Freedom's Conscientious Limits: The Natural Law

IN OUR LAST POST WE QUOTED that part of the Compendium which stated that the proper exercise of personal freedom demands not only specific conditions of economic, social, political, and cultural order to be properly exercised, but that, moreover, these must be conformed to the natural law, since "[b]y deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.'" (Compendium, No. 137) (quoting CCC, § 1740)

The natural law is therefore behind all of man's economic, social, political, and cultural life. It follows that the natural law is an essential part of the social doctrine of the Church. Indeed, the natural law is an essential part of man's freedom, for any action outside of the pale of the natural moral law is by definition a movement from the real, from what is, to the unreal, to what is not. As John Paul II vividly taught us in his Encyclical Veritatis splendor, there is an intrinsic connection between freedom and living in the truth. The negative is likewise true: there is an intrinsic connection between living in falsehood and slavery.

Freedom is not boundless. It must be exercised responsibly which means according to rule. Who can advocate an irresponsible freedom? As Solzhenitsyn pointed out in his famous Harvard Commencement Address (June 8, 1978), an "irresponsible freedom" granted "boundless space" is "destructive," and leads, moreover, society into "the abyss of human decadence."*

To avoid this fall into the "abyss of human decadence," therefore, we must exercise freedom responsibly. This means that freedom must conform itself to the judgment of conscience. Freedom is therefore restrained by conscience. Indeed, to place freedom under the judgment of conscience "leads to the acceptance of responsibility for the good accomplished and the evil committed." (Compendium, No. 139)

Conscience is therefore the lode star of freedom. Focus on the pole star of conscience keeps society from falling into the "abyss of human decadence," as Solzhenitsyn warned. But conscience serves a double purpose since it also keeps us out of the abyss of Hell. "Quidquid fit contra conscientiam, aedificat ad gehennam," the Fourth Lateran Council taught. That which goes against conscience, conduces one to Gehenna, a place where--one might to one's edification recall--both body and soul are destroyed. (Matt. 10:28)

If for both society and soul's sake freedom must be exercised responsibly, and this means in accordance with conscience, then what is to inform the conscience? Can conscience dispense with conscience? Surely not. Is conscience under no law? Surely not, for to judge means there is some law by which to judge. And if conscience is necessarily under some law, whose law, man's or God's?

If conscience is to be regarded as nothing more than vox hominis, the voice of man, then man is the measure of all things, and the law that governs conscience is nothing other than "self-law," a declaration of autonomy from external or objective rule. Conscience would then be nothing but the application of arbitrary rule. Conscience thought of in this way is, as Newman called it, in his famous Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, "counterfeit."** It is, in fact, rebellion.

Tower of Babel (Breughel)

Such a notion of conscience cannot support life in common. "Those who proclaim themselves to be the sole measure of realities and of truth cannot live peacefully in society with their fellow men and cooperate with them." (Compendium, No. 142) So there is an ominous harbinger of things to come when a Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy can say, in what his much more sensible fellow Justice Scalia mocked as "the famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage," that "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (Planned Parenthood v. Casey)

No, Justice Kennedy. The "right to define one's concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," is not at the heart of liberty, it's at the heart of slavery.

Conscience, Justice Kennedy plainly forgot, is not the voice of man, it is vox Dei, the voice of God. And this suggests that God, and not man, is the measure of all things. There is then a measure or rule outside ourselves to which we must conform. And this outside measure or rule--which finds its source in God and his eternal law and as it applies to man-- is known as the natural law.

For this reason, the Compendium states that the "exercise of freedom implies a reference to a natural moral law, of a universal character, that precedes and units all rights and duties." As if bullet points, the Compendium insists on the following:

• The natural law is "nothing other than the light of intellect infused within us by God."***
• By the natural law we "know what must be done and what must be avoided."†
• "This light or this law has been given by God to [man in] creation."††
• The natural law consists in the participation of God's eternal law, "which is identified with God himself."
• The natural law is called "natural" "because the reason that promulgates it is proper to human nature."
• The natural law "is universal, it extends to all people insofar as it is established by reason."
• The natural law, in "its principal precepts," is presented "in the Decalogue," that is, the Ten Commandments, "and indicates the primary and essential norms regulating moral life."
• The natural law's "central focus is the act of aspiring and submitting to God, the source and judge of everything that is good."
• The natural law's "central focus" also includes the "act of seeing others as equal to oneself."
• The natural law "expresses the dignity of the person and laws the foundations of the person's fundamental duties" to both God, to himself, and to man."
  

(Compendium, No. 140)

The natural law is the law among all people, and it traverses all culture, all convention, all human law. It is the law under all laws, over all laws, and within all laws. It is "immutable," constant, a reliable lode star, even "under the flux of ideas and customs," though it is also flexible, and "its application may," where exceptionless or absolute norms are not at issue, "require adaptations to the many different conditions of life according to place, time, and circumstances."††† (Compendium, No. 141)

It is true that man can reject the natural law, and in the main our society seems to have rejected its guidance. But "[e]ven when it is rejected in its very principles," the Compendium states quoting the Catechism, "it cannot be destroyed or removed from the heart of man. It always rises again in the life of individuals and societies." (Compendium, No. 141) Indeed, the "natural law, which is the law of God, cannot be annulled by human sinfulness."

Not only is it true that man can reject the natural law, it is also true that we can simply be ignorant of the natural law. The voice of the natural law is sufficiently quiet that particular individuals or whole societies fail to hear it. "Be still and know that I am God," says the Psalter. (Psalm 46:10 [45:11]) The "stillness" rule applies to the natural law: "Be still and know the natural law." And most of us are not still enough to hear the natural law. Most of us listen to other, louder voices: selfish regard, the poisons and conventions of our culture, the stupid, trite, and shallow aphorism of the day, the rule of expediency. Additionally, our inner ear is muffled by the ease of torpid conscience, the inconvenience even sacrifice demanded by a life lived by principle, or by an all-too-frequent acedia in moral life.

Since most of us are not still enough, listen to other voices, or have a sort of lint in our heart's inner ear, the natural law's "precepts . . . are not clearly and immediately perceived by everyone." It is therefore the case that, as a matter of practical necessity in a world that has lapsed after the Fall, religious and moral truths can be known "with facility, with firm certainty, and without the admixture of error" only "with the help of Grace and Revelation."

As Matthew Arnold said in his poem, "Pis Aller":‡

Man is blind because of sin,
Revelation makes him sure;
Without that, who looks within,
Looks in vain, for all's obscure.

The natural law is not only the recipe for individual morality, it is the recipe for social life. The natural law is, in fact, the foundation upon which the Church's social doctrine is built, and is the foundation upon which every society bar none must be built.

The natural law "lays the indispensable moral foundation for building the human community and for establishing the civil law that draws its consequences of a concrete and contingent nature from the principles of the natural law." (Compendium, No. 142) Without the natural law, in vain do men build their societies, found their governments, and attempt constitutions devoted to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

"Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain." (Psalm 127 (126):1) Build a society without reference to the natural law, build a society of relativism and moral pluralism without reference to God and his law, and you have built not on Mount Zion. Rather, you have built its ersatz, a fake substitute, a tower of Babel. And we all know what happened to that tower.

They who did labour Babels tower to'erect,
Might have considered, that for that effect,
All this whole solid Earth could not allow
Nor furnish forth Materials enow;
And that his Center, to raise such a place
Was far too little, to have been the Base;
No more affords this worlds, foundation
To erect true joy, were all the means in one.
But as the Heathen made them several gods,
Of all God's Benefits, and all his Rods,
(For as the Wine, and Corn, and Onions are
Gods unto them, so Agues be, and war)
And as by changing that whole precious Gold
To such small copper coins, they lost the old.

If we think like Justice Kennedy, we have traded precious Gold of the natural law, for the small copper coin of relativism, and with the loss of capital and the loss of coin, we have sold ourselves to slavery. And all this not even for a mess of pottage, but for such enormities such as contraception, abortion, homosexual marriage, and pornography.

________________________________
*"Harvard Commencement Address," by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Lewis Copeland, et al, eds., The World's Great Speeches 4th ed. (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999), 837.

**John Henry Newman, A Letter addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1875), 75, 82.
***Quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas, In Duo Praecepta Caritatis et in Decem Legis Pracepta Expositio, c. 1. ("nihil aliud est nisi lumen intellectus insitum nobis a Deo")
†Id. ("per quod cognoscimus quid agendum et quid vitandum")
††Id. ("Hoc lumen et hanc legem dedit Deus homini in creatione")
†††As an example, the distinction between extraordinary medical care (which one is not required to render a person) and ordinary medical care (which one is) varies "according to place, time, and circumstances." Similarly, the right to a living wage and what that means varies "according to place, time, and circumstances." Some norms--like the prohibition against murder or adultery--are exceptionless and do not admit of change "according to place, time, and circumstances."
‡See The Need for Revelation: "Pis-Aller" by Matthew Arnold.

The Gospel of the "Is With"

TWO THINGS THERE ARE FROM WHICH THE CHURCH can never separate: Jesus Christ and mankind. Christ is head of the Church. Christ is the bridegroom, the Church his bride, the two bound in an eternal marriage. The Spirit of Christ is the Church's spiritual soul. Christ--body, soul, flesh, and divinity--is the meat of her spiritual and supersubstantial food, the Eucharist. And Christ is the chief subject, the centerpiece, of her universal message of the salvation proferred to all men in Christ by a merciful God.

Christ's universality, then, binds the Church to all mankind, of which she is also part. There is not one man, woman, or child which she would ban from her message, or for whom the message would be irrelevant or superfluous. Like the colonnades of Bernini at St. Peter's square which seem to reach out and embrace all mankind, Christ's love, which the Bernini colonnades symbolize, embraces all bar none. It is for this reason that the Church "continues to speak to all people and all nations," and always will. (Compendium, No. 1)

Bernini's Colonnade at St. Peter's: Symbol of Christ's embracing love

Now the Lord Jesus did come only to save spiritual souls, to pull them out of the shells of their bodies and leave the body behind like refuse, as if the Gospel were nothing more than emptying out the contents of a disposable can. No. Our Lord came to save every man, woman, and child in his or her integrity: soul and body. That is why the doctrine of the Resurrection of the body has always been central to the Christian message. This, of course, is the anchoring truth of John Paul II's "theology of the body."

But Jesus and his Gospel go beyond even this. Every human being is more than soul and body. Every human being is fitted within relations: is someone's son or daughter, is perhaps someone's father or mother, is the member of some tribe, or the citizen of some nation. Every human being rubs shoulders with, exchanges words with, trades goods and services with, works with, breaks bread with, consorts with, and sometimes even fights with others of his kind. Every human being is answerable to law, civil, religious, and natural, a law to which he is accountable, sometimes even with his life. Every person not only is but also is with others.

Again, Christ came not only to save spiritual souls and fleshly bodies: He came also to save relations. He came to save both the is of each of us and the is with of each of us. Relations among men, the is with, ought to be governed by justice and ought to conduce to peace. Like Christ, the Church therefore addresses her Gospel to all humans and all human reality: the is and the is with. That part of the Gospel that addresses the is with of each of us is the Church's social doctrine.

The Gospel addresses itself first to the is, and from the is it spills over to the is with:

Discovering that they are loved by God, people come to understand their own transcendent dignity, they learn not to be satisfied with only themselves [the "is"] but to encounter in their neighbor in a network of relationships that are ever more authentically human [the "is with"]. Men and women [the "is"] who are made "new" by the love of God are able to change the rules and quality of relationships, transforming even social structures [the "is with"].

(Compendium, No. 4) Love is what changes the is, and love moves from changing the is to changing the entire is with so that the entire world of is with also conforms to love.

Love is necessarily ebullient: it cannot be bottled up in a Coke bottle and sold by the fluid ounce. It can't be stored in a safe, kept safe for a later day. It can't be divided up and parceled out, as if it were a welfare dole, and therein remain satisfied. Love is no respecter of boundaries, and it does not limit itself to the is.

No, love is something like the five loaves of bread and the two fish the Jesus blessed, and then inexplicably fed a crowd of thousands, with plenty left over to spare after the thousands had their fill. Cf. Luke 9:12-17. It never stays water; it always changes into wine. It spills over almost recklessly, but never lawlessly, into the is with. It always, invariably will focus on another.

And so the Church's message of God's love, including her social doctrine, is not to be kept in any storehouse like the wealth of a rich man, or under a bushel basket such as one may foolishly put a candle.

The Church's social doctrine is something like a Mother Theresa of Calcutta or a Father Damien: especially while others suffer, it will not stay trapped in a convent in solitary contemplation or remain only a vacuous word, but it will clamber over walls, break through the gates, cross oceans and deserts if it has to, face the swords and rifles of power, and venture into the rough and tumble and dirty streets of Calcutta or the leprosorium of the island of Molokai, and engage in action, even, at times, to unpopular denunciation.

Christian love leads to denunciation, proposals and a commitment to cultural and social projects; it prompts positive activity that inspires all who sincerely have the good of man at heart to make their contribution.

(Compendium, No. 6)

Urged by love, we are both Marthas and Marys. We live in a world of both theory and practice, of being and doing, and the Church's social teaching comprehends both. Nothing is worse than a talker and not a doer, except a doer who does not know what he is about.

In fact, the bane of society is the social gadfly, the officious intermeddler, an activist without guidance, or worse, an activist guided by bad ideas. Nothing is worse than someone who wants to change the is with who has not changed the is. Nothing is worse than someone who wants to change the is with when he does not know what the is with ought to be. And so the social doctrine of the Church provides guidance for action by informing us what the is with ought to be.

[I]n the social doctrine of the Church can be found the principles for reflection, the criteria for judgment, and the directives for action which are the starting point for the promotion of an integral and solidary humanism. Making this doctrine known constitutes, therefore, a genuine pastoral priority, so that men and women will be enlightened by it and will be thus enable to interpret today's reality and seek appropriate paths of action.

(Compendium, No. 7)

It this felt urgency that drove the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace to put together the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. It purports to provide a "complete overview of the fundamental framework of the doctrinal corpus of Catholic social teaching." And this complete overview, which must be taken in its complete integrity, is calculated to "suggest a systematic approach for finding solutions to problems, so that discernment, judgment, and decisions will correspond to reality." It is meant "as a guide to inspire, at the individual and collective levels, attitudes and choices that will permit all people to look at the future with greater trust and hope." It is meant as an "aid for the faithful concerning the Church's teaching in the area of social morality." (Compendium, No. 10)

For those, then, that confront the felt injustices of the world and her structures and institutions, for those who believe that they are their brother's keeper and want to extend a helping hand, for those who want to fix not only the is, but also the is with, for those who want to avoid being officious intermeddlers and mere social gadflies who do more harm than good, the Compendium is a valuable resource.

It is, in fact, a vade mecum that ought to be in the hand of every bishop, every priest, every religious, and every lay person in the Church. Indeed, it ought to find itself in the hands of our separated brothers and sisters in Christ, in the hands of those of other faiths, and in the hands of all men and women of good will. It comes with the same impetus, the same hope as the coming of Christ, of whom it bears witness: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will." Luke 2:14.

By means of the present document [the Compendium], the Church intends to offer a contribution of truth to the question of man's place in nature and in human society, a question faced by civilizations and cultures in which expressions of human wisdom are found . . . . The direction that human existence, society, and history will take depends largely on the answers given to the questions of man's place in nature and society; the purpose of the present document is to make a contribution to these answers. . . . The Church . . . intends with this document on her social doctrine to propose to all men and women a humanism that is up to the standards of God's plan of love in history, an integral and solidary humanism capable of creating a new social, economic, and political order founded on the dignity and freedom of every human person, to be brought about in peace, justice, and solidarity.

(Compendium, No. 14-15, 19)

The Compendium is the guide to the is with in all our lives. It is a sure guidance to those who feel that they are their brother's keeper, the brother who always is with them. It is, in fact, a compendium or exposition of the second table of the Ten Commandments, which Christ encapsulated in that Golden Rule: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Cf. Luke 10:26; Mark 12:31.

My Brother's Keeper: The Natural Law of Society

“AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?" is how the fratricide Cain impudently responded to God's question about the whereabouts of his brother Abel, whose blood he shed, but the cries of which he could not hear, though God heard well enough. Gen. 4:9. That self-justification was founded upon a lie, for Cain knew full well where his brother was and what he had done to him. And yet he perjured himself when he answered to the Lord of Life and testified against the witness of his conscience that he did not know the whereabouts of his brother. He murdered his conscience when he murdered his brother; now followed it up with a lie to himself when he lied to the Lord of Truth. With his own hand he unwittingly dealt himself a double wound, proving the Platonic verity that it is worse to commit injustice than to suffer it, though it is bad enough, intolerable in fact, to have to suffer it. And consequent to his murder, and to his lie, was a judgment, a judgment that led him to a life of alienation, a life of unrequited labor and the loss of ease, a life of fear that he was marked for death. By acting against the brotherhood of man via the lifting of his hand against his brother, Cain was ushered into a Hobbesian world, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," Leviathan, I.13, and where relationships with others are based upon the "fear of death, and wounds," coupled with a hedonistic panting, a "desire of ease, and sensual delight." Leviathan, I.11. This is a world far doubly removed from Paradise, one proximate to Hell. It is a world where one man's hand is always against another's, where man's hand is not extended in help, and where the hand of Providence and the Eternal Law are bracketed, where they are words of an old order, a defunct regime, now there is no more vox Dei, and all is vox populi. The only hand is the invisible hand trumped up by Adam Smith, an invisible, fictitious, unfeeling hand built upon the frivolous theory that a man's selfish vice and vicious selfishness redounds to the benefit of the common good.

"Cain and Abel" by Marc Chagall

The modern world suffers from the malaise of bad thinking: bad political thinking, bad economic thinking, bad thinking about sex, marriage, and family, and bad thinking about the purpose of human life and of man's nature. The classical political liberalism of John Locke, institutionalized in our Declaration of Independence; the classical economic liberalism of Adam Smith, and the laissez faire of the French Physiocrats upon which our economic system is built; the rugged individualism of supposed self-made men, who had not time for their poor, laggard brothers, the poor who would always be with them; the idolization of the dog-eat-dog competitiveness, a social adaption of the pseudo-science of Darwinian's survival-of-the-fittest dogma, Herbert Spencer's "Social Statics," where nature and society had no end, no law, but competition of species, resulting in an ethos that was red in tooth and claw. Moral relativism which stems from man's supposed autonomy, a price given to him not by God but by an untravelled man with a stoop, a man wakened up by Hume, with little imagination, less piety, but prodigious brains named Immanuel "God-is-with-Us" Kant, has now crept in to the mix. And this, and sloppy thinking, has led us to a world of nothing but incessant rights talk, a world which, in the words of those seagulls of the movie Finding Nemo, is nothing but a world of "mine, mine, mine," a world where natural law, reciprocal duties, and objective moral truth are viewed as words and concepts that are passé at best, and intolerable and dangerous evils, at worst. Ideas Have Consequences is the title of a famous book by Richard M. Weaver, but for him all ideas were arbitrary, the products of raw choice, without any basis in an objective world, without any tied to what is. We are products of the Great Stereopticon--truth being a commodity, not something tied to what is.

And then we have the backlash to this state of affairs: responses to the social ills brought in by this new thinking, whose prescription was and is worse than the disease: socialism, which denies private property and proposes a nanny-state; communism which to socialism added an admixture of philosophy of dialectical materialism, of atheism, of class warfare, of violence, yielding a socialistic witch's brew. And then there is Fascism, Nazism, Nationalism . . . ism after ism after tiresome ism. And we, like sheep, have gone astray, each one of us has turned to his own way, his own ism. And meanwhile, despite all isms, the divide between the haves and have-nots grows, and because of the isms, the bodies of victims become fuel and fodder, and they stack up as if funeral pyres, sacrifices to Moloch or Leviathan, to the point where desensitized survivors simply shrug their shoulders--the number of common graves becomes common, the modern world having become one vast charnel house, with rooms that differ only in decor: Gulag, Kozentrationslager, the Killing Fields, Čelebići, Kwan-li-so, Laogai. Even the mother's womb--where not rendered sterile by man's hand or by the modern magic of his pharmaceuticals--has been invaded, the thrust of flesh and orgy of lust is followed with the thrust of steel and an orgy of death, and all this under cover of right. But here the victim is not even given the limited dignity of a common grave. He--(to assuage consciences) called a nameless, sexless lying epithet: POC, "product of conception," though he has both sex and unique genetic makeup and deserves a name--is disposed of as if he were so much medical detritus. And yet, his blood, like slain Abel's, cries out to heaven in a chorus of hundreds of millions to the God who sees all. But it is a God that is largely unacknowledged by those that live and do the killing, for we have made way for the atheists de facto and de jure, and God is no longer a social reality, no longer the governor of men and the source of right. The world of man is bereft of God: we live in a world without charm, a demystified world, a world where wonder is gone, where nothing is sacred: Weber's disenchantment of the world, die Entzauberung der Welt is fully wended.

What of those of us who still carry in our hearts an affirmative response to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" What of those who look at modernity and its ills and ask themselves, "Is there not a better way?" Where are they to go?

The Church offers an answer to the disenchanted who seek enchantment. The Church's answer is a blend of honest observation of the way things are--the natural law--and the light of the Gospel--the message of the Lord of Life and Truth, who came and set up his human tent among us, who fulfilled the law and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. The answer, like the problems it addresses, is manifold. The answer is called the Church's social doctrine. Since the 1800s, beginning with Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, though deep-rooted in her doctrinal patrimony, the Church has been developing this teaching, drawing it out of what is discoverable in nature and in Revelation. And it has placed that teaching at the disposal to Christ's faithful, and to all men and women of good will. For the message of the Church's social doctrine are not for Christian ears only. The message of the Church's social doctrine is universal: it is meant for all men and women of good will. "[I]t places the human person and society in relationship with the light of the Gospel," and yet, it is offered "to the faithful and to all people of good will, as food for human and spiritual growth, for individuals and communities alike."* It is predicated, founded on "moral values, founded on the natural law written on every human conscience," and "every human conscience is hence obliged to recognize and respect this law." It is the Church's evangelical response, it is "her voice," perhaps one crying in the wilderness, "concerning the 'new things' (res novae) typical of the modern age," but a voice that "belongs to her to invite all people to do all they can to bring about an authentic civilization ever more towards integral human development in solidarity." The Compendium is a summary of this doctrine, one that is "presented in such a way as to be useful not only from within (ab intra), that is among Catholics, but also from outside (ab extra)," indeed, one issued to all men and women of good will, those who seek and share "a common motivation for the integral development of every person and the whole person."

For as long as it takes, we shall focus in these next blog postings on the Church's social doctrine, drawing principally, but not entirely, from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church prepared by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

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*These and other quotes are taken from the Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano's introduction to the Compendium addressed to the then-President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino. The text of the Compendium is available on-line. See Compendium.