Natural law or supernatural law?

When you blur a real distinction between any two things A and B, you invariably tend, at least implicitly, to deny the existence of either A or B.  For instance, there is, demonstrably, a real distinction between mind and matter.  To blur this distinction, as materialists do, is implicitly to deny the existence of mind.  Reductionist materialism is, as I have argued in several places (such as here), really just eliminative materialism in disguise.  There is also a clear moral distinction between taking the life of an innocent person and taking the life of a guilty person.  To blur this distinction, as many opponents of capital punishment do, is to blur the distinction between innocence and guilt.  That is why opposition to capital punishment tends to go hand in hand with suspicion of the very idea of punishment as such.

The eliminativism can go in either direction.  If there really is no distinction between mind and matter, then you could take this to mean that mind per se is unreal and what really exists is just matter.  But of course, you could equally well take it to entail that matter is an illusion, and opt for idealism rather than materialism.  If there really is no morally important distinction between the guilty and the innocent, then you could reject punishment altogether.  But you could equally well conclude (since in practice we can, after all, hardly avoid punishing evildoers to some extent) that not only the guilty, but the innocent too, might sometimes be punished if the consequences of doing so are good enough. 

A real distinction that is all too often blurred in theology is that between the natural and the supernatural -- between the limited relationship with God that is our natural end and the gratuitous, supernatural gift of the beatific vision; between the knowledge of God’s existence and nature that is available to philosophical reason, and that which is given only in revelation; and between the natural law and supernatural virtue.  One way to blur this distinction is to collapse the supernatural into the natural -- for example, to reduce God to a symbol, and Christian charity to a mere political program for social justice.  This, as Karl Barth famously put it, is not to speak of God at all but merely to speak of man in a loud voice, a kind of virtual atheism.

But another way to blur the distinction is to go in the other direction, absorbing the natural into the supernatural -- a tendency to be found in Catholic Nouvelle Théologie writers like Henri de Lubac and, it seems, in David Bentley Hart.  Where morality is concerned, the tendency is, as we’ve seen recently with Hart, to denude the notion of natural law of significant content, so that it is only through the lens of revelation that one can clearly see what the natural law requires and only via grace that one can to any extent obey it.  (I do not say that this is exactly what Hart himself thinks – though it seems to me he did not make it clear exactly what he thinks – but only that this is the direction in which his recent remarks about natural law tend.)

But a law that cannot be known from the nature of things, but only via special divine revelation, is not the natural law.  And a law that we could never have obeyed anyway is not a law for whose violation we can be held responsible.  To make knowledge of and obedience to the natural law essentially dependent on grace is to make of it something supernatural.  It is also to fail to do justice to the facts.  When an ill and tired pagan mother is moved by the tears of her crying child to come to its assistance at the expense of her own health and comfort, the love that moves her is real love, not some counterfeit.  Socrates’ self-control was truly virtuous.  Aristotle really was wise.  Confucius really was noble.  Plato had a genuine love for the good, and Plotinus for the divine.  Examples can easily be multiplied.  To deny that such virtue really is virtue, despite its having arisen apart from Christian revelation, would simply be to deny the obvious.

This is not Pelagianism, first because it has nothing to do with our attainment of the supernatural end of the beatific vision; and second, because even the highest degree of natural excellence attained by the pagans is flawed, like a beautiful Greek statue that has been chucked violently down the stairs and had various bits and pieces busted off of it.  (And of course, the operation of the natural order no less than the supernatural presupposes the conserving and concurring action of God.)  The virtue of the pagan qua pagan, however real, is never without serious defect and never extends beyond the natural order.  It can never get him an inch closer to the beatific vision, even if it makes him more suited to the natural knowledge of God that the great pagan philosophers had, albeit in an imperfect way. 

When one denies all this and absorbs the natural into the supernatural, implying that the only real virtue is Christian virtue and the only real theological knowledge is revealed knowledge, the sequel is to move in one of two opposed further directions.  The first is to condemn non-Christian thought and culture as without value, and to deny that there is any common moral and theological ground on which the Christian might win over the non-Christian.  The salvation even of the most apparently noble pagan comes to seem like a long shot at best, since even his apparent goodness is regarded as essentially just evil in disguise.  This makes of Christianity something repulsive and inhuman, unattractive to the non-Christian, not because he hates the good that Christianity upholds, but because he hates the refusal of such a Christianity to acknowledge the good to be found in nature and in human civilization. 

The alternative, opposite tendency is to affirm the evident good to be found in non-Christian thought, culture, and everyday life, but then to conclude that it must “really” be a result of grace, and that in some way non-Christians must “really” be Christians without realizing it, or at least would opt to become Christians if only they realized they should.  Their natural virtue, in other words, must “really” be supernatural even if they don’t know it.  The Christian merely has the “fullness” of the very same thing the non-Christian has, and the salvation of all well-meaning non-Christians seems certain.

Absorbing nature into grace thus tends to lead either to the Christianity of the rigorist, the prig, the holy roller, the buckle-shod puritan; or to the Christianity of the laxist, the bleeding heart, the universalist, the sandal-wearing bearded fruit-juice drinker (to borrow a choice phrase from Orwell).  Naturally, the Aristotelian-Scholastic theologian -- who insists on upholding the real distinction between nature and grace, the natural and the supernatural -- adopts the sober middle position between these extremes, and his shoes are both sensible and agreeably stylish. 

Again, I am not saying that Hart -- or de Lubac or like-minded thinkers for that matter -- would want to go to either of the extremes in question.  The trouble is that when one blurs the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, it is difficult to show how one can avoid them.

In recent decades some Christians seem to have taken a view that amounts to a bizarre amalgamation of both extremes -- a notion to the effect that non-Christians are more or less incapable of any natural virtue, and yet somehow are certain to be saved precisely for that reason.  Pope Benedict XVI, when still Cardinal Ratzinger, described this sort of attitude in his 1991 talk “Conscience and Truth.”  He recounts a conversation he had with someone he describes as “a strict Catholic who performed his moral duty with care and conviction” yet who expressed what Ratzinger characterizes as a “disquieting” view.  I’ll quote the entire relevant passage:

In the course of a dispute, a senior colleague, who was keenly aware of the plight to being Christian in our times, expressed the opinion that one should actually be grateful to God that He allows there to be so many unbelievers in good conscience. For if their eyes were opened and they became believers, they would not be capable, in this world of ours, of bearing the burden of faith with all its moral obligations. But as it is, since they can go another way in good conscience, they can reach salvation. What shocked me about this assertion was not in the first place the idea of an erroneous conscience given by God Himself in order to save men by means of such artfulness—the idea, so to speak, of a blindness sent by God for the salvation of those in question. What disturbed me was the notion that it harbored, that faith is a burden which can hardly be borne and which no doubt was intended only for stronger natures—faith almost as a kind of punishment, in any case, an imposition not easily coped with. According to this view, faith would not make salvation easier but harder. Being happy would mean not being burdened with having to believe or having to submit to the moral yoke of the faith of the Catholic church. The erroneous conscience, which makes life easier and marks a more human course, would then be a real grace, the normal way to salvation. Untruth, keeping truth at bay, would be better for man than truth. It would not be the truth that would set him free, but rather he would have to be freed from the truth. Man would be more at home in the dark than in the light. Faith would not be the good gift of the good God but instead an affliction. If this were the state of affairs, how could faith give rise to joy? Who would have the courage to pass faith on to others? Would it not be better to spare them the truth or even keep them from it? In the last few decades, notions of this sort have discernibly crippled the disposition to evangelize. The one who sees the faith as a heavy burden or as a moral imposition is unable to invite others to believe. Rather he lets them be, in the putative freedom of their good consciences.

End quote.  Now the attitude Cardinal Ratzinger was criticizing is deeply perverse and delusional, and I think it is in fact even worse than his remarks indicate.  The cardinal was making the point that the Catholic faith is a benefit rather than a burden, a source of moral knowledge and strength which, naturally, can only aid rather than inhibit one’s salvation.  But notice that the moral teachings his interlocutor was concerned with were no doubt the usual ones that the Church’s critics revile her for upholding -- the condemnation of abortion and the defense of traditional sexual morality.  And these teachings are not strictly speaking matters of faith in the first place, but matters of natural law.  They are good for human beings as such, whether or not they are Catholic and even apart from our supernatural end.  And they can be known and at least imperfectly followed even apart from faith in divine revelation.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s colleague seems to have conflated the natural law with the supernatural virtues.  Since the non-believer lacks the latter, he must (so the reasoning seems to go) also lack any capacity for the former; and since he lacks that capacity (so the reasoning apparently continues) he cannot be held responsible for living up to the natural law.  How much farther could one get from the teaching of St. Paul in Romans 1 and 2, according to which sinful pagans are “without excuse” given the law that is “written on their hearts”?  (And note that it is precisely sexual immorality that Paul puts special emphasis on as a sign of their decadence.)

If a non-Christian finds the Church’s teaching on sex too austere -- teaching a Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus would have easily seen the logic of, whether or not they would agree with every last detail of it -- then the problem runs far deeper than any difficulty with Christianity per se.  It reflects a kind of alienation of modern people from their own nature.  And if someone not only disagrees with, but viscerally despises the directives of natural law -- despises what would be necessary to fulfill him even if the supernatural gift of the beatific vision had never been offered him -- it is perfectly ludicrous to think he is likely to attain even his natural end, let alone the supernatural end of the beatific vision.  Modern secularists are surely in graver spiritual danger than the ancient pagans, who, for all their faults, at least could see that the existence of God was demonstrable and understood the broad outlines of natural law. 

The modern secularist, or at least the educated modern secularist, needs to be brought up to the level of the ancient pagan before he is likely to take Christian revelation seriously.  He needs a renewed understanding of the nature on which grace builds and apart from which faith, revelation, and the supernatural falsely seem to float in mid-air, without a foundation in reason or reality.  He needs natural theology and natural law -- natural theology and natural law grounded in the truths even the pagans knew, natural theology and natural law as articulated and defended within Scholasticism, within Thomism -- and he needs it now more than ever.