“The mystery genre is moral in itself, for in it that which was hidden is made plain, justice is achieved, and events often turn on a simple dispensation of grace.”

-- Fred Baue, "Mystery and Morality"

Finally we come to the supernatural light shed on nature by the sacraments.  It may seem impossible that sacrament could illuminate the natural law.  Doesn’t the grace of the sacraments exceed the resources our nature contains?  Doesn’t the truth about this grace exceed what reason could have discovered by itself?  Strange though it may seem, revelation about things that are above reason provides reason with clues about things that are not above reason.

Consider Saint Paul’s explosive remarks about marriage in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians.  From the outset, the language is daring.  Wives are to submit to their husbands as to the Lord; husbands are also to submit, but in another and asymmetrical sense, loving their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.  A turning point comes with Paul’s astonishing declaration that this is a “mystery” and it is somehow “about” Christ and the Church.  Suddenly we see that his figures are more than analogies.  He is saying that a certain natural reality and a certain supernatural reality not only happen to correspond, but were made for this correspondence; that in the depth of providence, the marriage of the spouses invokes the Marriage of the Lamb, and in some measure makes it present.  Paul calls this wonder a mysterion, something hidden and now revealed, but the Greek term is much more potent than its English cognate.  It is the same word that the Greek Fathers used from the fourth century onward for the sacraments; the Douay-Rheims Bible even translates it “sacrament.”  It would be extravagant to read all the later developments of sacramental theology back into the text, but it is not extravagant to say that the grace Paul has in mind is the same kind we now call sacramental.  For he is claiming nothing less than this: that because of Christ and among His people, the natural event of marriage is not just a sign of a spiritual event, but a participation in it -- an event of such potency that a man and a woman are really and permanently made one, receiving the grace to be bound with the love that binds Christ with the Church.  Transmundane meaning and power are supernaturally transfused into vessels of flesh.

Not only does the possibility of such grace tell us something about supernatural reality, it also tells us something about natural reality.  Why?  Because though grace exceeds nature, it never violates it; nature could receive nothing from grace had it not been fashioned ahead of time to receive it.  This is certainly true of matrimony, for sacramental marriage builds upon the covenantal and “donational” properties of natural marriage.  Apart from the form of the covenant, the sacrament would be unintelligible; apart from the grace of the sacrament, the donation might seem almost impossible.  Among the laws of the intellect, one of the foremost is this: What we barely fulfill, we can hardly discern.  The sacrament remedies this defect, so we can see the covenant better if we know the sacrament.

The same possibility of insight into natural reality accompanies each of the sacraments.  Consider a dock.  Even if we have never taken the trouble to look at the dock, we can infer something about it from the shape of the ship meant to berth there.  Afterward, we can examine it to see if our inferences are borne out.  Nature is the dock of grace, the place where the Glory chooses to come into berth.  And so, in just the same way as the ship and the dock, if we know something about the sacrament, then we can infer something about the natural institution that the sacrament ennobles.  By knowing something about the sacramental grace, we can more easily perceive the shape of the pre-sacramental reality that is ordained to receive this grace.  Afterward, natural reason can inquire to see if these inferences are true.  And so in an odd and indirect way, it turns out that the sacraments are proper subjects not only for theology, but even for natural law.

In the case of marriage, sacramental illumination clears up many things that would otherwise be obscure.  There is a taste of Godward longing even in natural marriage; somehow it participates in the sensus divinitatis.  In almost all times and nations people have dimly perceived something of transcendent importance about it, and the temptation to make idols of the potencies behind it is very strong.  Alas, whatever we treat as God that is not God betrays us, and from repeated betrayal arises an opposite temptation: to suppress the obscure longing for transcendence and treat marriage as less than it is.  Outside of the influence of the sacrament, no society has found the balance.  None has been able to give the sacred quality of conjugal union its due without idolizing it; none has been able to avoid idolizing it without debasing it; and all too often these tendencies have worked together.  No wonder!  For nowhere outside of the truth of the sacrament can the supernatural end of natural marriage be understood.  Nature is ordained the receptacle of grace: neither divine, nor simply profane, but a natural chalice for supernatural good.

Tuesday:  Conclusion (other posts on Sunday and Monday)

There will be no post tomorrow (Friday, January 23)

because I have been invited to speak at a conference

at Concordia Lutheran Seminary in Ft. Wayne,

Indiana.  The blog will resume on Saturday.

The next beam from supernature onto nature is the light of divine promise.  Two revealed promises are especially important.  The first is the promise of forgiveness -- divine assurance that God restores repentant sinners who accept the means of grace.  From this we learn not to despair of our sins against others.  The second is the promise of providence -- divine assurance that in the end, God will set everything to rights.  From this we learn not despair of the sins of others against us.  Only because of these two promises can conscience serve not as a rock to crush us, but as a dog to hound us home.

Here I can be brief, because I have discussed these matters in other writings.  Suffice it to say that without the former promise, the face of natural law would be only a face of accusation.  Few could bear to look at it at all; none could bear to look at it steadily.  Without the latter promise, the same accusing face would be turned outward.  Contemplation of the wrongs of the world would drive us to yet greater wrongs, on the principle “let us do evil that good may result.”  Whether by its own guilt or by rage at the guilt of all others, intellect would be undermined, and the counsels of natural law would be pulled in perverse directions.

Since every promise affirms something, the promissory sort of light might seem just a variation on the affirmative sort that we have considered already.  Such a conclusion would miss the point, because promises affi rm a different class of truths, illuminating the intellect in a distinctive manner.  How so?  Ordinary affirmations -- man is made in God’s image, spouses join as one flesh, divorce betrays posterity -- draw the attention of natural reason to creational realities right under its nose, which it might otherwise have slighted or overlooked.  Promises do something different, because they inform natural reason of something it never could have known: the place of natural law in the economy of salvation.

Although both kinds of light act upon the thinker’s mind, they do so in different ways.  One merely adds to his data, the other one purges his will.  Assured of God’s mercy, the thinker no longer needs the false comfort of thinking himself better than he is.  Assured of God’s providence, he is also freed from the equally false need to play God with others.  Cleansed of both kinds of despair, he can think about the natural law more honestly because he is no longer desperate or afraid.  Hope turns out to be not only a spiritual virtue but an intellectual virtue as well.

Continued on Saturday

Yet another wavelength in which supernature illuminates the natural realities is narrative: We learn more about natural law by thinking about the story.

God differs from human authors in that, by His infinite power and wisdom, He arranges and orchestrates not just words, but real things.  Consequently, although the literal sense of the revealed narrative is deeply important, it falls infi nitely short of exhausting its meaning.  Certain correspondences occur between earlier and later stages in salvation history; for example, Israel foreshadows the Church.  Others occur between lower and higher things; for example, the earthly sanctuary signifies the heavenly.  Still others occur between events outside us and events within us; for example, the wanderings of the Israelites describe the wanderings of the soul.

What does that have to do with natural law?  The answer is that if God is not only the Author of History but the Lord of Creation, then he can also orchestrate correspondences between events in the biblical story and truths about human nature.  Narrative illumination is this sort of correspondence.

More than one wavelength of light can shine out from the same passage.  Consider again the great passage in Genesis 1:27 that we have already discussed: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”  Reading it in the light of affirmation, it says, “We are made like this.”  But reading it in the light of its place in the origins narrative, it says, “And then we were made like this.”  In other words, instead of viewing it as a statement about what is the case, we can view it as the report of an event that implies something about what is the case.  Does this chronological addition make a difference?  Certainly.  By viewing it as an event, we relate it to other events, such as the Fall: Yes, we were created in such and such a fashion, but then we fell.  The Fall does not deprive us of our nature -- a broken foot still has the nature of a foot -- but our nature is not in its intended condition.  For natural law, this is no insignificant consideration.  If we had never seen healthy feet, it might have taken us a long time to discover that broken feet were broken --  to reason backwards from their characteristics even in their present broken condition, to the principles of their purpose and design, to the fact that their condition deviates from that design.  In the meantime we might have taken their broken condition as normative.  Even if we grasped that something was wrong with our feet, we might have misunderstood what it was.  We might have thought that feet are bad by nature, or that they are good but corrupted by shoes.  Apart from revelation we make the same mistakes about human nature.

But not all passages radiate in more than one wavelength; some illuminate the natural law only when read in their narrative context.  “God created man in His own image” -- we don’t need to know what happened next in order to understand at least part of what this passage tells us about man.  By contrast take the next line: “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.”  Presumably this, too, tells us something about ourselves, but what?  To know what the narrative implies, we have to take it seriously as narrative.

In our times, the most spectacular attempt to discern what the narrative as narrative tells us about human nature is the series of general audiences of Pope John Paul II published as Theology of the Body.  This remarkable work is both exegesis of Scripture and philosophy of natural law, but it respects the fact that these are different things -- neither dividing the reality that they are talking about nor confounding their ways of knowing it.  John Paul takes his departure from Christ’s reply to the question of why Moses permitted divorce: “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”  Christ’s answer forcefully redirects attention to the account of our origins in Genesis.  Taking the cue, John Paul draws insights into our nature from three crucial aspects of the narrative: original unity, original solitude, and original nakedness.

Consider only what he says about original nakedness.  These days carnality is underrated.  Our obsession with sex doesn’t show that we take embodiment seriously; actually, it shows that we don’t.  Like gnostics, we regard our bodies as separate from our true selves.  We use them merely to get pleasure, attention, and other things for self -- and nothing taken seriously is merely used.  But the gnostics were wrong.  As John Paul emphasizes, body is not separate from self; it is the emblem and vesture of self.  The body is the visible sign by which the invisible self is actually made present, the medium of the language that it speaks.  We mean things to each other by what our bodies do, and when the speech of the mouth contradicts the speech of the body, the latter abolishes the former.  To crush your windpipe with my thumbs is to say to you, “Now die,” even if I tell you with my mouth, “Be alive.”  To join in one flesh is to say, “I give myself,” even if my mouth shapes the words, “This doesn’t mean a thing.”

In some ways bodily speech is just as complex as vocal speech.  In particular, just as we can say inconsistent things with the spoken word, so we can say inconsistent things with the embodied word.  The important thing to remember is that even so, certain meanings are creationally embedded in the language of the body.  When you kiss to betray, you are certainly contradicting the primordial meaning of affectionate greeting, but you have not thereby abolished it.  You have only parasitized it; you are using the meaning to betray.  When you employ what is called a “barrier” during sexual intercourse, you are certainly fuddling the meaning of sex, but you have not erased it.  You have only overlaid it; overtop the engraved inscription, “I join without reservation,” you have scribbled, “but I hold back.”  Self-giving, moreover, is decisive.  When I give a thing external to myself, I can set a term for it, after which I will take it back.  When I give my very person, I give away the power of taking back; there is no authority left by which the gift can be revoked.  Totality and indissolubility turn out to be inherent in the meaning of the mutual act by which marriage is physically consummated.

We now have (among other things) two complementary demonstrations of the indissolubility of marriage.  One develops the unitive implications of the procreative realities, the other delves into the unitive realities per se.  Both kinds of demonstration lie within the reach of natural reason.  Yet even though both of them build on facts experienced at some level to every mature human being, it took centuries to work them both out.  Not until Thomas Aquinas, perhaps, did we have an adequate presentation of the former argument; not until John Paul, perhaps, did we have an adequate development of the latter.  Even now we quibble.  As to the procreative realities, I may claim that nannies, daycare workers, or bureaucrats can care for children better than parents can, or that it is better to have no parents than quarreling ones, or that a mom can be a mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa all rolled up into one.  As to the unitive realities, I may claim that only “free love” is real love, or that the language of the body is merely conventional, or that there is no such thing as a gift of self.  The argument is never really over.

Why isn’t it?  It isn’t as though claims like the ones I have mentioned are hard to refute.  The problem is that our ability to grasp the refutations --  even more, our willingness -- is all too easily undermined by the demons of greed, weakness of will, evil habit, vicious custom, and depraved ideology.  And so we see once again that even though the natural realities of marriage are fully knowable by unaided reason, they may not be fully known by it.  There seems no reason in the world why Aristotle, who knew a thing or two about marriage, could not have penetrated the procreative and unitive realities as deeply as two celibates, Saint Thomas Aquinas and John Paul II.  Nevertheless, he didn’t -- and this was no accident.  Through revelation, they had a leg up on the natural facts.  He did not.

VI The next beam from supernature onto nature is the light of divine promise.  Two revealed promises are especially important.  The first is the promise of forgiveness -- divine assurance that God restores repentant sinners who accept the means of grace.  From this we learn not to despair of our sins against others.  The second is the promise of providence -- divine assurance that in the end, God will set everything to rights.  From this we learn not despair of the sins of others against us.  Only because of these two promises can conscience serve not as a rock to crush us, but as a dog to hound us home.

Here I can be brief, because these matters have been broached in the previous chapter.  Suffice it to say that without the former promise, the face of natural law would be only a face of accusation.  Few could bear to look at it at all; none could bear to look at it steadily.  Without the latter promise, the same accusing face would be turned outward.  Contemplation of the wrongs of the world would drive us to yet greater wrongs, on the principle “let us do evil that good may result.”  Whether by its own guilt or by rage at the guilt of all others, intellect would be undermined, and the counsels of natural law would be pulled in perverse directions.

Since every promise affirms something, the promissory sort of light might seem just a variation on the affirmative sort that we have considered already.  Such a conclusion would miss the point, because promises affi rm a different class of truths, illuminating the intellect in a distinctive manner.  How so?  Ordinary affirmations -- man is made in God’s image, spouses join as one flesh, divorce betrays posterity -- draw the attention of natural reason to creational realities right under its nose, which it might otherwise have slighted or overlooked.  Promises do something different, because they inform natural reason of something it never could have known: the place of natural law in the economy of salvation.

Although both kinds of light act upon the thinker’s mind, they do so in different ways.  One merely adds to his data, the other one purges his will.  Assured of God’s mercy, the thinker no longer needs the false comfort of thinking himself better than he is.  Assured of God’s providence, he is also freed from the equally false need to play God with others.  Cleansed of both kinds of despair, he can think about the natural law more honestly because he is no longer desperate or afraid.  Hope turns out to be not only a spiritual virtue but an intellectual virtue as well.

Continued tomorrow

Picking up the thread from Saturday’s post:

The next supernatural light upon nature is the light of affirmation.  Affirmation is not a command to do or not do something, but a declaration that something is or is not the case.  Whereas a command presupposes that something is so, provoking the mind to discover what it is, affirmation declares that something is so, provoking the mind to see it for itself and work out the implications.  The faculty of reason responds to preceptive illumination like this: “I see now that I am to live in such and such a way; can I find out by my own proper methods what it is in the design of creation that makes this right?”  But it responds to affirmative illumination like this: “I see now that such and such is true; can I find out by my own proper methods what might follow from this fact?”

Conjugal sexuality is richly illuminated by the light of affirmation, as in the following passage from the prophet Malachi:

Has not the one God made and sustained for us the spirit of life?  And what does he desire?  Godly offspring.  So take heed to yourselves, and let none be faithless to the wife of his youth.  For I hate divorce, says the LORD the God of Israel, and covering one’s garment with violence, says the LORD of hosts.  So take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless.

If the intellect concedes Malachi’s claim that the sexual powers have a procreative purpose, then the logic of the rest of his argument is not hard to work out.  After all, marriage is the only form of association in which the family-building aim of the sexual powers can be adequately realized.  If a couple should say, “But we never meant to have children,” we should not think that they have a different, dissoluble kind of marriage, but that they do not have a marriage.  What they have is an affective liaison characterized by sexual intercourse outside of the conditions which allow the purpose of such intercourse to be fulfilled.  These conditions are stringent, because procreation is more than making children.  It also means raising them.  We can make them outside marriage, but raising them that way is like trying to churn butter in a furnace.  For at least two reasons, the bond must also be permanent.  One is that the knowledge that it will endure into the future radically affects its quality in the present.  The other is that the children of the union will go on to have their own children.  Not only will they need parental help to establish their new families, but the grandchildren will have need of their grandparents.

I began the previous paragraph with an “if.”  Should reason concede that sex has a procreative purpose?  Moderns object that the purposes of things aren’t natural, that they are merely in the eye of the beholder.  Supposing that nature is purposeful is derided as “metaphysical biology.”  But do we say this about the other natural powers?  On the contrary, sex is the only natural power about which we do say it.  The purpose of respiration is to oxygenate the blood; apart from it there would be no reason to have lungs.  The purpose of circulation is to deliver nutrients and other substances to the places they are needed; apart from it there would be no reason to have a heart and vascular system.  If we are consistent, we will reason this way about sex.  We will say that its purpose is to generate posterity; apart from this purpose there would be no reason for sexual organs.  Instead of saying this, we interrupt the argument to say that the purpose of sex is pleasure.

On its face, the interruption is absurd.  Of course sex is pleasurable, but in various kinds and degrees, pleasure accompanies the exercise of every voluntary power: eating, breathing, even stretching the muscles of the leg.  The problem is that eating is pleasurable even if I am eating too much, breathing is pleasurable even if I am sniffing glue, stretching the muscles of the leg is pleasurable even if I am kicking the dog.  For a criterion of when it is good to enjoy each pleasure, one must look beyond the fact that it is pleasurable.

We have been considering the unitive implications of the procreative realities, but the unitive realities can also be considered in themselves.  Here, the prime example of affirmative illumination is the declaration, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”  A great deal is happening in this brief passage.  What it has to do with natural law might at first seem obscure, because God is not part of nature; He is not something created, but the Creator.  Although unaided intellect can draw inferences about Him from the evidence of what He has made, it can neither see Him as He is nor take the measure of His relation with us.  Here is the astonishing thing: Although the fact that we are His image exceeds unaided reason’s power of discovery, the things that are true about us because we are His image do not exceed it.  To mention but two of these things: If God is personal, and we are His image, then it pertains to our essence that we are personal too.  And if two kinds of personal reality are required to image Him, male and female, then male and female must complement each other not just in gross anatomy but in the very root of their personhood.

The antecedent parts of these statements, the ifs, go beyond what unaided reason could confirm.  We need revelation to know that God is personal, that we are made in His image, and that it takes two kinds of personal reality to image Him.  But the consequent parts of the statements, the thens, lie entirely within reason’s range.  Revelation interrogates reason.  It asks, “Now that I point it out to you, can’t you see for yourself that your fundamental reality is personal?”  “Yes,” replies reason, “I do.”  This stirs us to penetrate still more deeply into personhood, and through even longer reflection, we finally come to see that an individual person is a complete individual reality, existing in itself, different from all other somethings, made for rationality, the ultimate possessor under God of all it is and does.  A person is not just a piece or part of something, it is not just an instance or process of something, it is not just a clump of different somethings.  Nor is it merely a thing to be owned, a thing to be used, or a thing of any sort at all.  It is not just a what, but a who.  This insight has transformed the Western world.

But there is more.  Revelation goes on to ask, “And can you not see for yourself that your two kinds of personal reality, male and female, depend on and co-illuminate each other -- that neither can be understood in isolation?”  It would be impossible to understate the depth of this affirmation, or the abyss of the error from which it saves us.  How does it do this?  In the language of philosophers, personhood is incommunicable.  I cannot transfer the mystery of who I am to another person.  Unfortunately, it is all too easy to leap from this true statement to a mistaken conclusion.  I may falsely imagine that because I am complete in a certain sense, therefore I am complete in every sense; that because I cannot transfer myself, therefore I cannot give myself; that the incommunicability of persons precludes the communion of persons.  That would be bad enough, but in a fallen world, the difference of sex deepens the error and gives it sharper teeth.  To the mutual alienation of man and man is added the further disaffection of men and women.  They come to seem adverse to one another, natural enemies like fox and bird, perhaps drawn together by their senses, but sundered by difference in kind.  As the truth of personhood transformed the Western world, so the distortion of personhood bids fair to destroy it.

Revelation stays the error, showing that reality is the other way around.  If it takes both kinds of us to image our Creator, then our two kinds of personhood presuppose each other, and everything about us is made for communion.  Notice that just as before, the antecedent part of the statement, the if, goes beyond what unaided reason could confirm.  Just as we need revelation to see that we image God, so we need revelation to know in what mode we image Him.  But just as before, the consequent part of the statement, the then, lies entirely within reason’s powers.  Once it is called to the intellect’s attention, the intellect can say, “Yes, thank you -- now I see it for myself.”  I am complete in the sense that I am a whole person, not part of a person, yet when provoked to think more deeply, I perceive that I am not complete in the further sense that I could know myself if estranged from the opposite sex.  Wonderful to relate, the gap between the sexes turns out to be the very condition of the crossing of it.  To speak even more generally, the incommunicability of personhood does not preclude the communion of persons.  On the contrary, it is exactly what makes it possible.  Because I exist in myself, therefore I can give myself; if I were not a person, I would be incapable of such a gift.

Continued tomorrow