You may read Part I here.
Mecosta, MI. Even in the mother’s folksy verbal inversion one can hear a critique of the frequent modern understanding of nature and the “laws of nature” as simply that which has previously existed. To know what is natural, we have also to know what ought to exist, to know what a thing ought to be in order to perfect itself. Dupré does not leave us to hash out the inadequacies of modern conceptions of nature relative to Aristotle’s. He fleshes them out incisively:
Aristotle’s concept of nature includes three distinctive strands of meaning: (1) a potential for development, the energeia for growth to perfection (as in Metaphysics 4.4, 1015a7); (2) the essence of the developing thing (as in Met. 3.4, 1030a3); (3) the goal or perfection of the thing once it attains the end of its development (as in Politics 1, 2, 1252b). Later generations elaborated these meanings without preserving their original coherence. The idea of nature as perfective norm came to dominate Stoic philosophy and, through that channel, the Scholastic theory of natural law. Modern thought from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century developed the idea of nature as potential into an ideology of progress unrestricted by such limits as Aristotle had set to any natural potency. Nature as essence emerged in isolated form, detached from its normative meaning, in the eighteenth-century theory of natural rights. Taken together, the three characteristics of Aristotle’s concept of nature constituted a teleological conception that none of the later developments of each of them taken singularly ever attained. Only by being simultaneously potential and norm is nature able to achieve the goals it pursues.
All three of these definitions smash through the cyclotron of contemporary culture with a hyperactivity that never achieves coherence. Dupré rightly indicts modern thought for severing the concept of nature as “potential for development” from the others, and thereby making it possible for us to envision nature as all the crude matter “outside” of us, meaning alienated from our active intellects, and therefore subject to our domination. Nature simply is what is, inert and meaningless until we impress upon it the forms of our imagination by the power of our art. In this conception, there could be no natural law much less any natural morality, for nature means precisely that which precedes the level of made or actualized meaning as a zone of pure potential. We have seen the consequences of this view throughout the modern age: the maniacal delusion that human beings are self-fashioning (they may make and remake their “selves” like so much putty) and that human communities can be artificially created and formed according to the imperatives of human will.
If one were to introduce any moral theory to this “pure potency” conception of nature, it would have to be in what Howell dubs “utilitarian” terms. That is, we can only ask questions about the methods of our making and doing relative to the subject-articulated judgments about the intended outcomes or consequences of those methods. When moderns say “that wasn’t supposed to happen,” they do not mean something has gone against nature, for nature does not do anything on this scheme. Nature is that to which things are done, it is the patient on which things “happen” according to our will. Utopian liberals imbibe this notion wholesale, and dream of a day in which no person shall exist who has not been formed on the social planning of their rationalistic geniuses. Neoconservatives merely caution against an o’erhastey marriage of social planning and human matter with their “law of unintended consequences.” But let us return to “nature” and her laws.
Notice how Dupré traces a genealogy from the misinterpretation of Aristotle by the Stoics to the rise of Scholastic natural law theory—a theory most richly expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas, but persisting in thinned and pruned ways in later thinkers, including Suarez and John Locke. The Stoic conception of nature in some ways resembles the utilitarian “pure potentiality” definition of nature just discussed; indeed, it is the Stoic conception that wrestles with the utilitarian one in the case of Darwin mentioned above and, I fear, in the case of Howell’s discussion as well.
In brief, Stoic thought presumes a perfect and achieved rationality in all things as they already exist. Nature is not a place of growth and change but of stasis and order. To say this does not mean things are “good” or “evil,” but that they are as they are meant to be in perfect conformity to the logos, the law of reality ordained by God. In regard to the condition of things, this view is absolutely deterministic: things are as they are because they always and already are as they are intended to be. Even dissolution and death inhere in this perfection, and Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor, wrote:
if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.
In regard to the human being, this passage hints, things are slightly less determined. Human reason can discern the laws that govern reality; it can know the truth, and it either does or does not know it not as a matter of freedom but of ignorance. Freedom enters only in the human faculty of the will. The Stoics teach us that man, in full knowledge of the perfect state of things, may either accept or refuse to accept his already determined condition. If the will refuses, the will is perverse and evil; if it accepts its condition, even in the worst events of suffering and pain, then the will is ordered rightly and is good. For Darwin to accept the state of nature as he described it and to say, “though I may find it grotesque, I accept it as true and perfect,” would be for him to manifest the Stoic position. His sensibility protests, “this isn’t supposed to happen,” but his knowledge corrects him: “S–t happens.”
Stoic thought has been assimilated into Christianity in multiple ways and in multiple times—in the early Christian centuries as well as during the Renaissance, and again in the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. One most readily detects this in Christian accounts of evil that say, as Alexander Pope once said in his Essay on Man, that “the first Almighty Cause / Acts not by partial, but by gen’ral laws.” He concludes:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.
“What appears to us as evil is only so because we have but a “partial” vision and not a “universal” one?,” we ask. No one accepts this claim as Pope asserts it, even though we may accept it in a substantially modified form, such as that of St. Augustine at his best; he does not deny the reality of evil, the reality of discord, active in the realm of creation. St. Augustine was sufficiently influenced by the Stoics himself to accept that, absolutely speaking, Pope’s maxims might in some sense be right, simply because God’s agency in history ultimately brings good from evil.
But he, with orthodox Christianity, affirms rather than denies the real negation-of-being that constitutes evil, and so does not reduce human agency to an attitude of will. Our actions can be good or evil in themselves and they can function for good or ill ends. Indeed, many things that happen must be understood as evil—whether natural or moral, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains: an earthquake is an instance of natural evil, adultery one of moral evil. Later in his poem, Pope condemns the Stoics (for thinking that the perfect ordering of the will is the purpose of human life and the definition of happiness). Such is the intricate history of Stoicism’s interaction with Christian thought that Pope is typical precisely in this respect. Christians often absorb and reject Stoicism like a half-brother in King Lear.
The Stoics presume, therefore, an already perfected order in the universe; and so, whatever is already must be right, and moral goodness consists of an absolute submission of the will and conformity to that determined order. Dupré observes that it was this static conception of the rational order of things that most directly led to the development of natural law theory in the Scholastic period. And it is the Christian Stoic conception of natural law that most frequently gets presented in contemporary moral debates. This occurs precisely because, as I said above, the Stoic conception of nature as a static order curiously resembles the modern “utilitarian” vision of nature as a realm of pure potency awaiting our exploitation. On the surface, no two ideas could seem more antipathetic, but what both of them decisively lack is Aristotle’s primary definition of nature—that of teleology. Neither accepts arguments about the purpose of things, the final cause toward which everything is directed in its particular way and for which everything exists. Both assume that arguments must be about “facts,” that is, already existent and static data of reality (facts are “made” according to the theory of potency, hence the origin of the word “fact” in facere, and they are “found” according to the Stoic). In both these schemes, any discussion of purpose seems only to cloud the inert clarity of matters of fact.
Thus, in a development of the Stoic tradition, Robert P. George and Hadley Arkes, have mounted powerful arguments against abortion and homosexual “unions” that meet the criteria of “public reason” in liberal society on its own terms, arguing in terms of a priori natural laws (matters of subjective rights, such as the right to life, for instance) and in terms of a posteriori consequences (the social utility of traditional marriage and the family). They present a series of immanent facts and draw swift conclusions without the introduction of broader questions about the meaning and purpose of human life. That our liberal masters refuse these arguments has nothing to do with a weakness in George or Arkes’ cogency; the arguments, again, meet the criteria of public, secular reason that liberal society establishes, and such arguments time and again lead to the equivocation of our liberal masters, who twist uncomfortably and lie until they can squirrel themselves away from honest argument.
To my lights, Howell has done much the same thing. He evidently saw that his students, having been reared in a liberal culture and educated according to standards of utilitarian pleasure-maximization, will struggle to think beyond the modern conception of nature-as-potential. It was indeed an act of charity for him to give them at least a glimpse of the Christian Stoic natural law conception of nature-as-normative-perfection. Such was his expressed intent in his email to the students:
Natural Moral Theory says that if we are to have healthy sexual lives, we must return to a connection between procreation and sex. Why? Because that is what is REAL. It is based on human sexual anatomy and physiology. Human sexuality is inherently unitive and procreative. If we encourage sexual relations that violate this basic meaning, we will end up denying something essential about our humanity, about our feminine and masculine nature.
I know this doesn’t answer all the questions in many of your minds. All I ask as your teacher is that you approach these questions as a thinking adult. That implies questioning what you have heard around you. Unless you have done extensive research into homosexuality and are cognizant of the history of moral thought, you are not ready to make judgments about moral truth in this matter. All I encourage is to make informed decisions. As a final note, a perceptive reader will have noticed that none of what I have said here or in class depends upon religion. Catholics don’t arrive at their moral conclusions based on their religion. They do so based on a thorough understanding of natural reality.
That this message should have excited the rage of students and been deemed justification for dismissal from the University reveals much about the libidinous relativism of our culture and the bankruptcy of both our conceptions of education and the institutions that pretend to purvey it. It sounds as if Howell sought to meet the supposedly paramount criterion of liberal society—informed consent—in his argument. He was trying to explain an argument so that the students could agree or disagree with it from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance. But, of course, contemporary universities in practice generally conspire to keep students as ignorant, docile, and hedonistic as possible—even though they pay lip service to expired Enlightenment conceptions of open-minded tolerance and cosmopolitan knowledge.
And yet, I do not think it out of place to insist that a Christian Stoic conception of natural law is not, ultimately, an orthodox Christian conception of natural law. In consequence, Howell’s argument remains incomplete and risks allowing the most doggedly perverse and intolerantly relativist students in his classroom to rest complacent in their dereliction. To Howell’s correct claim that the facts of nature show man and woman as a priori complementary and homosexual acts as injurious in multiple ways, might not a Stoic homosexualist reply, “If homosexual acts were wrong, then God would not have allowed them to exist in nature”? Unless one can show that homosexual desires occur nowhere in the natural order but only in the human will, Stoic moral theory will struggle on this point.
Thus, the thin Stoic understanding of nature leads to intractable arguments over which already-existent “facts” are most morally compelling, precisely because it does not allow the essential criterion of telos, of final purpose, to enter as judge. A more robust conception of nature alone, one that can offer a description of a perfection and happiness not yet achieved but ultimately achievable, is required. I propose that, as a matter of charity, Howell’s students deserve not just the truth they are prepared to handle, but the whole truth.
And the whole truth instructs us that orthodox Christianity relies with singular integrity upon natural reason as it does on the revelation by God’s grace. As St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it” (Summa Theologica I, 1, 8). In that crucial word, “perfects,” Aquinas indicates that his vision of nature is Aristotle’s and not that of the Stoics, however much his discussions of natural law elsewhere in the Summa may draw upon them. Like Aristotle, Aquinas sees that things are created with determinate essences or natures, and like Aristotle he presumes the fundamental characteristic of created reality is that of change—its composite status between non-being and being, between potency and actuality, between past and future. As such, ours is a dynamic world created according to intelligible laws, but it is also an incomplete world whose laws are not always and already fulfilled; they are, however, always on a path to their final end, to their perfection. He contends, along with the Philosopher, that nature must sometimes be imitated and sometimes completed; it has already determined our course, but human beings, endowed with free will, must actively work to find the means of making themselves into the persons they are intended to become. So, Aquinas writes,
For everything is called good according to its perfection. Now perfection of a thing is three-fold: first, according to the constitution of its own being; secondly, in respect of any accidents being added as necessary for its perfect operation; thirdly, perfection consists in the attained to something else as the end. (Summa Theologica I, 6, 3)
A watchmaker makes a watch; he puts a battery in it to make it tick; he sets the time and watches it mark the passing seconds perfectly. A human being is conceived; he soon acquires the “accidental” capacity to laugh and cry; he becomes a pious Catholic, a faithful husband, a good provider, and devoted father of five. He is living an almost perfect life, one that will be completed and perfected absolutely upon his final and eternal intellectual union with the Father in Heaven. The purpose of a watch is instrumental: it serves man. The purpose of a human life also lies beyond itself, but not in an instrumental fashion, for the eternal end that summons us is to happiness in truth and love. To say so does not reduce the Aristotelian and Thomist accounts of nature to a “utilitarian” one, but it acknowledges something that utilitarianism gets not right but more right than the Stoics: individual actions must also be judged according to a purpose that lies beyond them. Conversely, the Stoics are right to observe that those actions and ends are part of a rational and intelligible order and so have an absolute significance. But our age, and human beings in every age, requires more.
No doubt, in the course as a whole, Howell provided his students with a fuller description of that expansive call, the summons to happiness-in-perfection of the Catholic faith. No doubt, he did so circumspectly, and in his effort to meet many students in their benighted condition, he gave them a less compelling argument than he might have. And even for this, this small gift of knowledge and respect for the intellectual and moral potential of his students, he has already paid a great price.
Mecosta, MI.Even in the mother’s folksy verbal inversion one can hear a critique of the frequent modern understanding of nature and the “laws of nature” as simply that which has previously existed.To know what is natural, we have also to know what ought to exist, to know what a thing ought to be in order to perfect itself.Dupré does not leave us to hash out the inadequacies of modern conceptions of nature relative to Aristotle’s.He fleshes them out incisively:
Aristotle’s concept of nature includes three distinctive strands of meaning: (1) a potential for development, the energeia for growth to perfection (as in Metaphysics 4.4, 1015a7); (2) the essence of the developing thing (as in Met. 3.4, 1030a3); (3) the goal or perfection of the thing once it attains the end of its development (as in Politics 1, 2, 1252b).Later generations elaborated these meanings without preserving their original coherence.The idea of nature as perfective norm came to dominate Stoic philosophy and, through that channel, the Scholastic theory of natural law.Modern thought from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century developed the idea of nature as potential into an ideology of progress unrestricted by such limits as Aristotle had set to any natural potency.Nature as essence emerged in isolated form, detached from its normative meaning, in the eighteenth-century theory of natural rights.Taken together, the three characteristics of Aristotle’s concept of nature constituted a teleological conception that none of the later developments of each of them taken singularly ever attained.Only by being simultaneously potential and norm is nature able to achieve the goals it pursues.
All three of these definitions smash through the cyclotron of contemporary culture with a hyperactivity that never achieves coherence.Dupré rightly indicts modern thought for severing the concept of nature as “potential for development” from the others, and thereby making it possible for us to envision nature as all the crude matter “outside” of us, meaning alienated from our active intellects, and therefore subject to our domination.Nature simply is what is, inert and meaningless until we impress upon it the forms of our imagination by the power of our art.In this conception, there could be no natural law much less any natural morality, for nature means precisely that which precedes the level of made or actualized meaning as a zone of pure potential.We have seen the consequences of this view throughout the modern age: the maniacal delusion that human beings are self-fashioning (they may make and remake their “selves” like so much putty) and that human communities can be artificially created and formed according to the imperatives of human will.
If one were to introduce any moral theory to this “pure potency” conception of nature, it would have to be in what Howell dubs “utilitarian” terms.That is, we can only ask questions about the methods of our making and doing relative to the subject-articulated judgments about the intended outcomes or consequences of those methods.When moderns say “that wasn’t supposed to happen,” they do not mean something has gone against nature, for nature does not do anything on this scheme.Nature is that to which things are done, it is the patient on which things “happen” according to our will.Utopian liberals imbibe this notion wholesale, and dream of a day in which no person shall exist who has not been formed on the social planning of their rationalistic geniuses.Neoconservatives merely caution against an o’erhastey marriage of social planning and human matter with their “law of unintended consequences.”But let us return to “nature” and her laws.
Notice how Dupré traces a genealogy from the misinterpretation of Aristotle by the Stoics to the rise of Scholastic natural law theory—a theory most richly expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas, but persisting in thinned and pruned ways in later thinkers, including Suarez and John Locke.The Stoic conception of nature in some ways resembles the utilitarian “pure potentiality” definition of nature just discussed; indeed, it is the Stoic conception that wrestles with the utilitarian one in the case of Darwin mentioned above and, I fear, in the case of Howell’s discussion as well.
In brief, Stoic thought presumes a perfect and achieved rationality in all things as they already exist.Nature is not a place of growth and change but of stasis and order.To say this does not mean things are “good” or “evil,” but that they are as they are meant to be in perfect conformity to the logos, the law of reality ordained by God.In regard to the condition of things, this view is absolutely deterministic: things are as they are because they always and already are as they are intended to be.Even dissolution and death inhere in this perfection, and Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor, wrote:
if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements?For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.
In regard to the human being, this passage hints, things are slightly less determined.Human reason can discern the laws that govern reality; it can know the truth, and it either does or does not know it not as a matter of freedom but of ignorance.Freedom enters only in the human faculty of the will.The Stoics teach us that man, in full knowledge of the perfect state of things, may either accept or refuse to accept his already determined condition.If the will refuses, the will is perverse and evil; if it accepts its condition, even in the worst events of suffering and pain, then the will is ordered rightly and is good.For Darwin to accept the state of nature as he described it and to say, “though I may find it grotesque, I accept it as true and perfect,” would be for him to manifest the Stoic position.His sensibility protests, “this isn’t supposed to happen,” but his knowledge corrects him: “S–t happens.”
Stoic thought has been assimilated into Christianity in multiple ways and in multiple times—in the early Christian centuries as well as during the Renaissance, and again in the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.One most readily detects this in Christian accounts of evil that say, as Alexander Pope once said in his Essay on Man, that “the first Almighty Cause / Acts not by partial, but by gen’ral laws.” He concludes:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.
“What appears to us as evil is only so because we have but a “partial” vision and not a “universal” one?,” we ask.No one accepts this claim as Pope asserts it, even though we may accept it in a substantially modified form, such as that of St. Augustine at his best; he does not deny the reality of evil, the reality of discord, active in the realm of creation.St. Augustine was sufficiently influenced by the Stoics himself to accept that, absolutely speaking, Pope’s maxims might in some sense be right, simply because God’s agency in history ultimately brings good from evil.
But he, with orthodox Christianity, affirms rather than denies the real negation-of-being that constitutes evil, and so does not reduce human agency to an attitude of will.Our actions can be good or evil in themselves and they can function for good or ill ends.Indeed, many things that happen must be understood as evil—whether natural or moral, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains: an earthquake is an instance of natural evil, adultery one of moral evil.Later in his poem, Pope condemns the Stoics (for thinking that the perfect ordering of the will is the purpose of human life and the definition of happiness).Such is the intricate history of Stoicism’s interaction with Christian thought that Pope is typical precisely in this respect.Christians often absorb and reject Stoicism like a half-brother in King Lear.
The Stoics presume, therefore, an already perfected order in the universe; and so, whatever is already must be right, and moral goodness consists of an absolute submission of the will and conformity to that determined order.Dupré observes that it was this static conception of the rational order of things that most directly led to the development of natural law theory in the Scholastic period.And it is the Christian Stoic conception of natural law that most frequently gets presented in contemporary moral debates.This occurs precisely because, as I said above, the Stoic conception of nature as a static order curiously resembles the modern “utilitarian” vision of nature as a realm of pure potency awaiting our exploitation.On the surface, no two ideas could seem more antipathetic, but what both of them decisively lack is Aristotle’s primary definition of nature—that of teleology.Neither accepts arguments about the purpose of things, the final cause toward which everything is directed in its particular way and for which everything exists.Both assume that arguments must be about “facts,” that is, already existent and static data of reality (facts are “made” according to the theory of potency, hence the origin of the word “fact” in facere, and they are “found” according to the Stoic).In both these schemes, any discussion of purpose seems only to cloud the inert clarity of matters of fact.
Thus, in a development of the Stoic tradition, Robert P. George and Hadley Arkes, have mounted powerful arguments against abortion and homosexual “unions” that meet the criteria of “public reason” in liberal society on its own terms, arguing in terms of a priori natural laws (matters of subjective rights, such as the right to life, for instance) and in terms of a posteriori consequences (the social utility of traditional marriage and the family).They present a series of immanent facts and draw swift conclusions without the introduction of broader questions about the meaning and purpose of human life.That our liberal masters refuse these arguments has nothing to do with a weakness in George or Arkes’ cogency; the arguments, again, meet the criteria of public, secular reason that liberal society establishes, and such arguments time and again lead to the equivocation of our liberal masters, who twist uncomfortably and lie until they can squirrel themselves away from honest argument.
To my lights, Howell has done much the same thing.He evidently saw that his students, having been reared in a liberal culture and educated according to standards of utilitarian pleasure-maximization, will struggle to think beyond the modern conception of nature-as-potential.It was indeed an act of charity for him to give them at least a glimpse of the Christian Stoic natural law conception of nature-as-normative-perfection.Such was his expressed intent in his email to the students:
Natural Moral Theory says that if we are to have healthy sexual lives, we must return to a connection between procreation and sex. Why? Because that is what is REAL. It is based on human sexual anatomy and physiology. Human sexuality is inherently unitive and procreative. If we encourage sexual relations that violate this basic meaning, we will end up denying something essential about our humanity, about our feminine and masculine nature.
I know this doesn’t answer all the questions in many of your minds. All I ask as your teacher is that you approach these questions as a thinking adult. That implies questioning what you have heard around you. Unless you have done extensive research into homosexuality and are cognizant of the history of moral thought, you are not ready to make judgments about moral truth in this matter. All I encourage is to make informed decisions. As a final note, a perceptive reader will have noticed that none of what I have said here or in class depends upon religion. Catholics don’t arrive at their moral conclusions based on their religion. They do so based on a thorough understanding of natural reality.
That this message should have excited the rage of students and been deemed justification for dismissal from the University reveals much about the libidinous relativism of our culture and the bankruptcy of both our conceptions of education and the institutions that pretend to purvey it.It sounds as if Howell sought to meet the supposedly paramount criterion of liberal society—informed consent—in his argument.He was trying to explain an argument so that the students could agree or disagree with it from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance.But, of course, contemporary universities in practice generally conspire to keep students as ignorant, docile, and hedonistic as possible—even though they pay lip service to expired Enlightenment conceptions of open-minded tolerance and cosmopolitan knowledge.
And yet, I do not think it out of place to insist that a Christian Stoic conception of natural law is not, ultimately, an orthodox Christian conception of natural law.In consequence, Howell’s argument remains incomplete and risks allowing the most doggedly perverse and intolerantly relativist students in his classroom to rest complacent in their dereliction.As a matter of charity, they deserve not just the truth they are prepared to handle, but the whole truth.
And the whole truth instructs us that orthodox Christianity relies with singular integrity upon natural reason as it does on the revelation by God’s grace.As St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it” (Summa Theologica I, 1, 8).In that crucial word, “perfects,” Aquinas indicates that his vision of nature is Aristotle’s and not that of the Stoics, however much his discussions of natural law elsewhere in the Summa may draw upon them.Like Aristotle, Aquinas sees that things are created with determinate essences or natures, and like Aristotle he presumes the fundamental characteristic of created reality is that of change—its composite status between non-being and being, between potency and actuality, between past and future.As such, ours is a dynamic world created according to intelligible laws, but it is also an incomplete world whose laws are not always and already fulfilled; they are, however, always on a path to their final end, to their perfection.He contends, along with the Philosopher, that nature must sometimes be imitated and sometimes completed; it has already determined our course, but human beings, endowed with free will, must actively work to find the means of making themselves into the persons they are intended to become.So, Aquinas writes,
For everything is called good according to its perfection.Now perfection of a thing is three-fold: first, according to the constitution of its own being; secondly, in respect of any accidents being added as necessary for its perfect operation; thirdly, perfection consists in the attained to something else as the end.(Summa Theologica I, 6, 3)
A watchmaker makes a watch; he puts a battery in it to make it tick; he sets the time and watches it mark the passing seconds perfectly.A human being is conceived; he soon acquires the “accidental” capacity to laugh and cry; he becomes a pious Catholic, a faithful husband, a good provider, and devoted father of five.He is living an almost perfect life, one that will be completed and perfected absolutely upon his final and eternal intellectual union with the Father in Heaven.The purpose of a watch is instrumental: it serves man.The purpose of a human life also lies beyond itself, but not in an instrumental fashion, for the eternal end that summons us is to happiness in truth and love.To say so does not reduce the Aristotelian and Thomist accounts of nature to a “utilitarian” one, but it acknowledges something that utilitarianism gets not right but more right than the Stoics: individual actions must also be judged according to a purpose that lies beyond them.Conversely, the Stoics are right to observe that those actions and ends are part of a rational and intelligible order and so have an absolute significance.But our age, and human beings in every age, requires more.
No doubt, in the course as a whole, Howell provided his students with a fuller description of that expansive call, the summons to happiness-in-perfection of the Catholic faith.No doubt, he did so circumspectly, and in his effort to meet many students in their benighted condition, he gave them a less compelling argument than he might have.And even for this, this small gift of knowledge and respect for the intellectual and moral potential of his students, he has already paid a great price.
Nice article very thought provoking and enlightening.
I wonder if Howell’s student would have been as incensed if Howell had chosen some other non-procreative aspect of human sexuality – masturbation, prostitution, pedophilia, priestly abstinence – instead of male homosexuality as his case study for the purpose of comparing a “utilitarian” theory of morality with natural law theory. What do we talk about when we talk about “nature”?
Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And his disciples heard it.
I have looked at Howell’s syllabus; the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is a short unit at the end of his course, following a more general unit on the Church’s moral teaching. This, of course, is what most contemporary teachers do: they seek to address the most topical case studies to make theory clear for students who typically have little capacity for abstract thought.
Great article. Wow!
So, let’s say that Howell did present the whole truth to the students. Then the question arises: can they understand it? If MacIntyre is right, and the typical student in modern liberal culture is engaged in practices that do not embody this full truth, in fact, that embody its antithesis, then we need more than arguments. The soul-defective, truth-precluding, virtue-empty practices of liberal culture need to be replaced by ones that embody the natural law, and not a liberalized, Stoicized, utilitarianized version of it, as you so masterfully show.
And we need to, before any argument can be effective, get these students to engage in these sorts of practices first. As long as they are existentially deformed by being habituated in deformed practices (Facebook addiction, mall shopping, easy fornication, pornography, immanentized religious services, loveless families, bureaucratized political institutions, pleonexic economic institutions, therapeutic social institutions, uprootedness, living in cities that have too many people in them, etc.), they will have a tough time understanding philosophical and theological stories that explain and are embodied in practices that they have never experienced.
How to get them out of their “cave” practices into “outdoor” activities where they can see the sun–perhaps for the first time?
Well, Thaddeus, it looks as if a very long parenthesis has set on the table just how numerically daunting the challenges we face are.
Dear James,
Your analysis is excellent. While it does not address this question, I found myself wondering if cases similar to Howell’s will become more frequent as our academic institutions become more decidedly illiberal—both in their ideological commitments and their corresponding pedagogical practices. The ostensible pluralism of the contemporary academy seems increasingly unwilling to tolerate the distinctions and exclusions certain moral commitments usually demand. Who knew that by advocating “pluralism” what was meant was a “plurality of people who believe just as we do”?
As it happens, I was contemplating this question the other morning as I brushed my teeth before Mass. My fear and expectation is that essays such as the one above will be subject not only to academic attack but to criminal penalties within a few years.
One intention of this essay was to evoke the concern your comment raises. Namely, many of the defenders of Howell (the tenured radical emeritus, Carey Nelson, for instance) said they find his arguments absurd and unintelligible — but deserving first amendment and academic freedom protections. I am confident that such persons are disingenuous when they say such things; it would be incredible if they did not at once understand the arguments and intuitively sense something right in them.
In any case, I wanted to suggest that Howell’s account was a valid one according to at least one standard uncontroversially proper to the academic realm: I found his account of natural law wanting, but incisive enough to merit debate. His anonymous student accuser claimed something contrary to this: that such language was so egregious and hateful as to have no place in a college classroom. Again, to the contrary, such an argument is exemplary of the sort that is proper to the classroom: compelling, well reasoned, but requiring continued discussion if it is to become fully convincing.
I fear that there is little place left in our society (if it may be called a society) for serious debate on serious questions. And while I would heartily endorse a rigorous regime of public decorum, and would not therefore be confused with a civil libertarian, I think it clear that the bigotry of many students, professors, and our contemporaries at large inoculates them to arguments regarding the immorality of homosexual acts even as they sense the cogency of those arguments in their hearts.
Why the denial? My essay on the “Culture of Atomic Eros” sums it up, I think: relativism as a mask for self-indulgence; homosexual acts get approved not because they are morally indifferent, but because homosexuals have become the scape goats for modern man’s bad conscience about fornication, contraception, abortion, divorce, and myriad other objectively disordered acts. Our contemporaries approve what they would otherwise condemn in order not to risk arousing others to condemn their own activities. Again, such is my belief.
Very good couple of posts. As you have shown specifically in regards to man morality or natural law requires teleology and nature to be taken into account. It might be worse also pointing out that those who talk of the “law of nature” as if it were a jungle which nothing moral could taken from view “nature” in an at least implicitly materialist way. If one views “nature” in a Platonic or at least Aristotlian/Scholastic way then such a materialist, amoral view of “nature” disappears but you are entirely correct it takes this view of “nature” before we can simply draw moral observations from “nature”.
I’m no expert on the Stoics though I got much pleasure from reading Marcus Aurelius and some of Epictetus but is it completely fair to say they didn’t share this Aristotlian, indeed general traditional, conception of “nature”? Is it not more generally a case of misused emphasis than actual difference. It would be hard for instance for me to believe Marcus Aurelius started with much of a distinct view of “nature” as a whole and specifically human nature than the Aristotlian/Traditional conception. He is not perhaps as clear as could be hoped for, though his Meditations are more practical than theoretical, but I cannot see whatever basic assumptions about “nature” he would have.
This is a query worth answering. On the one hand, Stoicism endured over a long period of time and so, just because of the mutations to which an inherited set of ideas is likely to be subject, we see some variations among the Stoics — and certainly variations moving from the Greek to the Roman instances. To make your point, we need not attend so much to Aurelius as to Cicero, whom I have heard described as a Stoic (and he certainly has Stoic ideas; if I am not mistaken, he is the source of Enlightenment uses of the term “Natural Law,” for instance), and have also heard him described as a “skeptical Platonist.” There is considerable overlap between these terms; later Stoics believed they were “fulfilling” Platoism by chastening it. So, on the surface at least, it would seem questionable to propose a unified conception of nature to the Stoics, just as Cicero and Aurelius testify that the Stoic concept of citizenship varies considerably from that offered by Seneca or Epictetus.
On the other, Stoicism is a far simpler philosophical school than legitimate Platonism or Aristotelianism. See Pierre Hadot’s “What Is Ancient Philosophy?” for a pithy account — and for other reasons. One of the causes of this is that it has a radically simple conception of nature — such as I describe in this essay. Aurelius provides so many aphorisms that disclose this view, that he would be exemplary rather than an exception; as I recall, I quote one in this essay. Stoic nature consists of the perfected logos as achieved universal order; this does not entirely rob it of teleology, however. There is the teleology remnant in the human will, which is the only thing not determined; to assent to nature means freedom and happiness; to deny or reject the universal, intelligible order means depravity and moral evil. So, in partial support of your doubts, I would say it is mistaken to pretend that Stoicism does not have a telos, but simply that it radically constricts the function of teleology to the domain of the individual will.
Precisely because it retains any teleological conception of the good life, and therefore a very potent morality, Stoicism has remained an attractive philosophical school even during the Christian era; Russell Kirk was first moved to think deeply about the nature of things by Aurelius, and continued to think of himself as a Christian Stoic until the end of his life. He was not one; as Dupre argues, there has never been such thing as a Christian Stoic, but merely Christians who adapt to their own unique purposes Stoic aphorisms.
I would not, therefore, set everyone to burning their copies of the Stoics. I would, on the other hand, point out that the attraction of Stoic morality, with its taste for hardihood and temperance, should not delude us into adopting the view of nature on which that morality is historically and, in its purity, intellectually based. We get ourselves into trouble, and the world becomes, ironically, unintelligible, when we make the mistake in presuming the world is already perfect.
Thank you for your informed comments James. One reason I read Aurelius was because of Kirk’s recommendation but I must admit I completely missed his view of nature and couldn’t of told you whether it was Aristotle’s or the one you describe. I’m one of those naive sops who sees ancient philosophy, the real philosophy not the skeptics or Epicureans, as really theosophy rather than philosophy in the post-Descartes meaning. It is a wisdom tradition stretching back to Egypt and Mesopotamia and connecting many of the pre-Socratic philosophers as well as Plato, Aristotle(as Lloyd Gerson put it an anti-Platonic forumalation of Aristotle is not possible.) Hermetics, many of the mysteries and the Platonists. I’ve always seen the Stoics as a minor but generally legitimate arm of this tradition but I have yet to seriously study them and will have to rethink my position on them. One of the things that has always attracted me to them is that as well as being practical they are also relatively uncompromising, rather like Dr.Johnson another wonderful moralist, which is not very fashionable today. But like all moralists they require a proper conception of nature, a proper metaphysical and cosmological doctrine, as you have wonderfully pointed out.
I would largely echo by inversion your argument. Descartes is not philosophy but the death of philosophy; the pre-Cartesian tradition is the only legitimate philo sophia.
I agree even if I’d cheekily, for a Western Christian, add all sorts of non-Western traditional(well all of the truly traditional ones.) philosophers, theosophers, metaphysicians and mystics to that legitimate philo sophia.
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