Cardinal Mercier and the Natural Law, Part 12: The Moral Order Needs God

THE MORAL ORDER IS CHARACTERIZED by immutability and universality. Any order that is neither immutable or universal is an order other than moral: it is man-made, conventional or positive.

In terms of immutability, the law, so long as the matter is the same, can be expected to be the same. The precepts of the moral law do not change, as they are set in the nature of things. The moral law is not like the injunctions of Allah in the Qur'an, which are subject to being abrogated by the seeming whims of divinity or the desires of his prophet. There is no notion of naskh (نسخ) or abrogation in natural law.

[T]he application of the moral law is general, independent of the circumstances of time and place, and in this sense is eternal and common to all; it binds every man in possession of his natural reason no matter what time he may live or where he may dwell.

[250(57)] Thus, Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Atheist . . . all are bound by the one, unchanging moral law, and all are answerable to God for its breach. The moral law is thus exceptionless, but in saying this, one must also be wary not to identify the moral law itself with human expressions of it or human formulae. Thus, weakness in our expression or our formulas may require exceptions, adaption, or modification when confronting particular cases or new situations. But this is not a change in law, but a change in our description or grasp of it.

The moral law is recognizable, knowable, universally, by all men who have come to the age of reason, that is when he "has it in his power to reflect and is capable of perceiving the subordination his actions should have in regard to their moral end, and the time at which he has become a moral agent." [250(57)] No man can be ignorant of the first principles of the moral law, or even of the immediate conclusions of those first principles, though invincible ignorance is possible for more remote conclusions. Therefore, all men know that they ought to pursue good and shun evil, and that, for example, the intentional killing of an innocent human being is intrinsically wrong. There can be no ignorance of such fundamental principle and immediate conclusion. It is possible, however, to envision situations where someone may be invincibly ignorant of more remote conclusions that require additional knowledge or which are complicated by circumstances. Thus, a person may be invincibly ignorant that the use of contraceptives that are also abortifacients are, under the natural law, morally wrong (in addition to their contraceptive nature) because they involve the intentional taking of innocent life. (See generally Dr. Bogomir M. Kuhar, Infant Homicides Through Contraceptives (Bardstown, Ky: Eternal Life 2003) (5th ed.) They may be entirely unaware of the chemical nature of the drug they are taking and the abortifacient nature of it.

Can there be a morality independent of God? Mercier rejects the notion. Too bound up with God is the moral imperative, so that it is both erroneous and impracticable to posit a morality that is independent of God. Indeed, not only is God, who is knowable by reason, both the fundament and ultimate end of the natural moral order, revelation, and the graces of the Church, are aids that, under the present condition of the human race, are necessary.

An independent morality may include deistic or rationalistic views, or, more radically, atheistic ones. The deistic and rationalistic views, while not wholly rejecting God from the scope of the moral order, seek to establish a moral theory that does not include, and is independent of, all positive (i.e., revealed) religion:

Catholic doctrine merely sums up accurately the lessons taught by experience when it proclaims the universal and constant inferiority both in knowledge and practice of the moral law among those peoples who are without the supernatural aid of revelation and grace. The doctrine of the relative necessity of Revelation--which finds its application equally in the moral as in the purely speculative order--is briefly summed up in the following extract from the [1st] Council of the Vatican: 'To this divine Revelation it is indeed to be attributed that those things which, in matters divine, are not of themselves beyond reason can be known, even if the present condition of the human race, by all men, without difficulty, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error.'

[256(66)] (See, in this regard, The Need for Revelation: "Pis-Aller" by Matthew Arnold.)

The atheist moral program is even more objectionable. It is in vain to build moral theories without God. "Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam. (Ps. 126:1) "Now a moral system without God is as erroneous as it is impracticable." [256(66)] Mercier gives three reasons for the intrinsic failure of the atheistic moral program. First, without God there is no basis for any moral imperative. Here, the Dostoevskian wisdom within the Brothers Karamazov bears its full weight as encapsulated by the words: Если Бога нет, то всё дозволено. If God did not exist, all things would be permitted.

Take away, as the ultimate term of our volitions, an absolute, that is to say, an end which subsists of itself, and all our aspirations towards good and all our deliberate volitions cease to have any final object. We cannot conceive the absolute obligation to will what is morally good--in other words, duty--unless there be, beyond all contingent goods that I may or may not will, a good which is not contingent, which is an end in itself, namely God.

[256-57(66)] Thus atheism is as much a moral, as it is an intellectual, disease.

Moreover, natural theology shows, by reason, that an ontological order exists which demands the existence of a First Cause, of God. Moreover, the ontological order as it relates to morality, and upon which the entirety of the moral order depends, requires that there be a God who loves himself with necessary love, "so that only in view of Himself can He love those beings who are capable of sharing, though in a way far different from Himself, His infinite Perfection or His infinite Goodness." [257(66)] Without God that is love, and without God sharing that love with all men, it is impossible to envision a moral order. Put succinctly, God is both the justificatory source as well as the end (goal) of the moral order.

Finally, recourse to God is required to provide the assurance that observance of the moral law is supported by sanction. "For how is the observance of the moral law to be sufficiently guaranteed if man has no certitude that a just and powerful God will sooner or later establish an eternal harmony between virtue and happiness on the one hand, and between vice and misery on the other?" [257(66)] Without God as the great equalizer, the Eternal Judge, one despairs of the moral project, and one will lapse into morality as expediency. Invariably, morality will temporize.

Cardinal Mercier also criticizes secularist models of morality. These are identified by the suppression of God and his replacement with some other substitute or absolute. He divides those into three general groups. The first involves a sort of implied social contract, or social debt. The second posits a sociological origin of duty. The third group appears to tout progress of man's nature, self-realization or self-development. All these suffer from endemic faults and are doomed to failure. [257-58(67)]

Potpourri of Natural Law

QUESTIONS RELATING TO A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL LAW overlap with other philosophical questions, including those relating to freedom of choice (free will), the priority of reason over will, and the existence of God. So inextricably intertwined are these issues, that it is doubtful that a natural law theory can be accepted if there is a disbelief in free will, if will is given precedence over reason in the assessment of good (if right takes precedence over good), or if the existence of God is denied. Before he discusses the natural law proper in his The Tradition of Natural Law, Yves Simon summarily addresses these three issues.

Free Choice. The principal point that Simon stresses in his discussion of free choice is to dispute the false dichotomy generally posited between free choice and lack of causality or order. There is a tendency to pit freedom of choice against law. This is a false opposition, as freedom of choice is not inconsistent with reason, or order, or with law, but works hand in glove with these. Whatever its source (and the Christian tradition would place its source in the Fall), there is a tendency to place law and freedom in opposition, since freedom is seen to exist only where there is indeterminacy, which is another way of saying where there is no law.

There seems to be in the human mind an everlasting readiness to associate free choice with indeterminacy and, under favorable circumstances, to place the principle of freedom in a lack of determination, in the lack of a positive feature, in a lack of causality and rationality.

Simon, 58. Thus (the argument goes), if God exists, man is not free. Or if natural law exists, we are not free. Or if man has a human nature to which he ought to conform, he is not free. Unless man is servant to no God, to other man, to no social convention, to nothing but his existential self, he is not free. Autonomy from reason, from (any) cause, from nature, from God is the hackneyed recipe for freedom. It is as foolish a recipe, or perhaps as satanic an inspiration, as the argument that one is free only if one jumps into an abyss and is spared the limitations of being supported by the earth. It is this false perception which must be overcome and seen as a falsehood, or else one will be blinded to the notion of freedom within the constraints of reason, or of law, or the love of neighbor, or under God.

Human Lemmings Following "Autonomy" to a Moral Abyss

Yves Simon notes that the notion of freedom as absence of cause was historically manifested in the Epicurean response to the atomism of Democritus. Confronted with the necessity associated with the Democritean "necesitarianism" that "everything is made of atoms," and its doctrine that the "soul is nothing else than an aggregate of atoms that are more polished and move more smoothly that others," Simon, 59, Epicurus devised the notion of the unpredictable, indeterminable swerve, in the downward rain of atoms, the paregklisis (παρέγκλισις), what Lucretius, the Roman materialist, called the clinamen.

(Oh how dark and dreary, nay depressing, are Democritus and Lucretius! What sort of comrades are they! Let us theists say with the poet John Dryden in his "Epistle the First" against all who would rob us of our God, whether they be Democritus or Lucretius or Christopher Hitchens :

. . . [T]his is a piece too fair
To be the child of chance, and not of care.
No atoms, casually together hurl'd
Could e'er produce so beautiful a world.
Nor dare I such a doctrine here admit,
As would destroy the providence of wit.

And poor Epicurus! Who would save us from this dreariness by the doctrine of swerve! As if we should be happy that, in jumping into the abyss, we may gain meaning from the fact that we "swerve" before we hit bottom. Either way, it seems to me, we end up rather flat, our end being one-dimensional, pancake-like.)

We ought not to accept the general concept without some sort of critical frame of mind:

Some discrimination should be exercised before assuming that a free act has to be an event without a cause, and event without law and without reason, a thing akin to chance but more causeless than a chance event.

Simon, 60.

Let our minds stay. Let our minds pause. Let our minds go up instead of down. Let us suppose, even ex hypothesi if not ex fide, the opposite is true. Let us suppose:

[F]ree choice is to be described not as a case of indetermination but rather as a case of superdetermination, as a distinguished case of domination over diverse ways of acting and over the diversity of acting and nonacting, the notion of a law immanent in free natures assumes a sense widely different from whatever its sense might be in a theory which conceives of freedom after a pattern of indeterminacy.

Simon, 60. It would seem that the advocate of the natural law, and not its opponent, has the open mind. Only the close minded man, the man of a lemming-like mind, is foolish enough to jump into the abyss and hope for swerve. The open-minded man is willing to think that perhaps it may be wise to think twice before jumping into an abyssal void.

Reason versus Will. "In most, if not all, phases of its adventurous history, the notion of natural law is violently attacked whenever the voluntaristic trend is predominant." Simon, 61. When, in one's philosophical or jurisprudential view, will is placed before reason, there can be no natural law. This is because natural law places reason as logically prior to the will. Reason, not will, is the fundament of law. Since our understanding of the natural law is affected by the predominant notion of human law, when legal positivism reigns, as it did, for example, in Nazi Germany, or in the philosophy of the Franciscan William of Ockham (ca. 1288-ca. 1348), or the jurisprudence of the English philosopher John Austin (1790-1859) or the American Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) we may be sure that the environment for the natural law is poor. Legal voluntarism, a jurisprudence where law is primarily will, the command of the sovereign, is like throwing salt into the jurisprudential field. It stunts the growth of a sound philosophy.

God. The tentative words of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius--etiamsi daremus non esse Deum--seem to us moderns harbingers of the evils of atheism in law. (For a short treatment of Grotius's statement see Natural Law: Ecstasis and Telos.) God's absence in law is far from theoretical when we are confronted with the gaunt faces and lifeless bodies of our brothers and sisters in the Gulag of Soviet Russia or the Konzentrationslager of Nazi Germany.

Victims of the Rejection of Natural Law at a Gulag

Victims of the Rejection of Natural Law at Dachau

In the face the evils harvested by Marxist materialistic philosophy in Communism or in Nazi Germany where the will of the State overcame all right, one is haunted by Dostoevsky's message as summarized by Jean Paul Sartre: "Where there is no God, all things are lawful," Если Бога нет, то всё дозволено. Natural theology and natural law are inextricably intertwined, despite the efforts of many to divide them and their insistence that one can proceed lustily without the other.

There is no question of denying the connection between the problem of natural law and the problem of God. But it is not easy to show precisely what this connection is. One may wonder whether the study of moral nature and of natural law is a way to the knowledge of God or whether the knowledge of God must be had before the proposition that there exists a natural law of the moral world is established.

Simon, 62 Simon favors the first option.

The Prison of Atheistic Existentialism

But from this logical priority in the order of discovery it does not follow that the understanding of natural law can be logically preserved in case of failure to recognize in God the ultimate foundation of all laws. Again, the intelligence of natural law is a way to God. This means, for one thing, that it normally leads to the knowledge of God's existence and it means, for another, that if the way to God is blocked, no matter what the obstacle, the intelligence of natural law is itself impaired (this is logically inevitable).

Simon, 62. Thus, someone who, like Jean Paul Sartre, has locked himself in a cell of atheistic existentialism with the fundamental premise that there is no God, will be forced to reject, time and time again, any concept of the natural law because to accept it would require abandonment of his fundamental premise. Jean Paul Sartre, is, in the words of the popular Eagles song "Hotel California," a prisoner of his own device. And there are stubborn men who will remain in the prison made with their own hands, though someone shows them that their cell door is wide open. 'Tis a pity he's a fool.