Veritatis Splendor: Part 18--Created Conscience or Creative Conscience?

IT WOULD SEEM THAT THE "law of the heart," the heart's yearning for freedom, and what Pope John Paul II calls the "'heart of the person," his moral conscience through which the natural moral speaks to man, would have an intimate relationship. And so they do. Unfortunately, it is an intimate relationship that is modernly misunderstood.

In fact, one's understanding of conscience is at the heart of one's understanding of the relationship of freedom and law: and this would suggest that errors in understanding conscience either stem from misunderstandings on the relationship of freedom or law, or that errors in misunderstanding the relationship between freedom and law stem from misunderstandings of the role of conscience. So pivotal is conscience in the moral life.

Modernly, errors between freedom and law, specifically errors which exalt freedom "almost to the point of idolatry," result in man usurping the role of creator, thus leading to a "'creative' understanding of moral conscience," VS, 54, an understanding which "diverges from the teaching of the Church's tradition and her Magisterium," which is to say, it departs from the Words of Christ Jesus, the Word of God. Modern definitions of conscience ascribe to it a creative role to the point where it becomes not so much conscience, but an anti-conscience, something which bedevils conscience, a devil in the mind.

Based upon what seems to be a legion of justifications seemingly pastoral and humane, some modern theologians--unidentified in name by the Pope--enlarge the role of human conscience at the expense of law, of norms, of precepts. In general, these theologians tend to deprecate the role of law, norms, or precepts, and tend to ascribe to conscience a "creative" role, as if conscience ought to be considered the source of norms, precepts, or law, and not the faculty in man by which he recognizes the law, norms, or precepts as extra-consciential. Conscience is thus creative and free from God's law expressed in norms and precepts, and not created and submissive to those norms and precepts. Conscience is accordingly not seen as playing an adjudicatory role (applying pre-existing law to existing exigencies), but rather as a sort of legislative role (creative law to fit existing exigencies). Understanding conscience as the faculty of decision rather than the faculty of judgment, conscience becomes for these theologians the tool by which man in his autonomy crafts for himself laws of his own making rather than a faculty by which man can assess his prior acts or his prospective acts in conformity with those precepts, norms, or laws which may be found already given man either in his created nature, or in Divine revelation.

Clearly, such a notion of "creative conscience" suggests that conscience creates moral norms, and implies an autonomy of conscience from any law. In fact, some of these theologians suggest that only by making moral decisions "'autonomously' would man be able to attain moral maturity," as if venturing on one's own apart from God and his law were in fact acting in accordance with God's desire for mankind.

It follows that these theologians take a dim view of the Church's role in teaching applicable moral norms. They view the Church's teaching role as stifling this individual creative conscience, in limiting authentic autonomy, and in causing conflicts of conscience which ought not exist.

All manner of means are used by these theologians to "soften" the Magisterial role or pronouncements short of rejecting them wholesale. Commonly, these theologians ascribe to the Church's teaching sort of general guiding value, with at best a pastoral but not dogmatic or commanding role, and always subject always to the exceptions of an individual conscience. The situation envisioned by these theologians would be analogous to a situation whereby the legislature passed a law whereby the executory or judicial official enforcing the law retains the absolute discretion to enforce or not enforce the law. It is doubtful in such a case whether that law would be law at all, since it is not ultimately binding upon the official. Thus the Magisterial role in guiding conscience is essentially demoted to an irrelevancy. Conscience's rights are absolute over and against the voice of the teaching Church and, ultimately, given the role willed by God for the Church, over the law of God itself, indeed over God himself (for in God there is no distinction between Him and His Eternal Law). "No one can fail to realize," the Pope states, "that these approaches pose a challenge to the very identity of the moral conscience in relation to human freedom and God's law." VS, 56.

This description of conscience, as the creator of values, as the faculty or source of complete human autonomy, as an internal legislator rather than internal judge, despite the velvety words used by these theologians, is not conscience, but is more like the devil in one's mind.

These theologians, like Milton depicted Satan and his mind, see human conscience as:

. . . [H]e who now is Sovran [Sovereign] [and] can dispose and bind
What shall be right . . .
. . . .
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
. . . .
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.*

This sort of false depiction of conscience tells God and His Church what Manfred said in Lord Byron's poem by that name:

Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know;
What I have done is done . . .
. . . .
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts,
Is its own origin of ill and end,
And its own place and time; its innate sense,
When stripp’d of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without,
But is absorb’d in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.**

What is involved here is a re-definition of man, and a re-definition of God. In fact, it is a revolt. It is a replay of what occurred in the Garden of Eden, where man seeks, shrouded in words like "creative," "pastoral," "feeling," "psychological complexity" and so on, to shrug off the law of God as relevant to his day-to-day activities.

In fine, it is non-serviam redux.

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*John Milton, "Paradise Lost," Book 1.246, 254-55, 261-63.
**Byron, "Manfred," III.iv.146 ff.

Veritatis Splendor: Part 11--Neither Autonomy Nor Heteronomy, but Participated Theonomy

FREEDOM IS A GIFT from God, one that allows us to participate in God's own freedom, which is part of God's own personhood. Indeed, as the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et spes puts it, "'genuine freedom . . . is an outstanding manifestation of the divine image' in man." VS, 38 (quoting GS, 17). "God left man in the power of his own counsel," says the Book of Sirach (15:14), and these words and others like it in Scripture "indicate the wonderful depth of sharing in God's dominion to which man has been called." And this dominion is not only over things and other animals, but "in a certain sense over man himself." VS, 38. We have a certain kingship over ourselves. And just as a king is obliged to use his power over his realm for the common good of his realm and not for his self-aggrandizement, so likewise are there limits to our freedom, and these limits are not arbitrary or imposed from the outside, they are fundamental to the very purpose, the very nature of that freedom. Since freedom is something that makes us alike to God, it follows that freedom is something that ought to be used to makes us like to God:

[M]an himself has been entrusted to his own care and responsibility. God left man "in the power of his own counsel" (Sir 15:14), that he might seek his Creator and freely attain perfection. Attaining such perfection means personally building up that perfection in himself. Indeed, just as man in exercising his dominion over the world shapes it in accordance with his own intelligence and will, so too in performing morally good acts, man strengthens, develops and consolidates within himself his likeness to God.

VS, 39. So man has a certain autonomy:* it is part and parcel, a necessary concomitant, of this gift of freedom. And yet, this autonomy is not absolute, as if severed from the gift of freedom and from the Giver of freedom, the Creator. A notion of freedom that disassociates itself from God "produces particularly baneful effects, for '[w]ithout its Creator the creature simply disappears . . . . If God is ignored the creature itself is impoverished.'" VS, 39 (quoting GS, 17). Man wounds himself, he is guilty of self-mutilation, if he misuses the gift of freedom.

Freedom must be used within the constraints of reason, in particular practical reason, which is that part of reason in man which "discover[s] and appl[ies] the moral law." This freedom is part of the moral life to which man is called because "the moral life calls for that creativity and originality typical of the person, the source and cause of his own deliberate acts." VS, 40. Reason discovers these laws: it does not make them. The reason for this is that "reason draws its own truth and authority," not from reason, but "from the eternal law, which is none other than the divine wisdom itself." Freedom is a gift, and participates in God's eternal personhood. Reason is a gift, and it participates in God's eternal reason. Man might justly claim absolute autonomy in the use of his freedom and the use of his reason if these were faculties he gave to himself. But it is manifest, indisputable, self-evident that freedom and reason are not things that man has given to himself. They are part of his nature, the nature that is a gift of God, the Creator. There is, in short, a "rightful autonomy," a "genuine moral autonomy," and a wrongful or spurious autonomy. VS, 40.

Jesus weeps at man's disobedience, at man's
exercise of absolute autonomy independent of Him.

Autonomy is a quality in man that is found at the "heart of the moral life," of being a person, and is, in fact, a sine qua non of that moral life and personal dignity. God is front and center of the moral project before man because it is a shared enterprise, one might say.

The moral law has its origin in God and always finds its source in him: at the same time, by virtue of natural reason, which derives from divine wisdom, it is a properly human law. Indeed, as we have seen, the natural law "is nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided. God gave this light and this law to man at creation".* The rightful autonomy of the practical reason means that man possesses in himself his own law, received from the Creator.

VS, 40.

It is an error most fundamental to separate man's freedom from God, to suggest that the autonomy that comes with our freedom and reason creates values and moral norms independent of God: "Were this autonomy to imply a denial of the participation of the practical reason in the wisdom of the divine Creator and Lawgiver, or were it to suggest a freedom which creates moral norms, on the basis of historical contingencies or the diversity of societies and cultures, this sort of alleged autonomy would contradict the Church's teaching on the truth about man." VS, 40. Such a freedom and use of reason would, in fact, not be true freedom and reason. It spells death to freedom and reason. This sort of absolute autonomy must be rejected as baneful.

There is an opposite error that must be avoided. And this is the notion that man has no freedom, no reason, and that the moral law that is imposed upon him is heteronomous.***

Human freedom and God's law meet and are called to intersect, in the sense of man's free obedience to God and of God's completely gratuitous benevolence towards man. Hence obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom. If in fact a heteronomy of morality were to mean a denial of man's self-determination or the imposition of norms unrelated to his good, this would be in contradiction to the Revelation of the Covenant and of the redemptive Incarnation. Such a heteronomy would be nothing but a form of alienation, contrary to divine wisdom and to the dignity of the human person.

VS, 41.

So if neither absolute autonomy nor heteronomy are proper, how should we view the proper exercise of man's limited autonomy? The proper way is to view man's autonomy as theonomous, or one of participated theonomy.†

Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man's free obedience to God's law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God's wisdom and providence. By forbidding man to "eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", God makes it clear that man does not originally possess such "knowledge" as something properly his own, but only participates in it by the light of natural reason and of Divine Revelation, which manifest to him the requirements and the promptings of eternal wisdom. Law must therefore be considered an expression of divine wisdom: by submitting to the law, freedom submits to the truth of creation. Consequently one must acknowledge in the freedom of the human person the image and the nearness of God, who is present in all (cf. Eph 4:6). But one must likewise acknowledge the majesty of the God of the universe and revere the holiness of the law of God, who is infinitely transcendent: Deus semper maior.

VS, 41.††

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*The word autonomy, of course, is a word with Greek roots. It comes to us from the Greek word αὐτόνομος (autonomos), which is a compound word of αὐτο (auto) = "self" and νόμος (nomos) = "law", and so literally means "one who gives himself his own law"). In one way many does give himself his own law (he discovers it, applies it, rules himself under it), but in another way, that law is under a greater law and the dominion of God from which that very autonomy comes.
**Quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas, In Duo Praecepta Caritatis et in Decem Legis Praecepta. Prologus: Opuscula Theologica, II, No. 1129, Ed. Taurinen. (1954), 245.
***Heteronomy, like autonomy, is a word with Greek roots, a compound word formed from ἕτερος (heteros) which means "other" or "different" and νόμος (nomos) = "law", and so literally means a law that comes from outside oneself, is foreign to one's nature.
†Theonomy is formed from the Greek word for God, θεός (theos), and law, νόμος (nomos), and so literally means "God's law."
††The text [Deus semper maior, "God is always greater"] refers to Saint Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum LXII, 16: CCL 39, 804 (Parvuli sumus: ergo protegat nos Deus sub umbraculo alarum suarum. Quid cum maiores facti fuerimus? Bonum est nobis ut et tunc protegat nos, ut sub illo maiore semper nos pulli simus. Semper enim ille maior est, quantumcumque creverimus). Translated: "We are little: therefore, God protects us under the shadow of His wings. What means have we to become greater? It is good for us, then, that He protect us, so that under his greatness we are like chicks [to the hen]. For He is always the greater, however much we have grown." In our autonomy, we are, as it were, under the shadow of God's wings. In exercising autonnomy is if it were independent from God, we are to God as chicks are to a hen, a hen who wishes to gather her chicks under her wings, but whose chicks are unwilling. Cf. Matt. 22:37; Luke 13:34. This absolute autonomy is what makes God weep, like Christ did over the city of Jerusalem.

Toward a Recapture of Nature in its Fullness

FOLLOWERS OF ST. THOMAS linked God's knowledge of vision (his scientia visionis) with the knowledge of future free acts of man; they were loathe to separate them. This foreknowledge in God, the Thomist argued, necessarily implies a congruent act of God's will or divine decree that such free act happen. The future free act is known by God in virtue of, in fact in that very decree; accordingly, no future act can exist unless God has also decreed its existence.

The fact that man's freedom operated under the divine causality did not bother the Thomist. Thomists felt secure with the notion that human freedom was created freedom, and so, being created, human freedom was to be measured relative to created causes or relative to divine causality. For St. Thomas Aquinas no man was free from divine causality. Human freedom, therefore, was exercised within the umbrella of divine causality or divine providence. In short, there was no concept of freedom from God or outside of God. Freedom was always seen as under God. In fact freedom from God or freedom outside God, was not seen as freedom at all, but as a fall into the abyss of slavery, and a vain one at that, for no one could outrun our outmaneuver God and his providence. A man could be relatively and yet truly free, and nevertheless be fully under the rule of God: "[B]ecause the same act of free choice is reduced to God as to a cause, it is necessary that whatsoever happens from the exercise of free choice be subject to divine providence. For the providence of man is contained under the providence of God, as a particular cause under a universal cause."* Even more directly: "[I]t is not repugnant to liberty that God is the cause of the free act of the will." Et sic non repugnat libertati quod Deus est causa actus liberi arbitrii. De malo, q. 3, a. 2, ad 4. See Long, 38-39.

God as First Cause: End of Human Nature

Molina, however, thought that the Thomist doctrine subverted man's freedom, and human freedom was a highly regarded commodity in the Renaissance. Pico de Mirandola had already published his famed Oration on the Dignity of Man, the manifesto of the Renaissance. With respect to future events, therefore, Molina sought to find some means to explain how God can know a future free act before it happens and yet assure that that act occurs freely, without being decreed or caused by God. Molina thus attenuated the causal role of God in the area of human liberty. While he tried mightily to reconcile human freedom and providence, Long--a committed Thomist--sees Molina "falling as it were by accident into the error whereby freedom is defined in respect to God rather than with respect to its finite and contingent effects." Long, 39.

In analyzing the concept of human freedom, Molina distinguished between different kinds of knowledge in God. In God, this knowledge is one and simple; however, this knowledge may be distinguished in reference to the objects of that knowledge. There are, Molina says, such things as necessary truths, which are naturally known, and which even God cannot change. An example would be the truth that bachelors are not married, or circles are round. These really are not at issue when it comes to the foreknowledge of future events. They are prevolitional, or perhaps better, supravolitional, i.e., they were outside of the will of God because God, by their very nature, could not change these truths. By definition, these truths are established by the way things are and have to be. God could not causes these things to be other than what they are. They were outside God's causality.

As to future events, Molina distinguished two sorts of events and the knowledge of God had arising out of them. Molina divided future events into contingent events and conditional future contingents or futurabilia. Contingent events were those which depend upon God's will alone, and the knowledge God has of these is absolutely free. When a contingent event is involved, God is the primary cause of it. An example of this would be God creating Adam. God could have or could have not created Adam, and that fact that God created Adam makes it true. And so this event is known by God because God caused it.

There is, however, in Molinist thought a concept of knowledge that relates to a situation that is midway between contingent truths and necessary truths. There are future events which, given certain conditions, would exist, but because of future conditions, will not, in fact, exist. These are events that depend upon the autonomous choice of the creature and relate to the future. These events involve futurabilia (future subjective contingents) or futura conditionata (future contingents). God is not their primary cause. Like the necessary truths they are prevolitional, outside of God's will and providence. The creature is their primary cause, so, from the divine perspective they are caused by secondary causes. They are outside God's causal order.

These future contingent events are known by God through what Molina, in his distinctive doctrine, called "middle knowledge" (scientia media). These events (called counterfactuals)** need not be come to pass, and if come to pass they do so not through God being their primary cause, but they come to pass depending on the choice of the creature.

The classic source text of this sort of knowledge is in the Gospel of Matthew:

Woe to you, Chorazin! woe to you, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes . . . And you Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

Matt. 11:21, 23.

God as Trinity: Man's Supernatural End

God knows through "middle knowledge" what would have happened in Tyre and Sidon and Sodom had miracles or mighty works been done there. Because God has this knowledge, Molinists say God has some control (but not total control) over the future. God knows through "middle knowledge" infallibly that, if Adam enters the store on April 5, he will buy galoshes instead of Wellingtons. He knows that if Adam were to enter the store on April 4, he would buy Wellingtons instead of galoshes. If God wants Adam to buy Wellingtons instead of galoshes, he will work things out (if He can and if He wills) so that Adam does not go to the store on April 5, but instead on April 4. In this manner, God achieves what he wills, but man remains entirely free and autonomous. God does not cause Adam to chose galoshes over Wellingtons on April 5. The cause of that choice is entirely Adam's autonomous. But God decrees the circumstances*** so as to achieve the result he wills without interfering with the freedom of his creature. The point is that "middle knowledge" represents God's knowledge without control. That means that within this middle knowledge there is no law.

And that's where the rub is. What Molina's theory does, unfortunately, is to exclude, at least speculatively, a huge part of man's activity outside of the causal order and providential governance of God, that is, outside his law. "The Molinist account unwittingly carries the implication that the domain of human action is outside divine providence insofar as outside divine causality." Long, 39. Molinism, especially if taken out of its Christian context, therefore leads to a concept of human freedom that focuses on freedom with respect to God rather than to the contingent and finite effects of God's providence, that is, secondary causes. And it is this theory that has led theologians not rooted in Thomistic doctrine to see freedom as necessarily meaning freedom, not from secondary causes, but from God's causality. Whether a cause is "contingent [and hence free] or necessary [and hence determined] is a function of that cause's relation to God." Long, 38. "That is, it is assumed that, to be free, a cause must possess the liberty of indifference with respect to divine causality." Long, 38. In fact, Long suggests that the "libertarian account of freedom as an absolute capacity outside of the governance of the omnipotent God is prevalent even among believers."**** Long, 39.

The Molinist proposition in the hands of the secular political or moral philosopher becomes a wicked notion indeed:

[I]f the human will is not subject to divine providence, then it is not ruled and measured by the eternal law. . . . Hence, if we affirm the theonomic conception of natural law, we need also to affirm that the human will is autonomous [of God] neither in being nor in action, but is moved to its act from without [by God], yet in such a manner that this motion is truly its own motion. That is to say that the very motion that is received by the will from God is that whereby it moves itself in free self-determination. Like existence itself, the positive substance of may action is most my own, yet also most a gift.

Long, 40. Ultimately, if we believe that the natural law participates in the eternal law (that is, is thenomic), we must believe that the human freedom is relative freedom, created freedom, and is a true freedom that is exercised under the Providence of God. Providence extends only to where there is power and no further. Wherever God's power is not exercised, that is, where there is freedom from God's causality, there can be no providence and no law.

Molina erred by creating an envelope of human freedom from God, and, while that thought may not have borne ill fruit while the social body was healthy and vigorous with Christian mores, it, like some sort of virus, waited until the body was weak to flare up into a feverish concept that man is not free unless he is free from God. To be sure, Molina had patched up his system with the notion of scientia media or middle knowledge. "The formulation of Molina has sadly outlived the profound Christian context of his work, which limited the ill effect of this formulation and prevented its worst implication from being drawn." Long, 39. This concept, in any event, is contrary to the received tradition. Its implication is that human action is outside divine providence, since, to be free, it would have to be outside of divine causality; that is, human freedom would have to be outside of the eternal law.

For Steven A. Long, Molina's "negative treatment of the dependence of human freedom on divine causality seems in historical terms to be one large stride in the direction of undifferentiated libertarianism of a sort that implies that the created will is a being a se," to itself, that is, self-regarding and autonomous. The consequence of such a position is disastrous:

A separate jurisdiction of human liberty is thus created that is literally beyond divine governance, so that it becomes difficult to imagine what difference even divine revelation could make to the situation.

Long, 41.

So it would appear, that the Molinist tradition as well as the Enlightenment positions "each carved out," in their various ways, "a dominion for natural human agency as absolutely independent of God. . . . tend[ing] toward making the natural realm--and particularly the natural realm of human agency--an utterly separate jurisdiction sealed off from providence." Long, 41.

The position is disastrous, as I said, because it spells the death knell for a traditional notion of natural law as a participation in the eternal law:

Within such a world, natural law, far from being what it was for St. Thomas--namely, nothing other than the rational participation of the eternal law--becomes instead the demarcation of a realm outside the governance of the eternal law. Natural law becomes, as it were, the "stalking horse" of secularism and naturalist reductionism. A more complete inversion of the character of the doctrine of the natural law cannot be imagined--indeed a transvaluation of all values. . . .

The convergent implication of secular and Molinist thought seems indeed to be the loss of nature and natural order as theonomic principles, and the loss of natural law as nothing else than a participation of eternal law. Once this theonomic character of natural order and natural law are lost, then sustaining the distinction of nature and grace simply formalizes the boundaries consequent upon the loss of God.

Long, 41, 43.

It really doesn't matter, then, whether a theologian speaks of the autonomy of man from God's causality, or whether the materialist speaks of there being no such thing as God's causality, or whether a Kantian speaks of both man's autonomy and the "causal closure" of matters physical to matters metaphysical. In any event, whether a corrupt Molinist, an Enlightenment thinker, or a Kantian, God no longer is ruler of man and of his day-to-day life. God in all three cases is banished. If God is not dead, he is irrelevant. This is practical atheism in its three strains.

It was this practical atheism that led de Lubac to "overstress teleology" and adopt the erroneous doctrine that human nature has not real natural end, but only an ultimate supernatural end, the beatific vision. De Lubac refused to keep man within the "terrestial cage" where he had been placed, a cage stored somewhere outside of the loving reach or knowledge of God. Long, 42-43. De Lubac was, in some sense, right. He was right to try to re-inject teleology in nature. He was right to want to try to tie the natural order into the divine one. But he was wrong in trying to "shoehorn" the supernatural order into the natural order, as if stuffing food down the gullet of a goose to change goose liver into foie gras. What de Lubac did was nothing less than a sort of theological gavage or force-feeding, making nature into something it was not intended to be. It did not solve the problem, the loss of the theonomic principle in nature, but confused it. Nature's theonomic order in its own right, separate and apart from the theonomic order in the supernatural calling of man, is not established by the de Lubacian solution. "[T]he loss of the theonomic character of natural order and law in its own right and not merely by analogy of attribution with supernatural order is an error of decisive importance." Long, 45.

What then is really needed, the de Lubacian proposal being wrong?

[T]he greatest need of contemporary thought is to rediscover the theonomic character of natural law, and more extendedly of natural order as such--which will require a vigorous return to metaphysics, natural theology, and ontology of nature.

Long, 47. This is the only medicine for the problems of the day. It is the answer to the fideist, the fundamentalist, the rationalist, the nihilist, the empiricist, the scientist, the materialist, the atheist, the agnostic, the relativist, the espouser of excessive human autonomy, the fatalist and determinist, the deist, the pantheist. Let the dead bury their dead theories. Let us, on the other hand, recapture the Thomist synthesis, the delightfully true balance, between the natural order, which is ordered ad unum Deum, to the First Cause, and the supernatural order, which, presupposing the natural, is ordered ad Deum unum et trinum, to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the one true and only God, to which Jew, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and whatever man holding whatever varietal of religion and philosophy of his own device, is called to worship into perfect freedom.

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*S.T. I, q. 22, a. 2, ad 4. (Sed quia ipse actus liberi arbitrii reducitur in Deum sicut in causam, necesse est ut ea quae ex libero arbitrio fiunt, divinae providentiae subdantur; providentia enim hominis continentur sub providentia Dei, sicut causa particularis sub causa universali.); Hastings; see also S.T., I, q. 14, art. 9.
**This is the Achilles Heel of Molinism, the metaphysical status of "counterfactuals." Counterfactuals are writtten in the form, if x, then y, an antecedent and a consequent. If the antecedent is false, then how can the counterfactual consequent be regarded as true. Where is the metaphysical ground of the counterfactual being a truth that can be known if its antecedent is false?
***This, as Long notes, "treats the divine causality like that of a creature, neglecting the dependence of all created reality in being and action upon God." Long, 39. It also requires man to be autonomous from God so as to be considered free. It ignores the difference between being free as to secondary causes (finite and contingent effects, what Long calls elsewhere "terrestrial requirements"), versus being free as to primary causes (God).
****This raises another problem for Molinists that critics point to. Are we really free if our acts are determined by the circumstances into which we are placed? This is the so-called "determinism of circumstance." Long, 40.

The Plunder of Nature: Outside and Inside the Household

THE CONCEPT OF NATURE HAS BEEN DESPOILED by the barbarians of thought who styled themselves the enlightened ones. They have destroyed the outside structures, much like they burned churches and shattered their stained glass windows. They pillaged the interior, melted down the holy vessels, and spent what was valuable. What they left after their intellectual vandalism was a concept of nature in shambles. Ruins of nature, built by an unknown and unknowable architect who cared no longer for his structure. Ruins of nature, without the hearth of a spiritual soul or the smell of incense. Ruins of nature which no longer served a purpose, and end, for the altars of the natural temple of the Holy Spirit had been rent in twain. The human "nature" these men left to the world, was not the human "nature" that the men before them had known. These--we may count Hume, and Kant, and Comte, and Austin, and Bentham among them--left about as much of nature standing as the French Revolution left of the great monastery of Cluny, or the Revolutionists' children in the Old World left of the Coventry Cathedral in England or their children in the New World left of Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan. After these dismantlers, these inconoclasts of nature got done, what was missing? In a word, the theonomic principle of nature.

Urakami Cathedral after the Atom Bomb

But one may also identify what they left and what they substituted:

• They of deistic (Tindal) or pantheistic (Spinoza) persuasions severed nature from God, and saw nature as a "separate jurisdiction from divine authority and governance," no longer tied to any theistic account.


• Secular theories of progress and of morality, mainly utilitarian (Beccaria, Mill, Bentham), without regard to God or revelation were promoted.


• A reductive, materialistic and mechanical and non-teleological view of nature (Bacon), one that could be studied, and in fact could only legitimately be studied, by empirical methods alone (Locke).


• A rejection of any metaphysical thought, in both speculative and moral thinking, including any suggestion that God might be known through nature (analogia entis) or that any objective morality could be known through nature (analogia boni).

The problem of nature-in-shambles that confronted de Lubac cannot be placed entirely at the feet of secularist thought, though without doubt, especially if the intention of removing the theonomic in nature is considered, the lion's share belongs there. The problem, at least in Long's view, contains an ecclesiastical component. He sees the problem as a being the "convergent implication of [both] secular and Molinist thought." Long, 43.

The reference, of course, is to the Spanish Renaissance Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina (1535-1600). Long blames Molina for the current trend among Catholic theologians to "view free human action as standing outside divine governance and causality," an idea which, of course, is "incompatible with the understanding of nature as a theonomic principle." Long, 37. This is hardly what Molina--a commentator of St. Thomas Aquinas, part of the religious corps of of St. Ignatius, and loyal Catholic--would have intended. So how, in Long's view, did this come about?

Luis de Molina

At heart, the problem stems from Molina's emphasis on human liberty,* and his particular effort at reconciling this broad libertarian view of human liberty, on the one hand, with the concepts of God's providence, foreknowledge, predestination, and grace, on the other.

Now, the problem of reconciling human freedom, on the one hand,and God's providence and foreknowledge and the efficaciousness of grace, on the other, is, to put it mildly, knotty. And to outline both the Thomist view and the Molinist view on the matter and contrast them would, to do the matter justice, take a book in itself. This is hardly a matter to be handled in a blog posting.

But we shall try, beginning with our next post.

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*In Molina's Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione. The controversy caused by the publication of this work resulted in Pope Clement VIII institute a special board of inquiry called the Congregatio de Auxilia, which met at least 181 times. The commission eventually drew up a list of propositions and in 1607 prepared a bull to condemn 42 propositions of the work. However, the bull was never published, as the Pope at that time, Paul V, decided to postpone the condemnation, and, in fact allowed the opinions of Molinism and Thomism to be held. In any event, despite surviving condemnation, the Jesuit order got the picture of the general disfavor toward Molinism and the General of the Jesuits at the time Acquaviva decreed in 1613 that the Jesuits should teach the Congruism of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez and refrain from teaching Molinist theories. In the late 1800s, the theories of Molina enjoyed revival. See generally Hastings, Selbie, Gray, eds., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 8 (s.v. "Molinism")

Cardinal Mercier and the Natural Law: Part 9, The Natural Law

"MAN IS SUBJECT TO A NATURAL LAW," Cardinal Mercier states, "that is, an inclination which habitually disposes him to know and will the end of his rational nature and what conduces to it, as well as to discern and reject what is contrary to it." [236(40)] The thesis is supported by three separate arguments. The first argument argues from analogy. The second is founded upon consciousness. The third argument is based upon Providence. We shall treat the three arguments seriatim.

The argument from analogy begins with being, a transcendental which transcends all categories, and which is predicated of all that is. "Every being in this world has within it an inclination towards some end, and its law is to tend towards it." [236(40)] This is something that we learn from observation. What being do we know that has no end, that wanders about aimlessly, arbitrarily, chaotically, without order, without any kind of inner compass? Why should man alone be an exception? There is no answer why man should be an exception. "Man is no exception; he is likewise set towards his end." [236(40)] It follows, then, that we have an inclination which influences our reason and our will, and this "influence exercised by the end upon the higher faculties of man is called the natural law." Man, like all created beings, is under law; his particular law, which governs his will and reason, is called the natural law.

The next argument is based upon consciousness. If man reflects upon himself, if he practices the Delphic suggestion to know himself, he is aware that there is some sort of higher tug, a "higher attraction," that draws him toward the good that his reason recognizes. And all men are aware (which man has not experienced?) that he has breached or yielded to evil by "overcoming [a natural] interior resistance," and, having done so, is filled with the self-reproach of shame or with feelings of guilt or compunction. How many of us have felt regret for the evil word, the hurtful act, the deceit played out on others, the failure to meet the demands of our inner voice: how many of us do not know the Aristotelian and Biblical sense of hamartia? How many of us have not, like an archer, hamartein, missed the mark? He also experiences the satisfaction that comes by its opposite, the practice of virtue. Who does not sense the joy that comes with a kind word, a mendful act, and the leading of another from ignorance to truth?

Finally, one may work downwards as it were from creation. God must have had some end in view in creating the world and its creatures. Being both infinitely wise (and incapable of being deceived as to relation between the creature and its end), infinitely holy (and incapable of choosing an end unfit for the creature), and infinitely able (and therefore able to achieve what he intended), God has given to his created beings "an impulse towards their ends, a principle which directs their activities in conformity with the eternal designs of his Providence."

[I]n a word, He must have implanted in each created agent the natural law. Now this natural law must be in harmony with the constitution of the subject under its sway. The natural law implanted in man's nature, which is rational and free, cannot be, then a fatalistic law; on the contrary, it must consist in an intellectual tendency to form some principles of reason with certainty, and in an impulse which, without forcing or necessarily determining the will, inclines it towards the real good apprehended by the intellect.

[237(40)] The natural law is thus reflected in inclinations in man which show themselves as tendencies in his reason and in impulses of his will.

The natural law is, as it were, a subset of the eternal law. "By the eternal law," Cardinal Mercier states, "is meant the destination, as conceived by Divine Wisdom, of all creatures to their respective ends, and the adaptation of their activities to them." [237(41)] He cites to St. Thomas's short and classic definition: Lex aeterna nihil aliud est quam ratio divinae sapientiae secundum quod est directiva omnium actuum et motionum. "The eternal law is nothing other than the reason of divine wisdom by which all acts and motions of all things are directed." (S.T. Ia-IIae, q. 93, a. 1) The natural law is nothing other than how this eternal law is manifested in a free and rational creature. Hoc lumen et hanc legem dedit Deus homini in creatione. God gave this light and this law to man as part of the act of his creation. There would be no natural law without man. There would be no man without natural law.

At its most basic, the natural law is exceedingly simple; indeed incontestable. He who denies this principle is not worthy of his humanity.

Regarded under its general form the natural law is summed up in this fundamental dictum: 'Bonum est faciendum et prosequendum, et malum vitandum'. [One ought to follow and do good, and avoid evil.]

[238(41)] This is article 1, section 1 of the natural law. Everything else follows from it. "It is the function of reason to draw from this first principle both immediate and more or less remote deductions that will serve to guide the will in its conduct through life." [238(41)]

This fundamental principle of natural law--to follow and do good and to avoid evil--places man under a moral obligation, which implies a form of necessity. The necessity, however, is not physical. Rather the necessity is moral. The necessity is not theoretical, but practical. The necessity is not hypothetical, but it is absolute. [238(42)] In other words, if is not in the form of if you want to be good, then do . . . . This injunction is, plain and simple, you ought to be good; therefore you should do . . . .

How is freedom to be reconciled with this necessity? Is man robbed of freedom if he is subjected to moral, practical, and absolute necessity to do good and avoid evil?

In addressing the question of how to reconcile human freedom with the necessity of the moral law, Mercier explores the foundation of moral obligation. From whence does moral obligation proceed? Here, at least since the time of Kant, there appear to be two extreme answers Mercier explains: heteronomy (what Mercier calls "theological morality") and autonomy (what Mercier calls "independent morality" or "autonomy of reason"). In the heteronomical view, the moral law is exclusively imposed from above, as it were, from God as the supreme Legislator of the moral order. The heteronomists dispute as to whether this command is reflective of divine reason, or divine will, or both divine reason and will. Regardless of this, however, the heteronomists all believe the necessity of obeying the moral law is that it is an oracle, as it were, from the divine Legislator. It is imposed from above. This view is required, the heteronomists argue, because of the very nature of God and law. Moreover, it is the only possible way to avoid falling into the realm of "independent morality" or the "autonomy of reason," where man makes his own law.

Mercier rejects this either/or scenario. The moral duty, and the necessity to follow it, is not only a command of the sovereign God, though he does not reject God as the ultimate source of obligation. Mercier, however, rejects the notion of radical autonomy, that man has a law that is apart from God and that the duty he imposes he imposes upon himself. "[T]his necessity between choosing between the theological [heteronomous] morality . . . and autonomous morality is in no way forced upon us." [238(43)] Mercier, following "unreservedly" St. Thomas, believes that the necessity of moral duty arises from a "double foundation--immediately, upon human nature; remotely, upon the intelligence of God who rules all things by His providence." [238-39(43)]

With sure Catholic instincts, Cardinal Mercier consequently rejects false notions of autonomy without rejecting autonomy, and rejects false notions of heteronomy without rejecting heteronomy, and adopts, instead, a view that admits both man's autonomy and the law's heteronomy, in a reconciled view that John Paul II, in his encyclical Veritatis splendor called theonomy or participated theonomy. VS, No. 40-41. Thus, between the error of absolute heteronomy and the error of absolute autonomy, navigate St. Thomas, Cardinal Mercier, and John Paul II through the via media of participated theonomy.

The natural law is participated theonomy. And so Mercier is able to preserve two truths in equal measure:

We can therefore say that human nature is a law unto itself, that it bears within itself the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil, inasmuch as the soul's own tendency towards its complete good puts upon the will, enlightened by the practical judgments of the reason, the moral necessity of willing the good that is upright and, in its final analysis, the supreme good in which its completed good and perfection is realized.

[240(44)] Yet Mercier can also say, virtually in the same breath, that:

If God wills creatures to exist distinct from Himself, it is impossible that He should not perceive by His practical reason the necessary relations of subordination which must exist between these creatures and the essential goodness of the Divine Being. These relations as conceived by the Divine Mind are the 'eternal law'. Such is the ultimate foundation of the distinction between good and evil, and of the natural law and of moral obligation.

[240(45)] So the natural law is both a "law unto itself," and a law "subordinat[e]" to God who is its "ultimate foundation." The natural law is in man and from God, derived, as it were, from the eternal law of God and divinely crafted to fit the rational and free nature of the creature that God made in his image and likeness. It is in the participated theonomy that is at the heart of the natural law where man will find himself both free and good.

The Disfigured Face: The Unholy Trinity: Immanuel Kant

IF JOHN LOCKE WAS THE "FATHER OF LIBERALISM," IMMANUEL KANT was the "Father of Deontological Ethics" or the "Father of Autonomy." In the Pantheon of the Modern Thought, Kant is the Doctor Deontologicus, the Deontological Doctor, or perhaps the Doctor Imperativi, the Doctor of the Imperative, since his ethics are both based upon duty and command. What this, of course, means is that he is opposed to an ontological ethic. Kant's ethics are based on duty, on command, and they are not based on being or existence. In the face of growing individualism in ethics, Kant tried to derive some universal rules that were based on reason alone, but not in any sense on nature. "[F]or Kant, right does not conform to an ontological order, but rather to a rational order." Cortest, 54. He rejected the virtues, as not sufficiently exact, for he strained for moral rules "with mathematical exactitude" (mit mathematischer Genauigkeit). Virtues were too messy. Nature was to messy. Things like the "Golden Rule" were too messy. (See The Golden Rule in Immanuel Kant: The Golden Rule But a Footnote.) Reality was too messy, and we couldn't be sure we understood it anyway. In Kant's view, this "mathematical exactitude" (mathematischer Genauigkeit) based on a pure reason distilled of nature or being, was "more important than any deeper principle of being or truth," or inherited tradition or revealed religion. Cortest, 54. This search for universal rules to govern ethics based upon pure reason alone ultimately lead to his absolute categorical imperatives.

Kant's philosophy begins with a critique of traditional metaphysical thought. This is the very reason why his doctrine of right (jus) is entirely deontological. The older Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy is based on an ontological foundation. With Kant, the science of being is divorced from morality. The new foundation for morality becomes reason itself. Reason [alone] serves as the starting point and establishes the limits for moral reasoning. The participants in Kant's moral universe are guided by reason rather than by nature. Individual human beings act in accord with universal principles rather than through a sense of natural or intrinsic good.

Cortest, 55 (emphasis added). To his credit, Kant was a strong advocate of moral freedom, and his deontological ethic had some sense of nobility and beauty about it in its zeal for justice. There is something lovely, wistful in the saying: "For if justice goes, there is no longer any value in human beings living on the earth." Wenn die Gerechtigkeit untergeht, so hat es keinen Werth mehr, daß Menschen auf Erden leben. Yet there is a certain harshness about Kant, and he seems to exclude the role of mercy and of love. (The phenomenologist Max Scheler criticized Kantian imperative ethics because it excludes behaviors that someone in authority, whether it be God or man, cannot order but only woo, such as mercy and love and faith. He also criticized it for being overly pragmatic and finding moral value only in those areas where change can be accomplished by order or command. Wherever Kant has been one hears the plaint: Where, oh where has supererogation gone? Oh where oh where can it be?) That is why Kant shudders at the thought of anyone who dares compromise the "law of punishment," which for Kant is one of his "categorical imperative."

Woe to him who crawls through the windings of eudaimonism [Aristotelianism? Thomism?] in order to discover something [mercy? love?] that releases the criminal from punishment or even reduces its amount by the advantage it promises . . .

(Cortest, quoting Metaphysics of Morals [Wehe dem! welcher die Schlangenwindungen der Glückseligkeitslehre durchkriecht, um etwas aufzufinden, was durch den Vortheil,den es verspricht, ihn von der Strafe, oder auch nur einem Grade derselben entbinde . . . .] Similarly, before society disbands, it would have a duty to put all the criminals found guilty of capital offenses to death. "Clearly, Kant defends a hard-line position on this question; this is so because for Kant, matters of justice must have a universal application." Cortest, 57. This is done through the use of absolute, exceptionless imperatives. Command, command, command; duty, duty, duty. This is a dry, external ethic. Compared to the ontological ethic, it is like eating sand instead of steak. With this irrepressible impulse to enforce law at all costs, we ought to be very thankful that God is not Kant, and that Kant was not God.

Immanuel Kant

Cortest then addresses the interaction of Locke and Kant, and their particular contributions to the project of Modernity:

It is clear that what begins as the defense of personal freedom in Locke is transformed by Kant into a system of absolute imperatives, in which the personal becomes the universal. Perhaps the best way to understand this transformation is to imagine that while Locke "freed" the individual from tradition, Kant made the now autonomous individual, through a set of rational principles, the foundation of justice and right. More than any other innovation in his moral philosophy the feature the most characterizes Kant's thought is this emphasis on autonomy. . . . This notion of moral autonomy may well be one of the most important developments in the history of modern ethics. Indeed, this doctrine is one of the features that most characterizes the thinking we call "modern."

Cortest, 58. (We have treated the issue of Kant's notion of autonomy in our prior posting: Ecstasis and Telos: Immanuel Kant and Selflaw.)

In his For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), Henry Veatch criticizes Kant's anti-ontological ethical theory. Though the quote is rather long, it merits being posted:

So long as Kant is either unwilling or unable to recognize the possibility that a natural desire may nonetheless be a reasoned desire and thus determined by nothing less than a knowledge of the good, he must renounce altogether any and all attempts to provide an ontological basis for ethics in terms of a thing's nature, be it human nature or the nature of rational beings generally. But the question returns to plague the Kantians more persistently than ever: how can one possibly come to know the moral laws that are incumbent upon us as rational beings if appeal is not to be made to the nature of such beings by way of support? So far as we have been able to determine, the only way that a Kantian can answer this question is by attempting to appeal not to the nature of rational beings, bur rather to the purely formal requirements that presumably must attach to moral laws, insofar as these laws are held to be binding on all rational creatures.

Now, Locke the Liberal had made morality a matter of personal choice. The duty-above-all-else Kant had fitted this personal ethic into a system of static universal imperatives based upon reason alone. Hegel was to take these two and adds the component of development or evolution, as man, in his view was to find his increasing self-awareness by incorporation into the State. That will be the subject of our next posting.