Question:

Apropos the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the non-Catholic religion reporter Terry Mattingly comments, “I would … have liked to have seen someone talk to Catholic scholars about the degree to which 'natural law' did or did not influence” him.

A lawyer, not a scholar, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about Scalia's views on the natural law to know the answer.  Do you have any thoughts on this?

Reply:

Justice Scalia was a paradox.  He believed in natural law; it was part of his Catholic faith.  However, he took his judicial oath to mean that he must uphold the “positive” or enacted law, or, if he was conscientiously unable to do so, resign.  Needless to say, the natural law does not allow vows to be set aside casually.

The Justice took his oath to imply that judges must not allow the natural law to enter into their reasoning about how cases should be decided.  Nothing mattered but what the enacted law actually meant.  For judges to consider the natural law would in his view be a form of judicial activism, an unauthorized usurpation of the trust committed to legislatures and constitutional conventions.

Natural law thinkers agree that the judicial office does not authorize judges to rewrite laws and constitutions by judicial fiat.  However, in their view it does not follow that judges may not consider the natural law, because no formula of words is entirely self-interpreting.  Consequently, no matter how determined one is to defer to the enacted law, one must consider the natural law just to know what it means.

So legislators must rely on natural law in order to enact the positive law, but judges must rely on natural law in order to understand it.  The words which humans use presuppose the law written on the human heart; they cannot help doing so.

I will always remember Justice Scalia for his great generosity in speaking to a seminar on natural law which I led for six weeks at Calvin College in 2003.  The judge gave us an entire day, submitting to our questions for three full hours, sharing a working lunch with us for another hour and half, then giving a semi-public lecture, followed by yet more questions.  He will be missed.

A reader responds:

Your recent remarks about anti-Christian bias in graduate school (here, here, and here) are only too true.  In case you haven’t seen it already, you may be interested in So Many Christians, So Few Lions, by sociologists George Yancey and David Williamson, which confirms this fact in great detail.

What they find – I have read the book, but I am quoting from a newspaper interview with one of the authors -- is that an elite subculture of persons who are highly educated, white, wealthy, not highly religious, and self-identified as moral “progressives” views Christians as “ignorant, intolerant and stupid individuals who are unable to think for themselves ... a backward, non-critical thinking, child-like people who do not like science and want to interfere with the lives of everyone else.”

The book also validates the experience of Christians who encounter anti-religious bigotry.  There is a tendency, even among Christians, to minimize reports of those who do experience hostility.  I recall one Christian commenting on a movie which follows the experience of a college freshman who encounters blatant and dogmatic attacks on his faith from his philosophy professor.  Her comment was, “The premise is so lame. That does not happen.”  It really does happen, and is not merely accidental to academic life.

It happened to me during my own graduate studies.  I remember the day when I was shocked speechless by hostile, off-the-wall remarks directed my way by my anthropology professor.  Fortunately, the teaching assistant, who was Jewish, took up for me and redeemed the day.

In your reply to my previous letter, you asked what triggered the attack.  I am not really sure, but I had suggested in class that the methodology of “thick description,” promoted by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, would allow consideration of the influence of religion on culture.  The professor ranted that she would not allow religion to be brought into the classroom – as though I had been preaching.

I checked my perceptions with another grad student who affirmed, "Yeah, she was picking on you."  She was more aggressive toward me than toward any other student the whole semester.  Even so, after a year of study, she seemed glad to see me around and always greeted me in the anthropology office.  So, after some initial hazing, I may have earned respect.

Reply:

I hear about hazing from quite a few Christian grad students.  Sometimes it comes only at the beginning, sometimes it continues.  You earned respect because you were courteous but didn’t back down, even though, on that first occasion, you were too stunned to reply.

Students who think they are being hazed should do just as you did, checking their perceptions with others in the class.  Professors are supposed to be tough, and sometimes students may think they are being hazed when they aren’t.

Not only religious students, but also anti-religious students may acquire that false perception.  In my own experience, Christian students are more likely than atheists to keep silent for fear of being attacked by the professor – but atheists are more thin-skinned, even when the criticism is fair and well-intended, because they are not used to having their assumptions challenged.

A group of former grad students I know used to run intellectual relays.  Each time one of them began to tire under their professor’s relentless criticisms, another would take the baton and run with it.  They came to enjoy the game, and so did the other students.  The professor, who called them the “amen corner,” would actually invite them to speak up in seminar, because they were always prepared, their reasoning was always careful, and they always had interesting things to say.

That’s the way to capture strongholds.

The Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law now has its own trailer:

What is law? Is there such a thing as natural law? Where does it come from? What does it demand of us? What does it imply about human laws?

Talk it up.  Link to it on Spacebook.  Print the web address on your tee shirt.  Send your friends Treatise on Law greeting cards.  Wouldn’t it be fun if this 76-second epic spread further?

I would like to thank all the volunteers who donated their time, not only those who had speaking parts, but also my friend, Arlen Nydam, the videographer.  All I did was write a 157-word script and schedule a few people.  Check out his beautiful website.

Other links:

The Underground Thomist YouTube Channel

The Underground Thomist Listen to Talks Page

Not long ago in this blog, I reported the views of Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, the new Hungarian ambassador to the Court of St. Peter, concerning why Thomistic philosophy disappeared (thankfully, only for a while) during the third quarter of the twentieth century.  Afterward the Ambassador graciously emailed to comment on my post.  Combining portions of several notes back and forth, I quote here with his permission.

Dear Underground Thomist:

Thanks for your feedback on your blog about my theories on the fall of Thomism.  Unfortunately, my thesis has not been translated into English, you (as a Thomist) would doubtlessly find it a fun read.

I wrote a more detailed account in Osservatore Romano a little while ago, but that’s in Italian.  The scan is longer than the online text, which has been shortened by about one-quarter.  The article recounts the story of when Cardinal Ratzinger, whom I interviewed for my thesis 25 years ago, met me later and encouraged me to write either “a TV documentary or a thriller” on the fall of Thomism.

Anyway, I tweeted your blog post.  You don’t seem to be on Twitter?

Greeting from the Urbs

Eduard Habsburg

Ambasciatore

Ambasciata di Ungheria presso la Santa Sede

Dear Ambassador Habsburg:

Thank you for your reply to my post.  I’m glad you liked it, and am sure I would enjoy your dissertation.  No, I’m not on Twitter – on social media, I am such a dinosaur that instead of tweeting I would have to grunt.  Then again, if dinosaurs really were ancestors of birds, perhaps they did tweet.

Thanks, too, for permission to quote from your notes.  Below, I have very roughly paraphrased a section from the Osservatore Romano article, which I am sure will interest my readers.

By the way, your tweet says, “Underground Thomist agrees/disagrees with my analysis of the Fall of Thomism.”  Actually I agreed entirely with your analysis; I was merely reflecting upon what seemed to me the foolishness of the attitude of the theologians who thought St. Thomas irrelevant to the study of the Fathers.

Greetings to the Urbs, from the Suburbs

J. Budziszewski

Professor of Government and Philosophy

University of Texas at Austin

“You Must Write a Thriller!”

(excerpted and roughly paraphrased from the original Italian)

Between the Second Vatican Council [1962-1965] and 1968, Thomism disappeared completely – no noise, no fuss.  It disappeared, but I wanted to know whether its disappearance was due to murder, illness or accident.  So I jumped in the car – this was in 1993 -- and visited the great legends of Thomism in Europe:  Joseph Pieper and Marie-Dominique Philippe, Hyacinthe Paissac and Józef Maria Bocheński, Joseph de Finance and, though unfortunately, only for a few minutes, Yves Congar.  I spoke with some twenty teachers, filling my tape recorder with interviews lasting up to two hours.

The two most touching moments were probably, [first,] the conversation with Christoph Schönborn, today Cardinal Schönborn, who told me [how at the Domincan Saulchoir, the teaching of] Thomism was forbidden, [so that] Schönborn learned it in secret, from an old Dominican, with a small group that met in a dorm.

Then, the meeting with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith .... The prefect spoke to me mostly of his impressions of the disappearance of Thomism during the Council itself.  But much later, when I sent him the conclusion of my argument, he wrote me a nice letter saying that it would be very important for me to continue the story, describing the subsequent events.  He suggested "a documentary for television -- or a thriller!”

Related:

What We Teach When We Don’t Teach

How You Are Different from a Turnip

A surprising number of parents tell me that they are afraid to “force” their children to worship with them, because then the kids might come to resent religion.

By this reasoning, children should not be “forced” to take baths for fear that they will come to despise cleanliness, “forced” to be gentle with smaller children for fear that they will come to hate kindness, “forced” to do their homework for fear that they will come to love stupidity, or “forced” to share family meals for fear that they will come to loathe the taste of food.

Faith is not the same thing as compliance, but compliance and imitation are how children learn everything.  Children do not naturally resent God or the worship of God.  What we find in the nature we share with Him is not an aversion but a longing:  As one of the Wisdom books says, He has “put eternity in their hearts.”  But to listen to that eternity they must be taught how to do so.  They must see us loving God.

I am flooded with gratitude that my parents and grandparents taught me well enough that after abandoning Him I knew how to return; vanquished when I reflect that when my wife and I did return, and began to worship regularly, our children, small then, were delighted.

Concerning the teachings of the faith, a certain late Bronze Age people were taught, “"You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land.”