I was talking last week about the young man whom the experience of reading Aristotle’s Ethics had “scared.”  In talking with him, I dropped the ball, and I promised to tell how.

Some people may think this has nothing to do with natural law.  I think it has a great deal to do with it.  It seems to me that the theory of natural law ought to be able to address itself to the reasons why the theory alone is insufficient.  Our problem is not just in the intellect.

As I explained in the previous post, the mere discussion of virtue had troubled my guest’s conscience.  He told me that it had made him realize that he hadn’t led a virtuous life.  Aristotle hadn’t mentioned the moral law, but conscience informed my guest that the virtues are commanded by that law.  He was telling me that he was frightened by that accuser.  He wanted to know what he could do about it.  He already knew how Aristotle would advise him to live.  But he hadn’t lived that way.

I told him I didn’t think Aristotle had the answer to his question, but I did think there was an answer.  He asked me to tell him what it was.

This request put me in a difficulty.  "I could speak about that,” I told him, “but not as a representative of the State of Texas, which employs me as a teacher.  I could only do it from the perspective of my faith."

"Would you do that?"

"Are you giving me permission to speak with you not professor to student, but man to man?"

"Yes. That's what I want you to do."

I made a silly gesture of taking off my professor hat.  I explained that he was free to say anything he wished without fear that it could affect his standing in the course.  That didn’t concern him.  He wanted to get on with it.

So I told him I thought he was experiencing what the New Testament calls the conviction of sin.  He said that made sense to him.

I then said the question was about how to be forgiven of sin and healed of what was broken.  He said that was what he wanted.

So in inward fear and trembling, I explained the Gospel of Christ to him.  He had been “scared”; now, I confess, I was.  But he accepted the truth of it all without hesitation.

And he told me it sounded wonderful.

Then would he be interested in entering into that world of forgiveness?  No.  And this was the reason that he gave:  He wasn’t good enough to be forgiven.

Disturbed by compassion, thinking he had misunderstood, I said that if we were good enough, we wouldn’t need forgiveness in the first place.  Not being good enough is the point.  That’s why divine mercy is called grace; it is an undeserved gift.  First God forgives us; then He makes us good.  There would be no need to make us good if we were good already.  Neither would there be a need for forgiveness.

But like a mantra, he kept saying “God couldn’t forgive me.”  Dropping his voice, he said I didn’t know all the things he had done.  “I’m not a good man like you, professor.”  I said the comparison was inappropriate because he didn’t know all the things I had done either.  Christ suffered for us not because we didn’t need it, but because we did.

It was as though he didn’t hear me.  The problem was not just that he was in despair.  It was that he clung to his despair, much as the saints cling to hope.  And so the conversation went.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the sin of Satan was that he wanted something of his own power, something he had not received from God.  So I asked my guest whether his conviction that he was too sinful to be forgiven might be rooted in a kind of pride.  Was he suggesting that his sin was so great, so unique, that it towered even over God’s mercy?  For nothing can overcome God’s mercy.

My last shot was to ask whether he claiming that his moral standards were higher than God’s -- that in this sense he was more righteous than God – that he wouldn’t allow God to sink so low as to forgive him?  For it isn’t because of low standards that God forgives us.

The questions simply didn’t register with him.  He iterated and reiterated his formula that he was not good enough to be forgiven.  He repelled reasons like oilcloth repels water.  He longed for forgiveness, but he was resolute not to be forgiven.

We talked.  We parted.  For several years I saw him on campus from time to time.  He always greeted me and chatted for a few minutes.  But the conversation that day had completely failed.

Why had it?  Only God knows, but after years of thinking about it, I do suspect part of the reason.  Taking my guest’s statements at face value, I think I had utterly misread both his motive and the state of his understanding.  I thought then that he was missing the point about forgiveness, but in fact he did get the point.  I thought then that he didn’t understand that he could be forgiven and healed, but in fact he did know he could be.

The problem, I now suspect, was that he wanted to be forgiven, but not healed.  The fatal flaw in his motive was unwillingness to change and be changed.  We cannot cooperate with the grace of forgiveness unless we also cooperate with the grace of healing, but he wanted only the first half of the deal.

I should have challenged him.  I didn’t.

No one can refuse good except for the sake of some other apparent good – St. Thomas again.  I didn’t see that some good must have seemed even better to him than beatitude.  I didn’t recognize that even in the teeth of unhappiness, the pursuit of some cherished desire seemed better to him than the Supreme Happiness which leaves nothing further to be desired.  So, though he could barely live with himself, still he clung to himself.  Desiring to preserve his life, he was losing it.

I haven’t seen him in years, but I still pray for him.  I pray for his redemption.  I pray that he might have talked with others, who didn’t drop the ball as badly as I did.  I also pray that I will do better, the next time someone turns up at my door to show me his trembling hands.

My post this week is a short one.  I’ve been writing about the ways of bringing suppressed moral knowledge back to the surface.  Last time I emphasized that these ways are merely illustrations, not magic tricks to be played on every audience, not use-on-all-occasions conversational stratagems.  Sometimes, I said, the only thing to do is nothing – or what looks, from the outside, like doing nothing.  One must wait alertly for an opportunity from God.  And one had better be praying at all times, because one may have to wait a long while, and the opportunity may come and go by in a flash.

Case in point:  An older, returning student visited my office hours one day to tell me that I was “scaring him.”  The class had been studying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.  Conversation went something like this.

“I’m scaring you?”

“Yeah.  [He holds out his hand.]  I’m shaking.  See?”

He really was.

“How am I scaring you?”

“Well, it isn’t really you.  It’s Aristotle.”

“How is Aristotle scaring you?”

“It’s this book of his you’re making us read.”

“How is Aristotle’s book scaring you?”

“Well, he keeps talking about the virtues.  And it’s making me realize that I haven’t led a virtuous life.”

In the assigned reading, Aristotle had merely explained that the virtues are necessary for a flourishing life.  He hadn’t mentioned God.  He hadn’t mentioned law.  He hadn’t said a thing about guilt or transgression.  And I hadn’t said anything about them either.

Until this moment I hadn’t known that God could use an old pagan who said nothing about these things to bring about the conviction of sin.

And here the young man sat, his hands still quivering, waiting for me to tell him what to do about it.

The ball had been placed in my own hands.  And I dropped it.  Next week, why, and how not to.

Conviction

I’ve been discussing some of the ways in which suppressed moral knowledge can be brought back to the surface.  In my last post I described conversational turns which I called turning back the question, dissipating smoke, and connecting the dots.

As you can guess from those examples, I like to give things names.  Since people so often lock up their pain and guilt, as though in a jewelry box, so let’s call the next one releasing the catch.  A certain crisis pregnancy counselor whom I know is deft at doing that.  It helps that she isn’t afraid to ask seeminly silly questions, nor is she afraid of silence; she isn’t one of those people who think that every pause in conversation has to be mortared over with empty sound.  The intake form given to clients at her crisis pregnancy center asked a variety of questions:  Have you ever had an abortion?  If so, how many have you had?  Have you ever experienced any emotional side effects?  Even though the women she spoke with had already written answers, she always asked the same questions in the face to face interview.

Have ever had an abortion?  A woman who had written “No” might answer face to face, “Yes.”  How many have you had?  A woman who had written that she had had just one might answer face to face, “Three.”  Have you ever experienced any emotional side effects from an abortion?  Almost every woman had written “No” -- and almost every woman said the same thing when asked face to face.  My counselor friend, who doesn’t trust appearances, would say nothing for a few seconds.  It was a way to give permission to say more, and into the silence, women often did speak differently.  It might go like this.

My friend:  Have you ever experienced any emotional side effects from an abortion?

Woman:  No … [pause] [pause][pause] … other than the usual.

My counselor friend would then simply ask, “What’s the usual?”  That released the catch on the jewelry box, and all sorts of things would come out.

Still another approach is playing back the tape.  I am not speaking literally of voice recorders; I mean merely that many people spontaneously recognize their self-deceptions, if only they are given a chance to realize what they have been saying.  I gently pointed out to one challenger that he had interrupted each one of my answers by asking another question from a different direction.  Ordinarily a courteous fellow, he was abashed.  "I guess I do," he said; "Why do I do that?"  I replied, “Why do you think you do that?”  He had already figured it out:  "I must not want to hear your answers."  I suggested "Then let's talk about why you don't."  It was a turning point.  Soon he was discussing with me all of the things he didn’t want to think about, but really knew.

Yet another is calling attention to the obvious.  The counselor friend whom I mentioned above used well-directed questions.  Most abortion-minded women pretend to themselves that they are boxed in by circumstances; they say things like "I know abortion is wrong, but I just can't have a baby right now."  My friend would ask, "What do you call what's in you?"  No matter what she thinks she believes about abortion, almost every pregnant woman replies, as though by instinct, "I call it a baby."  That made it possible for my friend to say, without any trace of browbeating or presumption, "Then it sounds like you already have a baby.  The question isn't whether to have one, but what you're going to do with the one you've got."

The last way I’ll discuss might be called tightening the noose.  By this I mean helping people to recognize the implications of their own tacit choices.  That is more difficult than it used to be, for a great many people cling to the protection of views which are not merely false but incoherent; for instance, they dogmatically insist that truth cannot be known, all the while supposing that what they say is completely true.  Once upon a time, when people were still taught practical logic in the schools, it might have been enough to point out the incoherency.  Go ahead, try it.  It no longer works.  You are likely to hear answers like, "Yeah – I see that.  I guess you’re right.  I am being incoherent.  But so what?  I don't need coherency, and I can do without meaning."

I used to drop the ball terribly when people said things like that, because I thought I had to convince them that they needed meaning and coherency.  You can’t convince people that they need meaning and coherency, because you can’t convince people of what they already know, and they already know that they need meaning and coherency.  They are merely in denial.  The only thing you can do is rely on the fact that that they do know it.  So now I answer, "I don't believe you, because we both know that the longing for meaning and coherency is deep-set in every mind, including yours.”  You would think they would answer, “But I don’t know that.”  Au contraire.  Suddenly they get that cornered look on their faces; they have been caught out in a lie.  So I follow through, remarking, “The real question, then, is this:  What is so important to you that you are willing to give up even meaning, even coherency, to have it?"

In old fashioned language, this amounts to asking, “What is your idol?”  And they more or less understand the question.  Sometimes, after goggling for a few seconds, they even try to answer.  If they do, then they’ve reached that turning point I’ve mentioned.  But sometimes, instead of answering, they merely retreat into babble.  For a moment the shutter was open, but they’ve closed it again.  That’s all right.  Why is it all right?  Because they’ll remember that the shutter was open.  The memory will irritate them, so they will try not to think about it.  But if the shutter opens often enough, not thinking about it will may become more and more difficult.  They the shutter may stay open a little longer before they close it.  Perhaps it will even stay open long enough for a bit of the truth to get through.  There may even come a day when they don’t close the shutter.  You may not be the one to see that day.  That doesn’t matter -- so long as it comes, and someone is there who knows what to do.

These are merely illustrations.  They aren’t magic tricks to be played on every audience.  They aren’t use-on-all-occasions conversational stratagems.  Sometimes the only thing to do is nothing – or what looks, from the outside, like doing nothing.  One must wait for an opportunity from God.  One may have to wait a long time, and one had better keep his eyes open, because the opportunity may come and go by in a flash.

More about that next week.

Dredging the Sunken Conscience

Last week’s post ended with the question, “Can conscience be dredged?  Can suppressed moral knowledge be brought back to the surface?  Can anything be done, conversationally speaking, to help people recognize their own moral self-deceptions?”

The paradox is that the natural law is both really known, and really suppressed.  Among my Catholic friends, who “get” the fact that it is known, I stress the fact that it is suppressed; among my Reformed friends, who “get” the fact that it is suppressed, I stress the fact that it is known.  Sometimes people think that suppressed moral knowledge is the same as weakened moral knowledge with weakened power over behavior.  On the contrary, pressing down one's conscience does not make it weak any more than pressing down a wildcat makes it docile.  It only makes it violent.  The claws of conscience are even sharper in a culture with a Christian past, like ours, for then people have more knowledge to suppress.  That is why they act so badly.

The task, then, is to find the ways to stir up that disturbing knowledge and arouse that troubling memory.  How?

One way is to turn back the question.  One of my students proclaimed to me one day, "Morality is all relative anyway.  How do we even know that murder is wrong?"  I asked, “Are you in any doubt about that?”  He answered, “Some people might say murder is okay.”  I replied, “But I’m not talking with some people.  At this moment are you in any real doubt that murder is wrong for everyone?"  After a long uncomfortable silence he admitted that he wasn't.  That was an opening, but one has to follow through.  So I replied, "Good.  Then let's talk about something you really are in doubt about."  Suddenly he had discovered that he wasn’t a relativist after all.  Relativism was merely a convenient pose, which provided an excuse whenever he had done something wrong.

Another way is to dissipate smoke.  I was speaking with another person who expressed dozens of objections to a point I was making about God.  The interesting thing is that whenever I refuted one of his objections, he seemed unfazed and merely deployed another.  This fact suggested that he was laying down a smoke barrage – that his numerous objections were a way to hide from the truth rather than to get at it – more precisely, to hide from the kind of conversation that might unveil it.  So I asked "Suppose we took a few weeks and I answered every one of your objections to your own complete intellectual satisfaction.  Would you then submit to God?"  He answered "No."  Follow through, follow through, follow through:  I answered, “Then your real problem with God isn’t in your mind, it’s in your will.”  He saw that it was true.  If the other young man had discovered that he wasn’t a relativist after all, this one had discovered that he wasn’t an intellectual skeptic after all.  Disbelieving in God was a game that he played to keep from having to face Him.

Still another way is to connect the dots -- better yet, help the person on the other side to connect them.  A friend who was a chaplain at another university told me about a young woman in his student group who went to pro-abortion meetings, chanted in pro-abortion rallies, and even gave a speech to her college rhetoric class about how her abortion had solved her problem.  Yet her burst of activism coincided with a mysterious, seemingly unmotivated suicidal depression, which had come on all at once, and which she had not divulged to anyone else.  She herself had invested too much in the Solved Problem Story to recognize the link, but he knew her well enough to suspect what it might be.  So he asked her to tell him again when her depression had set in.  She answered, “Just this week.”  He asked, "If you hadn't had your abortion, then when would the child have been born?"  She thought for a moment, then answered, “Just about now."  She connected the dots.  Her wall of denial collapsed.  She realized that her abortion hadn’t solved her problem after all.  It had given her one.

That was a good thing, not a bad one, because now she could do something about it.

More about dredging conscience next week.

An Angry Professor

The other day a student at another university related an interesting tale to me.  According to his ethics professor, anything goes between consenting adults.  The student remarked during office hours that by this standard, voluntary incest, voluntary cannibalism, and voluntary bestiality would all be okay.  The professor agreed.  “What’s the harm?” he asked.  He wasn’t playing devil’s advocate; this was really his view.

That’s not what makes the story interesting.  Such is the state of our intellectual culture that opinions like this are not at all unusual.  What makes the story interesting is what came next.  When my young friend politely suggested that incest, cannibalism, and bestiality are immoral, indecent, and disgusting, and that consent doesn’t make them okay, the professor – who is rather shy in lecture, he says -- became enraged and aggressive.  The conversation, apparently, went on for some time, and went steadily downhill.  The professor became angrier and angrier.  “What’s the harm?” he kept asking.  In a gibe against the young man’s Catholic faith, he sneered “You have already lost – you have already lost.”

“I have never seen anything like it,” my young friend told me.  “It was almost as if he had found out that I had raped his wife during his anniversary, and I was confessing it to him.”

He adds that he is drained and demoralized by the conversation and needs to talk about it, but he hesitates to do so.  “I feel bad about speaking about it, not because I feel as though as though I did something wrong, but because I'm not sure that I can share this darkness with others.  How do you begin a conversation with a friend by telling him that your professor thinks that marrying your mother and eating people's flesh is morally permissible?”

Despite having spent much of my career criticizing such views, I too find them difficult to talk about, and most people find it difficult to hear about them.  Morally undamaged people find such topics creepy, with good reason.  Natural modesty makes them want to cover their ears.  The shame of it is that such reticence allows people who hold these creepy views to have their way in our schools, courts, and other opinion-forming institutions.

Where does one begin?  At any number of points.  For instance, we can talk about the sheer incoherence of the professor’s opinion.  His persistent question “Where’s the harm?” suggests that nothing is ever morally wrong unless it causes harm.  But isn’t it a little strange to suggest that eating a person doesn’t harm him?  The function of the professor’s ancillary principle, mutual consent, seems to be to reclassify being eaten as a special kind of harm, which doesn’t count as harmful.  John Stuart Mill, the pioneer of this way of thinking, had all sorts of devices for reclassifying harms as non-harms.  By his lights, the corruption of mores which safeguard human flourishing is not harm; seduction to evil is not harm; insult is not harm; conduct by which a person destroys his abilities to fulfill his obligations to others is not harm; and the risk of harm, distributed in such a way that we do not know on whom the sword will fall, is not harm either.

From a rational point of view, making such points is very good.  In a situation like the young man’s conversation with his professor, it is useless.  People don’t become enraged because they want to reason with you, but because they don’t want to reason with you.

Why don’t they want to reason with you?

Maybe because they have something on their conscience.  They have done something wrong, they don’t want to admit to themselves that it is wrong, and they are acutely uncomfortable when their rationalizations are called into question. Their rage is a “tell,” like the little tics and gestures most people make when they are lying.  It signals that at some level, even they know that the views they are trying to defend are indefensible.

This is only to be expected.  Thomas Aquinas points out that the foundational moral principles are “the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge.”  This little grenade of a proposition means that the moral basics are not only right for everyone, but in some sense known to everyone.  It follows that although anyone may make an innocent mistake about the remote implications of a first principle, if someone contradicts the first principle itself, his mistake isn’t innocent.  He is lying to himself.

I suggest that the hypothesis of moral self-deception explains a lot of things which the hypothesis of innocent error cannot.  We don't get angry just because people disagree with us.  The reason the professor is so angry is that he is trying to hide from avenging conscience, and someone is calling out to it, “Look!  Here he is!  Come and get him!”

How can one talk with self-deceived people?  Should one confront them?  That’s what my young friend wondered:  “I am starting to think that a valid response to some arguments is a good old fashioned ‘bulls—t.’”  This suggestion was half-right and half-wrong.  “Bulls—t” may be a valid response to certain kinds of opinion, because it cannot be rational to deny first principles.  However, it is rarely a persuasive response, because confrontation usually makes people more belligerent, not less.  And I don’t just mean professors.

Next week:  Leaving professors aside, can conscience be dredged?  Can suppressed moral knowledge be brought back to the surface?  Can anything be done, conversationally speaking, to help people recognize their own moral self-deceptions?

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