Politics is Grounded in Personhood

THE CHURCH'S SOCIAL DOCTRINE as it relates to the foundation and the purpose of political community, is personalist. "The human person is the foundation and purpose of political life." (Compendium, No. 384). At once, this personalist vision rejects several things. First, it rejects any materialistic--that is, non-spiritual, non-Transcendental--vision of the world. Second, it rejects any political theory that rejects the human as a person, with a particular nature (a nature which he makes not himself, but one which is "given"), and with a particular final end, and ultimate destiny (not one which he makes himself, but again one which is "given").

The political community originates in the nature of persons, whose conscience "reveals to them and enjoins them to obey" the order which God has imprinted in all his creatures: "a moral and religious order; and it is this order--and not considerations of a purely extraneous, material order--which has the greatest validity in the solution of problems relating to their lives as individuals and as members of society, and problems concerning individual States and their interrelations."

(Compendium, No. 384) (quoting Pope John XXIII, Pacem in terris, 258 and Mater et magistra, 450)

The Church's political vision clearly is founded on the natural law, on an order that is part of reality, of what is, an order which is given and is part of our creaturehood and createdness, and order which we do not make for ourselves, an order to which conscience prompts us to conform. This natural order, which is a moral one and is to be distinguished from a mere physical order, is part and parcel of God's creation, of which we are part, and it reflects the divine order. Drawing on the philosophical insights of Plato, Platonists, and Stoics, theologians put it this way: the natural law is nothing but an expression of, a participation in, the Eternal Law insofar as it relates to the human person, a rational creation.**

This natural law is, in its most fundamental expression, found in the two-fold commandment to love God and to love one's neighbor as one's self. The Golden Rule is at the heart of politics. As the Compendium expresses it:

Being open to both the Transcendent [that is the God who is "beyond" him, "outside" of him, "above" him] and to others is [man's] distinguishing trait. Only in relation to the Transcendent and to others does the human person reach the total and complete fulfillment of himself. This means that for the human person, a naturally social and political being, "social life is not something added one" but is part of an essential and indelible dimension.

(Compendium, No. 384)

Because this order is found all about us and within us, and is part of the natural order of things, it is something that we "discover," not something we "invent."* Since it is principally founded upon the use of practical reason, which of course is limited, created faculty, it should not surprise us that there may be some development in our understanding of the natural law. It should not surprise us that we may--from time to time, as individuals or even as cultures--get it wrong.

Though the order in which the natural law inheres and which it reflects is a posteriori, that is, it exists prior to, and independent of, our existence, the natural moral law is not something which we know a priori. It is something which we learn a posteriori. It is something we learn through the use of our practical reason, particularly the faculty of conscience, as it is informed with the reality that is both in us (especially our inclinations, what I have called our "intellectual feltness"), and around us (especially the existence of others of our kind as equally "intellectors of being" and "willers of good"). For this reason, the Church recognizes that this "order must be gradually discovered and developed by humanity." (Compendium, No. 384)

The fact that we "discover" the natural moral law means that there may be progressive "discovery" of it, i.e., development in our understanding of it. This development occurs not only in the individual (we learn about right or wrong as we grow and develop and confront experiences following the age of reason; hence the notion of wisdom coming with age), but also in societies as a whole as they develop in time, confront situations to which they have to adapt and from which they learn, and develop their particular mores, traditions, and customs.***

Man, a political animal, does not go about implementing this natural law on his own. To be sure the natural law ought to guide his individual acts. But it is also the basis of political life, of social life, of his life in common:

The political community, a reality inherent in mankind, exists to achieve an end otherwise unobtainable: the full growth of its members, called to cooperate steadfastly for the attainment of the common good, under the impulse of their natural inclinations toward what is true and good.

(Compendium, No. 384)

That is to say, in forming their political institutions and their social life, in coming together and cooperating for the common good, human persons are to give priority to the good over the right. In the Church's view, which is one based upon man as he is, the entire modern liberal construct--which gives priority to the right over the good--is ill-conceived.

_________________________________________
*I use scarequotes because we may be said to "invent" the natural law in the original sense of that word. In Latin, the word invenire (from which our word "invent" obviously comes) means to "come upon," to "stumble upon," "to find," or "to discover." The modern denotation and connotation of the English word "invent," however, is to come up with something, to contrive, produce, or fabricate it, for and by one's self. The natural law is not something we "invent" in this latter sense.
**E.g., St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, Q. 91, a. 2.
***It should be stressed that this development is not always progressive. While generally there is progress in man's knowledge, including his knowledge of the natural law (what Yves Simon calls the "law of progressivity"), it is not something assured, and there are times where regress is possible. For example, two generations ago, contraception, abortion, premarital sex, homosexual sexual acts, and divorce and remarriage would have been recognized for what they were: moral enormities. Modernly, we view these as goods or rights. There has been a huge regress in this area. There is also a "law of regressivity."

Long on Porter: Turning Subjective

JEAN PORTER IS OF THE VIEW THAT human rights can only be defended on theological grounds. She is not convinced that human rights have any solid philosophical ground. It is not only that, in her view, rights came out of the theological tradition (largely through the work of canon lawyers resting on the work of the scholastics) and then were appropriated by Enlightenment thinkers and later secularists. But in her view there is no persuasive philosophical basis in either Enlightenment or secular thought that can support with universal approbation a concept of human rights. "I have yet to see a persuasive philosophical argument," she says, "developed on grounds that would be compelling to all, for a doctrine of human rights." Long, 173 (quoting Porter).

But despite Porter's belief that human rights lack philosophical basis, and despite its original theological basis which has largely been rejected, Porter acknowledges that we have inherited a reasonably hale notion of human rights as part of our "secular patrimony," one which has de facto become the lingua franca of international discourse. "The language of rights has become part of the shared patrimony of the race," Porter asserts. Long, 174 (quoting Porter). In her view, there is much good in this. And the pragmatic advantage of this state of affairs is justification enough to embrace, and even bed with, the notion of subjective rights. We need not care whether our rich fiancé got his money from a family of bootleggers or from the invention of the light bulb or even whether his family stole it from a bank: the important thing is that he's got the money and we can spend it if we marry him.

Long harbors doubts about Porter's attitude on human rights, and has doubts about her justification of them. Porter rejects the Rawlsian formula of "overlapping consensus" since she finds it "very strange" that different and even contradictory presuppositions on morality and religion can ever give birth to such a consensus. She is likewise not convinced that there is "foundationalist justification for a universal morality," "compelling to all persons of good will," that would give rise to sufficiently specific moral norms so as to be practically useful. She, however, sees the justification in "species-specific patterns of behavior, which provide an indispensable touchstone for evaluating moral theories." Long, 174-75 (quoting Porter).

Man is a Crossword Puzzle: How do we fill him in?
Porter's "species-specific patterns of behavior" do not provide a clue.

Despite his generally respectful regard for Porter's work, Long here unleashes on Porter. He sees Porter's reliance on "species-specific patterns of behavior" as essentially contentless, "lacking sufficient specificity to provide the foundation for genuine political or social solidarity." At most the "species-specific patterns of behavior" yield us "rhetorical meta-language of law," language which we beat our opponents over the head with in the catch-as-catch can of modern "rights talk," a "rights talk" which Mary Ann Glendon (one-time American ambassador to the Vatican and Harvard law professor) described in her book Rights Talk; A Nation Under Lawyers.

The "species-specific patterns of behavior" appears to be more a sociological, empirical construct than a jurisprudential, philosophical one. And for that reason yields no norms. Thus, "species-specif patterns of behavior" shows that parents often educate their young, but it tells us nothing about what sort of education the young ought to receive: are they to be taught theism, animism, communism, secularism? Of these latter questions "species-specific patterns of behavior" provide no guidance. Similarly, it is a "species-specific pattern of behavior" to live in "family units." Are these to be monogamous, lasting unions between a man and woman? Or are we to allow serial or simultaneous polygamy? Family unions between two men or two women? Or even more broadly life in common? Again, "species-specific patterns of behavior" do not give us answers to these important questions. It is this complete inability to specify right and wrong, good and bad which drives Long to label this Porterian construct "Maritain's argument on stilts." Long, 175.

Manifestly then, "rights" talk does not seem in itself a path toward civic peace, but toward endless disputation. . . . [A] right [to be] a just claim--and here it must be said that this is true even if the just claim in question if founded on something permanent in human nature-presupposes judgment from above regarding the hierarchy of ends, and from beneath regarding prudence (whereby one identifies the practical issue as subject to the claim in question). This is true regarding "right" of self-determination itself, which of course is only genuinely right when exercised in some ways and not others, and is only even socially tolerable if exercised within certain limits. And what sets these limits? To say "other rights" will be jejune, because each of these, too, is limited.

Long, 175. In short, "species-specific patterns of behavior" do not fill in the cross-word puzzle that is man, at best they give us some empty boxes, empty boxes which alone are meaningless . These empty boxes need to be filled in with letters that answer questions both across and and down in intelligible and right ways. The fact is that "species-specific patterns of behavior" do not allow us a vehicle by which to know what what is normative and what is not.

Focus on rights cannot get us to the issue of what is normative and what is not in political discourse or life in common. This is because the determination of just claims of right is something that is obtained by going "outside of the genus of rights," and this whether the right is objective or merely subjective. We must turn to a "contextualizing narrative provided by [a] unified teleology" of man. Long, 276. The good must be defined before the right. The right does not define the good. But Porter, largely because she seems to have despaired of a philosophical demonstrable basis of the natural moral law, seems to have despaired of finding a public basis of the good. She is, at root, fideistic, and, as such, falls into the trap that there is no version of the good, and accordingly no objective version of right, that can "compel acceptance by any rational person, whatever his or her beliefs or moral convictions." (Long, 176, quoting Porter). If reason (and a fortiori Faith) cannot be the basis for compulsion, then what can compel? Power? Whim? We are left in intellectual no-man's land. Our political discourse, then, will be abandoned of both religion and reason. Hence do we find it so famished.

What follows the loss of inscape of natural teleology and metaphysics, however, is as earlier argued the loss of an analogical point of reference for Christians and non-Christians, and the only one on which discourse and common action is feasible: namely, the truth, and the truth proportionate to human nature inclusive of the praeambula fidei.

Long, 177.

In other words, the natural law is what must be at the heart of political discourse. The natural law and nothing other. The natural law and nothing less. This means a natural law that considers "close-in" teleologies and an adequate and correct account of the hierarchy of natural ends and prudential judgment. One, moreover, that acknowledges natural theology, that recognizes God as a provident Creator. Finally, one that is open to the possibility of some order beyond the proportionate or proximate end of nature, to a final and supernatural beatific end. Reason is naturally ordered to God. Reason takes us to the praeambula fidei, the threshold, the jumping off place, of supernatural Faith in the Trinity. Law based upon reason, that is the natural law, ought to do likewise.

It is not Porter, and it is not Maritain that provide us the means of secular consensus by their fall into "rights" talk. Long's sets out what ought to be the Catholic view on political discourse:

What does this mean for secular consensus? It means first that the speculative truths implied by or contained within the natural law provide a point of analogous reference for believer and nonbeliever, and are naturally knowable; secondly it also implies that the Church is our tutor in the natural law, for the simple reason that, although the truths of the natural law are knowable apart from revelation, their full existential appropriation and applications require advertence to truths only accessible through revelation. There are truths prior to the promulgation of any secular order, both natural and revealed supernatural truths, and knowledge of these necessarily affects prudence, including political prudence. This does not mean that the Church has one univocal political program, but it does mean that the zone of charitable political discourse is a function of natural moral law and of the Gospel of Christ. It is for precisely this reason that the social and legal tolerance of political states toward the Church tends toward Christianization, and that the rejection of the Church tends toward persecution and suppression. The dynamic is no different now than it was in the early days of the Roman empire.

Long, 178.

There is, when it comes right down to it, no such thing as a "secular consensus," if by such we mean the exclusion of God as Provident Creator, and the exclusion of the possibility of God as Trinity. If we do not open up to the theonomic feature in the natural law, one that through reason sets us right up to the threshold of faith, we disembowel, or perhaps better inanimate, any hope for achieving political discourse:

The danger elsewise is that natural law becomes a juridic realm that, being construed as lacking any real publicly applicable ethical content beyond species-specific recurrent functions, is nonetheless used to ward off either the full doctrinal legacy of natural law--from close-in teleologies of bodily nature with their ethical implications, on to the praeambula fidei--or even to ward off the directive teachings of divine revelation itself. The affirmation of such a juridic realm seems, not an embrace of the full ontological density of natura as a theonomic principle, but rather a significant methodological evacuation of the ontological density of nature liable to leave the public square in the possession of a naturally minimalist and proceduralist theory.

Long, 180.

What is required? A philosophical conversion. An epistemological "re-turn." For there to be any hope of achieving the common good and of a participatory process that is just, we must abandon the philosophical darkness and hence political and jurisprudential darkness in which we find ourselves.

[T]his end requires setting aside the antirealist premises of modernity and postmodernity: We properly know not phenomenal objects, not merely linguistic tropes or usages, no mere concepts, nor even merely a concrete person in grace lacking any impress of natural order, but rather we know, even in the concrete, beings with natures.

Long, 182.

Freedom and Law: Pope Leo XIII's Libertas praestantissimum, Part 5

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A MODERATE LIBERAL, a liberal that does not jettison notions of natural law and eternal law, that is, one that does not spurn the notion of an objective and knowable moral realm? Not all liberals, Pope Leo III admits, are as radical as those whom he addressed in the earlier part of his encyclical Libertas praestantissimum. There are those that reject any notion of an intemperate do-as-you-feel liberty, and maintain that liberty ought to be ruled by right reason and the natural law and, at least in theory, divine law. These liberals , however, would reject any public role of the Church as interpreter of the divine law and the natural law. They would expand the freedom of man and hold that man "as a free being is bound by no law of God except such as He makes known to us through our natural reason," LP, 17, thus cutting out divine law altogether at least in a public role, and thereby necessarily assigning "limits to His [God's] legislative authority." But this is to fail to render the obedience to God which God is due. Man's obligations to God go beyond the mere natural law (though they certainly encompass these), but they also include the obligation to obey the divine positive law. To these liberals who would limit God's bailiwick to the natural law, Leo XIII taught, to the contrary:

Man must, therefore, take his standard of a loyal and religious life from the eternal law; and from all and every one of those laws which God, in His infinite wisdom and power, has been pleased to enact, and to make known to us by such clear and unmistakable signs as to leave no room for doubt. And the more so because laws of this kind have the same origin, the same author, as the eternal law, are absolutely in accordance with right reason, and perfect the natural law. These laws it is that embody the government of God, who graciously guides and directs the intellect and the will of man lest these fall into error.

Necesse est igitur, vivendi normam constanter religioseque, ut a lege aeterna, ita ab omnibus singulisque petere legibus, quas infinite sapiens, infinite potens Deus, qua sibi ratione visum est, tradidit, quasque nosse tuto possumus perspicuis nec ullo modo addubitandis notis. Eo vel magis quod istius generis leges, quoniam idem habent, quod lex aeterna, principium, eumdemque auctorem, omnino et cum ratione concordant et perfectionem adiungunt ad naturale ius: eaedemque magisterium Dei ipsius complectuntur, qui scilicet, nostra ne mens neu voluntas in errorem labatur, nutu ductuque suo utramque benigne regit. Sit igitur sancte inviolateque coniunctum, quod nec diiungi potest nec debet, omnibusque in rebus, quod ipsa naturalis ratio praecipit, obnoxie Deo obedienterque serviatur.

LP, 17.

Yet another school of liberalism, even more moderate and tempered, stands condemned by its internal inconsistency. In this kind of liberalism, the advocate affirms "that the morality of individuals is to be guided by the divine law, but not the morality of the State." The divine law may be safely and morally disregarded by the State, and the "fatal theory of the need of separation between Church and State," is compelled as a matter of good governance. Given the existence of God, and given his revealed will in both the natural and divine law, and given that God is the author of both the Church and State, and is the authority behind both of them, "the absurdity of such a position is manifest." LP, 18. Indeed, the real problem seems to be a practical loss of faith.

Michelangelo Buonaroti, The Damned Soul (Uffizi)
(Enjoying his unbridled freedom of religion, speech, and conscience without reference to God)

The problem with an absolute separation between Church and State is that it ignores the complexity of the relationship between these two powers or institutions and substitutes in its place a facile formula that is calculated to reduce the authority of the Church in practical life. The problem is that there are, and always will be, areas of overlap between the two institutions. In those areas of overlap, how can one separate Church from State without giving one precedence over the other? In practice, the overweening State elbows the Church out as it has, for example, in the areas of marriage (e.g., instituting no-fault divorce), family life (e.g., homosexual marriage), education (especially moral education), health care (contraception, abortion, euthanasia, etc.):

[A]lthough the civil authority has not the same proximate end as the spiritual, nor proceeds on the same lines, nevertheless in the exercise of their separate powers they must occasionally meet. For their subjects are the same, and not infrequently they deal with the same objects, though in different ways. Whenever this occurs, since a state of conflict is absurd and manifestly repugnant to the most wise ordinance of God, there must necessarily exist some order or mode of procedure to remove the occasions of difference and contention, and to secure harmony in all things. This harmony has been not inaptly compared to that which exists between the body and the soul for the well-being of both one and the other, the separation of which brings irremediable harm to the body, since it extinguishes its very life.

Sed quod magis interest, quodque alias Nosmetipsi nec semel monuimus, quamvis principatus civilis non eodem, quo sacer, proxime spectet, nec iisdem eat itineribus, in potestate tamen gerenda obviam esse interdum alteri alter necessario debet. Est enim utriusque in eosdem imperium, nec raro fit, ut iisdem de rebus uterque, etsi non eadem ratione, decernat. Id quotiescumque usuveniat, cum confligere absurdum sit, sapientissimaeque voluntati Dei aperte repugnet, quemdam esse modum atque ordinem necesse est, ex quo, caussis contentionum certationumque sublatis, ratio concors in agendis rebus existat. Et huiusmodi concordiam non inepte similem coniunctioni dixere, quae animum inter et corpus intercedit, idque commodo utriusque partis: quarum distractio nominatim est perniciosa corpori, quippe cuius vitam extinguit.

LP, 18.

From his general review of liberalism, it its extreme dogmatic or ideological forms, to its more seeming moderate but equally inconsistent pragmatic forms, Leo XIII launches into an analysis of some of the more common "liberal" liberties or rights, and criticizes the liberal understanding or scope of these liberties or rights: the liberty of worship, liberty of speech and liberty of the press, and liberty of conscience. So much confusion is engendered by those who, wed to relativism or skepticism, or seeking to justify their own disordered appetites or immoral habits, would import license in worship, speech and press, and conscience, transforming license into liberty, and thereby making these rights theoretically or practically absolute, as if they transcended the very obligations of the natural and eternal law. It is, in fact, sheer error to suggest that liberty of worship, liberty of speech or the press, or liberty of conscience is a "safe harbor," a place where one may escape obedience to the law of nature and nature's God.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy face?
If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I descend into hell, thou art present.
If I take my wings early in the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea:
Even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me.

(Psalm 138:7-10)

Liberty of religion, speech, the press, and conscience are not secular sanctuaries outside the pale of natural law or God's divine law, and those who think otherwise stand in the darkness of nothingness, which are the haunts of the Devil. For where there is not God, there is, by definition, nothing, or at least nothing real, and toward nothing is where the Devil trends. One should think there may be a lot of freethinkers and journalists in the Devil's retinue as he traipses to the Land of Nada, the Kingdom of Nihilo.

(continued)

Freedom and Law: Pope Leo XIII's Libertas praestantissimum, Part 4

A LIBERAL WILL SUFFER HEARTBURN at the next paragraphs in Leo XIII's encyclical Libertas praestantissimum. Indeed, the disquiet one may feel as one reads these parts of the encyclical dealing with liberalism may be a good indicator as to how much we have absorbed, and internalized, the liberal conventions of the day without even knowing it. (Another document that serves this salutory purpose may be the Syllabus of Errors issued during the pontificate of Pius IX.) These conventions have drawn us, as it were, away from the natural law main stream into a liberal distributary. Modern Westerners--Americans in particular--have a sort of liberalism as part of their civil religion, since there is more than a seed of liberalism, at least in its Lockean form, in the foundational documents and theories of the American revolution which began the American experiment. We have come to view liberalism as normal.

There is a certain freshness, boldness in Leo XIII's language, a "calling a spade a spade" type of style, a style more akin to the Jewish prophet than a Greek philosopher, or an unctuous diplomat, a style which is less circumspect, less reserved, and more biting than the more judicious language we have come to expect from papal encyclicals modernly. And yet, when it comes down to it, is it any less true?

But many there are who follow in the footsteps of Lucifer, and adopt as their own his rebellious cry, "I will not serve"; and consequently substitute for true liberty what is sheer and most foolish license. Such, for instance, are the men belonging to that widely spread and powerful organization, who, usurping the name of liberty, style themselves liberals.

Sed iam permulti Luciferum imitati, cuius est illa nefaria vox non serviam, libertatis nomine absurdam quamdam consectantur et meracam licentiam. Cuiusmodi sunt ex illa tam late fusa tamque pollenti disciplina homines, qui se, ducto a libertate nomine, Liberales appellari volunt.

LP, 14.

For Leo XIII, liberalism is rationalist or naturalist philosophy brought into the moral and political domain. "The fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of the human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence, and constitutes itself the supreme principle and source and judge of truth." LP, 15. With a similar shrug and dismissal of the divine and eternal law, the liberals apply the same principle to the practical realm. Liberals ultimately "proclaim that every man is the law to himself," sibi quemque esse legem, thereby advance an ethical system that is essentially autonomous, "and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless license." LP, 15. If this principle is applied to the political realm, we have entered into what Pope Benedict XVI would later call the tyranny of relativism, where the will of the majority determines right and wrong:

For, when once man is firmly persuaded that he is subject to no one, it follows that the efficient cause of the unity of civil society is not to be sought in any principle external to man, or superior to him, but simply in the free will of individuals; that the authority in the State comes from the people only; and that, just as every man's individual reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs. Hence the doctrine of the supremacy of the greater number, and that all right and all duty reside in the majority.

Hoc enim fixo et persuaso, homini antistare neminem, consequitur caussam efficientem conciliationis civilis et societatis non in principio aliquo extra aut supra hominem posito, sed in libera voluntate singulorum esse quaerendam: potestatem publicam a multitudine velut a primo fonte repetendam, praetereaque, sicut ratio singulorum sola dux et norma agendi privatim est singulis, ita universorum esse oportere universis in rerum genere publicarum. Hinc plurimum posse plurimos: partemque populi maiorem universi iuris esse officiique effectricem.

LP, 15.

It is clear that the will of the majority does not define right. In a democratic form of government the majority, no less than one individual, is bound by the natural and eternal law, which alone determines right. A liberal democracy founded on relativism is a recipe for disaster for the very simple reason that it is repugnant to reason:

To refuse any bond of union between man and civil society, on the one hand, and God the Creator and consequently the supreme Law-giver, on the other, is plainly repugnant to the nature, not only of man, but of all created things; for, of necessity, all effects must in some proper way be connected with their cause; and it belongs to the perfection of every nature to contain itself within that sphere and grade which the order of nature has assigned to it, namely, that the lower should be subject and obedient to the higher.

Nullum siquidem velle homini aut societati civili cum Deo creatore ac proinde supremo omnium legislatore intercedere vinclum, omnino naturae repugnat, nec naturae hominis tantum, sed rerum omnium procreatarum: quia res omnes effectas cum caussa, a qua effectae sunt, aliquo esse aptas nexu necesse est: omnibusque naturis hoc convenit, hoc ad perfectionem singularum pertinet, eo se continere loco et gradu, quem naturalis ordo postulat, scilicet ut ei quod superius est, id quod est inferius subiiciatur et pareat.

LP, 15. It matters not what form of government a society finds itself under--democratic, aristocratic, regal--civil law, however engendered, remains subordinate to and must remain informed by, the natural law, that is to say, the eternal law.

The Upshot of Leo XIII's Libertas praestantissimum

Rejection of any principle of law outside man himself is a recipe for the corruption of both individual and society and it leads to eventual tyranny, for if man is the measure of all things, then man is the measure of what is right and wrong, and there is no appeal to reality itself: to nature, that is creation, and to God. Law has nothing to do with essence or form, but law becomes existential and formless. Law thing springs forth from the subjective, arbitrary will of man himself, to be formed as he sees fit. Usually, the form comes from an overruling and disordered passion: greed, lust, pride, power. Not ratio but libido is the principle of such law. Ultimately, the will that carries the most power determines what is most right. And this is no longer law.

Listen to the warnings which Leo XIII proclaimed in 1888 where the rejection of natural law would lead individuals vis-à-vis individual morality.

For, once ascribe to human reason the only authority to decide what is true and what is good, and the real distinction between good and evil is destroyed; honor and dishonor differ not in their nature, but in the opinion and judgment of each one; pleasure is the measure of what is lawful; and, given a code of morality which can have little or no power to restrain or quiet the unruly propensities of man, a way is naturally opened to universal corruption.

Sane reiecto ad humanam rationem et solam et unam veri bonique arbitrio, proprium tollitur boni et mali discrimen; turpia ab honestis non re, sed opinione iudicioque singulorum differunt: quod libeat, idem licebit ; constitutaque morum disciplina, cuius ad coercendos sedandosque motus animi turbidos nulla fere vis est, sponte fiet ad omnem vitae corruptelam aditus.

LP, 16.

The effect of such doctrines would have equally deleterious effect on public mores:

With reference also to public affairs: authority is severed from the true and natural principle whence it derives all its efficacy for the common good; and the law determining what it is right to do and avoid doing is at the mercy of a majority. Now, this is simply a road leading straight to tyranny.

In rebus autem publicis, potestas imperandi separatur a vero naturalique principio, unde omnem haurit virtutem efficientem boni communis: lex, de iis quae facienda fugiendave sunt statuens, maioris multitudinis permittitur arbitrio, quod quidem est iter ad tyrannicam dominationem proclive.

LP, 16.

It follows as the night the day, that once natural law is rejected, so will the public role of religion, which will be the last bastion against the tyrants. Neither natural law nor religion forming the characters of the citizens will require something other than conscience to hold them in check: "there will be nothing to hold them back but force, which of itself alone is powerless to keep their covetousness in check." LP, 16.

This may, perhaps, be the view of the more extreme liberals, and there are liberals who are more conservative or moderate in their views, and attempt to temper them, as it were, with some tie to natural and eternal law. Pope Leo XIII acknowledges that there are liberals that would seem more moderate or circumspect in their opinions, and it is to these theories that Leo XIII next turns in his encyclical Libertas praestantissimum.

(continued)

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Political Rights

FROM NATURAL RIGHT MARITAIN SEGUES into political rights or what he calls the "rights of the civic person." Maritain, 80. Directly, these rights arise from "positive law and from the fundamental constitution of the political community." Maritain, 80. Like all law and all institutions, however, political rights are indirectly predicated upon natural law, and this in two ways. First, the positive law, including that law relating to political rights, complements or supplements where the natural law leaves things undetermined. But political rights seem particularly close to the natural disposition or "aspiration inscribed in man's nature." Maritain, 80. It is for very good reason that Aristotle called man a "political animal," a zōon politikon (ζῷον πολιτικόν) or homo politicus. Politics, 1253a7–18. And the political rights of man are an expression of this deep-seated inclination towards the political life, towards the common good of the group.

Maritain understands Aristotle's description of man to be more than merely the truism that man naturally lives or flourishes in society. Aristotle also intended the term to include the natural capacity and desire that men have to lead a political life, to participate, in an active way, in the life of the political community. The right to vote--suffrage--is ultimately Aristotelian in inspiration: "It is upon this [Aristotelian] postulate of human nature that political liberties and political rights rest, and particularly the right of suffrage." Maritain, 81.

Of course, historically, men have not enjoyed participatory democracies over other forms of government, and neither did Aristotle suggest that all men--especially women, slaves, and children--participate in the political life, the leadership life of the polis. (Naturally, all these disenfranchised were active and necessary parts of the polis but they acted, not in public, political roles, but in private, domestic roles.) How then can such a aspiration be as universal as Maritain suggests? Maritain suggests that there is a sort of tug-of-war in man wherein the labors associated with the political life to which man aspires are checked by the desire to renounce such a life and let others take custody over the common good of the community. He suggest that for every Demosthenes in us that wants to participate in political life there is a Cincinnatus who wants to turn back to the plow. There is therefore also a tendency to reject the natural desire to participate, something which Maritain says is against the human dignity that political life implies.

Perhaps it is easier for men to renounce active participation in political life; in certain cases it may have happened that they felt happier and freer from care while dwelling in the commonwealth as political slaves; or while passively handing over to their leaders all the care of the management of the community. But in this case they gave up a privilege proper to their nature, one of these privileges which, in a sense, make life more difficult and which bring with them a greater or lesser amount of labour, strain and suffering, but which correspond to human dignity. A state of civilization in which men, as individual persons, by a free choice designate those who shall hold authority, is itself a more perfect state.

Maritain, 81. For this reason, Maritain values highly the right of universal suffrage, and sees it as "a wholly fundamental political and human value and is one of those rights which a community of free men can never give up." Maritain, 82. Allowing for universal suffrage simply makes for a better social framework, politically-speaking.

In addition to the right to vote, persons have the right to form political groups, "according to the affinity of their ideas and aspirations," and thus form"Freedom of investigation is a fundamental natural right, for man's very nature is to seek the truth."
--Jacques Maritain "political parties and political schools." Maritain, 82. Maritain admits the potential for abuse in these associations, and that political parties can even cause democracy to degenerate into mere partisan bickering and quest for power against the interests of the common good. But abusus non tollit usum. The abuse of political parties does not take away from their proper value.

[The vices in political parties] however, are not essential to the very notion of these groups, whose diversity corresponds to the natural diversity of practical conceptions and perspectives existing among the members of the political community.

Maritain, 82. Moreover, as Maritain trenchantly points out, one-party systems do not remedy, but exacerbate the party problem; one party systems "bring[] to a peak the vices and the tyranny with which the adversaries of democracy reproach the party system." Maritain, 82. "The totalitarian Single Party system is the worst form and the catastrophe of the party system." Maritain, 82. Better is it to put up with the problems of political parties and simply guard against the excesses that frequently arise with them.

More fundamental than the right to vote or the right to political association, is the "right of the people to take unto itself the constitution and the form of government of its choice." Maritain, 83. "The constitution established by the people is the right of the people, as the rights and liberty of the citizen are the rights of the civic person." Maritain, 83. "Such a right," Maritain insists, "is subject only to the requirements of justice and natural law." In the past the constitutions of societies and their governments were "a matter of consent and tradition," largely unwritten, and not principally a matter of "juridical institution." However, the juridical institution of a political constitution, "formulated and established, by virtue of the will of the people deciding freely to live under the political forms thus set up," is a tremendous progress in the "grasp of political consciousness and in political organization." Maritain, 83. It is something that, once learned, ought not to be let go.

The political rights of civic persons also encompass what Maritain calls the "three equalities." Maritain, 83. The "three equalities" are:

• Political equality which assures to each citizen his status qua citizen, and his security and liberties within the State.
  
• Equality of all before law, which implies an independent judiciary, access to courts, and the right to the rule of law, including due process.
• Equal admission of all citizens to "public employment according to their capacity," and free and ready access of all the various professions without racial or social discrimination.
  

Maritain also considers it important to stress, that, though citizens, as compared to aliens or the underage that reside within the State, have certain prerogatives over the non-citizens with respect to the political rights relating to the administration of the State, non-citizens retain rights "of the civic person," rights related to the ius gentium or Law of Nations, rights that come with their living and participating in civilized life. Maritain, 84.

Maritain completes his discussion of political rights and the rights of the civic person by visiting the right of association and freedom of expression, two rights that clearly have importance in the matter of exercising political rights, so closely are these two linked to political expression.

The right of association is a natural right. The right of association has political effects, and so it legitimately can be the subject of State regulation, even prohibition if the common good requires it. The State "has the right to prohibit and dissolve--not arbitrarily, but according to the decision of appropriate juridical institutions--an association of evil-doers or an association of enemies of the public good." Maritain, 84. The natural right of association does not protect crime syndicates or terrorist organizations.

"What we know as freedom of speech and expression," Maritain suggests, "would, in my opinion, be better designated by the term freedom of investigation and discussion." Maritain, 84. "Freedom of investigation is a fundamental natural right, for man's very nature is to seek the truth." Once the truth is found, the knowledge of it may clearly be promoted, and so there is a concomitant freedom to spread ideas. "Freedom to spread ideas which one holds to be true corresponds to an aspiration of nature." Yet, "like freedom of association it is subject to the regulations of positive law." Maritain, 85. Freedom of speech--like freedom of association--is not absolute:

For it is not true that every thought as such, and because of the mere fact that it was born in a human intellect, has the right to be spread about in the community. The latter has the right to resist the propagation of lies or calumnies; to resist those activities which have as their aim the corruption of morals; to resist those which which as their aim the destruction of the State and of the foundations of common life.

Maritain, 85. Maritain is disdainful of censorship and police methods, since these are the "worst way--at least in peace-time--to insure this repression" of illegitimate speech. Better to use a sort of common moral suasion, "that spontaneous pressure of the common conscience and of public opinion, which spring from the national ethos when it is firmly established." Maritain, 85.

It is manifest that the freedom of association and freedom of speech are both essential to the political life fundamental to the State and yet present it with the potential for its destruction if captured by those intent on dissolving the State or injuring the common good. Even in a democracy, the State is justified in protecting itself from those who would harm it, even if it means a limitation on association and speech:

I am convinced that a democratic society is not necessarily an unarmed society, which the enemies of liberty may calmly lead to the slaughterhouse in the name of liberty. Precisely because it is a commonwealth of free men, it must defend itself with particular energy against those who, out of principle, refuse to accept, and who even work to destroy, the foundations of common life in such a regime, the foundations of which are liberty and co-operation and mutual civic respect.

Maritain, 85. What then distinguishes a free society from one that is unfree in the matter of controlling associations and speech when the latter are commandeered toward the destruction of common liberties? "What here distinguishes a society of free men from a despotic society is that this restriction of the destructive liberties takes place, in a society of free men, only with institutional guarantees of justice and law." Maritain, 85.

Leo Strauss and Natural Right, Part 1: Introduction

LEO STRAUSS (1899-1973) will be the focus of our next several blog postings. In particular, we shall focus upon Leo Strauss's understanding of the natural law as presented in his Natural Right and History.* Originally published in 1953, the book was based upon Strauss's Walgreen Lectures of 1949.

Born in 1899 in Kirchhain, Hesse-Nassau, (Prussia) Germany of Jewish parents, Leo Strauss was raised in a ritually Orthodox Jewish home, one where the Jewish ritual was practiced, but where traditional Jewish learning was not. Rather, Strauss's parents appears to have wanted their son to gain a conventional education. After attending the Volksschule (public school) and the Protestant Rektoratsschule in Kirchhain, Strauss was graduated from the Gymnasium Philippinum in neighboring Marburg in 1917. There, he was exposed to neo-Kantianism. He briefly served in the German army during World War I, in between July 1917 and December 1918. At seventeen, the young Strauss turned Zionist, a movement to which he was attached until he was thirty and which exposed him to a number of Jewish intellectuals. He later referred to political Zionism as "problematic," though fulfilling an important "conservative function" in his life. After receiving his doctorate in Philosophy in 1921 from the University of Hamburg under the supervision of Ernst Cassirer (his doctoral thesis: "On the Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F. H. Jacobi"), he spent a short period of time attending classes taught by Edmund Husserl and Husserl's assistant, Martin Heidegger, at the University of Freiburg. In 1925, Strauss was employed in a research position at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. During the next three years, he researched and wrote what was to be his first published work, a work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In 1932 Strauss married the widowed Mirjam Bernsohn.

Leo Strauss (1899-1973)

In 1933 Strauss and his family moved to England. In between 1936 and 1937, Strauss held a research fellowship at Cambridge University where he was affiliated with Gonville and Caius College. Frustrated at finding permanent employment in England, however, Strauss moved to the United States where, for a short period of time, he was a research fellow at Columbia University in 1937. In between 1938 and 1948, Strauss was employed at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1944, Strauss became an American citizen.

In 1949, Strauss joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as a professor in the Department of Political Science, and in 1959 was appointed Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor, a position which he retained until 1969. In 1969 he moved to Claremont Men's College (now known as Claremont McKenna College) in Claremont, California for one-and-a-half years. In 1970, he transferred to St. John's College-Annapolis, where he served as the Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence until his death of pneumonia in 1973. "The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism--nay, it is identical with nihilism."
--Leo StraussDuring the course of his life, Strauss published numerous books on political philosophy, including what is probably his most popular and accessible work, Natural Right and History. An advocate of the traditional, classical natural law theory (at whose heart was Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero), Strauss was an indefatigable foe of modern liberalism and positivism, which he saw as founded on relativism and leading ultimately to nihilism. With respect to Strauss's faith, Edward Feser summarized it as follows:

Strauss was not himself an orthodox believer, neither was he a convinced atheist. Since whether or not to accept a purported divine revelation is itself one of the “permanent” questions, orthodoxy must always remain an option equally as defensible as unbelief.

Edward Feser, "Leo Strauss 101," in National Review (May 22, 2006). Thus, Strauss's advocacy of the traditional and classical natural law cannot be said to be based upon a religious presupposition, much less a Roman Catholic one. He based himself on the gem of Western tradition. Indeed, he based himself on what he viewed to be the sound nature of man himself.


Written on the heels of World War II, Leo Strauss's introduction to his Natural Right and History starts out rather forcefully by suggesting that Americans have traded in their inherited traditions, those documented in the Declaration of Independence, that man is endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights, and that such a truth is self-evident. It was a Esauian bargain, the trading of one's heritage and patrimony for a mess of pottage. In its place, America--indeed not only America, but the whole of the Western world--seemed bent on adopting the "yoke" of Germanic thought, in particular its relativistic "historical sense" political philosophy and jurisprudence. With the sole exception of Catholics, American social science--and this includes political science and jurisprudence--"is dedicated to the proposition that all men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right." Strauss, 2. That is, social thought was governed either by a nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw Darwinism or a boo-hurrah Emotivism, and not by natural law philosophy. Of course, rejection of natural right philosophy leads to (or results from) despair in objective morality, and therefore leads to a reliance upon pure positivism in law, where "right is determined exclusively by the legislators and courts of the various countries." Strauss, 2. So in this view the most that any ideal could be is convention, "nothing but the ideal adopted by our society . . . ." Arbitrary choice, perhaps not even so much active choice, but maybe even "dull and stale habit," define our values. Cannibalism for cannibals; abortionalism for abortionals; homosexuality for homosexuals; liberalism for liberals. "[O]ur ultimate principles have no other support than our arbitrary and hence blind preferences." Strauss, 4.

We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues--retail sanity and wholesale madness.

Strauss, 4.

This is absurdity. A form of delusional schizophrenia. Indeed, it is as if the floor has caved in and we have tumbled headlong into nihilism. "The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism--nay, it is identical with nihilism." Strauss, 5.

Strauss won't stand for it. We talk too much about justice. We argue and wrangle too much over right. By the very asking and arguing of these questions we give hint to the fact "that there is something in man that is not altogether in slavery to his society." Strauss, 3. Arguing belies the truth. There is a hint, then, of some extrinsic, extra-legal, extra-political, extra-cultural "standard" to which we even unwillingly pay implied obeisance despite our foolish rejection of natural right. The problem of justice, of right "cannot be solved if we do not possess knowledge of natural right." Strauss, 3. It is implicit in our discourse. And yet, Strauss warns, "the seriousness of the need of natural right does not prove that the need can be satisfied." Strauss, 6.

Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true. Utility and truth are two entirely different things.

Strauss, 6.

Rejecting the tradition of natural right for another social theory is, from a juridico-political view, disastrous. It robs us of our ends, but leaves us with all our means. Bereft of a standard to discriminate between "legitimate and illegitimate, between just and unjust," between "soundness or unsoundness," our sciences become "instrumental and nothing but instrumental." Strauss, 4. (One thinks here of Saul Alinsky's vicious "If the ends don't justify the means, what else does?") It is a fortunate accident of history that, having jettisoned our end, we are given to "generous liberalism," and so the artificial god our means serve has not been bloodthirsty [we say that, but is that really so? How many victims have been sacrificed upon the altar of liberalism if one counts the hideous liberal "sacrament" of abortion?]. But without a standard, our sciences can just as well be used by tyrants as well as free peoples. A Shiite radical can use a nuclear device equally as well as Mr. Truman. Science is no respecter of persons; but then it is not much of a respecter of right or justice either. It works very well in the hand of the mighty, whether that hand is moved by a good or evil is unimportant to it. And it matters to science not, it cares not, it wants not, what the mighty makes of it.

Our country is (or at least was in the 1950s) full of "generous liberals." (The "liberals" of today are less than "generous," they seem bent on controlling thought and speech--political correctness--imposing their values on the majority--homosexual marriage and unabashed secularism, and their values are increasingly bloody--abortion, euthanasia . . . need I go on?)
"Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance . . . but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance."
--Leo StraussThese "generous liberals" advance the virtue of tolerance as the only meaningful response to the impossibility of knowing objective (or intrinsic: it is the same thing as objective if it is intrinsic) right and wrong. But their purported tolerance of all views leads them down a strange road. If unlimited tolerance is what is in accord with reason, then it is nothing less than an admission that one must prefer (because reasonable) any preference that is tolerant of other preferences. What this means, negatively phrased, is that there is a "rational or natural right to reject or condemn all intolerant or all "absolutist" positions." (Strauss, 5) (emphasis added). One must be tolerant of the tolerant, but intolerant of the intolerant. All the tolerance of the "generous liberals" is, then, is a reverse sort of tolerance, where relativism is tolerated, but "absolutism" (objective morality) is not. An intolerant tolerance. And absolutism against absolutism. Liberalism is built on an oxymoron. Very weird.

Liberalism has done something else. Each and every time it is confronted with some limit, some natural right that constrains its madness for diversity, each time it encounters tension between natural law and diversity or individuality, it selects diversity and individuality.

When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality that are imposed by even the most liberal version of natural right, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality. They chose the latter.

Strauss, 5. What this means is that eventually liberalism is led to have to chose between the right to tolerance and diversity and individuality. This places the liberal in a sort of conundrum. If he chooses tolerance as an absolute value, then he has rejected his central tenet of uninhibited individualism. On the other than, if he opts for uninhibited individualism, then he places tolerance on equal footing with intolerance since liberals have no objective footing with which to distinguish objective reality. The liberal cannot advocate the moral equivalence of intolerance to tolerance, and so, by naked choice alone, by liberal fiat only (and not by any objective norm, since liberalism refuses objective, absolute norms), the liberal holds that tolerance is superior to intolerance. And so the liberal ends up being the most intolerant of them all:

Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.

Strauss, 6. This is precisely at the heart of what Pope Benedict XVI has called the "dictatorship of relativism."

At the heart of this modern "dictatorship of relativism" or liberal intolerance, or what Strauss calls "fanatical obscurantism," is the lack of belief in any fundamental principles. It is the frightening reality that liberals "have to silence the easily silenced voice of reason, which tells us that our principles are in themselves as good or as bad as any other principles." Strauss, 6. Liberals choke the life out of the life of reason, and they are left with nothing, nihil. Having cultivated nihilism while choking the life out of reason, they become fanatical obscurants, fugitives from the law of nature that pursues them, like a hound of heaven, for murdering reason. Liberals then are pursued by demons. Like Orestes, then are pursued by Erinyes or Furies for having murdered reason. The blood of murdered reason, like the blood of liberalism's victims, cry out to heaven for vengeance. Could it be that God has heard the cries? Could it be that the rise of bloody Islam is his judgment? Could it be that these godless worshipers of a false God and a false prophet are the Chaldeans of old called by God to do his dirty work of cleaning up that which was caused by our even dirtier work?

Behold ye among the nations, and see: wonder, and be astonished: for a work is done in your days, which no man will believe when it shall be told. For behold, I will raise up the Chaldeans, a bitter and swift nation, marching upon the breadth of the earth, to possess the dwelling places that are not their own. They are dreadful, and terrible: from themselves shall their judgment, and their burden proceed.

Habacuc 1:5-6. We hope not, but we do not know.

The dead end, the intellectual and moral cul-de-sac into which liberalism leads, has led to some renewed interest in natural right. But Strauss warns that in facing the fanatical obscurantism to which the valueless liberalism inevitably tends, we must not ourselves fall into fanatical obscurantism. "Let us beware of the danger of pursuing a Socratic goal with the means, and the temper, of Thrasymachus." Strauss, 6.

In approaching natural right, moderns are in a situation markedly different from the situation that confronted the ancients. They were striving for knowledge that they did not have. We are striving to recover knowledge we once had. Therefore: "[t]he problem of natural right is today a matter of recollection rather than of actual knowledge." Strauss, 7. In the matter of natural right, we are trying to retrieve, not invent, to recover not advance.

In approaching the notion of natural law, we become aware that we will be confronted with a stark choice. We have to chose our loyalties. "Natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe."
--Leo StraussWe are in the same situation that confronted Christ's disciples after he taught that he was the bread of heaven which they would be required to eat. This made the Jew shudder. (John, Chapter 6) We have to chose to follow a way. We have to chose which way is the Way. And some of us will depart and go one way, and some of us will remain and go another. Perhaps a large number will just do nothing. Shall we follow and go live with the liberals? Or shall we follow and go live with the advocates of natural law? Or shall we simply duck the problem?

The issue of natural right presents itself today as a matter of party allegiance. Looking around us, we see two hostile camps, heavily fortified and strictly guarded. One is occupied by the liberals of various descriptions, the other by Catholic and non-Catholic disciples of Thomas Aquinas. But both armies and, in addition, those who prefer to sit on the fences or hide their heads in the sands are, to heap metaphor on metaphor, in the same boat. They are all modern men.

Strauss, 7.

What is one fact that all modern men--the liberals, the advocates of natural law, the fence sitters--confront? "We are all in the grip of the same difficulty." Strauss, 7. The problem arises from the nonteleological philosophy behind the modern sciences, compared with the teleological view that is inherent in the philosophy of the natural law.

Natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe. All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them. In the case of man, reason is required for discerning these operations: reason determines what is by nature right with ultimate regard to man's natural end.

Strauss, 7. Modern science, in adopting what is essentially a mechanistic view of the universe, would appear to have destroyed the notion of a teleology in nature. (One recalls Francis Bacon's disdain of the Aristotelian "final cause," and the Cartesian and Hobbesian view of man, or at least his body, as machine, his heart but a spring or coil.) When confronting the scientific, nonteleological view of the universe and the requirement in the classical, traditional theory of natural right or natural law that requires a teleological view of man, what is one to do? How is one to decide?

Two opposite conclusions could be drawn from this momentous decision. According to one, the nonteleological conception of the universe must be followed up by a nonteleological conception of human life. . . . [T]he alternative solution . . . [is] to accept a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man.

Strauss, 8. In other words, we must be consistently nonteleological in both natural science and the science of man (the science of man becoming nothing other than part of the natural sciences), or we must become dualists: teleological in the science of man, and nonteleological in the case of all other natural sciences. If we chose the former, we are with the liberals, we are with the relativists, and like it or not, we help usher in the dictatorship of relativism. If we chose the latter, which "the modern followers of Thomas Aquinas, among others," feel compelled to take, we run into another problem. That problem is that we are not really disciples of Aristotle and St. Thomas at all. Because Aristotle and St. Thomas were not the dualists that we feel we are forced to be. They had a comprehensive teleological view, not a piecemeal, dualist teleological/non-teleological view, with science on the one hand, morality on the other.

The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science. An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basis problem has been solved.

Strauss, 8.

Alas, however, Strauss avoids the problem in his book. Its limited role, useful enough we suppose, but admittedly not reaching to the heart of the basic problem, is to address the problem of natural right vis-à-vis the social sciences. The main focus of Strauss's book, then, will be whether natural right is plausibly rejected on the grounds of history (and the apparent relativism of values we find in history) or on the grounds of the modern philosophical and ethical distinction between "fact" and "value" (the so-called naturalistic fallacy). The answer to both, we shall learn, is "no."


_____________________
*Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

Cardinal Mercier and the Natural Law, Part 19: Rights of the State

THE TERM RIGHTS OF THE STATE has an unfamiliar ring to it, but it is shorthand for the ensemble of "juridical [legal] relations which unite the governed to the governing power in the civil society." [325(106)] Within this division, and under the guidance of a natural law philosophy, Mercier explores the nature, origin, and end of the State. He asks what the functions of public authority ought to be, and in what form those functions ought be assumed and exercised. Mercier addresses the rights and duties of citizens to the State, the principles that ought to govern international relations, and the relationship between the civil society and the religious society. "All these questions . . . belong to the sphere of the philosophy of Natural Law." [325(106)] The answers to those questions are all predicated upon the theory of the State that one adopts.

The first matter addressed by Mercier is the various theories of the existence of the State. He reviews some of the main theories that are outside the classical natural law tradition: (1) a pantheistic view of the State (Plato, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte); (2) the view of the State as an institution of positive divine right (such as that advanced by Filmer or Bodin); (3) the view that the State is a creature of social contract alone (Hobbes, Rousseau); and (4) the view of the State as a social organism (Lilienfeld, Schäffle, Spencer). Finally, as against all these other theories, he discusses the rival Christian, that is natural law, conception of the State.

The pantheistic theory of the State is probably not much held modernly, and it is difficult to conceive that it was ever advocated in earnest. But it was. In some sense, Plato may be viewed as being its originator. In our day, we can trace this view largely to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

Plato's philosophy, specifically his ontology, had the "germ of pantheism." He saw the entirety of the cosmos informed by "a kind of psychic principle," of which individual's soul was "but an emanation." This view, coupled with the notion that universal ideas correspond to universal essences in the divine wrap up all things in a pantheistic blanket. These underlying metaphysical presuppositions inform his ideal state in his Republic. After all, the state is viewed as the cosmos writ large, and the state as the soul of man writ large. Thus they are all intimately joined and linked in one pantheistic chain of being. For Plato, justice was tied to harmony and unity. "Liberty and the traditional philosophy of man's spiritual nature stand or fall together."
--Cardinal MercierAccordingly, the role of reason was to harmonize and unify the various human faculties. Similarly, the role of the city state was to harmonize and unify its citizens into one body corporate of the City-State. This required a subordination of the individual to the City-State. Anything that could present itself as a threat to the unification was suspect, and so intermediate institutions such as the family, private property, and idiosyncratic activities such as poetry and so forth had to be banned from Plato's ideal state. (It is this tendency in Plato, noted by Mercier, that led Karl Popper to identify Plato (along with Hegel and Marx) as one of the traditional enemies of the "open society".) But even Plato, in his extremity, cannot be said to have "identif[ied] the State with the deity of the universe," though he came awful close. [326(107)] The same cannot be said for Hegel.

Portrait of Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger (1792-1855)

"With Hegel, who here follows Schelling and Fichte, the case is otherwise. . . .[I]n his later writings he professed the completest pantheism." [326-27(107)]

'The State', he says, 'is the social substance that has arrived at self-consciousness . . . . It is the rationnel* of itself and for itself . . . it is a terrestrial divinity.' Here we find the State has become an aspect of the Absolute which, according to Hegel, is the common substrate of all things, the universal substance, of which individual beings are but so many modes or determinations.

[327(107)] (quoting Hegel's Philosophy of Right) For Hegel, the State, being in essence divine, lives for its own ends, and not for the common good. "Hegel's answer is that the State must be viewed as an organic and living unity having its own subsistence as its one end." [327(107)] Similarly, the State is the source of all right:

[S]ince [the State] is the divine being, its will must be the sovereign law, the source of all rights and all duties. Therefore against its decisions no individual right founded on nature can be of any avail.

[327(107)] This divinization of the State is a serious lapse into paganism because it absolutizes the State. One of the boons of Christianity was to force a separation between the secular State and the religious life of man (the Church). Christianity thus demoted the pretensions of an absolute State, and it would seem that the State, like a man with a heart darkened by the bitterest desire for vengeance, has been unforgiving since that time, biding its time and nursing its wounds until it could destroy the Church and re-assume the powers that Satan would give it.

Charles I by Unknown Artist Receiving His
Divine Right to Rule Immediately from God
(National Portrait Gallery, London)

Another theory of the State is what may be called the "divine right" theory. Stemming from 17th century jurisprudence, it held the monarchy to be appointed by God himself in an office of divine right. Thus the prince was responsible not to his subjects, but to God alone. As if by divine election, the monarch was chosen from the mass of men and given special authority by God. Not only was he given authority directly from God, but apparently as part of it the power to cure his subjects of scrofula, known thereby by the moniker "the King's evil."**

The political interest of the monarch, namely, the consolidation and extension of his power, dominates all other interests. He is known as the 'raison d'Etat' Before his superior claims the rights of the individual must yield.

[328(108)] Such a theory of government is largely Eastern in inspiration. "Its origin is not Christian." [328(108)] Obviously, such a theory is not held by anyone modernly. One need only read the work of Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653) to see the risibility of such a theory. Another advocate of the theory was Jean Bodin (1530-1596). It is of merely historical interest currently.

The social contract theory of the State is probably the view held by a majority of political theorists currently since it is at the heart of political liberalism. Although there is great variety among advocates of this theory, the essential kernel shared among all of them is that "civil society owes its rights to a contract, either expressed or tacit, that has been freely entered into by its members." [328(109)]

Hobbes is an early advocate of the concept, but his theory has a decided monarchical slant, although his theory may be translated and mutated to the power of an absolute State of other stripes.

Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau in Armenian Dress

Rousseau was the theory's great popularizer and democratizer. Rousseau's writings, however, resulted in a dichotomous interpretation. On the one hand, Rousseau gave birth to an individualistic notion of the social contract theory, where the State's role was by common agreement or contract stipulated to be one that would allow men to express their autonomy, free of any extrinsic influence. What was originally the fruit of rationalism in thought (philosophy) and morality and religion (i.e., autonomy), found its expression in political theory. "There it fostered liberalism, and drew conclusions from the theory of the social contract which were directly opposed to those of Hobbes." [329(111)]

Essentially, any social contract theory of the State makes the institution's origin entirely human. It is formed by consent of men, and God has nothing to do with it. The social contract theory is the basis for the modern school of political liberalism, as from this theory it has borrowed two fundamental tenets. The first principle liberalism has borrowed is the legal basis of public authority. The second principle borrowed from the social contract theory relates to the purpose of the State.

Liberalism, along with the social contract theory, believes that the "free consent of individuals is the one and only source of all lawful authority." Thus the State and law finds its ultimately source in human consent, human contract, and it is therefore independent of any divine law. Public authority is viewed as limited by agreement or compact. Its role is to assure the greatest possible freedom among its citizens, without regard to morality or to nature.

As it is contrary to the principle of rationalism to accept any guidance from constituted authority alike in matters intellectual as well as moral, so it is consistent to assert that the function of the State is not in any way to direct the action of individuals as regards any ideal whatever, but simply to safeguard them from all obstacles that would hinder their free development. Accordingly the function of the State is not to civilize, but only to guarantee that the rights and liberty of the citizens shall be protected.

[330(111)] This is the path that Kant took: "As an advocate of the principle of the autonomy of reason, he gives us the conception of the State as the mere guardian of the rights of the individual." [330-31(111)] All this liberalism, shunning the World's enchantment, ignores God's Grandeur. But:

The world is charge with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights of the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.***

Liberalism has trod, and trod, and trod, and has lost its sense of truth and freedom. It wallows in self-indulgence, and revels in pollution of all sorts, especially social pollution like pornography, homosexuality, dead babies, ruined families, and ruined marriages, the empty shells of which are found anywhere it has had some say. Its expression in classical liberalism, of the laissez faire type, has not been particularly edifying either. The waste, the disregard for the world's resources, the disrespect for nature and the environment, the social and chemical dross left behind by Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is disheartening. How much beauty been have the grasping industrialists destroyed by careless exploitation of the world's resources?

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene****.

The other prong of Rousseau's thought took a decidedly less liberal path, and expressed itself in the notion of the "General Will" and the absolutism of a democratic state. Rousseau attributes to the general will qualities of absolute sovereignty, indefectibility, and infallibility, and by a sleight of hand, though it is but the will of the majority, makes it by transference the will of each individual. As it turns out, under this branch of Rousseauism, it is "law or, more accurately, the will of the majority, that creates rights, and especially the right of property." [331(112)] The seeds of collectivity are already present:

By becoming a citizen a man has even lost his own individual existence. For Rousseau informs us that 'the mission of the legislator is to transform each individual, who by himself is a solitary unit, into a part of a larger whole from which this individual in a certain measure receives his life and being.' . . . Christianity in asserting the independence of religious from civil authority had liberated the human conscience form the yoke of the State. Rousseau would replace that yoke.

[332(112)] Like a dog, it would seem, man left Christ and then returned to his own earlier pagan vomit. This is in keeping with proverbial wisdom: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so is the fool that repeateth his folly." Sicut canis qui revertitur ad vomitum suum sic inprudens qui iterat stultitiam suam. (Proverbs 26:11).

Herbert Spencer by John McClure Hamilton (1853-1936)

The last theory addressed by Mercier before launching in the natural law way of things is the theory of the "social organism" or organicism. Though it has some Platonic roots, and was present in the teachings of the Physiocrats, and even in a form in Hegel and his disciples, this now-forgotten theory was advanced by the likes of Paul (Pavel) von Lilienfeld (1829-1903), Albert Eberhard Friedrich Schäffle (1831-1903), and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer (1820-19

We are told by Spencer that all phenomena are governed by a law of evolution. . . . Now under this same law of evolution individuals are brought together to form social organisms. . . . For he viewed the life of society as not essentially different from the organic life of man . . . .

[333-34(113)]. Mercier cuts to the quick: this theory "is simply a restatement of the old-world materialism." Like all materialism it denies the human personality. [334(113)] Ultimately, the question revolves around whether "the individual, who is also the social unit, is not something more than a mere aggregation of cells, such as materialists would have us believe." Their denial of any further principle other than atomism or cell-aggregation, "when applied to political science," leads to "the most radical absolutism." [335(113)]

"Liberty and the traditional philosophy of man's spiritual nature stand or fall together." [335(114)] And it is to that conception of man and to the State, that Mercier directs his attention and ends his foray in the natural law in his A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy. That will be the subject matter of our next, and also last, posting on Cardinal Mercier and the natural law.

___________________________
*Rationnel (adjective) is French for rational.
**The "King's Evil" (le mal du roy) or Scrofula (Tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis) is essentially tuberculosis of the neck. Popular belief held that the "royal touch" of the monarch of France or England could cure the unfortunate subject of the disease. It was viewed as a power collateral to his right of rule. Apparently, the power respected the Salic law in France, but not in England, where Queens apparently claimed it.
***Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur."
****Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Binsey Poplars."

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.


__________________________________________

*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.