Veritatis Splendor: Part 29--Freedom as Cruciform

JOHN PAUL II INSISTS on the connection between freedom and truth and faith and morals. These are the two burdens of his encyclical. Christ set men free, and the Christian life to which all men are called is centered upon freedom. Christ is the truth, and the Christian life to which all men are called is likewise centered upon truth. "[O]nly freedom which submits to the Truth leads the human person to his good. The good of the person is to be in the Truth and to do the Truth." VS, 84.*

Here is the central tragedy of this age:

This essential bond between Truth, the Good and Freedom has been largely lost sight of by present-day culture. As a result, helping man to rediscover it represents nowadays one of the specific requirements of the Church's mission, for the salvation of the world. Pilate's question: "What is truth" reflects the distressing perplexity of a man who often no longer knows who he is, whence he comes and where he is going.

VS, 84.

The Pope's solicitude toward mankind is apparent. The loss of a moral compass, of a knowledge of who he is, where he is supposed to go, and how to get there has left modern man in a moral quandary, in a state of moral chaos, in a slough of despond. He is like the Man Who Was Thursday.

Hence we not infrequently witness the fearful plunging of the human person into situations of gradual self-destruction. According to some, it appears that one no longer need acknowledge the enduring absoluteness of any moral value. All around us we encounter contempt for human life after conception and before birth; the ongoing violation of basic rights of the person; the unjust destruction of goods minimally necessary for a human life. Indeed, something more serious has happened: man is no longer convinced that only in the truth can he find salvation. The saving power of the truth is contested, and freedom alone, uprooted from any objectivity, is left to decide by itself what is good and what is evil. This relativism becomes, in the field of theology, a lack of trust in the wisdom of God, who guides man with the moral law. Concrete situations are unfavorably contrasted with the precepts of the moral law, nor is it any longer maintained that, when all is said and done, the law of God is always the one true good of man.

VS, 84.*

There is but one way from shadow into light, from the darkness of moral relativism to the light of moral truth, and it is this way to which the Church is witness. The Church came into the world not for the purpose of denouncing or refuting falsehood. While she may do so, she does so only as a natural concomitant of her true rule: to constantly look toward and point to the Lord Jesus, to Christ crucified. VS, 85.

Each day the Church looks to Christ with unfailing love, fully aware that the true and final answer to the problem of morality lies in him alone. In a particular way, it is in the Crucified Christ that the Church finds the answer to the question troubling so many people today: how can obedience to universal and unchanging moral norms respect the uniqueness and individuality of the person, and not represent a threat to his freedom and dignity? The Church makes her own the Apostle Paul's awareness of the mission he had received: "Christ . . . sent me . . . to preach the Gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power . . . We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor 1:17, 23-24).

VS, 85.

Drawing of Christ Crucified by St. John of the Cross

Freedom is, at its heart, cruciform: "The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom." VS, 85. Christus cruci affixus verum libertatis sensum ostendit! The crucifix--the Jesus affixed to the cross--and Christ's victory over death--His Resurrection--are crucial to understanding the Christian insistence that freedom and truth are conjoined:

Jesus. . . is the living, personal summation of perfect freedom in total obedience to the will of God. His crucified flesh fully reveals the unbreakable bond between freedom and truth, just as his Resurrection from the dead is the supreme exaltation of the fruitfulness and saving power of a freedom lived out in truth.

VS, 87.

Man's freedom suffers from nobility and weakness. It is both real and limited. It is a created freedom, and like all creation something we have not give ourselves, but something which has been given to us: "its absolute and unconditional origin is not in itself, but in the life within which it is situated and which represents for it, at one and the same time, both a limitation and a possibility." VS, 86. The gift of freedom has a responsibility attached to it: it is "to be received like a seed and to be cultivated responsibly." VS, 87. It is self-evident that freedom is not an evil to be suffered, but a good. It is self-evident that freedom ought not to be used to do evil, but rather to do good. And so the gift of freedom contains within itself a hint of its purpose; it hearkens back to the Giver of the gift:

Within that freedom there is an echo of the primordial vocation whereby the Creator calls man to the true Good, and even more, through Christ's Revelation, to become his friend and to share his own divine life. It is at once inalienable self-possession and openness to all that exists, in passing beyond self to knowledge and love of the other. Freedom then is rooted in the truth about man, and it is ultimately directed towards communion.

VS, 86.

Freedom, then, points "Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, yonder."** Though freedom, then, has this golden "echo of the primordial vocation" which points yonder, it also has a leaden echo, a tragic weakness which we witness, and of which we know:

Reason and experience . . . confirm [freedom's] tragic aspects. Man comes to realize that his freedom is in some mysterious way inclined to betray this openness to the True and the Good, and that all too often he actually prefers to choose finite, limited and ephemeral goods. What is more, within his errors and negative decisions, man glimpses the source of a deep rebellion, which leads him to reject the Truth and the Good in order to set himself up as an absolute principle unto himself: "You will be like God" (Gen 3:5).

VS, 86.

There is then, in freedom, the "beginning to despair, to despair, despair, despair, despair, despair."** And man becomes aware of this odd necessity: that freedom has become captive, and "freedom itself needs to be set free."

Libertas ideo est liberanda!

Who, then, is to set the captive freedom free?

Christus est liberator!

Christ, the Pope cries anew with the voice of old, invoking St. Paul's letter to the Galatians (5:1), "has set us free for freedom." Ipse nos liberavit ut essemus liberi. VS, 86.
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*This is actually a quote from the Pope's Address to those taking part in the International Congress of Moral Theology (April 10,1986), 1; Insegnamenti IX, 1 (1986), 970.
**G. M. Hopkins, "Maiden's Song from St. Winefred's Well"

Ignorance of the Wrong-Doing Good

MAN BY NATURE HAS AN INCLINATION to do good. It is writ within his nature, as an innate and invariable principle, to seek his good. He is determined, in a general yet invariable and inescapable way, to seek his good, to implement it, to actualize it. Man is condemned, as it were, generally to seek his specific good, a good determined for him by his specific nature, a nature created by God.* It is, to be sure, a sweet condemnation, not a condemnation against which one should rebel, for its alternatives--to be free fundamentally to do evil, or to be condemned to do evil, or to have no specific end or good--are too horrid to countenance. In fact, to undo our condemnation would be to undo our very nature, who we are. It would call for an essential unraveling. It would be to pour us out as water, to put all our bones out of joint; to make our heart wax, and to melt it in the midst of our bowels. (cf. Ps. 22:14) So I repeat, we are condemned to do good. It is an unalterable, invariable law of our nature.

Je suis condamné à être libre?
Au contraire, Monsieur Sartre.Je suis condamné à être bon!

But this seems to be an absurd, or at least an empirically improbable, proposition. If man is condemned to be good in accordance with his specific nature by this unalterable inclination, why is there so much evil in the world? Why--if we are in fact under the compulsion of this inclination to seek our good--do we chose, or do, or want and desire (even if we do not chose or do) things that are not to our good, i.e., things that are evil? Something, it would appear, creeps in between the general inclination to our good and our concretization of that general inclination that makes man free to do acts of evil. What is it?

It is the presence of will, free will. And this interaction of nature and will brings us to an important distinction between what Bertke calls the "will qua nature" and the "will qua will."**

The "will qua nature" is the specific perfection or good congruent to its specific nature to which every created nature is ordained by God to incline necessarily. All creatures have this inclination, this appetite, this fundamental ordering or "will," whether they have free will or not. Man is counted among those creatures. Man has therefore a will qua nature. That will qua nature is ordered to his fulfillment, that is, happiness, beatitudo.

Man, however, has an additional component, specific to him, and which introduces him into the moral life: freedom of will. Man is thus able to determine or concretize the necessary appetite or inclination, the will qua nature, to particularize it, to seek to fulfill it or carry out, to give it expression, not through necessity, but through individual acts or goods which he is free to select. This appetite or inclination which man follows as a result of his own will (as distinguished from the specific appetite or inclination which is given him by God, the will qua nature) is the "will qua will."

As a result of his freedom, man is free to exercise his "will qua will" in a manner which is consonant with or in a manner which is opposed to the will qua nature. Man may seek his happiness in things that, in fact may not really make him happy if compared to what his nature really calls for. It is, however, in comparing the good sought by the will qua will with the good determined by the will qua nature that we determine the badness or goodness of an act. Hence, "it follows that the goodness of an object [sought by the will qua will] is to be judged according as it is connatural and proportionate to the subject [and its will qua nature]." Bertke, 20-21. The will qua nature is what gives us the standard, not the will qua will.

Here, however, is the problem as it pertains to ignorance of the good and the issue we are exploring (invincible ignorance of the natural moral law).

[M]an by nature is ordained to the perfect human good . . . . This good, which constitutes the final goal of man, must be an unlimited good, corresponding to the unlimited capacity of his intellect to conceive and his will to desire such a good. In so far as this good is the necessary object of the will qua nature, it remains, in the present life, in the abstract (beatitudo in communi).

Bertke, 21.*** What this means is that the will qua nature in this life remains generalized, not particularized, inchoate and not fully formed.

[T]here is in man a natural appetite for the human good. The connotation of this term is made clear by [St. Thomas's] contrast between the will qua nature and the will qua will. The will qua will, according to St. Thomas, seeks things in line with its own determination and not of necessity. The will qua nature, on the contrary, seeks its object necessarily and it is in this sense that the word natural is to be understood.

Bertke, 21-22.

The human will is free, it has what is called the libertas exercitii, or a freedom of exercise, so that man need not act in accord with the necessary inclination of the will qua nature. Man can act in accordance with it, or he can not act in accordance with it (he can abstain). Man is however not free to act against it. The will qua nature remains invariable, though it need not be exercised: it can be put on "hold," in "neutral" so to speak.

The human person is free not to act; but when he does act, of necessity he must tend to an ultimate end. This ultimate end must be the total good of the person as proposed by the intellect. Hence underlying every human action is the desire for complete human happiness. Everything will is ordained to this ultimate end.

Bertke, 29.

Man is not free to determine his own nature, or specify what is, in fact, good for him. He has no libertas specificationis (velle hoc velle illud) in the matter of his nature, though he has it with respect to everything else. Therefore, when a human being acts, the will qua nature is incapable of choosing some lesser good or some evil (i.e., imperfect happiness) instead of perfect happiness. When man chooses a lesser good or some evil, man does so under the compulsory law that he must act in a manner which is consonant with his will qua nature. But since the will qua nature can be put on hold, in neutral, man has in him the freedom in choosing specific goods, that is, in exercising his will qua will, to choose contrary to what the will qua nature would otherwise demand. In choosing the means to his good, to his happiness, man is free. And so in the selection of particular goods, man is free, free even to act against his own good, his own perfect happiness.

The goal of man, perfect happiness, is established by God; nothing can change this. Because he has an end, man seeks the means to the end. . . . However, the dependence of the will qua will on the will qua nature is not the same as that of the will qua nature upon nature itself, for, whereas the will qua nature is drawn necessarily toward the goal established by nature, the selection of the final gaol in the concrete and of the means to the goal, which are the objects of the will qua will, are left to man's self-determination. Further, man in his present state can deliberately choose a false goal of happiness and means that do not lead to the true goal of his nature in the concrete.

Bertke, 22-23.

This freedom is at the heart of the entire moral order, for the entire moral order seeks to govern, guide, rule the freedom so that man may exercise it in conformity with his own good, ultimately to his own real happiness. Thus, the injunction "do good" and "avoid evil" is not aimed at man's will qua nature, but is aimed at where man is free, in the exercise of his will qua will.

The principle, "do good," enters here. It is the first principle of the moral order. It is not the mere expression of man's necessary inclination to perfect happiness considered in the abstract [beatitudo communis]. Though it is based on this inclination, in itself it has solely to do with the choosing of the particular end and means, for only concerning these is man free, and only where man is free can there be a moral law. The principle, "do good," is only another way of saying, "use the means that lead to your end," "act for your true end."

Bertke, 23.
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*How different is this principle, that man is "condemned" to be good, compared to Sartre's famous principle that man is condemned to be free ("Je suis condamné à être libre," I am condemned to be free, he famously stated in his book Being and Nothingness. To get there he also has to say "L'existence précède et commande l'essence," existence precedes and commands essence, for the moment that that principle of existentialism is reversed, that essence precedes existence, then instead of being "condemned" to be free, we are "condemned" to do good. Of course, Sartre also places good and freedom in false opposition, as there is no opposition between freedom and our nature. Freedom, moreover, does not fundamentally mean the ability to do good and evil, but rather the liberty to do good and concretize or instantiate the good, so freedom is ordered to the good, and not in any manner opposed to it.
**The distinction is found in St. Thomas Aquinas's work De Veritate, q. 22 a. 5 co.

Hoc autem est cuiuslibet naturae creatae, ut a Deo sit ordinata in bonum, naturaliter appetens illud. Unde et voluntati ipsi inest naturalis quidam appetitus boni sibi convenientis. Et praeter hoc habet appetere aliquid secundum propriam determinationem, non ex necessitate; quod ei competit in quantum voluntas est.

Sicut autem est ordo naturae ad voluntatem, ita se habet ordo eorum quae naturaliter vult voluntas, ad ea respectu quorum a seipsa determinatur, non ex natura. Et ideo, sicut natura est voluntatis fundamentum, ita appetibile quod naturaliter appetitur, est aliorum appetibilium principium et fundamentum. In appetibilibus autem finis est fundamentum et principium eorum quae sunt ad finem; cum quae sunt propter finem, non appetantur nisi ratione finis. Et ideo, id quod voluntas de necessitate vult quasi naturali inclinatione in ipsum determinata, est finis ultimus, ut beatitudo . . . .

[Bertke's translation]

Every created nature is divinely ordained to the good, and seeks this good naturally. Hence, there is in the will a natural appetite for the good congruent to itself: over and above this it has an appetite to seek things according to its own determination and not of necessity. The object of this second inclination is the good which is sought by the will qua will.

Moreover, the relations between the objects sought by the will qua nature and the objects sought by the will qua will are the same as the relation between nature and will. And therefore, just as nature is the foundation of the will, so also the object naturally sought by the will qua nature is the foundation of the things sought by the will qua will. In the objects of the appetite, moreover, the end is the foundation and principle of those things which lead to the end, since they are sought only in relation to the end. And therefore the object of the will qua nature is perfect happiness.

[Schmidt's translation]

It belongs to any created nature, however, to be ordained by God for good, naturally tending to it. Hence even in the will there is a certain natural appetite for the good corresponding to it. And it has, moreover, the tendency to something according to its own determination and not from necessity. This belongs to it inasmuch as it is the will.

Just as there is an ordination of nature to the will, there is, moreover, a parallel ordination of the things which the will naturally wills to those in regard to which it is determined of itself and not by nature. Thus, just as nature is the foundation of will, similarly the object of natural appetite is the principle and foundation of the other objects of appetite. Now among the objects of appetite the end is the foundation and principle of the means to the end, because the latter, being for the sake of the end, are not desired except: by reason of the end. Accordingly what the will necessarily wills, determined to it by a natural inclination, is the last end, happiness . . . .

(The first (more liberal) English translation is found in Bertke. The second (more literal) English translation is Robert W. Schmidt, S.J. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954)).
***Beatitudo in communi means happiness in general, abstractly, inchoately.

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 6: Free Will

BEFORE CARDINAL MERCIER ADDRESSES THE ISSUE of the natural moral order (which is subordination of the human act to its natural, ultimate end), he must address another issue: the freedom of the will. The very existence of a moral order, as distinguished from a physical order, "rests on the presupposition that there is liberty in the subject." [225(23)] It is immediately apparent that if we have no more say in our behavior than a rock does to the law of gravity, then there is no such thing as a moral order: all order would be determined, and man would not be free. Without freedom, without choice, there is no basis for talking about oughts and ought nots; we would only talk about ises and is nots.

As a minimum condition of freedom or liberty of will, there can be no strict determination or compulsion either externally or internally, at least in the matter of choosing particular goods. We have to have the ability to assent or to dissent from an act in regard to particular goods. "Moral liberty," Mercier continues, "is the faculty of choice between different objects in their relation to the end of rational nature." [225-25(24)] We can attest to this moral freedom, we are conscious of it. Mercier insists, consistent with St. Thomas, that "[t]he universal good exercises an irresistible determining action upon us, since it corresponds adequately with the capacity of our will." (emphasis added) (Similarly, the speculative intellect is ordered to the true, though in particulars it may believe falsehoods under erroneous guise of being true.) Though we are free to chose particular goods, they are always willed under guise of being goods, because our will cannot choose but what appears to us to be our good. The will is necessarily ordered to the good. However in the area of particulars it is not so necessarily determined.

[W]ith particular goods [they are not irresistibly determined]. These may be willed; for they are means towards the attainment of the whole good (summum bonum) and on this account are real goods. They need not be willed, since they are not the good.

[225(25)] An act of free will involves judgment on the part of the intellect, and desire on the part of the will. Though these are spiritual faculties, they are not uninfluenced by the sensitive faculties. Not only can the will take command and act through the sensitive faculties, but, particularly when there is a loss of integrity in man, the sensitive faculties can influence, even overpower, the spiritual faculties of the will and intellect. We know this from experience. There are those who have no real command of their speculative or practical intellects or their will (the mentally deranged, the unconscious). There are others that while not mentally impeded are yet "incapable of resisting solicitations to evil," for example, sociopaths or psychopaths. But these exceptions do not disprove the rule; they are simply exceptions to it.


Ordinarily, "the [antecedent as opposed to consequent] passions or lower emotional states and exterior material agents do not generally do more than weaken moral liberty." [226(27)] "Sometimes their action [of the antecedent passions] is the same direction as that of the will, sometimes in opposition to it." [226(27)] While passions both frustrate or encourage the will in certain directions, we are conscious of the ability to override most of these antecedent passions. It is only infrequently that the antecedent passions are of such compulsion that they rob us of free will. We can almost always exert our will over the passions. Sometimes their current helps us; sometimes their current hinders us; but even if it hinders us, we can still generally paddle upstream:

We may exert [control over the passions] in different ways. Either indirectly, by diverting the soul's activity, through change of thought, through applying the will to other objections, even through exciting other passions. Or direct, by the will directly acting on the passions, to strengthen them or to repress them, at leas to a certain extent. Or yet by a third way, perhaps the most effectual: by conjuring up in the imagination some appropriate object and retaining the sensitive appetite under its influence until the new passion neutralizes what reason would have us combat.

We experience ourselves as the driver of a chariot with some control, some will, over the horses of passion under our reins. Our will is perceived in most instances as being the pilot. The Humean notion that the intellect is but the slave of passions is not our common experience.

Mercier sets forth some general rules regarding the will:

• No agent, not even God, "can exercise violence in the strict sense of a human will." Violence can be done to our body, but no spirit, not even God, can violate the inner sanctum where free will lies.


• No external agent, God alone excepted, can have a "necessitating influence" over the more particular determinations of the will.


• The sensitive appetite influences the will directly and indirectly (by, for example, creating such a disturbance that they affect the intellect, upon which the will relies).


• Material agents act remotely upon our will because they have to act through our sensitive appetite, which then acts upon our will. External material agents (say, a hamburger) do not act upon the will directly, they must act through our sensitive faculties or appetites (our sense of smell, which makes our mouth water with desire and so solicits the will's consent to eat it).

Mercier concludes with a summary:

We see, then, that between the fully free act--in the carrying out of which man has a clear view of the morality of his conduct and has complete control of his will--and the act entirely lacking responsibility and freedom, there are possible many intermediate states, in which the senses and the reason, the passions and the spiritual faculty of the will, each strive for their share in the determination of our activity.

[228(28)] Most of the time, in the continuum of free will that confronts us in each decision, we are neither white or black but in various shades of gray. That's why judging the internal forum requires extreme delicacy. Indeed, even the best of us have trouble knowing ourselves. To know others is, for a finite being without the ability to witness the inside of another agent except several steps removed, fraught with problems. That is the basis, undoubtedly, of the divine injunction: Nolite iudicare ut non iudicemini. "Judge not lest you be judged." (Matt. 7:1). We can judge external, objective wrongs, and we can state the principles of morality, and we can opine on the inner state of a man and have good grounds for doing so (e.g., we can say with the highest of probability, moral certainty in fact, that someone who participated directly in the genocide of the Jews in the Holocaust would not have been blind to the fact that what he was doing was wrong, and if he was, he would have to have been guilty of an antecedent and culpable squelching of his conscience), but any definitive judgment on the heart of man and his subjective guilt before God is simply outside our competency.

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.