www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Discerning what to accept from the Pope

"Every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" is intrinsically evil


This would make Natural Family Planning intrinsically evil would it not?

I support the NFP alternative but wonder about the same thing.

I suppose the argument would be that you are being procreative with your wife . procreating the relationship -

We need to start a different thread about sex

No.

"Natural family planning" is a bit of a misleading phrase for these purposes. NFP consists mainly in not, ahem, engaging maritally on this or that occasion. There are, of course, myriad reasons why a Christian couple might at any moment be doing something other than exercising their marital rights. Sleeping, for instance.

So while intent does enter into the morality of taking most decisions, it cannot change the intrinsic morality or immorality of an action. At any rate you will immediately see the difficulty and practical impossibility of declaring evil the mere fact of not doing it at any given moment, for even the most upstanding Christian gentleman must take a breather every now and then.

Yes, it would, if one accepts the fundamental premise that any attempt to regulate reproduction is a perversion of the purpose of sex--moreso in classic Western theology, which holds that all sex is inherently sinful, but that conjugal relations within marriage are redeemed by the need for procreation. Hence, any attempt to circumvent procreation is by definition sinful. That's the consensus of the Latin Church from Tertullian through Augustine to Aquinas and down to Pius XI.

Of course, if one does not hold that sex is inherently sinful and only redeemed through procreation, we can toss out this line of reasoning. But if we do, let's not pretend that the attitudes of the Latin Church have not evolved (that is to say, "changed") on this subject.

Stuart, you and I have disagreed on this subject before but you bring something new to this discussion for me. I had heard that Augustine taught that sex was inherently sinful, but not that anyone else really taught that. Could you help me out here and provide me with some easily attained references of Aquinas and especially the relatively more recent ones like Pius XI? I would really appreciate the most recent reference on this position as the official understanding of the Roman Catholic Church on sex, that is that it is intrinsically sinful and only redemable via procreation. Are there any good books that go over the change in attitude from Rome on this subject? Also, how would you descrbe Rome's current understanding since you did just say that it has evolved (that is to say "changed").

I do hope you give this curious young brother some references as I have seen you tell others to basically just take your word. I am definitely a get as close to the original source as possible kind of guy.

Thank you in advance,

Kyrie eleison,

Manuel

And very recently, at that.

I've never been able to understand how the "unitive" aspect of sex that is referenced throughout HV came about in recent Roman theology and philosophy, as you note that the Roman church has a long history of denying it.

I'm not saying it's an arbitrary evolution, but that's how it seems. As far as I have been able to understand, that evolution has not been explained.

That this view of sex (owing much to Aquinas) never developed in the East means that the very terms of the discussion are uniquely Roman.

So we come full circle to the topic of the thread - "how to discern what to accept from the Pope?" (As this teaching is uniquely Papal, the majority of the Roman church having been against it). I'd add to the question, "...especially when the very frame of reference in question is uniquely Roman?"

As I see it, you can either go the "uniate" route and plop Roman dogma on top of Byzantine ritual and reflexively revert to the Roman teaching despite any contradiction that may arise, or you can maintain an Eastern theology and patrimony in communion with the Pope, acknowledging his special role and primacy - with an eye towards how that was developed in the first century, when these two Churches indeed did develop differences in their understandings of issues such as this and nevertheless maintained communion.

Just like many Eastern Catholics would tell you that they understand the Theotokos' relationship with sin much differently than it is defined "infallibly" by the Roman Church, and still maintain communion with the Pope in so doing.

What's the difference?

This is an excessively narrow view, nearly to the point of a distortion. Augustine and Aquinas both discuss goods of marriage other than procreation. Both also discuss the enjoyment of pleasure as faultless, etc. If you had written that conjugal relations are redeemed by "marriage", and not only by "procreation", you would be accurately representing their positions.


This is why a different example would better serve the wider discussion. On this, participants seem keen to set up a straw-man version of the Latin position, the better to knock him down, or demonstrate substantial flaws in understanding. Either way, we seem more to be engaged in engaged more in mass self-justification than discussing the subject of the thread.

Um, no. It's just an open-eyed historical assessment that reflects what the Western Church believed and taught right down to the 20th century--at which point, it changed its mind a bit. You are quite wrong in saying that sex was redeemed by marriage; the West did not believe that--it believed that sex was redeemed by procreation IN marriage. Every sex act outside of marriage is sinful; every sex act within marriage not intended for procreation was considered equally sinful.

Next you'll be telling me the Western Church never taught that the stain of original sin was passed on through sexual reproduction.

You're entitled to your opinion on that, but you aren't entitled to rewrite history because it is apologetically convenient to do so.

Here we go again.

Aquinas enumerates three goods of marriage (which I believe he took directly from Augustine).

Two of these, even taken individually, he says "excuses" the evil of the marriage act.

Procreation is one of them. Why are you ignoring the other? Is it because it doesn't fit with your tidy argument?

Then we have Augustine:

"For intercourse of marriage for the sake of begetting has not fault; but for the satisfying of lust, but yet with husband or wife, by reason of the faith of the bed, it has venial fault: but adultery or fornication has deadly fault, and, through this, continence from all intercourse is indeed better even than the intercourse of marriage itself, which takes place for the sake of begetting. But because that Continence is of larger desert, but to pay the due of marriage is no crime, but to demand it beyond the necessity of begetting is a venial fault, but to commit fornication or adultery is a crime to be punished; charity of the married ought to beware, lest while it seek for itself occasion of larger honor, it do that for its partner which cause condemnation."

De Bono Coniuagli [newadvent.org]

Augustine was pretty influential in the West.

Does coming into communion with the Pope mean that we must adopt this type of view on sex and marriage, which never took root in the East?

Perhaps a study of concupiscence might be in order. This as opposed to conjugal love.

Here it is necessary to know how the ancients (and their medieval counterparts) understood the mechanics of human conception. Women, like men, were believed to emit a kind of seminal fluid, and the combination of the male and female fluid in the womb was what resulted in pregnancy. Women, as well as men, had to achieve orgasm in order to conceive. This was probably a pleasant side effect for women, although it caused problems for them in cases of rape: if the woman conceived after being raped, it was assumed that she enjoyed it, therefore was at least passively consensual in the act.

Beyond that, given this understanding of human reproduction, all human sexual activity involved the sin of lust, only partially mitigated by the duty of procreation. This is the "shut your eyes and think of England" defense. Of course, it's all poppycock--was then, is now.

One reason the Latin Church changed its understanding of sex in marriage was the impossibility of sustaining an obsolete theory of human reproduction in the face of accurate biological science.

And those who wonder whether we as Eastern Catholics need to accept the long discredited doctrine of a fourth century African bishop should ask first whether anybody in the Latin Church--other than a few mindless reactionaries--accepts it, either. There is no need to be more Catholic than the Pope.

Finally, one needs to recognize that different attitudes towards sex existed between the Eastern and Western Churches throughout the entire first millennium. The East always had a more optimistic view of human nature than the West, including a more optimistic view of human sexuality. It wasn't a problem in the first millennium, so why should we make it a problem today?

There is no evil in the marriage act, according to St. John Chrysostom: "The nuptial chamber can be as holy as the monk's cell" (Homily on Ephesians).

I'm not disagreeing. It's beside the point.