This is the second part of a four-part series which began with “What If?  What If?  Why Shouldn’t?” on Friday, 03-07-2014.

The title of today's post reflects how the question is usually posed to me.  Taken literally, it is nonsense, like the question “If I had been born to Scandinavian parents, would my eyes have the same color?”  “I” could not have been born to Scandinavian parents; anyone who had been would not be “me.”  In the same way, “we” could not have a different nature; beings with a different nature would not be “us.”  But it is perfectly reasonable to ask questions about them.  The real meaning of the title question is “Would rational beings endowed with a different nature than ours be subject to a different natural law?”

You see why the question is troubling.  Starting with H.G. Wells, our speculative literature has conditioned us to expect that if other rational beings exist, then for all we know they may be “alien” to us in every sense of the word.  For example, they might be natural predators, like H.G. Wells’ Martians or Larry Niven’s kzinti.  For us, the natural law forbids murder.  For Martians or kzinti, might it command murder?  If so, then morality would arbitrary – it would be, so to speak, an “accident of nature,” as the wealth of my parents is an accident of birth.  A kind of moral relativism – relativism of species nature – would be built into the fabric of creation.

Here are some of the most common responses:

1.  That’s right.  Morality is arbitrary.  Get used to it.

2.  No, morality can’t be arbitrary.  But as the examples show, it would be arbitrary if it had anything to do with nature.  So it doesn’t.  The idea of a “natural” moral law is confused.  We should drop it.

3.  No, morality really is grounded in our created nature.  But that doesn’t make it arbitrary, because those sorts of examples won’t arise.  A good Creator wouldn’t have made intelligent predators.

I think all of three responses are mistaken, because all three overlook the same thing.  We are speculating aboutrational animals -- not merely animal, like lions, and not merely rational, like angels, but beings in whom an underlying animal nature is taken up into and transformed by the rational nature.  That makes a difference.

Consider sexuality.  One of the things which human nature has in common with mere animals like dogs and cats is the union of male and female.  For both us and them, this is how the wheel of the generations is turned.  But mere animals have only blind impulses to guide them.  Although they have natures, they have not risen to the level of naturallaw, because law presupposes an intelligent being capable of recognizing the goodness of the precept and responding accordingly.

We are that latter kind of being.  Because of our rational nature, we experience the impulses we share with the animals differently than they ever could.  For us, the impulses aren’t blind.  In the first place they have natural meaning for us; recognition of meaning is one of the functions of intelligence.  In the second place we can steer them so that they participate more deeply in their meaning.  So instead of rutting, we have marriage, which arranges not just for the birth of children, but also for their care and nurture by a mother and father who give themselves to each other mutually, totally, exclusively, and irrevocably.  True, we may be tempted by mere rutting.  But we cannot be satisfied by it.

Now let’s consider beings in whom rational nature supervenes on a different animal nature.  For an analogy, consider non-Euclidean geometries.  In planar, Euclidean geometry, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, but on the surface of a sphere it is more than 180, and on the surface of a saddle it is less.  Yet on all three, two angles equal to a third angle are equal to each other.  Though some things are different for each metric surface, others are the same just because they are all metric surfaces.

In the same way, for rational animals different than ourselves, some things will be different because the underlying animal nature is different, but other things will be the same just because the underlying animal nature is equally taken up into rational nature.  What sort of thing will be the same?  Richard Hooker gave a famous explanation of one of them.  As he wrote five centuries ago (and his point is much older than that):

The like natural inducement hath brought men to know that it is no less their duty, to love others than themselves; for seeing those things which are equal, must needs all have one measure; if I cannot but wish to receive good, even as much at every man’s hands, as any man can wish unto his own soul, how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire, which is undoubtedly in other men, being of one and the same nature?

In other words, things of the same nature are necessarily governed by the same measure; just insofar as we are rational we are of the same nature; and because we do possess rationality, we can recognize what follows from these premises.  That’s how we know that we should love other rational beings as ourselves – not that we usually work it out in this fashion.

So I think we are free to imagine a rational animal who is a predator, but we are not free to imagine one who does not know the Golden Rule.  Do unto other natures as “you,” with that nature, would have others do unto you.

Of course it may be rather difficult for each species to grasp how the other species, given its particular animal nature, would have beings to do unto them.  The rational predator may be what we call a strong colleague.  He may not be good company for humans (any more than we might be for him).  Even so, he would not be “a murderer by nature.”

So I don’t think the real moral problem is that each rational species would have a different natural law.  The rational continuities would be more important than the animal discontinuities.  In principle, both species should recognize all the first principles of practical reason.

The nightmare arises from a different possibility:  That his nature – like ours – may be fallen; that like us, he may know the law, but not follow it.  Our rational nature has rebelled against its Creator.  As a natural consequence, our animal nature is no longer docile and obedient to reason.  Presumably, it would be the same with other fallen species.

We can cross that bridge when and if we come to it.  There may not be any other rational animals.  The universe may be teeming with them, but we may not ever meet them.  Other worlds are very far away.

But would rational beings endowed with a different nature than ours be subject to a different natural law?  In the ways that make us moral, no.

Next time:  What if we changed our nature?

Certain questions tend to come up whenever I teach about natural law.  They don’t always come up in words, much less in these words, but they often lurk beneath and between the lines.  What if our nature had been different?  What if we changed our nature?  Why shouldn’t we transcend our nature?

From a classical perspective these questions seem strange ones.  Though the classical natural law thinkers were quick to respond to objections and often anticipated some of ours, they never quite anticipated these.  Why is that?  Because it was a little more obvious to them what a nature is, a purpose implanted into something by the Divine Art that it be moved to a determinate end.

Consider human beings.  Ours is a rational and personal nature which supervenes on an animal nature.  As rational animals we have ends like raising families and turning the wheel of the generations.  As rational animals our yet higher end is to know and share the truth of things, especially to know and share God; without being destroyed, even our animal ends come to share in this higher quest.  And because we are personal rational animals, the knowledge of God is personal knowledge, less like how I know a theorem -- not that we should disparage theorems -- than like how I know my wife.  Except that God is the Bridegroom, not the Bride.

If you no longer believe in the Divine art, and no longer believe that purposes are implanted into things, then you may still use the expression “nature,” but you will use it in a different sense.  What is there?  You will answer:  Just stuff.  The nature of a thing is just the pattern of its stuff.  But the pattern is also just stuff.

You might even go on using the expression “natural law,” but that expression will take on a different sense for you too.  You will be thinking of genes and so-called instincts and so-called drives, of things that jerk and yank us and pull our strings without considering how we feel about the matter, all just machinery of a meaningless and purposeless process that does not have us in mind, “laws” only in the sense that the edicts of a tyrant are laws.

Ironically, that objection is half-right.  Things that jerk and yank us and pull our strings are not what the classical tradition means by natural laws.  Laws are ordinances of reason.  Everything in our animal nature is preserved, but it is taken up into our rational nature and transformed.  The animal merely ruts; I marry.  The animal is merely curious; I wonder.  The animal merely eats and flees from danger, following blind impulses which tend to the preservation of its life.  I reflect on the goodness of life, and on what kind of life is good.

Some people refuse to recognize the Divine Art but cannot bear the implications of everything being just stuff.  Having ejected God, they make everything in the cosmos into a god or a goddess.  I once listened to a scholar present a paper rejecting what he called theocentric and anthropocentric ethics and defending what he called ecocentric ethics.  He said all life deserved equal concern and respect.  He wondered out loud why we don’t consider the rights of bacteria.

During the response period I posed him a problem:  "I am driving in my automobile.  A little girl darts into the road from the right, and at the same moment two dogs dart into the road from the left.  Should I swerve to the left to miss the girl and hit the dogs, or swerve to the right to miss the dogs and hit the girl?  After all, they have equal rights, and there are two of them and only one of her."

His reply:  "I admit that there are some unresolved problems in ecocentric ethics."

But I digress.  The topic is those three questions which keep coming up:  What if our nature had been different?  What if we changed our nature?  Why shouldn’t we transcend our nature?  I mean to address them from the classical perspective, which does recognize the Divine Art.  Next time we will take up the first one.

The actual title of the post you are looking for is "This Time Will Not Be the Same."

You can read part 1 here.

You can read part 2 here.

This is Part 2 -- Click Here for Part 1

Because the Gospel was new to him, the pagan needed to learn it from the beginning. The neo-pagan is in a very different position; he needs to unlearn things he has learned about the Gospel which happen to be untrue. We see a trivial symptom of the problem in the great number of people who think a little drummer boy was supposed to have accompanied the shepherds, a notion which makes the Christmas narrative seem most implausible to anyone more than ten years of age.

But non-existent drummer boys are the least of the problems. The neo-pagan is likely to have entirely mistaken views of what Christians believe about creation, fall, and redemption—about God, man, and the relation between God and man.

One thing may seem to be unchanged: Now as then, the non-believer hails Caesar, not Christ, as Lord. But whereas the pagan reproached Christians for doubting distinctively ancient illusions, for example the eternal destiny of the Empire of Rome, the neo-pagan is more likely to reproach them for doubting distinctively modern illusions, for example the idea that by technology and social engineering, we can devise a world in which nobody needs to be good.

In one way the pagan was less deluded, for he could hardly fail to know that he was an idolater. His idols were visible and touchable. They were carved from physical substances like wood and stone. The neo-pagan is much less likely to know that he is an idolater; if faith concerns things not seen, then in a sense he is more faithful, for his idols are invisible and untouchable. They are woven of sensations, wishes, and ideas, like pleasure, success, and the future. Even his magazines have names like Self. Perhaps visible idols were always masks for invisible idols, but in our day the masks have come off.

The pagan world was unfamiliar with Christian ideas. By contrast, the neo-pagan world is brimming with them.  The makers of that world have even appropriated some of them—but have emptied them of Christian meaning.

For example, the neo-pagan may have a high view of what he calls faith, hope, and love, virtues undreamt among the pagans—yet he is likely to use the term “faith” for clinging to the illusions of a barren life, “hope” for sheer worldly optimism, and “love” for desire or sentiment without sacrifice or commitment of the will. Another example of such emptying is the way some neo-pagans accept the Christian view that history has meaning and direction, but purge God from the story so that it becomes a bland tale of “progress” toward whatever they want the world to have more of. Pagans didn’t believe in progress, but in endlessly repeated recurrence.

Nor must we overlook another profound difference. If the pagan was at all inclined to admit that his nation had ever done wrong, he had no one else to blame. But the neo-pagan can blame his culture’s sins on Christianity. The trial of Galileo, the plunder of the American indigenes, the Spanish Inquisition—they were all the Christians’ fault.

Surely these things were gravely evil, though if neo-pagans were consistent, they would set the thousands killed by Christian inquisitions against the millions killed by atheistic inquisitions. Yet it is easy to see why they don’t. Christian offences are easier to invoke, because the Church admits them, and they are also more scandalous, just because of the Gospel of love.

In spite of the sins of Christians, one might expect the memory of the influence of the Gospel to favor its re-proclamation. After all, the pagan world had never experienced the revivifying effect of grace, but the neo-pagan world has. Consider just the Gospel’s high views of conscience and of the dignity of the human person, and how these have transformed Western culture. Surely all this cannot be overlooked!

No, but the neo-pagan takes for granted all the good that his culture has inherited from Christendom. In his view, certain things simply got better: That is just how history goes, or at least how it went. If he assigns anything the credit, he assigns it not to grace, but to such things as science, capitalism, and “enlightenment.”

He expects the stream to keep on flowing without the spring. When it does begin to dry up, he may be vaguely uneasy, but he does not fully grasp what he is seeing.  Why doesn’t he?  Because his ideas of dry and wet are changing too.  It isn’t just that the neo-pagan world around him is losing respect for the sacredness of the conscience and the dignity of the human person; he is a part of that world, and he is losing respect for them too.  They seem so unimportant.  Why do Christians obsess over them?

Finally, the pagan knew he was not a Christian. By contrast, a certain kind of neo-pagan may think that he is one. This oddity is perhaps the most challenging difference between evangelization and re-evangelization. In the ancient world, the people who needed to be evangelized were outside the walls of the Church; today they include thousands who are inside, but who think just like those who are outside.  When the Gospel is proclaimed, they complain.

A pew is a difficult mission field. It is hard for the shepherds to bring home the sheep if they think they are already in the fold.  But that is a story for another day.

This is Part 1 -- Click Here for Part 2

God willing, the new evangelization will happen, but let us not imagine that this time will be like the first time. The old evangelization proclaimed the Good News among pagan, pre-Christian peoples to whom it came as something new. Nothing like that had been done before. But nothing like our task has been done before either.

Re-evangelizing is not evangelizing as though for the first time again; the very fact of past proclamation makes re-proclamation different. For we proclaim the Gospel to a neo-pagan, post-Christian people to whom it does not come as new. The old world had not yet felt the caress of grace; our world, once brushed, now flinches from its touch.

Is re-evangelization completely and radically different from evangelization? No. The same Christ knocks at the door of the same human heart, though a heart with a different history. Is it more difficult? In some ways. Easier? In some ways. But different.

Here is one great difference: The pagan made excuses for transgressing the moral law. By contrast, the neo-pagan pretends, when it suits him, that there is no morality, or perhaps that each of us has a morality of his own. Since they had the Law and the Prophets, it comes as no surprise that the Jews took morality for granted. But to a great degree, and despite their sordid transgressions, so did the pagans.

Not that skepticism was unknown among them: “What is truth?” Pilate asked, not waiting for the answer. Yet consider all the pagan errors to which St. Paul alludes in his epistles: Was relativism one of them? No. He could omit it then; he could not have omitted it today.

Related to that first great difference is another. The pagan wanted to be forgiven, but he did not know how to find absolution. To him the Gospel came as a message of release. But the neo-pagan does not want to hear that he needs to be forgiven, and so to him the Gospel comes as a message of guilt.

This inversion seems incredible, because the neo-pagan certainly feels the weight of his sins. But he thinks the way to have peace is not to have the weight lifted, but to learn not to take it seriously. Hearing Christ’s promise of forgiveness, he thinks “All those guilty Christians!” Having chosen to view the freest people as the most burdened, he naturally views the most burdened as the freest. “Everyone has done things he regrets. Everyone lies. Get over it!”

The pagan was raised differently. He was brought up in the ways and the atmosphere of paganism, and in order to be converted, he had to be removed from both. By contrast, though the neo-pagan has probably also been taught pagan ways, he may have been brought up in an atmosphere of Christian sentiment. Consequently he regards the Gospel not as the story of true God become man, but as a sentimental fable for children. Even Christian sentiments are difficult to take seriously apart from the actual life of grace.

Then too, the pagan was likely to be exposed to the Gospel either all at once or not at all. The neo-pagan has been exposed to just enough spores to develop an allergic reaction. Perhaps he was baptized as a child, but never seriously taught the faith. Perhaps his parents became angry with the Church and stopped taking him.

The pagan suffered the burden of a pagan childhood, but he was spared the burden of an interrupted Christian childhood. Whereas he had never been immersed in the waters of faith, all too often the neo-pagan has been dipped in them, but then pulled out.

Not only was the pagan devoid of nostalgia for a Christian past, he was also unencumbered by the anger of guilt for rejecting it. The neo-pagan is susceptible to both the nostalgia and the anger, and he may even feel both at once.

I once met an atheist with a chip on his shoulder who boasted of the “fun” he had “ruining all the Catholic kids” at the Catholic college where he had taught. Yet after a few glasses of wine he said that he was “very religious,” and that he had recently joined a church choir from sheer love for the great old hymns. At turns, he was nostalgic for something good he had left behind, and belligerent because he had no good reason for having left it.