To Kill a Continent - On Assisted Reproductive Technology (III)
There is no surer way to kill a continent than to destroy its families. Ironically, assisted reproductive technology contributes to this mass destruction.
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This is the third part of a series of articles on assisted reproductive technology. Here are links to Part I and Part II.
There is no surer way to kill a continent than to destroy its families. Ironically, assisted reproductive technology, advertised and embraced as a tool to make fertile the barren womb, contributes to this mass destruction, all the more dangerous for its subtlety – and our blindness.
For it is blindness indeed that does not see the value of a human life, of whom the angels sing, as the Archangel Gabriel cried to the Virgin Mary, bringing tidings of the birth of a Child: “O highly favored one!”1 From the moment that life comes into existence, it is meaningful; it is loved into being. Every act of love proclaims the meaningfulness of life – from the silent passion of a loving husband’s gaze upon his sleeping wife to the earnest focus of a little child on an ant crawling up his arm, all say to the object of attention: You are truly meaningful. You are truly worthwhile. You are truly lovable, no matter what darkness or venom you may harbor within yourself. Your existence is proof of it. And for the lover, the beloved becomes a window through which he may perceive his own meaningfulness – for how has it come to be that he has seen something or someone so wondrous? (Yes, even the tiny little ant is a wonder! How marvelous it is that it lives, walks, and waves its tiny antennae up and down as it feels the path in front of it!) In those exalted moments, he feels truly awake to the reality of things, and his gratitude discloses the source of the truth that he sees, of the lovability of the world. He echoes that outpouring of gratitude from the heart of Elizabeth, cousin of the Virgin Mary: “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?”2
The one who loves in this way, who sees the goodness of things and people, the value of their existence, is also the only one who can see the difference between man and woman. And likewise, only the one who sees this difference can say: “It is good to be alive.” By reducing the person to a biological mechanism, assisted reproductive technology would eliminate the profundity of the difference between the sexes.
Sexuality reveals that the human person is not just open to others, but is an openness. The abstract notion “human being” does not, in reality, exist. What does exist are men and women. The human person is necessarily sexed and is necessarily incarnated in a dual mode: man and woman – each meaningless without the other. And it is the union of man and woman that is, in a sense, paradigmatic of all human love.
The idea that nuptial love is paradigmatic is a Christian novelty. For it would seem that it is in Sacred Scripture that the love between the Creator and the creature is first described in nuptial terms: in the Old Testament, the prophets speak of the covenant between God and Israel as a marital relationship and of idolatry as prostitution;3 and in the New Testament, heaven is described as a “wedding banquet”4 and Christ’s relationship with the Church is said to be imaged by that of a bridegroom and his bride.5
For Aristotle, it was not so.
According to Aristotle, friendship is the highest form of love – and the relationship between man and woman as such is a lower kind of friendship. Friendship in the most basic sense is between persons who consciously wish each other’s good and who frequent each other’s society. However, people wish each other good based on the pleasant, the useful, or the good. Consequently, he speaks of friendships of pleasure, friendships of use, and friendships based on the good. The first two “do not love each other in themselves, but insofar as some benefit accrues to them from each other.” This does not mean that they are exploitative. After all, a certain “mutual wishing of the good for the friend’s own sake” is implied in friendship as such. Margaret H. McCarthy gives examples of a friendship between two witty men, where one likes his friend because he is agreeable, but also wants to be agreeable in turn; and a friendship of utility, where the friend wants to be useful in return. Nevertheless, the highest friendship is that based on the good, in which friends “wish each alike the other’s good in respect of their goodness”. They love each other for themselves, and not in respect of something else.
Aristotle would hold that a friendship based on the good is based on a similarity of goodness between the friends. The virtuous love each other, and they alone can be true friends.6 Therefore, friendship is closest when there is greatest similarity between friends.
Turning to the relationship between man and woman as such (not as “virtuous persons” in general), Aristotle says that their friendship is of a lower kind on two accounts: first, it is a friendship of pleasure and use. It is a friendship based on the enjoyment of the other and the mutual supplying of each other’s needs in the generative act and the management of the household.7 Second, he holds that a woman is merely a deficient man.
Before rising in uproar against this statement, we, beneficiaries of a culture formed by 2,000 years of Christianity, must give the Stagirite his due. For him, all material beings are composed of form and matter. “Form” is that principle that makes things be what they are – “treeness”, “antness”, “humanity”, etc. Matter is that principle that makes one ant different from another. Now, gender does not seem to be a “form”, for the male and the female are not different in species. A male dog and a female dog are both just that: dogs. It would seem, then, to be a matter of… well, matter. Gender would appear to be an accidental characteristic.
Now, here we must introduce another crucial notion for the “Stagirite”: “contrariety”. Contraries represent the extremes of a genus. “Contrariety” is extreme difference: hot-cold, darkness-light, etc. Difference presupposes an underlying unity. When we speak of the comparison of terms so different as to be incomparable, we sometimes refer to it as “comparing apples and oranges.” What we mean is that one apple can be compared to another because they both are apples. An apple can be said to be a better apple than another apple, but not a better apple than an orange – that sounds absurd. If we were to attempt to compare apples and oranges, we would do so, again, based on some underlying unity, some underlying genus of which they both form a part, e.g., they both are fruits. We could then specify what it means to be a fruit and determine whether a given apple or orange may be held against that standard and found wanting.
But when we speak of “contrariety”, as the examples we have given demonstrate, we are talking about the existence of a quality on the one hand, and its absence on the other. Cold is the absence of heat. Darkness is the absence of light. One apple is better because the other apple is “less of an apple”. Man and woman appear to be contraries. Therefore, one must be less than the other. (Aristotle concludes that it is the woman who is less than the man, though chivalry impels me to add that he does so despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)
If man and woman are unequal, their friendship must be of a lower form. How, then, could nuptial love be paradigmatic based on such an understanding of sexuality? For it is precisely that which is at issue here: the meaning of human sexuality.
Yet this is not the only issue that hangs in the balance.
If those who are unequal – and, it would appear, profoundly so – cannot live a noble friendship as unequals, then must we not despair, as Aristotle did, of befriending the Absolute Good? Indeed, how could we even conceive of a God who freely creates us out of love? Why would God create us? How could love possibly be primary? And if we are not lovable because we exist, if we are not loved into existence, then isn’t our purpose undiscoverable, hidden in the mind of an inscrutable God? Do we “proceed” from God by necessity, outgrowths from his substance as the hand is an “outgrowth” from the body? Is all the universe God, and God the universe? Or might we not be arbitrary and meaningless, as so many have thought throughout the ages?
Nor are the implications of the nature of human sexuality merely ontological. They cannot be, precisely because there are ontological implications. We could ask: Is the insistence on “social justice” an imposition of a strictly unnatural agenda? In Nietzschean terms, are social justice and democracy a subtle tyranny of the weak? Is there meaning in the suffering of the elderly and the dying, or those who will be born with congenital disorders? Indeed, if the person might be meaningless, then wouldn’t it be better to put an end to the charade, to extinguish the absurdity that is humankind from the universe? Would it not be better for Africa to perish in flames and smoke, or in the protracted collapse of demographic decline, unmourned, unsung?
But like a sunburst breaking through the clouds of our confusion, we hear again the angel’s voice crying, “O highly favored one!” From a distance, there comes the voice of the One who speaks the words that hope had not dared to dream of, the words of a God who “so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” And man and woman hear from His lips a call that their inmost hearts cannot resist. Their love is not destined to founder and crumble beneath the storms of life: “From the beginning, it was not so…”8
So, what is the meaning of human sexuality? What has Christianity revealed? How do reproductive technologies subvert it? We will continue our exploration of these questions in the next article in this series.
References
Books
Chinua Achebe (1994). Things Fall Apart. Penguin Books.
Marcus Tullus Cicero (44, BC). Laelius De Amicitia.
Margaret Ogola (1994). The River and the Source. Focus Books.
St. John Paul II (1995, 25 March). Evangelium vitae. Libreria Editrice Vaticana: Vatican City.
The Bible.
Articles
Adrian Nyiha (2023, September 22.) The African Ontology and Thomistic Personalism – On Assisted Reproductive Technology (II), The AfroDiscourse, https://theafrodiscourse.substack.com/p/the-african-ontology-and-thomistic
- Hope and the Meaning of Life in Sauti Sol - Part 2. The AfroDiscourse, https://theafrodiscourse.substack.com/p/sauti-sol-hope-and-the-meaning-of-life-part-2
DC Schindler (2016). Perfect Difference: Gender and the Analogy of Being. Communio 43(2), pp. 194-231.
Margaret H McCarthy (2005). “Husbands, Love Your Wives as Your Own Bodies”: Is Nuptial Love a Case of Love or Its Paradigm? Communio 32(2), pp. 260-294.
Cf. Lk 1:28.
Lk 1:43.
See, for instance, Ez 16:1-15, 60, 63.
Cf. Rev 19:6-9.
Cf. Eph 5:22-33.
Cicero’s Laelius De Amicitia (a treatise on friendship) makes precisely this assertion.
A similar view can be found in the specific idea of polygamy in many African societies. Okonkwo of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a classic example, as are the Luo as described in Margaret Ogola’s The River and the Source.
Cf. Mt 19:8.