"Man is obviously made for thinking.  Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.  Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end.”

-- Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Political theory is a branch of the theory of how to live.  If God is our greatest good, then of course the truth about Him will make a difference to how to live.

When people say theology has nothing to do with political theory, what they usually mean is that either there is no God, or He is irrelevant to how we should live.  But that is a theology; it is a doctrine about God.  So such people think theology has something to do with political theory after all.  The problem is that they insist we all live by their theology.   And since they pretend that it isn’t a theology, they don’t think they have to explain what makes their theology true.

The claim is sometimes made that anyone who thinks God matters to how we live must want to bully people into obeying the true religion.  But of course that depends on how God matters.  If you believe as Muhammad did that God requires enforcement of Shari’a, then obedience to God requires coercing them to obey.  But if you believe as St. Hilary of Poitiers did that “God does not want an unwilling obedience,” then obedience to God requires not coercing them, doesn’t it?

Tomorrow:  What We Are For

The expression “self-deception” is not to be taken literally; what happens is that I try not to think about certain things, and I try not to think about the fact that I am trying not to think about them.

But if they are the sort of thing one tends to think of, then trying not to think about them takes effort.  How much effort?  It depends.  Some things are known in themselves; some are known with just a little reflection; and some things are known only after much reflection.

To deny things in the third class is easy.

To deny things in the second class -- the existence of God, for example -- is possible, but difficult, because in order to deny one of them, one must develop the habit of not thinking about all the things that point to its truth.

To deny things in the first class – say, the basics of right and wrong – is harder still.  Somehow we manage.

Honesty is hard too, because our hearts are divided -- hard in a different way.  In the other cases, the difficulty is finding a way to hide from the inbuilt desire to dwell in truth.  But in order to dwell in it, we must overcome the terror of admitting that so far we haven’t been doing so.

Tomorrow:  Why Must You Bring Up That Subject

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