give the seed of himself (Seed is here intended to refer equally to the male or the female generative element.).  Giving one's seed is much more significant, and in particular is much more real, than giving one's heart.  "I am yours, I give you my heart; here, take it", remains mere poetry, to which no physical gesture can give true body.  But, "I am yours; I give you my seed; here, take it", is not poetry; it is love.  It is conjugal love embodied in a unique and privileged physical action whereby intimacy is expressed ("I give you what I give no one") and union is achieved: "Take what I have to give.  This will be a new me.  United to you, to what you have to give - to your seed -  this will be a new "you-and-me", fruit of our mutual knowledge and love".  In human terms, this is the closest one can come to giving one's self conjugally and to accepting the conjugal self-gift of another, and so achieving spousal union.

           Therefore, what makes marital intercourse express a unique relationship and union is not the sharing of a sensation but the sharing of a power: of an extraordinary life-related, creative physical sexual power.  In a true conjugal relationship, each spouse says to the other: "I accept you as somebody like no one  else in my life.  You will be unique to me and I to you.  You and you alone will be my husband; you alone will be my wife.  And the proof of your uniqueness to me is the fact that with you  - and with you alone - am I prepared to share this God-given life-oriented power". In this consists the singular quality of intercourse.  Other physical expressions of affection do not go beyond the level of a mere gesture; they remain a symbol of the union desired.  But the conjugal act is not a mere symbol.  In true marital intercourse, something real has been exchanged, with a full gift and acceptance of conjugal masculinity and femininity.  And there remains, as witness to their conjugal relationship and the intimacy of their conjugal union, the husband's seed in the wife's body [1].

           Now if one deliberately nullifies the life-orientation of the conjugal act, one destroys its essential power to signify union.  Contraception in fact turns the marital act into self-deception or into a lie: "I love you so much that with you, and with you alone, I am ready to share this most unique power..."  But - what unique power?  In contraceptive sex, no unique power is being shared,  except a power to produce pleasure.  But then the uniqueness of the marital act is reduced to pleasure.  Its significance is gone.

           Contraceptive intercourse is an exercise in meaninglessness.  It could perhaps be compared to going through the actions of singing without letting any sound of music pass one's lips... Contraceptive spouses involve each other in bodily movements, but their "body language" is not truly human.  They refuse to let their bodies communicate sexually and intelligibly with one another.  They go through the motions of a love-song; but there is no song.

           Contraception is not just an action without meaning; it is an action that contradicts the essential meaning which true conjugal intercourse should have as signifying total and unconditional self-giving.  Instead of accepting each other totally, contraceptive spouses reject part of each other because fertility is part of each of them.  They reject part of their mutual love: its power to be fruitful. A couple may say: we do not want our love to be fruitful.  But if that is so, there is an inherent contradiction in their trying to express their love by means of an act which, of its nature, implies fruitful love; and there is even more of a contradiction if, when they engage in the act, they deliberately destroy the fertility-orientation from which precisely it derives its capacity to express the uniqueness of their love.

           In true marital union, husband and wife are meant to experience the vibration of human vitality in its very source [2].  In the case of contraceptive "union", the spouses experience sensation, but it is drained of real vitality.  The anti-life effect of contraception does not stop at the "No" which it addresses to the possible fruit of love.  It tends to take the very life out of love itself.  Within the hard logic of contraception, anti-life becomes anti-love.  Its devitalising effect devastates love, threatening it with early ageing and premature death.

           At this point it is good to anticipate the possible criticism that our argument so far is based on an incomplete disjunction, inasmuch as it seems to affirm that the conjugal act is either procreative or else merely hedonistic...  Can contraceptive spouses not counter this with the sincere affirmation that, in their intercourse, they are not merely seeking pleasure; they are also experiencing and expressing love for one another?  Let us clarify our position on this particular point.  We do not claim that contraceptive spouses may not love each other in their intercourse, nor, insofar as they are not prepared to have such intercourse with a third person, that it does not express a certain uniqueness in their relationship.  Our thesis is that it does not express conjugal uniqueness.  Love may somehow be present in their contraceptive relationship; conjugal love is not expressed by it.  Conjugal love may, on the contrary, soon find itself threatened by it.  Contraceptive spouses are constantly haunted by the suspicion that the act in which they share could indeed be, for each one of them, a privileged giving of pleasure, but could also be a mere selfish taking of pleasure.  It is logical that their love-making be troubled by a sense of falseness or hollowness, for they are attempting to found the uniqueness of the spousal relationship on an act of pleasure, which tends ultimately to close each one of them sterilely in on himself or herself.  They are refusing to found that relationship on the truly unique conjugal dimension of loving co-creativity, capable in its vitality of opening each of them out not merely to one another, but to the whole of life and creation.

Sexual love and sexual knowledge

           The mutual and exclusive self-donation of the marriage act consists in its being the gift and acceptance of something unique.  Now this something unique is not just the seed (this indeed could be "biologism"), but the fullness of the sexuality of each spouse.

           That it was not good for man to be alone provided the context in which God made him sexual.  He created man in a duality, male and female, with the potential to become a trinity.  The differences between the sexes speak therefore of a divine plan of complementarity, of self-completion and self-fulfilment, also through self-perpetuation. It is not good for man to be alone because man, on his own, cannot fulfil himself.  He needs others.  He especially needs one other: a companion, a spouse.  Union with a spouse, giving oneself to a spouse, sexual and marital union in self-donation, are normal conditions of human growth and fulfilment.

           Marriage, then, is a means of fulfilment through union.  Husband and wife are united in mutual knowledge and love. This love is not just spiritual but also bodily; and this knowledge underpinning their love is not just speculative or intellectual but also bodily. That marital love is meant to be based on carnal knowledge is fully human and fully logical.  How significant it is that the Bible, in the original Hebrew, refers to marital intercourse in terms of man and woman "knowing" each other.  Adam, Genesis says, knew Eve, his wife (Gn 4:1).  What comment can we make on this equivalence, which the Bible draws, between conjugal intercourse and mutual knowledge? What is the distinctive knowledge that husband and wife communicate to one another?  It is the knowledge of each other's integral human condition as spouse.  Each discloses to the other the most intimate secret of his or her personal sexuality.  Each is revealed to the other truly as spouse and comes to know the other in the uniqueness of that spousal self-revelation and self-gift.  Each one lets himself or herself be known by the other, and surrenders to the other, precisely as husband or wife.

           Nothing can undermine a marriage so much as the refusal fully to know and accept one's spouse or to let oneself be fully known by him or her.  A marriage is constantly endangered when one spouse holds something back from the other or keeps back some knowledge that he or she does not want the other to possess [3].  This can occur on all levels of interpersonal communication, physical as well as spiritual.

           In many modern marriages, there is something in the spouses, and between the spouses, that each does not want to know, does not want to face up to, but rather wants to avoid: and this something is their sexuality.  Since they will not allow each other full mutual carnal knowledge, they do not truly know each other sexually or humanly or spousally.  This places their married love under a tremendous existential tension, which can tear it apart.

           In true marital intercourse each spouse renounces protective self-possession, so as to fully possess and be fully possessed by the other.  This fullness of true sexual gift and possession is only achieved in marital intercourse open to life.  Only in procreative intercourse do the spouses exchange true "knowledge" of one another, do they truly speak humanly and intelligibly to one another; do they truly reveal themselves to one another in their full human actuality and potential.  Each offers, and each accepts, full spousal knowledge of the other.

           In the body language of intercourse, each spouse utters a word of love that is both a self-expression, an image of each one's self, as well as an expression of his or her longing for the other.  These two words of love meet, and are fused in one.  As this new unified word of love takes on flesh, God shapes it into a person, the child, who is the incarnation of the husband's and wife's sexual knowledge of one another and sexual love for one another.

           In contraceptive intercourse, the spouses will not let the word, which their sexuality longs to utter, take flesh.  They will not even truly speak the word to each other.  They remain humanly impotent in the face of love, sexually dumb and carnally speechless before one another.

           Sexual love is a love of the whole male or female person, body and spirit.  Love is falsified if body and spirit do not say the same thing.  This happens in contraceptive intercourse.  The bodily act speaks of a presence of love or of a degree of love that is denied by the spirit.  The body says, "I love you totally", whereas the spirit says, "I love you reservedly".  The body says, "I seek you"; the spirit says, "I will not accept you, not all of you".

           Contraceptive intercourse falls below mere pantomime.  It is disfigured body-language; it expresses a rejection of the other.  In it, each says: "I do not want to know you as my husband or my wife; I am not prepared to recognise you as my spouse.  I want something from you, but not your sexuality;  and if I have something to give to you, something I will let you take, it is not my sexuality" [4].

           This enables us to develop a point we touched on earlier.  The negation that a contraceptive couple are involved in is not directed just towards children, or just towards life, or just towards the world.  They address a negation directly towards one another.  "I prefer a sterile you", is equivalent to saying, "I don't want all you offer me.  I have calculated the measure of my love, and it is not big enough for that; it is not able to take all of you.  I want a "you" cut down to the size of my love..." The fact that both spouses may concur in accepting a cut-rate version of each other does not save their love or their lives or their possibilities of happiness from the effects of such radical human and sexual devaluation.

           Normal conjugal intercourse fully asserts masculinity and femininity.  The man asserts himself as man and husband, and the woman equally asserts herself as woman and wife.  In contraceptive intercourse, only a maimed sexuality is asserted.  Sexuality, in the truest sense, is not asserted at all.   Contraception represents such a refusal to let oneself be known that it simply is not real carnal knowledge.   A deep human truth underlies the theological and juridic principle that contraceptive sex does not consummate marriage.

           Contraceptive intercourse, then, is not real sexual intercourse at all.  That is why the disjunctives offered by this whole matter are insufficiently expressed by saying that if intercourse is contraceptive, then it is merely hedonistic.  This may or may not be true.  What is true, at a much deeper level, is that if intercourse is contraceptive, then it is not sexual.  In contraception there is an "intercourse" of sensation, but no real sexual knowledge or sexual love, no true sexual revelation of self or sexual communication of self or sexual gift of self.  The choice of contraception is in fact the rejection of sexuality.  The warping of the sexual instinct from which modern society suffers reflects not so much an excess of sex as a lack of true human sexuality.

           True conjugal intercourse unites.  Contraception separates, and the separation works right along the line.  It not only separates sex from procreation, it also separates sex from love.  It separates pleasure from meaning, and body from mind.  Ultimately and surely, it separates wife from husband and husband from wife.

           Contraceptive couples who stop to reflect realize that their marriage is troubled by some deep malady.  The alienations they experience are a sign as well as a consequence of the grave violation of the moral order involved in contraception.  Only a resolute effort to break with contraceptive practices can heal the sickness affecting their married life...

Why does only procreative sex fulfil?

           Our argument so far is that contraceptive marital sex does not achieve any true personalist end.  It does not bring about self-fulfilment in marriage, but rather prevents and frustrates it.  One may still ask, however, does it follow that open-to-life marital sex alone leads to the self-fulfilment of the spouses? I think it does and that the reason lies in the very nature of love.  Love is creative.  God's love (if we may put it this way) "drove" Him to create.   Man's love, made in the image of God's, is also meant to create.  If it deliberately does not do so, it frustrates itself.   Love between two persons makes them want to do things together.  While this is true of friendship in general, it has a singular application to the love between spouses.  A couple truly in love want to do things together; if possible, they want to do something "original" together.  Nothing is more original to a couple in love than their child: the image and fruit of their love and their union.  That is why "the marital thing" is to have children; and other things, as substitutes, do not satisfy conjugal love.

           Procreative intercourse fulfils also because only in such intercourse are the spouses open to all the possibilities of their mutual love: ready to be enriched and fulfilled not only by what it offers to them, but also by what it demands of them.

           Further, procreative intercourse fulfils because it expresses the human person's desire for self-perpetuation and does not contradict it, as contraception does.  Love can thrive only on life-wishes, not on death-wishes. When a married couple have a child, they joyfully pass their child to each other.  If their child dies, there is no joy, there are tears, as they pass the dead body to one another.  Spouses should weep over a contraceptive act. This barren, desolate act rejects the life that is meant to keep love alive; it would kill the life to which their love naturally seeks to give origin. There may be physical satisfaction, but there can be no joy in passing dead seed or in passing living seed only to kill it.

           The vitality of sensation in sexual intercourse should correspond to a vitality of meaning (remembering, as we have said, that sensation is not meaning).  The very explosiveness of sexual pleasure suggests the greatness of the creativity of sex.  In each conjugal act, there should be something of the magnificence, scope, and power of Michelangelo's Creation in the Sistine Chapel.  It is the dynamism not just of a sensation, but of an event - of something that happens, of a communication of life. A lack of true sexual awareness characterizes the act if the intensity of pleasure does not serve to stir a fully conscious understanding of the greatness of the conjugal experience: I am committing myself and my creative life-giving power, not just to another person, but to the whole of creation: to history, to mankind, to the purposes and design of God.  In each act of conjugal union, teaches Pope John Paul II, "there is renewed, in a way, the mystery of creation in all its original depth and vital power".

           A last point should be made.  The whole question we are considering is tremendously complicated precisely by the strength of the sexual instinct.  Nevertheless, the very strength of this instinct should itself point towards an adequate understanding of sexuality.  Elementary commonsense says that the power of the sexual urge must correspond to deep human aspirations or needs.  It has been traditional to explain the sexual urge in cosmic or demographic terms: just as we have a food appetite to maintain the life of the individual, so we have a sex appetite to maintain the life of the species.  This explanation makes sense, as far as it goes; however, it clearly does not go far enough.  The sex appetite, in all its strength, surely corresponds not only to cosmic or collectivist needs, but also to personalist needs.  If man and woman feel a deep longing for sexual union, it is also because each one personally has a deep longing for all that is involved in true sexuality: self-giving, self-complementarity, self-realization, self-perpetuation, in spousal union with another.

           The experience of such complete spousal sexuality is filled with many-faceted pleasure, in which the simple physical satisfaction of a mere sense instinct is accompanied and enriched by the personalist satisfaction of the much deeper and stronger longings involved in sex, and not marred and soured by their frustration.  Continuous and growing sexual frustration is a main consequence of contraception because the contraceptive mentality deprives the very power of the sexual urge of its real meaning and purpose, and then tries to find full sexual experience and satisfaction in what is basically little more than a physical release.

Why Does Procreation have to be the Fruit of a Conjugal Act?

           Human life has its origin in sex; it cannot be passed on other than by sexual reproduction. The generation of each child, which marks the renewal and perpetuation of creation, is always and necessarily the result of the union of sexual differences. Modern science has made procreation possible by fusing these sexual differences without any actual union of the bodies of husband and wife. It is the teaching of the Catholic Church that this gravely violates the God-given rule and mode of procreation, as well as the use and purpose of sex within marriage. This teaching has been most recently set forth in the Instruction on Respect for Human Life. The few remarks that I set down here simply constitute some incidental thoughts on the topic of artificial fertilization, in line with the reasoning of the preceding pages on human sexuality.

            The child is meant to be, not just the fruit of sexuality in a purely biological sense (that is, the fruit of the union, however brought about, of two cells), but the fruit of human and spousal sexuality. The child is and has the right to be the fruit of the living union of two persons, which means the union of two souls and two bodies, not just of two wills with no true bodily union. A union of wills without a union of bodies lacks the proper composition of parental love. It does not constitute a sufficient human basis for the creation of a new life, nor does the simple union of seed without the union of bodies. The union of bodies is conjugal and human; it is the mere union of seed that is biological.

           A child is not meant to be the fruit of a bodiless union. In such a union, his origin is less than human; he is de-humanized in his origins. If the child is not the fruit of true marital intercourse between the parents, the fruit of that act by which they have human sexual knowledge of one another, he is not actually conceived. He remains, all his life, a product of the knowledge of technology, but not an incarnate concept of his parents' spousal and bodily knowledge of each other. Humanly, if not biologically, he will suffer the consequences. He may easily end up as a misfit in a life that has certainly started as a misconception.

NOTES

[1] In this way in fact the uniqueness of the decision to marry a particular person is reaffirmed in each marital act. By every single act of true intercourse, each spouse is confirmed in the unique status of being husband or wife to the other.

[2] This still remains true even in cases where, for some reason or another, the spouses cannot have children. Their union in such cases, just as their union during the wife's pregnancy, draws its deepest meaning from the fact that both their conjugal act and the intention behind it are "open to life", even though no life can actually result from the act.  It is their basic openness to life which gives the act its meaning and dignity.  Just as the absence of this openness is what undermines the dignity and meaning of the act when the spouses, without serious reasons, deliberately limit their marital intercourse to the infertile periods.

[3] We are not referring here to those occasions in which, out of justice to a third party, one of the spouses is under an obligation to observe some secret, e.g. of a professional nature. Fulfilment of such an obligation is in no way a violation of the rights of married intimacy.

[4] If it is not sexuality that each spouse in contraceptive intercourse gives to or takes from the other, what does each one in fact actually take or give?  In what might be termed the better cases, it is a form of love - divorced from sexuality. In other cases, it is merely pleasure, also - be it noted - divorced from sexuality. In one case or the other, contraceptive spouses always deny themselves sexuality. Their marriage, deprived of a true sexual relationship, suffers in consequence.

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Study Questions on Cormac Burke

           1. Do you agree that contraceptive intercourse is unable to express the full self-giving of the spouses? Is it only a kind of "going through the motions"?

           2. Suppose we agree with Burke that a true marriage must include acts that are both unitive and open to procreation. Is it necessary that each and every sexual act in marriage should have this character?

           3. What if a couple are physically unable to have children, say because the wife has had a hysterectomy? Does Burke's argument imply that they are incapable of truly marital sexual acts? Does natural family planning —or timing intercourse to avoid fertile periods— escape Burke's criticisms?

           4. Do spouses ever fully possess one another? What would it mean if they did (that neither of them keeps anything secret from the other, for example)?