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The Prayer of Lady Macbeth: How the Contraceptive Mentality Has Neutered Religious Life

Paul V. Mankowski, S.J.

The following paper was delivered during the national meeting of the Institute on Religious Life held in Chicago April 16-18, 1993. The theme of this meeting was "Religious Life and Family Life: Co-Partners in the Mission of the Church."

"Unsex me here!" Lady Macbeth's prayer, significantly, was made to the gods of death _ "you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" _ and we remember with a shudder how completely and vividly her plea was answered. She was, largely though not entirely, a contrivance of fiction, and yet Shakespeare's powerful and gruesome anti-heroine was a forerunner of a species of Christian for whom the conjunction of prayer, personal resolve, and the negation of life produced a radically new thing, a third order of sexuality _ a way of being human that is neither authentically male nor recognizably female, neither inceptive nor receptive of life, neither ordered to creation nor designed to nurture: "Unsex me here!"

It is important to notice that when Lady Macbeth prays that she be unsexed, she is pleading not for a diminishment of libido but for a freedom from compassion. The juices of sexual frenzy may flow unchecked; it is the promptings of that must be ripped clean away.

Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!

The upshot is that it is not lust, but life, that must be alienated from the votaries of this Third Order of the Unsexed.

The question I have been asked to address is, "Has the contraceptive mentality affected religious life?" The short answer is Yes, emphatically. I want to use the prayer of Lady Macbeth to discuss the paradox of celibate men and women re- centering their lives on a contraceptive worldview. The contraceptive mentality is more than the conviction that artificial birth control is morally licit. It comprises an extensive fabric of attitudes about sin, religious authority, human fulfillment, as well as sexuality _ attitudes that are determinative of choices central to every human life, including those for whom personal fertility and infertility are utterly irrelevant issues.

Contraceptive acts, and their moral condemnation, are equally ancient. As is well known, the contraceptive crisis was brought into being with the development and marketing of orally administered anovulants. The Pill (or, as it is irreverently known in Britain, the Tablet) focussed the moral issues and polarized the champions of rival solutions decisively and irrevocably. This is not simply, or even primarily, the consequence of what is misleadingly called the Sexual Revolution brought on by the Pill. The Sexual Revolution was no revolution at all but the normal operation of social laws of gravity. "Folks done more of what they done before" simply because one constraint _ fear of unwanted pregnancy _ was eased. The water of sexual libido ran downhill after a sluice-gate was opened: no surprise there. No, the real revolution occasioned by the Pill not was not sexual but religious.

Contraception has traditionally been censured as an instance of sexual misdemeanor, and sexual sins have generally been treated by moralists of all traditions as sins of the weakness of will. Pagan, Christian, Moslem and Jew knew equally well that it's wrong for the head of the household to sport with the dairy maid, but recognized that in a moment of weakness a man generally resolved to live uprightly could succumb to temptation. The understanding of remorse, penance and reconciliation varied widely, but all acknowledged the phenomenon of lust mastering the moment. The Pill changed all that. To contracept by this method involved not a surrender to the urgent passions of an instant but an action _ better, a series of actions _ clearly foreseen and assented to in cold blood, passionlessly, with deliberation and resolve. The majority report of Pope Paul VI's commission on birth control clumsily attempted to assimilate use of the Pill to the class of human actions undertaken impulsively, but this concession was rightly rejected with scorn by Catholic couples who insisted that they embarked on contraception as a consciously (and, in their view, conscientiously) studied choice. To those who had made their peace with the Pill in the early '60s, the shock delivered by was staggering. It still is.

"Unsex me here!" begged Lady Macbeth,
. . . make thick my blood.
Stop up th'access and passage to remorse
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th'effect and it.

This is not a person trying to justify the ill means to a contemplated good end, or someone asking for pardon after the fact for an acknowledged wrongdoing. She prays to be rid of the access to remorse, to get beyond questions of conscience entirely. She resolves to be fixed on her purpose and on it alone, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Once the Church included the choice to contracept by means of the Pill in the class of morally condemned actions, no Catholic could leave the confessional in doubt about his capacity to "sin no more" in this respect (as, say, a penitent might doubt his strength to avoid the sins of fornication or blasphemy). Contraception involves no temptation at all in the sense of pressure to yield to an impulse (Was Lady Macbeth to murder Duncan?) but rather the resolution to lead one's life in defiance of the Church. To contracept while attempting to remain a Catholic accordingly required the development of an entirely novel religious stance, a stance founded on two beliefs: first, the conviction that the teaching Church is wrong in an area in which she explicitly claims authority; and second, the conviction that a Catholic can coherently hold that the Church is wrong in one place and right (or right enough) in others such that Church membership remains a conscientious and meaningful choice.1

Even on the pastoral level, very few religious were directly affected by the face-value content of Yet the religious stance that emerged in the rejection of was of paramount importance to their lives. For it involves the belief that there is a higher, or deeper, or at any rate more reliable mediator of God's will than the teaching Church. This point cannot be stressed too much. If the Church is wrong in , the judgment that it is wrong can only be made with reference to some standard. That standard, obviously, cannot be the Church herself; some contend that it is moral intuition, others a more academically respectable reading of scripture or of the history of doctrine; still others some comprehensive system of ethics or logic. But the crucial point is that whatever standard is taken as fundamentally reliable, this standard judges the Church, and is not judged by her. Here is the real revolution incited by the Pill; next to it the rise in promiscuity is a mere flutter. As did their lay married counterparts, religious men and women instinctively perceived (and in many cases, rushed toward) the breach in the dam of doctrine and discipline caused by adoption of this new standard. Keep in mind that this new crisis is of an entirely different order from the classical moral controversies in Church history, which involved the laxity and rigor of the Church's treatment of what all parties to the dispute agreed to be sins. Dissenters from are about something else entirely, for they maintain that an action specifically and categorically condemned by the Church may be contemplated and chosen in good will as a licit option by a conscientious Catholic.

The remainder can be read here. Recall this was done in 1993....