Any Underground Thomists in the San Antonio area?  I'll be giving the Mars Hill

 lecture at  6:30pm, THIS THURSDAY, January15, at  the Geneva School of Boerne.

The talk title is  “Written on the Heart: What Writing? What Heart?”

The last two posts, especially yesterday’s, may have startled some of my readers by implying that history matters -- even from the perspective of natural law.  What human beings did by rebelling against their Creator mattered; what God did to rescue them also mattered.  Thus in the view of the Christian mainstream of the natural law tradition, natural law can be understood properly only from the perspective of salvation history.

In its foundational principles, natural law per se does not change.  It couldn’t, because the fundamental nature of a being cannot change.  If there was a change, you would have a different being.  The old one would have ceased to exist.  But although our nature cannot change, its condition can change.  One and the same body can be either well, or ill, or healed.  In much the same way, the condition of our nature can be either innocent, fallen, or redeemed.  So Christian thinkers have insisted since the Patristic era.

The main reason this fact is overlooked is that in the modern period, revisionist natural law writers tried to shake off the classical tradition, either denying, ignoring, or disparaging the significance of salvation history.  Natural law came to be conceived in a much more abstract and ahistorical way.   Think Hobbes.  Think Locke.  Think Voltaire.

So far did the pendulum swing in an ahistorical direction that in order to bring history back into the theoretical picture, other modern thinkers thought they must deny that we even have a fixed nature.  Think Rousseau.  Think Hegel.  Think Marx.

So here we are, with the strange misunderstanding that one can admit the importance of nature or the importance of history, but not both.  Sometimes people who are otherwise sympathetic to the classical natural law tradition even chastise it for denying that history matters – a view which it never held.

Continuing my reply to yesterday’s letter from a student:

Your second question is about what you call “moral miracles.”  Can God make it right to do what is intrinsically wrong, just by commanding it?  This question arises especially for those who not only accept natural law, but also accept the Bible as authentic divine revelation.

The answer is no.  Omnipotence does not mean that God can do literally everything.  He cannot act against that goodness are justice which are identical to Himself.   In particular, not even God can make exceptions can be made to the precepts of the Decalogue, such as “Do not murder” and “Do not commit adultery,” because they embody or “contain” God’s very intention to justice and the good of all His creatures.  To ask whether He could command such things is to ask whether God could be other than God.

St. Thomas Aquinas argues that on the other hand, God can declare exceptions to certain more detailed arrangements, arrangements which further His intention to justice and the common good only in some cases, not in all.  For example, God will never command theft.  But theft is taking away property unduly – taking away property which the other party does not deserve to lose.  Under ordinary circumstances it would have been theft for the Hebrew people to demand spoils from the Egyptians when they left the country of Egypt.  But God, as judge, decreed these spoils as a just punishment to the Egyptians for having subjected the Hebrew people to slavery.  Because of this judgment, the taking of spoils was not theft, just as it would not theft for you to be sentenced by a court to pay a fine as the punishment for some crime.

Much more troubling to many people is God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.  To you it seems that this may be a “moral miracle,” the conversion of sheer wrong into right just by commanding it, because it looks like a command to commit murder.  In the Thomistic analysis, God cannot command murder.  But murder is the undue taking of human life, and it is not murder if a just judge sentences a person who is guilty of capital crime to death.  Ever since the fall, all human beings had been under sentence of death for rebellion against God, and the Redeemer had not yet come.  God -- the divine judge who decrees this sentence -- can also decree the time and manner in which it is carried out.  If He decrees that in the case of Isaac, Abraham should carry it His sentence in the manner in which sacrifice is carried out, then although there is a strong departure from what would normally constitute murder, there is no departure from the prohibition of murder per se, because the act is not murder.

Disturbing as it is, I think this analysis of the story is correct.  We tend to misunderstand the story’s point because we read our own preoccupations into it instead of trying to understand what it is actually about.

The point of the story is certainly not that fathers may kill their sons at will, for the decision was not Abraham’s.  No human being can make such a decision.

Nor is the point that God can command anything.  God was acting here as a just judge, not as an arbitrary tyrant.

Nor is the point that God Himself desires child sacrifice.  In the first place, God intervened to stop Abraham before he actually committed the act.  In the second place, later in the Old Testament, God forcefully and repeatedly makes clear that He abhors child sacrifice, and that he condemns the nations which practice it.  But Abraham does not know that God abhors it.  He comes from a culture in which child sacrifice is common, and for all he knows, a god might desire such a thing.  Whether children may be sacrificed is just not the issue for him.

Nor is the point that every seeming divine appearance really is one.  We, living much later in history than Abraham, our consciences formed by a great deal more instruction, have the advantage of knowing that God abhors child sacrifice.  So if you hear what sounds to you like a divine voice commanding you to kill your son or daughter, you may be utterly sure that it is a delusion.

Then what is the point of the story?  For Abraham there is only one question:  Whether or not he will trust God to keep His promise to give him descendants.  Such trust is severely trying for Abraham because he and his wife are far beyond the normal age of childbearing, and Isaac is their only son.  The point is that he trusts God anyway.  Notice, too, what happens at the end of the story:  After putting an end to the proceedings and rescuing Isaac, God Himself supplies a ram as a substitute sacrifice.  In a later age, the Church took the substitution of the ram as foreshadowing the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ – the means by which at last we can be set free from the universal sentence of death.

St. Thomas discusses other acts you might consider “moral miracles” too.  For example, it might seem at first that God commanded the prophet Hosea to commit adultery, because He commanded him to marry a woman who lived like a whore.  According to St. Thomas, not even God can command someone to have intercourse with a woman who is not his wife.  Such a command would be contrary to the divine intention of purity which God built into human nature in the act of creation.  But God is the author of marriage; it follows that if God, for special reasons, commands Hosea to take a particular woman as his wife – even a woman who would otherwise have been regarded as unsuitable -- then by the very fact of the command, the woman is Hosea’s wife, and he is not committing adultery.

You mention that your questions came to you as you were reading my Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.  I’ve included additional discussion of this sort of thing in the online Companion to the Commentary, which continues into selections from Questions 98-108, concerning the Old and New Testament divine law.  God bless your investigations.

Mondays are reserved for questions from students.  This student is writing from Oxford.

I am enjoying your Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, and I have a question relating to natural law and contingent divine commands.  Since classical natural law is based on the essences or natures of things, and on their goal-directedness, it is universal and also objective.  It also bypasses the difficulties of divine command theory -- although perhaps divine command theory can meet these in some other way.  But does a natural lawyer have to have a divine command theory in addition to his theory of natural law?

My reason for thinking that he might is that some Old Testament commands seem to be contingent and not based on the nature or end of anything, for example dietary laws, or the commands to sacrifice Isaac or to war against the nations in the promised land.  It seems that only a divine command theory can ground commands like these, but this brings back the problems the natural lawyer sidestepped by adopting natural law theory instead of divine command theory.

One of these related problems is whether God can perform “moral miracles” – whether He can command something wrong and so make it right.  On a divine command theory this looks possible, but I’m not sure how it would work on a natural law view, since goodness depends on essences and goal directness, and so God would seem to need to change our essences for this act to be good.  But if God changed our essences, then it seems we would become something we aren’t.  We would cease to be human.

Reply:

By a divine command theory, some people mean merely a theory which holds that the moral laws are, in fact, divine commands.  According to classical natural law theory, they certainly are.  God commands in one manner via the natural law (by incorporating certain potentialities for good into our nature, potentialities which can be realized only in certain ways), and in another manner via the Divine law (by making what we are to do explicit in the words of revelation).  But other people use the term “divine command theory” for a theory which holds that God can command anything whatsoever – a theory according to which the mere fact of its having been commanded would make it right.  Classical natural law theory denies this, because God cannot contradict His own being; he could not have commanded anything contrary to that justice and goodness which are identical to Himself.

To think of the matter another way, St. Thomas rejects both the view that the good is good just because God commands it (which makes God higher than good), and the view that God commands what He does because He is obeying an external standard of good (which makes good higher than God).  Both of these views make God and good different, but in fact they are the same.  God simply is the uncreated good.  He is identical to His own goodness, His own justice, His own will, His own wisdom, and so forth.

How then does natural law come into the picture?  Nature is what He has created, and natural law expresses its inbuilt norms.  Life, for example, is intrinsically directed toward preservation; marriage, toward procreation, and the union of the procreative partners.  Though God could have created a different nature than He did, He could not have created a nature that contradicted His uncreated goodness.

Your first question is about contingency.  Certainly, some commands are contingent, but this doesn’t mean that they are arbitrary.  Detailed laws can be derived from deeper principles in two different ways.  One way is by “conclusion,” which means strict inference.  To illustrate with ordinary human laws, murder is wrong, so by conclusion, murder by poisoning is wrong.  Such a law cannot cease to be right.  The other way is by “determination,” which means pinning something down that could have been otherwise.  For instance, we ought to take care for the safety of others on the roadways, but this might be arranged either by commanding that everyone drive on the right or by commanding that everyone drive on the left.  This is changeable.

The same distinction applies to Old Testament precepts – not only the moral precepts, but even the ceremonial and judicial precepts.  One example is that we need to worship God together.  The norm that specific times be appointed for such worship is derived by conclusion, and cannot be otherwise.  Yet the norm that appoints the seventh day is derived by determination, and can be changed.  Another example is dietary laws, of which I will discuss only one.  Because we ought to hold life in reverence, we must not murder; this is derived by conclusion, and cannot be otherwise.  Yet the ceremonial rule that we symbolically express such reverence for life by not consuming blood, which represents life, is derived by determination, and can be changed.

Tomorrow I’ll continue this discussion by answering your question about “moral miracles.”

Once, monasteries preserved civilization through chaos.  Today, intact families fill that role.  Fathers and mothers, especially you who are young and struggling, hail and greetings!  What were once the most mundane of virtues have in our time become rare and heroic.  Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn their children to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.

It’s strange how the notion that men and women are identical works against the very equality that it tries to uphold.  The same, are they?  The same as what?  Though with some dissimulation, identicalists almost always answer, "The same as men."

Men who despise women are not the only ones who take this line.  It is also taken by those so-called feminists who detest everything feminine, regard womanly women as traitors to the cause, and insist on an ideal which is supposedly indifferent to sex, but is actually masculine.

This is the same root from which spring those strange male fantasies about worlds of the future in which women lead armies, command starships, gun down enemies, and are ready for sexual intercourse at any moment.  The underlying wish is that both sexes would be men, but that some of these men would look like women and wear tight clothes.

Considering how things have been going lately, I wonder why no one imagines a different future, in which the institution of marriage has disintegrated.  Women of that time raise children in matriarchal clans, like elephants.  Now and then, a man who is hardly a man drifts in to mate, after a short time drifting out to roam with others who are just like himself.  Thanks to our social policies, it is already happening among the poor.