Reason and Faith - Fr. James V. Schall,(NATURAL LAW)

Father Schall: C. S. Lewis' book, Mere Christianity, begins its discussion of natural law by asking: "Have you ever heard people quarrelling?" When they quarrel, they say, "I'm right." They next give reasons for why they are right. First one, then the other person, will give reasons why he is right in the quarrel. Within the presuppositions of a quarrel, both sides appeal to some principle of what is right. Basically, whether in the abstract they believe in the natural law or not, they always give reasons why they are right. If they are not quarreling, then the question of reasonableness of action does not come up. It arises only in the questions of "I disagree with you, and therefore...." Each participant in a quarrel uses an appeal to reason. From this familiar beginning experience, we can establish a whole history of natural law arising from an appeal to reason implicit in our actions and words.

A new book edited by William Sweet collects several of Jacques Maritain's essays on natural law (Natural Law, St. Augustine's Press, 2002). Maritain's most famous definition of natural law was "the normalcy of functioning" of a thing. A thing does what follows from its being. Natural law is found in all of our relations. We constantly appeal to it whether we realize it or not. The history of natural law is another thing. This is the articulated history of what people have said about it from Plato and Aristotle on to present times, together with the alternative or objections to natural law.

From this history of natural law, follow the debates about positivism and whether positivism is tenable. That is where people like Robert George, Russell Hittinger, Henry Veatch, and John Finnis are good. There is today a body of literature, scholarly and polemic, of newer natural law thinkers who have literally thought natural law out very clearly. They have produced a series of works that are quite formidable, even though they may not be recognized as such. Natural law is not easily accepted. The reason for this "non-acceptance" is because we do not choose to go where natural law arguments lead. We keep our guard up. Therefore, there must be a history of the various alternatives to natural law contained in every natural law discussion.

We have quite a remarkable literature, of both critiques of natural law, from Ronald Dworkin and Lon Fuller and many others, together with responses to them. In addition, an ongoing Catholic presence exists in natural law thinking because the papal tradition comments on it. The present papacy, itself something of an intellectual revolution in its own order, has, until relatively recently, been rather neutral on natural law. Natural law was not much emphasized by Vatican II. But since the encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae, Pope Wojtyla has revived his own personal interest in and explication of natural law.

Thus one side of the natural law tradition has been within the Catholic tradition, particularly that stemming from Thomas Aquinas. If, however, someone looks up a bibliography of natural law from another angle, he is going find an analogous notion of natural law from science, or a debate about science and "natural laws." Within the literature, one will also find moral concern defined or expressed in terms of natural law. Likewise, questions of natural law in Protestantism can be found, and there are a fair number of studies in this area (See my "Natural Law Bibliography," American Journal of Jurisprudence, 40 [1995], 157-98).

If I understand its notion of the pure will in Allah and its effect on secondary causes, I do not think one can have a Muslim notion of natural law. But Muslims in Western countries are beginning to realize that, in order to talk to others, they have to have some notion of public life that is not just an appeal to the Quran. Whether they can sustain that discussion in their own philosophy is why I think Al-farabi, Avicenna, and Averröes are important as the intellectual background of the possibility of philosophy in Islam.

Leo Strauss, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, compared Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the context of the relationship between philosophy and revelation. Catholicism and Christianity in general have considered revelation to be indirectly, but properly, related to philosophy. Christianity is not a revelation of a legal system. It is a revelation of a doctrine, or of a person and the need to explain who or what that person is in intelligible terms. The intellectual crisis caused by Greek thought to revelation was expressed from the very beginning of Christianity in philosophical terms. A philosophical component was seen particularly in Augustine. In the Middle Ages natural law was taken up, however briefly, by Thomas Aquinas. The key questions of understanding revelational positions contained a philosophical component.

Strauss held that there was a crisis in the Middle Ages for all of the major revelational-related religions because they did not know what to do with Plato and Aristotle's natural wisdom. These Greek texts had been lost but were being rediscovered both from the Arabs and from direct contact with Greek learning. A Platonic tradition was seen in Augustine, for whom Platonism was known also through Cicero. But the real crisis came in the Renaissance. What do believers do about the incredible knowledge that is found in Plato and Aristotle, who evidently did not know anything about revelation? Theories proposed either that they had a private revelation (and in the case of Plato, even people like Voegelin suspect it), or that what the natural mind can do is vast, and to be praised.

Strauss held that revelation for the Muslims and the Jews was the manifestation of a law or legal code. What is primary in Islam and Judaism is the rabbi, the lawyer. When a problem arose about what to do, they had to go to what the text says. How is the text of the law to be interpreted? Piety consists in observing the technicalities of the law, interpreted in such a way as to prevent revelation from being wrong or contradictory.

But if one thinks in Pauline terms of a law that makes us free, therefore, in a sense, there is no law in any political sense. Rather there is an endeavor to guide oneself to see the right things in the event that comes up. Aristotelian prudence and the "new law" have a resonance for each other. Revelation is not so much a particularized definition of what we can and cannot do, but it is an orientation of the soul - towards what is and away from what is not the good. What God expects is the following of this good even in the intricacies of changing reality and particularity.

But, what revelation is in itself does not, in principle, contradict Plato and Aristotle. They usually have a valid philosophical point even when revelation has another perhaps superior point about the same issue. Revelation simply confirms and clarifies philosophy in its own order. This is where the problem of their coherent relationship comes up. What is the relation of revelation to philosophy? It is a classical question. Josef Pieper speaks well on this topic. Likewise, does Yves Simon who has a wonderful discussion about it in his book, The Tradition of Natural Law: A Philosopher's Reflection. Simon is always on the side of Aristotle, the great theoretician of the nature of the practical intellect.

I don't know if you remember the last chapter of Finnis's book, Natural Law and Natural Rights, a great chapter. He takes natural law as inner priority, not presuming a metaphysic or natural philosophy. We discover the good by experience and by confronting it. The question next arises about the origins of natural law questions, almost as an afterthought after we already discovered such principles and practices, as C. S. Lewis did in his analysis of quarrelling. In his last chapter, Finnis asked, "What does this all mean?" This is where he approaches ontology and theology. Indeed, he is very Platonic. He does not start with ontology, natural philosophy, or revelation, like the lawyers and scholars do. We do have to have, however, an ontological understanding of the world and the nature of human beings, or a whole Aristotelian approach to both.

KM: Now, they're very ahistorical, these new natural law thinkers, but you're saying that they get to where Aquinas and other thinkers like Russell Hittinger get by studying practical intellect.

JVS: Robert George, in his excellent book, In Defense of Natural Law, has a chapter about his relationship to his natural law critics, scholars like Hittinger, Veatch, and MacIntyre. These latter think that a metaphysical foundation of natural law is necessary. George insisted that he is not ungrounded in reality, but his is a different kind of grounding, or better one that arrives at the ultimate questions in different ways. In my mind this controversy is definitely going to be resolved. Hittinger and Finnis go in the same direction when it comes to most major issues of natural law in practice.

Take, for example, the sections in George's book about marriage and homosexuality, about what is right about the marital act. It is a stunning discussion. He explains what is wrong with a homosexual act. He has the essential issue down quite clearly, as does Janet Smith, in her chapter in Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law (ISI Books, 2002). Another related book is Jennifer Roback Morse's Love and Economics (Spence, 2000, reviewed in the Claremont Review of Books). Morse had a column in the November 24, 2002 National Catholic Register called "An Economist-Mum Discovers the Real World." It is the best article about the essence of motherhood I have seen in a long time.

KM: What you're saying is that any coherent notion of natural law relies on revelation in the sense that it points to revelation as its fulfillment. Now what about for a non-Christian, or say even an irreligious person? Can natural law actually bring them to Christianity?

JVS: That is the delicate problem, the Strauss question. St. Thomas, Strauss said, reads revelation into natural law. I think that view is quite wrong. But one can see why St. Thomas says that such reading in is found in experience. Someone might deny that there is a progression in things from one level of being to another, wherein some pointing of things to their origins and to their destiny can exist. One has to refuse any contrary indication of relationships to avoid the implications of what Thomas Aquinas is doing.

E.F. Schumacher's book, A Guide for the Perplexed, has a chapter called "Progressions," in which he talks about the whole order of things. How does one get to or identify each different level of animal, vegetable, and mineral? The fine lines between the levels of being can sometimes make it difficult to tell which level is which. But each level of being is such a clearly distinctive thing in terms of what its properties are. They are not transformable into each other. We do not get a living action out of a non-living thing. Whenever a higher level assumes something on a lower level into itself, it transforms everything on the lower level to its own higher purpose. Anyway, Schumacher explicates this question about progression.

I was just reading a book, Letters of Etienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac. De Lubac wrote a famous book called Surnaturel. The de Lubac book was on the question of whether there is such a thing as a natural desire for the Beatific Vision. His basic position was that there has never been a purely natural state of man. The man who was actually created was always intended for the Beatific Vision, but it was due to him as a grace, not something "due" to his nature. There is not in fact any such thing as a natural man whose soul is structured only to a purely natural end.

And that is why the desire for a supernatural vision is not a refutation of Augustine, or of any Platonist "looking at" this kind of thing. The reason why we are called out of ourselves, even in the highest things, is because we are not intended for anything at any lower level of being, including any hypothetical purely human level. We are always called to that to which we are ultimately ordained. Therefore, we are never going to find at any level in this world a good which will completely satisfy us.

But the Aristotelian side of this issue is that we will find many goods that do satisfy certain things within us. Therefore, the notion that certain things are objectively good is itself a good thing, is itself an orderly good. Natural law understands this longing for higher things as well as for simply good things. What natural law does is to establish that there is an order, some kind of a direction. We do not, ultimately, ever rest at anything which is less than the highest thing. And so whether we accept anything higher than natural order is partially right and partially wrong. Part of the problem of human life is the active rejection of grace. Parallel to that is the active rejection of reason, when reason is going in a certain direction, particularly in the direction of the truth of revelation.

That observation about reason and grace is why I am a great fan of Josef Pieper. Pieper points out that the reading of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas suggesting that St. Thomas "read natural law" into Aristotle is wrong. Whenever Aquinas disagreed with Aristotle, he would always do the following thing: he would explain just what Aristotle said. Aristotle sometimes would take a position that was a philosophically sound position, but which was, looking at it from revelation, a wrong position. St. Thomas would then suggest another equally philosophical position that was compatible with revelation but not necessarily found in it. He would defend Aristotle on philosophical grounds.

A classic example of this position is whether the world is eternal. St. Thomas defends Aristotle as a philosopher for giving an answer that is possible, namely, a finite world could have been without contradiction created from eternity. Since revelation held that the world was created, therefore, it was suggested, Aristotle must have been philosophically wrong. St. Thomas argued that the world could have been finite from eternity on philosophical grounds, so Aristotle was not a "heretic." But the argument is whether revelation, in a certain sense, guides the philosopher to being a better philosopher on his own grounds. The defense of philosophy is therefore in a certain sense the defense of the possibility of revelation, in terms of the mind that wants to see and hear both reason and revelation, to see the whole.

KM: Is there a fundamental flaw in the way the natural rights thinkers understand human nature, in the sense of cutting men off from revelation?

JVS: Frankly I think so. I tend to agree with people like Allan Bloom, who say that natural right is a modern idea, stemming from Hobbes and Weber. There is a legitimate way in which one can use the word jus, the Latin word for "right." There are two words, law and right. There has always been a word for law, and there has always been a word for right. We will have these two words that refer to a different kind of thing. The modern notion of a natural right meant that there are no presuppositions to it other than the will of the legislature. Modern natural right causes its devastations because of this will basis.

The Pope frequently uses the word "right," often getting into such serious trouble with it. The reason, which he seems to understand, is that inevitably we do not hear the word "right" other than in a modern or will context. The reason we do not hear the notion of objective right is that there is another operative theory about the whole place of will and intellect. When we also have theories of divinity in which the will of God is primary, as in Islam and in a direct line of thought from Ockham, to Marsilius, to Hobbes, we have unlimited will the basis of reality. Hobbes, via Ockham and Marsilius, is really a product of theology. He is not a product of political science.

In our terms, in natural right discussion, one can use that word "right." It is a very useful word. It describes that which is due to any human being, objectively speaking, and therefore, what is due to him by others, something by duty. Thus, because there is, in reality, an objective truth that is owed to a rights-holder, "right" is not something that is artificially created by will. Whereas, if we conceive of "right" as that which the state grants us, intellectually it means that we have a "right" to do whatever we want to do or whatever the state permits. Hence, we have a rights theory that simply means that what I will is all right.

The famous comment by John Austin on the British Parliament meant that the British Parliament can do what it wants to do. That may be true as a theory of sovereignty in which sovereignty simply means the highest authority to enforce a law - "no writ runs against the king." But we still have the question of what transcends the positive law, the natural law question. Without a natural law, sovereignty simply means that what the legislature or de facto political power can do in terms of the law is unlimited. This is what St. Thomas meant by including the primary objection to the definition of the law that he gives from Roman Law - "law is what the prince wills." Whenever we have a will-based "right," to find out what the law is, one spends his time finding out what the legislature or the lawgiver, whichever it happens to be, has said what is permitted. The question of the objective justice of the law cannot arise in this position.

Therefore, when we have a habit of mind of doing what the law-giver "wills," the people want to know whether the law gives them permission to do this or that. If it does, then it is considered morally all right to do, no further questions being asked. The conflict between morals and law in a will-based system should be no problem. If a problem occurs, it is because sooner or later we run into a situation where we think that the law should not be commanding what it does on the basis of will alone.

The law in a will system can be made to change if enough votes are cast, as Rousseau says, but that just relocates the same problem in another way. I do not think there is much difference between Rousseau and Hobbes with regard to what they mean by will. One means general will, the other means the will of the prince, but they both allow the will to make the law and to be the law. Rousseau, in that sense, is much more dangerous as he wanted both our souls and bodies. At least Hobbes said that if we are coerced to do something, all one can do is try to resist, but Rousseau said, "I am going to change your soul, or constrain you to change it."

KM: But you don't see certain limitations in Locke with regard to individual's natural rights?

JVS: That is what Jay Budziszewski, in his excellent book, Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (Inter-Varsity, 1997) argues when he says there are two sides to Locke. He holds that there is an old Locke and a new Locke. Some people think Locke is all new and others think he is all old. I tend to think Budziszewski's analysis of Locke is right. Locke was in the process of lowering our sights, the Machiavellian project against Plato. For Locke, natural law is a certain thing about property, about our external well-being. But his system still returns to Hobbes, largely because of Locke's theory of knowledge. Two books I like on Locke and his understanding are those of Charles N. R. McCoy, The Structure of Political Thought (McGraw-Hill, 1963) and David Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Missouri, 1997).

KM: I was wondering if there might be a parallel between Lockean natural right and personalism.

JVS: That is an interesting point to make. I never thought of that in those terms, but I do not think that Lockean natural right is ever going to get to personalism, because personalism has to do with the primacy of the inner soul and its structure. The Lockean notion of knowledge just does not allows us to do reach that far. The whole Essay on Human Understanding is a treatise that prevents us from understanding the essence of things, especially the highest human things.

JVS: The greatest experience is to read Josef Pieper: An Anthology (Ignatius, 1989). It is a collection of his own writings. It goes through all of the virtues, all of the main philosophic, theological questions. For a more complete understanding of philosophy, though, the best book would be Pieper's In Defense of Philosophy(Ignatius, 1992). That is really a good book. Everything that Pieper writes is outstanding. He may be the clearest German mind ever to have existed! He is one of the few philosophic writers who is clear, simple, profound, thoroughly grounded in history on all points, and who covers all the things we need to know about reality. He is a Platonist in many ways. I love his book on the Phaedrus: Enthusiasm and the Divine Madness. We enter this whole question with Strauss about the primacy of Plato versus the primacy of Aristotle. We need both. Plato has become more important to me in recent years, without Aristotle becoming less so. The more we read Plato, the more we understand Aristotle. I have started to teach a course in which we read as much as possible of Plato in one semester. It cannot be done, of course! The point is that it is an overwhelming experience to read Plato. There is no such thing as a university education that does not include regular reading of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.

Ken Masugi: What about Thucydides in regard to the education in the highest things? Consider that very curious ending in Leo Strauss's The City and Man, quid sit deus (what would God be?). Why does Strauss end it with the Latin question?

Father Schall: Strauss' ending was "quid sit Deus?" The only question that we can answer, however, as Aquinas maintained, is "an sit Deus?" (whether there is a God?"). It is on the basis of that question, "whether there is a God?", that the questions about the nature of this God, "what is God?" can in some sense be answered. But that is the whole issue about "negative" philosophy. We cannot know what God is unless we ourselves be God, which we obviously are not. We can know the perfections that exist in things. When we have said everything about them, we know God is still not comprehended by our understanding of what we know. We know thus what he is not. The whole understanding about unity and simplicity in God we arrive at negatively. What is is greater than what we know, even when what we know is a real knowledge and indeed great.

Through all of these existing things, we can know indirectly what God is, because real things analogously exist in our experience and do not explain themselves. Therefore, if they stand outside of nothingness, their causes must be in their origins more different than what we know and what we experience. As it says in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, to protect the human mind's own true knowledge rooted in things, it cannot directly know God, what He is (quid sit Deus?). Therefore, the question of Thucydides about what are the gods? About "what is God?," is the ultimate question. The question is central if philosophy claims to seek to know the whole.

Strauss' position about the relationship between reason and revelation maintains that they both have to come to some neutral accommodation. The one, reason, cannot reach or refute the other. revelation, or vice versa. They have come to an impasse with regard to each other. One cannot refute the other. Both have to say, "we cannot refute the other, so therefore let us live in respect toward one another." This proposed impasse seems quite unsatisfactory. That there need be no impasse is why I think these philosophers so gingerly treat St. Thomas. St. Thomas, though deeply respected, is never really treated quite fairly. He is said to have "preserved" Aristotle, but he does not become more Aristotelian than even Aristotle, as I would hold.

If there is this connection of intelligibility between faith and reason, it destroys the whole notion of an impasse. We have to reckon with the fact that there is something more that arrives to us that is not philosophy, though it is directed to our mind. Therefore, we should look for this "more." Our whole being cries out to do so. We cannot simply reject anything that is out there that answers valid philosophic questions. If we do refuse to consider the revelational answers on theoretic grounds, we then have to take the position that the answer to our philosophic questions cannot come from revelation, or better, from Christian revelation. This refusal is the origin of that kind of ideology (or counter explanation of reality) that arises out of the necessity to advance an alternative.

Someone sent me the other day an account of a Jewish rabbi, about why Christ, on a careful reading of the Hebrew Bible, could not have been God. This is a very interesting reflection. Pious Jews have to explain another kind of Messiah from the same book that the Christians explain their own account of revelation. The modern relation of Christians and Jews at its best is a serious reflection or consideration of the truths of these readings.

Generally the alternative to the Christian account of the last things - this is something Voegelin was good at explaining - will be a this-worldly Messiah, something that is characteristic of most modern ideologies. The Messiah, or whatever it is called, has to be someone or some thing that is looking for the good of everything. But it cannot include the notion of personal death, resurrection of the body, transcendent God. We cannot go that direction and still maintain that Christian revelation is false. Therefore we have to invent a philosophical or theological system that requires us to formulate another answer to these questions. Everyone has to protect intellectually from a position that claims to be true both in the order of reason and revelation.

KM: Now, to go back to the Thucydides. What struck me is that this book, The History of the Peloponnesian War is supposed to be this great book on war, which, of course, it is. But Strauss turns it into the ultimate question about the ultimate question, God. Today we are in a war of sorts, and you take it to be in a sense an extension of the Crusades.

JVS: The Crusades were a much-delayed defensive action that, had they not been undertaken, would have opened Europe to be conquered by a very aggressive Islam. The Crusades were a response to a religion that had conquered three quarters of the Mediterranean, mostly Christian, world, without much effective response. It would have conquered the rest of it had it not been repulsed. The Crusades, granted well-known problems, were a defensive reaction that, in a certain sense, prevented an Islamization of Europe. We seem now to witness a renewed effort again to expand Islam outside its desert confinements. One thing that I find especially interesting is that Islam would probably win this battle against the West if it did not choose to fight, if it just kept increasing in numbers before a declining western population.

There was a lead article in the Post the other day that said something like half of the new jobs in the United States are taken by immigrants, that is, by someone else's children. What does that mean? It means that the whole structure of society is changing right before our eyes and we fail to acknowledge the "culture of death" as a major cause. Even more so is this happening in Europe, because the Europeans do not assimilate new peoples easily. We tend to think, perhaps optimistically, that it is normal to assimilate immigrants. The point is that our immigrants in the United States, up until this time, have been mostly from the same broad culture. They are not anymore, except for the Latin Americans. One thing about the United States is that half of the immigrants here are, of course, Hispanic. They are from the same civilization. They are not from a different civilization. An Hispanic is not an "alien" in our civilization. He is simply a member of the civilization coming up from, say, Mexico. But if we talk about Muslims or Hindus or Chinese, then a deeper problem may exist. But even there, the Chinese and the Arabs in America are very often Christianized. They say something like 80 percent of the Christian Arabs have left the Middle East to the West.

JVS: I think that it is utterly naïve to think this is that this is a fight about "terrorism." I am willing to say that the distinction between good Muslims and terrorists is politically a good or necessary move, a kind of "noble lie." But we should not be naïve about what we up against. The reason we cannot see that there may be a more dangerous problem is because we are mostly all relativists today. Our relativism blinds us and does not allow us to say that there is someone so passionately interested in what he believes, that he does not care about his own life and death.

Aristotle had already said that if someone intends to kill us and does not care about his own death, it will be very difficult to stop him. We have no idea what to do with voluntary and arbitrary suicide bombers, something justified in some Muslim traditions. If someone does not care about his life, unless we get to him first, he can kill us if he wants to, especially if he thinks that he is a martyr in doing so. We see that every day, and it is incomprehensible to us. Why would some fool want to do that? For us often there is no such thing as an idea worth dying for, generally anymore including our own country. To turn around and say, "well this is just a question of a few odd weirdoes," does not work. They are not "weirdoes" in their own terms; their culture looks on them often as heroes.

KM: So how might such a disarmament of Islam occur, a more rational Islam, a sort of "enlightenment" of Islam?

JVS: You have the right issue. Namely, it does go back to the origins of science and modernity, the nature of Islamic rejection of Christianity and Judaism. No diversity, no Trinity, in the Godhead means that, for Islam, implicitly at least, Christians are "idolaters." Christ cannot be "true God and true man," as no distinction in the Godhead is allowed. Once we understand what obedience or submission to a divine will that itself has no other control other than its own pure will means, it seems to follow that there can be no natural law or even no secondary causality. Those who maintain the supremacy of divine mind or the reality of secondary causes are considered heretical in some sense. There has to be a recognition that this understanding of the Godhead as pure will has something wrong with it in principle. It is by no means a neutral principle.

The Pope has been so great on many things. He is always preaching the need of dialogue and of agreeing when possible, particularly with Islam. I think he has constantly propose discussion. We do have to find out what is good in any system, however strange it may seem. We have to work with that good and say we agree on those things that are common.

Remember that Maritain's chapter in Man and the State (Chicago, 1952) is about the practical Democratic Creed. He maintained that we need not care in public how someone philosophically arrives at an agreed-on principle of law or action, though Maritain did not deny that theoretic argument was important. But when we do arrive at practical agreement, we will, so Maritain proposed, all arrive at it together and agree to uphold what is agreed upon. We will live together in peace. I am not so sure that this agreement will happen. Unless we have a theoretical background of agreement, which is truth, we are unlikely to agree on practical things.

KM: Jumping to the current crisis in the church, and maybe possibly relating our natural law discussion to this, what is it that you think non-Catholics should be learning from the way the church reacts? In other words, how should the church be making use of this terrible situation to communicate its teaching?

JVS: It is always important to explain one's own doctrine in light of his own problems. The Catholic Church has never denied that any members of its own Church, whether Pope or peasant, is potentially, or actually, a sinner. Therefore, when Christ said that He came into the world, He affirmed that He did not come for those who did not need Him. He came for sinners. One of the primary purposes of Catholicism lies in the fact that the revelation is designed to address itself to sinners in order for them to stop as much as possible their being what they are, namely sinners. Such ceasing can only happen if the cause of the sin in the human will is in some sense acknowledged, whether it be publicly or privately, depending on the nature of the thing. There should always be a difference between private confession and public scandal. We seem to have arrived at that point where Scripture says that our sins will be "shouted from the housetops."

Normally speaking, we do not want to have people going on and on about their sins all the time. I mean, if we commit a sin, we commit a sin. Get rid of it, restore one's life, and live with it. But in the process of repentance, we must acknowledge that this act is a sin if in fact it is a sin. We must restore order in our souls, where all disorder begins. But once we claim that our sin a "right," a natural thing to do, instead of saying what it is, a sin, then we involve ourselves in an attack on the Church itself, or better, on the right order of things. Once we say that homosexual acts are, as such, an expression of love and devotion, that they have nothing intrinsically wrong with them, and that there is no disorder in the act itself, then we intimate that the only "disorder" is found in the discrimination of people speaking or acting against those practicing such acts. Once we arrive that position, then the whole notion of what one is doing deflects us from the issue itself.

I think that this whole issue in the contemporary scandal in the Church has been obscured in the sense that it is not primarily a pedophilia problem. Statistically and financially, it is a homosexual problem. That position goes against the modern notion of what is legally a "right," versus what is right. And therefore there is a conflict between the public notion of what is a "right" and the fact of sin. To disagree with such a "right," looks like a prejudice, because what one is saying is that, in my world, it is not right. Therefore, we cannot resolve the problem because no common standards can be found according to which the issue can be resolved. It either is or is not an aberration. That is why that George's book, In Defense of Natural Law, is such a wonderful book. He looks at precisely what is the objective issue involved in this activity.

One of the things that is revealed in this whole scandal is the refusal of bishops to be bishops, to be orthodox bishops. It is a failure of leadership. It goes back to who is appointed, how were they appointed, by whom? Why was not anything done about the issue long ago? Insofar as it is a reflection on the Pope, since he appointed most of these bishops, in some sense it shows that there has been a lack of attention to the governance side of the Papacy. That lack goes down the ecclesiastical line. The Church does not have an FBI to keep the Pope informed of aberrations in high places. The Pope is not a super mind who looks over at the United States automatically to find a really good priest to be a bishop. If the Pope says to existing episcopal advisors, "whom do you recommend to be a bishop?" they come up with three names. The three names they come up with are not names the Pope pulls out of the sky. They are three that someone presents him to select. The local authorities testify that they are acceptable. The Pope then appoints one.

The Pope is a charismatic man as teacher. When it comes to appointing bishops, he must choose someone for each open post. He must appoint this bishop to be in charge of a diocese for the good of the souls of the people entrusted to him. If the man fails him, the Pope, who has a generous heart and expects men to follow his example, is left holding the bag. He goes back and wonders to himself, "what do you expect of people who are sinners?" Obviously, he does not expect it to be something disordered that infiltrates the Church's most important training program in a seminary. But if it in fact comes to that, and it is that in certain areas, then something radical has to be done.

The idea of reprimanding or removing someone that the Pope himself has put in charge carries a certain embarrassment. The Pope depends on these men. The Pope does not knock heads, as it were, because he expects bishops, especially sinful ones, to change their ways so that he can do what he is supposed to do. There is something noble about the expectation that honorable men will do honorable things. But whether one can expect every bishop to do it, I don't know. We do not want the episcopal position to be just a temporary appointment. It is supposed to be a lifetime duty and service. The Church is not simply just a Pope. There is a whole structure. The Pope cannot substitute himself to do everything. He is not just a religious leader. Reading George Weigel's biography of John Paul II, one can only exclaim, "what a man!" But no one can help wonder, respectfully, why this Pope has let this scandal go on so long.

JVS: Yes, Ignatius Press published Chesterton's book, What's Wrong with the World. It is a very short book, written in 1910. It is about the woman, the man, the child, and the home. The most important thing we have to recognize today is what is it that goes on in the home? In spite of all our experiments to find something else, there is no substitute for it.

Also, I have been doing this class on Plato. The controversy about genetics is already in Plato. My view of Plato is that when he is wrong, as he was on the proposal for a communality of wives, children, and property, he is, nevertheless, very close to being right. I tried to spell this point out in an essay called "The Christian Guardians" (Downside Review [January, 1979]). We do need certain people to look out for the common good. They should not be there for greed or vanity or pride, vices often symbolized by wealth and honors. Rulers are to be there for service, as the New Testament teaches. Within the Church, the vow allows one to do this service, while at the same time, the vows are to protect the family. This suggests further the terrible wrongness of recent clerical crimes. Unlike Plato, this concept of service is not, in principle, antagonistic to the family; rather it arises out of it.

Christianity says that in order be a father or mother of a family, in order to have a family, one has to go all out for it, give his heart to it. One cannot be putzing around with something else. Whereas if someone is going to be a monk, he has to be a monk. He cannot be worried about a family, however good it is, because it interferes with what he should be doing.

What I naturally recommend for current Christmas reading, to return to your question, is Schall's

On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (ISI Books, 2001). I think that title points to the really crucial question. "The unseriousness of human affairs" is a Platonic phrase that comes from The Laws. When we get right down to it, human affairs, however noble, are not that important. The whole of modernity has been built on the notion that the most important thing is what we do in this world. But this is conceived to be all that there is. Behind most movements for the reformation of the world lies an ideological supposition: since this world is all there is, it must be of supreme importance.

That whole Epicurean argument about false fear of the gods lies behind much of this over-emphasis of the world. I think that Platonic philosophy can leads us to worship because Plato reminds us that God, not man, is truly important. Plato simply implies that, however great man is, which is not to be denied, God is much greater. To Him our highest attention is to be paid. In this matter, I am an admirer of Catherine Pickstock's book, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Blackwell, 1998). In the end, if there is a disorder in our cities, it is probably because there is a disorder in our souls. And if there is a disorder in our souls, it is because we do not seek the highest things, the ultimate seriousness, something that we are called to do in the very structure of our being. Augustine was right, our hearts are "restless" until they find an object worthy of our peace. This too was de Lubac's point that no one is actually created who does not have the Beatific Vision as that which alone will satisfy him.

From this history of natural law, follow the debates about positivism and whether positivism is tenable.

Reply To Judge Richard A. Posner on The Inseparability of Law and Morality

Natural law is not easily accepted. The reason for this "non-acceptance" is because we do not choose to go where natural law arguments lead. We keep our guard up.

Ninth Circuit Disconnect from Natural Law. Apparently, the ninth circuit court has not kept this in mind, nor are they dimly aware of the consequences of attempting to flout natural law the way they have with their latest insane position they've taken about self-defense being only a collective right. That's right! "Insane" is the operative word, here, and I will attempt to connect sanity with natural law so I can eventually expose the reality of the ninth circuit's collective mental illness which precludes a basic understanding of individual rights and which has them flying in the face of the American Way.

A Law Professor's Guide to Natural Law and Natural Rights 20 HARVARD JOURNAL OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY 655 (1997)

...When one mentions "natural law," some ask, "where are these natural laws?" Are they "out there" somewhere? Yet we do not speak of the humanly-developed principles of engineering or agriculture as being "out there," though these principles must be respected if bridges are to stand and crops to grow. The "principles of society" ... are of the same status. They must be respected if people are to pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity while living in society with one another.

Americans at the founding of the United States well-accepted the idea that the world, including worldly governments, is governed by laws or principles that dictate how society ought to be structured, in the very same way that such natural laws dictate how buildings ought to be built or how crops ought to be planted⁸. Consider this passage from a sermon delivered by Pastor Elizur Goodrich (1734-1797) to the governor and general assembly of Connecticut on the eve of the Constitutional Convention:

The principles of society are the laws, which Almighty God has established in the moral world, and made necessary to be observed by mankind; in order to promote their true happiness, in their transactions and intercourse. These laws may be considered as principles, in respect of their fixedness and operation; and as maxims, since by the knowledge of them, we discover those rules of conduct, which direct mankind to the highest perfection, and supreme happiness of their nature. They are as fixed and unchangeable as the laws which operate in the natural world.

Human art in order to produce certain effects, must conform to the principles and laws, which the Almighty Creator has established in the natural world. He who neglects the cultivation of his field, and the proper time of sowing, may not expect a harvest. He, who would assist mankind in raising weights, and overcoming obstacles, depends on certain rules, derived from the knowledge of mechanical principles applied to the construction of machines, in order to give the most useful effect to the smallest force: And every builder should well understand the best position of firmness and strength, when he is about to erect an edifice. For he, who attempts these things, on other principles, than those of nature, attempts to make a new world; and his aim will prove absurd and his labour lost. No more can mankind be conducted to happiness; or civil societies united, and enjoy peace and prosperity, without observing the moral principles and connections, which the same Almighty Creator has established for the government of the moral world.⁹

Notice that, although Goodrich identifies God as the original source of the laws that govern in the moral world, so too does he identify God as the source of the laws that govern agriculture engineering and architecture. With both types of principles and laws, once established by a divine power they become part of the world in which we find ourselves and are discoverable by human reason. Thus today one can no more disparage the idea of natural law (or natural rights) because eighteenth-century thinkers attributed their origin to a divine power than one can disparage the laws of physics because eighteenth-century scientists believed that such laws were also established by God.

Islamic Law & its Challenge To Western Civilization

Most people in the West believe that Islam is a religion in the traditional sense of the word. However, this is a fateful misconception. Islam is not just a religion. It is much more than a religion. Muslims themselves describe their faith by saying, Islam is a Complete Way of Life. This is certainly a more apt description, because Islam is a religious, social, economics, educational, health, political, and philosophic way of life. In fact, Islam is an all-embracing socio-politico-religious utopian ideology that encompasses every field of human endeavor.

The Western view of religion is that a religion is a narrow aspect of life. It does not encompass all human affairs. Religion stands beside economic, politics, and other human institutions. Westerners may differ on matters of religious faith, but they can works together in social, state, and economic affairs. The reason for this is that their respective religions don't claim divine authority over the institutions of governance and economics. Their faiths may differ regarding the salvation of the soul, life after death, and religious rituals, but they don't claim to have divine insight into the institutions of human government and its particular laws.

Islam is different from other religions in that it is not limited to the spiritual aspects of life. It engulfs all aspects of life from the cradle to the grave. Islam claims to have a divine mandate over everyone, and this includes non-Muslims too. While non-Muslims may not be required to observe the religious rituals of Islam, they must recognize the supremacy of Islamic rule over them. As an ideology, Islam promises an economic, political, social, and religious utopian world when the world finally submits to Allah and the rule of Shari'a law. The Islamic objective is to have all aspects a nation's culture and institutions undergo gradual Islamization to yield an Islamic state obeying Shari'a Law.

The Howard Center

The Natural Family

...the natural family is the fundamental unit of society; that it is the basis of all healthy and progressive civilizations.

The best definition of the natural family we know of (because we helped to craft it) comes from the second World Congress of Families gathering.

"The natural family is a man and woman bound in a lifelong covenant of marriage for the purposes of:

the continuation of the human species,
the rearing of children,
the regulation of sexuality,
the provision of mutual support and protection,
the creation of an altruistic domestic economy, and
the maintenance of bonds between the generations."

Our use of the term "natural family" is significant in many respects.

The term signifies a natural order to family structures that is common across cultures, historical, and overwhelmingly self-evident.
The term signifies a wholly defensible expression. "Natural" is not "nuclear," which would limit its scope, nor is it "traditional," which would burden its utility in public discourse. It is what it is, a totally self-evident expression.
The term "natural" precludes incompatible constructs of the family as well as incompatible behaviors among its members.
The "natural family" is a positive expression. It does not require a discussion of negative incompatibilities to define itself.

Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences. was produced by a politically diverse and interdisciplinary group of leading family scholars, including psychologist John Gottman, best selling author of books about marriage and relationships, Linda Waite, coauthor of The Case for Marriage, Norval Glenn and Steven Nock, two of the top family social scientists in the country, William Galston, a Clinton Administration domestic policy advisor, and Judith Wallerstein, author of the national bestseller The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. This is the first time leading family scholars have issued a definitive joint report based on a steadily accumulating and by now very large body of social science evidence about the consequences of marriage and its absence.

The Death of the West In this chilling book, the conservative pundit and presidential candidate zeroes in on unrestricted immigration, legal abortion, and the contempt for all that is Western that has become almost universal since the Sixties.

But once we claim that our sin a "right," a natural thing to do, instead of saying what it is, a sin, then we involve ourselves in an attack on the Church itself, or better, on the right order of things. Once we say that homosexual acts are, as such, an expression of love and devotion, that they have nothing intrinsically wrong with them, and that there is no disorder in the act itself, then we intimate that the only "disorder" is found in the discrimination of people speaking or acting against those practicing such acts. Once we arrive that position, then the whole notion of what one is doing deflects us from the issue itself.

St. Paul's Argument From Nature Against Homosexuality (Romans 1)

Romans 1:26-27

[26] For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones, [27] and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

St. Paul mentions "dishonorable passions." To what does he refer? The next word "for" implies that what follows is an example of what Paul calls "dishonorable." So what does he present as an example?:

For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones,

Paul is saying, then, that there is such a thing as "natural sexual relations" and its contrary, "unnatural [sexual relations]." This brings it down to the matter of natural law and God's created order, and all that that entails. Some things are natural, some are not.

Explaining the Argument for Design and Purpose
While gay couples may adopt children (or have then through artificial indemination), a same-sex relationship is incapable of providing balanced gender modelling. Gay parenting is also inherently unable to provide the model of man-woman relationships that the child will need for building a future marriage.

When human design and purpose is thwarted, we can expect to see a higher level of emotional and physical problems. Dr. Budziszewski points out some of those problems--particularly, widespread promiscuity (even in "committed" gay relationships) and the bodily damage that is the byproduct of sexual practices that are incompatible with one's anatomy. "It's hard to see what is loving," Dr. Budziszewki notes, "about sexual acts that cause tearing, stretching, bleeding, choking, death, disease and pain."

Strauss held that there was a crisis in the Middle Ages for all of the major revelational-related religions because they did not know what to do with Plato and Aristotle's natural wisdom. These Greek texts had been lost but were being rediscovered both from the Arabs and from direct contact with Greek learning. A Platonic tradition was seen in Augustine, for whom Platonism was known also through Cicero. But the real crisis came in the Renaissance. What do believers do about the incredible knowledge that is found in Plato and Aristotle, who evidently did not know anything about revelation? Theories proposed either that they had a private revelation (and in the case of Plato, even people like Voegelin suspect it), or that what the natural mind can do is vast, and to be praised.

AHRC - History of the Hebrew language
The Greeks adopted the Hebrew alephbet around 800 to 600 BCE for their own use, but reversed the picture and the Hebrew aleph became the Greek alpha. Between 600 and 200 BCE the Greek alphabet evolved to what is very close to the modern Greek alphabet. The Romans then adopted the Greek alphabet sometimes with a few changes of their own.

NPNF1-02. St. Augustin's City of God and Christian Doctrine Author: Schaff, Philip (1819-1893)

Chapter 11. How Plato Has Been Able to Approach So Nearly to ...

Certain partakers with us in the grace of Christ, wonder when they hear and read that Plato had conceptions concerning God, in which they recognize considerable agreement with the truth of our religion. Some have concluded from this, that when he went to Egypt he had heard the prophet Jeremiah, or, whilst travelling in the same country, had read the prophetic scriptures, which opinion I myself have expressed in certain of my writings.1 But a careful calculation of dates, contained in chronological history, shows that Plato was born about a hundred years after the time in which Jeremiah prophesied, and, as he lived eighty-one years, there are found to have been about seventy years from his death to that time when Ptolemy, king of Egypt, requested the prophetic scriptures of the Hebrew people to be sent to him from Judea, and committed them to seventy Hebrews, who also knew the Greek tongue, to be translated and kept. Therefore, on that voyage of his, Plato could neither have seen Jeremiah, who was dead so long before, nor have read those same scriptures which had not yet been translated into the Greek language, of which he was a master, unless, indeed, we say that, as he was most earnest in the pursuit of knowledge, he also studied those writings through an interpreter, as he did those of the Egyptians,—not, indeed, writing a translation of them (the facilities for doing which were only gained even by Ptolemy in return for munificent acts of kindness,2 though fear of his kingly authority might have seemed a sufficient motive), but learning as much as he possibly could concerning their contents by means of conversation. What warrants this supposition are the 152 opening verses of Genesis: "In the beginning God made the heaven and earth. And the earth was invisible, and without order; and darkness was over the abyss: and the Spirit of God moved over the waters."3 For in the Timæus, when writing on the formation of the world, he says that God first united earth and fire; from which it is evident that he assigns to fire a place in heaven. This opinion bears a certain resemblance to the statement, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth." Plato next speaks of those two intermediary elements, water and air, by which the other two extremes, namely, earth and fire, were mutually united; from which circumstance he is thought to have so understood the words, "The Spirit of God moved over the waters." For, not paying sufficient attention to the designations given by those scriptures to the Spirit of God, he may have thought that the four elements are spoken of in that place, because the air also is called spirit.4 Then, as to Plato’s saying that the philosopher is a lover of God, nothing shines forth more conspicuously in those sacred writings. But the most striking thing in this connection, and that which most of all inclines me almost to assent to the opinion that Plato was not ignorant of those writings, is the answer which was given to the question elicited from the holy Moses when the words of God were conveyed to him by the angel; for, when he asked what was the name of that God who was commanding him to go and deliver the Hebrew people out of Egypt, this answer was given: "I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, He who is sent me unto you;"5 as though compared with Him that truly is, because He is unchangeable, those things which have been created mutable are not,—a truth which Plato zealously held, and most diligently commended. And I know not whether this sentiment is anywhere to be found in the books of those who were before Plato, unless in that book where it is said, "I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, who is sent me unto you."

EV speaks of a "dominance" when the law of the polis is the only law that matters, (as it appears to be the case in Aristotle, since all the terminology concerns itself only with the justice of the polis--and yet there is also justice of arrangements of other kinds). The dominance of a political justice established by the law of the polis obliterates the justice that extends beyond the justice of the polis to that which is eternal and immutable, as opposed to that which is changeable. Why? If you grant preminence to the law (nomos) of the polis ("the dominance of the politikon") there is nothing to check what we understand as "positive law" The law of the polis is then the only arena wherein arbitrary law arises against it. The dominance of the politikon is when the law of the polis is itself right by nature. It is law no longer accountable to anything else. Nor is it positive law, which only arises in a situation where the law of the polis is no longer preeminent.

That's my take, so far.

21 posted on 02/16/2002 6:38 PM PST by cornelis

MacIntyre in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry provides an overview of Thomistic interpeters influenced by modern philosophy presuppositions, including Rosmini, Kleutgen, Marechal, and even Maritain. His remarks on the priority of divine law for human rights are worth posting here, I think. He notes especially the modern interpretations of Aeterni Patris, and remarks that their interpetations open the way for Thomism to be just one more possible points of view that compete for ascendancy, the very thing that Nietzsche attributed to the will to power. Thomism as such, says MacIntyre,

"by epistemologizing itself after Aeterni Patris, proceeded to reenact the disagreements of post-Cartesian philosophy. Thus there were generated in turn a number of systematic Thomisms, each in contention both with whatever particular erroneous tendencies in modern secular philospohical thought that particular Thomism aspired to confront and overcome and with its Thomistic rivals. Often enough these two kinds of contest wre closely connected. So Marechal, the most distinguished philospher in the Thomistic school founded by Cardinal Mercier at Louvain, made out of Aquinas a rival and corrector of Kant, the work of interpretation being inseperable from that of philosophical apologetics . . . So Maritain at a later date would formulate what he mistakenly took to be a Thomistic defense of the doctrine of human rights enshrined at the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a quixotic attempt to present Thomism as offering a rival and superior account of the same moral subject matter as do other modern nontheological doctrines of universal rights alleged to attach to individual persons.
What Maritain wished to affirm was a modern version of Aquinas's thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural knowledge of divine law and hence of what every human being owes to every other human being. The plain prephilosophical person is always a person of sufficient moral capacities. But what Maritain failed to reckon with adequately was the fact that in many cultures, and notably in that of modernity plain persons are misled into giving moral expression to those capacities through assent to false philosophical theories. So it has been since the eighteenth century with assent to a conception of rights alien to and absent from Aquinas's thought. For on Aquinas's view the rights which are normative for human relationships are derived from and warranted only by divine law, apprehended by those without the resources afforded by God's self-revelation as the natural law. Law is primary, rights are secondary. But for Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modernity, human rights provide a standard prior to all law.
For Maritain this was an uncharacteristic lapse.

On a separate note, the interview above mentions Protestant theologians only by label. I'll name Herman Dooyeweerd as one, and hopefully that bibliography was sufficient enough to include him. In any case, Dooyeweerd in Roots of Western Culture blames Roman catholic social thought and thomism for accepting the Aristotelian (rather than Kantian) influence on Aquinas. The point of issue for Dooyeweerd is this: even though Divine Law is primary for natural law, ("rooted in the creation motive of revelation") the language of subsidiarity in catholic social teaching implies a dualistic motive and casts in doubt the contingency of natural law on divine law. All the same, both reject the epistemological primacy afforded to modern rights ideology and that's a good start.

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