The Assumption of Mary
The proclamation of this Marian dogma, like the event of Christ, came as a surprise. A surprise is not a casual event. It is an unexpected desired event. When Christ came to this world, it interrupted our logic, but it made sense to our history. It united the fragmented parts of Israel's life, and therefore explained it more than she can herself. So too with the event of the declaration of Mary's Assumption. Scholars can look at the early history of the Church to try to find evidence for such a belief and may find the evidence wanting. Yet, the dogma explains the salvific presence of God in the world, which, in turn, explains our place in the world.
The first thing to recognize is that the Assumption is a revelation of God Himself. The God of Jesus Christ is not a watchmaker but someone who “lifts up the lowly.” God is the main actor of this event and Mary can only participate.
The other aspect of this dogma is that it reflects the logic of the Ascension. Christ ascended into heaven so that he can be near to us. Within the bosom of his Father, Christ sends His Spirit and transforms the bread into His body so that we can be one spirit with Him. We can be one with Christ and each other because Christ detached Himself from us. This is the summit of love, virginity. The fecundity of the Marian fiat is seen in the event of the Assumption: the Virgin becomes mother of all. Christ's declaration to the beloved disciple on the cross is universalized through the Assumption. We can receive Mary as our mother only if she is united with God. Her universal maternity cannot be understood apart from the tender mercy of God for us. We cannot love another person, cannot receive another, if we do not see them as sent from God.
This gives us the reason for the proclamation of the dogma. It came from the devotion of the Church to her Mother. What does the motherhood of Mary mean? The faithful's devotion to Mary is the source of the Church's knowledge of her Assumption. This historical event, at the same time, explains our devotion. The Church, therefore, gave us the reason why the motherhood of Mary is possible: God has lifted up the lowly. Our devotions are not meaningless and unreasonable because the Church has provided the ultimate reason: Christ, the son of Mary, is God.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Thoughts on the Natural Law
Pope Benedict, when he was in America, encouraged the attempt to reconcile the biblical faith and the natural law. It will take time to do so since we are dealing with a wonderful mystery: what is the relationship between faith and reason? This, no doubt, deals with the relationship between nature and grace as well as the unity of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Everyone knows the Chalcedonian maxim: union without confusion. Philosophy and theology, faith and reason, and nature and grace, are in a unity without confusion. But such a maxim seems to be hardly informative. What does it actually mean? Is there such a thing as a Christian philosophy, an autonomous science apart from theology? Yes, there is but it is not separate from theology. And vice versa. Trying to draw the line is as hard as solving the Sorites paradox. Questions are endless.
How much can we know about man apart from divine revelation, apart from Christ? This seems to be the debate surrounding the natural law theory since the natural law theory is based on the account of human nature. Some Christians will say that Scripture speaks of man as being created in the image and likeness of God and this means that man has the capability to know certain things such as his desires and things of the world apart from divine revelation. Reason is what man has that differentiates him from others and what he has that is similar with God. Some, such as J. Romanides, reject a certain interpretation of this view. According to J. Romanides, to ground the natural law in the eternal law is absurd because nature is not static but is in a continuous state of change. To ground unchangeable principles within human nature is unrealistic. At the same time, since he rejects analogy of being, it is difficult to ground human forms and laws in immutable laws and forms because forms are created things by their nature. Another form of critique is from theologians who want to ground all things in Christ. The life of Christ is the center of history. He fully reveals man to himself. Reason is then submitted to this event of God’s claim. Better yet, the fact of being created is itself a form of being submitted to the love of God, a form that is also ordered to the Incarnation. Christ is the universal norm. How then are we going to construct a human nature apart from Christ? Can we construct a natural law that is neutral to the mercy of God?
We can distinguish between the metaphysical and the epistemic. Some say that the metaphysical ground of human nature is in God’s freedom to create and His Incarnation. We can know what a human being is thanks to the Christian metaphysical account of man. This is the metaphysical ground of the natural law. But there are some who say that the epistemic ground of the natural law not need be in the metaphysical. We can know the principles of the natural law without knowledge of Christian metaphysics. The question, “Can there be a natural law without God?” is different from, “Can we know the principles of the natural law without belief in God?” Some would say that the nature of the natural law itself is that it can be known apart from divine revelation. People can know that abortion is wrong apart from believing in Christ or God.
The question regarding the natural law, it seems, is the epistemic. For some, there are some goods that are self-evident such as the goodness of life. We should protect and love human life. All other laws and principles are based on these kinds of basic goods. But the question remains on how such principles can be known apart from having knowledge of human nature. Aquinas worked out the metaphysics and psychology of man before he worked out his natural law theory. Without a basic understanding of the human person, of understanding what and who he is, the principles attributed to the natural law become fragile. Take the abstract question, “If an alien that possessed a type of superior reason came to earth and started murdering people, is it wrong?” To answer “no” seems that one has an intuitive account that human nature has dignity. But as long as one does not have a ground on what accounts for this dignity, this intuition can be easily lost.
The epistemic problem, then, rests on the metaphysics. The problem is how we can account for the metaphysical problem. The question is whether our knowledge of human nature is accessible to us in the same way that our knowledge of mathematics or scientific facts is accessible to us. We can know that 2+2=4, water is H20, etc. without knowing that the gracious God of Christ made the universe as it is. Can we then know that man is made for woman and vice versa, that human life is valuable, that religious freedom is a fundamental human right, without knowing the original purpose of Yahweh? This is a much more difficult question to answer since it seems that many different traditions apart from the Christian one can confidently declare the same answer as that of the Christian. On one hand, we acknowledge that people from different backgrounds agree with some Christian moral beliefs. On the other hand, we do not want to construct moral principles neutral to the economy of salvation. To justify a moral belief apart from the narrative structures that we find ourselves in seems to accept the Cartesian project. It is difficult to accept a theory of natural law that all rational persons can assent to. In the first place, there is the importance of one’s tradition and story. To look at reasons is to understand whether it conforms and make sense of one’s story, not simply that it makes sense logically. Another point is the notion of original sin. Sin makes man blind to reality. Not only is it difficult to do what is good, it may be difficult to know what is good. Hence, there is the need of speaking of the salvific presence of Christ, which includes taking part of his historical presence, the Church. The knowledge of the natural law is fragile without the Church.
How natural is the natural law? We are reminded of E. Anscombe’s thesis that we should abandon the notion of a law-conception of ethics. Aristotle has an ethical theory without it. We should also abandon using thin concepts and use thick concepts instead such as “selfish,” “just,” “benevolent,” etc. But even when we speak of virtues, we can know virtues only by looking at the virtuous man. In fact, as MacIntyre pointed out, according to Aquinas, only a learned man, a person who is trained by a master, can understand Prima Secundae or otherwise, it won’t make sense. Thomistic epistemology is based on the teacher-student paradigm. On this point, we can definitely rule out any theory that proposes that the knowledge of the natural law can be understood simply by demonstrations. What is necessary is a relationship between the teacher and the student, a proper education in which the teacher explains and builds the student of having a proper posture towards reality. Such teacher is the Church. Another point is whether we can really understand thick concepts such as “just,” “benevolent,” etc. apart from Christ. The normative norm is Christ and it is he who should be followed. Human nature apart from grace becomes inhuman and impersonal. Human beings become fully human only when they are united to the divine will. Here, the figure of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane is appropriate. The conformity of the human will to the divine will is what makes man truly human. It is no wonder, then, that Aquinas followed his treatise on ethics with his treatise on grace.
Even when we take the ethics of D. von Hildebrand, fundamental proper attitudes towards values are required for the knowledge of values, attitudes such as reverence. Although according to von Hildebrand, the moral excellence of virtues is evident to those without faith, it is difficult to imagine how a person can have reverence apart from the experience of a holy man, a witness. How can we be reverent unless our hearts are awakened by beauty? We can also take the notion of religious sense by L. Guissani in which he, following Christian tradition, speaks of man’s openness to all of reality, of the desire to know the reason for all of life. But even Guissani does not start from the religious sense but the event of Christ. Apart from Christ, can we know what we desire? Usually, our hearts are inactive and we are not engaged with life. Unless something beautiful takes us out from our nothingness, we are left unengaged with life. It is very difficult, then, to construct a human nature apart from grace. They are so united that we cannot conceive one without the other. This is not because grace is not free, but because God has unconditionally gave Himself for the world that we cannot separate ourselves from His gaze upon us.
But there is something that strikes us as something evident. We can take the example of poets. Why is it that poetry need not be helped by divine revelation in order to be beautiful? Poets express great truths without believing in Christ. Great non-Christian literature reveals truths about the human person. Are they not about human nature? And do we not know human nature through literature? Probably even more than reading psychologists. Why then do we need the Church to know some moral truths? Does a person really need the Church to see that the violence in the Middle East is unjust? What the Christian can propose about the natural law is that certain precepts, even secondary ones, can be known by reason alone. Certainly we can follow Aquinas in saying that the natural law is in the heart of every person in the sense that general precepts are known by all but the secondary precepts are not known by all. Yet, to say that secondary precepts are possible to be known is not to say that they are probable.
We can make the analogy to natural theology. Vatican I teaches that through reason alone, we can be certain of God’s existence. But this does not teach that there needs to be a natural theology. Nor does this teach that the knowledge of God’s existence through reason alone requires a demonstration. It seems that A. Plantinga’s notion of proper basic belief can be reconciled with Vatican 1, for example. But if we take the conversion of A. Flew, for example, we are left wondering what kind of God he believes in. Believing in the evidence of intelligent design, he has posited a deistic god. Better than nothing at all, you might say. However, apart from the community of believers, can we truly speak of the God of the philosophers as the Christian God? Even E. Gilson’s treatment of the God of the Christian seems to reduce him to merely a Creator who created the world out of nothing. But what about Christ? Here we can see certain deficiencies of natural theology. Which God are you speaking of? Certainly natural theology is possible and we need to understand what value it has in our lives. Yet, apart from faith, it can be destructive.
What about the personalist ethics of John Paul II? His book on sexual ethics, Love and Responsibility, does not have anything theological about it, although it seems to presuppose some kind of Creator’s plan. It is very attractive and yet he does not speak of Christ. Although we cannot understand his overall philosophical work apart from his theological, we can definitely speak of philosophy’s autonomy from theology. It is not that it is neutral or that it is not ordered to serve theology, but that it has its own principles apart from theology.
What makes the notion of a natural law attractive apart from the help of divine revelation is that it can influence the state. By this, I mean that it is not simply a political reason but that it seems that it can persuade the others of certain moral truths apart from using scriptural grounds. A student in a secular university trying to persuade his colleagues of the immorality of contraception is better off if he does not use scripture to support his beliefs. Why use the Bible if his epistemic peer does not believe in it? Should we not look for a common ground? The common ground, some say, is the natural law which all has in their hearts. Or one can even say: the human heart. Is this not the common ground? Do not all men desire happiness? What is the difference of having an exposition on Beethoven’s 5th symphony on a secular university to awaken men’s heart and a person trying to use the personalist ethic of John Paul against contraception? Do they not simply trust that human nature will realize what is beautiful and good? It is at this point where I am left wondering what kind of response anti-liberals have to the modern world, especially in America. One can grant MacIntyre’s argument that all debates in America is under the flag of liberalism. Yet, in what way a Christian can respond to such a circumstance, I do not know. It is true that the response of the Christian is simply to witness. But in what way, I do not know. On the one hand, I believe in the importance of the narrative structure of the human person. On the other hand, in what way we can dialogue with others with different epistemic systems is another question. One can certainly understand the importance of Christ on our account of human nature. But when a person is in the midst of an audience that comes from different backgrounds, trusting in the notion of a natural law is very attractive.
It seems to me, then, that the purpose of the Christian is at stake here. It is true that faith creates a culture, but it is not simply trying to create political structures. Granted that abortion should be fought against, but one cannot reduce culture to fighting for health care or abortion. What is at stake is our value: in what way do we reduce it? Who really values it? At this point, the Person of Christ is relevant: his mercy is everlasting. Christians can forgive because he has been forgiven. Christians can be the hope in the Middle East because through them, all men can learn forgiveness. Here, then, I would like to offer thoughts on the natural law:
First, the general precepts of the natural law can be known. But the meaning of the general precepts can be informed by revelation. General precepts can be known confusedly, but divine revelation helps us understand it. The dynamic of the Church and the human conscience seems to support this view.
Second, we need once more a better understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and salvation history, a topic that attracted Ratzinger. Aquinas noted that practical reason is a matter of contingent affairs. We can also hear Romanides’ objection here. Because we are in a state of change, because we are historical, finding what is immutable is difficult. It is a necessary one study but we must look for a way in which the immutable and the mutable meet.
This leads to the third which is that time is required for a demonstration. Not only this, but a fidelity to the truth of things and a continuous engagement with others. Logos is experiential and communal. Only in engaging in others and their stories can we understand them and therefore ourselves. As MacIntyre noted, rational traditions are fallible and epistemological crises can occur. The solutions to these crises may not be a deductive demonstration but a demonstration that comes from continually seeking the truth in others.
Part 2
The natural law is a participation in the eternal law. In what way natural law is natural is difficult to define. The term “natural law” is itself uncomfortable because it can have a Kantian ring to it, in the sense that we are to follow some kind of abstract sense of duty. Even if we place the law in the mind of God, the whole notion of law runs the risk of falling into moralism. What is required is an understanding of normativity that takes into account man’s inclination for happiness.
There are some interesting discussions on the relationship between theoretical reasons and practical reasons. Many philosophers have thought that they were separate and so one branch focused on things epistemological and the other action or ethical theory. But recently, some philosophers are trying to bridge the gap. One way is to emphasize the convertibility of goodness and truth. One does not look for truth if it does not interest him. Truth becomes abstract if it does not take into account many other factors. Let’s give examples from analytic philosophy. Take, for example, the goal of epistemology. Some say that the goal of epistemology is truth. But that is hardly the case. The goal is knowledge, something that is more than truth. We can have true beliefs without them being knowledge. Or suppose that we compare someone with a true unjustified belief and another with a false justified belief. One can hardly attribute intellectual virtues to the former. And then there is the account in which practical interests play a role (cf. J. Stanley). Our attributions of knowledge also depend on what is at stake. Usually, when there is more at stake there is less knowledge, we are told. Then there is also the knowledge rule of assertion (cf. T. Williamson): we should only assert what we know. Finally, there is the notion of practical reason based on facts or knowledge. According to some (cf. J. Hawthorne, J. Stanley), we should only act according to what we know. D. Parfit has also argued against desire-based theories, proposing that facts give us reasons; in fact, facts give us reasons to have desires. D. von Hildebrand proposed long ago that there is not just being but importances. By this, he means that things motivate us to act in a certain way. They can motivate us to act because they either are self-satisfying, because they are objectively good, that is, will make us happy, or because they are important in themselves, or combinations of the three. A. Pruss has argued that all facts are normative because they make us act a certain way. We can then assert that there is an intuition about the relationship between the theoretical and the practical.
Facts, then, are not just neutral. They have a normative and practical component. Any kind of realism that does not take into account the splendor of truth and its gratuity is a false realism. We cannot look at reality as if it does not affect us, as if it does not asks us to be engaged in it. Here we can turn again to von Hildebrand’s notion of value. Being has value and this value requires a proper response. Saints are to be admired and evil is ought to be hated. When I understand the truth of things, it requires me to respond in a certain way, like a child seeing a mother and rejoicing in her presence or a person committing a sin and having a contrite heart because he knows who he has offended. The key is trying to figure out the source of this normativity. Ratzinger has been insisting that God is essential in having a realistic worldview; any realism that is not holy can be hardly called realistic. Here we understand the nature of law in the natural law. Law, as Thomists have emphasized, is in the mind of God and it is in this way that we are obligated to act in certain ways. But even the notion of a participated theonomy is very abstract in our minds. What is necessary is to understand that reality requires us to act in a certain way because it is there for us. A mother requires a child’s love not only because she is important in herself but because receiving the mother is a good of the child. A true account of realism, then, takes into account the intention of God as that which is good and beautiful. The term “law” should not distract us into abstraction if we understand it as the intention of a gracious God. It is at this point that it becomes difficult to understand how it is that natural law is natural. In the first place, it is in the mind of God, that is, the place of man in God’s heart, and in what way we participate in this law gets into the problem of the nature and grace distinction.
The distinction between nature and grace is difficult. In the first place, we should understand the account of creation as an act of grace. The Eastern Christians, for example, would speak of every act of creation as the activity of God. To see creation is to see the energies of God, that is, God Himself. But creation is seen as being ordered to the Incarnation. We can quote Maximus: “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end, the goal, for whose sake everything was created. This was the divine purpose that lay before the beginning of all things…with this goal in mind, God called the natures of things into existence” (Quaest. Ad Thal. 60). If we are to speak of the natural law as the intention of God, we definitely have to take into account in which way this law would lead to the divine law.
We need to be specific with regards to nature and grace. Both are gifts but in what way they are distinct needs to be fleshed out. A helpful way to understand nature and grace is simply this: grace is the concrete activity of God in the world which is directed to and is the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery. To put it in another way, grace is the covenant of God with man, both new and old. This way, we can understand grace as both a continuity and discontinuity (analogy of being) with nature. Here the natural law and divine law complement each other. Because the natural law refers to the capacity of human nature, which is the capacity for beatific vision, the divine law perfects and uplifts the natural law. But in what way is the Incarnation a free gift of God? One way we can understand the nature and grace distinction is to understand whether the Incarnation is necessary for every act of creation. Take the proposition:
(4) The Incarnate God exists in all possible worlds.
This means that the Incarnation is necessary, that in every world that there is, Christ exists. But if this is true, that the basis of all creation is the Incarnation, then we can argue for the following:
(5) Creation entails the Incarnation.
Every creation of human nature, then, entails that God assumes this human nature. One wonders where the gratuity is in such an event. It is true that God does not have to create a world and therefore there can be no Incarnation. But this leaves gratuity simply as the act of creation since we can deduce the Incarnation from the act of creation. To put it in another way:
(6) If an essential property of a world is the Incarnation, then the Incarnation can be deduced from the existence of a world.
Now, it is true that in every world, before the event of Incarnation, man has a certain lack and looks forward to a fulfillment that he himself cannot attain. But if the Incarnation is necessary in all possible worlds, then since this event must happen, this event is gratuitous only insofar as it comes from God and not from man. Gratuity is reduced to simply: it comes from God and not from man. But such an assertion can be said of human nature also: it comes from God. Where, then, is the radical gratuity of the Incarnation? Where is its discontinuity from the act of creation?
I think that if we are to speak of possible worlds God could have created, we have to admit that there are some worlds without the Incarnation. There are some worlds where there are original sin and the Incarnation, and some worlds where there is simply the Incarnation without original sin. Some worlds have no Incarnation. This way, we can understand that gratuity and discontinuity of the Incarnation while at the same time not holding on to the notion that sin causes the Incarnation.
But if we look at the actual world in which the Incarnate God exists, we need to take into account its normativity. If the natural law is nothing but the intention of God’s creation, the intention of the Paschal Mystery must be taken into account. The precept of the natural law, do good and avoid evil, is meaningful only when we take into account that Christ satisfies man’s desires. Here we understand the meaningfulness of the natural law and its unity with the divine law. The precept can be known by all in a confused way but its meaning is understood within the salvific presence of Christ. We also need to understand that there is no such thing as nature apart from God. Again, the account of human nature is precisely looking at the human being: the intention of God to make a creature to be his dwelling place. A human ethic that does not take into account that the good of man rests in God is a reduction of ethics into an abstract sense of duty or the good of man will be reductive. But a reduction of man into structures or a human fraternity is contrary to the human nature itself. It is true that the proper response to a person is love, but the acknowledgement of the nature of the person is fragile unless one sees the person as relation to God. In fact, natural law or ethics concerns the goodness of an action which is only entailed by the goodness of human life. This is why the human person is truly himself when it is within the people of God, the Church.
The notion that truth is practically normative reveals to us that persons are inherently relational. Even Aristotle saw the social aspect of the rationality of man. Justice, as Aquinas noted, is a matter of right relations. J. Garcia has been emphasizing that we should see virtues as role-centered. To understand whether an action is good or bad, we need to understand his person and his role. Assisted suicide is wrong not simply because of the general precept “killing is wrong,” but because it is contrary to the nature of a doctor. The relationship between a doctor and his patient is contrary to such an act. The role of a mother is to love her child. A mother performs virtuous acts insofar as she fulfills her role. This notion of role-based theory of virtue is no doubt complemented by the theodramatic theory of Balthasar that a person is fully a person when he fulfills his mission (instead of “role,” Balthasar prefers mission). Within this Balthasarian framework, we do not limit the person to his roles (profession, social, sexual, etc) because we understand that his role is broader than our categories: his mission comes from Christ. If the natural law is a participation in the eternal law of God, we must understand this to be the Trinitarian God: the Father generates the Son and the Spirit. Normativity should then be taken into account as fulfilling certain roles that God intends for the human person. It is vocation, accepting who he is for the one who created him. It seems to me that a natural law without the notion of a vocation makes it inhumane. When we contemplate what justice is, that is, what a just person is, we will tend to reduce a just man into our own preconceptions unless we take into account his vocation. Here we find fitting Guissani’s notion of love as loving a person’s destiny. Furthermore, we find the notion of justice as related to virginity. Virginity, as possession in detachment, the way God looks at the world (that is, in Christ), can truly be called a right relations of things. Justice requires virginity so that it does not become cold. The natural law obligates the following of a vocation. The rest, such as its form or even to accept it, is grace. With regards to the epistemic, if it is true that the natural law is a calling to accept a vocation, it is very difficult to discover this without a community-tradition. Persons understand roles and obligations solely through witnessing and/or experiencing the relationships. Knowledge can never be individualistic but starts from a communal event, a teacher-student paradigm.
What, then, of the universality of the natural law? This seems to be the issue of finding a common ground within people with different traditions. If the natural law is universal, then to look for arguments apart from scriptural grounds is very attractive. It seems to me that this is attractive because it can influence the state. Within a pluralistic society, the natural law seems to be the way in which we can convince people of providing just laws. What seems to be the crucial point is finding a way in which the natural law, which is not neutral to the salvific presence of Christ, can be the foundation of human laws. This is a difficult project indeed. J. Maritain, for example, saw that pluralism is simply the methodological means in which we can have a Christian society, although distinguishing the state from society. Some believe that although there is a juridical autonomy of the state from the Church, the state should be ordered to the Church. This gives us a way in which we can see the separation of Church and state while not being neutral to Christ. What is important, I think, is a realization of values that is intrinsically connected to a vocation-role. The function of the State is to provide and protect human goods, but human goods are human insofar as they relate to the relationships they are made for. What is needed is a constant purification of our understanding of what the goodness of a human being is and this comes about only when we understand the proper relations and roles of each person.
The natural law, if it is not to be abstract and reduced to mere moralism, must take into account the notion of a vocation. This is not far from the notion of an Aristotelian telos. The difference is that this notion takes into account the personal nature of man as well as the notion of duty being a personal calling from a personal God. This is complemented by revelation in the sense that this personal God is revealed in Christ and is Trinitarian.
Pope Benedict, when he was in America, encouraged the attempt to reconcile the biblical faith and the natural law. It will take time to do so since we are dealing with a wonderful mystery: what is the relationship between faith and reason? This, no doubt, deals with the relationship between nature and grace as well as the unity of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Everyone knows the Chalcedonian maxim: union without confusion. Philosophy and theology, faith and reason, and nature and grace, are in a unity without confusion. But such a maxim seems to be hardly informative. What does it actually mean? Is there such a thing as a Christian philosophy, an autonomous science apart from theology? Yes, there is but it is not separate from theology. And vice versa. Trying to draw the line is as hard as solving the Sorites paradox. Questions are endless.
How much can we know about man apart from divine revelation, apart from Christ? This seems to be the debate surrounding the natural law theory since the natural law theory is based on the account of human nature. Some Christians will say that Scripture speaks of man as being created in the image and likeness of God and this means that man has the capability to know certain things such as his desires and things of the world apart from divine revelation. Reason is what man has that differentiates him from others and what he has that is similar with God. Some, such as J. Romanides, reject a certain interpretation of this view. According to J. Romanides, to ground the natural law in the eternal law is absurd because nature is not static but is in a continuous state of change. To ground unchangeable principles within human nature is unrealistic. At the same time, since he rejects analogy of being, it is difficult to ground human forms and laws in immutable laws and forms because forms are created things by their nature. Another form of critique is from theologians who want to ground all things in Christ. The life of Christ is the center of history. He fully reveals man to himself. Reason is then submitted to this event of God’s claim. Better yet, the fact of being created is itself a form of being submitted to the love of God, a form that is also ordered to the Incarnation. Christ is the universal norm. How then are we going to construct a human nature apart from Christ? Can we construct a natural law that is neutral to the mercy of God?
We can distinguish between the metaphysical and the epistemic. Some say that the metaphysical ground of human nature is in God’s freedom to create and His Incarnation. We can know what a human being is thanks to the Christian metaphysical account of man. This is the metaphysical ground of the natural law. But there are some who say that the epistemic ground of the natural law not need be in the metaphysical. We can know the principles of the natural law without knowledge of Christian metaphysics. The question, “Can there be a natural law without God?” is different from, “Can we know the principles of the natural law without belief in God?” Some would say that the nature of the natural law itself is that it can be known apart from divine revelation. People can know that abortion is wrong apart from believing in Christ or God.
The question regarding the natural law, it seems, is the epistemic. For some, there are some goods that are self-evident such as the goodness of life. We should protect and love human life. All other laws and principles are based on these kinds of basic goods. But the question remains on how such principles can be known apart from having knowledge of human nature. Aquinas worked out the metaphysics and psychology of man before he worked out his natural law theory. Without a basic understanding of the human person, of understanding what and who he is, the principles attributed to the natural law become fragile. Take the abstract question, “If an alien that possessed a type of superior reason came to earth and started murdering people, is it wrong?” To answer “no” seems that one has an intuitive account that human nature has dignity. But as long as one does not have a ground on what accounts for this dignity, this intuition can be easily lost.
The epistemic problem, then, rests on the metaphysics. The problem is how we can account for the metaphysical problem. The question is whether our knowledge of human nature is accessible to us in the same way that our knowledge of mathematics or scientific facts is accessible to us. We can know that 2+2=4, water is H20, etc. without knowing that the gracious God of Christ made the universe as it is. Can we then know that man is made for woman and vice versa, that human life is valuable, that religious freedom is a fundamental human right, without knowing the original purpose of Yahweh? This is a much more difficult question to answer since it seems that many different traditions apart from the Christian one can confidently declare the same answer as that of the Christian. On one hand, we acknowledge that people from different backgrounds agree with some Christian moral beliefs. On the other hand, we do not want to construct moral principles neutral to the economy of salvation. To justify a moral belief apart from the narrative structures that we find ourselves in seems to accept the Cartesian project. It is difficult to accept a theory of natural law that all rational persons can assent to. In the first place, there is the importance of one’s tradition and story. To look at reasons is to understand whether it conforms and make sense of one’s story, not simply that it makes sense logically. Another point is the notion of original sin. Sin makes man blind to reality. Not only is it difficult to do what is good, it may be difficult to know what is good. Hence, there is the need of speaking of the salvific presence of Christ, which includes taking part of his historical presence, the Church. The knowledge of the natural law is fragile without the Church.
How natural is the natural law? We are reminded of E. Anscombe’s thesis that we should abandon the notion of a law-conception of ethics. Aristotle has an ethical theory without it. We should also abandon using thin concepts and use thick concepts instead such as “selfish,” “just,” “benevolent,” etc. But even when we speak of virtues, we can know virtues only by looking at the virtuous man. In fact, as MacIntyre pointed out, according to Aquinas, only a learned man, a person who is trained by a master, can understand Prima Secundae or otherwise, it won’t make sense. Thomistic epistemology is based on the teacher-student paradigm. On this point, we can definitely rule out any theory that proposes that the knowledge of the natural law can be understood simply by demonstrations. What is necessary is a relationship between the teacher and the student, a proper education in which the teacher explains and builds the student of having a proper posture towards reality. Such teacher is the Church. Another point is whether we can really understand thick concepts such as “just,” “benevolent,” etc. apart from Christ. The normative norm is Christ and it is he who should be followed. Human nature apart from grace becomes inhuman and impersonal. Human beings become fully human only when they are united to the divine will. Here, the figure of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane is appropriate. The conformity of the human will to the divine will is what makes man truly human. It is no wonder, then, that Aquinas followed his treatise on ethics with his treatise on grace.
Even when we take the ethics of D. von Hildebrand, fundamental proper attitudes towards values are required for the knowledge of values, attitudes such as reverence. Although according to von Hildebrand, the moral excellence of virtues is evident to those without faith, it is difficult to imagine how a person can have reverence apart from the experience of a holy man, a witness. How can we be reverent unless our hearts are awakened by beauty? We can also take the notion of religious sense by L. Guissani in which he, following Christian tradition, speaks of man’s openness to all of reality, of the desire to know the reason for all of life. But even Guissani does not start from the religious sense but the event of Christ. Apart from Christ, can we know what we desire? Usually, our hearts are inactive and we are not engaged with life. Unless something beautiful takes us out from our nothingness, we are left unengaged with life. It is very difficult, then, to construct a human nature apart from grace. They are so united that we cannot conceive one without the other. This is not because grace is not free, but because God has unconditionally gave Himself for the world that we cannot separate ourselves from His gaze upon us.
But there is something that strikes us as something evident. We can take the example of poets. Why is it that poetry need not be helped by divine revelation in order to be beautiful? Poets express great truths without believing in Christ. Great non-Christian literature reveals truths about the human person. Are they not about human nature? And do we not know human nature through literature? Probably even more than reading psychologists. Why then do we need the Church to know some moral truths? Does a person really need the Church to see that the violence in the Middle East is unjust? What the Christian can propose about the natural law is that certain precepts, even secondary ones, can be known by reason alone. Certainly we can follow Aquinas in saying that the natural law is in the heart of every person in the sense that general precepts are known by all but the secondary precepts are not known by all. Yet, to say that secondary precepts are possible to be known is not to say that they are probable.
We can make the analogy to natural theology. Vatican I teaches that through reason alone, we can be certain of God’s existence. But this does not teach that there needs to be a natural theology. Nor does this teach that the knowledge of God’s existence through reason alone requires a demonstration. It seems that A. Plantinga’s notion of proper basic belief can be reconciled with Vatican 1, for example. But if we take the conversion of A. Flew, for example, we are left wondering what kind of God he believes in. Believing in the evidence of intelligent design, he has posited a deistic god. Better than nothing at all, you might say. However, apart from the community of believers, can we truly speak of the God of the philosophers as the Christian God? Even E. Gilson’s treatment of the God of the Christian seems to reduce him to merely a Creator who created the world out of nothing. But what about Christ? Here we can see certain deficiencies of natural theology. Which God are you speaking of? Certainly natural theology is possible and we need to understand what value it has in our lives. Yet, apart from faith, it can be destructive.
What about the personalist ethics of John Paul II? His book on sexual ethics, Love and Responsibility, does not have anything theological about it, although it seems to presuppose some kind of Creator’s plan. It is very attractive and yet he does not speak of Christ. Although we cannot understand his overall philosophical work apart from his theological, we can definitely speak of philosophy’s autonomy from theology. It is not that it is neutral or that it is not ordered to serve theology, but that it has its own principles apart from theology.
What makes the notion of a natural law attractive apart from the help of divine revelation is that it can influence the state. By this, I mean that it is not simply a political reason but that it seems that it can persuade the others of certain moral truths apart from using scriptural grounds. A student in a secular university trying to persuade his colleagues of the immorality of contraception is better off if he does not use scripture to support his beliefs. Why use the Bible if his epistemic peer does not believe in it? Should we not look for a common ground? The common ground, some say, is the natural law which all has in their hearts. Or one can even say: the human heart. Is this not the common ground? Do not all men desire happiness? What is the difference of having an exposition on Beethoven’s 5th symphony on a secular university to awaken men’s heart and a person trying to use the personalist ethic of John Paul against contraception? Do they not simply trust that human nature will realize what is beautiful and good? It is at this point where I am left wondering what kind of response anti-liberals have to the modern world, especially in America. One can grant MacIntyre’s argument that all debates in America is under the flag of liberalism. Yet, in what way a Christian can respond to such a circumstance, I do not know. It is true that the response of the Christian is simply to witness. But in what way, I do not know. On the one hand, I believe in the importance of the narrative structure of the human person. On the other hand, in what way we can dialogue with others with different epistemic systems is another question. One can certainly understand the importance of Christ on our account of human nature. But when a person is in the midst of an audience that comes from different backgrounds, trusting in the notion of a natural law is very attractive.
It seems to me, then, that the purpose of the Christian is at stake here. It is true that faith creates a culture, but it is not simply trying to create political structures. Granted that abortion should be fought against, but one cannot reduce culture to fighting for health care or abortion. What is at stake is our value: in what way do we reduce it? Who really values it? At this point, the Person of Christ is relevant: his mercy is everlasting. Christians can forgive because he has been forgiven. Christians can be the hope in the Middle East because through them, all men can learn forgiveness. Here, then, I would like to offer thoughts on the natural law:
First, the general precepts of the natural law can be known. But the meaning of the general precepts can be informed by revelation. General precepts can be known confusedly, but divine revelation helps us understand it. The dynamic of the Church and the human conscience seems to support this view.
Second, we need once more a better understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and salvation history, a topic that attracted Ratzinger. Aquinas noted that practical reason is a matter of contingent affairs. We can also hear Romanides’ objection here. Because we are in a state of change, because we are historical, finding what is immutable is difficult. It is a necessary one study but we must look for a way in which the immutable and the mutable meet.
This leads to the third which is that time is required for a demonstration. Not only this, but a fidelity to the truth of things and a continuous engagement with others. Logos is experiential and communal. Only in engaging in others and their stories can we understand them and therefore ourselves. As MacIntyre noted, rational traditions are fallible and epistemological crises can occur. The solutions to these crises may not be a deductive demonstration but a demonstration that comes from continually seeking the truth in others.
Part 2
The natural law is a participation in the eternal law. In what way natural law is natural is difficult to define. The term “natural law” is itself uncomfortable because it can have a Kantian ring to it, in the sense that we are to follow some kind of abstract sense of duty. Even if we place the law in the mind of God, the whole notion of law runs the risk of falling into moralism. What is required is an understanding of normativity that takes into account man’s inclination for happiness.
There are some interesting discussions on the relationship between theoretical reasons and practical reasons. Many philosophers have thought that they were separate and so one branch focused on things epistemological and the other action or ethical theory. But recently, some philosophers are trying to bridge the gap. One way is to emphasize the convertibility of goodness and truth. One does not look for truth if it does not interest him. Truth becomes abstract if it does not take into account many other factors. Let’s give examples from analytic philosophy. Take, for example, the goal of epistemology. Some say that the goal of epistemology is truth. But that is hardly the case. The goal is knowledge, something that is more than truth. We can have true beliefs without them being knowledge. Or suppose that we compare someone with a true unjustified belief and another with a false justified belief. One can hardly attribute intellectual virtues to the former. And then there is the account in which practical interests play a role (cf. J. Stanley). Our attributions of knowledge also depend on what is at stake. Usually, when there is more at stake there is less knowledge, we are told. Then there is also the knowledge rule of assertion (cf. T. Williamson): we should only assert what we know. Finally, there is the notion of practical reason based on facts or knowledge. According to some (cf. J. Hawthorne, J. Stanley), we should only act according to what we know. D. Parfit has also argued against desire-based theories, proposing that facts give us reasons; in fact, facts give us reasons to have desires. D. von Hildebrand proposed long ago that there is not just being but importances. By this, he means that things motivate us to act in a certain way. They can motivate us to act because they either are self-satisfying, because they are objectively good, that is, will make us happy, or because they are important in themselves, or combinations of the three. A. Pruss has argued that all facts are normative because they make us act a certain way. We can then assert that there is an intuition about the relationship between the theoretical and the practical.
Facts, then, are not just neutral. They have a normative and practical component. Any kind of realism that does not take into account the splendor of truth and its gratuity is a false realism. We cannot look at reality as if it does not affect us, as if it does not asks us to be engaged in it. Here we can turn again to von Hildebrand’s notion of value. Being has value and this value requires a proper response. Saints are to be admired and evil is ought to be hated. When I understand the truth of things, it requires me to respond in a certain way, like a child seeing a mother and rejoicing in her presence or a person committing a sin and having a contrite heart because he knows who he has offended. The key is trying to figure out the source of this normativity. Ratzinger has been insisting that God is essential in having a realistic worldview; any realism that is not holy can be hardly called realistic. Here we understand the nature of law in the natural law. Law, as Thomists have emphasized, is in the mind of God and it is in this way that we are obligated to act in certain ways. But even the notion of a participated theonomy is very abstract in our minds. What is necessary is to understand that reality requires us to act in a certain way because it is there for us. A mother requires a child’s love not only because she is important in herself but because receiving the mother is a good of the child. A true account of realism, then, takes into account the intention of God as that which is good and beautiful. The term “law” should not distract us into abstraction if we understand it as the intention of a gracious God. It is at this point that it becomes difficult to understand how it is that natural law is natural. In the first place, it is in the mind of God, that is, the place of man in God’s heart, and in what way we participate in this law gets into the problem of the nature and grace distinction.
The distinction between nature and grace is difficult. In the first place, we should understand the account of creation as an act of grace. The Eastern Christians, for example, would speak of every act of creation as the activity of God. To see creation is to see the energies of God, that is, God Himself. But creation is seen as being ordered to the Incarnation. We can quote Maximus: “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end, the goal, for whose sake everything was created. This was the divine purpose that lay before the beginning of all things…with this goal in mind, God called the natures of things into existence” (Quaest. Ad Thal. 60). If we are to speak of the natural law as the intention of God, we definitely have to take into account in which way this law would lead to the divine law.
We need to be specific with regards to nature and grace. Both are gifts but in what way they are distinct needs to be fleshed out. A helpful way to understand nature and grace is simply this: grace is the concrete activity of God in the world which is directed to and is the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery. To put it in another way, grace is the covenant of God with man, both new and old. This way, we can understand grace as both a continuity and discontinuity (analogy of being) with nature. Here the natural law and divine law complement each other. Because the natural law refers to the capacity of human nature, which is the capacity for beatific vision, the divine law perfects and uplifts the natural law. But in what way is the Incarnation a free gift of God? One way we can understand the nature and grace distinction is to understand whether the Incarnation is necessary for every act of creation. Take the proposition:
(4) The Incarnate God exists in all possible worlds.
This means that the Incarnation is necessary, that in every world that there is, Christ exists. But if this is true, that the basis of all creation is the Incarnation, then we can argue for the following:
(5) Creation entails the Incarnation.
Every creation of human nature, then, entails that God assumes this human nature. One wonders where the gratuity is in such an event. It is true that God does not have to create a world and therefore there can be no Incarnation. But this leaves gratuity simply as the act of creation since we can deduce the Incarnation from the act of creation. To put it in another way:
(6) If an essential property of a world is the Incarnation, then the Incarnation can be deduced from the existence of a world.
Now, it is true that in every world, before the event of Incarnation, man has a certain lack and looks forward to a fulfillment that he himself cannot attain. But if the Incarnation is necessary in all possible worlds, then since this event must happen, this event is gratuitous only insofar as it comes from God and not from man. Gratuity is reduced to simply: it comes from God and not from man. But such an assertion can be said of human nature also: it comes from God. Where, then, is the radical gratuity of the Incarnation? Where is its discontinuity from the act of creation?
I think that if we are to speak of possible worlds God could have created, we have to admit that there are some worlds without the Incarnation. There are some worlds where there are original sin and the Incarnation, and some worlds where there is simply the Incarnation without original sin. Some worlds have no Incarnation. This way, we can understand that gratuity and discontinuity of the Incarnation while at the same time not holding on to the notion that sin causes the Incarnation.
But if we look at the actual world in which the Incarnate God exists, we need to take into account its normativity. If the natural law is nothing but the intention of God’s creation, the intention of the Paschal Mystery must be taken into account. The precept of the natural law, do good and avoid evil, is meaningful only when we take into account that Christ satisfies man’s desires. Here we understand the meaningfulness of the natural law and its unity with the divine law. The precept can be known by all in a confused way but its meaning is understood within the salvific presence of Christ. We also need to understand that there is no such thing as nature apart from God. Again, the account of human nature is precisely looking at the human being: the intention of God to make a creature to be his dwelling place. A human ethic that does not take into account that the good of man rests in God is a reduction of ethics into an abstract sense of duty or the good of man will be reductive. But a reduction of man into structures or a human fraternity is contrary to the human nature itself. It is true that the proper response to a person is love, but the acknowledgement of the nature of the person is fragile unless one sees the person as relation to God. In fact, natural law or ethics concerns the goodness of an action which is only entailed by the goodness of human life. This is why the human person is truly himself when it is within the people of God, the Church.
The notion that truth is practically normative reveals to us that persons are inherently relational. Even Aristotle saw the social aspect of the rationality of man. Justice, as Aquinas noted, is a matter of right relations. J. Garcia has been emphasizing that we should see virtues as role-centered. To understand whether an action is good or bad, we need to understand his person and his role. Assisted suicide is wrong not simply because of the general precept “killing is wrong,” but because it is contrary to the nature of a doctor. The relationship between a doctor and his patient is contrary to such an act. The role of a mother is to love her child. A mother performs virtuous acts insofar as she fulfills her role. This notion of role-based theory of virtue is no doubt complemented by the theodramatic theory of Balthasar that a person is fully a person when he fulfills his mission (instead of “role,” Balthasar prefers mission). Within this Balthasarian framework, we do not limit the person to his roles (profession, social, sexual, etc) because we understand that his role is broader than our categories: his mission comes from Christ. If the natural law is a participation in the eternal law of God, we must understand this to be the Trinitarian God: the Father generates the Son and the Spirit. Normativity should then be taken into account as fulfilling certain roles that God intends for the human person. It is vocation, accepting who he is for the one who created him. It seems to me that a natural law without the notion of a vocation makes it inhumane. When we contemplate what justice is, that is, what a just person is, we will tend to reduce a just man into our own preconceptions unless we take into account his vocation. Here we find fitting Guissani’s notion of love as loving a person’s destiny. Furthermore, we find the notion of justice as related to virginity. Virginity, as possession in detachment, the way God looks at the world (that is, in Christ), can truly be called a right relations of things. Justice requires virginity so that it does not become cold. The natural law obligates the following of a vocation. The rest, such as its form or even to accept it, is grace. With regards to the epistemic, if it is true that the natural law is a calling to accept a vocation, it is very difficult to discover this without a community-tradition. Persons understand roles and obligations solely through witnessing and/or experiencing the relationships. Knowledge can never be individualistic but starts from a communal event, a teacher-student paradigm.
What, then, of the universality of the natural law? This seems to be the issue of finding a common ground within people with different traditions. If the natural law is universal, then to look for arguments apart from scriptural grounds is very attractive. It seems to me that this is attractive because it can influence the state. Within a pluralistic society, the natural law seems to be the way in which we can convince people of providing just laws. What seems to be the crucial point is finding a way in which the natural law, which is not neutral to the salvific presence of Christ, can be the foundation of human laws. This is a difficult project indeed. J. Maritain, for example, saw that pluralism is simply the methodological means in which we can have a Christian society, although distinguishing the state from society. Some believe that although there is a juridical autonomy of the state from the Church, the state should be ordered to the Church. This gives us a way in which we can see the separation of Church and state while not being neutral to Christ. What is important, I think, is a realization of values that is intrinsically connected to a vocation-role. The function of the State is to provide and protect human goods, but human goods are human insofar as they relate to the relationships they are made for. What is needed is a constant purification of our understanding of what the goodness of a human being is and this comes about only when we understand the proper relations and roles of each person.
The natural law, if it is not to be abstract and reduced to mere moralism, must take into account the notion of a vocation. This is not far from the notion of an Aristotelian telos. The difference is that this notion takes into account the personal nature of man as well as the notion of duty being a personal calling from a personal God. This is complemented by revelation in the sense that this personal God is revealed in Christ and is Trinitarian.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Christmas 2009 from Pope Benedict
Source: http://www.zenit.org/article-27943?l=english
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
"A child is born for us, a son is given to us" (Is 9:5). What Isaiah prophesied as he gazed into the future from afar, consoling Israel amid its trials and its darkness, is now proclaimed to the shepherds as a present reality by the Angel, from whom a cloud of light streams forth: "To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord" (Lk 2:11). The Lord is here. From this moment, God is truly "God with us". No longer is he the distant God who can in some way be perceived from afar, in creation and in our own consciousness. He has entered the world. He is close to us. The words of the risen Christ to his followers are addressed also to us: "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Mt 28:20). For you the Saviour is born: through the Gospel and those who proclaim it, God now reminds us of the message that the Angel announced to the shepherds. It is a message that cannot leave us indifferent. If it is true, it changes everything. If it is true, it also affects me. Like the shepherds, then, I too must say: Come on, I want to go to Bethlehem to see the Word that has occurred there. The story of the shepherds is included in the Gospel for a reason. They show us the right way to respond to the message that we too have received. What is it that these first witnesses of God’s incarnation have to tell us?
The first thing we are told about the shepherds is that they were on the watch -- they could hear the message precisely because they were awake. We must be awake, so that we can hear the message. We must become truly vigilant people. What does this mean? The principal difference between someone dreaming and someone awake is that the dreamer is in a world of his own. His "self" is locked into this dreamworld that is his alone and does not connect him with others. To wake up means to leave that private world of one's own and to enter the common reality, the truth that alone can unite all people. Conflict and lack of reconciliation in the world stem from the fact that we are locked into our own interests and opinions, into our own little private world. Selfishness, both individual and collective, makes us prisoners of our interests and our desires that stand against the truth and separate us from one another.
Awake, the Gospel tells us. Step outside, so as to enter the great communal truth, the communion of the one God. To awake, then, means to develop a receptivity for God: for the silent promptings with which he chooses to guide us; for the many indications of his presence. There are people who describe themselves as "religiously tone deaf". The gift of a capacity to perceive God seems as if it is withheld from some. And indeed -- our way of thinking and acting, the mentality of today's world, the whole range of our experience is inclined to deaden our receptivity for God, to make us "tone deaf" towards him. And yet in every soul, the desire for God, the capacity to encounter him, is present, whether in a hidden way or overtly. In order to arrive at this vigilance, this awakening to what is essential, we should pray for ourselves and for others, for those who appear "tone deaf" and yet in whom there is a keen desire for God to manifest himself. The great theologian Origen said this: if I had the grace to see as Paul saw, I could even now (during the Liturgy) contemplate a great host of angels (cf. in Lk 23:9). And indeed, in the sacred liturgy, we are surrounded by the angels of God and the saints. The Lord himself is present in our midst. Lord, open the eyes of our hearts, so that we may become vigilant and clear-sighted, in this way bringing you close to others as well!
Let us return to the Christmas Gospel. It tells us that after listening to the Angel's message, the shepherds said one to another: "‘Let us go over to Bethlehem’ … they went at once" (Lk 2:15f.). "They made haste" is literally what the Greek text says. What had been announced to them was so important that they had to go immediately. In fact, what had been said to them was utterly out of the ordinary. It changed the world. The Saviour is born. The long-awaited Son of David has come into the world in his own city. What could be more important? No doubt they were partly driven by curiosity, but first and foremost it was their excitement at the wonderful news that had been conveyed to them, of all people, to the little ones, to the seemingly unimportant. They made haste -- they went at once. In our daily life, it is not like that.
For most people, the things of God are not given priority, they do not impose themselves on us directly, and so the great majority of us tend to postpone them. First we do what seems urgent here and now. In the list of priorities God is often more or less at the end. We can always deal with that later, we tend to think. The Gospel tells us: God is the highest priority. If anything in our life deserves haste without delay, then, it is God's work alone. The Rule of Saint Benedict contains this teaching: "Place nothing at all before the work of God (i.e. the divine office)". For monks, the Liturgy is the first priority. Everything else comes later. In its essence, though, this saying applies to everyone. God is important, by far the most important thing in our lives. The shepherds teach us this priority. From them we should learn not to be crushed by all the pressing matters in our daily lives. From them we should learn the inner freedom to put other tasks in second place -- however important they may be -- so as to make our way towards God, to allow him into our lives and into our time. Time given to God and, in his name, to our neighbour is never time lost. It is the time when we are most truly alive, when we live our humanity to the full.
Some commentators point out that the shepherds, the simple souls, were the first to come to Jesus in the manger and to encounter the Redeemer of the world. The wise men from the East, representing those with social standing and fame, arrived much later. The commentators go on to say: this is quite natural. The shepherds lived nearby. They only needed to "come over" (cf. Lk 2:15), as we do when we go to visit our neighbours. The wise men, however, lived far away. They had to undertake a long and arduous journey in order to arrive in Bethlehem. And they needed guidance and direction. Today too there are simple and lowly souls who live very close to the Lord. They are, so to speak, his neighbours and they can easily go to see him. But most of us in the world today live far from Jesus Christ, the incarnate God who came to dwell amongst us.
We live our lives by philosophies, amid worldly affairs and occupations that totally absorb us and are a great distance from the manger. In all kinds of ways, God has to prod us and reach out to us again and again, so that we can manage to escape from the muddle of our thoughts and activities and discover the way that leads to him. But a path exists for all of us. The Lord provides everyone with tailor-made signals. He calls each one of us, so that we too can say: "Come on, ‘let us go over’ to Bethlehem -- to the God who has come to meet us. Yes indeed, God has set out towards us. Left to ourselves we could not reach him. The path is too much for our strength. But God has come down. He comes towards us. He has travelled the longer part of the journey. Now he invites us: come and see how much I love you. Come and see that I am here. Transeamus usque Bethlehem, the Latin Bible says. Let us go there! Let us surpass ourselves! Let us journey towards God in all sorts of ways: along our interior path towards him, but also along very concrete paths – the Liturgy of the Church, the service of our neighbour, in whom Christ awaits us.
Let us once again listen directly to the Gospel. The shepherds tell one another the reason why they are setting off: "Let us see this thing that has happened." Literally the Greek text says: "Let us see this Word that has occurred there." Yes indeed, such is the radical newness of this night: the Word can be seen. For it has become flesh. The God of whom no image may be made -- because any image would only diminish, or rather distort him -- this God has himself become visible in the One who is his true image, as Saint Paul puts it (cf. 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). In the figure of Jesus Christ, in the whole of his life and ministry, in his dying and rising, we can see the Word of God and hence the mystery of the living God himself. This is what God is like.
The Angel had said to the shepherds: "This will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger" (Lk 2:12; cf. 2:16). God’s sign, the sign given to the shepherds and to us, is not an astonishing miracle. God’s sign is his humility. God’s sign is that he makes himself small; he becomes a child; he lets us touch him and he asks for our love. How we would prefer a different sign, an imposing, irresistible sign of God’s power and greatness! But his sign summons us to faith and love, and thus it gives us hope: this is what God is like. He has power, he is Goodness itself. He invites us to become like him. Yes indeed, we become like God if we allow ourselves to be shaped by this sign; if we ourselves learn humility and hence true greatness; if we renounce violence and use only the weapons of truth and love.
Origen, taking up one of John the Baptist’s sayings, saw the essence of paganism expressed in the symbol of stones: paganism is a lack of feeling, it means a heart of stone that is incapable of loving and perceiving God’s love. Origen says of the pagans: "Lacking feeling and reason, they are transformed into stones and wood" (in Lk 22:9). Christ, though, wishes to give us a heart of flesh. When we see him, the God who became a child, our hearts are opened. In the Liturgy of the holy night, God comes to us as man, so that we might become truly human. Let us listen once again to Origen: "Indeed, what use would it be to you that Christ once came in the flesh if he did not enter your soul? Let us pray that he may come to us each day, that we may be able to say: I live, yet it is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20)" (in Lk 22:3).
Yes indeed, that is what we should pray for on this Holy Night. Lord Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, come to us! Enter within me, within my soul. Transform me. Renew me. Change me, change us all from stone and wood into living people, in whom your love is made present and the world is transformed. Amen.
Source: http://www.zenit.org/article-27943?l=english
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
"A child is born for us, a son is given to us" (Is 9:5). What Isaiah prophesied as he gazed into the future from afar, consoling Israel amid its trials and its darkness, is now proclaimed to the shepherds as a present reality by the Angel, from whom a cloud of light streams forth: "To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord" (Lk 2:11). The Lord is here. From this moment, God is truly "God with us". No longer is he the distant God who can in some way be perceived from afar, in creation and in our own consciousness. He has entered the world. He is close to us. The words of the risen Christ to his followers are addressed also to us: "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Mt 28:20). For you the Saviour is born: through the Gospel and those who proclaim it, God now reminds us of the message that the Angel announced to the shepherds. It is a message that cannot leave us indifferent. If it is true, it changes everything. If it is true, it also affects me. Like the shepherds, then, I too must say: Come on, I want to go to Bethlehem to see the Word that has occurred there. The story of the shepherds is included in the Gospel for a reason. They show us the right way to respond to the message that we too have received. What is it that these first witnesses of God’s incarnation have to tell us?
The first thing we are told about the shepherds is that they were on the watch -- they could hear the message precisely because they were awake. We must be awake, so that we can hear the message. We must become truly vigilant people. What does this mean? The principal difference between someone dreaming and someone awake is that the dreamer is in a world of his own. His "self" is locked into this dreamworld that is his alone and does not connect him with others. To wake up means to leave that private world of one's own and to enter the common reality, the truth that alone can unite all people. Conflict and lack of reconciliation in the world stem from the fact that we are locked into our own interests and opinions, into our own little private world. Selfishness, both individual and collective, makes us prisoners of our interests and our desires that stand against the truth and separate us from one another.
Awake, the Gospel tells us. Step outside, so as to enter the great communal truth, the communion of the one God. To awake, then, means to develop a receptivity for God: for the silent promptings with which he chooses to guide us; for the many indications of his presence. There are people who describe themselves as "religiously tone deaf". The gift of a capacity to perceive God seems as if it is withheld from some. And indeed -- our way of thinking and acting, the mentality of today's world, the whole range of our experience is inclined to deaden our receptivity for God, to make us "tone deaf" towards him. And yet in every soul, the desire for God, the capacity to encounter him, is present, whether in a hidden way or overtly. In order to arrive at this vigilance, this awakening to what is essential, we should pray for ourselves and for others, for those who appear "tone deaf" and yet in whom there is a keen desire for God to manifest himself. The great theologian Origen said this: if I had the grace to see as Paul saw, I could even now (during the Liturgy) contemplate a great host of angels (cf. in Lk 23:9). And indeed, in the sacred liturgy, we are surrounded by the angels of God and the saints. The Lord himself is present in our midst. Lord, open the eyes of our hearts, so that we may become vigilant and clear-sighted, in this way bringing you close to others as well!
Let us return to the Christmas Gospel. It tells us that after listening to the Angel's message, the shepherds said one to another: "‘Let us go over to Bethlehem’ … they went at once" (Lk 2:15f.). "They made haste" is literally what the Greek text says. What had been announced to them was so important that they had to go immediately. In fact, what had been said to them was utterly out of the ordinary. It changed the world. The Saviour is born. The long-awaited Son of David has come into the world in his own city. What could be more important? No doubt they were partly driven by curiosity, but first and foremost it was their excitement at the wonderful news that had been conveyed to them, of all people, to the little ones, to the seemingly unimportant. They made haste -- they went at once. In our daily life, it is not like that.
For most people, the things of God are not given priority, they do not impose themselves on us directly, and so the great majority of us tend to postpone them. First we do what seems urgent here and now. In the list of priorities God is often more or less at the end. We can always deal with that later, we tend to think. The Gospel tells us: God is the highest priority. If anything in our life deserves haste without delay, then, it is God's work alone. The Rule of Saint Benedict contains this teaching: "Place nothing at all before the work of God (i.e. the divine office)". For monks, the Liturgy is the first priority. Everything else comes later. In its essence, though, this saying applies to everyone. God is important, by far the most important thing in our lives. The shepherds teach us this priority. From them we should learn not to be crushed by all the pressing matters in our daily lives. From them we should learn the inner freedom to put other tasks in second place -- however important they may be -- so as to make our way towards God, to allow him into our lives and into our time. Time given to God and, in his name, to our neighbour is never time lost. It is the time when we are most truly alive, when we live our humanity to the full.
Some commentators point out that the shepherds, the simple souls, were the first to come to Jesus in the manger and to encounter the Redeemer of the world. The wise men from the East, representing those with social standing and fame, arrived much later. The commentators go on to say: this is quite natural. The shepherds lived nearby. They only needed to "come over" (cf. Lk 2:15), as we do when we go to visit our neighbours. The wise men, however, lived far away. They had to undertake a long and arduous journey in order to arrive in Bethlehem. And they needed guidance and direction. Today too there are simple and lowly souls who live very close to the Lord. They are, so to speak, his neighbours and they can easily go to see him. But most of us in the world today live far from Jesus Christ, the incarnate God who came to dwell amongst us.
We live our lives by philosophies, amid worldly affairs and occupations that totally absorb us and are a great distance from the manger. In all kinds of ways, God has to prod us and reach out to us again and again, so that we can manage to escape from the muddle of our thoughts and activities and discover the way that leads to him. But a path exists for all of us. The Lord provides everyone with tailor-made signals. He calls each one of us, so that we too can say: "Come on, ‘let us go over’ to Bethlehem -- to the God who has come to meet us. Yes indeed, God has set out towards us. Left to ourselves we could not reach him. The path is too much for our strength. But God has come down. He comes towards us. He has travelled the longer part of the journey. Now he invites us: come and see how much I love you. Come and see that I am here. Transeamus usque Bethlehem, the Latin Bible says. Let us go there! Let us surpass ourselves! Let us journey towards God in all sorts of ways: along our interior path towards him, but also along very concrete paths – the Liturgy of the Church, the service of our neighbour, in whom Christ awaits us.
Let us once again listen directly to the Gospel. The shepherds tell one another the reason why they are setting off: "Let us see this thing that has happened." Literally the Greek text says: "Let us see this Word that has occurred there." Yes indeed, such is the radical newness of this night: the Word can be seen. For it has become flesh. The God of whom no image may be made -- because any image would only diminish, or rather distort him -- this God has himself become visible in the One who is his true image, as Saint Paul puts it (cf. 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). In the figure of Jesus Christ, in the whole of his life and ministry, in his dying and rising, we can see the Word of God and hence the mystery of the living God himself. This is what God is like.
The Angel had said to the shepherds: "This will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger" (Lk 2:12; cf. 2:16). God’s sign, the sign given to the shepherds and to us, is not an astonishing miracle. God’s sign is his humility. God’s sign is that he makes himself small; he becomes a child; he lets us touch him and he asks for our love. How we would prefer a different sign, an imposing, irresistible sign of God’s power and greatness! But his sign summons us to faith and love, and thus it gives us hope: this is what God is like. He has power, he is Goodness itself. He invites us to become like him. Yes indeed, we become like God if we allow ourselves to be shaped by this sign; if we ourselves learn humility and hence true greatness; if we renounce violence and use only the weapons of truth and love.
Origen, taking up one of John the Baptist’s sayings, saw the essence of paganism expressed in the symbol of stones: paganism is a lack of feeling, it means a heart of stone that is incapable of loving and perceiving God’s love. Origen says of the pagans: "Lacking feeling and reason, they are transformed into stones and wood" (in Lk 22:9). Christ, though, wishes to give us a heart of flesh. When we see him, the God who became a child, our hearts are opened. In the Liturgy of the holy night, God comes to us as man, so that we might become truly human. Let us listen once again to Origen: "Indeed, what use would it be to you that Christ once came in the flesh if he did not enter your soul? Let us pray that he may come to us each day, that we may be able to say: I live, yet it is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20)" (in Lk 22:3).
Yes indeed, that is what we should pray for on this Holy Night. Lord Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, come to us! Enter within me, within my soul. Transform me. Renew me. Change me, change us all from stone and wood into living people, in whom your love is made present and the world is transformed. Amen.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Philosophical Musings
William Rowe, in Can God be Free? (2004), gives us three propositions
A) There necessarily exists an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good being who has created a world.
B) If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world that it could have created, then it is possible that there exists a being morally better than it.
C) For any creatable world there is a better creatable world. (pg. 120)
If B and C are true, then A is false. We don't want that. C looks plausible to me so I will not dispute it. I know there are those who would have no problem of denying C and argue that there is a best possible world but God does not have to create that one. Again, this looks intuitively false to me. It seems to me that if there is a best possible world, God, if He were to create, should choose that one. But if this is true, then if He were to create, He would have no freedom to choose any other world. God is not free. Now, I do think we can avoid C by arguing that there is a best possible set of worlds and that set consists of an infinite number of worlds. So God is free to choose from that set. That seems to get rid of that problem.
But let's suppose that C is true. Is B true? Rowe says,
For suppose a being selects a world W1 to create when there is a better world W2 it could have created instead. Surely it is logically possible that there be a being whose degree of moral goodness is such that when confronted with worlds W1 and W2, either of which it has the power to create, it will choose to create W2, the better world. And this would then be a better being than the being whose degree of goodness permitted it to select the less good world to create when it could have easily created the better world. (pg. 112)
It's a good argument but I think we can reject Rowe's principle. Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne, "Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding" (2003), argued that when we are dealing with a finite case, we are to pick the most dominant option. For example, if I have a choice of finitely many outfits to impress an honorable person, the rational thing to do is to choose the best outfit to wear. However, this does not work when it comes to infinite options. They argued,
Whenever one has no best option, there is no univocal answer to the question, "What should I do?" Suppose, for instance, that God offers to let you live any finite time of your choosing. Assuming that your utility is an increasing bounded function of the length of your life, there is no answer to the question: what life-span should you choose? Where there is a lowest upper bound on your utility, one could perhaps give useful vague guideline: pick a large number. By picking a large number, you can come very close to the lowest upper bound on your utility. So you should pick a very large number...In addition to the normative issue, there is something of a motivational puzzle here. What exactly would cause you to ask for one lifespan rather than another? But this puzzle is nothing new. We are already used to the idea that, pace Buridan, an ass confronted with equally attractive bales of hay will go to one of them rather than die of indecision. (16-17)
Now, suppose we take A/E/H's example of Satan cutting an apple into infinitely many pieces labeled by natural numbers. Eve may take whatever piece she wants. If she takes a finite amount of pieces, then she does not suffer. If she takes infinitely many of the pieces, then she is expelled from the garden. Her first priority is to stay in the garden and her second is to eat as many pieces as she can. Satan reasons she should eat the first apple because if she takes the first one, it is a finite number and she will not be thrown out of the garden. Even if she takes an infinite amount, she will still enjoy eating the pieces so she should definitely take apply #1. But Satan reasons the same way for #2, #3, ad infinitum. Of course if she accepts them all, she will be thrown out of the garden. Yet, as A/H/E have argued, the rational thing for Eve to do is to take a very large finite number of pieces.
Now, suppose in W5 Eve is the most rational human person in that world and the most rational she can get. In W5, she is put in the situation with Satan. She picks 4340 pieces although she could have picked 4341. Is she at fault? It seems that she is not. Could she be more rational if she picked 4341? Again, no. Is it possible that there is a more rational person than her? No. It seems that we cannot judge her degree of rationality by simply seeing how many pieces they picked. At the very least, we cannot judge whether there is a person more rational than her by simply looking at the choice she made. The reader can see how this can be applied to Rowe's argument. Rowe argued that the Expressive Thesis, the goodness of an agent's actions is expressive of the agent's goodness, is related to B (pg. 100). However, because there are an infinite number of possible worlds, this gives us the ability to see that the expressive thesis cannot be applied to God creating a world. The expressive thesis, like the dominant option theory, might be applicable to finite choices, but not necessarily to infinite choices. For example, Billy and Sally see that there are an infinite number of people drowning. There is a machine where they can press a number and an angel would save them from drowning. The machine can only accept a finite number. Billy pressed 8245 and Sally 8643. But Billy is very much like St. Francis of Assisi and Sally is a known murderer. Here we see that Sally is not morally better than Billy because she saved more people. We cannot reduce moral goodness by the action of the person. So, if God creates W456 and He could have created a better world, He is not at fault for creating W456.
The other ideas that came to my mind were
1) Worlds may be incommensurable. W1 has a lot of justice and W2 has a lot prudence. Which is better?
2) One can grant that B is true, that it is possible that there is a being better than that being. But how is that incompatible with A? We can reply this way: it’s true that there may be a being better than God. But that would be God. So in W1 God is unsurpassable. Now, in W2 there is a being that is better than God. But that’s God. I think K. Kraay makes that point.
3) It could be that A is wrong. God is contingent. Not contingent in the medieval sense, but contingent in the sense that there may be a possible world where God does not exist. But that doesn’t take anything away from God. God is still unsurpassable when it comes to benevolence, power, etc. It’s just that He does not exist in all possible worlds. The problem of this, of course, is that if the principle of sufficient reason is true, then this won't work.
William Rowe, in Can God be Free? (2004), gives us three propositions
A) There necessarily exists an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good being who has created a world.
B) If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world that it could have created, then it is possible that there exists a being morally better than it.
C) For any creatable world there is a better creatable world. (pg. 120)
If B and C are true, then A is false. We don't want that. C looks plausible to me so I will not dispute it. I know there are those who would have no problem of denying C and argue that there is a best possible world but God does not have to create that one. Again, this looks intuitively false to me. It seems to me that if there is a best possible world, God, if He were to create, should choose that one. But if this is true, then if He were to create, He would have no freedom to choose any other world. God is not free. Now, I do think we can avoid C by arguing that there is a best possible set of worlds and that set consists of an infinite number of worlds. So God is free to choose from that set. That seems to get rid of that problem.
But let's suppose that C is true. Is B true? Rowe says,
For suppose a being selects a world W1 to create when there is a better world W2 it could have created instead. Surely it is logically possible that there be a being whose degree of moral goodness is such that when confronted with worlds W1 and W2, either of which it has the power to create, it will choose to create W2, the better world. And this would then be a better being than the being whose degree of goodness permitted it to select the less good world to create when it could have easily created the better world. (pg. 112)
It's a good argument but I think we can reject Rowe's principle. Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne, "Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding" (2003), argued that when we are dealing with a finite case, we are to pick the most dominant option. For example, if I have a choice of finitely many outfits to impress an honorable person, the rational thing to do is to choose the best outfit to wear. However, this does not work when it comes to infinite options. They argued,
Whenever one has no best option, there is no univocal answer to the question, "What should I do?" Suppose, for instance, that God offers to let you live any finite time of your choosing. Assuming that your utility is an increasing bounded function of the length of your life, there is no answer to the question: what life-span should you choose? Where there is a lowest upper bound on your utility, one could perhaps give useful vague guideline: pick a large number. By picking a large number, you can come very close to the lowest upper bound on your utility. So you should pick a very large number...In addition to the normative issue, there is something of a motivational puzzle here. What exactly would cause you to ask for one lifespan rather than another? But this puzzle is nothing new. We are already used to the idea that, pace Buridan, an ass confronted with equally attractive bales of hay will go to one of them rather than die of indecision. (16-17)
Now, suppose we take A/E/H's example of Satan cutting an apple into infinitely many pieces labeled by natural numbers. Eve may take whatever piece she wants. If she takes a finite amount of pieces, then she does not suffer. If she takes infinitely many of the pieces, then she is expelled from the garden. Her first priority is to stay in the garden and her second is to eat as many pieces as she can. Satan reasons she should eat the first apple because if she takes the first one, it is a finite number and she will not be thrown out of the garden. Even if she takes an infinite amount, she will still enjoy eating the pieces so she should definitely take apply #1. But Satan reasons the same way for #2, #3, ad infinitum. Of course if she accepts them all, she will be thrown out of the garden. Yet, as A/H/E have argued, the rational thing for Eve to do is to take a very large finite number of pieces.
Now, suppose in W5 Eve is the most rational human person in that world and the most rational she can get. In W5, she is put in the situation with Satan. She picks 4340 pieces although she could have picked 4341. Is she at fault? It seems that she is not. Could she be more rational if she picked 4341? Again, no. Is it possible that there is a more rational person than her? No. It seems that we cannot judge her degree of rationality by simply seeing how many pieces they picked. At the very least, we cannot judge whether there is a person more rational than her by simply looking at the choice she made. The reader can see how this can be applied to Rowe's argument. Rowe argued that the Expressive Thesis, the goodness of an agent's actions is expressive of the agent's goodness, is related to B (pg. 100). However, because there are an infinite number of possible worlds, this gives us the ability to see that the expressive thesis cannot be applied to God creating a world. The expressive thesis, like the dominant option theory, might be applicable to finite choices, but not necessarily to infinite choices. For example, Billy and Sally see that there are an infinite number of people drowning. There is a machine where they can press a number and an angel would save them from drowning. The machine can only accept a finite number. Billy pressed 8245 and Sally 8643. But Billy is very much like St. Francis of Assisi and Sally is a known murderer. Here we see that Sally is not morally better than Billy because she saved more people. We cannot reduce moral goodness by the action of the person. So, if God creates W456 and He could have created a better world, He is not at fault for creating W456.
The other ideas that came to my mind were
1) Worlds may be incommensurable. W1 has a lot of justice and W2 has a lot prudence. Which is better?
2) One can grant that B is true, that it is possible that there is a being better than that being. But how is that incompatible with A? We can reply this way: it’s true that there may be a being better than God. But that would be God. So in W1 God is unsurpassable. Now, in W2 there is a being that is better than God. But that’s God. I think K. Kraay makes that point.
3) It could be that A is wrong. God is contingent. Not contingent in the medieval sense, but contingent in the sense that there may be a possible world where God does not exist. But that doesn’t take anything away from God. God is still unsurpassable when it comes to benevolence, power, etc. It’s just that He does not exist in all possible worlds. The problem of this, of course, is that if the principle of sufficient reason is true, then this won't work.
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