Monday, February 6, 2017

Is there a Traditional view of Contraception?



Is there a Traditional view of Contraception?

            It has become commonplace for Orthodox theologians to assert that there is no traditional position on the subject of contraception.[1] Paul Evdokimov writes, for example:
In the age of the Church Fathers, the problem of birth control was never raised. There are no canons that deal with it. The ancient collections of penitential discipline are no longer entirely applicable; moreover they say nothing on the subject…One must therefore start from the patristic spirit [italics his] and not from a precise, inexistent teaching.[2]
What does the data show? Is it possible to discern a traditional teaching on contraception?
            Contraceptives were not unknown in the ancient world. Soranos of Ephesus, for example, in his 2nd century Gynecology, outlines ancient theories and techniques of contraception.[3] He distinguished between those things which prevented conception and those things which affected a fetus already conceived.[4] He wrote, for example: “A contraceptive differs from an abortive, for the first does not let the conception take place, while the latter destroys what has been conceived. Let us, therefore, call the one ‘abortive’(phthorion) and the other ‘contraceptive’ (atokion).”[5]
            In A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, Paul Veyne offers the following description of the situation in ancient Rome:
Abortion and contraception were common practices, although historians have distorted the picture somewhat by overlooking the Roman use of the term “abortion” to describe not only surgical practices that we would call abortion but also techniques that we would call contraceptive…All classes of the population certainly made use of contraceptive techniques. Saint Augustine, who speaks of “embraces in which conception is avoided,” gives no indication that these are rare; he condemns the practice, even between legitimate spouses. Augustine distinguishes between contraception, sterilization by means of drugs, and abortions, only to condemn them all… Saint Jerome, in his twenty-second epistle, speaks of young girls who “savor their sterility in advance and kill the human being even before its seed has been sown,” an allusion to a spermicidal drug.[6]
            From this it seems clear that the Fathers would not have been ignorant of the practice of contraception. What then did they have to say?
The Fathers
            Laying aside those texts from the Fathers which deal with the question Onan (Gen. 38:9)—a major area of discussion, let us instead examine other patristic texts related to the question of contraception.
            Hippolytus writes (c. 225), concerning some Christian women married to men of lower social status: “on account of their prominent ancestry and great property, the so-called faithful want no children from slaves or lowborn commoners, they use drugs of sterility or bind themselves tightly in order to expel a fetus which has already been engendered”[7]
            According to Lactantius (c. 307):
[Some] complain of the scantiness of their means, and allege that they have not enough for bringing up more children, as though, in truth, their means were in [their] power…or God did not daily make the rich poor and the poor rich. Wherefore, if any one on any account of poverty shall be unable to bring up children, it is better to abstain from relations with his wife.[8]
            St. Epiphanos of Salamis, in his polemics against the Gnostics, writes (c. 375), “They exercise genital acts, yet prevent the conceiving of children. Not in order to produce offspring, but to satisfy lust, are they eager for corruption.” [9]
            Titus, Bishop of Bostra in Asia Minor writes (c. 363):
But indulging in pleasure more frequently, they [the Manichees] hate the fruit that comes necessarily from their acts; and they command that bodies be joined beyond what is lawful and restrict and expel what is conceived and do not await births at their proper time, as if birth alone were dangerous and difficult.[10]
            Although St. John Chrysostom is the Father most often appealed to in Orthodox sources to support acceptance of contraception, it does him an injustice to read this into his work.[11] Chrysostom strongly criticizes those who use potions and incantations or other means to avoid having children. He writes (c. 390):
Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain only a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well…it is something worse than murder, and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you contemn the gift of God and fight with His laws? What is a curse, do you seek as though it were a blessing?… In this indifference of the married men there is greater evil filth; for then poisons are prepared, not against the womb of a prostitute, but against your injured wife. Against her are these innumerable tricks…[12]
[I]n truth, all men know that they who are under the power of this disease [the sin of covetousness] are wearied even of their father's old age [wishing him to die so they can inherit]; and that which is sweet, and universally desirable, the having of children, they esteem grievous and unwelcome. Many at least with this view have even paid money to be childless, and have mutilated nature, not only killing the newborn, but even acting to prevent their beginning to live.[13]
            According to Dubarle, Augustine offers “the most detailed, the most doctrinally systematic” condemnation of contraception.[14] For example, Augustine writes (c. 419):
It is one thing not to lie [with one’s wife] except with the sole will of generating: this has no fault. It is another to seek the pleasure of the flesh in lying, although within the limits of marriage: this has venial fault. I am supposing that then, although you are not lying for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame. They give themselves away, indeed, when they go so far as to expose their children who are born to them against their will; for they hate to nourish or to have those whom they feared to bear. Therefore a dark iniquity rages against those whom they have unwillingly borne, and with open iniquity this comes to light; a hidden shame is demonstrated by manifest cruelty. Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility, and, if these do not work, extinguish and destroy the fetus in some way in the womb, preferring that their offspring die before it lives, or if it was already alive in the womb to kill it before it was born. Assuredly if both husband and wife are like this, they are not married, and if they were like this from the beginning they come together not joined in matrimony but in seduction. If both are not like this, I dare to say that either the wife is in a fashion the harlot of her husband or he is an adulterer with his own wife.[15]
A final source, Caesarius of Arles, writes (c. 522):
“Who is he who cannot warn that no woman may take a potion so that she is unable to conceive or condemns in herself the nature which God willed to be fecund? As often as she could have conceived or given birth, of that many homicides she will be held guilty, and, unless she undergoes suitable penance, she will be damned by eternal death in hell. If a women does not wish to have children, let her enter into a religious agreement with her husband; for chastity is the sole sterility of a Christian woman.”[16]
            In his book, Noonan provides a chart of the positions of the Church Fathers. Most, he indicates, believe that sexual intercourse should only be used for procreation within marriage. A few, such as Chrysostom, held that intercourse was acceptable within marriage even when procreation could not be realized. [17] With this in mind, acceptance of the rhythm method or Natural Family Planning could be seen as a liberal position.
The Penitential Tradition
            Because of the nature of the genre, penitential texts are more straightforward. One of the earliest sources is the Council of Ancyra (c. 372), which decreed:
If any woman has fornicated and has killed the infant thence born or has desired to commit an abortion and kill what she has conceived, or to take steps so that she may not conceive, either in adultery or in legitimate marriage, the earlier canons decreed that such women might receive communion at death; we, however, in mercy judge that such women, or other women who are accomplices of their crimes, should do penance for 10 years.[18]
            Noonan notes that one version of the earliest available Greek penitential, written between the 8th and 10th centuries and attributed to St. John the Faster, denounces as a very serious sin “the drinking of a drug, as a result of which one cannot further procreate.”[19]
            The Armenian Penitential of David of Ganjak (d. 1140) strongly denounces coitus interruptus:
Certain evil men, in the course of fornication or in order to spite their wives, act contrary to Creation, that is, they spill the seed of procreation which the Lord established for the increase [of His creatures], which act is cursed by the church of God. If anyone is possessed by the Evil One and does this many times, he shall be classed among the murderers. But the vardapets, considering his heavy penance, may reduce the period.[20]
Noonan notes that Dowsett believes this work to reflect older Eastern tradition rather than Anglo-Saxon or Irish influence.[21]
            More recent Russian manuals follow along similar lines.[22] Severe penances were prescribed for those who used contraceptives, which were also commonly associated with pagan practices.[23] In her survey of Slavic penitential material, Eve Levin discusses how contraception was perceived:
From the medieval Slavic perspective, contraception, abortion, and infanticide were similar offenses; provisions against birth control did not always distinguish among them. All three represented the same thing: an attempt to forestall the introduction into the world of a new soul. For that reason, all three offenses were sometimes called dusgube’e, literally, “the destruction of a soul.”[24]
She adds, “Serbian epics…presented women who used contraceptives as burning in Hell for their failure to bear the number of children God had intended.”[25]
            In both patristic and medieval thought the practice of contraception was often associated with abortion and infanticide.[26] Why was contraception routinely equated with abortion? Was it simply that medical knowledge was not very advanced, or was something more fundamental going on?
            A recent theory set forth by Roman Catholic theologians John Ford, Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle and John Finnis attempts to address this question.[27] Finnis explains:
The old canon law embodied an understanding of contraception more accurate than neoscholastic theology’s. To contracept, one must think that some behavior is likely to cause a new human life to begin, and that such a beginning of new life could be impeded by some other behavior one could perform, and one chooses to perform the latter with the intention that new life not begin… Choosing to contracept is simply contralife, whatever else may then be said, and rightly said, about the morally significant features of the sexual act performed as contracepted. Thus, the church’s universal canon law, from its inception until 1917 [when the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law was issued] (and thus too those Fathers whose thought was crystallized in this canon), identified contraception as a wrongful act precisely because, as a choice, it is contralife.[28]
            There is also some association in ancient times between the use of such potions and sorcery. The Greek word pharmakia contains both in its range of meanings. As Levin makes clear, this association, and indeed, connection in practice, seems to have persevered through “modern” pre-revolutionary Russia.[29] John M. Riddle, in his book Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, sets forth the thesis that knowledge of contraceptives and abortifacients had to go underground and be preserved as “witchcraft” because the Church was intent on suppressing such knowledge of fertility.[30] 
Conclusion
            Although the evidence presented contains certain ambiguities, a consistent picture does emerge. Diverse sources from Ireland, Italy, North Africa, Greece, Serbia, Russia, and the Syrian Orient all attest to the fact that contraceptives were condemned by the Church. Until very recently opposition to contraception was commonly recognized as the traditional position. Francis Edgecumbe writes: “The traditional attitude has been strictly to forbid all employment of contraceptives, and even to discourage the so-called ‘rhythm method’.”[31]
            Father Gregory Naumenko, writing in Orthodox Life, offers a similar perspective:
The true Church of Christ has never in the past given her blessing for such a practice. This is clearly stated in the Book of Needs (Trebnik), where, in the Order of Confession, among the questions addressed to women we find the following: “Did they wear herbs so as not to have a child,… or whether someone poured something into her womb so as not to conceive, or ate some herb…She is to desist and be excluded for six years.” Here the Book of Needs draws support from a ruling of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. Thus, the use of contraceptives goes against not only the spirit and purpose of the Christian marriage and the teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, but also goes against the clear and direct decrees and laws of the Church.[32]
It should be noted that it was not until 1930 that any mainstream Christian group officially endorsed the use of contraceptives. The Christian world had been universally opposed to the use of contraceptives until that time.

[1] ‘Contraception’, referring to something which is specifically directly against conception, is used throughout this thesis rather than the more general ‘birth control’ or ‘family planning’.
[2] Paul Evdokimov, The Sacrament of Love (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995), 174.
[3] See John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), 13ff. Noonan’s work is a classic with regard to the history of contraception. It should be noted that Noonan was among those who dissented from Humanae Vitae. In his book, he argues in defense of contraception. See also Dona J. Lethbridge, “Ancient Methods of Fertility Regulation,” chapter thirteen of Dona J. Lethbridge, Ph.D., R.N. and Kathleen M. Hanna, Ph.D., R.N., Promoting Effective Contraceptive Use (New York: Springeer Publishing Co., 1997), and John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
[4] A. M. Dubarle, O.P. “Le Bible et Les Pères ont-ils Parlé de la Contraception?” in La Vie Spirituelle Supplement (1962): 588. Soranos’ chapter on contraception was preserved by the 7th century Byzantine writer Paul of Aegina (Noonan, 13).It is interesting to note that many other translators in the patristic period left it out of the Gynecology—see Keith Hopkins, “Contraception in the Roman Empire” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 8 (1965-1966), 132. Hopkins also notes that there is evidence of a general decline of contraceptive knowledge beginning in the 4th century ad (p. 150n.).
[5] Soranos, Gynaecia 1.60, qtd. in Hopkins, 137-138. While Soranos and many of the Fathers seem quite clear, Hopkins does point out that there was not always a clear delineation made in the ancient world between the two (see p. 137-138 and 150).
[6] Paul Veyne, ed. A History of Private Life, Vol. I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987), 12.
[7] Refutation of All Heresies 9:12; qtd. in Noonan, 94.
[8] Divine Institutes 6:20; see Noonan, 94-95.
[9] Medicine Chest Against Heresies 26.5.2; qtd. in Noonan, 97.
[10] Against the Manichees 2.33 (PG 18:1197); qtd. in Noonan, 114.
[11] Basilio Petrà points this out as a specific weakness in his review of J.C. Larchet, Pour une Èthique de la Procréation: Éléments d’Anthropologie Patristique. Intrams Review 5:2 (1999), 229.
[12] Homily 24 on Romans; quoted in Noonan, 98. William Basil Zion, in his book Eros and Transformation (New York: University Press of America, 1992) also recognizes that “contraception is ruled out by St. John insofar as it violates the laws of God”; see p. 241. Hopkins concurs that Chrysostom was speaking about contraceptives and not merely abortifacients, see p. 137.
[13] Homilies on Matthew (28:5); qtd. in Noonan, 95. See Noonan for a discussion about the interpretation of this passage.
[14] Dubarle, 604.
[15] Marriage and Concupiscence 1.15.17; qtd. in Noonan, 136.
[16] Sermons 1:12; qtd. in Noonan 146.
[17] Noonan's chart appears on pp. 57-58. In Homily 5 on First Thessalonians (PG 62:426); Chrysostom states that “…no one blames a man who has lawful intercourse with his wife into old age…” See Noonan, 78 for further discussion of this point. Noonan notes the Pauline character of Chrysostom’s views.
[18] Chapters from the Synods of the Eastern Fathers 77, in Martin of Braga’s Opera, p. 142; qtd. in Noonan 149). The text cited represents a variant reading, perhaps expanded by Martin of Braga himself.
[19] Penitential (PG 88:1904); qtd. in Noonan, 168n.
[20] The Penitential of David of Ganjak, trans. C.J.F. Dowsett (Corpus Scriptorum Christianum Orientalium CCXVII; Louvain, 1961), no. 54; qtd. in Noonan, 168n.
[21] See Noonan, 168n.
[22] Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 175-176. For a survey of penitentials and manuals of confession in the Greek tradition, see Basilio Petrà, Tra Cielo E Terra: Introduzione alla teologia morale ortodossa contemporanea. Bologna: EDB, 1992.
[23] Levin, 176-178.
[24] Levin, 175-176.
[25] Levin, 176n.
[26] Levin, 175.
[27] This argument also has the distinction of not being dependant on a notion of biological teleology. For a summary and critique of this approach see Janet Smith, Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1991), 105-107 and 340-370.
[28] John Finnis, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1991), 85-86.
[29] Levin, 177.
[30] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[31] See Francis Edgecumbe, “Orthodox Reactions to Humanae Vitae” in the Eastern Churches Review 2:3 (1969): 305.
[32] “Pastoral Practice and Contemporary Moral Questions” Orthodox Life no. 1 (1992), 30.