Everyone admits that pain is educational:  Since I feel agony when I put my hand into the fire, I don’t do it again.  Curiously, we are much more reluctant to admit that there is such a thing as natural disgust, and disgust is educational too.  St. John Chrysostom makes this point exactly in his Homily on First Timothy:

“Food is called nourishment, to show that its design is not to injure the body, but to nourish it.  For this reason perhaps food passes into excrement, that we may not be lovers of luxury.  For if it were not so, if it were not useless and injurious to the body, we should not cease from devouring one another.  If the belly received as much as it pleased, digested it, and conveyed it to the body, we should see wars and battles innumerable.  Even now when part of our food passes into ordure, part into blood, part into spurious and useless phlegm, we are nevertheless so addicted to luxury, that we spend perhaps whole estates on a meal.  What should we not do, if this were not the end of luxury?  …

“Some have strangely complained, wondering why God has ordained that we should bear a load of ordure with us.  But they themselves increase the load.  God designed thus to detach us from luxury, and to persuade us not to attach ourselves to worldly things.”

The passage was called to my attention by my friend Daniel Mattson, who blogs at Letters to Christopher.  I won’t say more about the passage here because I don’t want to encroach on Dan’s own insights about it, which he will be discussing in a book he is writing for Ignatius Press.

The Other Side Almost Agrees with Me

Worth noting is the fact that many pro-abortion writers come very close to agreeing with me.  One pro-abortion journalist quotes a pro-abortion counselor as commenting, "I am not confident even now, with abortion so widely used, that women feel it's OK to want an abortion without feeling guilty.  They say, 'Am I some sort of monster that I feel all right about this?'"   The counselor’s statement is very revealing.  Plainly, if a woman has guilty feelings for not having guilty feelings about deliberately taking innocent human life, sheer moral ignorance is not a good explanation.

In fact, the phenomenon of moral denial is taken for granted even by many people who commerce in abortion.  However – chillingly -- they regard denial as good.  One of the physicians involved in the clinical trials of the abortion pill remarked, "I think there are people who want to be in denial about whether it's really an abortion or not.  I think that's fine .... For some people that's a very useful denial and more power to them if they have to use that not to have an unwanted child."  The authors of the article, who are strongly pro-abortion, seem to agree:  "Indeed, denial may be considered a form of agency,” they write, “in that it enables women who are troubled about abortion to get through the experience more easily."[18]

Needless to say, even if everyone really does know that deliberately taking innocent human life is wrong, it does not follow that everyone knows the rest of the general moral principles as well.  So I do not claim to have proven St. Thomas’s claim that the general moral principles are all “the same for all as to knowledge.”  But I think I have made it plausible.

Notes

18.  Simonds, ibid., pp. 1318-1319.

Link to Part 12 of 14

Mondays are always for replying to letters from readers.  I’ve paraphrased this letter for brevity.

Question:

After we gave her some books about Greek and Roman mythology, one of our young relatives reasoned that believing in the God of Christianity is like believing in the gods of the Greeks or Romans.  According to her, since we no longer believe in those gods, we shouldn’t believe in our God either.  How would you reply?

Reply:

Comparing the mythological gods of the Greeks and Romans with the God of Christianity is like comparing beats with beets, or bells with belles -- they aren’t even “gods” in the same sense of the term.  Your young relative might reasonably have asked her question about how Mormons think of God (I say this with respect; Mormons work hard at being good people).  But it has no application to how Christians think of God.

The mythological gods were contingent beings like you and me.  They didn’t have to exist; something caused them to exist.  But the true God as Christians understand Him exists necessarily.  He can’t not be.

The mythological gods existed in the same way that you exist.  They just had more of everything.  But God is the Being above all beings.  He is the answer to the question of why there is something and not rather nothing – why anything at all exists apart from Him.

The mythological gods were products of human imagination.  But the reality of God was worked out even by the pagan philosophers, in explicit opposition to what they called the “lies of the poets.”

The answer to your question was brilliantly put by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in his book Introduction to Christianity:

“The early Christian proclamation of the Gospel and the early Christian faith found themselves once again [like the Jews] in an environment teeming with gods …. Wherever the question arose to which god the Christian God corresponded, Zeus perhaps or Hermes or Dionysus or some other god, the answer ran: to none of them.  To none of the gods to whom you pray but solely and alone to him to whom you do not pray, to that highest being of whom your philosophers speak.  The early Church resolutely put aside the whole cosmos of the ancient religions, regarding the whole of it as deceit and illusion, and explained its faith by saying:  When we say God, we do not mean or worship any of this; we mean only Being itself, what the philosophers have exposed as the ground of all being, as the God above all powers -- that alone is our God.  … The choice thus made meant opting for the logos as against any kind of myth; it meant the definitive demythologization of the world and of religion.

“… Of course, the other side of the picture must not be overlooked.  By deciding in favor of the God of the philosophers and logically declaring this God to be the God who speaks to man and to whom one can pray, the Christian faith gave a completely new significance to this God of the philosophers, removing him from the purely academic realm and thus profoundly transforming him.  This God who had previously existed as something neutral, as the highest, culminating concept; this God who had been understood as pure Being or pure thought, circling round for ever closed in upon itself without reaching over to man and his little world; this God of the philosophers, whose pure eternity and unchangeability had excluded any relation with the changeable and transitory, now appeared to the eye of faith as the God of men, who is not only thought of all thoughts, the eternal mathematics of the universe, but also agape, the power of creative love.”

One sometimes hears otherwise faithful persons say that although they never speak to their friends about their faith, they try to live in such a way that their lives will be a witness to the Gospel.

A bogus quote from St. Francis of Assissi is often used in support of this idea.  No, he did not say “Always preach the Gospel, and when necessary, use words.”

The problem with the idea of being so good that words become unnecessary is that none of us are that good.

Even if we were that good, our friends would need words to know what accounted for the fact.

Besides, our witness rests not on our virtue, but on the mercy of the God who suffered as Man what we deserved.

Christ used words.  Wouldn’t it be strange if our lives were better witnesses than His?

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If you’ve read the Iliad, then you know that whenever the Greeks weren’t fighting, they were wrangling about women, sacrificing to the gods, boasting, feeling sorry for themselves, eating barbecue, or competing athletically.  One of the most popular competitions was racing.  The impromptu racecourse always had an outbound and an inbound leg, like an inverted U.  Contestants dashed for a designated tree or rock, rounded it, and returned to the starting line.

Aristotle used this inverted U as a metaphor for the path of human reasoning.  First we reason up to first principles; that’s the outbound leg of the race.  Then we reason down from first principles to more detailed conclusions; that’s the inbound leg.

In disciplines like geometry, we traverse the outbound leg so quickly that we hardly notice doing so; we assent to the axioms almost instantly.  But imagine a dull student for whom assent doesn’t come quite so easily.  Though the axioms are evident in themselves, they aren’t yet evident to him.  “Teacher, why does the whole have to be greater than the part?  Couldn’t be less sometimes?  And why do two things equal to a third thing have to be equal to each other?  Couldn’t they be unequal now and then?”

The teacher can’t prove the axioms to the boy, because there are no deeper axioms to prove them from.  That’s the whole point of first principles.  But there may be other ways to help the boy assent.  The teacher might draw pictures.  He might give examples.  He might show some of the absurd results of assuming the axioms to be false.  Eventually the boy gets it.  The axioms click, and he assents.

John Henry Newman called this outbound mode of reasoning, so different from formal logic, the “grammar of assent.”  Though we hardly give it thought in geometry, in theology and ethics it is almost the whole action.  Even in skeptical times like our own, it is rare to find anyone who refuses assent to geometrical axioms.  But about the first principles of ethics, people argue.  “Teacher, why is it wrong to do gratuitous harm to my neighbor?  Why not just do as I want?”

This sort of difficulty arises not just among dull students, but even – and especially – among the most powerful and intelligent people in our culture.  Scholars, jurists, and other agents of culture openly avow that there is no such thing as intrinsic evil; that moral distinctions are the product of irrational animus; that the end justifies the means; that since truth is whatever works, successful lies aren’t lies; and that the weak have less claim on our protection than the strong.  Their assumption is “If a first principle isn’t evident to me, then it can’t be evident in itself.”  Thus, to refute a first principle, all I have to do is –- deny it.  This is the grammar of dissent.

Why is the grammar of dissent more troublesome in ethics than in geometry?  I think it would be just as prominent in geometry, if geometry presented us with equally strong motives for defending what is obviously false.  Not many people have vested interests in trying to show that two things equal to a third thing aren’t really equal to each other.  But a lot of people have vested interests in trying to show that their lies are really truths, or their injustices are really just.  To put it another way, we aren’t dealing with honest confusion, but with dishonest confusion – with error that is motivated by corruption.

And why is the grammar of dissent more prominent at the highest strata of the culture?  Since power wakens such great temptations to do wrong, it generates equally great yearnings to justify doing wrong.  Those who have not only power but intelligence are more skillful at making up excuses.  Intelligence is a gift -- but never confuse being smart with having wisdom.