Archive for the ‘Moral Theology’ Category

h1

Nature Loves to Hide — David Bentley Hart

April 25, 2013
It does not then represent some grave failure of natural reason that philosophy cannot achieve definitive moral demonstrations, or that true knowledge of the good is impossible without calling upon other modes of knowledge: the (ubiquitous) supernatural illumination of a conscience -- a heart -- upon which the law is written, Platonic anamnesis (of the eternal forms or of what your mother taught you), cultural traditions with all their gracious moments of religious awakening (Jewish, pagan, Christian, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and so on), prayer, inspiration, the cultivation of personal holiness, love of the arts, and so on. Ultimately the world is a cruel and relentless place and we are not of it because we can interpret its moral fundamentals through the full range of our human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual.

It does not then represent some grave failure of natural reason that philosophy cannot achieve definitive moral demonstrations, or that true knowledge of the good is impossible without calling upon other modes of knowledge: the (ubiquitous) supernatural illumination of a conscience — a heart — upon which the law is written, Platonic anamnesis (of the eternal forms or of what your mother taught you), cultural traditions with all their gracious moments of religious awakening (Jewish, pagan, Christian, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and so on), prayer, inspiration, the cultivation of personal holiness, love of the arts, and so on. Ultimately the world is a cruel and relentless place and we are not of it because we can interpret its moral fundamentals through the full range of our human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual.

I think Feser and Hart rather talked past each other, but the event of my two favorites being in some kind of disagreement with each other really became a learning experience for me. Feser is much more capable of defending and presenting purely philosophical arguments whereas Hart tends to fade into reveries that emphasize the being of the world: “To encounter the world is to encounter its being, which is gratuitously imparted to it from beyond the sphere of natural causes, known within the medium of an intentional consciousness, irreducible to immanent processes, that grasps finite reality only by being oriented toward a horizon of transcendental ends (or, better, “divine names”).” is a sentence Feser would never produce. I don’t think you need to choose sides here but can feel an allegiance to both the Christian natural philosopher (Hart) and a kind of natural-law thinker (Feser) Both advocate a  comprehensive nature of faith, and believe their faith can be rationally demonstrated as a good and necessary thing. Morality is inescapable, and it is so on absolutely reasonable grounds.

*******************************************

Two issues back, I spoke ill of a modern form of natural law theory that unsuccessfully attempts to translate an ancient tradition of moral reasoning into the incompatible language of secular reason. Because of an obscurity I allowed to slip into the fourth paragraph, several readers imagined that I was speaking in propria persona [from Latin "for one's self," acting on one's own behalf, generally used to identify a person who is acting as his/her own attorney in a lawsuit.] from that point on, rather than on behalf of a disenchanted modern rambling among the weed-thronged ruins; and some were dismayed.

Edward Feser, for instance, issued a robust if confused denunciation, accusing me of numerous logical errors I did not commit and of being a Humean modernizer who doubts reason’s natural orientation toward the good. I suppose I should savor that as a refreshing change from the invective I usually attract; but, honestly, what most interested me about Feser’s argument were its fallacies, chief among them a notably simplistic understanding of such words as “revelation” and “supernatural.”

There is an old argument here, admittedly. Somewhere behind Feser’s argument slouches the specter of what is often called “two-tier Thomism”: a philosophical sect notable in part for the particularly impermeable partitions it erects between nature and grace, or nature and supernature, or natural reason and revelation, or philosophy and theology (and so on). To its adherents, it is the solution to the contradictions of modernity. To those of a more “integralist” bent (like me), it is a neo-scholastic deformation of Christian metaphysics that, far from offering an alternative to secular reason, is one of its chief theological accomplices. It also produces an approach to moral philosophy that must ultimately fail.

Before completing that thought, however, it might help to rehearse just a few of the conceptual obstacles our age erects in the path of natural law theory. So:

First. Finality’s fortuity. Most traditional accounts of natural law require a picture of nature as governed by final causality: For every substance, there are logically prior ends — proximate, remote, or transcendent — that guide its existence and unite it to the greater totality of a single cosmic, physical, moral, social continuum embraced within the providential finality of the divine. They assume, then, that from the “is” of a thing legitimate conclusions regarding its “ought” can be discerned, because nature herself — through her evident forms — instructs us in the elements of moral fulfillment.

In our age, however, final causality is a concept confined within an ever more beleaguered and porous intellectual redoubt. One can easily enough demonstrate the reality of finality within nature, but modern scientific culture refuses to view it as in any sense a cause rather than the accidental consequence of an immanent material process.

Within any organic system, for instance, ontogeny is fruitfully determined by strict formal constraints, but these are seen as the results of an incalculably vast series of fortuitous mutations and attritions, and therefore only the residue of an entirely stochastic phylogeny. Hence nature’s finality indicates no morally consequential ends (much less the supereminent finality of the Love that moves the stars), but is rather merely the emergent result of intrinsically meaningless brute events.

Second. Dame Nature, serial murderess. Even if final causality in nature is demonstrable, does it yield moral knowledge if there is no clear moral analogy between natural ends and the proper objects of human motive? After all, our modern narrative of nature is of an order shaped by immense ages of monstrous violence: mass extinctions, the cruel profligacy of an algorithmic logic that squanders ten thousand lives to fashion a single durable type, an evolutionary process that advances not despite, but because of, disease, warfare, predation, famine, and so on.

And the majestic order thus forged? One of elemental caprice, natural calamity, the mercilessness of chance — injustice thrives, disaster befalls the innocent, and children suffer. Why, our deracinated modern might ask, should we believe that nature’s organizing finality, given the kinds of efficient causes it prompts into action, has moral implications that command imitation, obedience, or (most unlikely of all) love?

Third. Elective priorities. Assume, however, that we can establish the existence of a moral imperative implicit in the orderliness of the world, as perceived by a rational will that, for itself, must seek the good: Does that assure that we can prove what hierarchy of values follows from this, or how we should calculate the relative preponderance of diverse moral ends? Yes, we may all agree that murder is worse than rudeness; but beyond the most rudimentary level of ethical deliberation, pure logic proves insufficient as a guide to which ends truly command our primary obedience, and our arguments become ever more dependent upon prior evaluations and preferences that, as far as philosophy can discern, are culturally or psychologically contingent. Consistent natural law cases can be made for or against slavery, for example, or for or against capital punishment, depending on which values one has privileged at a level too elementary for philosophy to adjudicate. At some crucial point, natural law argument, pressed to disclose its principles, dissolves into sheer assertion.

Fourth. Theory’s limits. The most gallantly errant of Feser’s assertions is that, because reason necessarily seeks the good, there exists no gap into which any “Humean” separation of facts from values can insinuate itself. But obviously the gap lies in the dynamic interval between (in Maximus the Confessor’s terms) the “natural” and “gnomic” wills: between, that is, the innate yearning for the good that is the primal impulse of all rational life and the particular acts of judgment and choice by which finite individuals live.

The venerable principle that the natural will is a pure ecstasy toward the good means that, at the level of our gnomic deliberations, whatever we will we inevitably desire as the good (for us); it does not mean that philosophical theory can by itself prove which facts imply which values, or that the good must naturally be understood as an incumbent “ought” rather than a compelling “I want.”

Feser asserts that “purely philosophical arguments” can establish “objectively true moral conclusions.” And yet, curiously enough, they never, ever have. That is a bedtime story told to conjure away the night’s goblins, like the Leibnizian fable of the best possible world or the philosophe’s fairy tale about the plain dictates of reason.

The question relentlessly left open in all of this is what “reason” really is. It is perfectly possible to believe that the whole natural dynamism of our reason and will is toward the good, and even to desire a true moral cultural renewal, and yet still to deny that natural law theory provides a sufficiently rich or logically coherent model of how the intellect can know moral truths. There is nothing scandalous in this unless one creates a false dilemma by imagining a real division between the discrete realms of supernatural and natural knowledge.

Feser thinks of revelation as an extrinsic datum consisting in texts and dogmas, and of the supernatural as merely outside of nature, and believes there really is such a thing as purely natural reason. From that perspective, one cannot deny philosophy’s power to demonstrate objective moral truth without denying reason’s intrinsic capacity for the good. Like a Kantian (the two-tier Thomist’s alter ego), one must believe that philosophical theory’s limits are also reason’s.

These divisions are illusory. What we call “nature” is merely one mode of the disclosure of the “supernatural,” and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason’s ascent into the light of God. Nowhere, not even in the sciences, does there exist a “purely natural” realm of knowledge.

To encounter the world is to encounter its being, which is gratuitously imparted to it from beyond the sphere of natural causes, known within the medium of an intentional consciousness, irreducible to immanent processes, that grasps finite reality only by being oriented toward a horizon of transcendental ends (or, better, “divine names”). There is a seamless continuity between the sight of a rose and the mystic’s vision of God; the latter is in fact implicit in the former, and saturates it, and but for this supernatural surfeit nothing natural could come into thought.

It does not then represent some grave failure of natural reason that philosophy cannot achieve definitive moral demonstrations, or that true knowledge of the good is impossible without calling upon other modes of knowledge: the (ubiquitous) supernatural illumination of a conscience — a heart — upon which the law is written, Platonic anamnesis (of the eternal forms or of what your mother taught you), cultural traditions with all their gracious moments of religious awakening (Jewish, pagan, Christian, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and so on), prayer, inspiration, the cultivation of personal holiness, love of the arts, and so on.

There is no single master discourse here, for the good can be known only in being seen, before and beyond all words. Certain fundamental moral truths, for instance, may necessarily remain unintelligible to someone incapable of appreciating Bach’s fifth Unaccompanied Cello Suite. For some it may seem an outrageous notion that, rather than a collection of purportedly incontrovertible proofs, the correct rhetoric of moral truth consists in a richer but more unmasterable appeal to the full range of human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual. I, however, see it as rather glorious: a confirmation that our whole being, in all its dimensions, is a single gracious vocation out of nonexistence to the station of created gods.

Posted in David B. Hart, Edward Feser, Moral Theology, Understanding Natural Law | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

Happiness: The First Three Beatitudes — Peter Kreeft

December 28, 2012
As Chesterton said, “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ's philosophy seems upside down." We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

As Chesterton said, “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.” We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

Christ proposes a vision of happiness which is the exact opposite of what everyone in the post-Christian West assumes to be the sources of the greatest happiness in life.

**************************************

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
We say how blessed we are as individuals or as a nation when we have wealth. He says no, you are blessed when you are poor. Poor not only in your bank account, but even more than that, not less, poor down to the depths of your heart, poor in spirit, detached from riches, whether you are physically rich or poor.

When Harvard University invited Mother Teresa to give a commencement address, she shocked them by taking issue with the gracious invitation they sent to her, as “the most famous person in one of the world’s poorest nations, to address the world’s richest nation.” She said no, “India is not a poor nation; India is a very rich nation. She has a wealth of riches, true spiritual riches. And America is not a rich nation. She is a poor nation, in fact, a desperately poor nation. She slaughters her own unborn children.”

Why? Because the mother fears those children will be poor, or will make her poor. The mother fears that she will not be able to afford to have these children, as if children are like cars or computers, calculable items in the household’s economy, consumer goods rather than consumers, objects rather than subjects, part of the circle rather than the center of the circle.

The supposed insanity of Christ’s saying thus turns out to be an illusion of perspective. In a lunatic asylum, from the lunatics’ point of view, it is the sane outsider who is insane. How useful to have a continual supply of outsiders, the saints, to remind us of where we live: east of Eden, in a lunatic asylum. Christ gives us a map to show how far east of Eden we are. The poor in spirit, of course, are not the weak-spirited; they are exactly the opposite. They are strong enough to be detached from riches, that is, from the whole world. They are those who are strong enough not to be enslaved to their desires for the things of this world.

Blessed are Those who Mourn
Well, what could Christ possibly mean by his second beatitude? Weeping and mourning is certainly not an expression of contentment, of the painless state that we all long for as part of happiness. Yet Christ tells us that those who mourn are blessed. How ridiculous for some Bible translations to translate makarios by ‘happy’ in this verse, in a society that means by ‘happy’ simply subjectively satisfied or content. That translation would make Christ say, “Those who weep are content,” which is not a meaningful paradox, but a meaningless self-contradiction.

Mourning is the expression of inner discontent, of the gap between desire and satisfaction, that is, of suffering. Buddha founded an entire religion on the problem of suffering, or dukkha, and its cause, tanha, or greed, and its cure, the Noble Eightfold Path leading to nirvana, the abolition of both suffering and its source.

Unlike Buddha, Christ came not to free us from suffering, but to transform its meaning, to make it salvific. He came to save us from sin, and he did so precisely by embracing the suffering and death that are the result of sin. It must sound as absurd to a Buddhist to say that suffering is redemptive, as it would sound to a Christian to say that sin is redemptive. Each religion must accuse the other of the most radical practical error: confusing the problem with the solution.

The reason Christ gave for declaring mourners blessed is that they shall be comforted. For in hope this future is made present. It’s true that “one foot up and one foot down, that’s the way to London Town,” whether one is going to London to be crowned king or to be hanged on Traitor’s Gate. But the future destiny of the journey makes everything in the journey itself different, not just accidentally, but essentially, and not just extrinsically, but intrinsically. A journey to be hanged is tragic, even if it is in a comfortable coach. A journey to be crowned, even if it is in an uncomfortable wagon, is glorious.

St. Teresa said, “Looked at from the viewpoint of heaven, the most horribly painful earthly life will turn out to be no more than one night in an inconvenient hotel.” And Christ has the viewpoint of heaven. Christ is the viewpoint of heaven. Christ is heaven. In giving us himself, he gives us heaven, and its viewpoint, that is, his.

Blessed are the Meek
The meek who will inherit the earth, whom Christ calls blessed — who are they? They are not well-known. They do not thirst for honor, fame or glory, and do not usually have it.

We all want to be known. But God, who is supremely blessed, is anonymous. He works by nature most of the time. He hides instead of constantly showing his glory. He came as a baby, and died as an executed criminal, and lets himself be ignored. He lets himself be eaten daily, as what looks like a little piece of bread. He is utterly meek, and utterly blessed. If we are utterly meek, we will be utterly blessed. If we are half meek, we will be half blessed. If we are not meek, we will not be blessed, for God is the source of all blessedness, and God is meek. And the effect cannot be the opposite of the cause.

The meekness that Christ calls blessed in his third Beatitude is indeed in sharp contrast to the desire to conquer nature that Francis Bacon declared to be the new summum bonum, the new meaning of life on earth, and to the desire to conquer fortune that was Machiavelli’s new summum bonum. But it is not the contrast that the world thinks. It is not a blessing on wimps, sissies, dishrags, wallflowers, shrinking violets, worry-warts, Uriah Heeps, nebbishes, nerds or geeks. The meek are those who do not harm, who do not see life as competitive, because they understand the two premises from which this conclusion logically follows.

  1. First, that the best things in life are spiritual things, not material things. That life’s meaning is to be found in wisdom and love and creativity, in understanding and sanctity and beauty, rather than in money or power or fame or land or military or athletic conquest.
  2. And they understand the second principle, too, that spiritual things are not competitive. That they multiply when shared, while material things are divided when shared. Since happiness depends on understanding the best things in life, and since the best things in life are spiritual, and since spiritual things do not diminish when shared, and since what does not diminish when shared cannot be obtained by competition, and since competition is the alternative to meekness, therefore meekness makes for happiness.

We should not be surprised that Christ the Logos is at least as logical as Socrates. Or that we are not. That’s why his pure reason sounds outrageously paradoxical to us. As Chesterton said (it’s impossible to stop quoting Chesterton; that’s like stopping eating potato chips), “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.” We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

Posted in Happiness, Jesus, Moral Theology, The Sermon on the Mount, Understanding the Beatitudes | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

Ancient and Modern Concepts of Happiness – Peter Kreeft

December 26, 2012
We all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason.

We all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason.

Adapted from a lecture by Dr. Kreeft, who is a treasure of the Catholic Church:

*****************************************************

My topic today is Jesus’ concept of happiness. And we must begin with the dullest and most necessary preliminary: defining our term. Nearly everyone, from Aristotle to Freud, agrees that we all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason. We argue about other things, but not about happiness. We may say, “What good are riches if they don’t make you happy?” But we don’t say, “What good is happiness if it doesn’t make you rich?” This is clear, to both ancients like Aristotle and moderns like Freud.

But there is a very significant difference between the typically ancient and the typically modern meaning of happiness. Ancient words for happiness, like eudaimonia, or makarios in Greek or beatitudo in Latin, mean true, real blessedness, while the modern English word happiness usually means merely subjective satisfaction, or contentment, so that in modern English, if you feel happy, you’re happy. It makes no sense, in modern English, to tell someone, “You think you’re happy, but you’re not.”

But that is precisely the main point of the most famous book in the history of philosophy, Plato’s Republic: that justice, the all-inclusive virtue, is always profitable, that is, ‘happifying’. And injustice never is. Thus, that the just man, even if like Socrates, he has nothing else, is happy. And the unjust man is not, even if he has everything else, like Gyges, or Gollum, with his ring of power and invisibility. Thus, we should distinguish the ancient concept, which is really blessedness, from the modern, which is really contentment. I shall be talking about blessedness here.

  1. Blessedness differs from contentment in four ways, all of which can be seen by analyzing the Greek word eudaimonia. First, it begins with the prefix eu, meaning good, thus implying that you have to be good, morally good, to be happy.
  2. Second, daimon means spirit, thus implying that happiness is a matter of the soul, not the body and its external goods of fortune. The word happiness, by contrast, comes from the Old English word hap, meaning precisely fortune, luck or chance, which was the one Pagan thought category Christianity subtracted. In all other cases, Christianity added to Paganism. As Chesterton said, summing up all spiritual history in three sentences: “Paganism was the biggest thing in the world. Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small.” If blessedness is spiritual, it is free. You are responsible for your eudaimonia, but happiness just happens.
  3. Third, eudaimonia ends in ia, which means a lasting state, something permanent. Contentment is for a moment, blessedness for a lifetime. So much so that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics could not make up his mind whether to agree or disagree with the saying “call no man happy ’til he is dead.” That is, wait for the end of the story to judge it.
  4. Fourth, and most important of all, the state of eudaimonia is objective, whereas contentment is subjective. When we say happiness, we usually confuse these two meanings, the ancient and the modern. And that is not wholly unwise, because within the ancient concept of happiness, in a secondary way, there is also present the modern one: the need for some contentment, peace of mind, pleasure and at least a modicum of the gift of fortune. While within the modern concept of happiness, that is, within subjective contentment, there is also present, in a secondary way, a feeling for the need of something of the typically ancient ingredient, the need for at least some virtue and the feeling that the happiness, to be deep and lasting, ought to be real and earned and true happiness, whatever that may be.

We are about to explore Christ’s concept of happiness. It is typically ancient (blessedness) but it also includes the above ambiguity or doubleness of meaning: subjective satisfaction as well as objective perfection.

Our Concept of Happiness
Let’s look first at our concept of happiness. When I speak of our concept, who is us? I mean our culture, the mental landscape we all inhabit, even when we feel like aliens here, most generally the modern, post-Christian West, but most specifically contemporary America, as it would appear on opinion polls.

If an opinion poll were to ask Americans to list the nine most important ingredients in the happy life, they would probably give an answer pretty much like the following:

  1. First, the most obvious, though not the profoundest ingredient, is probably wealth. If you notice your friend has a big smile on his face today, you most likely would say to him, “What happened to you? Did you just win the lottery?” If that’s what you’d say, it must be because that’s what would put the biggest smile on your face. And let’s face it; money can buy everything money can buy, which is a lot of stuff.
  2. Second might be our culture’s most notable success, the conquest of nature and fortune by science and technology, allowing each of us to be an Alexander the Great, conqueror of the world.
  3. Third would probably be freedom from pain. I think few of us would disagree that the single most valuable invention in the entire history of technology has been anesthetics.
  4. Fourth would probably be self-esteem, the greatest good, according to nearly all of our culture’s new class of prophets, the secular psychologists — and secular psychologists are among the most secular of all classes in our society.
  5. Fifth might be justice, securing one’s rights. Justice and peace summarize the social ideals of most Americans, the ideals they want for themselves and for the rest of the world.
  6. Sixth, if we are candid, we have to include sex. To most Americans, this is the closest thing to heaven on Earth, that is ecstasy, mystical transcending of the ego — unless they’re surfers.
  7. Seventh, we love to win, whether at war, at sports, at games of chance, in business, or even in our fantasies. Our positive self-esteem requires the belief that we are winners, not losers. We want to be successful, not failures.
  8. Eighth, we want honor. We want to be honored, accepted, loved, and understood. In our modern egalitarian society, we are honored, not for being superior, but for being one of the crowd. In most ancient societies, one was honored for being different, better, superior, excellent. But we still crave to be honored. Some even want to be famous. All want to be accepted.
  9. Ninth, we want life, a long life and a healthy life. Thomas Hobbes is surely right in saying that fear of violent death, especially painful and early death, is very, very powerful. Your life is not happy if it’s taken from you, obviously.

This all seems so obvious and so reasonable as to be beyond argument. Higher ideals than these are arguable. Some of us seek them and some of us do not. But these nine would seem to be firm and impregnable, universal and necessary. Whoever would deny that they form a part of happiness would be a fool. Whoever would affirm that happiness consisted in their opposites would be insane.

Christ’s Concept of Happiness
Let us now perform a fantastic thought experiment. Let us suppose that there was once a preacher who did teach precisely that insanity, point for point, deliberately and specifically. Perhaps you cannot stretch your imagination quite that far, but I’m going to ask you to stretch it even one step farther. Imagine this man becoming the most famous, beloved, revered, respected, and believed teacher in the history of the world. Imagine nearly everyone in the world, even those who did not classify themselves as his disciples, at least praising his wisdom, especially his moral wisdom, especially the single most famous and beloved sermon he ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, the summary of his moral wisdom, which begins with his 180 degree reversal of these truisms.

Perhaps you find this far too incredible to be imaginable. It would be a miracle harder to believe than God becoming a man. It is hard enough to believe that anyone would believe the strange Christian notion that a certain man who began his life as a baby, who had to learn to talk, and ended it as an executed criminal, who bled to death on a cross, and in between got tired and hungry and sorrowful, is God, eternal, beginningless, immortal, infinitely perfect, all-wise, all-powerful, the Creator.

But it is even harder to believe that anyone would believe his utterly shattering paradoxes about happiness. Perhaps we do not really believe them after all. Perhaps we only believe we believe them. Perhaps we have faith in our faith rather than faith in his teachings.

For, of course, I am referring to Christ’s eight beatitudes which opened his Sermon on the Mount, the most famous sermon ever preached, and the one part of the New Testament that is still held up as central and valid and true and good and beautiful even by dissenters, heretics, revisionists, demythologizers, skeptics, modernists, theological liberals, and anyone else who cannot bring himself to believe all the other claims in the New Testament or the teachings of the Church. These people strain at the gnats but swallow the camel. So let’s look at the camel that they swallow. Perhaps they only seem to swallow it. Perhaps they swallow only their own swallowing, gollumping like Gollum.

To our desire for wealth, Christ says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” To our desire for painlessness, he says, “Blessed are those who mourn.” To our desire for conquest, he says, “Blessed are the meek.” To our desire for contentment with ourselves, he says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” To our desire for justice, he says, “Blessed are the merciful.” To our desire for sex, he says, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” To our desire for conquest, he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” To our desire for acceptance, he says, “Blessed are the persecuted.” And to our desire for more life, he offers the Cross. And now this man carrying his cross to Calvary even dares to tell us, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Posted in Happiness, Jesus, Moral Theology, Peter Kreeft, The Sermon on the Mount, Understanding the Beatitudes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

The So-Called Immorality of Christianity – Jeffrey Burton Russell

August 28, 2012

Giovanni BELLINI, Sacred Allegory, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

The cover of the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic, asked, “Did Christianity cause the crash?” In fact, a tide of anti-Christian propaganda is holding that “Christianity caused  —————“(fill in anything you don’t like). The only good thing about it is that Christians can learn how Jews have felt for centuries. Antitheists believe that Christians who do good are either not really Christians or else do good despite their Christianity: Christians cannot do good on the basis of their beliefs, because their beliefs are bad. [Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), pp. 173-9)]

They also think Christianity is immoral: it supports war, denies rights to minorities, pits itself against science and blocks progress. The antitheists attack all religions but focus on the three most prominent Judaism, Christianity and Islam — and their prime target is Christianity. They fail to note that in Europe and America Christians originated hospitals, orphanages, schools and universities. Humanists fail to recognize that their humane values come from Judeo-Christian religion. And one may ask what Christian oppression actually exists in contemporary America: the one that controls universities? The one that controls business and finance? The one that controls the media? The one that dominates the public schools? The one that runs the government? The one that conducts foreign policy? Where is all this hateful oppression anyway?

Immorality is sometimes distinguished from amorality (the lack of any kind of morals), but a more important distinction is between immorality and illegality. Many things are illegal without being immoral — double parking, for example — and many things are immoral without being illegal — for example, paying yourself hundreds of times more than your employees. Sometimes, as in Nazi or Soviet society, it is even illegal not to be immoral: you are obliged by law to inform on your neighbor. Illegality depends on whoever is in control of the state. Immorality is quite different: it means violating a fundamental code of behavior.

Morality and religion don’t necessarily go together. In many other cultures, religion has to do with offending or placating gods who are themselves morally ambivalent. The first religion to tie morality inextricably to divine law was Israelite monotheism. An old question asks whether rape and murder are wrong because God says so or whether God condemns rape and murder because they are wrong. Judeo-Christian morality dissolves the difference: some actions are good and some evil by both natural and divine law. Even Christianity is not primarily about morality but about God’s love for humanity expressed in Jesus. A recent study of the sense of fairness in societies showed that fairness correlates significantly with participation in religion. ["Fair Play," The Economist, March 20, 2010]

To be moral or immoral requires a free choice. Bacteria, ants, pelicans and robots can be neither moral nor immoral, because they are programmed to act exactly the way they do. Most atheists think that humans, like pelicans or robots, are programmed by genetics and circumstances to do exactly what they do. Having no freedom of choice, we are incapable of either morality or immorality. Now, if there is no such thing as immorality, Christianity can’t be “immoral.” What antitheists really mean by saying that Christianity is immoral is that they believe Christianity is opposed to certain values that they think are good.

Christians believe that morality is living in harmony with the divine law found in the “two books”: the Bible and nature. In the Bible the truth is revealed in words; in nature it is revealed through mathematics and research into the universe. [Josef Zycinski makes the point that "the mind of God" in modern physics is mathematical rather than Platonic; he traces the change back to the seventeenth century: God and Evolution: Fundamental Questions of Christian Evolutionism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006)] A principle is a basic truth from which consistent ideas and behavior proceed, and Christians believe that their primary principle is the truth of the two revelations.

In contrast, atheist and humanist morality can have no principle [The latest effort to establish atheist morality is Sam Harris, Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010).] Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov notes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. If a humanist wants to do good, how does he or she know what is good? If the response is that human nature is basically good, the evidence of both biology and history is counter to the claim. Further, to assert that “man is good” requires some Good by which to measure good. If there is no perfect Good, secularists have no principle on which to base their ideas of what is good. Humanists imagine that the world, once purged of religion, would adopt their own vague, liberal morality, but why would it? Why assume that such a world would embrace compassion, equality, or freedom? [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions] Those ideas come from Christianity.

Secularists have been trying to establish secular moral codes without the principle of the Good and have repeatedly failed. Without this basis, ethics become relative, and “a simple `I disagree’ or `I refuse’ [or `I am offended'] is enough to exhaust the persuasive resources of any purely worldly ethics.” [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions] I once heard a witness in a child-rape trial say, “Who’s to say what’s right or wrong in this round world?” The effort of secularism to create a principle in the welter of relativism is like pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.

The very point of relativism is that it doesn’t have a principle: everybody chooses his or her own values. Relativism therefore means that morals become a matter of fashion or else are imposed by a self-appointed authority. The atheist Jurgen Habermas and Pope Benedict XVI agreed in a debate that “there had to be some value system.” [97Micklethwait and Wooldridge, God Is Back] But any value system man creates will be dissolved by man. What evidence is there of moral progress, unless by “moral progress” one means that certain things one personally admires have recently become more common? Relativism and materialism are antithetical to one another, but the two converge in denying a principle of morality based on anything other than personal or cultural preference.

This degrades the “very notion of freedom, its reduction in the cultural imagination to a fairly banal kind of liberty,” and the result is both triviality and monstrosities like eugenics. [David BentleyHart, Atheist Delusions] Our own will, based on nothing but itself, feels any limitation on its choices to be intolerable. Any reasonable system of belief, any principles, must be avoided because they interfere with our illusion of absolute freedom, an illusion that ironically leaves us open to infinite manipulation. “The inviolable liberty of personal volition” cannot permit any “standard of the good that has the power (or the right) to order our desires toward a higher end…. Choice [seems] to exercise an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns.” [David BentleyHart, Atheist Delusions]  The result is “an abyss, over which presides the empty power of our isolated wills…. The original nothingness of the will gives itself shape by the use it makes of the nothingness of the world — and thus we are free.” [David BentleyHart, Atheist Delusions]

Atheists argue that a coherent morality can be created out of evolutionary principles. They argue that overall the process of evolution rewards altruistic behavior over selfish behavior, breeding more and more altruism into the species. However, there seems to be more evidence against this idea than for it. Allowing it for the purpose of argument, the most it can do is account for the inclination that people have to protect their children, not the moral duty to do so. If we don’t abandon our child, fine; if we just don’t feel like protecting her, we have no moral duty to keep her. If a Nazi shoves a Jew into a gas chamber, we can say, “That makes me feel bad,” or “I find that inappropriate behavior,” or “I’m offended,” or even “That is unhelpful to evolutionary development,” but we have no basis for saying, “That behavior is immoral.” We can argue all day with the Nazi or call him all sorts of names, but we can offer no principle on which to dispute his choice.

Sade argued, consistently with his atheism, that without basic moral principles behavior is simply a matter of choice. If you prefer dining to raping, okay, so long as you don’t prevent him from raping. [Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986)] If you don’t like killing Jews, fine, but on what basis do you interfere with the preference of others to do so? The rights of the victim? Without a moral principle there is no basis for assigning rights to the victim — or anyone else. The idea that evolution, when defined as being without purpose and goal, can produce a basis for moral action is illogical, unfounded and frankly impossible. Under some circumstances, violent xenophobic behavior fits with evolutionary development better than altruistic behavior. The horrors of post-Christian behavior are no longer speculation but already being realized. [David BentleyHart, Atheist Delusions]

If there is no absolute standard of morality, then there is no standard by which individual and social moralities can be judged. No standard at all. And this means, for deconstructionists and radicals, that the dominant morality will be determined by domination, power and force. The only real alternative to absolute morality is imposition of a manmade morality on a public intimidated by power and deluded into thinking that their choices are their own. The arrival, persistence and success of new elites who operate by repression and intimidation will continue.

Humanists and other secularists affirm that causing others unnecessary suffering is bad, but they cannot explain on what basis it should be considered bad. If one insists that there is no principle on which to base morality other than human preferences, then one has destroyed the possibility of moral truth and abandoned morality to either personal preference or to the dictates of power groups. Ian Markham calls this a “cozy atheism” that bases its morality on Judeo-Christian values while claiming not to. Values without principle are simply products of whoever is in power. If God goes, morality goes. Although the antitheists “are good at deciding to affirm basic moral values, it is difficult to see how the discourse is justified.” [Markham, Against Atheism] Since both Christians and atheists can be immoral, is there any distinction in their behavior? Often not, but “as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.” [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions]

In historical fact, the gentle values promoted by humanists and other secularists today are themselves based in Christianity. [Berlinski, Devil's Delusion] Where did the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity come from? Not from the Greeks or Romans. Christianity was a giant rebellion against the pure power assertions of the ancient Not from the Aztecs or the Mongols, either, but from the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment came from what preceded it: Christianity.

Christianity is the first philosophy to have enunciated and promoted these values. Christianity invented the idea of human rights. [Berlinski, Devil's Delusion]  There were no human rights in antiquity — in Egypt or Babylonia, Greece or Rome, China or India or Mesoamerica. There was only power. Christianity speaks truth to power, and it does so on the basis that there are rights inherent in every human being that are inalienable because they derive from the God who is both human and divine. Those who deny that there is truth can’t use it to speak to power. If there is no God, there are no inherent rights — only temporary artificial “rights” imposed by pressure groups. [Mark D. Linville, "The Moral Poverty of Evolutionary Naturalism," in Contending With Christianity's Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors, ed. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig (Nashville: B & H Publishing, 2009)]

This is not a question of belief but of reality. As William Lane Craig put it, belief in God is not required for morality, since many atheists behave morally. It’s much simpler: the actual Being of God is necessary for morality. [William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2010)] God the Creator is the basis of moral behavior.

Posted in Definitions, Moral Theology | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

h1

Faithfulness – Dietrich von Hildebrand

May 1, 2012

Who do you know like this, a “traitor to themselves”? I’ve marked this off with the Cardinal Virtues as fortitude and faithfulness seem to run together.

*****************************************

AMONG THE ATTITUDES OF MAN WHICH ARE BASIC FOR HIS WHOLE MORAL LIFE, faithfulness is ranked next to reverence. One can speak of faithfulness in a narrow sense and in a large one. We have the narrow sense in mind when we speak of fidelity toward men, such as fidelity to a friend, marital fidelity, fidelity to one’s country or to oneself.

This type of fidelity throws into relief the other type. I refer here to the continuity which first gives to a man’s life its inner consistency, its inner unity. The building up of one’s personality is only possible if one holds firmly to those truths and values which one has already discovered.

The course of a man’s life contains a continual rhythmical replacement of one impression, one act, one decision by another and different impression, act or decision. We are unable to ponder over one thought for a long time and to keep our attention on one point for very long. Just as in the biological realm, hunger and satiety, fatigue and renewed strength succeed one another, so a certain rhythmical change is proper to the course of our spiritual life. Just as the various impressions which affect us give place to one another, and the stream of events offers to our mind a great variety of objects, so our attention cannot long remain focused on any one object with the same intensity.

A movement from one subject to another is therefore proper to our thought, as well as to our feeling and will. Even in the case of a very blissful experience, such as the long-desired meeting with a beloved person, we are unable to dwell permanently in this joyous experience. The rhythm of our inner life forces us to leave the full presence of a great joy and to turn our attention in another direction and to register different experiences.

But — and this must be stressed — the same man has different levels of depth. The psychical life of man is not restricted to the level on which this continual change unfolds itself; it is not restricted to the level of our express attention, of our present consciousness. While we proceed to another impression and give our attention to another mental object, the preceding impression or object does not vanish, but will, according to its significance, be retained in a deeper level, and will continue to live at that level. Memory is an expression of this capacity of the soul for super-actual life, and this continuity is seen in our capacity to remember, to connect past and present.

Above all we see this continuity in the super-actual survival of our attitudes toward the world, toward fundamental truths and values, which remain unchanged even though our present attention is turned in a completely different direction. Thus, for example, joy caused by some happy event continues to “live” in the depth of our souls and colors everything which we do, colors all our tasks of the moment, and colors our approach to all those things with which we are expressly concerned. So also our love for a beloved person remains living in the depth of our souls, even though we are occupied by work, and it constitutes a sort of background against which different events run their course.

Without this capacity for continuity, man would have no inner unity; he would be but a bundle of interwoven impressions and experiences. If one impression merely took the place of the preceding one, if the past should indiscriminately vanish, the inner life of man would be senseless and shallow; any building up, any development would be impossible. Above all there would be no personality.

Even though this capacity of retaining impressions and attitudes in a super-actual way, without which the individual life of a spiritual person is impossible, is a capacity common to every man, yet the degree to which a given individual possesses this inner continuous coherence is very different in each case. We say of many men that they live in the moment only; the present instant has such power over them that the past, even though its content be deeper and more important, vanishes before the insistent clamor of the present.

Men differ very much from each other in this regard. Some of them live exclusively on the exterior level of their present consciousness, so that one experience follows another without any relation to the one preceding. We could call such men “butterflies.” Others, on the contrary, also live in the deeper level of their being. In them nothing important is sacrificed because it is no longer present, but it becomes the unalterable possession of the man, according to its degree of importance, and the new meaningful experiences organically unite themselves with it. The last type alone can be said to have “personality.” Only in them can an inner spiritual plenitude be constituted.

How many people there are who are never lastingly influenced by great works of art, or by delight in beautiful landscapes, or by contact with great personalities. The momentary impression may be strong but it strikes no deep root in them; it is not firmly held in their super-actual life but disappears as soon as another impression makes its appearance. These men are like a sieve through which everything runs. Though they can be good, kindly and honest, they cleave to a childish, unconscious position; they have no depth. They elude one’s grasp, they are incapable of having deep relationships with other people because they are capable of no permanent relationship with anything. These men do not know responsibility because they know no lasting bond, because with them one day does not reach into the next one. Even though their impressions are strong, they do not penetrate down to the deepest level in which we find those attitudes which are over and above the changes of the moment.

These people honestly promise something one moment, and in the next it has completely disappeared from their memory. They make resolutions under a strong impression, but the next impression blows them away. They are so impressionable, that they are always held at the superficial level of their present consciousness. For these people, weight and value are not the preponderant factors determining their interest in things, but only the liveliness of the impression created by the actual presence of these things. What makes an impression upon them is the general advantage of “liveliness” which present impressions or situations have over those of the past.

There are two types of inconstant men. In the one, nothing ever truly penetrates to their deeper center. This deeper center, so to speak, remains void in them; they know only the strata of present consciousness. These men are at the same time superficial, deprived of profound life, and of any sort of inner “firmness.” They are like quicksand which yields without any resistance. If you seek in such men a permanent center upon which you can depend and rely, then you really snatch at the void. Of course, in a healthy man this is not absolutely and completely the case; a man who, in a literal sense, would be completely of this character would be a psychopath. But we often meet people whose lives, at least to a certain extent, unfold themselves in such a manner, although we could not therefore call them psychotic.

In the second type, we have to deal with men who actually do have deep impressions, in whose deeper strata much really does take root. Their deeper consciousness is therefore not void; they have created in themselves a firm, lasting center. But they are so imprisoned in the present moment that that which lies in their deeper strata is unable to carry its true weight; it cannot hold its ground against the power of the momentary impression. Only when the present, lively impression fades away, can the content of the deeper strata again come to light. Such men could, for example, very well nourish a deep, lasting love for another person, but a momentary situation, if it happens to be powerful, vivid and appealing, would capture them to such an extent that the beloved one would be almost forgotten. Then they say and do things which contradict the genuine and living love hidden in the depths of their souls.

Such people are continually in danger of becoming traitors to themselves or to others. For such persons, the one present, merely because he is present, has always the advantage over the absent. This is the case even when the absent person is, on the whole, dearer to them, and in the long run, plays a more important role. Suppose they have, for example, received a deep impression from a work of art: a lasting relation to this work of art has constituted itself in the depths of their souls. Nevertheless, new powerful impressions take hold of them to such an extent, that the prior impression is not firmly held in the new situation, and as a result one sees no trace of the first impression as long as the new one lasts. Later, when the immersing effect of the new situation has worn off, the old one, in itself deeper, re-enters into possession of its rightful place and authority.

In contradistinction to these two types, the persevering man holds on to everything which has revealed itself to him as a true genuine value. The advantage of liveliness which the present possesses over the past, has no power over his life when compared to the inner weight of deep truths which he has once recognized, and of values which he has once grasped. The importance of the role played by a given thing in his present consciousness is exclusively determined by the height of its value, and in no way by its mere presence.

Such men are, consequently, protected from the tyranny of fashion. A thing never makes a deep impression upon them merely because it is modern, because it is momentarily “in the air,” but only because it has a value, because it is beautiful, good and true. As a matter of fact, these persons consider that which is more important and has a higher value as itself the more “up to date.” Objects endowed with values never grow old for them, even if their concrete existence ceased long ago. The lives of these men are meaningfully integrated, and in their course reflects the objective gradation of values.

While the inconstant man is a prey to accidental impressions and situations, the constant man dominates his own impressions. Such men alone understand the sublime pre-eminence of values over any mere dimension of time, the unchanging and unfading character of values and truth. They understand that an important truth is not less interesting and less worthy of concern because we have known it for a long time. They understand, above all, that the obligation to respond to a good possessing a value is not limited to the moment in which it is grasped.

Only the man who is constant really grasps the demands of the world of values; only he is capable of the response to value which is due to objective values. A proper response to values is lasting, independent of the charm of novelty, and of the attractive force represented by the mere presence of a thing. He alone for whom values never lose their efficacy and charm, once they have been revealed to him, and who never lets a truth which he has grasped drop into oblivion will really do justice to the proper character of the world of truth and values; for he alone is capable of remaining faithful to objects possessing value.

This constancy or fidelity in the true sense of the world is, as we see, a fundamental moral attitude of man. It is a necessary consequence of all true understanding of values, and it is a component element of every true response to values, and consequently of the whole moral life. Only the constant response to values, the response which clings to a thing possessing a value, whether that thing is actually present or not, is a developed, a morally mature and fully conscious response to value. Only a man who responds in this way is truly morally awakened; he alone is reliable, he alone feels himself to be responsible for that which he has done in other situations, he alone is capable of a true contrition for previous misdeeds. In him alone all true obligations will dominate every situation of his life.

He alone will stand firm in trials. For the light of values will shine for him even in the humdrum situations of workaday life; yes, even at the moments of temptation. It is so because this man lives from the depth, and masters every moment from the depth. The more faithful, the more constant a man is, the richer and more substantial will he be, the more capable of becoming a vessel of moral values, a being in whom purity, justice, humility, love and goodness will dwell lastingly and will radiate from him to the world about him.

Were we to examine the different levels of life, we would find over and over again the basic significance of faithfulness in this larger sense. The basic attitude of constancy is a general presupposition for all spiritual growth of the person, and above all for every moral development and every moral progress. How can a man grow spiritually who does not firmly adhere to all the values which have been revealed to him, and for whom these values do not become a lasting possession? How could one who is dominated by short-lived momentary impressions ever succeed in a gradual development of his own moral structure?

When we have to deal with the type of radical inconstancy, we see that nothing at all reaches down into such a person’s deeper strata. Such men are inwardly dead; their personality lacks a lasting center. In men of the second type, there is lacking the possibility of a real formation of the course of life, for the values they once grasped, and which should be a permanent possession of their souls, have disappeared from their lives. They cannot therefore mold new impression by such values. What is the use of the best education if this contancy is missing? What is the use of the most pressing exhortations, of the most vivid revelation of values, if values once grasped remain either without any permanent roots or if they slumber in our souls?

As surprising as it may sound, inconstant people never change themselves. They retain the faults and features which they have inherited from their nature, but they acquire no moral values. Even though they really do for a moment recognize their faults, and form the best resolutions, their inconstancy prevents any lasting moral improvement.

Even when their will is good, education will have no lasting effect upon them. Not because they close themselves up, like the man who is victim of a cramping pride and to whom therefore the influence of values cannot penetrate, but because they give too much weight to every fleeting impression, and they are thus unable to retain what they have acquired.

All self-education presupposes this attitude of constancy. The constant man alone will be able to assimilate contradictory impressions, so as to draw that which is good out of each. He will learn from every situation of life and will grow in every situation, for in him the measure of genuine values remains alive; while the inconstant man yields now to one, now to another impression, and becomes so entirely a prey of each that in the depth of his soul everything passes on more or less without leaving a trace. This gradually withers his comprehension of values, and his susceptibility to their influence.

The constant man alone will prefer what is more important to what is less so, what is more valuable to the less, while the unstable person will at best respond indiscriminately to all values, recognizing no hierarchy in them. Nothing is, in fact, more important for moral growth, for the very moral life of a person, than consideration for the objective hierarchy of values, and the capacity to give priority to that which is objectively higher.

The fundamental attitude of fidelity is also the presupposition for reliability in every moral trial. How can he keep a promise or stand the test in a battle of ideas, who lives only in the present moment, in whom the past, present and future do not form significant unity? How can one rely upon such an inconstant person? The faithful man alone can inspire that confidence which forms the basis of any community. He alone possesses the high moral value of stability, reliability and trustworthiness.

But constancy is also a condition for any confidence on the part of the person himself and above all for heroic faith. The unstable man is not only undeserving of confidence, but he himself will be incapable of a firm, unshakable confidence either in other men, in truth, or in God Himself. For such a man lacks the strength to nourish his soul upon a value once discovered. Therefore when night and obscurity surround him, or when other strong impressions assail him, he loses faith. It is no accident that in Latin the word fides means both fidelity and faith. For constancy is an essential constituent of all capacity to believe, and consequently of all religion.

The eminent importance of faithfulness will stand out in a special way against the background of human relationships. (Here faithfulness is taken in its narrow sense, i.e. fidelity.) For what is love without fidelity? In the ultimate analysis, it is nothing but a lie. For the deepest meaning of every love, the inner “word” uttered in love is the interior orientation toward and giving of oneself to the beloved, a giving which knows no time limit. No fluctuation in the course of life can shatter it. Only a deep change in the beloved person can affect our love if it be true love. A man who would say: “I love you now, but how long it will last, I cannot tell,” does not truly love; he does not even suspect the very nature of love.

Faithfulness is so essentially one with love, that everyone, at least as long as he loves, must consider his devotion an undying devotion. This holds good for every love, for parental and filial love, for friendship and for spousal love. The deeper a love, the more it is pervaded by fidelity. It is precisely in this faithfulness that we find the specific moral splendor, the chaste beauty of love. The especially touching element of love, as expressed so uniquely in Beethoven’s Fide-ho, is essentially tied up with fidelity. The unalterable fidelity of a mother’s love, the victorious faithfulness of a friend, possess a specific moral beauty which touches the man whose heart is opened to values. Faithfulness is at the heart of every true and deep love. It is immanent to its very nature.

On the other hand, what is more base or more repulsive than outspoken unfaithfulness, that radical opposition to fidelity, which is far worse than mere inconstancy. What a heinous moral stain marks the traitor who by infidelity pierces the very heart which has confidently opened itself to him, and offers itself unprotected to him. He who is unfaithful in his basic attitudes is a Judas to the world of values.

There are people to whom fidelity appears in the light of a mere bourgeois virtue, a mere correctness, a technical loyalty. In the opinion of such people the man who is great, highly gifted and freed from “petty conventions,” has no concern with it. This is a senseless misunderstanding of the true nature of fidelity. It is true that too strong an emphasis on one’s own fidelity may create a painful impression. It is true that it is possible to give a certain harmless, good-natured cheap imitation of fidelity. The fact remains that true faithfulness is an indispensable element of all moral greatness, of all depth and strength of personality.

Fidelity is opposed to mere bourgeois loyalty, or to a pure clinging to habit. It would be an error to believe that fidelity is the mere result of a lazy temperament, and inconstancy the result of a spontaneous and vivacious one. No, this virtue is a free, meaningful response to the world of truth and of values, to the unchangeable and intrinsic importance, to the real demands, of that world. Without this basic attitude of fidelity, no culture, no progress in knowledge, no community, above all no moral personality, no moral growth, no substantial, inwardly unified spiritual life, no true love, are possible. This basic significance of fidelity, in the larger sense, must penetrate to the heart of every relationship, if it is not to be judged as a failure.

Posted in Dietrich von Hildebrand, Faith, Moral Theology, The Cardinal Virtues | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

The Gospel Sources of Catholic Morality II – Servais Pinckaers, O.P.

March 8, 2012

 

The Sermon of the Mount as depicted by Louis Comfort Tiffany in a stained glass window at Arlington Street Church in Boston

The Paraclesis of the Letter to the Romans
We find the second example of moral teaching in the second part of the letter to the Romans, in chapters 12 to 15. It is a model of apostolic catechesis. It has a different style from the Sermon: While the Sermon enjoys the authority of the Lord whose words it proclaims in formulations, the letter to the Romans presents the doctrine of an apostle who shares what he himself has received. The passage begins with a significant term, a term that reappears regularly in St. Paul: “I exhort you brothers and sisters….” The moral teaching of the apostles is made in the manner of an exhortation among brothers and sisters in the name of the Lord from whom it receives its force.

We shall call this mode of teaching a paraclesis (from the Greek word that Paul employs: parakaleo [I exhort], from which comes “Paraclete,” a word signifying the Holy Spirit [John 14.26]). We do so in preference to the usual parenesis, since parenesis evokes a simple recommendation on the spiritual plane, without any direct impact in moral science. This great text from Romans was continually commented on by the Fathers and the early scholastics. Yet, like the Sermon on the Mount, it was much neglected in the years that followed.

The paraclesis of the letter to the Romans depends directly on the first part of the letter, which deals with justification by faith, life in the Spirit, and the love of Christ. The paraclesis explains concretely how those who believe in Jesus and are animated by his Spirit are called to live. This progression is natural and would not have caused difficulty if later theologians had not intervened to cut the thread that joins the two halves of the letter.

Among Catholics this separation was expressed in the division between dogmatic theology, to which the teaching of faith belongs, and moral theology, to which the second part of the letter was relegated, and subsequently reduced to a form of spiritual exhortation. Among Protestants the opposition was between faith, which alone justifies (a topic treated at the beginning of the letter) and works, along with the virtues (a topic addressed in the second part of the letter).

In our view, it is not possible to return to the apostolic sources unless we discover how to reestablish the connection between the act of faith and the moral life, and thereby recover the holistic unity of Romans.

The paraclesis of chapters 12 to 15 possesses a specific structure and sketches for us the dominant lines of Gospel morality, coining to a close by offering a response to certain precise problems. The stages of this teaching are the following.

  1. The Christian life is true worship. It is a liturgy where we offer to God as a living sacrifice our bodies and our persons, discerning what is good and pleasing to him. The term “body” (soma) employed here evokes the body of Christ offered in the Eucharist and the body that forms the Church (12.1-2). One can, therefore, refer to the liturgical dimension of Christian morality.
  2. Shaped by faith, moral teaching takes place within the context of the Faithful’s participation in the body of Christ. They are members of this body and have received a multitude of gifts and ministries that they exercise for the good of all (vv. 3-8). This is the ecclesial dimension of the apostolic moral teaching, which returns to the fore in 1 Corinthians (ch. 12).
  3. This ecclesial unity and generosity are the work of charity. Paul describes charity through a collection of characteristics that form a prototypical passage composed of brief, well-chosen notes that in Greek have an assonance and rhythm that facilitate memorization. With these successive brushstrokes, St. Paul paints for us the face of the Christian (vv. 9-13) . (See C. H. Dodd, Gospel and Law: The Relation of Faith and Ethics in Early Christianity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957]).
  4. The picture is completed by a passage full of energy that calls to mind the Sermon on the Mount: the invitation to bless one’s persecutors, to seek out what is humble, and to conquer evil with good. This is the summit of Gospel agape (vv. 14-21) .
  5. After this more general part, Paul presents the attitude that Christians should hold toward civil authority, which at that time was pagan. One should offer civil authority a frank and active obedience, an obedience that flows from one’s submission to God and love of neighbor, which the Apostle sees as the summation of the entire Law (ch. 13.1-10).
  6. Pauline moral teaching also has an eschatological dimension: sustained by the hope that the coming of Christ is a day that is going to appear, the Christian is invited to “put on Christ,” and in the light of Christ to remain vigilant in the battle against the works of darkness (w. 11-14).
  7. The Apostle next examines at length (chs. 14 to 15.6) the delicate problem of divergent practices among the faithful with regard to diet and days of the week. Paul’s response is a model of Christian discernment in the treatment of cases of conscience, something that we also find in 1 Corinthians. St. Paul demonstrates with great refinement how to give priority to fraternal charity in the discussion of concrete cases.
  8. The conclusion takes up again the major themes of the entire letter, offering the example of Christ. Christ became the servant of all (Jews and Pagans) in order that they might live as brothers and sisters in the faith through the mercy of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Other Texts Containing Moral Teaching
Besides these prototypical examples of the moral catechesis of the apostolic period, we should note a series of other texts that are often equally rich. The order in which they appear in the Scriptures is as follows.

1 Corinthians: Paul first examines a series of “cases of conscience,” concerning incest, recourse to pagan tribunals, fornication, and so forth, which he resolves through rational arguments and chiefly in reference to Christ (chs. 5-11). Paul then in chapters 12 and 13 presents the hierarchy of the Spirit’s gifts. Principal among these gifts is charity, which holds the body of Christ (the Church) together and inspires the other virtues, ministries, and charisms.

Galatians 5: Paul offers a description of spiritual combat that opposes the works of the flesh against the fruits of the Spirit, beginning with charity.

Ephesians 4.1-5.32: an exhortation to preserve the unity of the one Body and the one Spirit by casting off the “old self” and putting on “the new self. . . created in God’s way injustice and holiness of truth.”

Philippians 2.1-17 and 3.1-4.9: an exhortation to imitate the attitude of Christ in humility and obedience to the cross in order to participate in his glory and to become imitators of Paul, who strains in his race to seize the prize that is knowledge of Jesus.

Colossians 3.1-4.6: an exhortation to love in Christ in order to put on the new self “which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” We note as well the two great introductory hymns of Colossians and Ephesians (Col 1.15-20 and Eph 1.3-14), which describe the mystery of salvation in Christ, offered as the object of Christian hope and contemplation; they reveal our destiny according to the divine plan.

1 Thessalonians 4.1-5.28: an exhortation to holiness and vigilance in waiting for the Day of the Lord. We are to wait as children of the light in the imitation of Christ, an imitation that underlies one’s imitation of the Apostle and of one’s brothers and sisters (1 Thessalonians 1.6-8 and 2 Thessalonians 3.7) .

Let us add several references to other New Testament writings that present a moral doctrine.

James, with its wise teaching, so concrete and pungent.

1 Peter, which is a veritable jewel of moral paraclesis, whose teaching is often close to that of Paul and the Sermon on the Mount.

1 John, with its great and characteristically Johannine themes: the light of the Word and the darkness; sin and the world, charity and faith.

Two Poles of the Moral Teaching of St. Paul
In conclusion let us turn to the two major poles of the moral teaching of St. Paul that will guide later theology.

  1. In the face of Jewish moral teaching (which laid claim to justice) and Greek moral teaching (which alleged to have wisdom), and in light of their inadequacy, Paul puts forward a moral teaching that has a new source: the person of Jesus who shares with his disciples the justice and wisdom of God, through faith and the work of charity poured into their hearts by the action of the Holy Spirit. Christian action, therefore, is equally a life “in Christ,” and a life “in the Spirit.” The trilogy of faith, hope, and charity control the other gifts and virtues.
  2. At the same time, Paul invokes the creative work of God in nature and in the conscience of the human person, in harmony with the Gospel. Two texts stand out in this regard: according to Romans 1.19-20 and 2.26, the pagans can both know God by his works and know the moral law written in their hearts. Paul recommends to the Philippians that they have concern for “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just. . . if there is any virtue and if there is anything worthy of praise” (Philemon 4.8). This is an invitation to receive with discernment whatever is just and best in the teaching of the philosophers, even among the pagans; Paul himself does not hesitate to borrow at times from popular stoicism, and to offer reflections that appeal to human common sense in the judgment of cases of conscience. This double foundation, supplied by faith and by reason, grace and nature, will be taken up continuously in the teaching of subsequent generations, but the emphasis will vary greatly from one period of the Church’s history to another.

Lastly, let us note a fundamental rule of interpretation for all of these evangelical texts: one cannot understand fully their moral teaching unless one puts it into practice in a spirit of faith. The interior experience of living these texts reveals their reality and truth, which can be compared to a rock on which one can build solidly. We are not dealing here merely with a collection of beautiful ideas, but with a Word that grounds existence and gives life to those who docilely and actively receive it.

Posted in Moral Theology | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

The Gospel Sources of Catholic Morality – Servais Pinckaers, O.P.

March 7, 2012

The Sermon is the longest piece of teaching from Jesus in the New Testament, and has been one of the most widely quoted elements of the Canonical Gospels. It includes some of the best known teachings of Jesus such as the Beatitudes, and the widely recited Lord's Prayer. To most believers in Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount contains the central tenets of Christian discipleship. The last verse of chapter five is a focal point that summarizes the teaching of the sermon: "be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect", advising the disciples or students to seek the path towards perfection and the Kingdom of God.

Ancient Moral Catechesis
The New Testament contains numerous moral texts, both in the words of the Lord as reported by the evangelists and in the apostolic preaching. This teaching has its roots in the Old Testament, but deepens its doctrine and imparts a new dimension by placing it in relation to the person and life of Jesus.

The apostles and the first Christian communities took particular care to compile and transmit a precise moral catechesis faithful to the teaching of their Lord. The most representative example is the Sermon on the Mount. It gathers together in one great discourse, after the manner of the historians of antiquity, the teachings of Christ that present the rules of life, rules that will enable his disciples to attain a “justice surpassing that of the scribes and Pharisees.”

In order, however, to appreciate adequately the ethical character of these texts, we must remove from our minds certain modern notions that inhibit our ability to interpret them correctly. Moral theology has become the domain of obligations and legal imperatives and has set aside the question of happiness or perfection. Hence, it especially separates itself from spirituality and from parenesis, which is a form of exhortation.

Such divisions were unknown in antiquity; one cannot apply them to the writings of the New Testament without being anachronistic. These divisions have led many interpreters, theologians, and exegetes to view the scriptural texts that go beyond the level of strict obligations as not properly belonging to moral theology; this explains why these texts generally attract so little attention. This mindset is a major intellectual obstacle inhibiting our return to the ancient sources of the Christian life.

The Gospel texts presuppose a different conception of the moral life. Their moral teaching is a response to the question of happiness and of salvation. It offers a description of the ways of wisdom that lead to holiness and perfection through living the virtues and the precepts.

From this perspective, moral theology encompasses a larger domain. It recovers the sapiential and spiritual dimensions essential to it. The Sermon on the Mount, for example, responds directly to the moral question understood in this way. It begins by announcing the Beatitudes; it then extends the moral pathways traced in the Ten Commandments to the precept: “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

The Sermon on the Mount
Let us review rapidly the principal passages of the New Testament that offer moral catechesis, focusing above all on two characteristic texts. The Sermon on the Mount stands out at once. It is the first of five discourses that are the linchpins of Matthew’s Gospel. It assembles the essential elements of Jesus’ teaching on justice and the moral rules offered to his disciples. It is an explanation of the call to conversion: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4.17).

This discourse, which draws together into an ordered whole words that might well have been spoken on different occasions, is a model of the ancient moral catechesis. It can justly be called a “charter of the Christian life.” The Sermon enjoys the authority of the Lord, expressed in categorical formulas: “Unless your justice surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven”; “you have heard it said…. But I say to you….”

The text has undergone a work of redaction that has not been sufficiently recognized. It is composed of short phrases, often arranged together to form compact units such as the Beatitudes. They are bundles of condensed doctrine fashioned for oral transmission as well as for meditation. Assembled together they form a body of doctrine inspired by a single guiding wisdom.

The Sermon is not a mosaic of disparate sayings. Although it does not follow the logic of abstract reason, it does exhibit an underlying unity. It conforms to the often contrasting movements of the deep intelligence of the human heart revealed in human experience. As John Chrysostom and Augustine well understood and explained to their people, the Sermon is addressed to all, beginning with the poor and the afflicted. Thus, contrary to what will too often be claimed later, it is not reserved to a religious elite.

The structure of the Sermon in its broad outline is relatively simple.

The Beatitudes take up the promises made to the Chosen People since the time of Abraham. These are the numerous blessings scattered throughout the Scriptures, as for example in the first verses of the Psalter. The Beatitudes focus the hope of the disciples upon the kingdom of heaven, paradoxically directed to the poor and those persecuted for Jesus’ sake, a message that expresses the experience of the first Christian generations. The Fathers saw in the Beatitudes the response of Christ to the question of happiness. When they present Jesus as addressing the philosophers’ central question, the question of happiness, they are portraying him as the true sage.

After the description of the disciples as the “salt of the earth” and “the light of the world,” there is the description of the `justice” of the moral law according to Christ. This description develops five of the precepts of the Ten Commandments by means of contrast: “You have heard it said…. But I say to you….” Justice is henceforth placed at the level of the human heart, at the roots of action. It is there that the love of God and neighbor is formed and attains its summit in the forgiveness of one’s enemies, imitating the mercy and perfection of the heavenly Father.

Next there is the reordering of three primary acts of a pious life: almsgiving (the archetypical form of mutual assistance), prayer, and fasting (the principal form of asceticism). Instead of doing these acts to be seen by one’s fellows, one should engage in them for love of the Father who sees in secret. We return once again to the level of the heart’s intention, which places us by faith and love in communion with the Father. It is here at this central point in the Sermon that Matthew inserts the Our Father.

The last section is more diverse and brings together sayings that invite us to seek our true treasure in heaven. We are to guard against the attraction of wealth and to be benevolent in our judgments. We are also called to persevere confidently in our prayer.

The conclusion of the Sermon summarizes the teaching of the Law: It presents the Golden Rule as a practical criterion of discernment; it offers us a choice between the narrow way that leads to life and the broad way that leads to perdition; it distinguishes false prophets from true disciples by noting whether they practice the Word and exhibit the fruits and perseverance that the Word produces.

The evangelist notes in conclusion the admiration of the crowd before the authority of Jesus, an authority that he will subsequently reveal through a series of healings. The modern interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount has principally addressed the issue of whether one can put this teaching into practice. The difficulty of interpreting the Sermon has been increased by the habit of viewing the Law as a code of obligations.

In reality, the Sermon describes the ways of the kingdom of heaven toward which the Holy Spirit wishes to lead the disciples by faith in Jesus, a faith that operates through charity. Thus, the Sermon is integrated into a Gospel that both announces “Jesus Christ the Son of God,” and calls us to believe in him. This response of faith is impossible for those who count only on their own strength. The Sermon on the Mount, however, describes itself as accessible to the humblest who know how to receive the gift of grace and love. This, at least, is how the Fathers interpret the Sermon.

Posted in Moral Theology | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 159 other followers