“Certain things,” writes Josef Pieper, “can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and life. If we are not ready to do that, we give up all claim to saying anything significant.”

Exactly what things did Professor Pieper have in mind here? Love and Death. These are, he insists, the two main subjects to be given the most searching study because, unlike lesser things, they are inclusive of everything. Festivity, too, may be included in the Pieper inventory, which makes perfect sense inasmuch as the two sentences I began this essay with come from a book called In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity.

But let’s stick with the first two for now since they seem the most salient examples we have of experiences that, inescapably, implicate us in the whole galactic sweep of human life. They are totalizing events, in other words, and so whatever attitude we take up before each one of them will determine our entire stance in relation to reality. The whole shooting match, I am saying, impinges upon how we think and feel about love and death.

Having a child, for example, would certainly seem to be just about the most transformative moment in the lives of most people. What could possibly be more determinative of the stance we take before the world than the decision to welcome new life into it? To marvel and take delight in the child who, through the very loins of human love, we have brought into being?

When Whittaker Chambers, for example, decided that he could no longer remain an atheist, following his break with the Communist Party he had spent years working for as an underground spy, it was the direct result of his having become a father. He simply could not believe that her birth was the chance result of random atoms colliding with one another in a godless universe.

“I was watching her eat,” he writes in Witness, his moving account of his life and the circumstances that led to his conversion. “She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life.” And when his eye fell upon her ear — those “delicate convolutions of her ear,” he calls them — it all at once hit him that only God could have arranged so amazing a feat. Such “intricate, perfect ears,” could not possibly have been the outcome of chance.

Only God could have produced such a prodigy; only he could have created so lovely a child. Which means, of course, that unless God were to concert his own freedom to make it happen, along with our willingness to let it be, it simply would not happen. That is because, while the proximate cause of the child will obviously be the parents choosing to have one, only God can, metaphysically as it were, jump-start the process. The body is given by the parents, but the soul, that divine spark which animates the person, is given directly by God.

Knowing this to be true, one has got to believe that in seeing any child suddenly come into the world, we cause God to smile. Or, as the poet Sandburg once put it: “The birth of a child is God giving his opinion that life should go on.” Which, in the order of finality, is always a matter of God’s doing, the exercise of his will causing life to begin. As if God were to exclaim before each child he made, “It is so good that you are here!” And if the nature of the good is that it be diffusive of itself, and if there can be no greater good than God, then the good can never really stay put, can it? It has simply got to burst into being, filling the universe with new life.

And yet, to believe some people, it all seems to be winding down. In a recent piece in The New Yorker entitled “The End of Children” (March 3, 2025), a staff reporter by the name of Gideon Lewis-Kraus, has produced a great deal of research to document the point.

“For hundreds of thousands of years, we had gone forth and multiplied,” he tells us, but now the epoch of life is fast coming to an end. The coming fertility collapse threatens to become a universal fact. According to the evidence, births are plummeting everywhere. Including even here in the United States, where fertility rates over the past two decades have fallen 20%, putting us dangerously below replacement levels.

And no one quite seems to know why. At least that’s what The New Yorker is telling us. “Anyone,” says the author, “who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong.” However, not long after tiptoeing around the subject, he actually does venture an explanation, which may well have something to do with God, only he cannot quite bring himself to say so directly. “The only overarching explanation for the global fertility decline,” he opines, “is that once childbearing is no longer seen as something special — as an obligation to God, to one’s ancestors, or to the future — people will do less of it.”

Well, then, does God have something to do with the supply of children in the world, or not? Is he a stakeholder in keeping the human race going? If so, then clearly he needs us to lend a helping hand — as we read in the Book of Genesis.

“Be fruitful and multiply,” we are exhorted in 1:28, “and fill the earth and subdue it.”

Deuteronomy is equally emphatic on the subject. Which, come to think of it, was the reading I heard recently at Mass. “Moses said to the people: 

‘Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God…you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you… If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, I tell you now that you will certainly perish… I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live …’ (30:15-20).

It seems that we must not only, as Jesus commands, “suffer the little children to come unto me,” we must suffer them to come unto us. And only by coming first unto us may we then commend them to Jesus, who will bless us abundantly for choosing life over death.