…we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; not many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.
- Edmund Burke, Reflections On The French Revolution
h/t Dover Beach
The bishops of Britain and Ireland have offered a clear and compelling argument in response to their government’s plan to usurp for themselves the right to define marriage (see my earlier post here). What is most interesting, and gratifying, about this is that the bishops do so not only by appealing to the Church’s tradition but also to Western culture and natural law. Doing so allows them to appeal to both believers and those without no religious faith. As a result the bishops present the Church as a partner and defender of a just civil order and not simply as a lobbyist for sectarian concerns.They write:
The permanent and exclusive union of one man and one woman, open to the procreation of children and ensuring the continuity of the generations and the stability of family relationships, has been the object of special societal, religious and legal recognition by virtually all cultures for thousands of years.
Again, this is no narrow appeal to sectarian self-interest but a sober acknowledgment of the importance of marriage as a natural relationship essential to the well-being of society. Marriage is the creation neither civil society nor religious tradition. Rather Church and State recognize marriage.
For this reason, the bishops argue,
The proposal to give equivalent legal status to the unions of individuals whose relationship does not correspond to the natural complementarity of the sexes is one that we cannot view with equanimity. We believe that such a change would only further diminish the understanding of marriage in our society, which already tends to see it mainly in terms of a contract between two individuals based on their feelings for one another, with little intrinsic reference either to children or to the wider community.
The challenge facing society is not same-sex marriage as such. Instead the bishops see the proposed changes in the law as symptomatic of the radical individualism that now frames our understanding of marriage AND is dissolving the bonds of society. And so they conclude
The proposed change is not, as is claimed, an extension of the high status and responsibilities of marriage to homosexual couples. Rather, it gives legal recognition to a radical change in the understanding of marriage itself that affects all married couples and hence society as a whole.
This last point is critical.
In changing the definition of marriage from a natural institution that Church and State recognize but do not as such create or define to a mere contract between individuals radically deforms our understanding both of marriage and society. Divorced from any normative understanding of human nature and so our life together, society becomes merely a collective of competing self-interested individuals who have no inherent meaning each for the other. In effect, the proposed laws are both rooted in and foster a radically individualistic anthropology that makes community life impossible.
May God bless their efforts!
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
The Assembly unanimously approved the document [you can download the pdf here], which is to be signed by the Chairman, Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira and Great Britain, and sent to the Home Secretary and other interested parties.
To use an analogy previously developed by Stephen Barr, to ask whether God or evolution created life is like asking whether Shakespeare or Hamlet killed Polonius. If there is no Shakespeare, Hamlets act is meaningless. It is merely the accidental arrangement of ink on a page. If there is a Shakespeare, however, his existence as the creator of the literary Denmark does not obviate the drama of the play. It is rather a necessary prerequisite for it. Shakespeare, as a playwright, is not a competitor with the drama of the play.
God as creator is not in competition with the beauty and causality of nature. Nor is God an unnecessary ornament added as a beautiful but superfluous extra onto the complete and subtle explanations offered by science, anymore than Shakespeare is a superfluity to the play Hamlet. The beauty seen in the working out of natures laws is not commandeered by God; God is the source of it, just as Shakespeare is the source of the drama in Hamlet.
Read the rest here.
A friend sent me John Finnis’s thoughts on Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the German Parliament (here) For the rest of the interview with Finnis, go here.
. . . I would say that true human freedom (as St Thomas says on the first page of his great treatment of morality) is the freedom of an image of God – one who has freedom of choice and exercises it in line with goods that are truly fulfilling – fulfilling for individuals and for the friendships and wider societies in which they find so much of their fulfilment. As Augustine says, just before the passage the Pope quoted – and here the saint is transmitting the philosophical tradition established by Plato and carried forward by Aristotle – the life of an individual who gives in to cupiditas is a life of enslavement to anxiety, insecurity, unslakeable lusts, and so forth. No true freedom that way. Nor by any “existentialist” “self-determination” by which one might seek to recreate oneself as a quasi-Nietzschean master, free from the constraints of human equality and justice. Perhaps also related to the Pope’s thought in these sentences is this: any manipulation of human nature, for example, by non-therapeutic genetic modification, makes the products of that manipulation the slaves of the manipulators, even if the latter were benevolently motivated.
Reading this I can’t help wonder how substantively close this is to the argument made by Christos Yannaras in The Freedom of Morality. Yannaras in the forward to this works writes:
In the book’s title, The Freedom of Morality, the Greek word translated as “morality” is ithos, a term signifying “ethics,” but also meaning “ethos,” distinctive character, the “thusness” or the “Ah!’ of a person or thing. When using ithos, the author has in view both these senses. Morality, “theics” is nothing more or less than the expression of the person’s proper “ethos.” It is not to obey external rules but to become as person that which one truly is. By the same token, sin is not the transgression of some impersonal law, but “missing the mark,” the failure to become oneself.
While I agree with Yanaras that “sin is not the transgression of some impersonal law, but “missing the mark,” I think he and other Orthodox thinkers are simply wrong when they dismiss out of hand an objective morality in general and natural law theory in particular. Both, as Finnis I think argues in the interview quoted about, are simply another way of saying that sin is “the failure to become oneself.” Or, as Finnis has it, “true human freedom … is the freedom of an image of God – one who has freedom of choice and exercises it in line with goods that are truly fulfilling – fulfilling for individuals and for the friendships and wider societies in which they find so much of their fulfilment.” Continue reading
From Rabbi Daniel Lapin, some wise thoughts on the family and society:
Scripture is far more than a history book; it is a guidebook to the world. It may not seem fair that parents’ misdeeds damage their children. But it is how the world works. As the Ten Commandments state, when we do something really bad , it impacts our children, our grandchildren and perhaps even our great-grandchildren. (Exodus 20:5 and Deuteronomy 5:9) Bernie Madoff’s children and grandchildren had their lives forever changed by the actions of the notorious swindler.
Knowing these rules truly benefits us. We can channel our own drive for desiring more into positive enterprise, thus using it constructively. We can also understand human nature better, thereby interacting more effectively with others.
We can behave in ways that give our children advantages rather than disadvantages. We can also structure our society more wisely. Instead of recognizing that children thrive in stable, two parent families, we normalize alternative arrangements. Instead of helping individual children overcome tough challenges we pretend that all situations are equivalent. In doing so, we encourage damaging conduct.
People can and do often overcome the effects of their parents’ mistakes, but one of the strongest human impulses is to protect our children. God created the world with this parent/child connection to encourage us to behave properly, ever aware of our present and potential children.
As much as we like to believe that our actions are our own business, this simply isn’t true. Our behavior yesterday will even impact the lives of children we may bring into the world tomorrow.
Read more: Ham-I-Am
An Orthodox polemics that would dismiss Western Christianity as rotten to its core does nothing to advance the cause of the Orthodox Church. In fact – and I think the empirical evidence bears this out – rejecting the foundations of Western Christian culture and trying instead to create a Church that is thus divorced from the surrounding culture has undermined our ability to fulfill the mission of the Church. To understand why this is NOT in the Church’s best interest, let me borrow an idea from economics: Gresham’s law. Continue reading