When sound eschatology is denied, rather than evaporating, it spills.  The Church has had long experience with diverted spiritual longings and spilled eschatology.  The older forms have included worship of the ruler, adoration of the nation or race, and ecstatic devotion to the power of government.  But newer and stranger manifestations of spilled eschatology are even now appearing on the horizon.

Perhaps the most bizarre example is the argument of Tulane University physicist Frank J. Tipler that through the advance of science, intelligent species will literally evolve into God.  The idea that dependent being could turn into absolute Being is so muddled that one hardly knows how to argue with it, yet arguments of this sort are taken seriously by serious people. 

If we are searching for common moral ground with people, it may seem impudent to drag in something so plainly not common ground as eschatology.  Aren’t things like that better left unmentioned?  Don’t they lie beyond the province of natural reason?  Yes, but that doesn’t mean we can avoid it.

To see why we can’t, consider the contrast between two impulses embedded in human nature, the mere love of self and the impulse toward transcendence.  Those who do not know what their nature is cannot love themselves properly; those who do not know what the object of transcendence is cannot hope properly.  Yet there is a difference, for the knowledge of human nature is accessible apart from revelation, but the knowledge of the object of transcendence is not accessible apart from revelation; the longing we harbor is a ghostly natural preparation for the supernatural virtue of hope.

Unfulfilled longing for transcendence drives otherwise reasonable people either to despair or to false objects of transcendence, bewitching sirens that lure them to destruction.  When the craving grows desperate enough, people lose interest in merely natural things.  Their ears are full of the rush of their blood.  They cannot hear us.

The paradox, then, is that not all of the questions that vex dialogue about natural law are contained within natural law.  On one hand, the reality of natural law can be grasped by every person of good will; on the other hand, apart from grace its contours seem cloudy, and the stirrings it awakens may madden us.  Natural lawyers have scarcely begun to think about problems like this.

Tomorrow:  What Self-Deception Is and Isn’t

Every honest college teacher – at least every one who has been around long enough to judge -- knows that teaching, really teaching, is getting more and more difficult.  One reason is the prolongation of adolescence, which I discussed yesterday.  But there are others.

For example, even intelligent students have lost the reading habit.  Recently – a common complaint -- a student protested that one of my courses assigned “so much reading,” with the phrase “so much” doubly underlined.  Yet in that particular course he was rarely expected to read more than thirty pages a week.

An even bigger reason why teaching is harder than it used to be is the spread of the practice of having students rate their professors, with the results used as a factor in salary and promotion.  Empirical research shows pretty conclusively that most students evaluate their teachers not according to how much they learned, but according to whether the assignments were easy, the lectures were entertaining, and the grading was relaxed.  Is it difficult to fathom why college courses are turning into fluff?  One of my students commented that although he had written essays in other courses, “This was the first time I’ve had to use arguments.”

Yet every semester, I am encouraged to find that it is still possible to get something across.

I administer a questionnaire of my own devising, which is different than the required rate-your-teacher survey.  One item on my questionnaire remarks that the ideal of the liberal arts is to liberate us to reflect on the permanent goods and persisting concerns of human life.  Then it asks, “In what way, if any, do you consider yourself most deficient in what you may need to reflect more deeply and rationally on these matters?”

A student in one of my courses responded last year that he was trying to “let go of his relativist tendencies” and remarked that his greatest difficulty lay in considering the question, “Are these values my values because they are true and good, or because they let me do what I want?”

Since the questionnaire is anonymous, I don’t know how much he had learned about Augustine, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas.  But if that was all he learned about himself, I’d say that he did pretty well.

Tomorrow:  Spilled Eschatology

If we think of adolescence as the span of time between the biological readiness to begin a family and the moral readiness to assume its responsibilities, it might seem that it should be rather short -- a brief and expectant walk down the corridor between the childhood and maturity.  Until recently it was; adolescence as such is not new, but adolescence as we know it is historically novel.

Think of a time when the interval between puberty and marriage was much shorter than today.  Most people worked the land, but great age is not needed to farm.  Other young men of common birth apprenticed at trades or went into commerce.  Those of higher birth sometimes acquired various kinds of learning, but not usually at universities.  Those who did matriculate at universities were few in number, often began when much younger than students today, and were frequently destined for holy orders, which meant, not marriage, but celibacy.  Adolescence, as we know it, barely existed; people passed rather more quickly from childhood to adulthood, and did not expect an extended period of play in between.  Various rituals dramatized the admission of the young person into the adult community.  That society had problems of its own -- but a long interval between the readiness to marry and the entrance into matrimony was not one of them.

Something has happened.  In the first place, the age of puberty is dropping all over the world.  No one knows why, although guesses abound.  One theory blames it on persistent organic pollutants -- chemicals which mimic estrogen, released by human activities into the environment.  Another blames it on what might be called persistent cultural pollutants -- the unavoidable and unremitting deluge of sexual stimulation in words, sounds, and images.  Still others blame it merely on better nutrition, although it is hard to see why having sufficient food should be maladaptive.

In the second place, as the age of puberty drops, the age of marriage rises.  Though some of the reasons are obscure, not all of them are.  Many lines of work require more training than of old; that is plain enough.  More puzzling is that apprenticeships have died out, and most training has been exported from the workplace to the school -- where students earn no wages.  Schools, in the meantime, have become incompetent, so that the time necessary to learn anything takes much longer than it ought to.  What once was taught in secondary school now waits for college; what once was taught in college now waits for graduate school.  And let us not forget how much sheer junk is taught, just to provide the teacher with a job.  The result is a long period of economic dependence.

Apologists for late marriage consider it good because human beings do not reach full maturity until their mid-twenties.  "To marry before this," said the late John R.W. Stott, "runs the risk of finding yourself at twenty-five married to somebody who was a very different person at the age of twenty."  Stott was a wise man from whom much could be learned, and I am loath to differ with him.  Certainly people should not marry until they are mature.  But although the rate of human neurological development seems to be fixed, the rate of maturation is not exactly the same thing.  In particular, the age at which people are mature enough to take on the responsibilities of marriage is not a constant; it depends in part on when we do marry, and in part on when we are expected to.  If today people are not ready to marry and begin families until twenty-five -- or thirty -- or thirty-five -- then our first question ought to be "Why aren't they?"  Are they less grown up than they used to be?  Do corrupted understandings of marriage make it more difficult than it used to be?  Both, one suspects.

We should also pause to remember how maturity is attained.  Men and women do not first become mature, and then accept responsibilities; it is through accepting responsibilities that they become mature.  Responsibility itself transforms them, the marital responsibility even more than most others.  Matrimony and childbearing shatter, reassemble, and fuse the man and woman into a single organism with two personalities.  If you marry at twenty, then you ought to be very different persons at twenty-five -- and you ought to have changed hand in hand.  Unfortunately, the older we become, the harder it is to yield to the transformation; the more we have changed by ourselves, the harder it is for us to change together.

The unnatural prolongation of adolescence poses a variety of moral problems.  Normal erotic desire is transmuted from a spur to marriage to an incentive for promiscuity.  Promiscuity thwarts the attainment of moral wisdom, and makes conjugal love itself seem unattractive.  Furthermore, prolonged irresponsibility is itself a sort of training, and a bad one.  Before long the entire culture is caught up in a Peter Pan syndrome, terrified of leaving childhood.  At this point even the responsibilities of marriage and family begin to lose their transformative character.  Men in their forties with children in their twenties say "I still don't feel like a grown-up," "I still can't believe I'm a father."  Their very capacity to face the moral life has been impaired.

Tomorrow:  Yes, It Is  Still Possible to Teach

Mondays are for letters from students.  This one is a doctoral candidate in Dallas.

Question

Since discovering your online writings and lectures I have read and listened to a fair bit of your work and talks.  I’m writing to ask about the difference between St. Thomas Aquinas’s and Francisco Suarez’s views of natural law.  St. Thomas has a clear understanding of natural law and much to contribute.  But if Suarez is right about what law is, then it strikes me that the St. Thomas’s ethics and politics are not natural law theory simply, but something more like Aristotelian virtue ethics.  In the De Legibus, Book 5 and Book 6 , Suarez argues that Natural Law isn’t divine law by virtue of its having been promulgated by a lawgiver; rather it comes from God as efficient cause.  This seems a rather radical disagreement. 

I gather from other writers that Suarez is more nearly the father of the early modern views of natural law.  That implies that there must be two streams or traditions of natural law theory, one which views God as a lawgiver and one which does not.  Could you point me in a direction that would explain your thinking on this?

Reply

Right:  Though Suarez holds natural law in great esteem, he argues that it is not literally law, except insofar as God verbally commands it – something which does not happen except through revelation.  One might then say that the natural law is produced by God -- since He is the First Cause of everything -- but not promulgated by God.  Many of the Enlightenment thinkers took a view something like this too.  For them the natural laws were not laws in the sense of commands; they were more like the empirical generalizations of the sciences.  So, just as you suggest, there was a split in the natural law tradition in the early modern era.  The classical tradition epitomized by St. Thomas continued to develop, and is experiencing a modest renaissance in our own times.  But the revisionist tradition turned out to be a dead end – or so I would argue (long story).

St. Thomas agrees with Suarez that law must be promulgated to be law.  Yet he disagrees with Suarez too, because he thinks natural law is promulgated.  Natural law is the finite manner in which the eternal law, the Wisdom of God’s own mind, is reflected in the mind of the rational creature.

One might expect St. Thomas to say that natural law does not have to be promulgated verbally, because it is promulgated through the structure of creation.  And he could have said that, for as he points out, sometimes we use the term "word" in a figurative sense, not for the word itself, but for that which the word means or brings about.  For example, we say "The word of the king is that such and such be done."  This way of speaking collapses the Suarezian distinction between what God produces and what He promulgates.  So St. Thomas might have argued that just by being an effect of God as First Cause, the natural law is figuratively spoken to us.

But what he actually says is more intriguing.  Natural law is promulgated verbally -- and not in a figurative sense, but literally.  In saying this, St. Thomas is not referring to sounds made by the mouth (or for that matter characters formed of ink).  He argued that the expression "word" has three proper senses.  The most fundamental sense is "the interior concept of the mind," because a vocal sound is not a word unless it signifies this interior concept.  In natural law, our minds receive an impression of the idea in the mind of God.  We receive this impression through the natural disposition of the mind called synderesis, deep conscience, which is put to work by conscientia, conscience in action.

So St. Paul’s remark in the letter to the Romans that the law is “written on our hearts” turns out to be precisely true.  As St. Thomas points out in his commentary on the letter, “conscience does not dictate something to be done or avoided, unless it believes that it is against or in accordance with the law of God.  For the law is applied to our actions only by means of our conscience.”  In other words, when we enter the court of conscience and listen closely, the voice we are trying to hear is the voice of God – whether or not we fully realize that we are trying to do so.

If you want to follow up, take a look especially at Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 90;  Q. 91, Art. 1, ad 2; Q. 94, Art. 1, ad 2 ; and Q. 94, Art. 6.  I discuss all of these texts in detail in my Commentary on St. Thomas’s Treatise on Law.  My quotation from the Commentary on the Letter to the Romans is from the Fabian Larcher translation, Chap. 4, Lect. 2, Sec. 1120, which I also take up there.

Tomorrow:  The Prolongation of Adolescence

You may have noticed that animals have a sense of fun, but not a sense of humor.  James V. Schall, S.J., explains why:

“Humor arises because we are rational beings who can and do delight in the things that we know, in the things of the mind.  We are amused in the comparisons we make, either in speech or in reality, between what we expect and what is said or what happens.  The correction of mind by mind is one of the greatest of human enterprises.  We do not want, as Plato said, a lie in our souls about the things that are.  In things of the intellect too, a brother is helped by a brother.  Indeed, this correction is one of the great divine enterprises.  God, in revelation, undertook to do so Himself.”

(The image is from the famous 1957 spaghetti hoax.)