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The Uses of Death

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400

From Here to Eternity:
Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body
by randall b. smith
emmaus road, 296 pages, $27.95

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Left, Right, Prudence, Principle, and Catholic Social Doctrine

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 16:42:00 -0400

A long-running battle between the so-called Catholic left and the so-called Catholic right concerns which political issues the Church should speak about and which ones she shouldn’t. One crucial distinction is that teaching the basic principles of Catholic social doctrine go to the heart of her charism, but she has no special expertise in prudential judgments about how to apply them.

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Evangelizing Christians

Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0400

If baptism isn’t just a symbol of initiation but is an initiation, then Zach was already a Christian. God’s seal had been impressed indelibly on his soul. The inky divine thumbprint declared, “Mine.” He was adopted into God’s family, inducted into the knighthood of worship.

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This Time Will Not Be the Same

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0500

G od willing, the new evangelization will happen, but let us not imagine that this time will be like the first time. The old evangelization proclaimed the Good News among pagan, pre-Christian peoples to whom it came as something new. Nothing like that had been done before. But nothing like our task has been done before either.

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Natural Law Revealed

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

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Truth–or Consequences

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Truth–or Consequences

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Capital Punishment: The Case for Justice

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Justice is giving each what is due to him. So fundamental is the duty of public authority to requite good and evil in deeds that natural law philosophers consider it the paramount function of the state, and the New Testament declares that the role is delegated to magistrates by God Himself. “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution,” says St. Peter, “whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right” (1 Peter 2: 13-14). St. Paul agrees:

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The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The informing vision of this important and subtly argued book is that man is not left to himself; there is no place on the planet, period of history, domain of conduct, or region of the mind where he can be separated from the relentless providence of God. Although faith is the first grace in the order of redemption, Russell Hittinger’s title” The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World ”refers to the broader order of providence, in which the “first grace” of natural law is irrevocable. In our rebellion we may be given up by God to our passions, but even this is not the same as to be thrown outside of His authority; it is a disciplinary penalty of the same natural law that we defy. According to Hittinger, the theory of natural law once knew such things. It sprouted and flourished in the garden of theology, rooted deeply in the doctrines of creation and providence. For complicated reasons, the groundskeepers of our time walled off the garden, but not before taking cuttings from the flourishing theory, potting them, and turning them into a house plant. The author wants to set things right.

Hittinger says that his essays investigate “problems that arise once natural law is understood as free-floating with regard to authority, whether human or divine.” The statement suggests three purposes for writing: to reorient natural law theory with respect to divine authority; to reorient it with respect to human authority; and to survey the symptoms of its late disorientation. Thus, in chapters one and two, he lovingly replants the theory of natural law in the garden of theology. In chapters three and four, he takes down the garden’s enclosing wall, rejecting the idea that theology should be isolated from the study of statecraft or jurisprudence. In the remaining seven chapters, he returns to the windowsill to examine the potted cuttings, finding that when uprooted from its proper soil, the theory of natural law either withers or turns toxic. Although Hittinger writes from within Catholicism, Protestants have not been forgotten; a secondary motive in writing is to persuade his evangelical readers that the separation of theology from Catholic thought about natural law has developed “only recently, and as an aberration.” Along the way, he discusses not only the paradox that “contemporary Catholic thinkers who have no aversion to theology as such are reluctant to predicate ‘law’ properly of natural law,” but also the endeavor of the papal magisterium to reassert the older tradition.

The four essays of section one, “Rediscovering the Natural Law,” are so tightly knit that they could stand as a short book on their own, and I foresee them becoming a staple of graduate seminars. Hittinger first observes that natural law theory can be viewed as a theory of order either in the mind, in “things,” or in the mind of God. Historically, the tradition has viewed the first and second foci as subordinate to the third. We are creatures; our human design and situation are not law itself, but rather the effect and the witness of law. Not only were our inclinations designed by the Creator, but our intellects reflect Him in a yet more eminent way, for He governs rational beings differently than animals: we “participate” in the eternal law by which His providence governs the universe”receiving it, understanding it, and going on to make more law. Unfortunately, if we attempt to isolate the theory of natural law from its theological basis, not only do we become unable to understand the natural law as law , but we lose sight of why the first principles of mind and things should matter. Our minds and urges seem laws unto themselves. The permanent features of our situation seem mere brute facts”to be endured or, if possible, gotten around.

Even if we view the three foci rightly, says Hittinger, one may ask three kinds of questions about natural law: philosophical, like whether there really is a natural law; political, like how to distribute constitutional responsibilities to give natural law the fullest possible effect; or jurisprudential, like whether judges may appeal to the natural law directly. Debaters lamentably confuse the categories, reasoning for example that if there is a natural law (category one), then such things as rule of law, division of powers, and judicial restraint (categories two and three) go out the window. Against such confusion, Hittinger maintains that natural law demands the rule of law; prudence suggests that the rule of law is assisted by division of powers; and such division necessitates judicial restraint. Such corrections form part of a more general argument about how diverse authorities participate in a constitutional order under natural law. A paradox is that while prohibiting one use of natural law, judicial restraint requires another. No judge should usurp legislative power in its name, but apart from it, legislative intent cannot be fully ascertained.

In several instances one might question the author’s decision to place a topic in section two, “Natural Law and the Post-Christian World,” rather than section one. In particular, chapter five investigates the dangers of trying to protect natural rights by inserting them in constitutions without explaining what they mean. But if Hittinger is right (as I think he is), then under-specification is dangerous in any world. The rationale for the placement of the chapter appears to be that in post-Christian jurisprudence, when natural rights are viewed as an “authority-free zone,” the danger becomes still more acute. I think this rationale is sufficient, though it might have been more clearly explained.

In most of Section Two, the selection of chapters is more clear. Chapter six considers another instance of under-specification”the alleged right to assisted suicide as an instance of the alleged general right to privacy”in order to find out how far we can demand a right “to be left alone” and still remain “civilized.” Paradoxically, at the same time that such a right weakens the rationale for the state by privatizing “judgments that indisputably belong to public authority,” it inflates the liberty of the state by implying that “some individuals [are] beyond the pale of common protections from the government itself.”

In chapter seven, where Hittinger considers the attitude of the U.S. Supreme Court toward religion, he finds that although the Court makes inconsistent legal arguments, the real and consistent basis of its decisions is the extra -legal view that religion is “divisive, coercive, irrational,” and resistant to objective definition. Hittinger’s contribution to the controversial First Things symposium “The End of Democracy?” can be found in chapter eight, where he points out that the Supreme Court itself raised the symposium’s explosive question: it has “self-consciously staked its own legitimacy, and indeed the legitimacy of the constitutional ‘covenant,’” on an entirely novel view of itself as the exemplar of the general will. In chapter nine, Hittinger explores Christopher Dawson’s view that liberalism has been replaced and inverted by a technological order whose central feature is the replacement of the distinctive human act by the machine. For the book, the significance of this development is the practical challenge that it poses to the theory of natural law”a challenge for which there is “no history [and] . . . no precedent.”

The capstone of the volume, chapter eleven, chronicles and celebrates the “decisive shift” of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic natural law theory toward a new understanding of the relation between the state and the body politic”a shift that Hittinger finds paralleled in some Protestant thought of the period. Although previous theorists like Tocqueville had offered arguments in defense of civil society, most of them praised it only in instrumental terms”for its contribution to the good of the state. In the new view, it was the state that came to be seen as the instrumental good, its purpose “to protect the flourishing of societies other than the state itself.” This required a deepening analysis of the intrinsic value of the various kinds of bonds in civil society. Remarkably, Hittinger shows, Pope Leo XIII’s nineteenth-century brief for the associational rights of laborers in the encyclical Rerum Novarum “relies directly” on Thomas Aquinas’ thirteenth-century argument on behalf of the newly formed mendicant orders in Contra impugnantes ”a document Hittinger convincingly presents as “the first, or at least one of the first, systematic defenses of civil society.” As Hittinger summarizes Thomas’ argument, “to prevent free men and women from associating for the purpose of communicating gifts is contrary to the natural law. It is tantamount to denying rational creatures the perfection proper to their nature, and denying to the commonweal goods it would not enjoy were it not for free associations.”

The contribution of The First Grace to Catholic moral theology should be plain, but it should be read at the other end of the churchyard as well. For some time, evangelicals have been seeking high and low for the materials of a public philosophy. Although they find the idea of natural law attractive, the only sort of natural law theory that Scripture-sensitive Protestants could embrace would be the sort that Hittinger champions”one that acknowledges its rootedness in the providence of God. At the same time, such acknowledgment raises a problem for both evangelicals and Catholics. Just how persuasive to the public can a “public philosophy” be if it is rooted in considerations that large parts of the public reject? This, I suspect, is the reason why “even contemporary . . . thinkers who have no aversion to theology as such” hesitate to let it touch the theory of natural law. Yet there is a possible response to such hesitation. The case for public use of natural law theory is not that it constitutes a form of public speech, but that it offers theoretical guidance for public speech. One need not burden one’s neighbor with the theory of what is first in mind, things, and the mind of God”but one had better know what is first in the neighbor’s mind.

Another complication of the relation between theology and natural law turns up in chapter nine, which scrutinizes the liberty of religion through the lens of the Vatican II text Dignitatis Humanae . In Hittinger’s view, the document builds a two-story house”grounding general religious liberty on the dignity of man made in God’s image, but grounding the particular liberty of the Church on its divinely redemptive charter. It strikes me that both points appeal not to natural but to revealed theology. Of course natural theology has nothing to contribute to the second floor; it is silent about the Church. As to the first floor, it might be able to explain why human beings should be free to seek God, “if haply they might feel after him, and find him” (Acts 17:27)”but post-Christian people find it hard to say what kinds of “feeling after” the “finding” might require. When religious liberty might mean almost anything, it threatens to mean almost nothing, so it is not surprising that the Church is at pains to refute theoretical errors like the so-called “neutrality” of liberalism or the cuius regio doctrine that the Church is “an organ of the state.”

Why Hittinger puts this argument in section two of the book is plain enough. But if one considers the deep and general importance of his underlying proposition, it deserves to be featured more prominently. In effect, he is claiming that by the light of natural reason, some natural rights turn out to be under-specified; to come into their own, they need the further light of special revelation. John Paul II put the general case for the mutual dependence of faith and reason in Fides et Ratio , but until now, natural law theorists have hardly begun to consider its implications. This potentially explosive idea demands rethinking the whole relationship of faith to public life.

In short, the only significant difficulty with this brilliant and penetrating work of theology and philosophy is that it requires another”and the sooner, the better.

J. Budziszewski is Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide (Spence, 2003) .

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Feeling Moral

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Luke! Trust your feelings!” As we know, Luke does what he is told, and the galaxy is saved. How fortunate that he did not trust his mind and skill, as he was tempted to, because then the evil empire would have won. The Star Wars movies express a view of how to live, a morality of feeling, found far beyond the perimeter of the Dreamworks studio . As Keats wrote to a friend, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!”

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The Second Tablet Project

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

According to the mainstream of the natural law tradition, the reality of God and of our duty to Him are among the things everyone really knows. They are part of “general” revelation; we have natural knowledge not only of the Second Tablet of the Decalogue, but of the First. Needless to say, some people find this claim scandalous. They deny the natural knowledge of God, deny the natural knowledge of the First Tablet of the Decalogue, and deny the natural knowledge of the first precept of the Summary of the Law. Apart from direct or “special” revelation, they think ethics should acknowledge neighbor only. Passions run high among such thinkers. A book reviewer angrily declares that “God does not belong” in discussions of how to live. A scholar of my acquaintance devotes the last phase of his intellectual career to what he calls “pushing God out of the natural law”—or at least, he says, “into the wings.” This goal is widely shared. Insofar as it wishes to get by on the Second Tablet without the First, we might call it the Second Tablet Project.

The Second Tablet Project is probably more popular among lukewarm religious believers who wish to make the moral law palatable to nonbelievers than it is among nonbelievers themselves. Nonbelievers who want to get rid of the First Tablet usually have doubts about the Second too”and for the same reasons. God, they think, is a dubious proposition, but why should morality be less dubious than He? Aren’t both matters equally dim? As to the notion of “things we can’t not know,” they do not believe that there are any”we have only a grab bag of incompatible opinions about God and how to live, all of them equally controversial because none of them can be known to be true. Under the circumstances, they think, the only sensible thing to do is to eject the whole lot of these opinions from the public square. This is the mentality that finds it scandalous to post the Ten Commandments on a courtroom wall. The argument seems to be, “Because we don’t agree with each other, you must do as I say”—for if anyone should protest, “But your opinion that these norms are not common knowledge is far more controversial than the norms themselves,” they respond, “See what I mean?” Or perhaps, like John Rawls, they respond that their opinion should have special privileges because it is “political, not metaphysical.” Here the argument seems to be, “The ultimate truth of things is unknowable, and that’s why you must do as I say.” Of course, any view of what is knowable or un knowable presupposes something about what is, so that is another sleight of hand.

For those who do believe in natural law or general revelation, the fact that the Second Tablet Project so often turns into a No Tablet project raises an important question. What difference does it make to the knowledge of the moral law that we do have some knowledge about God? If we didn’t have that knowledge, then could we retain knowledge of morality? And if we could retain it, would it be different?

The inquiry requires two parts, because there are two ways to know about God: the vague, partial, natural knowledge of God that is available to every human being, and the additional knowledge of God that is offered (for those who accept it) in the biblical tradition of direct revelation. Though my emphasis is on the first way, I will comment on the second as well. To be sure, the Bible is not included in the things one can’t not know. But every perspective for discussing what we can’t not know is some perspective for discussing what we can’t not know, and my perspective is biblical.

By the first way to know about God I mean the sensus divinitatis, the spontaneous awareness of the reality of the Creator. I do not exclude the clarity that philosophy can add to this awareness; I only wish to point out that the philosophical arguments for the existence of God do not start from nowhere. However complex they may be, they merely elaborate pre-philosophical intuitions, such as the everyday idea that anything which does not have to be requires a cause. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a question that anyone can ask.

As to the second way of knowing about God—the biblical tradition of direct revelation—I use the qualifier “biblical” advisedly. Other religions have traditions too, but traditions of direct revelation are quite rare. Every major religion that claims to record God’s direct revelations to human beings in actual historical time accepts at least part of the Bible; this includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. No major religion outside of the biblical orbit claims to record God’s direct revelations to human beings in actual historical time.

Part one of the inquiry, then, is this: Apart from any consideration of an alleged direct revelation, what difference does it make to the natural law that we naturally have knowledge of God? It seems to make not one difference, but at least four.

The first difference has to do with what C. S. Lewis called the “abolition of man.” If God has designed and endowed us with our nature—this is not a question of how He did it or how long it took, only of who is responsible—then we can be confident that we have the nature that we ought to have in accord with His good purposes. This premise in no way slights the Fall; even a crushed foot remains a foot. The proposition that we are in conflict with our nature has nothing to do with the proposition that it is not, in fact, our nature.

Let us imagine someone who denies divine design. He admits that human beings have a nature, just in the sense that certain ways of living go against the grain; he only refuses to allow that we were endowed with this nature by God. Paraphrasing George Gaylord Simpson, we are to regard the direction of the grain as the result of a meaningless and purposeless process that did not have us in mind. I think it follows that had the process gone a bit differently—had our ancestors been carnivores instead of omnivores, had they laid eggs instead of borne live young, or had they never left the oceans for the land—then we would have had a different nature. Given the nature that we do have, certain things go against the grain, hence a certain natural law. Honor your father and mother. Do not kill. Do not covet. Given some other nature, different things would have gone against the grain—hence a different natural law. It might have been anything. Supplant your father. Chase away your mother. Eat your neighbor and covet his mate. What strikes our nature as distressing would for that nature be the norm.

The entire basis of morality, on this account, is the particular nature that we have at the moment. There would be nothing wrong with having a different nature and thus a different natural law. We just don’t.

But what if we could? What if we could change our nature? According to those who hold this view, we already have. Our ancestors were as different from us, they say, as a prosimian is different from a man. Generation by generation, the ur-men of the long-gone past adapted to a changing environment. Our great-grand-primates were the products of adaptation to a life in the branches of trees. Our grand-primates were the products of adaptation to a life on the savanna. Our parents were the products of adaptation to the practice of agriculture. And our descendants will be the products of adaptation to the most enduring features of our own environment, whatever those turn out to be. Perhaps television.

Notice that on this theory, some of the circumstances to which our ancestors adapted were the results of their own prior actions. It was they who came down from the trees, and had therefore to adapt to the savanna. It was they who invented agriculture, and had therefore to adapt to a different diet. In a sense, then, we have been influencing our own evolution all along. We have already changed our nature. We just didn’t know that we were doing it.

If there is nothing wrong with having a different nature—and if we have already changed our nature without knowing—then why shouldn’t we take the process in hand? Why shouldn’t we deliberately change ourselves as we wish to be changed? Why shouldn’t we determine the nature of our descendants?

Such proposals are no longer idle talk. In October 2000, news leaked that an American company named Biotransplant and an Australian company named Stem Cell Sciences had successfully crossed a human being with a pig by inserting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus into the pigs’ eggs. Although the embryos were destroyed when they reached the thirty-two-cell point, they would have continued to grow had they been implanted in the womb of a woman—or a sow.

According to J. Bottum in the Weekly Standard , “There has been some suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use . . . . Then, too, there has been some suggestion that the creators’ purpose is not so much to corrupt humanity as to elevate it.” His comments are worth quoting at some length:

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