Utrum Deus sit Necessarium?

CHRISTIANS CALL GOD THE ONE THING necessary, the Unum Necessarium. He is Being itself. He is Good itself. All being and good outside of God participate in him and rely upon him for any of their being and its goodness. God--the God who has progressively revealed himself in Scriptures and, in the fullness time and in the fullness of means, in the Man-God Christ--is the first reality in any Christian's life.

Outside of the Christian or Jewish revelation, however, is this God necessary? In other words, is God--the acknowledgment of his existence, his role as Creator, his authority over us, and his right to our worship--part and parcel of the natural moral law? From the time of the Enlightenment to the modern age, there has been a persistent effort to banish God as if he were a dispensable adjunct to the natural moral law. We can proceed tamquam non esse Deum, as if God did not exist, als ob es Gott nicht gäbe, we are told. But can we have a moral philosophy in the Vaihingerian sense, a Philosophie der Naturgesetz Als Ob, a philosophy of the natural law as if God did not exist?

Can we dispense with the First Table of the Decalogue, the first three commandments that deal with man's relationship with God? Traditionally, the necessary relationship between God and morality has been recognized, and so we have the classic formulation of it in Dostoevsky, who wrote that if God does not exist, then all things are permissible: Если Бога нет, то всё дозволено. Moreover, traditionally disbelief in God was seen as both an intellectual and a moral fault. Such a thing as an atheist or agnostic ethic would not have been countenanced a logically or morally sound. Practical and historical experience ought to forewarn us that dispensing with the First Table of the Decalogue means dispensing with all or part of the Second Table. The horrors of Facism, Nazism, Communism, or Islam would be inconceivable had duties to God not been squelched by these ideologies.

"Atheoi"--Those without God--Ephesians 2:12

The question of God's role in the moral life of man can be viewed from two vantage points depending upon whether one looks at him from the light of Reason alone, or with the advantage of Faith. To a certain extent, such divisions are artificial, particularly for anyone who already believes, because Reason and Faith are complementary, mutually supportive, intercommunicating, and not separate, independent, and self-sufficient compartmentalized means to God. That is why, for example, in St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure or Duns Scotus, or in any orthodox Catholic theologian or philosopher, we find Faith and Reason hand in glove working toward an understanding of reality. Fides quaerens intellectum et intellectus quaerens fidem. As D'Entreves points out in his book on the Natural Law, "Surely the progress of the mind is twofold, and the intellectus quaerens fidem has its counterpart in the fides quaerens intellectum."*

It would seem that God is necessary in any theory of natural moral law if for no other reason to preserve human nature. The question is who has authority, claim, or jurisdiction over human nature. If the answer is God, then man is not free to change human nature. On the other hand, if human nature is a terra nullius, a land with no Governor, then man may lay stake to it. Accordingly, if the answer is not God, then man, it would seem, is free to change human nature, which means that man is free to change morality, and indeed is free even to abolish himself. The opposite then suggests itself essential: that God must be part of the natural moral law or there is no natural moral law. "A godless natural law would revere the laws of human nature only insofar as we continued to be human. Denying that our humanity is a creation, it would have no reason to preserve this humanity, and no objection to its abolition." Budziszewski (2003), 56-57. In light of our modern knowledge of the genome and our technological prowess over the genetic and procreative process, we have the means to enter worlds with designed human or pseudo-human castes, where there may be men, as well as supermen and untermenschen, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, or perhaps a place where there will be no men at all. Why, after all, should a caste of supermen tolerate a caste of men? Under what kind of morality would the superman live by if the choice had already been made that man had no need to abide by any limit?

The reason that removing God from the natural law leads to man occupying the territory of nature is that such a law without God has no oughtness associated with it. At best it has what Budziszewski calls an "oughtless prudence," one that has a "rather thin" obligatory claim, and one that invariably would lead to a sort of consequentialism or utilitarianism, where any norm suggested by our nature would be transgressable if the benefits outweighed the costs. Gone would be all exceptionless norms. Budziszewski (2003), 58.

The reason for the lack of oughtness if there is no nature's God behind nature, is that, if God's creative or providential care has no relationship to our nature, then our nature would have no design, plan, or purpose behind it. It becomes meaningless, something which "just is," which is ultimately to say that our nature is something arbitrary, something that "just happened." Something arbitrary, something that "just happened," however, would have no reasonable claim over us. Why pay any respect to something which, had things "just been different" would have been different? One throw of the dice is as good as the other, whether it is snake eyes or box cars or anything in between. Human nature would be the result of a meaningless game of craps. Indeed, it would have less meaning than a game of craps, for there must be rules (and a rulegiver, for without a rulegiver, the rules themselves have no meaning) to the game of craps for snake eyes to have any meaning.

Finally, if God exists, then to take him out of the moral equation leads ineluctably to moral blindness. The Apostle John says that if we say we love God, but do not love our brother, we are liars. (1 John 4:20). The converse would propose itself as true: that if we say we love our brother, but do not love God we are also liars, and perhaps even fools if the Psalmist is to be believed. (Ps. 14:1). If God does exist, and his role denied in the moral life, the argument is that invariably one will be morally stultified. Budziszewski calls this a "moral metastasis." A lie in one area easily begins to infect other areas.

In the main, man desires to know. This is an Aristotelian basic: "All men by nature desire to know," πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει. Metaphysics 980a21. "Men in general desire the good," ζητοῦσι δ᾽ ὅλως . . . τἀγαθὸν πάντες. Politics 1269a4. But there is also an opposite tendency to which unfortunately man is heir: the capacity to self-deceive, to want to remain ignorant, to seek peace--the life of ease, to maintain the status quo, to retain advantage--than truth. It is difficult to face the truth. Imagine, for example, the possibility for King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to be honest with the falsity of Islam and the truth of Christianity. If the least scintilla of doubt arose in his head, would he not try to squelch it? What sort of advantage to him would Christianity's truth and Islam's falsity gain him? No, most unfortunately suffer from the scruples of Henry Bourbon, who, to become Henry IV, facilely accepted Catholicism and dropped his Huguenot faith for reasons--not of truth, or at least not of truth alone--but of expediency: Paris vaut bien une messe, "Paris is well worth a mass." Even about little things, we tend to lie to ourselves. Hence it is that psychologists have identified all kinds of "defense mechanisms"--dissociation, intellectualization, rationalization, regression, repression, etc.--which are nothing other than means repressive of truth. The same resistance to truth that one would expect in King Abdullah and the same facility of compromise we see in Henry IV one might expect in all men, even though their kingdoms lost or kingdoms gained are substantially more humble. This includes the Atheist's or the Agnostic's "kingdoms" whatever realms they may encompass.

But the moment that men lie about one thing, it touches another. Truth is thus intertwined. In Budziszewski's words:

[T]he universe is so tightly constructed that in order to cover up one lie, we must usually tell another. This applies with just as much force to the lies we tell ourselves as to the lies we tell to other people. . . . This tendency is strongest precisely in the case of the greatest self-deception, pretending not to know that God is real, because there are so many things one must not think of in order to not think of the reality of God. . . . But it is extraordinarily difficult--I think impossible--for such self-deception not to slop over at some point into what he admits about the moral law.

Budziszewski (2003), 65.

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*Alessander Passerin D'Entreves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 166.

Ignorance of the Wrong-God and Law

IF OUR ULTIMATE END IS GOD, and not any created thing, and our end therefore ordained to God, how is it that we attain that ultimate end? There is an ordination of ends, but there is also an ordination of means. The ordination of means, like the ordination of our final end, is also one that is based upon our nature. The means to our ultimate end requires acts consonant with our nature, that is, acts that are reasonable. "Man's nature is rational and only through rational action will he obtain his end." Bertke, 28. It is our rational ordination to God as our last end that is the basis of all moral law: indeed all law.

Here we must distinguish between or ordination in general, and our choice in the concrete or particular:

The human person is free not to act; but when he does act, of necessity he must end to an ultimate end. The 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 happiness. Everything willed is ordained to this ultimate end.

Bertke, 29. We are, willy nilly, ordained necessarily to God. And yet, in our selection of means, things are not so necessary. We are free in the selection of means, and the upshot of this is that we have both the boon and burden of freedom:

Only in the possession of uncreated being, the essence of God, will satisfaction for the will and perfect happiness be found. But here tragedy enters. Man does not always seek the true perfection of his being. He can seek the ultimate in things which, of their nature are particular, by deliberately turning aside from the true ontological end of his nature.

Bertke, 29.

The tragedy, though real enough in all our lives (Exi a me, quia homo peccator sum, Domine!) is meant to be avoided. And this is where the precepts come in. The precepts guide us to prevent us from tragically choosing, mistaking a lesser good for the ultimate good, or choosing a lesser good in a way that distracts us, or places us in opposition with, our own ultimate good. The precepts are not, in this sense prohibitions that restrict us, but are, in fact, affirmative guides which promote our freedom, our happiness, our flourishing. "Man must tend to an ultimate end; the precepts prescribe that he take the necessary means to his true ultimate end." Bertke, 30.

There is accordingly a direct nexus between the precepts and our ultimate end, as the precepts are intended to inform our acts so as to ordinate them toward our ultimate end. So we find in that "transcendental relation" between precept and ultimate end the "proximate source of the natural law's obligation." Bertke, 30. The ultimate basis (as distinguished from the proximate basis) of the natural law is the Eternal Law. The natural moral law is therefore a "secondary and true cause of moral obligation," albeit it "only a cause in virtue of the Eternal Law." The natural moral law "has the same relation of dependence on the Eternal Law as all secondary causes have upon their first cause." Bertke, 30-31.

Because natural law is the proximate source of obligation (and not the ultimate source of obligation), we can have an awareness of its demands even if we do not have a complete awareness of God's existence or of our supernatural destiny. Although living in conformity with the natural moral law would naturally allow itself to knowing of God by natural reason, the knowledge of God is something that is not necessary to the intellectual feltness arising from the moral compulsion of the natural law. Bertke explains:

Though the basis of obligation is to be ultimately found in the Eternal Law, it is not to be supposed that the perception of the idea of obligation depends upon a knowledge of the Supreme Being. St. Thomas holds that the basic precept "do good" is self-evident to all men while God's existence is not self-evident quoad nos [from our vantage point]. And since this self-evident precept implies obligation, it follows that the concept of obligation may be perceived prior to, or even without, a knowledge of God's existence. In practice, all that is required for the notion of obligation is the general and confused knowledge of human nature and its end together with its essential relations (though not necessarily all of them). Nor is knowledge of a perfect sanction or punishment required; everything necessary is contained in the perception that an action leads to, or is useful for, attainment of the end of human nature and that its contrary, being out of harmony with such an end, leads to unhappiness.

Bertke, 30. But this must be understood as a minimalistic analysis. For in practice, the knowledge of the God behind the natural moral law, and belief in God and in his sanction for violation of the natural moral law is a necessity. (Just like in practice Christ and His Church, in particular the merciful office of the Ecclesia docens is needful.) The natural moral law is, as it were, hamstrung without a knowledge of God and the Eternal Law in which that natural law participates. The natural law is not autonomous, but theonomous. Accordingly, the following propositions are condemned by Pope St. Pius IX:

Humana ratio, nullo prorsus Dei respectu habito, unicus est veri et falsi, boni et mali arbiter, sibi ipsi est lex et naturalibus suis viribus ad hominum ac populorum bonum curandum sufficit.

Human reason, without any regard to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, of good and evil; it is its own law to itself, and suffices by its natural force to secure the welfare of men and of nations.

Morum leges divina haud egent sanctione, minimeque opus est ut humanae leges ad naturae jus confirmentur aut obligandi vim a Deo accipiant.

Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and there is no necessity that human laws should be conformable to the law of nature, and receive their sanction from God.*

The natural moral law, it ought to go without saying, does not provide man an independent realm of action whereby he can act ostracized from God, apart from God, or act as if God did not exist. Though the inclinations and the faculties and the propositions (at least some) of this natural law can be known self-evidently, and the knowledge of God is not self-evident, one ought not to posit a vision of natural moral law that is atheistic, even in theory. One ought not to go down that path that the Dutch jurist dared mention: etiamsi daremus non esse Deum. One does not live life shorn of propositional reason, shorn of Grace, ignorant of all revelation, acting life out limited to self-evident principles and ignoring conclusions that are based upon them. It would be as foolish as a man stripping down to his underwear when he is aware that he is taking a trip to the North Pole.

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*Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors), Prosp. 3, 56.

Avoiding Secularist Minimalism: Jacques Maritain, Part 2

IT IS A MISTAKE in Steven A. Long's view for one committed to the natural law to advocate in the manner of Jacques Maritain a merely practical agreement based upon human rights in the political realm. It may, Long concedes, be a "quasi-starting point provided by providence," but it can hardly be an adequate foundation for civil society, political discussion, and law as a whole. Contrary to modern human rights theory which is unintelligible to itself, the natural law in its totality can provide the foundation requisite to provide an intelligible and reasonable moral and political discourse. The notion of natural law is accessible to Christians of confessions other than Catholic, non-Christians, even, in a significant though incomplete way, to non-theists. But it remains to be said that the natural law of necessity must have a metaphysical basis, a theoretical or speculative basis, and one which, at end, includes the notion of the God of philosophy, "God as First Cause, Final End and extrinsic Common Good of the universe of finite beings." Long, 260 n. 4. Since the natural law is, by definition participation in the eternal law, to remove the reference of the eternal law spells the eventual death knell to the natural law. One cannot lop the head off the theory and expect the body to survive.

The real starting point for any discussion must be God as he is known in nature. God, as First Cause, Final End, and Provident Creator of our human nature. These are truths that are known by reason, they are naturally-known verities, graspable by reason unaided by faith.*

[I]t is the natural philosophy and metaphysics of theism--or at least the judgments upon which these are based--that play the role that Maritain erroneously gave to purely practical cooperation over lists of unordered rights. Such natural philosophy and metaphysics, condition the exercise of practical reason and essential to St. Thomas's doctrine of natural law, provide a basis for common understanding and cooperation. By contrast atheism and agnosticism, which are simple and demonstrable errors, by their nature provide nothing to the common good.

Long, 151. Common life, then, is predicated upon the praeambula fidei, the preambles of faith. In law, those preambles are the natural law. Without it, common life is a mockery. The secularist, who wishes to ostracize God from the chambers of the legislature, the courts of justice, and the public schools, has an odium theologicum or perhaps an odium antitheologicum against the believer. This explains the fervor with which public displays of faith, even the most innocent, are rabidly excised with the force and power of law.

[T]he secularist wishes that religious believers did not exist, and wishes to order public life as though they did not--sometimes by achieving such nonexistence as an effect of policy. The secularist will not be polluted by any mere practical tolerance or effort to reach de facto peaceful accord with his religious neighbors.

Long, 153. The secularist, we should not forget, is a mini-Nero, ready at once, should he have the power, to consign us to the lions or to the flames. He is always pollice verso, with a thumb turned down. At the extreme, we see the believer in a state of servitude or the victim of injustice or even genocide. Normally, however, we see a softer but equally virulent strain, one which has the goal of excluding, by rule, custom, or ridicule, any expression of Christian value. If it were up to the secularist, Christ would no longer be welcome in the Halls of Congress, and he is very close to having accomplished his goal.

Long concludes his analysis of the Maritanian program with the following:

• Purely practical agreement based upon some list of human rights is an unworkable proposition since rights alone, which are derivative concepts, do not provide for any ordering or definitional schema. These schema must come from whence human rights derive, which is the natural law. It is the natural law, therefore, and not human rights detached from the natural law that is the common language of believers and unbelievers alike in civil society, politics, and law. It allows a point of "analogical reference and convergence" between them.
  
• This requires an acceptance of the "speculative foundation, principles, and content of the natural law," which, naturally, spill over into moral and political life and ultimately into law. These are accessible and intelligible to unassisted natural reason. There must be a civil recovery of the natural law, in particular the recovery of those speculative truths upon which it is founded, namely "the praeambula fidei regarding the existence and nature of God as First Cause and Provident Creator," and also "moral teachings rooted in natural teleology." These are philosophical truths, not truths of the Faith or of any confession.
• To accommodate for man as he is in the concrete, there must be some advertence to, if not outright acceptance of, the revealed realities of original and actual sin and man's calling to a life of grace and the beatific vision of God.
  

This sort of program avoids the secularist minimalism which is an unfortunate by-product of the Maritainian modus vivendi. Natural law, and the natura pura upon which it is based, is not a recipe for secularism, but an antidote to it.

For from secularism, the ontological density of nature and its proximate teleology is essential to the overcoming of secularism; essential to the very capacity of the Christian to engage with, and in, the world, and to articulate the intelligibility of revelation to a world in which revelation is often taken to be the fruit of irrational arbitrium decisively alienating man from his own nature.

Long, 155.

How is this to be done? How do we bell the cat? It requires a philosophical conversion, an "epistemological re-turn," one that will require "setting aside the antirealist premises of modernity and postmodernity."

The foundations of Christendom have been destroyed. Now the preambles to that foundation are in shambles. More than the Church has been razed. The very earthen foundations have been disemboweled. What is left is something akin to a bomb crater. The preambles must be filled in with a realist philosophy, a metaphysics that is open to realities beyond the material, namely one that is open to God as First Cause, as Last End, and as Provident Creator of the universe in which we have our home, a universe which includes us, beings with a particular, specific nature, whose end is this First Cause, Last End, and Provident Creator, et hoc dicimus Deum.
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*Indeed such a view is de fide: "Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason." Vatican Council I, Dei Filius No. 2: DS 3004; cf. 3026; Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum No. 6. See also Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 36.

Freedom and Law: Pope Leo XIII's Libertas praestantissimum, Part 6

FREEDOM OF RELIGION, OF SPEECH AND THE PRESS, and of conscience are considered to be staples of modern political and civil organization in the Western and Western-style democracies. Though there is an authentic freedom of worship, of conscience, and of speech and the press, there is, in Pope Leo XIII's view, also an inauthentic or counterfeit freedom of religion, conscience, and speech, one based upon a misunderstanding of man. The misunderstanding stems from man's supposed autonomy from the natural law and the divine law. Some advocates of such extensive civil rights insist that these freedoms are beyond the reach of the natural or divine law: that these are temples where no man or even God can reach, or, what is the same thing, that such untrammeled freedom of religion, conscience, and speech are themselves mandated by the natural or divine law and so the natural law or divine law precludes any curb--individual or social--upon their exercise.

In his analysis of these liberties or freedom, Leo XIII does not begin with the liberty or freedom, but with its related virtue or good. Thus, with respect to the liberty of worship, he starts with the virtue of religion. LP, 19. With regard to the liberty of speech and and related liberties, he begins with truth. LP, 23. In approaching the rights of conscience, he begins with the duty of man to God. LP, 30. The only means of understanding these freedoms or these liberties is to understand their end. These freedoms are not without their end or purpose, and it is only in reference to their end that they, and any proper limits to them, can be understood. As Pope Leo XIII had earlier indicated, freedom does not consist in the liberty to do wrong, but freedom is the liberty to do right. The freedom of worship is the freedom to worship rightly. The freedom of speech is the freedom to speak truthfully. The freedom of conscience is the freedom conscientiously to determine and follow objective good. Another way of looking at it is to analyze the freedoms from the perspective of their analogous duty. The freedom of worship is tied to the duty to worship the one true God, and not idols of our own making. The freedom of speech is tied to the duty to speak the truth, and not to lie. The freedom of conscience is tied to the duty to form one's conscience in accordance, not with whim, not based upon subjective preference, but upon the foundation of an objective moral reality.

The liberty of worship that Leo XIII analyzes is a one that is based "on the principle that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none." LP, 19 (emphasis added). In assessing this freedom, Leo XIII points to what is "without doubt" man's "chiefest and holiest" duty, officiis . . . sine dubitatione maximum ac sanctissimum, which is the duty "to worship God with devotion and piety." LP, 20. Moreover, the choice of worship is not up to individual whim: the natural law and reason both give guidance here, and impose an affirmative moral duty on man:

And if it be asked which of the many conflicting religions it is necessary to adopt, reason and the natural law unhesitatingly tell us to practice that one which God enjoins, and which men can easily recognize by certain exterior notes, whereby Divine Providence has willed that it should be distinguished, because, in a matter of such moment, the most terrible loss would be the consequence of error.

LP, 20. Consequently, a liberty of religion that is framed as a liberty where "every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none," is palpably false. The choice of religion is not an autonomous choice, a choice or exercise of will with no duty but to ourselves and to our whim. It is a choice with a duty, a duty imposed by reason and the natural law. The duty is to the true God. The suggestion that man has the liberty of religion defined as a liberty to manufacture an idol of his own hand, or, if he is more sophisticate, and idol of his own mind, is to suggest that "the power is given him to pervert or abandon with impunity the most sacred of duties, and to exchange the unchangeable good for evil." LP, 20. The sort of notion of religious liberty that Leo XIII condemned is the one espoused by Justice Anthony Kennedy in the "sweet-mystery-of-life" (so-sarcastically referred to by Justice Scalia) passage in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and which he has been justly ridiculed as "New Age jurisprudence" (Robert Bork), "open-ended validation of subjectivism" (William Bennett), "gaseously" written (George Will), or a "thing of almost infinite plasticity" (Michael Uhlman), or as the editors of First Things called it, the "notorious mystery passage":

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Justice Holmes, in his famous dissent in Lochner v. New York, stated that the "14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Spencer's Social Statics." Well neither, one should have thought, did the 14th Amendment enact Sartre's existentialism. I would call Justice Kennedy's "sweet-mystery-of-life" passage as--fittingly--nauseous, "nauseous words past mentioning or bearing." (Byron) For Leo XIII, these are the words of a man--probably through sheer philosophical ignorance or obtuseness or mindless acceptance of convention--which adopt Lucifer's "rebellious cry," and consequently substitutes "for true liberty what is sheer and most foolish license." LP, 14. One can virtually hear the voices of demons a-Maying, dancing as in a Mayfest around a phallic maypole, and chanting in dissipated glee and the rising of he coming mayhem:

La nausée reprend le pouvoir
La nausée reprend le pouvoir
La nausée reprend le pouvoir
La nausée reprend le pouvoir

Neo-Pagans celebrating the "Sweet-Mystery-of-Life"
before the Nausea sets in

The natural law obliges man to search for the truth in religious doctrine, to use all his tools at his disposal to seek for the truth, including both reason and prayer, and, if found, adopt and embrace the religion one believes to be true. That is the liberty protected by liberty of religion. There is no natural right to create our own religion, to create our own god, and to manufacture our own reality, as if religion is nothing other than ordering a Martini instead of a Bellini.

There is a concomitant duty upon the State equally to recognize God, to render homage to God, and to profess that religion which alone is true. Leo XIII labels as "manifestly false," the notions that "the State has no duties toward God, or that such duties, if they exist, can be abandoned with impunity." LP, 21.

[C]ivil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness-namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.

Quamobrem Deum civilis societas, quia societas est, parentem et auctorem suum agnoscat necesse est, atque eius potesta tern dominatumque vereatur et colat. Vetat igitur iustitia, vetat ratio atheam esse, vel, quod in atheismum recideret, erga varias, ut loquuntur, religiones pari modo affectam civitatem, eademque singulis iura promiscue largiri.

LP, 21. There will be, Leo XIII warns, a loss of liberty that will be engendered by a false notion of liberty of worship which relativizes all religions, which acts indifferently toward them, which advances a notion that religious truth and cult is what we craft and not what we discover. Religion conduces to pure morals and pure morals to liberty. Praetermittimus quantum religio bonis moribus conducat, et quantum libertati mores boni. LP, 22. In fact, if Leo XIII is to be believed, our false notions of freedom of religion and the rejection of any strict obligation, both individual and communal, to God and to objective truth in religion will lead to our demise because it will corrupt morals: "Reason shows, and history confirms the fact, that the higher the morality of States; the greater are the liberty and wealth and power which they enjoy." LP, 22.

(continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Law's but a Short Step to God

IN OUR LAST POSTING we discussed knowing the natural law. Before we know that law, does it exist? The answer is yes. It exists in things. Behind that, it exists in God.

[B]efore natural law exists in our mind as a proposition it exists in things. . . . [The nature of the things we perceive] we express . . . rationally, and we have the first component of the definition of law: it is a work of the reason. But notice that it is a reason measured by things [whether life, a mother protecting her baby, an untrue word, or a promise, or whatever], which bows before things: that is what we mean when say that those things are right by nature. The natural law exists in nature before it exists in our judgment, and it enjoys the latter existence--that is what natural law means!--by reason of what the nature of things is. . . . It exists ontologically before it exists rationally in our minds; it is embodied in things before it is thought out, thought through, understood, intelligently grasped. Plainly it is because natural law is first embodied in things that we declare such and such an action to be right, and such and such an action to be wrong, under circumstances which may have to be defined with great attention and particularity.

Simon, 137.

This is the predicate discussion to Simon's re-exploration of obligation, as he sees obligation as intimately tied to the notion of rational order in nature. Obligation cannot stop at things, at the non-rational, at the ontological. Obligation, if it exists, would have to be rational, and thus it requires a reason behind the ontological, and ultimately, that requires one who is ordering all things to their end, namely God.

Historically, the natural law was related or linked to a Theistic world view. God was seen as the author of both physical creation and rational creation, the physical nature and the rational or moral nature. God as a rational Creator was the "backing," the "standard," in the words of Simon, the "ultimate guarantee," which gave stability to the laws of nature, and by analogy, to the laws of the moral order. Thus all order resided in the rational, most fundamentally, in the Logos, the Reason or Word of God.

The discovery of natural law is typically found in three stages beginning with the created order. First, the natural law presents itself to our minds as an explanation or proposition for the order we witness and as being part of the "nature" of things, whatever those things might be. The second stage is the recognition that by saying that something exists "by nature," there is implied that, before apprehended by the intellect, the natural law exists in things. The natural law in things precedes our thought about the natural law, or else we would not have found it therein. We draw it out of things, as it were, out of things where we find it (even intangibles such as promises), and where it has been placed by someone else. Thus we are led to the third stage. What is it that is behind nature that leads our mind to discover that law and that is in that nature independent of our minds? We thus are led to the threshold of the discovery of the "author of nature," the "legislator of nature," the "nature" that has the laws that we discovered first with our minds, and later determined to be in these things.

And thus the law which, in the order of discovery, exists first as a proposition in our minds, secondly as a way of being, thirdly and ultimately exists in the divine mind, where it takes on the name of divine [read: eternal] law.

Simon, 139. So the rational, bows to the ontological, and the ontological bows to Reason, that is to say, God. Our reason is therefore not ultimately subservient to things, but to the God behind the things. "To know" comes from the "to be" and the "to act" of things, and all three lead to that being in which "to act," "to know," and "to be" are identical, and this is God whom we are then obliged "to adore." That's where the non serviam of those who reject the natural law ultimately stems from.

Christ the Pantokrator, El Shaddai, the Ruler of All

So it is that we confront what in practice is the real objection against natural law. The natural law implies the existence of God and all the moral responsibilities, the answerability, and in extremis, the final judgment and the possibility of punishment following. We learn that our freedom is not without responsibility, and we are responsible, answerable to another for its use or abuse. It may also demand metanoia, repentance. (The part we often forget is that it also means the opportunity for mercy and grace and reconciliation.)

There are a hundred reasons for opposition to natural law, but this is one of them and at certain times it may be the strongest: obligation in natural law does not hold unless the natural law exists in a state which is actually prior, but which is ultimate in the order of discovery--"this law is an aspect of God."

Simon, 139. In fact, it takes us to the threshold of a proof of God's existence.

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

Quinta via sumitur ex gubernatione rerum. Videmus enim quod aliqua quae cognitione carent, scilicet corpora naturalia, operantur propter finem, quod apparet ex hoc quod semper aut frequentius eodem modo operantur, ut consequantur id quod est optimum; unde patet quod non a casu, sed ex intentione perveniunt ad finem. Ea autem quae non habent cognitionem, non tendunt in finem nisi directa ab aliquo cognoscente et intelligente, sicut sagitta a sagittante. Ergo est aliquid intelligens, a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur ad finem, et hoc dicimus Deum.

S.T., Ia, q. 2 a. 3 co.

There is thus a relationship between obligation and order, between obligation to law and God's Providence:

Here we see about how reasoning about finality in nature and reasoning about obligation ultimately converge. The ways are slightly different, but the logical structure and the end are the same. The facts of order in the universe and the facts of obligation under natural law, i.e., that our reason bows before things, both require rationally a transcendent First Being in whom "to be" and "to act" and "to think" are one and the same.

Simon, 145.