Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Natural Law, Onto-Gnoseologically Speaking

IN THE LAST POSTING WE LEFT OFF with the Maritainian concept of the development of the natural law. Maritain advances the notion that there has been a progressive development of the natural law, or perhaps more accurately, a progressive development in the knowledge of the natural law, prodded by the knowledge obtained through inclinations or connaturality. It is this internal, amorphous yearning, feeling, or impulse, what we have referred to in previous posts as intellectual feltness or perhaps even better expressed as an intellectual tedentiousness, that is later looked at with conceptual, discursive reasoning and which has led to a greater understanding of the content of natural law over history from ancient times into modernity. What was implicit, or rather what is known through inclination, has become explicit, which is to say, stated through conceptual and discursive terms. What was there ab initio, but not known or not fully grasped by philosophy or word, has in tempore been brought to the surface and is known and made fully intelligible in the way of philosophical concepts and words.

[H]uman knowledge of natural law has been progressively shaped and molded by the inclinations of human nature, starting from the most basic ones. We should not expect philosophy [L.C. since it is based upon conceptual, discursive knowledge and not knowledge by inclination] to offer us an a priori picture of those genuine inclinations [which are rooted in man's being as vitally permeated with the preconscious life of the mind, and]* which either developed or were released as humanity advanced. They are evinced by he very history of human consciousness.

Maritain, 35.

How can we tell authentic inclinations from spurious ones? Knowing which inclinations are legitimate and which are not would seem fundamental to distinguish between authentic knowledge and inauthentic knowledge, that is, whether something is natural law or not. Maritain's test, which is not particularly precise, but highly amorphous, is as follows:

Those inclinations were really genuine which, in the immensity of the human past, have guided reason in becoming aware, little by little, of the regulations that have been most definitely and most generally recognized by the human race, starting from the most ancient social communities. For the knowledge of the primordial aspects of natural law was first expressed in social patterns rather than personal judgments. This knowledge was developed from inside, within the double protecting tissue of human inclinations and human society.

Maritain, 35-36. Maritain seems to advocate a sort of vox populi vox legis naturalis, a very challenging form of distillate law.

Gnoseologically speaking, then, natural law is that law which is "naturally known, or, more exactly, . . . the knowledge of which is embodied in the most general and most ancient heritage of humanity." Maritain, 36 (emphasis Maritain's). These constitute, in Maritain's view, the "first principles" known through inclination starting from the "most common" to the "more and more specific ones." Maritain, 36.

Not particularly convincingly, or at least not particularly clearly, Maritain suggests that he has thus "put together two perspectives [of natural law] which, at first glance appear contradictory," namely the ontological and the gnoseological.**

Maritain identifies areas where a knowledge by inclination, "spontaneous knowledge," Maritain, 37, before they are specifically determined, would take us. They would take us to certain "dynamic schemes" or "tendential frameworks" recognized by the data of anthropology:

• to take a man's life is not like taking another animal's life
• the family group has to comply with some fixed pattern
• sexual intercourse has to be contained within given limitations
• we are bound to look at the Invisible
• we are bound to live together under certain rules and prohibitions
  

Maritain, 36-37. This is the sort of knowledge, universally known, that is gained by inclination. It is subsequent to these "tendential frameworks" or "dynamic schemes," when they are fleshed out by individual tribes and cultures that the "immense amount of relativity and variability is to be found in the particular rules, customs, and standards . . . among all peoples of the earth." Maritain, 37. It is within these "tendential frameworks" or "dynamic schemes" that "many various, still defective contents can occur,--not to speak of the warped, deviated, or perverted inclinations which can mingle with the basic ones." In other words, Maritain seems to advocate that knowledge by inclination by connaturality comes up with these "tendential frameworks" or "dynamic schemes," the bones, as it were, of what is natural law. It is when conceptual or discursive reasoning steps in and fleshes out these bones that we get human variability and, inevitably, along with some good, also some corruption and perversion.

The rotten flesh on the clean bones of natural law can be progressively identified and healed in Maritain's view. The identification and healing is performed "in a double manner," both through inclination and discursive reason. Over the course of history, reason "has become aware in a less and less crepuscular, rough, and confused manner, of the primordial regulations of the natural law." On the other hand, man's inclinations have made man more "aware . . . of its further, higher regulations." Maritain, 37. It is therefore why "natural law essentially involves a dynamic development," and why "moral conscience, or the knowledge of natural law, has progressed" from cave man to modern man. Maritain, 37. Indeed, for Maritain that progress is, apparently by natural means alone and not by any supernatural help,**** ineluctable, undeniable, infallible, assured:

[S]uch knowledge is still progressing, it will progress as long as human history endures. That progress of moral conscience is indeed the most unquestionable instance of progress in humanity.

Maritain, 37. It is this notion of progress, a progress without Christ,***** that Maritain uses as his springboard to effect some sort of synthesis with classic natural law and modern natural right. This will be the subject of our next few blog postings. Here, however, we shall end with what might be called the preface of what is to come. First, we have a summary of Maritain's efforts at synthesizing the ontological and gnoseological aspects of the natural law, that is, the natural law as it is, and the natural law insofar as it is known:

I have said that the natural law is unwritten law: it is unwritten law in the deepest sense of that expression, because our knowledge of it is no work of free conceptualization, but results from a conceptualization bound to the essential inclinations of being, of living nature, and of reason, which are at work in man, and because it develops in proportion to the degree of moral experience and self-reflection, and of social experience also, of which man is capable in the various ages of his history.

Maritain, 38. Within certain limits, this would appear unobjectionable, indeed, irrefragable. But as an absolute principle, it would seem untenable. Yet it is from this untenable basis that Maritain leaps into his heart's desire, which is to effect some sort of engrafting of the Enlightenment doctrine of human rights with the classical Thomist doctrine of natural law:

[T]hus it is that in the ancient and medieval times attention was paid, in natural law, to the obligations of man more than to his rights. The proper achievement--a great achievement indeed--of the XVIIIth Century has been to bring out in full light the rights of man as also required by natural law. That discovery was essentially due to a progress in moral and social experience, through which the root inclinations of human nature as regards the rights of the human person were set free, and consequently, knowledge through inclination with regard to them developed.

Maritain, 38. It is true that Maritain tempers his zeal from the advance of human rights caused by the Enlightenment somewhat; he does put one foot on the brake while he has another on the accelerator. He does not wish to swallow the Enlightenment "human rights" and the Enlightenment "ideology" whole. Maritain wants to indulge in Enlightenment fare, but not on a take-all-or-nothing table d'hôte basis; he'd rather order Enlightenment dishes selectively à la carte. To his credit and his Catholic sensibilities, there are some dishes, or combination of dishes, that he simply finds unpalatable.

[A]ccording to a sad law of human knowledge, that great achievement [of the Enlightenment] was paid for by ideological errors, in the theoretical [L.C. and not moral?] field, that I have stressed at the beginning. Attention even shifted from the obligations of man to his rights only. A genuine and comprehensive view would pay attention both to the obligations and the rights involved in the requirements of natural law.

Maritain, 38.

Maritain, it would seem, would enjoy a blended cuisine, a cuisine of both Thomist natural law and of Enlightenment natural right. Can such a blend be done, and, if so, how? If done, can such a blend be digested? Does the effort result in dyspepsia or eupepsia? Will we enjoy the nouvelle cuisine? Or suffer indigestion?

The scholars and theologians are still thinking, writing, debating, arguing, and pontificating. Some burp with satisfaction. Others groan with the pains of acid reflux. And the jury of history is still deliberating without having reached a verdict.

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*The part in these brackets was not in the original text when published as Leçon 1- La loi naturelle ou loi non écrite, but was added when re-published as part of Chapter IV in Maritain's Man and the State. See Maritain, 25 n. 5. The part in the preceding brackets was added for clarity by Lex Christianorum.
**I do not see the ontological perspective in Maritain's synthesis, unless it is expressed in the phrase "the knowledge [of natural law] embodied in the most general and most ancient heritage of humanity." But he refers to this as part of the "gnoseological element." His synthesis seems therefore entirely weighted on the gnoseological perspective. Granted, the sentence in which purportedly effects this synthesis is not felicitously written. "With regard to the second basis element, the gnoseological element which natural law implies in order to have force of law, we can say that natural law--that is, natural law naturally known, or, more exactly, natural law the knowledge of which is embodied in the most general and most ancient heritage of humanity--covers only the field of the ethical regulations of which men have become aware by virtue of knowledge through inclination, and which are the basic or first principles of moral life--progressively recognized from the most common principles to the more and more specific ones. This is to put together to perspectives which, at first glance, appear contradictory: the first perspective sees the natural law as coextensive with human nature, so that every ethical regulation that might be discovered may be found to be in agreement with this 'normality of the functioning of human nature': the other perspective does not deal with the entire set of moral regulations, but only with the very first principles (because it focuses not so much on the ontological element as on the gnoseological element, and because it deals only with those regulations that are known by inclination)." Maritain, 36. Unless I'm thick-headed, this sentence is hardly a model of clarity. Perhaps we need to access the original French.
***These "tendential frameworks" or "dynamic schemes" seem horribly without substantive value. If these for the principal part of the natural law gained through the knowledge by inclination, they are disappointingly without substance. The knowledge gained by inclination, under Maritain's theory, would be disappointingly thin.
****This is again troublesome. If progress in our knowledge of the natural law is naturally assured as a result of some sort of ineluctable law of human progress, then what need is there for Christ? What need for His Church? It seems that, in Maritain's view, human progress, by human effort alone, without the need of grace, will take us asymptotically to the limit of Gospel morality. This appears to be a Pelagian-stained doctrine, and not one authentically Thomistic, Augustinian, or, for that matter, Evangelical. Again, I am not a Maritainian scholar, and Maritain's Catholic and Thomistic credentials are far, far superior to any claim I, as a mere autodidact amateur, have to such, but there seems to something in this Maritainian doctrine that rubs against the Tradition and a strict Orthodoxy. This doctrine would seem to be somewhat temerarious, or at least inching towards such temerity. But again, I withhold any kind of final or even preliminary judgment on Maritain's thought. These areas, however, seem to be problematic and require further analysis.
*****In fact, a progress that may have been inspired by anti-Christian, and certainly anti-Catholic, sentiment. The Enlightenment Project, whatever good may be found in it mixed with whatever evil may be found in it, was certainly inspired by a spirit of rebellion from the Church. Its motto and inspiring spirit may have been taken from Voltaire's lips and poisoned heart: "écrasez l'infâme." But all involved, both advocates and enemies, may have been confusing the civil order, and the ecclesiastical interest in maintaining civil order, including its privileged status (and the benefits to the common good gained thereby), and avoiding bloodshed that comes with revolution, with the ecclesiastical order itself. These, like most historical areas, are full of thorny thickets, with very few clearings.

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Natural Law, Ontologically Speaking

MARITAIN DOES NOT MINCE HIS WORDS. The so-called "father of natural law," the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), was not its father,* much less its worthy exponent or faithful son. Grotius was, in fact, a great deformer of natural law, a bastard son of the natural law if there ever was one. Maritain reaches back, behind the Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), beyond the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (ca. 1492-1546), to the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who, "alone among these great authors grasped the matter of the natural law and made it into a wholly consistent doctrine." Maritain, 26. St. Thomas may be called the great synthesizer of the natural law doctrine. If anyone is natural law's "father," it is St. Thomas. But St. Thomas built upon the work of his predecessors, and so at best he was a midwife. The theory of natural law that flowed from his pen did not come out of his mind fully formed like Athena from the head of Jove. He stood on others' shoulders; he relied on human intellectual patrimony, and simply put it together in a marvelous synthetic symphony.

Therefore, to grasp the "true origin of the idea of natural law," we have to accept the historical fact that its authentic manifestation, in all of its fullness, is an inheritance of both Greek and Christian thought. Thus we reach even further back from St. Thomas Aquinas to his great predecessors, to St. Augustine, to the Church Fathers, to Saint Paul, and, leaving the children of the Church, back to the pagan antiquity, to Cicero, to the Stoics, "to the great moralists of antiquity and its great poets, particularly Sophocles."** Maritain, 26. In many prior postings we have looked at the contributions of these men or these philosophical schools.

In haling back to its ancient Graeco-Roman and Christian sources, Maritain divides his analysis of natural law into two elements: an ontological (or metaphysical) element and a gnoseological (or epistemological) element. The first element attempts to answer the question: what is the natural law? The second element attempts to answer the question: how is it we know what the natural law is?

In this blog posting we will address Maritain's treatment of the metaphysical or ontological element of natural law. In the next posting, we will treat of the gnoseological or epistemological element.

In his discussion, Maritain assumes--he takes for granted--that there is such a thing as human nature, that it is the same for all men, and that man possesses intelligence, is cognizant of his acts and their purpose, and so is aware and moved by the ends he seeks. Maritain--moderate realist Thomist that he is--assumes that human nature--a universal--exhibits itself in an individual man. Nevertheless, this human nature carries with it a "ontological structure," that is, it possesses a structure that is attached to, that is part and parcel of, being human. This "ontological structure" is the "locus of intelligible necessities," which is to say it can be known and it is needed. This "ontological structure" is the center, the navel as it were, of an order that can be grasped by human intellect. It is the moral omphalos of man. It informs man that he "possesses ends which necessarily correspond to his essential constitution and which are the same for all." Maritain, 27. All things have a "ontological structure," which is universal though it may be expressed in a particular individual, but which informs us of the end that this nature-in-individual shares with all other individuals that are part of that nature. Thus, pianos regardless of their variety--from spinets to grands--have as their end the production of musical sounds. Analogously, man regardless of his individual characteristics has an end that is intimately tied to his nature and so shares with all men. Yet man, having both intellect and free will, is in a position vastly different from the piano:

[S]ince man is endowed with intelligence and determines his own ends, it is up to him to put himself in tune with the ends necessarily demanded by his nature. This means that there is, by the very virtue of human nature, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the essential and necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, considered in its ontological aspect, is nothing more than that ...

Maritain, 27. Maritain acknowledges that comparing man to a piano is "crude and provocative," but that he adopted such an invention of human workmanship to compare man to in the spirit of Plato. The point is to show that anything that exists has its own purpose, and to that extent it may be said to have its own natural law, its "normal way of functioning," that is ontologically part of its nature. We don't use a piano to hammer a nail: that is not its purpose and violates the natural law, as it were, of the piano as well as the nail. A hammer, on the other hand, has its own purpose--a natural law, if you will--that makes it ideal for hammering a nail. Every day, many times a day, we accept the natural law that inheres in individual existent things, particularly things such as tools that have been designed and manufactured by men. We recognize the natural law in things when, for example, we shave with a razor, and not a hair dryer, or when we open up our bottle of Refosco from Friuli with a corkscrew instead of a shotgun.

The same notion of purpose or natural law inheres in things not designed or manufactured by man, that is, in natural objects. We are aware of the normal functioning of creatures, of plants--what a palm should look like, that a coconut palm yields coconuts, not dates--, of animals--that a dog is not a cat, and that our dog will shake her tail when we come home after a long day's work. Some people have either an inherent sensitivity to the natural working of things--such as Washington Carver with his plants--or as a result of training and education--such as our local Veterinarian has with our pets--or as a result of both--Mozart with respect to his harpsichord.

With respect to these things made by human artifice and things natural, we recognize how things, if they act within their norm, their "natural law," should act, though they have no free will in the matter:

[N]atural law is but part of the immense network of essential tendencies and regulations involved in the movement of the cosmos.

Maritain, 28.

That is another way of saying that natural law participates in the eternal law. There is, of course, a huge distinction between the "natural law" that governs things without free will and the "natural law" that governs things with free will. Whether a horse acts in accord with its nature or not, there is never a question of the horse being immoral:

The horse who fails in that equine [natural] law only obeys the universal order of nature on which the deficiencies of his individual nature depend. If horses were free, there would be an ethical or moral way of conforming to the specific natural law of horses. But a horsy morality is a dream because horses are not free.

Maritain, 28-29.

Because there is the "ontological structure" in all things, we speak sensibly when we talk about how a thing "should" act. Thus, our veterinarian knows how a healthy dog "should" act. Mozart , with his perfect pitch, knew how his harpsichord "should" play. Washington Carver knew how healthy plants "should" grow, bloom, and seed. This "should" is metaphysical, not yet moral. "The same word should," however, "starts to have a moral meaning, that is, to imply moral obligation, when we pass the threshold of the world of free agents." Maritain, 29. So the natural law that governs things without free will, and the "should" that comes from it, follows into those things that have free will. And yet the "should" changes character as a result of the addition of free will. We enter into another order, not an order without natural law, but an order where natural law is one that is intellectually grasped, and voluntarily obeyed or disobeyed:

For man, the natural law is a moral law because man obeys or disobeys it freely, not necessarily, and because human behaviour pertains to a particular, privileged order which is irreducible to the general order of the cosmos and tends to a final end superior to the immanent common good of the universe.

Maritain, 29. This "normality of functioning" is what Maritain identifies as the "ontological element" of natural law.

Natural law in general . . . is the ideal formula of development of a given being. . . . Let us say, then, that in its ontological aspect, natural law is an ideal order relating to human actions, a divide between the suitable and the unsuitable, between what is proper and what is improper to the ends of human nature or essence. This is an ideal order or divide which rests on human nature or essence and the unchangeable necessities rooted in it. . . . [N]atural law is something both ontological and ideal. It is something ideal, because it is grounded on the human essence, on its unchangeable structure and the intelligible necessities it involves. On the other hand, natural law is something ontological, because the human essence is an ontological reality, which moreover does not exist separately, but in every human being, so that by the same token natural law dwells as an ideal order in the very being of every existing man.

Maritain, 29-30, 31.

Natural law is not contained in us like movie film, a whole set of pictures that ineluctably are unrolled and that govern our lives, either individually or as a species. And so there is a progressive awareness of, a development of the demands of the essence of being human. Moral progress comes from "ask[ing] questions of that essence," Maritain, 30, whether that question is posed as to my essence, or as to my neighbor's essence, or as a result of a relation between those two essences in which we equally share. Man cannot know all the answers all at once. He learns, both individually and across the span of history. He is not an angel, but lives in time, and works within the confines of a mind limited by a material brain, or a society limited by its material aspect:

An angel who knew the human essence in his angelic manner and all the possible existential situations of man, would know natural law in the infinity of its extension. But we do not, though the Eighteenth Century theoreticians [L.C. in their hubris, or in their extreme dualism] believed they did.

Maritain, 31.

The next aspect of the natural law that Maritain addresses in the book Natural Law: Reflections on Theory and Practice is how that natural law is known, that is, is the natural law from its gnoseological or epistemological aspects. We shall address that aspect in our next posting.

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*So was Hugo Grotius called by, for example, Luigi Miralia (1912), Hamilton Vreeland (1917), and Johann Eduard Erdmann (1893). The title is entirely undeserved. Grotius is also frequently called the Father of International Law, a title perhaps more better earned, but which probably should go to his predecessor Francisco de Vittoria. That is hasn't may be probably be ascribed to prejudice against Spanish thinkers arising from the Black Legend, or the Leyenda Negra, the intense Hispanophobia and anti-Spanish prejudice in the early modern period, seen especially in the English-speaking and Protestant nations.
**Sophocles's Antigone, is a classic treatment of the tension between law as convention, specifically in tyrannical form, and the natural law. "Antigone is the heroine of natural law; she was aware of the fact that in transgressing the human law and being crushed by it, she was obeying a higher commandment--that she was obeying laws that were unwritten, and that had their origin neither today nor yesterday, but which live always and forever, and no one knows where they have come from." Maritain, 26.

The Disfigured Face: The Survival of Tradition

IN THE FINAL CHAPTER OF HIS BOOK, The Disfigured Face: Traditional Natural Law and Its Encounter with Modernity, Professor Cortest undertakes a whirlwind tour of the advocates of the natural law in the 20th century. In seriatim order, he undertakes brief reviews of the natural law thought of Belgian prelate Désiré-Joseph Cardinal Mercier (1851-1926), the Catholic layman and neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Pope John XXIII 1881-1963), Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), and the Australian-born and Oxford Don, John Finnis (1940) and the American moral theologian Germain Grisez.

In general, this part of Professor Cortest's book disappoints on various fronts. His treatment of Cardinal Mercier is odd and superficial, mainly because of the selection of texts chosen to illustrate this Cardinal's thought. Cortest relies mainly on excerpts from Mercier's letters and speeches. But surely more should have been dedicated to the scholarly work of Mercier, who, Cortest acknowledges, "was, without question, one of the leading Catholic intellectuals of his day." Cortest, 78. Where, for example, is a discussion of Cardinal Mercier's treatment of the natural law in his A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy? One would have expected that this be included in any treatment of Cardinal Mercier's notion of the natural law. Indeed, there is no citation to any principal work of Cardinal Mercier in the entire text. Moreover, in discussing Mercier's work, Cortest seems to have lost the thread of his work, namely the significance of ontology in the matter of natural law.

Another criticism that may be levied against Cortests' last chapter is his failure to include the effect that World War II had on the resurgence of a natural law theory, and a widespread recognition of the failure and intrinsic weakness of positivistic theories of law. Specifically, the Nuremberg Trials held between 1945 and 1946 and their justification on principles of natural law should have been accorded some treatment in a review of natural law in the 20th century. Additionally, his focus on exclusively Catholic scholars is unfortunate. He could, for example, have cited the works of Leo Strauss or Eric Voeglin as a non-confessional example of the natural law.

Cortest's treatment of Jacques Maritain is tolerable, if whirlwindish. The works of the neo-Thomist Maritain certainly should be included in any survey of the natural law in the 20th century. Cortest stresses the democratic leanings of Maritain, and his admiration for the U. S. Constitution and American's constitutional regime. But Cortest relies almost entirely upon Maritain's Man and the State. Although the corpus of Maritain's work is truly daunting, one would have thought that some mention would be made of Maritain's Lectures on Natural Law, and his Natural Law: Reflections on Theory and Practice, or even his The Rights of Man and Natural Law (Les droits de l'homme et la loi naturelle). Nevertheless, at least with respect to Maritain, Cortest summarizes Maritain's thought on the natural law and returns to his theme:

For Maritain, natural law is ontological; therefore, it reflects the natural order of being. As such, natural law expresses an obligation that human beings have by nature. If there is no ontological foundation for human rights, these rights must be based exclusively on reason.

Cortest, 85. It seems clear from this excerpt that Maritain rejected the notion of a natural law being one predicated upon reason alone without regard to some ontological concept of nature. Maritain struggled, whether successfully or not is another story, to reconcile the traditional, classical, ontologically-based notion of natural law with the Enlightenment view of natural rights which, stemming principally from the Cartesian dualism, largely rejected any metaphysical or ontological basis of natural law, and instead predicated its natural rights theories on reason alone, denuded of anything that could be called "nature." But it is clear that fundamentally Maritain's concept of natural law is authentically Thomistic, and goes back to "being" above all things:

I have said that natural law is unwritten law; it is unwritten law in the deepest sense of that expression, because our knowledge of it is no work of free conceptualization, but results from a conceptualization bound to the essential inclination of being, of living nature, and of reason which are at work in man, and because it develops in proportion to the degree of moral experience and self reflection, and of social experience also, of which man is capable in the various ages of his history. Thus it is that in ancient and medieval times attention was paid, in natural law, to the obligations of man more than to his rights.

Cortest, 85 (quoting Maritain's Man and the State). It is manifest that Maritain's view of natural law is based upon something more than mere reason, though reason is one of its components. It also regards--indeed is "bound"--to the "essential inclination of being, of living nature." Here is a clear reference to the ontological basis of Maritain's view of natural law, one obtained from the Aristotelian/Thomistic well out of which this great Catholic philosopher drank in great abundance.

The modern age is awash in "rights talk," and to some extent the Church, and not always felicitously and without confusion, has accommodated herself (but not abandoned herself) to the world by adopting the language of rights and religious liberty. This aggiornamento was done in a Pauline spirit of being all things to all men.

For whereas I was free as to all, I made myself the servant of all, that I might gain the more. And I became to the Jews, a Jew, that I might gain the Jews: To them that are under the law, as if I were under the law, (whereas myself was not under the law,) that I might gain them that were under the law. To them that were without the law, as if I were without the law, (whereas I was not without the law of God, but was in the law of Christ,) that I might gain them that were without the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all. And I do all things for the gospel's sake: that I may be made partaker thereof.

(1 Cor. 9:19-23). For the Church, the language of "rights" and "religious freedom" is not entirely natural. It is in some sense fraught with problems (since the modern notion of "rights" stems from an anthropology, a moral philosophy, entirely at odds with the traditional anthropology or moral philosophy of the Church, and is so hopelessly undefined). Some of these "rights" have sound ontological basis; others (e.g., the right homosexual marriage or access to contraception) do not. Modern "rights" also tend to be overly expansive, being civil or conventional rather than natural. Moreover, there are differences in rights depending upon whether they are born of tolerance by the common good, or whether they are affirmative in nature and demand strict reciprocal duties from others. But to interact with the world, to bring the world to Christ, our mother and teacher, our Mater et Magistra, has taken the risk of engaging in "rights talk." So it is that Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in Terris (April 11, 1963) describes a whole range of natural rights, including religious, economic, personal, and political, unsettling folks such as Garry Wills who coined the expression (a macaronic expression of Latin and Spanish), "Mater, si, Magistra no" in a conversation with William F. Buckley. (The phrase is typically attributed to William F. Buckley, but it apparently comes from Garry Wills, if Wikipedia is to be believed. It certainly seems consonant with Wills's erratic Catholicism.) This "rights talk" appears to be something that will continue in the Church's dialogue with the world for the foreseeable future, so in foro externo we must be resigned to it, understanding the nuances in rights language, and recalling always the underlying doctrine. If the Church hopes to save souls, so must the Church speak to the world which otherwise would turn a deaf ear. Cortest expresses his discomfort at this expansion of "rights talk" in John XXIII's encyclical ("If indeed Pope John's extensive treatment of human rights does not represent a departure from previous Catholic thought . . . " [Cortest, 86]), but acknowledges that there is always the reserve or the tie to traditional principles of natural law ("Pope John, however, is careful not to break completely with older tradition." [Cortest, 87]).

Another curious omission by Cortest is the natural law thinking of the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, and the culmination of his thought in the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. Another striking omission in Cortest's tour of the 20th century is Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae which relies so heavily on principles of natural law, to the chagrin of many a Catholic theologian at the time. Similarly, though he acknowledges that "the overall influence of Thomism has declined," since the Second Vatican Council, Cortest does not address the wholesale apostasy from traditional moral philosophy and theology, even the natural law, by the likes of the Germans Josef Fuchs and Bernard Häring, the Canadian Bernard Lonergan, and the American Charles Curran, among many others which could be cited.

But the other side of the coin of aggiornamento is ressourcement. And a return to the sources is what the pontificate of John Paul II was all about. "The Roman pontiff, John Paul II, may well have been the strongest defender of natural law since the time of Leo XIII." Cortest, 88. Cortest rightly emphasizes John Paul II's rigorous treatment of the natural law in his encyclicals Veritatis splendor, Centesimus annus, and Fides et ratio. "All these texts address moral questions in terms of traditional natural law." Cortest, 94. Indeed, Cortest suggests in a footnote against the view of Ernest L. Fortin, that "John Paul II is perhaps the strongest defender of Thomistic principles among the Roman pontiffs of the twentieth century." Cortest, 120 n. 30.

Finally, Cortest addresses the work of John Finnis, and, to a lesser extent, the preliminary groundwork underlying Finnis's work by the moral theologian Germain Grisez. Rather oddly, in my mind, Cortest has chosen Finnis's Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory as the basis for his review of his work. Completely unmentioned by Cortest is John Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights. It is this latter text that has had significant impact upon Academia. If one is going to critique the Finnisian theory of natural law and rely on one text, the natural text that should have been chosen would be the latter. Nevertheless, at least in my mind, Cortest is quite right when he ultimately concludes that "[t]he doctrine that Finnis and Grisez find in Aquinas's thought may, indeed, be called 'natural law,' but it certainly is not the traditional version that we have described in this study. That form cannot be understood apart from considerations of nature and being." Cortest, 100-01. As Cortest notes, referring to Lloyd Weinreb's Natural Law and Justice, the natural law theory of Finnis and Grisez and those of their followers, is not an ontologically-based natural law. It is a non-ontological natural law theory. "Natural law's contemporary proponents . . . have accepted the burden of providing an unmetaphysical grounding for their position." Cortest, 121 n. 52 (quoting Weinreb). For one who advocates a traditional, classical view of natural law, while Finnis and Grisez may be allies, they are not within the boundaries of a classical, traditional, ontologically-based theory of natural law. At the heart of their theory is a separation of "good" from "being," practical reason from speculative reason, morality from ontology or metaphysics, acting from being. For Grisez as for Finnis and those who base their thought on them, nature has no moral things to teach us, it is largely pre-moral. For them, there is no "ought" to be found in the "is" of nature. They argue as if Hume was right.

The separation of ontology from morality in Finnisian natural law theory, and the effort to build a natural law on this separation, comes from the thought of German Grisez. As Grisez stated in his seminal essay, "The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1-2 Question 94, Article 2," Natural Law Forum 10 (1965), 168-20:

Some interpreters mistakenly ask whether the word "good" in the first principle has a transcendental or an ethical sense. The issue is a false one, for there is no question of extending the meaning of "good" to the amplitude of the transcendentals convertible with "being."

St. Thomas doesn't teach that good is convertible with being? Is Grisez serious? Has Grisez abandoned an ontological basis for ethics? It seems manifestly so. And just to make it clear that we are not misconstruing Grisez's intendment, we ought to quote the clear criticism that Grisez makes of Suarez for holding to the classical position:

Suarez thinks that what is morally good or bad depends simply upon the agreement or disagreement of action with nature, and he holds that the obligation to do the one and to avoid the other arises from the imposition of the will of God. Hence "evil" in the first principle of natural law denotes only the actions which definitely disagree with nature, the doing of which is forbidden, and the "good" denotes only the actions whose omission definitely disagrees with nature, the doing of which is commanded.

(quoted in Cortest, 99). This view found in Suarez and criticized by Grisez is not only a view held by Suarez, this is the view held by the Stoics, by St. Thomas, and, most importantly, by the common teaching of the Church.

How Grisez can reach his conclusion when the very Summa Grisez purports to interpret states unequivocally that "good and being are really the same, and differ only according to reason . . . . it is clear that a thing is good so far as it is in being . . . ." Bonum et ens sunt idem secundum rem. Ia, q. 5 art. 1. Perhaps Grisez's professor should have made him write on the blackboard three hundred times when his student was studying his Thomism:


Another unfortunate omission is the failure to include the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly his After Virtue, which, in a manner of the young subject pointed out in the story of the Emperor with No Clothes, that the Enlightenment Project has been an abysmal failure. Reason alone, abstracted from the existence, that is, reality, and, from a practical perspective, unmoored from the Faith, simply has not been effective in arriving at any consensus. There is only cacophony among modern ethicists and moralists who cannot even talk to each other any more.

Cortest finally concludes:

In the early twenty-first century, very few thinkers still embrace traditional natural law. Nevertheless, as we have shown, this doctrine has survived in an intellectual world that has rejected almost any notion of ontological reality and understands the human person and morality in purely biological and cultural terms. For most modern thinkers, traditional natural law is like a face that no one can bear to look upon anymore. Indeed, it is a face disfigured by time and neglect.

Cortest, 101.

Sudarium (Veil) of St. Veronica, Depiction by Francisco d' Zurbarán

Indeed, in this, the traditional and classical notion of natural law is not unlike the Lord. Both the Lord and his Law are despised and rejected by men (Isaiah 53:3). But, though the libertine, the tyrant, the materialist, the anarchist, and the fat capitalist blind with pleonexia, are not among those who love the Lord and his Law, there are also those who, perhaps now fewer in number than before, love them both. They will treasure the face of the Lord and his Law, however disfigured by time and neglect, like Veronica did her sudarium.

The Disfigured Face: The Unholy Trinity: G. W. F. Hegel

IF KANT IS A DIFFICULT READ, HEGEL IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE without an investment of years and tears and the loss of hair. But one cannot ignore Hegel in the ushering in of modernity. Cortest makes him the last of the unholy trinity of moralists that have helped fashion the ethics of modernity and conspired to disfigure the face of the natural moral law by robbing morality of its ontological basis. According to moderns that follow Locke and Kant instead of Aristotle and St. Thomas, morality is no longer based upon being, upon existence, upon the nature of things. It is based upon autonomous choice, under a universal and unyielding regime of external imperatives that cut through human flesh in their razor-like steel of mathematical certainty. Ethics is a matter for the brain; to hell with the heart. Kantian ethics is sort of like making love to a robot. There ain't nothing human in that.

Hegel, Cortest argues, takes the modernist abandonment of ontological ethics to an entire new level, a sublime or spiritual one. If Kant's ethics may be likened to having sex with a robot, Hegel's ethics may be likened to having sex with a disembodied spirit, a sucubus. Not just any sucubus. Hegel's sucubus has a vagina dentata.

Hegel accepted the notion of a free, self-conscious individual (the contribution of Locke) and the notion of the rational and universal (the contribution of Kant). But, in Hegel's view, the self-conscious individual and the universal had to be developed, had to evolve. Self-consciousness and self-direction under the regime of the universal was just the starting point. For Hegel, life was not being, existence; life was becoming. Hegel clearly rejected an ontological ethic, an ethic based upon being. Rather, one might say that Hegel advanced an ethic of becoming, a rheological* ethic. "The human being, in his immediate existence [Existenz] in himself, is a natural entity, external to his concept," Hegel says in his Elements on the Philosophy of Right. In other words, man's existence is untrue, he must aim at something else, his "concept" which is distinct from his existence. He continues:

[I]t is only through the development [Ausbildung] of his own body and spirit, essentially by means of his self-conscious comprehending itself as free, that he takes possession of himself and becomes his own property as distinct from others. Or to put it the other way around, this taking possession of oneself consists also in translating into actuality what one is in terms of one's concept.

Cortest, 59 (quoting Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right). This is autonomy in its fullness. Man "becomes his own property as distinct from others," only if he becomes self-consciously aware of himself as free. That would suppose that man is not distinct from other men unless he becomes self-consciously aware of his freedom, and this would appear to be consistent with Hegel's pantheistic tendencies. What this means is that one translates himself by a process of development into an actual realization of one's concept. What is the "concept" to which this self-consciously free man strives for? This concept of the human being is that the human being is spirit:

[It is] something free in itself, and is one-sided inasmuch as it regards the human being as by nature free, or (and this amounts to the same thing) takes the concept as such as its immediacy, not the Idea, as the truth. . . . The free spirit consists precisely in not have its being as mere concept or in itself, but in overcoming [aufheben] this formal phase of its being and hence also its immediate natural existence, and in giving itself an existence which is purely its own and free.

Cortest, 60 (quoting Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right). Thus, one is to reject the notion that one has his being as a mere concept or in himself (ontology); rather, this free spirit is exactly in not having its being as mere concept or not having its being in itself. One has to overcome, lift oneself out of being and out of one's immediate natural existence. One thereby translates himself then into a unbounded existence which is purely of its own manufacture and is completely free of any links to nature or being. We are free when we join in the grand dance of becoming, when we leave, through the recognition of our own radical freedom of spirit, the notion that we are being. We are not free in being. We are free only in becoming.

In Hegel's view, we are not born free as human beings. We become free only through our own rationality. The human person has no ontological dignity that necessarily and absolutely requires that all men be born free. Our natural existence is of lesser importance for Hegel, for whom the rational is preeminent. No human being is born free in this system, he or she acquires freedom through rational self-consciousness.

Cortest, 60. But in all this becoming, where is it exactly we are going? Here, Hegel, who has cast off the supposed shackles of natural being and existence, and led us to the freedom and the spirit of becoming, leads us back into an ominous, dehumanizing prison: the State. It is as if Hegel were an SS guard, persuading the Jew that to be free he had to leave his hearth and home in old Warsaw, be shipped in the cold of winter to Auschwitz in a Reichsbahn Güterwagen, assuring him that, now that he has been released from hearth and home, the freedom he experienced in the cold box car will translate itself into the ultimate freedom of the concentration camp. It is no coincidence that some, whether fairly or unfairly we will leave others to figure out, have traced the horrors of World War I (L. T. Hobhouse in his The Metaphysical Theory of the State) and World War II and the Nazi totalitarianism and atrocities (Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies) at least in part the foot of Hegel.

Hegel's Recipe for Freedom?

Whatever the final verdict on the contribution of Hegel's philosophy to one of the bloodiest and most brutal half-centuries in the history of man, one at least on to pay attention to the following words of Hegel. They lend probable cause for Hegel's indictment by Hobhouse and Popper:

The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal individuality [Einzelheit] and its particular interests should reach their full development and gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of the family and of civil society), and also that they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and on the other, knowingly and willingly acknowledge this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit, and actively pursue it as their ultimate end.

Cortest, 60-61 (quoting Hegel's Philosophy of Right). Hegel also says that "[t]he state is the divine will as present spirit, unfolding as the actual shape and organization of a world." Cortest, 61. Concrete freedom is found in the State? The State is the "divine will as present spirit"? Did we read Hegel right? Cortest certainly thinks so:

Human dignity, for Hegel, must be acquired through a process of self-awareness in the state. The notion of the dignity of the human person as such, independent of the state, is a doctrine not defended by Hegel. If the "ultimate end" of human beings is only fully realized in the state, no individual human being can ever achieve this end outside of the state. The state is, therefore, the context within which human beings acquire dignity.

Cortest, 61. This is a long way down from the dignity St. Thomas Aquinas's ontological and eudaemonistic ethic gives us. As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord and his Church, and not Hegel and his State.

To close these postings on the unholy trinity of moralists, the liberal John Locke, the imperativist Immanuel Kant, and the statist/spiritualist G.W.F. Hegel, all of whom have contributed to the modern system and have disfigured the face of natural law which is upon ontological suppositions, we will allow Cortest to summarize for us:

Although Kant's doctrine may have differed from Hegel's in many fundamental ways, his emphasis on the universality of reason and moral autonomy prepared the way for Hegel's rational spirit. Locke, who most probably would have rejected much of what Hegel would later write, also prepared the way for Hegel with his emphasis on individual freedom. All three of these thinkers broke with the older tradition of ontological morality, that by Hegel's day had few intellectual defenders. Indeed, not since the time of the great Aristotelians of the seventeenth century had the old system found a strong enough advocate to defend it against the philosophical voices that now dominated European intellectual life.

Cortest, 64. What and who was going to draw us out of the vortex of confusion?

Enter Stage Right: Count Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci, more commonly known as Pope Leo XIII.

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*This is probably a neologism, at least in matters of morality. The word "rheos" comes from the statement attributed to Heraclitus, though not found in his extant writings, which encapsulates that reality is not being, but is becoming: Τα Πάντα ῥεῖ (ta panta rhei), meaning "everything flows."

The actual words attributed to Heraclitus are found in his cryptic utterances:

ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.
Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.

Ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.
We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.

Plato in his dialogue Cratylus [402a] gave his interpretation of the Heraclitean notion of the ever-flowingness, ever-changingness of life, the never-staying-the-sameness of life:

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.
Everything changes and nothing remains still.

Instead of "to flow," rheos, Plato uses chōrei, from the word, χωρέω (chōreō), change, give way, or withdraw.

Though as far as I know the words rheology or rheological are not used in moral philosophy, the word rheology is used in physics to describe the study of the flow of matter.

The Disfigured Face: The Unholy Trinity: John Locke

THE LOSS OF ONTOLOGICALLY-BASED MORALITY began when Western man walked the intellectual trail from the woods of Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition to the moral desert of increasing autonomy, and thence to relativism and skepticism and moral anarchy. In his walk from the perennial ethic to modern autonomy and relativism, man the pilgrim, homo viator, traveling through history shed himself, as it were, of his traditional moral accoutrements. On the way to wherever apparent self-mastery and self-definition would lead him, a goal as pointless and as elusive as the search for the legendary Prester John, Western man cast off his scrip, his hat, his cloak, his staff, and ultimately even his faith, and in so doing, lost likewise his nature. This was the path from ontological ethics to deontological ethics: from ὄν to δέον, from being to duty,* at first duty to reason, and then duty, even enslavement, to the overweening State.

Sant'Iago (St. James) Dressed as a Pilgrim

Luis Cortest explores this process of the increasing rejection of the ontological and eudaemonistic ethics of Aristotle and St. Thomas in his fourth chapter of his book The Disfigured Face. Though there are many who are answerable to humanity and, even more importantly to God,** for their ideas of increasing infidelity and rejection of the natural law, Cortest focuses on three: John Locke (1632-1704), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). (He could have chosen many others, including Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, etc.) By focusing on these three, Cortest spans the 17th through the early 19th century. These are the chosen unholy trinity of "the Modern way," whose quality is supposedly autonomy, but is actually thralldom to human convention, to sin, and to the State.

Locke, Kant, and Hegel: Luis Cortest's Unholy Trinity of "The Modern Way"

The 17th century is where one must look for the genesis of the modern notion of positive human rights. The unity of Christendom had been rent by the Protestant rebellion, and the powers of tyrant kings and tyrant princes went unchecked by the submissive state-sponsored churches, and increasing secularism grew as it were cancer. The Wars of Religion had exhausted men, pitting German against German, and Frenchman against Frenchman, European against European. And all of Europe, its hands in stained vermilion in fraternal blood, struggled with finding some sort of modus vivendi which was nothing other than practical compromise to a situation spawned by rebellion against God and His Church. Those practical compromises and accommodations were eventually apotheosized to the preeminent moral value of toleration. The preeminence given to toleration as a means to deal with religious dissent, and the temporizing accommodation to idiosyncrasies of belief that came with religious and moral anarchy, naturally led to despair that objective truth in religion or philosophy was impossible to attain. "Holiness before Peace," was the young John Henry Newman's motto adopted from Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford when liberalism was already infecting the schismatic Protestant ecclesial communions and established churches, a liberalism Newman, when created Cardinal, described thus in his so-called "Biglietto Speech" of 1879:***

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. . . . . Hitherto the civil Power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young [E.N. Newman was born in 1801], that: "Christianity was the law of the land." Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and, by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten.

The end of the century came and went, and the Almighty does not appear to have interfered, probably because the West has refused to repent, and so must confront the punishment, some natural, some surely supernatural, for its disobedience. What the newly-created Cardinal Newman described as Liberalism was the doctrine of John Locke, the first of the unholy Trinity selected by Cortest. A man with opposing sentiments to Blessed John Henry Newman in every way, John Locke's motto may be said to have been, in opposition to Newman's, "Peace (or Tolerance) before Holiness."

When religion is understood as a purely personal matter, it becomes extremely difficult to tolerate religious groups that defend a doctrine of absolute truth in matters of faith and morals. Locke's goal for society was the peaceful coexistence of citizens. For Locke, it was more important that each person in society follow his or her own conscience than for anyone to defend a doctrine of absolute truth.

Cortest, 53. John Locke's weakness of Faith was physically mimicked in the weakness in his lungs (he was chronically asthmatic). Locke worked with limited lung capacity as well as limited Faith capacity. Locke's doctrine on tolerance was born from the brain of a man who rejected the Trinitarian faith, lapsing into an unorthodox Socinianism that denied the pre-existence of Christ and his atoning death on the Cross. Locke was a proto-Unitarian, only nominally Christian. He certainly had no traditional notion of the Church, as he seems to have had an ecclesial theory predicated upon social contract: "A church," Locke said, "seems to me to be a free society of men, joining together of their own accord for the public worship of God in such a manner as they believe will be acceptable to the Deity for the salvation of their souls." Cortest, 50 (quoting from Locke's Letter on Tolerance). What? Faith a contract among men? This betrays no notion of a Faith or a Church founded by an Incarnate God. Cortest's conclusion is a massive understatement:

Obviously, Locke was not a defender of traditional church teaching; he was, rather, one who had embraced a new way of understanding religious matters.

Cortest, 50. Locke seems to have been skeptical of the human mind to grasp ultimate truth, and of God to reveal himself to man. And to make way for his increasing rejection of the Faith, he demanded increasing tolerance from secular and religious authority for this false religious freedom. He wanted his rebellion to become right. The spirit that motivated him may be gleaned from his hatred of the Roman Catholic Church. Locke was intolerant with the notion of an objectively true Faith. Though these things are hard to tell with moral certainty (the last shall be first, the first shall be last), one thinks maybe the Devil had John Locke in his employ and it may have landed him in Hell. He, along with Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and (less frequently) Friedrich Schleiermacher), is honored with the title the "Father of Liberalism," which is already a condemnation. Locke made the honor roll of error when his name was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. In fine, he is a Doctor of Beelzebub's Church, the Doctor Liberalismus. (This is not to say that all of Locke's ideas are ipso facto suspect, but he must be handled with caution, sort of like a Petri dish infected with dangerous bacteria.)

John Locke

Locke not only advocated a religious freedom, he also advocated the radical separation of Church and State.

The church itself is absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth and civil affairs. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He mixes heaven and earth together, things most remote and opposite, who confuses these two societies, which in their origin, their end, and their whole substance are utterly and completely different.

Cortest, 50-51 (quoting Locke's Letter on Toleration). The church "absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth?" The boundaries on both side are fixed and immovable? Where are these boundaries? And by whom are they set? By man or by God? By the State or the Church? The State and Church "remote and opposite?" The Church's role is to bring men to God. Is Locke suggesting the commonwealth's role is the opposite, that is, to bring men to the Devil? Clearly not. But perhaps unclearly yes.

Cortest compares Locke's novel doctrine with the Quanta cura, the Encyclical of Pope Pius IX of 1864, and comes to the conclusion:

Obviously, Pius IX did not believe for an instant that the Church should remain separate from and have no voice in civil society. One the contrary, he believed that the Church has the responsibility to make civil society more humane and just. Locke's doctrine of the complete separation of church and sate is absolutely incompatible with Roman Catholicism.

Cortest, 52.

Locke thus opened the way to modern secularism. "Locke may well not have been a secularist, but his principle of the total separation of the spiritual from the temporal prepared the way for modern secularism." Cortest, 53.

What the empiricist Locke wanted was the Church shoved in a corner where it should become irrelevant. His toleration is suspect; indeed it is a guise, a feigning, a cover for his skepticism and relativism. Why do we know this? Because Locke was intolerant of any Church that claimed special status. He was intolerant of anyone who believed in objective truth. With respect to the Catholic Church:

These, therefore, and the like, who attribute to the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is, in plain terms, to themselves, any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals, in civil concernments; or who, upon pretence of religion, do challenge any matter of authority over such as are not associated with them in the ecclesiastical communion; I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate; as neither those that will not own, and teach, the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion.

So much for the tolerant Locke. No Catholic was wanted in tolerant Locke's tolerant England. No more Merrie Old England. No, to be part of the way things were going to be, you had to drop the notion that God came down from heaven in the form of a man, and founded a Church upon the Rock of Peter. You had to give up the notion that Peter had been given the authority, the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and could bind things both in heaven and on earth. You had to give up the notion that there was a natural law that was ontologically-based and that the Church claimed the right, by divine bestowing, to declare infallibly truths of Faith and truths on Morals. Being Catholic was the new crime. So it was that in Locke's "tolerant" Dour New England, the Catholics were legally and socially discriminated against until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. No, Locke was not tolerant. He was simply an old-fashioned, unreasonable, closed-minded, and intolerant anti-Catholic.

What is perhaps the most characteristically modern aspect of Locke's thinking, is his "emphasis on the personal." Cortest, 53. This hyper-individualism simply does not fit with traditional moral thinking.

From the time of Plato, ethics as the science of the good was never a doctrine of individual choice. Traditionally, ethics formed part of an ontological whole; it is only in modern thought that morality and being become autonomous.

Cortest, 53. In support of his view, Cortest quotes Louis Dupré, whose work on the passage of traditional society to modernity has been mentioned in an earlier posting on this blog: (See Louis Dupré on Metanoia.) "As a science of the good, ethics had always been more than a concern about human perfection," Dupré observes.

Almost from the beginning it had occupied the center of an all-inclusive ontology. But when modern thought reduced the good to personal or social perfection, independently of and occasionally in position to the whole, it deprive it of ontological depth and marginalized morality with respect to the totality of Being. Few modern thinkers avoided the pitfall of severing the person as creative principle from the rest of nature.

Cortest, 53 (quoting Dupré's Passage to Modernity, p. 143). So Locke, though perhaps not the first to put a dent in the armor of ontological ethics, certainly did his part to weaken the temper of that armor's steel. Cortest argues that the separation of the individual from the community is the upshot of Locke's thought. Locke rejected any sort of ontological foundation for moral activity. While he talks of nature and natural law, he did not understand "nature" in the manner of his forefathers.

Locke's doctrine of human rights is non-ontological; by the time he was writing his most important works (in the late seventeenth century) the older understanding of the relationship between nature and morality had started to disappear. When Locke speaks of "nature," that term no longer has the same meaning as it had for thinkers one hundred hears before, who were still operating within an Aristotelian-teleological context.

Cortest, 54.

Noah's Covenant: Stained Glass, 13th Century, Chartres Cathedral

Locke's emphasis of individual freedom at the expense of an objective notion of justice and at the expense of an ontologically-based morality was problematic. If personal caprice is more important than some sort of universal order that is based upon being or that which exists, then where is the objectivity to be found if at all? Is there such a thing as an objective order? What is it that is supposed to guide the State, to guide positive law? Where is any effective restraint on the State?

Like some sort of clumsy white knight, Kant comes in to the rescue, but instead of repairing the breach in the dike of ontological morality, he made the hole wider, and changed to focus of ethics from being to duty, a duty based upon a pure reason completely distilled from anything else that may be characterized as being part of man. And now the whole world's flooded with Kantian deontological ethics, and the ontologically-based natural law finds itself largely in the confines of the Ark, that is to say, the Roman Catholic Church, waiting the end of the rains and the recession of the world's waters. God promised he would not destroy the earth with waters he sent from the heavens (Gen. 9:11), but he did not promise that he would save us from the floods that we made for ourselves. At least not without repentance. Where the new Mount Ararat is to be found, where the Christian may once again stand on terra firma and rely on government that is not against him, is anybody's guess.

We will save Kant for our next posting.


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*ὄν [on]= being in Greek, δέον [deon]= duty in Greek.
**We are bound by the natural moral law to assure that our thoughts conform to objective truth, and that our conscience and actions conform to the good. This obligation we owe to our neighbor and to God. The moral freedom we enjoy is ordered to truth and the good. There is moral fault in spreading falsehood among our brothers, a worse fault that knowingly spreading some sort of infectious disease.
***A biglietto is the name given to the formal correspondence that one has been created Cardinal by the Roman pontiff.

The Disfigured Face of Natural Law: Introduction

WE SHALL FOCUS THE NEXT SIX OR SO POSTINGS on a book by Professor Luis Cortest entitled The Disfigured Face: Traditional Natural Law and its Encounter with Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Professor Cortest is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Oklahoma University. It is apparent that his interests in the Spanish writers of the 16th century, the so-called Siglo de Oro, or the "Golden Age," of Spanish literature introduced him to the principles of the natural law which were so prevalent in that age. In earlier postings, we reviewed at some depth the auto sacramental authored by the great 17th century Spanish playwright, Pedro Calderón de la Barca entitled A Dios por razón de estado, To God by Reason of the State. For the Spanish of the Siglo de Oro, the doctrine of natural law was as prevalent and as alive in the minds and hearts of thinkers and artists as feelings of democracy, human rights, and relativism are today. Central to the thesis of Professor's Cortest book is that the great synthesis of the natural law found in St. Thomas Aquinas is based upon a certain ontology or philosophy of being, and a certain teleological or purposeful view of nature (nature has an end, a purpose, a telos, which is Greek for "end," "goal," or "purpose."). The underlying Aristotelian/Thomist ontological and teleological assumptions, central to an authentic Thomist natural law theory, have been progressively dismantled by the philosophical and scientific presuppositions stemming from the Enlightenment and Modernism. By and large, Enlightenment and Modern thought have rejected the Aristotelian/Thomist ontology and teleological view of nature. This is true--alas--of even advocates of the so-called "modern" natural law theories of Finnis, Grisez, O'Boyle, and George (what is sometimes referred to as the "Integration" natural law theories, see our previous posting By Nature Equal: Human Equality and the Natural Law, Last Possible Ally Fails where this theory is briefly discussed.) The necessity of a certain view of being (ontology) and nature (teleology) as part of a classical treatment of natural law has been also the topic of a posting on the Jesuit thinker, John Courtney Murray. See The Four Requirements of a Classical Natural Law Theory.


Professor Cortest's book has four chapters: Thomistic Ontology, Ontological Morality and Human Rights, The War of the Philosophers, The Modern Way, Pope Leo XIII and His Legacy, and The Survival of Tradition. We intend to devote one posting for each chapter.