Natural Law and the Instrumentum Laboris on the Family

                        Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but your wife

I can't claim to have read the preparatory document for the Synod on the family (online here) in great detail yet, but one bit attracted my immediate attention (para 30):

The language traditionally used in explaining the term “natural law” should be improved so that the values of the Gospel can be communicated to people today in a more intelligible manner. In particular, the vast majority of responses and an even greater part of the observations request that more emphasis be placed on the role of the Word of God as a privileged instrument in the conception of married life and the family, and recommend greater reference to the Bible, its language and narratives. In this regard, respondents propose bringing the issue to public discussion and developing the idea of biblical inspiration and the “order in creation,” which could permit a re-reading of the concept of the natural law in a more meaningful manner in today’s world (cf. the idea of the law written in the human heart in Rm 1:19-21; 2:14-15). Moreover, this proposal insists on using language which is accessible to all, such as the language of symbols utilized during the liturgy. The recommendation was also made to engage young people directly in these matters. 

In short, more reliance on Scripture and liturgy as the basis for morality.

Frankly, this is nuts, or, in more polite language, a 'partial' truth. For signed up Catholics, there is nothing wrong in suggesting that we deepen our appreciation of scripture and liturgy and their interconnections with our life. If (as in Latin America) your main 'competition' is an Evangelical church which rests on scripture alone, there may well be a need to fight back mainly in scriptural terms. But in the UK, where most people can't tell the difference between Elton John and Jesus, let alone have any but the vaguest recollection of the Bible, it doesn't really sound like a plausible strategy at all. It's particularly bad for the semi-detached Catholic. I have frequently encountered 'Catholics' who retain some sense of being in the Church (albeit often not much) and who will quote a Bible passage on tolerance out of context, and hope that the Church will soon  catch up with the tolerance and love of the Bible by allowing their niece/son/guy off Eastenders to shack up with their other niece/drug dealer/younger glamour model. If you then start to say that the Bible has to be interpreted through the Church and anyway isn't the sole source of authority on these issues, you just get blank looks or an assurance that's not what Sister So-and-So taught in Primary 5.

In sum, in the UK, increased reference to the Bible either misses the secularized entirely, or reinforces the view that true Christianity is about being a liberal Protestant and undermines a true understanding of Catholicism.

That said, there is a problem with the concept and reality of Natural Law. When I started this blog about two and a half years ago, I remember being very unsure about whether describing the approach as 'Natural Law' was helpful. I've swallowed my doubts on this over the years -mainly on the ground that it is the most familiar way of denoting -simply pointing to- the body of teaching, and to try to substitute more helpful (or simply more various) descriptions would simply confuse matters further. But both the Instrumentum and a recent exchange on Twitter have encouraged my initial worries here to revive.

The Twitter exchange was with someone who describes himself as a 'Conservative Party member and radical sexual anarchist'. (No, not Dave.) In it, he made the common suggestion that Catholic morality is based on 'bits' and their function:

cumlazaro So, I cannot rationally conclude that the purpose of sex is derivable from sexual organs, as is unacceptably reductionist.Not 140
— Tom (@TRLangham) June 29, 2014

I've heard this before and it is part of the problem with the 'Natural Law' brand: frankly, if you think Natural Law is about simply staring at willies and deriving Catholic sexual teaching from what they can and can't do, it's not surprising you think it's rubbish.

I want to try and unpick some points at least but it will take a few blogposts to do this even in a slightly superficial way. Perhaps before we begin, it's worth making a couple of preparatory points.

1) The judgment that 'x is wrong' is often more certain than why it is wrong. In most cultures (certainly pre-modern ones) the sense of what is right and what is wrong in everyday matters is usually quite clear at least in its broad lines. The problem, for example, in sexual matters, is less what is to be done than in fighting the personal defects that encourage one to do it:


And on this account nothing but a good moral training can qualify a man to study what is noble and just—in a word, to study questions of Politics. For the undemonstrated fact is here the starting-point, and if this undemonstrated fact be sufficiently evident to a man, he will not require a “reason why.” Now the man who has had a good moral training either has already arrived at starting-points or principles of action, or will easily accept them when pointed out. But he who neither has them nor will accept them may hear what Hesiod says—

“The best is he who of himself doth know;
Good too is he who listens to the wise;
But he who neither knows himself nor heeds
The words of others, is a useless man.” [Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics]

Now I make this point, less to avoid having to defend the Church's teaching rationally, than at least to alert the reader to some of the difficulties in moral philosophy. We may be very certain (as we ought to be) that this or that action is wrong, but struggle to articulate why. But the inability (certainly in short order to articulate why) is not a sure sign of the wrongness of the action: it may merely be that it is so obviously wrong that little thought has been given up till now about why it should be wrong; it may be that there is a complex network of reasons behind the judgment that defy easy articulation; it may just be that it is simply a very difficult area to explore.

2) The above perplexities as to reasoning for morality -a common experience to all human beings- is in part resolved for Catholics by revelation. As the Catechism [s.1960] puts it:

The precepts of natural law are not perceived by everyone clearly and immediately. In the present situation sinful man needs grace and revelation so moral and religious truths may be known "by everyone with facility, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error." The natural law provides revealed law and grace with a foundation prepared by God and in accordance with the work of the Spirit.

The eternal law -ie the complete understanding of how we should live our lives- can be made known to us by the teaching authority of the Church: revelation. Starting from those revealed truths, we can then work backwards to understand the rational structure of what we initially take on authority (much as a student can work backwards from the answer at the back of the textbook to understanding how to solve the question).

So from a Catholic perspective, part of the explanation for the greater prominence of the that than the why noted in 1) is the existence of an alternative, authoritative route to the that : divine revelation and authority. Moreover, the why may only be comprehensible with the prior help of revelation.

3) But apart from the way that revealed law may ease the understanding of natural law, eudaimonistic ethics (I'll come back to this in a later post: for the moment, just interpret this as 'the Catholic understanding of reasoned ethics') rests on the person rather the action. There are two relevant aspects to this. First, the primary question of ethics is less; 'What should I do?' and more, 'What sort of person should I be?'


...what is the highest of all realizable goods? As to its name, I suppose nearly all men are agreed; for the masses and the men of culture alike declare that it is , eudaimonia [roughly, happiness, but more exactly, flourishing]  and hold that to “live well” or to “do well” is the same as to be “happy.” [Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics]

Secondly, the final arbiter of what is right is not an articulated reason, but the perception of the practically wise agent:

And on this account we ought to pay the same respect to the undemonstrated assertions and opinions of men of age and experience and prudence as to their demonstrations. For experience has given them a faculty of vision which enables them to see correctly. [Aristotle: NE]

Virtue, then, is a habit or trained faculty of choice, the characteristic of which lies in moderation or observance of the mean relatively to the persons concerned, as determined by reason, i.e. by the reason by which the practically wise agent [phronimos] would determine it. [Aristotle: NE]

OK. Where does that leave us?

So far, we have the commonsense (or at least familiar) thought that good people who've thought a lot and had experience of human life will know what to do. We also have the thought that becoming a good person is the real heart of ethics. Finally, we have the thought that ethics is very difficult to do as a philosophical exercise involving the articulation of the reasoning behind judgments, and that experienced wise people (and from the Catholic point of view, aided by revelation) are going to be the ones who will usually get it the judgments right even if they can't always explain why.

Careful readers will notice the absence of 'bits' and their functions up to this point....

To be continued...

Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre: Jihadists and Social Cohesion

Marlborough has left for the war / Nobody knows when he will come back.

He will come back at Easter / Or on Trinity Sunday.

Trinity Sunday goes by. / Marlborough does not return.

My lady climbs up her tower / As high as she can climb.

She sees her page coming / All clothed in black.

"Good page, my good page / What news do you bring?"

"At the news that I bring / Your pretty eyes will start crying!

"Take off your pink clothing / and your embroidered satins!

"My lord Marlborough is dead; / he is dead and buried.

"I have seen him borne to the grave / by four officers.

"One of them carried his breastplate / another his shield.

"Another carried his great sabre / and the last carried nothing.

"On his tomb was planted / a beautiful flowering rosebush.

"When the ceremony was over / Everyone went to bed. [From Wikipedia.]

As I've mentioned previously, I'm currently buried ('mongst other square, papery (but digitalized) things) in the works of Sir Walter Scott (42% through according to my Kindle).

One of the things that immersing yourself in a different sensibility can bring is a bringing to the foreground of consciousness facts that we in our age tend to overlook and that other ages faced up to squarely. I'm pretty much convinced that one (if not the) central theme of Scott is social cohesion: how groups (especially the Jacobites and the Hanoverians) can live together in social peace whilst loathing each other and whilst having each other's blood on their hands. I'll probably come back to this in the future, but the answer certainly isn't the imposition of a common loyalty: instead, and briefly, it's much more to do with a recognition of common humanity, deliberate avoidance of certain issues, having a 'flexible' attitude to law and authority, and the aestheticization of violence. Not a very modern mix, of course, but probably all the better for that and possibly one from which we can still learn.

But a subsidiary theme is that of the violence of young males. Duels are fought. Most of the old have spent their youth on some battlefield or other. The solution to life's problems of going abroad as a soldier exists as a constant possibility. Even if we haven't been reading Scott, we ought to be familiar with such a vista. The male members of the two previous generations of my family fought in the army. (I pass over my own exalted -if brief- service in a school CCF troop.) I've worked with several former soldiers and we're all familiar with the young men who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. (And rather closer in time and space, there is the  'Armed Struggle' in Northern Ireland.) Idealism and a tendency to violence are characteristics of young men. If channelled correctly, they form part of the social mix, the activity of the young balancing the resignation of the old etc.

So I'm not really sure why 'we' are surprised at young men going off to fight for ISIS. It seems perfectly reasonable to worry about what effects this will have on UK society: whilst I've no doubt that most will probably not come back to take up an armed struggle here, it seems implausible that none will. And certainly an attitude of mind forged in an armed struggle is unlikely to accept an easy cultural integration into modern British ways. So it's certainly reasonable to worry about (eg) security implications and to act accordingly. But constantly using the language of indoctrination and manipulation of these men is silly:


Using the hash tag #AllEyesOnIsis, extremist fighters flooded the social media site with propaganda, luring vulnerable people to join them in Iraq. [Here.]

The media attitude to ISIS, quite apart from a core, commonsense worry about national and international security, demonstrates many modern failings. It decorporealizes minds: instead of acknowledging that the young and the old, male and female, have a different biology and different characteristics, it regards all as disembodied reasoners with only one rational path. It undervalues religion: the intensity of religion's pursuit of justice surprises those whose lives lack commitment or transcendent values. It invents rational expertise: last week's pundit who knew everything about Putin's Russia now knows everything about the Middle East. It is orientalist in creating a landscape of the Other populated neatly with homogeneous and docile 'communities' (ie tribes) led by community leaders. And so on.

There probably isn't an answer. Some of us will probably die in the long run as a result of terrorist actions. The Middle East sounds like it's on its way to becoming a Hell for a time, especially for Christians. What can be done in terms of security precautions should be done, but without destroying the normal business of society. But on the specific problem of angry young men, and particularly angry young Muslim men, the only answer (and it's a partial one) is to do what societies have always done: find a way of channelling their energies into the wider society through the institutions of the family, civil society and the State. At the moment, the family is being deliberately undermined, the economic crisis of the West is destroying business and employment, and politics is closed to those who cannot mouth the secularized platitudes of consumerist liberalism.

 In the video, he says: "Are you willing to sacrifice the fat job you've got, the big car you've got, the family you have?

"Are you willing to sacrifice this for the sake of Allah? Definitely! If you sacrifice something for Allah, Allah will give you 700 times more than this."

Later in the video, he says: "All my brothers living in the west, I know how you feel.

"When I used to live there, in the heart you feel depressed. The cure for the depression is Jihad." [Here.]


Perhaps, in the end, it's about death: the Jihadists have retained a sense of the inevitability of death and killing that the modern West has lost. In that case, perhaps the true resistance is to face our own death well, even matter of factly. If so, please note that I will not be dying for 'British values' but for Catholic ones.

The Pope and Scottish Independence

                                                  Toda división me preocupa.

I hadn't really intended blogging about the Pope's statement on Scottish Independence. It struck me as relatively anodyne, a sort of Argentinian version of Father Dougal's, 'Careful now'. But a few conversations recently have convinced me that at least some Nationalists (and doubtless Unionists) have interpreted the statement as an addition to the List of Prominent People Who Have Spoken Out Against Independence. Before this enters too far into the status of urban myth, I should probably try to correct the picture.

Another urban myth: if you say, 'Papa Francesco' in front of your computer screen three times, he'll Skype you.

The full interview can be found here in Spanish. A fullish English summary can be found here.

The main thing to note about this is that Pope Francis is simply repeating Catholic social teaching. As I've blogged before, the principles of subsidiarity (ie authority descending to the lowest unit of society) and nationality (ie the normal condition of one people constituting one nation) do stack up heavily on the Nationalist side. But equally there is the principle of solidarity:

The commitment to this goal is translated into the positive contribution of seeing that nothing is lacking in the common cause and also of seeking points of possible agreement where attitudes of separation and fragmentation prevail. [From the Compendium: para 194.]

Above all, political authority exists for the promotion of felicitas, of the good life:

Political authority is an instrument of co-ordination and direction by means of which the many individuals and intermediate bodies must move towards an order in which relationships , institutions and procedures are put at the service of integral human growth. [394]

Given the complex web of principles and the variety of concrete circumstances, making a decision in this area requires the exercise of the virtue of practical wisdom (prudentia):

the virtue that makes it possible to discern the true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means for achieving it. Thanks to this virtue, moral principles are applied correctly to particular cases. We can identify three distinct moments as prudence is exercised to clarify and evaluate situations, to inspire decisions and to prompt action. The first moment is seen in the reflection and consultation by which the question is studied and the necessary opinions sought. The second moment is that of evaluation, as the reality is analyzed and judged in the light of God's plan. The third  moment, that of decision, is based on the preceding steps and makes it possible to choose between the different actions that may be taken.[547]

On the basis of Catholic social teaching, therefore, one would expect a Pope in such circumstances as the current Scottish Independence campaign to point out a few principles, and to advise voters to think very carefully about their decision in the light of these principles and the concrete circumstances in which they find themselves. And that is precisely what he's done.

So why the brouhaha? (If there is brouhaha. I may simply be coming across a few individuals more given to the practice of brouhahing than normal.) Here's some suggestions:

1) Some Nationalists think the answer to the referendum is so obvious that even asking for thought smacks of opposition. Clearly nuts. It's an important decision made with a lot of uncertainties. For some, there is a tendency towards a 'Sod it' decision: why not give it a go? (Tom Gallagher has suggested that the referendum may be decided by 'volatile and emotional' men with too much time on their hands.) Anyway, a non starter. Think hard about this decision: it matters. A lot. (For balance, I should add that there is a corresponding Unionist version of this category: again, a non-starter.)

2) The Pope talked about division and was against it. So he must be against the dissolution of the UK. Context matters here. The question posed was: "¿Le preocupa el conflicto entre Catalunya y España?" (Does the conflict between Catalonia and Spain worry you?) It was in reply to this that the Pope said: 'Toda división me preocupa.' (Any division worries me.) It is fair to say, I think, that the struggle between Catalan Nationalism and the Spanish government can legitimately be described as a conflict, with severe disagreement about how (and indeed whether) a question about independence can be posed democratically. In comparison, there is no conflict in the UK on this issue: the constitutional process is relatively clear. The 'divisio' referred to here relates more to the bitterness than to the possibility of peaceful, constitutional separation.

3) The Pope put Scottish Independence in the 'doubtful' class rather than the class of obviously attaining freedom. The Pope distinguished between two types of independence: that by emancipation and that by secession. The first case is that of Imperial conquest and the liberation from that. [Las independencias por emancipación, por ejemplo, son las americanas, que se emanciparon de los estados europeos.] Scotland, pace extreme Nationalists, isn't really a case of that. That leaves the second case, where, in essence, we are dealing with some cases where it's a good idea (or at least inevitable -Yugoslavia) and some where it isn't. To decide which case Scotland falls into requires deliberation 'con muchas pinzas' which the BBC has as 'with a lot of grains of salt' but which (admittedly with my minimal Spanish) I take to be better translated as 'with a great deal of care'. So back to prudentia: take the decision seriously and think about it with great care.

It really isn't much more than, 'Careful now!', is it?