Mirabile Dictu: A Pagan Gets Marriage Right

The Roman Stoic philosopher, contempoary of Seneca and teacher of Epictetus, Gaius Musonius Rufus (1st century A.D.), was not a Christian, but his view on marriage came, as John Finnis expressed it, "particularly close to articulating" a view on marriage attuned to the natural law. Finnis, "Natural Law Theory and Limited Government," in Robert P. George, ed., Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). An excerpt of his discourse on marriage was preserved by his student, a certain "Lucius," who also preserved in twenty other reasonably lengthy extracts (as far as extracts go), and which were included in Stobaeus (Floril. xxix. 78, lvi. 18).

Here is a translation of Discourse 13A by Cora E. Lutz, Musonius Rufus: The Roman Socrates. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942):

The husband and wife, he [Musonius] used to say, should come together for the purpose of making a life in common and of procreating children, and furthermore of regarding all things in common between them, and nothing peculiar or private to one or the other, not even their own bodies. The birth of a human being which results from such a union is to be sure something marvelous, but it is not yet enough for the relation of husband and wife, inasmuch as quite apart from marriage it could result from any other sexual union, just as in the case of animals. But in marriage there must be above all perfect companionship and mutual love of husband and wife, both in health and in sickness and under all conditions, since it was with desire for this as well as for having children that both entered upon marriage. Where, then, this love for each other is perfect and the two share it completely, each striving to outdo the other in devotion, the marriage is ideal and worthy of envy, for such a union is beautiful. But where each looks only to his own interests and neglects the other, or, what is worse, when one is so minded and lives in the same house but fixes his attention elsewhere and is not willing to pull together with his yoke-mate nor to agree, then the union is doomed to disaster and though they live together, yet their common interests fare badly; eventually they separate entirely or they remain together and suffer what is worse than loneliness.

Theologia Corporis 2 - Homo Solus

HOMO SOLUS AUT DEUS AUT DAEMON, "Man alone is either God or a demon," goes the Latin saying, quoted among others by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, which is an obvious borrowing from Aristotle's Politics where the Greek philosopher says that a man who lives alone--that is outside the Greek city-state, the polis--is either a god or a beast. Politics, 1253a 28-29. Aristotle, with his notion of man as a political animal, clearly refers to man's social tendencies, an observation true enough as far as it goes.

But there is a deeper, more fundamental way in which man is alone and yet not meant to be alone. And for this we must go away from Athens and go to Jerusalem, away from the philosophers to the prophets. We must begin at the beginning, that is we must turn to Genesis.

These are God the Trinity's own words, to the Jew the words of Yahweh, words which the Jews to their everlasting merit have preserved and bequeathed to us: "Non est bonum esse hominem solum . . . ." (Gen. 2:18) It is not good that man (אָדָם, ’adam) be alone . . . . It is significant to John Paul II that the Hebrew distinctions between male and female, i.e., אִישׁ, ’ish=male and אִשָּׁה, ’isha= female, arise only after the woman is created by God. Therefore, in his discussion on the Theology of the Body, John Paul II notes that the "original solitude" referred to by God in Genesis 2:18 refers to "the solitude of 'man' as such and not only to that of the male." [5.2, 147] The solitude referred to here, which is found only in the second account of creation (i.e., the Yahwist account), therefore, is not only the solitude of man (male) without a man (female), but, but also the solitude of man fundamentally. Thus Pope John Paul II:

It seems, therefore, on the basis of the whole context, that this solitude has two meanings: one deriving from man's very nature, that is from his humanity . . . , and the other deriving from the relationship between male and female, and in some way, this is evident on the basis of the first meaning.

[5.2, 147]

The issue of "original solitude," which chronologically existed before man's created division into male and female, is therefore a fundamental anthropological issue, more basic than gender. It is an issue chronologically prior to the separation of man into male and female, but also prior in an "existential sense." [5.3, 148]

Pope John Paul II finds man's solitude linked to his consciousness of being superior to all other living creatures on earth, a consciousness that is brought home to him when God "tests" man, that is, leads him into self-knowledge, by having him name all other creatures. [5.4, 148] In identifying and naming all other living beings (animalia), man comes to grips with two truths. He learns what he is not, but he also learns what he is.

As all animals march before him, man finds no other creatures like him; he finds himself, despite sharing some features with animals (a "body among bodies," [6.3, 152] his proximate genus), a creature sui generis, a unique being, dissimilar from all other animals, and therefore, in a manner of speaking, alone. There is a quality, a specific differentia, an "invisible" quality that distinguishes the "visible" qualities [7.4, 155-56] that man has vis-à-vis the animals. This quality comes from man's ability, before God, to know the visible world and with it to know the distinctiveness of his own being, the invisible soul; that is, man is conscious of both knowledge and self-knowledge, that he is, and he is aware that he is. In Aristotle's words he is aware of himself as a zoon noetikon, the animal rationale, the rational animal (and not Desmond Morris's "naked ape"; man's uniqueness is not in his lack of hirsuteness). In distinguishing himself thus from the world of living beings, man in his subjectivity "at the same time affirms himself in the visible world as a 'person.'" [5.6, 150] "In fact, in relatively few sentences, the ancient text sketches man as a person with the subjectivity characterizing the person." [6.1, 151] Added to this unique mix is the "aspect of choice and self-determination" of which man is made aware upon God's commandment regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, the "concept of original solitude includes both self-consciousness and self-determination." [6.1, 151] This "deep meaning of man's original solitude" must be fathomed so that one can understand man's "primeval covenant with God," that which arises from his created situation, that is, from his condition as an image of God, the imago Dei. [6.1, 151] Thus, at the same time that man becomes aware of his original solitude, he also becomes aware of the way out of the solitude, he becomes aware that he is called to communion with God, to be a "partner of the Absolute." [6.2, 151]

Man is "alone": this is to say that through his own humanity, through what he is, he is at the same time set into a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God himself.

[6, 2, 151]

The anthropological definition that man acquires for himself by comparing himself with the animals, approaches therefore the theological definition that is found within the very Trinitarian mystery of God ("let us make man in our own image and our likeness," Gen. 1:26). Man's uniqueness, which prevails upon him in distinguishing himself as more than a "body among bodies," also makes him aware that he is, for all that uniqueness, still a "body among bodies." And so man's solitude, his awareness of his uniqueness from all other visible beings, also allows him to discover something which modern man, infected by Cartesian dualism, has discarded. And that is the "meaning of his own bodiliness," a body through which he is to "cultivate the earth" and "subdue it. " (Gen. 2:5; 1:28). [6.4, 153] At the same time aware of its complex structure, man becomes aware of the "relation between soul and body." [7.1, 153] John Paul II summarizes:

Man is a subject not only by his self-consciousness and by self-determination, but also based on his own body. The structure of this body is such that it permits him to be the author of genuinely human activity. In this activity, the body expresses the person. It is thus, in all its materiality ("he formed man with dust of the ground"), penetrable and transparent, as it were, in such a way as to make it clear who man is (and what he ought to be) thanks to the structure of his consciousness and self-determination. On this rests the fundamental precept of the meaning of one's own body, which one cannot fail to discovery when analyzing man's original solitude.

[7.2, 154]

Theologia Corporis-1-Ab Initio

TO ENGAGE US INTO CONVERSATION WITH CHRIST is what John Paul II asks us to do in approaching matters of marriage and family life. In sort of an Ignatian mediation, we are asked to imagine ourselves among the crowd in Judea. We have seen this God-Man heal persons of various ills, and he fascinates us. A small group of Pharisees approach Christ with questions of marriage, and, more specifically, its dissolution--divorce, but in a spirit of challenge, rather than as disciples open to his teaching. "Is it lawful," they ask him, "for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?" Matt. 19:3.

In response, Christ refers them to fundamentals, from the beginning, ab initio. Christ refers them to Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Scriptures. He refers them to the creation of man. He refers them to the creation of woman. He refers them to the first marriage. Ab initio. Christ does not refer to the Law of Moses to answer a question about the Law of Moses, of which the Pharisees are the greatest representatives. He does not refer his questioners to any divinely promulgated law, but to the First Law, the Law of Nature, the Law that inheres in the created order and reflects in a primordial manner, the Eternal Law, the law in the mind of God. His teaching is thus to all men, for all times, and not only to the Jews in Judea in the 1st century A.D. Were we to ask the Lord, "the laws of the State allow for divorce . . . ," or "Science has given us birth control . . . ," or "Advocates of human rights claim that two persons of the same sex may marry . . . " In arriving at answers, Christ would say, "Turn ab initio." Go back to the beginning, to the Natural Law in created nature.

To John Paul II, Christ's invocation of the beginning, his focus on the ab initio, is fundamental; it is the operative and normative basis for the entirety of Christ's teaching, and so John Paul II seeks to "try to penetrate into the 'beginning'" to which Christ appealed. [1.5, 133]

There are two narratives regarding creation in Genesis (Gen. 1:1-2:4, the so-called Priestly or Elohist version because it uses the word Elohim to refer to God; and Gen. 2:5-25, the so-called Yahwist version, because it uses the word Yahweh to refer to God). In his answer, Christ refers to them both. [As an aside, Christ's reference to both versions of the creation story may be something that biblical scholars of the critical school may keep in mind when they try to pit one version of scripture to another, as if putting truth against truth, seeking to separate and divide, instead of accepting both as God's word and finding the truth in a fruitful synthesis or harmony of truths.]

What does Christ teach by referencing the Elohist creation story? It is a reference to the objective order. He wishes to teach us that Man is in the world, part of created nature; yet he is also above the world, made in the image of God. He shares in the brute creation (that which is "separated" "called" "put" from chaos), and in the living creation (that which is "created" or "blessed"). [2.3 & n.1, 135] Yet when it comes to man, there is, as it were, a divine pause. "[T]he Creator seems to halt before calling [man] to existence, as if he entered back into himself to make a decision, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.' (Gen. 1:27)." [2.3, 135] Christ's reference to the ab initio in Genesis is therefore a reference to the rich ensemble that is man, who, at the instruction of the Lord, must answer questions about his end and the good by reference to cosmology, but also to theology; he must refer both to the natural and to the supernatural; he must refer to the physical and the metaphysical; he must refer to body and the soul; to the contingent here, and to the absolute beyond. He must also recall that he is both man, and woman.

Christ's invocation of the Yahwist creation narrative, on the other hand, is more a reference to the subjective order, the areas of psychology, of conscience. "One could say that Genesis 2 presents the creation of man especially in the aspect of subjectivity." [3.1, 138-39] But it is not as if the objective order is opposed to the subjective order. "When we compare the two accounts [of creation], we reach the conviction that this subjectivity corresponds to the objective reality of man created in the 'image of God.'" [3.1, 139]

In referring back to the Yahwist creation narrative, Christ also places us within the context of man's own history, specifically, the creation of man and woman, and the narrative of the Fall. It is significant that the "beginning" to which Christ refers, the ab initio, is the reality of man before the fall. In answering the question the Pharisees posed to him regarding divorce, Christ refers to man in the state of paradise. There is sufficiently left of this order for us to be able to refer to it even now. Theologians distinguish the state of man before the fall, in his state of original innocence, his status naturae integrae, from his state after the fall, in his state of sinfulness, his status naturae lapsae. [3.3, 141] The following is key:

When Christ, appealing to the 'beginning,' directs the attention of his interlocutors to the words written in Genesis 2:24, he orders them in some sense to pass beyond the boundary that runs, in the Yahwist text of Genesis, between man's first and second situation. He . . . appeals to the words of the first divine order, expressly linked in this text with man's state of original innocence. This means that this order has not lost its force, although man has lost his primeval innocence. Christ's answer is decisive and clear. For this reason, we must draw the normative conclusions from it, which have an essential significance not only for ethics, but above all for the theology of man and the theology of the body . . . .

[3.4, 141-42]

One may note, that on this insight of John Paul II alone, the entirety of Calvin's (and to a slightly lesser extent Luther's) notion of man's "total depravity" is blown to smithereens and shown to be manifestly unscriptural. Similarly, the Lutheran theologian Karl Barth's vehement, even vituperative rejection of natural theology and natural law is found wanting. If you want better to follow Christ, throw away your copy of Christian Institutes Presbyterians, and your Church Dogmatics Lutherans! Instead, follow Christ's lead and

First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), An Essay on Criticism, Part 1.

This includes the art of being human, which is what morality and the theology of the body is all about.

Theologia Corporis--Introduction

The next series of blog entries will consist of reflections upon John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" (theologia corporis), as this was advanced in 129 reflections given by John Paul II in his Wednesday audiences at the Pope Paul VI Hall between September 1979 and November 1984. These reflections will rely upon the new translation of these talks by Dr. Michael Waldstein , Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books, 2006).

It is fitting, nay, it is mandatory, for a Theology of the Body to be the subject matter of a blog devoted to the Natural Law because a Theology of the Body is really nothing else other than a theological view of the Natural Law, and one with papal imprimatur. Pope John Paul II's theology of the body has a deep affinity with the Thomist doctrine of natural law, but one refined with modern psychological and philosophical insights. John Paul II's theology of the body avoids the Scylla of a mechanistic, materialistic view of the body and Charybdis of a Platonic idealismor Gnostic spiritualism. Based upon an incarnational view of the human, it seeks to learn of both man and God through a proper understanding of the body and the soul/body union.

Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben and the Natural Law

IN HIS THE CHRISTIAN FAITH (Der Christliche Glaube nach den Grundsäzen der Evangelsichen Kirchen im Zusammenhange Dargestellt, Vol. 1, p. 17 (§ 4) (2nd ed. 1830), the great German classicist and Romantic philosopher Friederich Ernst David Schleiermacher (1768-1834) refers to the awareness that one has not brought existence upon himself as Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben, "not-having-posited oneself," or a feeling of Irgendwiegewordensein, a "somehow-having-come-to-be." While Schleiermacher sees this as a subjective sentiment, a feeling, and it surely is, it seems that this is also an objective, self-evident reality, a truth of the objective order which cannot be denied without absurdity.

[I]n every self-consciousness there are two elements, which we might call respectively a self-caused element (ein Sichselbstsetzen) and a non-self caused element (ein Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben); or a Being and a Having-by-some-means-come-to-be (ein Sein und ein Irgendwiegewordensein). the latter of these presupposes for every self-consciousness another factor besides the Ego [dem Ich], a factor which is the source of the particular determination, and without which the self-consciousness would not be precisely what it is.

(Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, H. R. Mackintosh, trans. (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2000), 13)

As Louis Dupré summarizes this aspect of Scheiermacher's thought: "However powerful a person may be, he remains aware of the fact that he is not responsible for his being-there: he has not brought himself into existence." (Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2008), 102.) It is self-evident that none of us had any role in bringing ourselves to be, and that we owe both our existence and our essence to Someone other than ourselves, and so, at best, are only relatively autonomous, and not absolutely so. Because both our essence and existence rely on an Other, the question arises as to whether that Other has a claim of right upon us: whether there is a Law promulgated by this Other which we must acknowledge at the risk of absurdity by contradicting something that is self-evident: that, in a fundamental way, we have not made ourselves to be. Naturally, the awareness of Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben ought to lead us to ask that question with which the Baltimore Catechism begins:

1. Who made us?

And we ought to at least acknowledge that a possible answer may be: God made us.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the Protestant (Pietist) Schleiermacher is to be regarded as reliable in all things, and from the little I know of his thought I would not give him a ringing endorsement. There are problems with his theology which relies excessively on "feeling" (Gefühl) at the expense of reason, and his theism is at best ambiguous, as he tends toward pantheistic or panentheistic expressions. Similarly, his notions of dogma are deficient, at least from an orthodox Catholic perspective. (Dupré, 100-01, 104). His biblical exegesis and hermeneutics are also to be wary of. But in his notion of Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben, Schleiermacher seems to have hit on a great truth, even if obliquely. Both in our subjective awareness of Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben, and, more importantly, as a self-evident datum of speculative reason, we can predicate a reasoned argument for the existence of an Eternal Lawgiver and his Eternal Law in which we participate, a law in our hearts and in our conscience, and this participation is the Natural Law.