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A Review by Patrick Killough [01-07-00]
HUMANAE VITAE: A GENERATION LATER is three good books between two covers. --It is a meditation manual for very serious young men and women considering Christian marriage as a path to holiness. --Secondly, it is a book about recent Roman Catholic theological debates on the link between personal fulfilment in marriage and openness to children. --Finally, A GENERATION LATER argues from natural law and personalist philosophies for the truth of a vision of the rock bottom elements of any SECULAR marriage.*** The best part is also the briefest: Chapter 8, “Self-Giving and Self-Mastery: John Paul II’s Interpretation of the [60s movement leading to Pope Paul VI's] encyclical, HUMANAE VITAE.” The current Pope proves a tough but profound read. His grounding of marriage in the creation stories of Genesis could help men and women all along the Judeo-Christian spectrum rediscover God’s plan for a human nature created equally male and female. This part of Professor Smith’s large book reminds of St Francis de Sales leading ordinary people to seek personal perfection and holiness. Less devotional and more scholarly are the large portions of the book in which University of Dallas Professor Janet Smith presents, interprets and defends against “revisionist” Catholics the theological and biblical teachings on human sexual behavior of Popes Leo XIII, Pius XII and Paul VI, culminating in the personalist insights of John Paul II. Christians who make Scripture the firmest anchor of personal belief may be pleasantly surprised by Bishops of Rome shown hard at work to derive from Sacred Texts a vision of married behavior which firmly unites both the life transmitting and the personal bonding dimensions of married sexual intercourse. The book is weakest in sketching a non-revealed, purely philosophical ethics of sexual behavior. Janet Smith herself wonders if a Western philosophy teacher today is not inevitably influenced by what she has learned from Jewish and Christian teaching and practice. Secular readers might well prefer more reliance on Plato and Aristotle and less on Thomas Aquinas. Professor Smith sketches an exalted vision of secular marriage. All men and women everywhere, if they have good will, self-discipline and a well-formed conscience will see in the special form of friendship called marriage that it is meant by nature to be heterosexual, life long, exclusive and that its acts must not permanently separate the life-generating and the friendship-forming dimensions of sexual intercourse. What lingers after this book is read is an exalted vision to which only a small, heroic portion of the real world will ever likely aspire. It seems easier to be a monk or nun than to be a Janet Smith married couple. For our world is not largely populated by unselfish lovers giving totally of themselves to their spouses and willingly co-operating with and consciously imitating their Maker. Through the highest forms of marriage, whether secular or sacramental, idealists make each other better persons and beget children whom they also bring to God. One misses with Professor Smith earlier moralists’ emphasis on distinctions between venial versus mortal sins. A GENERATION LATER optimistically proclaims that even ordinary, sluggish humans, if they did but try, would find in marriage an heroic search highly likely to lead both to happiness and to the outer limits of human perfection. That vision may not win many converts from
the Playboy Philosophy. It might, however, make a professed religious life
in community with vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience to religious
authorities look easy by comparison with marriage.
[SMITH, Janet E. (1950- )
-OOO- for INDEPENDENT TORCH
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