Bulletin:  My Commentary on Thomas

Aquinas’s Treatise on Law is back in stock.

Considering what a fetish people make these days of being able to do what they want, it’s amazing how helpless they think they are.

“I know he’s bad for me, but what can I do?  I’m in love.”  The best thing is not to get into that situation in the first place.  “But I can’t help who I fall in love with.”  Of course you can.

People fall in love with people they spend time with.  So don’t associate with persons who are bad for you and then be surprised when you fall in love.  Instead, associate with persons who are good for you.  You will eventually fall in love with one of them.

Here’s the catch.  The sort of person who can be good for you is the sort who is good for other people in general.  To attract that kind of person, you have to be one.  In fact, even to be attracted to that kind of person, you have to be one.

Becoming that kind of person takes a long time.  So don’t wait until you meet one.  Get started now.

Tomorrow:  How to Raise Poltroons

Mondays, as always, are for questions from students.

Question:

I have been educated to take the naturalistic fallacy seriously, even though I thought it was a bit of bunk, because some smart and good men espouse it.  You write in both popular and specialist venues.  In one of your more popular articles, I notice you make short shrift of the fallacy.  Do you treat it briefly because you consider it a simple, albeit serious, mistake, or just because of the audience?  If it is really simple, then why do those smart and good men err?

Reply:

Like you, I was educated to believe that deriving an is from an ought is invalid.  Just because so much has been written about why this “naturalistic fallacy” is not a fallacy, by thinkers like Peter Geach, Ralph McInerny, Anthony Lisska, and Robert Koons, I don’t think I need to explain at great length.  I’ve also found that sometimes saying too much obscures the point rather than clarifying it, no matter what the venue.  But I do think the error is simple.

Yes, some smart and good thinkers espouse it.  We all commit many errors; they would say I am committing one now.  In general, to attain a single insight, one must unlearn a dozen mistakes.  I say a dozen, but that’s if one is lucky.

It seems to me that “Is does not entail ought” is a claim about ontology, disguised as a claim about logic.  I can’t see why anyone should accept it unless he denies that things have real moral properties.  In that case he will say that is statements describe facts, ought statements express attitudes toward facts, and nothing about the facts could ever make any attitudes unfitting.

But this is absurd.  “Seeing is the function of the eye” is an is statement.  But to assert it is to hold that eyes that see well are good eyes, and eyes that see poorly are bad eyes.  And since “good” means what ought to be furthered, we ought to help bad eyes see better.

Again, “Arsenic is a poison” is an is statement.  But to assert it is to hold that arsenic injures the natural good of health.  And since evil means what ought to be avoided, we ought to keep arsenic off our tables.

Christian Smith helpfully remarks, “the descriptive observation is first made that is and ought belong to different orders, from which is then derived the normative injunction that we should keep them separate.  But if we really cannot get an ought from an is, where did that injunction come from?”

Tomorrow:   What Can I Do?  I'm in Love

Feminism is the ideology that little boys must be like little girls and adult women must be like adult men.

Tomorrow:  Is and Ought

For new readers:

Introduction to the blog (2013)

A purely ahistorical view of natural law is certainly possible.  Christians, however, view our unchanging human nature in the light of salvation history – Creation, Fall, Redemption.  How can something unchanging have a history?  The answer is that although our nature does not change in itself, its condition can certainly change, and it does.

Man was created in the condition of “original justice,” a condition of friendship with his Creator, in which he was also in harmony with his own nature, with his fellows, and with the rest of creation.  Original sin is the loss of original justice – not friendship, but alienation from our Creator.  The result of this loss is a habitual tendency to disorder, which afflicts human nature in much the same way that sickness afflicts the human body.  Just as sickness makes the body a stranger to health, so original sin makes the soul a stranger to integrity; it destroys the original harmony and equilibrium that characterized our original condition.  Once the harmony of original justice has been ruined, the various powers of the soul, which were formerly held in balance by reason, push us in different and even opposite ways.  Each power of our nature turns away from the supreme and eternal good, God, toward lesser and changeable goods.  At bottom, the disorder of our desires is nothing but this turning away.  Specific disordered desires, such as lust, are only its manifestations.

But this turning away manifests itself in other ways too.  Because reason is no longer properly ordered toward truth, we suffer ignorance; because the will is no longer properly ordered toward the good, we suffer malice, which is the desire for what is evil because it seems to us good; because what is called the concupiscible appetite is no longer properly ordered toward “delectable” goods, we suffer concupiscence; and because what is called the irascible appetite is no longer properly ordered toward “arduous” goods, we suffer weakness.  These consequences are called the “wounds” of sin.

If reason is truly sovereign, then one might ask how it is possible for the appetites and emotions to be insubordinate to reason in the first place.  The answer lies in how reason exercises its sovereignty.  Borrowing an analogy from Aristotle, St. Thomas says reason commands the lower powers not by a “despotic sovereignty,” the way slaves are commanded by their master, but by a “royal and political sovereignty,” the way free men are ruled by their governor.  Even though they are subject to his rule, they “have in some respects a will of their own,” so that they can resist his commands.

Although the sin of our first parents did not take away our original nature and give us a different nature, a "sin nature," as some people mistakenly suppose, it is easy to see how this error arises.  As we have said, original justice was a gift of grace to human nature, superadded to the principles that God built into it, and original sin is the deprivation of this gift.  Although man has not literally lost his nature, the disharmony, dislocation, and disequilibrium that result from the deprivation of original justice are "like a second nature."  Yet even so, St. Thomas comments, "sin cannot entirely take away from man the fact that he is a rational being, for then he would no longer be capable of sin.  Wherefore it is not possible for this good of nature to be destroyed entirely.”

The doctrine of original sin helps to understand a great many things about us that would otherwise be puzzling:  For example, why is it so hard to do what we see that we ought to do, and avoid what we see we should avoid?

It also reminds us of a fundamental difference between the way Christians reason about natural law, and the way pagans and secularists reason about it.  Although the pagan can theorize about human nature and its laws, he is at a grave disadvantage in understanding them.  Just because he does not know about original justice and original sin, he is apt to think that our disharmonious, dislocated, disequilibrated state is our normal state -- that original sin is our original condition.  At the level of those deep intuitions that are expressed in myths of primal ruin, even he senses that something is wrong with us, that something is not as it should be.  Yet at the level of theory, he does not know what to make of these intuitions.  For though he may know all about the present human condition, he lacks the history of how its disorder came to be – and of how it can be remedied by grace.

This concludes the series on natural law and original sin.

Tomorrow:  Attempt at a Definition (no, of something else)

Though sin dreadfully thwarts the fulfillment of the principles by which our nature operates, not even sin can obliterate them.  Our nature, though wounded, persists.

St. Thomas Aquinas explains with a pair of analogies.  The first of these is the effect of clouds on glass.  A transparent body has an inclination or readiness to receive light, from the very fact that it is transparent.  Yet although this readiness always remains rooted in its nature, it is diminished by clouds which get in the way of the sun.  In the same way, although we have a naturally inclination to virtue, sin diminishes it, not by destroying our nature, its root, but by impeding our nature from achieving its end.  This can go on and on, because even if man goes on adding sin to sin, his nature, which is the root of the inclination to virtue, remains.

Lest anyone misunderstand the first analogy and underestimate the seriousness of sin, St. Thomas’s second analogy is blindness.  Even in a congenitally blind man, the potentiality for sight is still naturally present in the sense that he is an animal of a sort which is naturally endowed with sight.  Yet this aptitude is not actualized or fulfilled in him, because something has prevented the proper formation of the eye.  In the same day, the natural inclination to virtue persists even in the lost.  If it didn’t, they would not suffer the remorse of conscience. However, the inclination to sin is not actualized in them because they have been deprived of grace by divine justice.

The fact that not even sin can obliterate the inclination to adhere to God's law may seem comforting.  It isn't, for what it really means that the wicked man is divided not only against God, but against himself.  This division begins right now, in the present life.

St. Thomas argues that because the wrongdoer disturbs three different orders -- his own reason, human law, and Divine law -- so he receives a threefold punishment, one inflicted by himself, one by man, and one by God.  The one which he inflicts on himself, remorse of conscience, is united to the one which is inflicted by God, the withdrawal of His presence, because conscience is the interior testimony to God's law.  Whenever a man acts against conscience, "he has by this very fact decided not to observe the law of God."

Tomorrow:  Part 3