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My title is, What is Love, Plato's Philosophical Theology of the Body?

In 1980, David Lodge, addressing the controversy precipitated 12 years earlier by the

papal encyclical Humanevite, wrote, The availability of effective contraception was the thin

edge of a wedge of modern hedonism that had already turned Protestantism into a parody of itself

and was now challenging the Roman Catholic ethos. The ban on artificial birth control, he continued,

was the last fragile barrier holding back the Catholic community from joining the great collective pursuit of erotic

fulfillment, increasingly obsessing the rest of Western society in the 1960s. Lodge was not

unsympathetic to Humanevite. Conservatives in the church, he wrote, who predicted that approval of contraception

for married couples would inevitably lead sooner or later to a general relaxation of traditional

moral standards and indirectly encourage promiscuity, marital infidelity, sexual experiment,

and deviation of every kind were essentially correct,

and it was disingenuous of liberal Catholics to deny it. Still, Lodge thought,

the conservatives had unknowingly conceded defeat on the contraception issue. Through acceptance of non-artificial means of regulating

birth, the church had already allowed that sexual pleasure pursued apart from reproduction

could be a legitimate function of sexual intercourse. The erotic impulse was not alien to purely Christian love. Agape. Lodge is not a theologian,

nor a church historian. He is a novelist and also a keen observer of psychological and social dynamics,

and so also a keen observer. His discourses on Humane Vite occupies nine pages in a chapter

...