I travelled down to New York Harbor to meet my dear friend Franz. No sooner had I arrived at our meeting place than when the sun began to emerge from its hiding place and light up the sky above and the waters beneath. As it leapt up from its abode its warm rays stretched out and rested on the cold and fragile buildings of the city. There is something about a sunrise that gives one hope. Soon I noticed Franz approaching in the distance.

“Hello, friend!” he shouted from afar. “Good day for sailing, don’t you say?”

“It is a rather beautiful morning,” I said. “Tell me, Franz, what is liberty?”

“Oh, Arthur, we’ve barely started the day and you are already philosophizing! Let me light my pipe first and get a smoke in and then I’ll be happy to discuss this with you.”

“Very well,” I said, wearing a grin on my face. I valued my friendship with Franz dearly. We could talk about anything and everything. Nothing was off the table. And the best part is that we each valued each other no matter what, for we both knew that disagreement did not have to lead to opposition.

After Franz finished his smoke he began, “Okay. So you want to know what liberty is? Well, it is freedom, is it not? Seems rather straightforward.”

“I suppose so, yes, but are not liberty and freedom the same thing? And if they are the same thing, then have we really progressed in our understanding of liberty at all?”

“I guess they are the same thing.”

“Well, let us continue with our plans for the day, shall we? Let’s go to the dock and prepare for our sail. Once we are in the water we can resume our conversation and let it be our issue to tackle for the day.”

“That sounds like a fine plan,” said Franz.

We walked a decent ways and then finally made our way to the dock where Franz’s sailboat lay. By now the sun had risen higher and it was much warmer than when we had first met.

We set out near the upper part of the bay, and as we made our way I asked Franz, “Tell me, would you say we live in a free country?”

“Why, yes,” he said.

“What is it that makes the United States of America a free country?”

“We do not have an oppressive government.”

“I see,” I said. “So freedom from oppression is what makes us free?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I would like to know how you define ‘oppression’,” I said. “But let us leave that aside for a moment. In this sense freedom is seen in negative terms.”

“What do you mean, Art?”

“Well, this. Can it not also be the case that freedom is for something, and not only from something? There is the sense in which we are free from a tyrannical government, but is it not also the case that we have the freedom to do things? If so, there is both a negative sense of freedom and a positive one.”

“I see what you are saying,” said Franz. “That certainly makes sense. We have the ability to make choices and choose how we live our lives. And in so doing there are various freedoms allotted to us.”

“Precisely,” I said. “But tell me, my dear Franz, is freedom then the permission to do whatever it is we want?”

“I am not sure. It appears to be that way. If someone tried to limit my autonomy I would be very skeptical. Would that not be a violation of my freedom as an individual?”

“Would it?” I asked. “Is the freedom to do whatever you want really freedom? Consider this on the larger scale. If every person in this country defined freedom as you just have, then would not we live in anarchy rather than a democratic republic? A society where anyone can do as they please seems like a dangerous society to live in indeed.”

“Now, now, Arthur, you know that I would never advocate for anarchy. Never!”

“I know, Franz, I know. But the way you described what freedom is certainly sounded like it. Which means we need to work harder at defining what freedom truly is. Now, isn’t it true that freedom consists in having certain restrictions? For example, consider our nation. We are a nation of laws. Our leaders constantly say that we are a nation of laws, and so on. And yet we still live in a free country, right?”

“Yes, that is true,” he said.

“So laws can liberate?” I asked.

“I suppose they can.”

“Consider also the sonnet. Both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets have certain parameters that guide its composition. The use of iambic pentameter, the narrative arc, and so on are ways in which a sonnet has limitations.  The author can play around with these, of course, and so they are not rigid, but nevertheless these limits are there. But here is the fascinating thing: these limits actually allow a writer to find creative possibilities that he or she might never have considered otherwise. So, in one way the restraints open up freedoms.”

“Why, I never even thought of that,” exclaimed Franz.

“So we agree then, that freedom consists of having restraints?”

“Yes, I suppose we do. But is it not true that some restraints can be oppressive?”

“Certainly so, my dear Franz. Certainly so.”

“So then, it is not just having restraints but having the right restraints.”

“Indeed, it must be. That is a great point, Franz.”

“So how are we to find the right restraints?” asked Franz. “Is finding the right constraints even possible? Are we flirting with utopian concepts here, Art? For even in our own country it is not perfectly right. It is true that we are free, but surely there are laws that are imperfect insofar as preserving liberty in its truest form. In finding the right restraints we ought then also to seek what true goodness is, and justice, should we not?

“You’re absolutely right,” I said.

“Oh dear! That would put us on a lengthy pursuit!”

“Yes, it would,” I said. “But it is a worthy pursuit, and one we cannot afford to abandon. We must do this not just for ourselves but also for our children.”

“Oh how true!”

“I want to touch on something you just said, Franz, regarding finding proper constraints. For it seems to me that a free country can only remain free to the extent that its citizens and its leaders are virtuous. And they can only be virtuous if they possess an inner freedom.”

“I’m not sure I see where you are going with this, Art. Can you please explain?”

“Certainly. As we have been discussing, while laws prohibit certain actions we can take in society, we agree that laws are necessary for true freedom to exist; otherwise we have anarchy and not freedom. Well, then we recognized that true that freedom consists not only in having restraints but having the right restraints in order to have human flourishing and not oppression. Well, to the extent that such a proper society could be maintained rests on the leaders to create just laws and the citizens to obey those laws. So, the populace must be virtuous, willing to abide by the rule of law and to implement laws that allow for true freedom. But in order for a person to be virtuous, he or she needs to have a moral constitution, otherwise how will they be able to distinguish between that which is good and that which is bad? This is what I mean by an inner freedom: a proper morality in the individual soul.”

“I think I see what you’re saying,” said Franz. “But how does one come to a proper morality inside themselves?”

“You ask an important question. Have you ever read Plato? His masterpiece, the Republic, treats this very question. It is in Republic that Plato presents his famous tripartite structure of the human soul.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Humans have a rational part, a spirited part and an erotic part. The rational part controls thinking and, in a good human, governs. The spirited part corresponds with the higher passions, like courage. The erotic part deals with the passions of the body, such as the desire for food and sex.¹. When within the soul appetites follow will and will follows reason then there is an inner harmony.”²

“I see. I need to ponder this for a moment.”

“There are some things I disagree with in Plato. For instance, I don’t think he takes enough account of the fickleness of human beings. Are we really capable of ordering our own souls? But he does make good points about how inordinate desires can lead one astray. Things like food, sex, and drink, are good; but when they become immoderate they can take over and give us inordinate desires that can force us to be slaves to them. We must practice self-mastery, and so a healthy asceticism seems requisite. However, like I was saying, we ourselves can only do so much. Our wills are insufficient. We need divine intervention.”

At this point we were making our way past the island where Lady Liberty dwells.

“Wait,” I said. “Let us behold this majestic frame! Beacon of hope! Have you ever read the poem that Lazarus wrote which is on the pedestal of the statue?”

“Why, no, I haven’t.”

“Let me recite it for you. It really is quite beautiful.”

“Oh, Art, you’ve always been an orator! Delight me with your speech.”

“The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"³

“Bravo! Bravo!” exclaimed Franz. 

“Do you know why there are seven spikes coming out of her crown?” I asked.

“No, I don’t,” said Franz.

“The seven spikes represent the seven oceans and the seven continents of the world, indicating the universal concept of liberty.⁴ And this is the heart of it, my friend. That this concept is universal is telling. It is why I go so far as to say that freedom cannot merely be external but internal. There is a deep yearning within each human soul for a sense of liberation: a liberation from something and for something.”

After this, we both sat in silence for a while and thought deeply about our conversation. After some time we continued our sail, now traveling south with a nice wind at our back guiding us along.

Last week, I wrote about the longstanding Catholic drive to reinterpret the philosophy of Plato as realist. In actuality, Aristotle’s philosophy perfected Plato’s by connecting the material to the formal world—two separated domains which, in Plato, remain wholly alien to one another. Accordingly, it is quite a “stretcher,” I suggested, when Catholics talk about Plato as a realist. Any philosophy which divorces the material and the formal qualifies as anti-realism, because matter’s interaction with form is the very thing that constitutes intelligibility. (More on that below…)

As predicted, the article’s “combox” bore out my very thesis: Catholics and other Westerners (including some atheists) remain so strongly accustomed to just such an unduly charitable characterization of Plato that they startle to hear otherwise.

But here’s the real rub: such a distinction between the two ancient philosophers matters only because we live in a more violently anti-realist Modern era, which put to death (in popular thought) the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Church’s Scholastic philosophy. Plato’s errors would not matter nearly so much if we were pre-Moderns.

As mentioned in last week’s article, living in the “Modern era” means inhabiting the centuries after the Sixteenth. Two moments of that most unfortunate century are directly insinuated here: the Protestant Reformation and the secularist Enlightenment. They are equal but opposite rejections of the Natural Law.

Today, in English-speaking countries, the faithful grandchildren of the Reformation are usually thought of as “the religious right,” while the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment comprise “the secular left.” It so happens, as one of history’s bitterest ironies, that in countries like America and England, a giant, sustained food fight erupted between the two sets of grandchildren...who were once fellow travelers! We are all familiar with these skirmishes, of course, comprising the so-called “culture war” between two shouting, red-faced fundamentalisms: Protestant Biblicism versus Enlightenment Scientism in all its many vestiges.

The narrative not falsely goes that these two camps despise one another.

They do…today. But as aforementioned, it was not always so. One is surprised to find that together, each half of Prot-Enlight originally teamed up with the other against the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Catholic Church. Together, each camp strove cooperatively to make the sixteenth century Catholic view of nature, the Natural Law, seem outdated. Together, both parties asserted an aggressive new anti-realist dichotomy for the supposedly new times: form versus matter, faith versus science, even faith versus reason.

Ironically, the two sides cooperated steadily against the Church during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in order to create these false dichotomies, only to spend the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries arguing ceaselessly about them!

Whether or not the reader accepts Plato’s role in this Modernist overturn of the Natural Law, it is far more important—and leagues more undeniable—to a clear conception of our world that we come to terms with the primary role played by Prot-Enlight. Plato’s role was mere prefigurement to that of the Prot-Enlight philosophies. The Prot-Enlight philosophies set the goal as the complete eradication of the Natural Law.

Prot-Enlight and the Three Prongs of the Natural Law

The two halves of Prot-Enlight Modernism altered the prevailing Western notion not so much of God, counterintuitively, as of nature. That is, any pop-theological changes wrought by the Reformation or the Enlightenment were actually secondary, in pervasiveness, to the harmful amendments Prot-Enlight made to the popular Western view of the world, or reality, itself.

I wrote in last week’s article: “In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology.” Whether we’re talking about the authors of the Enlightenment like Francis Bacon and David Hume or the authors of the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin, Prot-Enlight sought to “take down” the “big game” of the Catholic Natural Law, of which these three prongs were (and are) constitutive.

Natural Law Prong #1: Firstly, Catholic Aristotelianism (i.e. Thomism) puts forward physical nature as the forum of man’s freedom and morality. In other words, humanity’s freedom and morality are altogether natural. Catholicism does not naively suppose that either human or physical nature guarantee man’s automatic morality through any and all uses of his freedom; rather, physical nature is the forum where the proper use of human intellect and will may through deliberate action dispose each of the natural appetites, through habit, toward morality. And nature is the locus in quo where this happens. The secular and the Protestant worlds together decry this Catholic position: morality, for each worldview, counteracts nature. Again, for Catholicism, morality is perfectly natural, which is why Thomas Aquinas asserted that all of the appetites are natural…if implemented with the proper disposition, of course.

Protestantism, as mentioned above, rejects the possibility of freedom and morality altogether. Man is enslaved to sin. Whether we talk of Luther’s assertion that human will is “in bondage,” or Calvin’s infamous doctrine of predestination, Protestantism writ large rejects the first prong of the Natural Law hailed by the Catholic Church. The Protestant view of sin, mankind’s “total depravity,” swallows up any possible proper usage of intellect or will.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, posited naturalism—the perfect opposite of the Natural Law’s first prong. Naturalism describes a deterministic nature which we find “red in tooth and claw.” The animals are no more than complex mechanisms, meat machines, which operate as the vector sum of their competing appetites. Moreover, naturalism places man squarely in the middle of, not above, nature. He too is bestial. He too is determined by his appetites alone. He too is just a meat machine. As such, human free will is rejected and determinism (equal but opposite to Protestant pre-determinism) prevails, although Enlightenment thinkers certainly wouldn’t designate this “sin,” as the Protestants do.

Natural Law Prong #2: Secondly, Catholic Aristotelianism puts forward nature as intelligible. “Being is intelligible,” Aristotle famously explained. As articulated in last week’s article, Aristotle described that form was in matter, as it were, rather than above matter, as Plato had taught. Because matter is in-formed, then, nature is intelligible. If form were instead compartmentalized somewhere above matter, as in Plato’s “noetic heaven,” then the material objects would be neither knowable nor differentiable. But the opposite is true. On this Aristotelian basis, the Thomism of the Catholic Church affirms that faith and reason work together, rather than against one another. Faith is strengthened, not weakened, by the two ways of knowing about human reality: the a priori way, philosophy, and the a posteriori way, science. Both philosophy and science affirm theology because, as Thomas Aquinas famously held, “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Protestantism, beginning with Luther, repudiated the scientific worldview—and not only the false scientific worldview of Scientism, but even science properly done. Protestantism also rejected the philosophical approach to the world: Luther held that “the whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light.” The rallying cry of Luther’s Reformation was sola scriptura, meaning that the Bible alone—not science or philosophy or anything less than supernatural revelation—is intelligible to the mind of man.

The teachings of the Enlightenment, in a coordinate if opposite manner, reject the intelligibility of the universe. And this is strange because Enlightenment secularists have always claimed to be “for science,” a claim which requires the principle of intelligibility. It’s quite simple: the new Scientism posits materialism. For the materialist, nothing but matters exists. Even though this precludes both ratio and intellectus, materialists never seem to understand how their point of view vitiates science’s ability to be done at all (cogitation requires ratio and intellectus: one recalls John Lennox’s debate with Richard Dawkins, where clearly Dawkins failed to understand Lennox that “the principle of consciousness, intelligibility itself, proved [his] point”).

Natural Law Prong #3: Thirdly, the Aristotelian view of nature poses nature’s goal-orientedness (i.e. teleology). Nature discloses its own purpose. Just as in prong #2, wherein the Catholic worldview affirms via the principle of intelligibility the formal cause of nature, this third prong of the Natural Law affirms nature's final cause as Jesus Christ. Nature's purposive, christological aspect is the culmination of Natural Law prongs one and two: because nature has a goal, its morality and intelligibility are thereby validly connected to the supernatural. If, in fact, nature were devoid of a supernatural telos, as the Prot-Enlights believe, then its ostensible morality and intelligibility would be rendered arbitrary and even conceptually null.

So, with regard to the convoluted Protestant stance on prong #3, the Reformation rejection was not of Christ, but of his sustained connection to the physical world. Reformation theology rejects the idea that nature's purpose is knowable through human examinations of the world. In short, Protestants express ambivalence insofar as they think the natural world does not really have a knowable supernatural end, even though of course they affirm Christ as the Logos (and in that sense, the goal). As Louis Bouyer said, “in Protestantism, everything goes on, or seems to go on, as if the Incarnation had ended with the Ascension of the Savior.” As if Jesus' connection to the world lasted only thirty-three years!

Clearly, through the Enlightenment’s rejections of God, of formal causation, and even of consciousness itself, the secularists removed any conception of a purpose in the universe. Such a crystal clear issue need not be belabored here. The secularists tell us every day, after all, that everything is pointless.

Conclusion

From here, the story only gets stranger and stranger. After all, the Modern English-speaking republics—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, among ours and the motherland—all claim to be founded upon the Natural Law, even as their professed basis lies in the twin sixteenth century movements (their opposite motives notwithstanding) whose raison d’etre was the elimination thereof!

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us confused, schizophrenic. Think of American history: who was it but men steeped in the Reformation and the Enlightenment—the “Prots” and the “Enlights”—who drafted the several state constitutions, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights? And what are these papers but documented ways of life, memorialized articles of culture, predicated squarely upon the Natural Law. As such, we Moderns are confounded citizens of the most schizophrenic republics of all-time. America, crown gem of all the paradoxical republics, was even founded as against Rome, by folks who thought Canterbury had grown to be too close a likeness.

Americans in 2016 have the temerity to be surprised when recounting our cultural failures in Natural Law living. Many Americans even have the gall to wonder why our republic is failing. In short, when Modernism is based upon dual rivaling rejections of the Natural Law, untangling the web equates to no trifling academic affair: it becomes an existential exercise required for our very survival. Until the republics founded in the Modern era return to the Natural Law, we will continue to be unable to justify such republican desiderata and sine qua nons as: natural rights, subsidiarity, popular morality, anthropology, a liberty-based political economy, and a humane employment of science and technology (materialist science yields materialistic technology, as we recognize). We shall no longer receive these benefits without shouldering the burdens, or at the very least without acknowledging the mutual exclusivity of the Natural Law and Prot-Enlight Modernism.

Until we return to Aristotle, to Thomas, and to the Natural Law, we should expect to find our Modern world more than just cold and hostile to us—we should expect to find it unfree, unintelligible, and pointless.

In today's Catholic Church, Platonism and Aristotelianism are often considered equal. It is a dangerous error that hails all the way back to the first neo-Platonists in the third century. Simply put, the true description of reality, rightly recognized by the Catholic Church, is that account given by Aristotle (not Plato!) and confirmed by Thomas Aquinas.

But too many Catholics speak of Plato and Aristotle together, as if their metaphysics are identical. They are in fact nowhere near this. And when this error of conflation was combined with the the Enlightenment and the Reformation, the byproduct was a surge in atheism.

These two sixteenth century forces staged a joint revolt against the metaphysics of Aristotle. And the overly close association of Plato and Aristotle was and continues to be a major piece of the puzzle: in our day, Plato is either falsely held to be Aristotle’s equal, or even his philosophical better.

Even among Catholics, it hasn't been articulated commonly, plainly, or clearly enough: to abandon Aristotelian metaphysics and ethics is to veer toward atheism. Aristotelianism alone accounts for the close causal interaction of formal reality—"being qua being" or existence as it really is—and our day-to-day material lives. Platonism flatly rejects such an interaction.

Often, well-intentioned Catholic theologians have been all too ready to consider Plato a practical Aristotelian simply because St. Augustine was a sort of Platonist. (In fact, he was the precise sort—a neo-Platonist—who popularized the conflation. But more on that later.)

At present, suffice to affirm that Plato was not any sort of Aristotelian, proto- or otherwise, except in the very most mechanical sense: Plato first posited “form” and “matter,” and from there said perfectly opposite things (compared against Aristotle) about them. In fact, Plato divorced form from matter. The divorce of form and matter comprises the position of anti-realism to which the Modern world has predictably returned—following the anti-Aristotelian metaphysics of the two forces of Modernism, what I call “Prot-Enlight,” and also the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (the perfect vindication of both the Reformation and the Enlightenment).

And this is in turn due largely to the unhappy fact that neither ancient thinker, Plato nor Aristotle, has been studied with any consistent degree of seriousness, anytime following the Late Middle Ages.

Neo-Platonists and Straussians

As mentioned above, the first historical which equated Platonism with Aristotelianism were the neo-Platonists, who were the contemporaries (and in some cases, collaborators) of the Church Fathers, like Saint Augustine. Rather than emphasizing all of the plain errors in Plato's metaphysics, corrected by Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, especially those at Alexandria, highly exaggerated the few likenesses between Plato's and Aristotle's ontologies.

In other words, neo-Platonism generally regards Plato as an Aristotelian and vice versa. This falsity influenced many students in the early Roman empire, and continues to do so.

One factor that partly excuses neo-Platonism's false equivocation between Plato and Aristotle was the widespread disappearance and general unavailability of Aristotelian texts during this period (the third through the sixth century A.D.). The neo-Platonists wrongly but honestly assumed that Plato's student, Aristotle, had incorporated more of his teacher's system into his own metaphysics than he actually had. Where there existed a hole in Aristotelian scholarship, the neo-Platonists assumed (wrongly, most of the time) that Aristotle probably agreed with his teacher Plato.

And this is understandable enough.

But in today's academy, there is no longer any excuse for this equivocation. In any of today's colleges and universities willing to give Plato or Aristotle a read at all, which is far too few, the influence of cultish twentieth century thinker Leo Strauss prevails. What Strauss and the Straussians did to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle was to re-bundle them, as neo-Platonism had, into a “package deal.” The Plato and Aristotle package.

And since none of the Straussians gave a sufficiently close or accurate read to either Plato or Aristotle, they tend(ed) to buy the neo-Platonist myth of the close lineage between the two metaphysics. (For whatever reason, Straussians studying the Medieval period in philosophy tend to focus on neo-Platonic-inclined Arab scholars like al-Farabi or Avicena instead of Aristotelian-leaning Averroes or Thomas Aquinas. And this tends to re-solidify the wrong impression inaugurated by the neo-Platonists.) The Straussians have not helped matters.

Prot-Enlight and Immanuel Kant

Naturally, it would require a much longer, drier article to enumerate fully all of the parties involved in the phenomenon of falsely aligning Plato and Aristotle—and what motivated each of these parties. Instead, what merits our attention is the Modern world, where the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant “undid” most of the corrections Aristotle made to Plato's thinking.

Long after the neo-Platonists, but long before the Straussians, two distinct sixteenth century groups wanted not necessarily to characterize Aristotle as a Platonist (or vice versa) but rather to kill Aristotelianism outright. In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology. These three prongs not coincidentally characterize the Catholic view of reality. The Protestant reformers and the Enlightenment secularists wanted to depart from Aristotelianism for quite differing, even opposite, reasons.

But they shared at least one common goal: to unyoke the Modern world from the “thralldom” of Rome. Doing so involved the development of a Prot-Enlight ontology which viewed man’s nature as unfree (determinism), nature as unintelligible, and reality as purposeless (random or “non-teleological”). Perhaps a follow-up article, explaining how each they achieved this, and how a German philosopher would vindicate both 150 years later, is warranted.

That German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, vindicated both the Enlightenment and the Reformation by returning (in non-Platonic language) to Plato’s divorce of matter and form. In other words, what is knowable about this world constitutes practical knowledge, but is unimportant; what is knowable about reality constitutes pure knowledge, is important, but unknowable from this world. Such Kantianism falsely claimed to justify the overturn of Aristotle. Even into our age, this claim has fooled most of the world.

Jacques Maritain and the Way Forward

To date, the clearest and most definite argument put forth against the equation of Platonism with Aristotelianism was that of twentieth century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain appraised Plato’s metaphysics as both vastly important for its undeniable contributions to the truth, and yet vastly wrong where it became too specific. (Plato was certainly the “big picture thinker” par excellence!) Such specific calculations about reality required Aristotle’s corrective hand, Maritain reasons.¹

The only metaphysics sufficient to explain this intuitive truth of existence would have to be capable of positing a much closer causal connection between ideal reality—what Plato called the “really real”—and our material existence. Aristotle’s did this, and Thomas Aquinas’ perfected upon it by use of the concept of analogia.

The practical aspect of Maritain’s philosophy, aside from its bright distinction between Plato and Aristotle, was its popularity among non-philosopher Catholics.  Readers of Maritain among the Catholic laity are able, en masse, to understand, from a truly Aristotelian perspective, just

how are we to explain the relationship between [material] things and their forms? Plato replied by calling them likenesses or participations of the forms. But these terms, which later will receive in Scholasticism a profound significance, are in Plato’s system nothing more than metaphors devoid of any strictly intelligible content…[which is] a pregnant conception which, in Aristotle’s hands, was to be purged of all internal contradiction, but which, as presented by Plato, seems self-contradictory…

By rightly pointing out the self-contradiction in Plato’s metaphysics of divorce—divorce between the world and meaning, between material objects and their forms, between reality and semblance—Maritain points us away from Kant, and back to the truth—that is, back to Aristotle and St. Thomas.

Conclusion

When the world embraces anti-realism, a divorce between form and matter, Aristotelian realism is abandoned and atheism naturally follows. The view of a rational, causal, meaningful universe requiring a God drops away…and you wind up with irrational, anti-philosophical worldviews, like the self-contradictory scientism of Laurence Krauss.

Now, this is truly a "strange notion," that the apparent winning philosophy has lost. In the hearts and minds of the West, the philosophia perennis has been passed over in favor of dozens of differing strains of Modernist alternatives over the last five centuries. In truth, only part of this blame can be attributed to the usual suspect one finds beneath popular falsities and behind the executioners of priests and philosophers: old-fashioned, prophet-slaying mobbishness.

In this particular case, the killers and deniers of the truth have been aided—and in that sense exculpated—by confused Modern philosophers themselves, who ought to know better, and who long ago popularized the supposed "closeness" of Plato and Aristotle.

The Catholic Church asserts the truth that mankind has suffered a privation of grace as a consequence of disobedience. By the sin of our first parents we are saddled until the end of time with the defect of Original Sin. Man is fallen. To be born into this world is to be burdened with a life of toil, trial and torment. Adam and Eve were in a state of grace in the Garden of Eden before succumbing to temptation. The doctrine of the fall is a most obvious proposition expounded upon by nearly every religious and philosophical tradition in history. To deny man’s fallen nature is an unprecedented narrowness based on implausible pathology grounded in the denial of the most vital attributes that make us fully human.

Man is more than just material, he has an interior and transcendent nature recognizable by his intellect and will. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden for disobedience, God described the consequences of their rebellion in Genesis 23:17-19 when He said “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.” This is an obvious statement about the physical difficulties all men have faced throughout the millennia of human existence. What may not be so obvious is that this is analogous to the two other realms of human existence as well, those two dimensions of interiority we know as intellect and will. It is as difficult to cultivate the right use of reason and our moral sensibilities as it is to till hard earth. Agriculture on material soil is like education and spiritual formation on the inner soil.

It is real labor to cultivate the inner landscape. Just as there was no need for agriculture in the Garden of Eden, there was no need for education before the Fall. Education is after all intended to be the cultivation of habits of being most fully expressed by the acquisition of virtue and the deracination of vice. Adam and Eve had preternatural gifts of perception, clear intellectual sight, an acuity of judgment, a precision of the senses, and astounding memory retention. They were also gifted the infused knowledge of things as they pertained to their station in the divine economy. There was no need for virtue because the appetites were properly subordinated to the right use of reason.

The sin of our first parents resulted in the loss of sanctifying and sanitizing grace. We even find ourselves bereft of the original preternatural gifts. Our natures have been corrupted by the original sin and we are left with three wounds of the fall, a darkened intellect, a weakened will, and an inclination towards evil. Our lot in life became dreary, toil against the soil for man and painful childbirth for the woman. Strife, hatred, and enmity now characterize this vale of tears as we struggle to rediscover our purpose when dark shade prevents us from seeing clearly. Although the fall of man is expressed most comprehensively by the Catholic Church, the truth of the doctrine of the fall is by no means exclusive to Christianity.

Many traditions hold myths depicting the fallen nature of man. In Gnosticism, there is gratitude for the snake revealing hidden knowledge to Adam and Eve which liberates them from the “demiurge’s” constricting control. In Islam, Adam and Eve are deceived by Shaitaan who promised them immortality and other delights, but even after having been warned, they gave into Shaitaan’s temptations. In Zoroastrianism and Persian Myths, humankind is created to resist and endure through degradation and decay by cultivating good habits of charitable deeds, the correct use of speech and by the right use of the intellect.

The Hindu tradition has prayers to Varuna, Indra, and Agni which allude to a corrupt human nature by constantly asking forgiveness of their sins and for their offenses against the gods and their neighbors. In Buddhism the predominate theme is suffering and falleness, in the words of the Buddha in the Dhammapada, 147-8 “Behold this painted body, a body full of wounds, put together, diseased, and full of many thoughts in which there is neither permanence nor stability. This body is worn out, a nest of diseases and very frail. This heap of corruption breaks in pieces, life indeed ends in death.” Even Confucius in his Analects stressed the importance and difficulty of cultivating the virtues to live the moral life. He called for men to constantly remind themselves of the inverse golden rule. This is similar to the Ancient Greeks who clearly understood the need to cultivate virtue to combat man’s natural inclination towards evil.

Perhaps the most notable non-Christian tradition to elucidate man’s fallen nature is found in the myth of Pandora. The Titan Prometheus was charged with making man out of dust. Man was a feeble creature with a poor lot in life. Prometheus had pity on man and asked Zeus if he could give them fire. Zeus refused but Prometheus stole fire from Zeus anyway and got caught. Zeus had Prometheus chained to the side of a mountain while he planned revenge on Prometheus’ family.

In the meantime, the gods made beautiful Pandora out of clay. Pandora means “all gifts” and she is named so because Zeus had all the gods and goddesses each give her a gift as he made her a live person. Hera gave Pandora an insatiable curiosity. Zeus offered Pandora as a wife to Prometheus’ dimwitted brother Epimetheus and gave them a box for a wedding present with the instruction that she was never to open it. Of course Zeus knew she wouldn’t be able to resist and when she opened the box and let loose its contents, Zeus’ punishment was complete, for in the box were all the evils, sicknesses, and sins that ushered death irrevocably into the world. Of course, man has lived in this fallen state ever since. There is further corroboration in philosophy.

In book two of The Republic, Plato alludes to man’s fallen nature by having Glaucon assert that it is good to perpetrate injustice for gain but bad to suffer it. Glaucon further proclaims a fallen notion of justice by a compromise between the distorted notion that doing injustice without punishment is a benefit and suffering an injustice without the ability to retaliate is a great evil. Glaucon suggests that conventional laws are asserted to protect victims, “not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honored by reason of the inability of men to do injustice” without interference. Plato has Glaucon further assert that concerning the conventional law, “no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did.” To illustrate his point, Glaucon tells the myth of Gyges ring to demonstrate that the just and unjust man alike will find themselves on the same road if only given the right circumstances.

Plato later demonstrates that because of our fallen nature we are called to cultivate virtue and commit to moral formation for excellence if we are going to do the right thing for the right reasons. There is no doubt that most men in Gyges position would take advantage of invisibility for personal gain, even though it is immoral. This is an illustration of man’s fallen nature because our uncultivated inclinations do not square with natural law of goodness and truth.

All the major philosophical and religious traditions in the history of the world acknowledge the fallen nature of man. The obvious incongruity between the natural good and man’s inclination to do evil is a most evident thing. The history books are a record of the strife, sin and death that have plagued all peoples in all lands and at all times. We are in a unique time when a growing number “educated” souls operate in fields that systematically deny the fallen nature of man. Professions such as education, psychology, the social sciences and several more operate as if all of humankind’s strife has its root causes in genetic accidents and material inequalities.

Why such a radical break from the preponderance of history and evidence?

Aristotle said “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousand fold.” The problems we face today began in the Garden with one bite of the fruit of the forbidden tree. That first deviation is the source of incalculable error multiplying a thousand fold in every subsequent generation. In the modern era, the movement to deny the fallen nature of man is the artifact of another original error. At the end of the period known as the scholastic philosophical tradition, William of Occam (1287-1347) asserted an initial deviation known as nominalism. He used his razor to begin to cut real things off from their real explanations. Universal realities had been severed from their images or signs.

By identifying the contrivance that universal truths revealed by God are mere names, we can observe one initial deviation that serves as the root for countless philosophical errors today. Specifically, the denial of universal truths is the first step to cut the image off from the reality. Since the advent of Occam’s nominalism in the 13^th century, the ground was laid for the enlightenment which embodies the thousand fold errors instituted by Occam. In excising reality from images and images from shadows, the Enlightenment ushered in the philosophical age of inversion. Sir Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum inverted Aristotle’s deductive method based on first principles to the inductive method of scientific inquiry grounded in the idea that “man is the measure of all things.” The misapplication of the scientific method to philosophical, moral and educational concerns has made a wasteland of modern notions of interiority.

St. Pope John Paul II said in May of 2003 that the “drama of contemporary culture is the lack of interiority, the absence of contemplation. Without interiority culture has no content; it is like a body that has not yet found its soul. What can humanity do without interiority? Unfortunately, we know the answer very well. When the contemplative spirit is missing, life is not protected and all that is human is denigrated. Without interiority, modern man puts his own integrity at risk.” We risk exponentially expediting societal decay by the denial of man’s fallen nature, but we also risk incalculably more: eternity.

The atheist problem of denying man’s fallen nature is one of denying a proper understanding of the interiority of man. To believe that man is not fallen is also to deny the nature and existence of virtue and vice, which is a denial of the objective standard of truth goodness and beauty. To deny the Fall is also to deny the reality of nearly all of human history as well as to collected wisdom of nearly every philosophical and religious tradition. To deny the fallen nature of man is to arrogate to oneself the possibility of constructing a heaven on earth. The efforts have been made on a massive scale and they have produced catastrophic results sure to proliferate as the foolish rush towards an impossible utopia based on the false assumption of man’s natural goodness. These reductive utopian schemes are picking up even more momentum in this ever darkening age. The only possibility of surviving the denial of man’s fallen nature is for souls to hope to transcend humanity itself, and by the single trick of applied technology, this is a most impossible endeavor.

NOTE: This is the second of a three part series on classical theism by theologian Thomas M. Cothran. Read part one here.

Stephen Webb not only misstates what classical theists believe, he misstates why they believe it. Consider, by way of example, Webb’s review of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God. Webb claims that Hart infers “the main tenets of classical theism … from the deceptively simple premise of God’s immateriality.” Webb attributes a similar line of reasoning—namely that “being immaterial, God is not limited in any way”—to classical theists in his book Mormon Metaphysics.¹ But classical theists, including Hart, can (and for the most part do) believe in all manner of immaterial things—angels, concepts—without ascribing to them divinity or infinity. Classical theists, including those Webb cites as representative, simply do not argue that immateriality entails divinity or infinity.²

Webb’s review proceeds to claim that Hart “does not mean that God is literally infinite.” This is quite an odd statement, since an insistence on God’s infinity has been a core theme of Hart’s work for well over a decade. Hart, in fact, clearly and repeatedly insists on a positive notion of divine infinity not only in the Experience of God,³ but also his more substantial Beauty of the Infinite and sundry essays such as “The ‘Christian Infinite.’”⁴

These sorts of misreadings are not limited to contemporary authors. Webb attributes to Plato (among others) the notion that God is “pure being” when famously, for Plato, being is subsequent to the one in the metaphysical order. Webb claims that “Christians worshiped Jesus for several centuries before any of them thought to argue that God created the world out of nothing ….”⁵ In fact, the Old Testament narrative probably presupposes creation ex nihilo⁶, and the doctrine is rather baldly stated in 2 Maccabees 7:28. The doctrine can be found quite early among Christian sources such as The Shepherd of Hermas and Irenaeus’ Against Heresies circa 180 AD.

The result of all of this is that it is quite difficult to find anything salvageable in Webb’s critique of classical theism, since he accurately presents neither what classical theists believe nor the arguments they actually give for their beliefs. Atheist polemicists unfortunate enough to adopt Webb’s account of classical theism would resemble a ragtag legion lost on the wrong continent, without enough of an idea what the foe looks like to identify him in the unlikely event that they someday meet. Webb sometimes abandons even the semblance of rational argument and stoops to accusing classical theists of bad faith, as when he says “for me, [Hart’s] mantra that ‘God is outside of space and time’ is most certainly false, and I think he knows that too.” If there is one thing popular anti-atheists do not need to learn from theologians, it how to make nasty personal attacks.

Why Is God Immaterial?

If classical theists don’t affirm God’s transcendence in bad faith or because they think God is imaginary, what reasons do they have for so overwhelmingly conceiving of God as immaterial? The Christian answer comes quickly enough from Scripture. The Gospel of John stoutly declares that ”God is a spirit,” and, as Jesus himself says, spiritual things “lack flesh and bone.” The Hebrew scriptures define idolatry as the confusion of God with any particular reality on earth, below the earth or in the heavens, the Wisdom literature praises God’s transcendence, and the New Testament indicates the abyss of God’s transcendence through Jesus Christ’s very imminence.

It is unclear whether Webb intends to indict the author of John’s Gospel with those “elite theologians” embarrassed by Christian doctrine. Yet the theological reason that Christians do not believe God to be material does not hinge on this or that text considered in isolation, but on the basic notion of God that emerges from the Scriptures: as the Creator of the universe, the ultimate source and origin of all that has being.

Webb, on the other hand, proposes a material god, a god with a body.⁷ Such a deity cannot be the creator of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, for reasons Philip Cary cites in his review of one of Webb’s books. All material beings depend for their existence on something more fundamental—that out of which they are made. Yet any god who is dependent for his existence on something else is only a proximate, and not an ultimate, source of being.

Take the classic example of a statue. A statue can be made out of bronze while sharing the same form, say, of Richard the Lionheart. The material is not really identical to the form—since the same material can be reshaped to become a pillar or a number of coins—but it is necessary to the statue’s existence. The statue depends on the material out of which it is made, and we rightly speak of the bronze as a cause of the statue. Material entities have material causes.

If God were a material being, then, he would be caused and dependent. God would not be the ultimate origin of all that is; he would himself depend on something more basic. No Christian could affirm this, of course, because it puts God on the side of the caused and the contingent. It is, therefore, straightforwardly the case that asserting the materiality of God is inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of creation.

The Intrinsic Connection Between Classical Theism and Christian Doctrine

Webb also thinks the doctrines of divine immateriality and the Incarnation are ill suited for one another. For example, in “Plato is not Paul” he says “I don’t believe that God is outside space and time for the simple reason that I believe Jesus Christ is in heaven, fully bodied, and ruling over the world.” And indeed, readers unfamiliar with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation might find themselves confused: if Jesus is God and Jesus is a material being, why shouldn’t way say that God is a material being?

Yet for the Christian, this objection runs immediately into problems: if we attribute materiality to God, why not attribute ethnicity to God. Does it belong to God to be semitic? The way that Christians have thought about this answer traditionally has been to say that Jesus had two natures: human and divine, and that those two natures are unmixed. Indeed, the denial of this point places one outside Christian orthodoxy.⁸ Not everything true of Jesus with respect to his humanity can be affirmed straightforwardly of his divinity.

Christians, then, can attribute material being to God in much the same sense as they can attribute to him an ethnicity or being the son of Mary. But this does not commit us to say that God qua God is a material being. The eternal can become united, in history, to the temporal. While perhaps paradoxical, it is obviously not contradictory.

Indeed, it is the notion of a material deity which cannot be reconciled to the doctrine of the Incarnation. Webb’s materialism would mean that the Incarnation would no longer be the singular event in which the infinite and eternal takes up the finite and temporal. It would be simply the reincarnation of a certain extra-terrestrial. Christians, after all, believe in the eternal Logos who took on flesh, not in bad late night science fiction.

The classical theistic notion of God is not only necessary to maintain Christological doctrine; it is requisite for Trinitarian dogma. Webb makes several strange claims on this point. He claims, for instance, that classical theists consider “Jesus Christ identical with God the Father”⁹, when, in fact, any orthodox Christian denies this. Webb veers to the other extreme when he says that “[n]o classical theist has ever given a convincing account of how God can be without parts and yet composed of three persons.”¹⁰ But of course, no orthodox Christian thinks that the divine persons are “parts” of God.

Webb frequently misstates what divine simplicity is understood to be. For example, Webb claims that simplicity and immateriality are equivalent: “divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided).” Webb’s assumption that simplicity just is the same as immateriality rather obvious errs, of course, in that there are immaterial things that are not simple—such as angels or concepts. Moreover, as William Vallicella has pointed out, Webb’s summary of simplicity is deficient: divine simplicity excludes not only parts, but metaphysical composition between act and potency, thus ruling out any real composition of essence and existence, substance and accident, matter and form, and so on.¹¹

Far from being at odds with the Trinity, the doctrine of simplicity is a necessary component to any sound Trinitarian dogma. There is one God. Yet simplicity, while excluding composition and extension, does not exclude all real relations. Were the persons “parts” of God or distinct accidents that belong to God, the triunity of God would contravene simplicity. However, the persons are subsistent relations. None of the arguments used to establish God’s simplicity would exclude subsistent relations; and, indeed, when the notions of simplicity and subsistent relations are combined we are given a perfectly consistent (though obviously not comprehensive) way of affirming the unity and triunity of God.

If Webb’s theological arguments run afoul both of the historical record and logical coherence, what of his philosophical argument? Is Webb right that classical theism asserts God’s immateriality because it misunderstands the nature of matter?

Webb’s exposition of how the Western philosophical tradition understands matter is, unfortunately, unreliable at best. In the first place, Webb misunderstands what classical theists typically mean by “matter.” For example, he attributes to classical theists the view that matter is “a substance that makes up everything we know, [and] is unknowable.”¹² Yet perhaps the most elementary point about the classical Western understanding of matter and substance is that matter is not a substance.

Webb goes on to claim that the traditional notion that matter is a limiting factor is true “if matter is the inert stuff that is destined to disappear when our souls enter into the afterlife. But what would happen to these assumptions if we thought that matter is more like the fields of energy that animate the whole cosmos rather than incredibly small particles held together by external forces?”¹³ But precious few classical theists think of matter as “incredibly small particles held together by external forces.”¹⁴ Webb’s assertion that classical theists talk about “bare matter in its most elementary form,”¹⁵ wildly conflates the most basic metaphysical categories of theists like Plato, Aristotle, Origin, Aquinas (etc.) are.

But then, classical theism as such entails no particular position on the relation of matter and form (other than their distinction). Indeed, though none of the classical Western traditions actually resemble Webb’s portrait, classical theists do not hold to a single doctrine of what matter is. Being a classical theist does not commit one to any particular Greek, Latin, German, of Indian view of material being. Webb’s attempts at refutation are directed only at his Frankensteinian creation, and do not come near any particular living species of theism.

NOTE: Stay tuned for part three of this series on Friday.

Gary Gutting is a Notre Dame philosophy professor who thinks that what counts about arguments is whether they “work.” And so his complaint against natural-law arguments for Catholic teachings about sex is that they “no longer work (if they ever did)”. His New York Times “Opinionator” post of March 12th (“Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex”) names us as two people who are “still” exponents of such arguments. For us what counts about an argument is whether it is sound, i.e., whether its premises are true and its logic valid. If a line of thought about the morality of sex is reasonable today, it was reasonable in the time of Jesus or Plato or Abraham or as far back as we find men and women and their children. Whether arguments “work” persuasively in one era but not another is philosophically irrelevant, as any philosopher should take for granted.

Gutting seems to think none of the positions of Judeo-Christian civilization on sex ethics are true, though he mentions only a few acts or practices that his own principles would leave immune from moral objection, carefully stopping short of calling attention to others such as polygamy, polyamory, prostitution, adultery, promiscuity, incest, bestiality and the man-boy sex that Plato’s friends and associates admired (but Plato himself condemned, like his teacher Socrates as Plato depicts him). This is not surprising, since his whole article never mentions, even by implication, the idea that grounds and unifies the whole set of sex-morality teachings, not only for Catholicism but also for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other great thinkers.

The idea is not “heterosexual union,” nor “shared acts directed towards reproduction,” nor any of the other concepts Gutting refers to and associates with “nature.” Instead, it’s the idea—the intrinsic human value—of marriage.

Even apart from any question of its legal status, marriage is a natural form of human association, with its own basic structure and value. It is the sort of loving union inherently oriented to family life; it is the sort of living bond that by its nature would be fulfilled—extended and enriched—by the bearing and rearing of children. Children by their nature need such familial, parental nurture, support, and guidance; by their coming to be, they make possible the continuance and flourishing of the wider society whose aid and social capital made feasible the wellbeing of their parents and other forebears.

Of course, people sometimes band together in other arrangements with a view to child-rearing, and other forms of association can realize other types of (non-erotic) love. But only a man and woman together can commit to a loving union of the kind inherently oriented to family life and appropriate to being the mother and the father of their children. What this procreative-parental commitment and union require is an especially deep and far-reaching bond: the man and woman’s making the most extensive and permanent of human mutual commitments to sharing of life and earthly destiny, centered upon a permanently exclusive sexual relationship. The shaping end of procreation-and-nurturing thus unifies and explains all the features of marriage as “traditionally” understood: permanent exclusivity, sexual consummation, family life, and a radical union of the persons (in body as well as mind, in the wide-range pursuits of domestic life) that is uniquely extensive across time (“until death us do part”) and at each time (exclusive).

Because marriage is in these ways (i) an especially complete loving union (ii) of the sort oriented to procreation, it is uniquely embodied in sex acts with the same dual nature: acts that are (i) chosen as a seal of their complete (permanently exclusive) marital love-and-commitment (ii) and of the sort apt to make them (where circumstance allows) parents, the mother and father of their children. Only coital acts—chosen with a will to permanently exclusive marital love—can actualize, express, and allow the husband and wife to more fully experience their marriage—the multi-level (physical, emotional, rational-dispositional) sharing of life whose foundation and matrix is the biological unity made uniquely possible by sexual-reproductive complementarity. That explains why historically in our law (and in philosophical accounts of the intelligibility of the pertinent legal norms) only acts of spouses that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation have validly consummated marriage—and they do that whether or not the non-behavioral conditions of procreation happen to obtain. In short, only such sex acts are marital.

Moral reasoning is “of a natural law kind,” whether in St. Paul or St. Thomas Aquinas—or in Plato, Aristotle, Musonius Rufus, and others untouched by Jewish or Christian thought—not because it tries to read premises or conclusions off biological or sociological facts. It doesn’t. Instead, it considers what are the basic forms of human flourishing: conditions or activities that are good for us in themselves: friendship, knowledge, life and health, and the like. The identification of these of course takes into account biological and other cause-and-effect facts. But it is focused not on those but on the intrinsic goodness of the various elements of human fulfillment. We can then reason to the moral goodness and badness of types of choice and act by considering which choices are consistent with love and respect for ourselves and all others in regard to each of these basic dimensions of fulfillment. A choice consistent with love and respect for all the goods in all persons is morally upright; one that isn’t, is immoral.

That determination of consistency must take into account the fundamental circumstances of all our choices and acts. The basic goods for which we can act are many and various, so we cannot realize them all at once. But they all remain always goods, and each in its own irreplaceable way. So in pursuing some, we ought not to choose to denigrate or damage any of the others. And as they are goods for all people, we ought not to let our choosing be deflected by prejudice, wayward passion, and the like.

Now one of the basic human goods, as each of the thinkers mentioned above—and not just the Catholics or other Christians—understood, is marriage. So sex ethics unfolds by considering the conditions under which choices to engage in sex acts are consistent with the good of marriage. A few sentences in a short essay such as this one are not enough to show the good sense of this unfolding by defending and deploying its premises in ordered sequence to their conclusions. But one key to understanding it all is to grasp that—aside from obvious forms of injustice and harm-doing involving sex, especially the various forms of rape and some aspects of incest—every conclusion about wrong kinds of sex act is of the form: this kind of choice is wrong because it is unreasonable because it is against the good of marriage that is intrinsic to human fulfillment (of mother, father, their children, and their society). All forms of morally bad sex are against human nature because they are contrary to integral human fulfillment and therefore against reason.

The fact that from a limited perspective they may, as Gutting writes, be experienced or conceptualized as contributing to “meaning, growth and fulfillment” does not show that they truly are—that is, that they can be integrated with human fulfillment considered in a more rationally adequate way. Plato himself exposed the fallacy of thinking otherwise, at the very founding of Professor Gutting’s academic discipline. What satisfies desire or induces pleasure, however good or bad it is in its full reality, will likely be experienced, at least initially, as promising meaning, fulfillment, and even personal growth—the elements of Gutting’s truncated and superficial replacement of natural law theory.

The point of philosophical reflection is to evaluate prospective choices from a critical-rational standpoint in order to assess their compatibility with human fulfilment traced to its ultimate principles in the basic human goods, and considered holistically or integrally. Indeed, the contrary thought, applied to sex—as in Gutting’s post—would make it impossible to justify general moral exclusions of promiscuity, or anonymous sex, each of which can satisfy desire, and in each of which some people report finding meaning or personal satisfaction. (Thus, John Updike extensively expounded in novels and life the “sacrament of [serial] adultery,” and Andrew Sullivan the “spiritual value” of anonymous sex—i.e. intimate relations among strangers who do not even share their names with each other. Can Gutting find grounds consistent with his rejection of our views for denying what Updike, Sullivan, and many others claim? We don’t think so, though he is, of course, welcome to try.)

So Gutting’s arguments to show that homosexual sex acts can be morally right are all beside the point. He has invented a weird straw-man “natural-law” “selfish pleasure” argument against same-sex sex acts, and knocked it down. But it is not an argument either of us has ever endorsed. The natural-law argument against such acts is essentially the same as against any other kind of non-marital sex—from masturbation to fornication to adultery to bestiality. (The last is more degrading than the others, of course, in expressing an equality between persons and beasts; these kinds of act aren’t alike in every morally significant respect and degree—the point is just that there is one morally disqualifying feature they all share.) If popular speech singles out some of these acts—masturbation, same-sex sex acts, or indeed acts with beasts—as “unnatural,” it is because they are especially visibly not of the marital kind, involving behavior visibly not of the procreative sort. But the truly morally significant thing about all non-marital sex acts is that, in diverse forms, they involve disrespect for the basic good of marriage.

There are several ways to see this disrespect. Here, in these next four paragraphs, is one. Adequately respecting any basic good requires, among other things, not setting one’s will directly against any conditions essential and internal to that good. Now if a husband and wife do not reserve sex to their marriage, then even their sex acts with each other can’t really actualize and embody their marital bond: for these acts can’t express a truly exclusive commitment, which marriage inherently is. The husband and wife’s firm will to reserve sex for each other is, then, an essential condition of any sex they have with each other being marital sex. Even just a husband’s conditional willingness to engage in sex with someone else—e.g., “if the circumstances ever ensured that my wife wouldn’t find out…”—disables the marital quality of his sex acts with his wife, whether or not he ever actually cheats; and likewise for a wife.

Similarly, if people are willing to perform a sex act that fails to embody permanent commitment, or a bond that is procreative in type (whether or not it is, or can in the circumstances be, procreative in effect), they disable themselves from willing in such a way that their sexual congress can actualize and express the good of marriage, which is inherently permanent and procreative in type. Even mere approval of anyone’s non-marital sexual conduct implies a conditional willingness to engage in such acts oneself—namely, if one were in relevantly similar circumstances. That is, such approval implies willingness to choose sex under a description (e.g., “simply pleasing to all three of us,” or “simply expressive of affection,” or “simply conducive to my psycho-somatic health”) other than: marital.

Any such willingness vitiates an essential condition internal to any realization of the good of marriage and damages that aspect of ourselves—our human nature—that makes us, to quote Aristotle, conjugal beings. (Aristotle is famous for teaching that the human being is by nature a political animal; what is less often recalled is his teaching that human beings are even more fundamentally conjugal than political.) So it involves a failure to respect that basic human good; so it involves immorality, whether or not one is married or plans to be.

And because this particular basic good is so central to the common good, failures to respect it—forms of willing or willingness at odds with it—are also failures of due respect for the good of one’s whole society. This is not a merely abstract or “merely moral” matter: Such contra-marital attitudes easily spread and cause tremendous and quite visible social harm, as the carnage of the Sexual Revolution makes clear—harm measured in broken hearts and homes, fatherless children, and broader related injustices.

Plato, Aristotle, Paul, and everyone in the tradition understood that everyone unwillingly experiences some disordered tendencies towards some non-marital acts, and that some experience disordered tendencies exclusively to non-marital acts. They also understood that many who choose to engage in same-sex sexual relations do not have such an exclusive tendency. Their moral arguments are valid for both and all kinds of persons, though harder for some to live up to than for others.

Catholic sexual ethics is “still” as fully reasonable today as it was when St Paul expounded it—and identified prostitution and same-sex sex acts as obviously or visibly far out of line with it—as the sort of thing that people would lose their sound judgment about if and only if they or their society were blind to or careless about the omnipresent, invisible reality of divine causation ex nihilo, divine providence, and the possibility of a divinely willed human destiny beyond death. The natural law understanding of human fulfillment is inherently intelligible without adverting to that “theistic” framework. But when reason closes itself off against the real framework as a true whole—in thought decapitating it—other distortions of understanding and judgment will ensue, especially in reason’s practical domain, where desire and satisfaction provide every incentive to rationalization of misjudgment.

The Archbishop of San Francisco wasn’t depending on natural law philosophizing when he said (what Gutting takes his cue from) that homosexual acts are against nature. He was just repeating Paul’s letter to the Romans, where the connections between reason, conscience, natural law, divine existence, and the divine revealed will and promise for human wellbeing are laid out as building blocks of the Catholic faith. But the concordance of this revealed faith with the best philosophy untouched by Hebrew sources, as a higher synthesis of the insights of Plato and Aristotle and many others, is just a sign of its perennial validity. Another equally telling sign is its good fruit—the good fruit of its exclusions and its condemnations of certain kinds of choice. These include the protection of children's rights to have a father and a mother exclusively and devotedly theirs, in fruitful families within a civil society that can fulfill the elementary conditions of sustainability: large numbers of marriages generously welcoming children who are nurtured in dignity and supported in respect for (and willingness to adopt in their turn) this fulfilling, generous, but demanding form of life.
 
 
This article was co-written by Robert P. George and John Finnis. Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, at Princeton University. John Finnis is Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus in the University of Oxford and the Biolchini Family Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. The article was originally posted at Public Discourse and reprinted here with permission.
 
 
(Image credit: Jordan Kranda)

The late Dr. Antony Flew—perhaps the greatest atheist thinker of the last hundred years—came to faith in God largely through his studies in philosophy and, most especially, science, as he recounted in his book written with Roy Abraham Varghese, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

It was in 2004 that Dr. Flew rocked the world with his confession that he had come to believe in God. He made clear that he accepted deism, and not the God of the Bible, or of any other of the great world religions. But this in no way lessened the impact of his startling declaration. The reactions ranged from surprise, to disbelief, to even questioning whether Dr. Flew's mental capacities were diminished, perhaps because of his age. He was 81 at the time of his "conversion."

Let me assure you, as one who knows personally one of the men who walked alongside Dr. Flew on his journey toward truth, and who helped him to write the above-mentioned book, Roy Abraham Varghese, his radical change was very much real, his faculties were not diminished, and he was entirely free in his decision-making process.

It is interesting to note that in the second appendix of There is a God, there is a fascinating dialogue between Dr. Flew and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright on whether or not God has revealed himself to man, where Flew had this to say about Christianity:

"I think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honored and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation is true. There is nothing like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul...If you’re wanting Omnipotence to set up a religion, this is the one to beat." (pp. 185–186)

Dr. Flew never came to accept Christ or Christianity, or any of the distinctively Christian teachings like the inspiration of Scripture, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the incarnation of Christ, etc. This is almost to be expected as they are dependent upon supernatural assistance and the acceptance of divine revelation. As a deist, Flew would have accepted none of these teachings.

But interestingly enough, Flew also never came to accept the immortality of the human soul. And this is a truth that is knowable by the natural light of reason apart from revelation. This makes me wonder if this may well have been the linchpin that, if understood and accepted, might have completed the foundation for Dr. Flew upon which the entirety of the revelation of God may well have been able to rest. Perhaps then Dr. Flew would have been able to accept the further light of revelation?

Perhaps.

Because Dr. Flew, unfortunately, died in 2010, just six years after his declaration of faith, I also wonder if time simply ran out. Dr. Flew was truly a fascinating man. And, according to my friend Roy Abraham Varghese, he was a good man as well.

Our Reason Tells Us So

 
Dr. Flew was certainly not alone in his struggle with the concept of the natural immortality of the human soul. (I say "natural" because human beings uniquely possess an immortal soul by nature. That means, according to Catholic teaching, man does not need grace in order for his soul to live forever. It would do so naturally, even if he ends up in the isolation and emptiness of hell forever.) This is a difficult point for many atheists.

If someone already believes in the Bible, and in the Church that has the authority to definitively interpret it, then the natural immortality of the human soul follows easily. But, obviously, not everyone accepts the Bible as God's word.

Yet that's okay, because this truth can be demonstrated through reason alone, i.e., through philosophy. To do so, we must first establish the fact that humans have souls at all, and define our terms.

Does Fido Have a Soul?

 
The soul is, by definition, the unifying and vivifying principle that accounts for the life and what philosophers call the “immanent action” of all living things. The word “immanent” comes from two Latin words that mean “to remain” and “in.” “Immanent action” means the multiple parts that comprise a living being are able to act “from within” in a unified way, and in accordance with its given nature, for the good of the whole being. The soul is what accounts for this unified action that is essential for there to be life.

St. Thomas Aquinas argued, and it follows from our definition of the soul above, that not only humans, but non-rational animals and plants have souls as well. Man alone possesses what St. Thomas called a "rational" or "spiritual" soul. Plants and animals possess "material souls" that, unlike human souls, are dependent upon matter for their existence. But they possess souls nonetheless.

To be precise, there are three categories of souls:

1. Vegetative - This category of soul empowers its host to be able to take in nutrition and hydration, grow, and reproduce others of its kind. A rock can't do this.

2. Sensitive - An animal with a sensitive soul can also acquire sense knowledge and use locomotion to both ward off danger and to gather goods it needs to survive and thrive.

These first two categories of souls are material in nature. By that I mean they are entirely dependent upon the material body for their existence. As St. Thomas says, “They are adduced from the potency of the matter.” When the host dies, the vegetative or sensitive soul ceases to exist.

3. Rational - Capable of all the above, the animal possessing a rational soul is capable of acquiring intellectual, or "spiritual," knowledge as well, and of choosing to freely act toward chosen ends.

The question now becomes: how does any of this demonstrate the soul of man to be immortal?

What is Death?

 
In order to get where we need to go, we first have to define death. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it as “...the separation of the soul from the body”—an excellent definition. But perhaps a more precise philosophical definition is: “The reduction of a composite being into its component parts.” This is why I would say when Fido dies, you might want to get him out of the house and bury him. It won't take long for him to start the process to becoming “reduced to his component parts.” And that process gets a bit messy!

However, a spirit, by definition, has no parts. There is nothing to be “reduced to its component parts.” Thus, that which is purely spiritual cannot die.

So for my first four proofs for the immortality of the soul, I am going to demonstrate it by showing the soul to be “spiritual” in nature. If I can do this, I will have accomplished the task at hand.

For my fifth, sixth, and seventh proofs, I will make my appeal through what we find in human experience down through the millennia that points us in the direction of man possessing an immortal soul.

The Soul, the Person, and the Body

 
The two principle powers of the soul are its power to know and to will. Why do we say these powers lie in the soul? In simple terms, it is because it is the entire man that comes to “know” or to “love” (love being the highest purpose of the will) not just “part” of him. This would seem to indicate that the same "unifying and vivifying principle" that explains man's life, would also explain his power to know and to will.

But man is more than just a soul. He also directly experiences the “I” that unifies all that he is and all that he has done down through the decades of his life. This "I" represents the individual “person” that constitutes each human being.

Is there a distinction between the soul and the person? Yes. But it can be a bit tricky to demonstrate.

Perhaps it would be best to demonstrate the distinctions by laying out some of the differences between the body, soul, and person.

There is no doubt that the body contributes to the soul’s ability to come to know. A damaged brain is a clear indicator here. The soul needs a properly functioning brain to be able to come to know anything, ordinarily speaking.

Yet, it is also interesting to note that man is much more than a body as well. Philosopher and theologian J.P. Moreland writes:

“...neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk or swallow...”

But yet, Moreland says, the “patient would respond by saying, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.”’ Further, no matter how much probing and electrical prodding, Penfield found there is no place in the brain that can “cause a patient to believe or decide” (Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, p. 258.).

Thus, the “I,” or, the person, seems to use his body, or here his brain, to be sure, but “he” is not determined by it.

We can also say with confidence that the “I” is not synonymous with the intellect and will, or the soul, either because “I” can struggle to remember, to know, or to exercise my will. There seems to be more to a person than just a body, or even just a soul. Man seems to be a body/soul composite. Both his body and soul contribute to the great and mysterious “I.”

The Proofs for the Natural Immortality of the Human Soul

1. The Intellect Possesses the Power of Abstraction

 
St. Thomas Aquinas explained, “The operation of anything follows the mode of its being” (Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 75, art. 3). To put it in simpler terms: action follows being. One can tell something of the nature of a thing through examining its actions. Hence, the spiritual nature of the human soul; and therefore its immortality, can be proven through the exhibition of its spiritual power in human acts. One such "spiritual action" is the power of abstraction.

To use Thomistic language once again, when a human being comes to know something or someone, let’s say, he sees a man, “Tim,” his senses engage the individual; “Tim,” through the immediate "accidental" qualities that he sees. By "accidentals," we mean the non-essential, or changeable, aspects of "Tim" like his size, color, weight, etc. From this conglomeration of accidentals, his intellect abstracts the “form” of “man-ness” from that individual (This reminds me of a philosophy professor I had in college who seemed to have an inability to pronounce a noun without adding a “ness” to the end of it.).

This "form" the intellect abstracts is an immaterial likeness of the object thought about or seen. It is ordinarily derived from a particular object, like the man, “Tim,” as I mentioned above, but it transcends the particular individual. The form gets at the essence of "Tim." It is that which is universal concerning "Tim," the man. He is risible (he laughs), he reasons, and more. This is that which is changeless and applies not just to "Tim," but to all men. And very importantly for our purpose, we must remember that this essential “form” abstracted by the intellect is a spiritual reality. It transcends the individual.

Now, there is a material likeness, or image, that is concrete and singular, impressed in the memory of man, but that is not what we are talking about here. Dogs, cats, birds, and bats have memory. Non-rational animals do not have the power to abstract the form of “man.” Only human beings can comprehend “man-ness” or “dog-ness.”

This is not to say the soul of a dog is not real. It is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, a "real principle," and it is “adduced from the potency of the matter.” This is analogous to elements formed into a compound or an atomic explosion caused from the potency of the matter used in the formation of a bomb. Certain kinds of matter exist in potency to other kinds of matter that when joined create elements, atomic explosions, or Fido! But only man (among animals on earth) has this power of abstraction that necessarily involves a spiritual principle.

Why is this crucial to understand? Well, let’s introduce yet another “form” here: “tree-ness.” “Tree” is defined as, “A woody perennial plant, having a single main stem or trunk arising from the soil and having branches and foliage.” This would represent “the form” that is common to all trees apart from any particular. I could burn the individual tree from which I abstract the form of “tree-ness,” and reduce it to ash so that there is no longer this particular “tree” in existence, but I can never burn “tree-ness” because it is “spiritual,” or “universal.”

Remember our philosophical principle? "Action follows being?" If the soul has this spiritual power to “abstract” the form of “tree,” or “man,” it must be spiritual. And if the soul is spiritual, it has to be immortal. It cannot be “reduced to its component parts.”

2. The Soul Forms Ideas of Realities That Are Immaterial

 
The human soul not only abstracts the forms of material entities encountered, but it also has the power to know the ideas or “forms” of immaterial realities like logical sequence, moral goodness, property rights, philosophical categories like “substance,” cause and effect, and more.

Where are these realities? What color are they? How big are they? How much do they weigh?

They have no color, size, or weight because they are spiritual—and by definition—immaterial. Sense image alone (like the Empiricists John Locke and David Hume say is the only source of knowledge) cannot account for these. We are not talking about the material world here.

To form an idea of something spiritual, again, requires a spiritual principle, i.e., the soul. If it's spiritual, it can’t die.

3. The Will Strives for Immaterial Goods

 
Closely related to my first two proofs, just as the intellect has the power to abstract the “spiritual” forms of the things and beings it encounters, and to form ideas of immaterial realities, the will also has the power to strive for immaterial things, like prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, etc. One cannot produce what one does not possess. There must be a spiritual; and therefore, immortal principle (the soul), to will these spiritual realities.

4. The Intellect Can Reflect Upon Its Own Act of Knowledge

 
It could not do so if it were material. A material faculty, such as the power of vision, only reacts in response to external stimuli. It could only be said to “perceive” inasmuch as one “part” was acted upon by another “part” of something else. When our intellect reflects on its own act of knowing, and we could add its own act of being as well, it is both subject and object of knowledge. The soul can only do this if it has no parts. A dog cannot reflect on its own act of knowing, or being. It just scratches! That is sense knowledge.

5. Man Has a Natural Desire to Live Forever

 
Aristotle gave us an extremely important philosophical principle when he said, “A potency without the possibility of actuality destroys nature.”

The existence of acorns necessitate the existence of oak trees. It is not that each individual acorn will be actualized and become an oak tree. That is clearly not the case. But if no acorns could be actualized, there would be no oak trees.

We could multiply examples here. A digestive system in animals necessarily means we can know there is food… somewhere out there. A female dog necessitates the existence of a male dog. If there's not, then "dog" will be eliminated in fairly short order.

Thus, the non-rational animal seeks self-preservation, food, and sex. Each of these is conditioned by time. Man has intellectual knowledge which is absolute. The “forms” are not conditioned to time as material knowledge is. Remember? The individual “tree” will die, but not the “form” or “idea” of tree that man alone possesses among creatures of earth. From this knowledge of the eternal springs a spontaneous desire to live forever. And this potency cannot exist in vain. That would be contrary to everything we see in nature.

6. The Testimony of Mankind Over the Centuries and Millenia 

 
From ancient Egypt's Book of the Dead, to Western Civilization's Bible, every civilization, every culture, in all of human history has attested to the existence of an after-life.

Some will point out the very few exceptions—one being Hinayana (or Theravedic) Buddhism—that deny the existence of "spirit," or the soul, to discount this our sixth proof. But to no avail.

Actually, the exception tends to prove the rule. And this, I would argue, is certainly the case with Hinayana Buddhism. Not only is this ancient form of Buddhism an anomaly in the world of religion, but the appearance of Mahayana Buddhism (that restored belief in “God” and “the soul”), very early in the history of Buddhism, and the fact that it is today by far the largest of the three main traditions of Buddhism, tends to demonstrate that man is so ordered to believe in the afterlife that errant thinking here or there over millenia can never keep its truth suppressed for very long.

7. The Existence of the Moral Law

 
My final proof for the natural immortality of the human soul is derived from the existence of the Moral Law that we can know apart from divine revelation. This is a true law knowable to all, and a law that man did not give to himself. And yet, it is often unpunished and the sanctions of law not carried out.  Hence, there must be an eternity where all is rectified.

Even Plato understood the necessity for the Moral Law to be rooted in the justice and wisdom of God. Without the immortality of the soul, Plato noted, there is no justice, which would be absurd. Yet if there is a God who is just, then there must be final justice. Since final justice so often does not occur in this life, there must be a next life in which justice will be served. Thus our souls must be immortal.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Dumb Ox Ministries)

Though agape [i.e. selfless love] comes from God, it resides in our free will as human beings. Its home is not the body or the feelings, or even the intellect, but the will. True, the intellect has to work with it. But it is not the intellect that loves, any more than it is the light in the operating room that performs the surgery.Agape may be aided by seeing, accompanied by feeling, and accomplished by doing, but it is essentially an act of choosing, an act of free will.

If God exists, and God is love, then God must be that which loves, the will. God is not just being or the Force or Cosmic Consciousness, but a willer with a will. This is the distinctively biblical concept of God, which is missing in most Oriental religions.

Three other words for will in Scripture are "heart" (the center or core of the person), "spirit," and "I" (as in "I AM WHO AM"). All three mean the self. The source of agapeis not any function of the self but the self itself, that mysterious and non-objectifiable personal center which is the root and source of all our functions. Who is it that thinks and feels? Whose body and soul is this? Who am I? "Know thyself."

I sense, I think, I know, I feel, I desire, I long-there is an "I" behind everything I do, inner or outer, spiritual or physical. This I is God's image in me. Like God, it is hidden (Is 45:15). For like God, it is the subject rather than the object, the thinker rather than the thought, the feeler rather than the felt, the doer rather than the deed. "Know thyself," then, is the insolvable puzzle—the mystery that cannot be reduced to a problem. The self or I is the thing we are but cannot know, the thing that is not a thing.

The closest thing to it is willing. I can distance myself from my thoughts, hold them captive as an object and criticize them. I can do the same with my feelings. But not with my willing—at least not my present willing—for the very act of holding something before my consciousness is an act of willing.

I am not wholly free or responsible for my thoughts and feelings, which partly come to me from my heredity and my environment. But I am completely free and responsible for my will's choices, which come from me. I am not what I think or feel but I am what I will. I can distance myself from my thought. I can even distance myself from my feeling, for I can feel angry and yet refuse to be identified with that feeling. But I cannot distance myself from my willing. I cannot will and refuse at the same time because refusal is willing.

That is why it is not important whether temptations come to me, but it is important whether I consent to them. "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man" (Mt 15:11). This is true not only of the mouth or the body, but also the soul. What comes into my soul is not necessarily what I will, but what comes out of my soul is precisely what I will.

The Greek philosophers did not clearly recognize this personal center. They were intellectualists; they thought the deepest thing in us was the mind. Thus Plato taught that whenever we really know the good, we do it. He thought that all evil is ultimately ignorance and curable by education. Aristotle too identified reason with the true self, that which distinguishes us from animals. He defined man as "a rational animal." But Scripture goes deeper. When asked how people could understand his teachings, Jesus replied, "My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me; if any man's will is to do his [the Father's] will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God" (Jn 7:16.17, emphasis added).

The will leads us to wisdom. The heart leads the head. Therefore Solomon says, "Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life" (Prov 4:23). In the natural sciences the head must lead. But in knowing persons—ourselves, others, or God—the heart must lead the head. "Deep calls to deep" (Ps 42:7), I to I. Thus Augustine declares that his Confessions cannot be understood by those who "do not have their ear to my heart, where I am what I am."

"Know thyself" was the first and greatest commandment for the Greeks. It was inscribed on every temple of Apollo. We can distinguish at least five levels of profundity in attempting to answer that fundamental question, What is the self? What am I? What is the human person? Only the key of love unlocks the deepest answer.

• Answer #1: I am the social self. I am simply a social function, an ingredient in society. Society is the absolute. This old tribal view is coming back into modern consciousness. Many of my students use "Society" (always with a capital S, like "Science") exactly where theists would use "God" as the ultimate authority. De Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Huxley, Orwell, and Riesman all warned of this: xeroxed souls, standardized selves, mass conformity, "the lonely crowd."
• Answer #2: I am the individual physical self. I am the thing that eats, diets, jogs, exercises, and dies. I am what I eat. This old pagan materialistic notion is also undergoing a great comeback in the modern yuppie world.
• Answer #3: I am the feeling self. I am a mass of self-actualization, loneliness, positive and negative vibes, different strokes, complexes, libidinous urges, or other kinds of liberations of the psyche! This is another very popular view in the modern world. It is a little deeper and closer to the heights reached by classical paganism, which is the next deeper view.
• Answer #4: I am the rational self. Unlike the animals, which include all the above answers, I can know truth. I stand in a light for which the animals have no receptor: the light of understanding, meaning, and intrinsic value. "Reason" meant this to the ancients: something immeasurably greater than what "reason" means to moderns. Namely, calculation, clever­ness, or logical correctness. To the ancients, it meant a divine attribute: wisdom.
• Answer #5: I am the will, heart, soul, spirit, self, or I. I am that which chooses, commits, decides, and loves.

Why is the fifth answer the truest one? The will is central because love is central. Not the intellect—not quite. Plato is half right: evil does indeed come from ignorance, but not only from ignorance, for then it would be excusable. In fact, ignorance first comes from evil. We will, we choose, we create the moral ignorance in our souls the ignorance that Plato saw was a prerequisite to doing evil. We voluntarily turn off the light of truth.

For instance, we shut out the divine truth and justice of "thou shalt not steal" before we sin by stealing. The ignorance of the thief—by which he thinks that filling his pockets with stolen money will make him happier than filling his soul with proper virtue—is indeed, as Plato saw, a prerequisite for his act of theft. But that ignorance in turn has as its prerequisite the will's choice to turn the thief's attention away from the truth of the moral law. He wills to look instead at the pleasures he thinks will derive from his loot. His ignorance comes from his ignoring.
 
 
Excerpted from The God Who Loves You. Copyright 2004 by Ignatius Press, all rights reserved, used with permission. Text copied from PeterKreeft.com.
(image credit: Acqualokos)

However, there is a theme in this film that is worthy of some reflection, namely the tension between individual autonomy and a state-controlled society. Man of Steel commences with a lengthy segment dealing with the closing days of the planet Krypton. We learn that a fiercely totalitarian regime, led by a General Zod, is seeking the arrest of a scientist called Jor-El. It becomes clear that Jor-El has attempted to undermine the regime's policy of strictly controlling the genetics of Kryptonite newborns. Very much in the manner of Plato's Republic, Kryptonite children are rigidly pre-programmed to be a member of one of three social groups.

Jor-El and his wife have conceived a child in the traditional manner and are seeking to send their son, born in freedom, away from their dying planet. I won't bore you with many more plot details, but suffice it to say that the child (the future Superman) does indeed get away to planet Earth and that General Zod manages to survive the destruction of his world. The movie then unfolds as the story of a great battle between the representative of freedom and the avatar of genetic manipulation and political tyranny.

Lest you think that the link to Plato is a bit forced, the director at one point shows the teenaged Superman reading The Republic. In his classic The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper, a survivor of Nazi tyranny, presented Plato's Republic as the forerunner of all totalitarianisms that have sprung up in the West. Very often, Popper saw, these tyrannies begin with the best of intentions. Good-hearted leaders believe that they have hit upon some form of life that will benefit the greatest number and thus they endeavor to implement their vision through binding legal prescription. Plato himself thought that the guardians of his ideal republic should have all property—including wives and children—in common and hence called for a strictly enforced communism among social elites. Further, he felt that the soldiers who protect his perfect city should have their emotions trained in a very precise manner and therefore decreed that tight censorship should obtain in regard to their reading and entertainment. On Popper's interpretation, post-revolutionary French society, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the Iran of the Ayatollahs would be imitations of the Platonic original: idealistic visions which quickly devolved into totalitarian oppression.

In answer to these totalizing systems, Popper proposed the open society, which is to say, a political arrangement that places stress on the prerogatives and freedom of the individual. Thomas Jefferson's insistence that government exists primarily for the purpose of guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to determine their own destinies, to seek happiness as they see fit, is deeply congruent with Popper's ideal. Much of the political history of the past three hundred years might be characterized as a battle between these two visions, these contrasting ideologies. At its limit, the Platonic system results in the apotheosizing of the state and/or the divinization of the ruler. And this is why General Zod (so close to "God") is aptly named. At its limit, the open society conduces toward the apotheosizing of the individual will, so that personal freedom becomes absolute. Many times before, I have pilloried the U.S. Supreme Court statement in the matter of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, whereby individual freedom is entitled to define even the meaning of the universe! If Plato is the philosopher who best articulates the nature of the totalitarian society, Friedrich Nietzsche is the philosopher who best expresses the limit case of the apotheosized ego. Beyond good and evil, he said, lies the will of the Ubermensch, literally the superman. We might read the battle between General Zod and Superman, therefore, as a symbol of the struggle between two falsely deified realities, the nation-state and the ego.

Happily, there is a state of affairs that lies beyond this clash. Biblical religion is eminently clear that there is one God and that any attempt to deify the state, the king, or the self-asserting ego results in spiritual calamity. If you're curious about particular references, I might urge you to read the account of the fall in Genesis chapter three, the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis chapter eleven, Samuel's critique of kingship in first Samuel chapter eight, and the story of David and Bathsheba in second Samuel chapter eleven. The Bible recommends neither the heteronomy of the oppressive state nor the autonomy of the individual will, but rather, if I can borrow a term from Paul Tillich, "theonomy," which means allowing God to become the inner law of one's life. Both the state and the will are under God's judgment and hence neither General Zod nor Superman is the answer.

I'm sure, gentle reader, that you will forgive my revealing the none-too-surprising ending to Man of Steel: Superman's victory over the wicked general. In a Biblical telling of the story, the hero of individualism, having conquered General Zod, would kneel to God.
 
 
Originally published at Word on Fire. Text from Real Clear Religion. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Front Page Mag)

"For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man..."
— Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

Last year, I found myself unexpectedly marveling at an album by Tom “It's Not Unusual” Jones, which featured covers of songs by Tom Waits, Paul Simon, and The Low Anthem. One track, "Soul of a Man," revived a bluesy 1930 song by Blind Willie Johnson that asks one my favorite philosophical questions: what is the soul?

Generally, people fall into one of the following three “camps” on the question of the soul. (Note: By soul, I mean the immaterial aspect of the human being which thinks, feels, and wills. By consciousness, I will mean something more rudimentary, but also apparently immaterial: rich subjective experience, or what philosophers call the “what it is like." This is an important distinction since people often use these words interchangeably. I’ll discuss both.)

1) Materialistic Monists (MMs) – A person is their body; the soul is reducible to the material or simply doesn’t exist.
2) Descartesian Dualists (DDs) – A person is their soul; the soul is a separable, non-material substance that inhabits the body.
3) Aristotelian Animalists (AAs) – A person is their body and their soul; the soul is the non-material form of the body, unified with the body.

MMs have been gaining ground in recent years, especially with advances in neuroscience and the rising prominence of the New Atheists. There are different sub-groups in this camp, but in general, they all doubt that there is anything spiritual or immaterial about man. They're convinced that poetic discourse about your or my “soul” is a form of “folk psychology.”

This view is not new, but in recent years, philosophers like Daniel Dennett have spun a far more sophisticated case with it. His 1991 book Consciousness Explained purports to show through a “multiple drafts” theory that there is no “center” of conscious experience (“I see a blue sky”), but rather a spreading of awareness “drafts” over subsystems in the brain that, through evolutionary and cultural conditioning, have resulted in an illusory unity of subjective experience.

Dennett's work suggests a question: are we gradually explaining with evolution and neuroscience what was almost always thought to be the work of divine providence? Is the soul just one more mystery-mongering domain of theologians to dispel under the hot white light of empirical science? According to Richard Dawkins, the answer is yes. “Science,” Dawkins says, “has either killed the soul or is in the process of doing so." Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker agrees: “Cognitive neuroscience has pretty much killed [the soul]...Many kinds of evidence show that the mind is an entity in the physical world, part of a causal chain of physical events. If you send an electric current through the brain, you cause the person to have a vivid experience. If a part of the brain dies because of a blood clot or a burst artery or a bullet wound, a part of the person is gone."

But philosophers have been more or less aware of this correlation between brain states and mental states since the ancient world. (You don’t need to be Socrates to see that the mind weakens as the brain decays, or malfunctions when the head is injured.) Yet, most have gone on believing in souls, because correlation does not imply causation. To use a computer analogy, the brain might be like the hardware of your iPhone which transmits the software of Words with Friends. When you smash your phone to pieces (say, because you keep getting all vowels), Words malfunctions and vanishes with it—but your game can continue on your iPad. Similarly, after brain death, the “software” of the soul may not die with it, because it was not caused by it—only transmitted. Pinker’s evidence seems to be a textbook case of the post hoc fallacy.

Neuroplasticity research further complicates the MM's position. There is growing evidence that—in patients with OCD, for example—the brain reshapes under the tutelage of new attitudes and behaviors. But if the soul is to the brain as digestion is to the stomach, why should mental effort execute any top-down causation? In response, materialists are forced to relegate the soul—with its rationality and will—to a sort of illusory, ineffectual middle man in the brain’s modification of itself.

But the biggest problem for the MMs are qualia, or distinctive conscious experiences of things (e.g., the “what it is like” to see yellow, feel hotness, etc.). Even Sam Harris, who like Dennett is one of the leading New Atheists, has emphasized this point. In his essay “The Mystery of Consciousness,” Harris (sounding very Cartesian) says: “[T]he only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself.” He concludes that “an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.” Harris indirectly cites the work of two philosophers leading this charge against the MMs: Thomas Nagel ("What Is It Like to Be a Bat?") and David Chalmers (the “hard problem” of consciousness), who are also both atheists. The work of these three eminent, non-religious thinkers yields an inconvenient truth: that the richness of subjective consciousness will not be subdued by materialism, not because the empirical tools of science have yet to advance on it, but because it is inescapably “stuff” of a different order. As Nagel puts it in his latest book Mind and Cosmos, “The existence of consciousness seems to imply that...the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.”

The irreducibility of consciousness to physics and chemistry seems to push us toward dualism and the DDs: perhaps consciousness is the bulwark of something like the soul, demanding that we acknowledge it?

The notion of dualism stretches back to Plato's Phaedo (360 B.C.) and beyond; but French philosopher and mathematician Descartes, at the birth of modern science, incorporated Platonic dualism into a systematic division of the world between the res extensa (extended thing) and res cogitans (thinking thing). For him, the only thing one could prove existed beyond the shadow of a doubt was the thinking subject. As he famously put it: “I am only a thing that thinks” (which sounds a lot like Johnson’s line, “a man ain't nothing but his mind”).

Many Christian movements (e.g., Gnosticism, and later Puritanism) have been made up of committed DDs. In fact, De Tocqueville once remarked that Protestant America is “where the precepts of Descartes are best applied.” Religious DDs tend to speak of the soul and “the flesh” as one speaks of a prisoner and a jail, and to conceive of everlasting life with God in wholly spiritual terms.

But the trouble for all DDs, religious or not, are legion. The first and greatest is the snare of skepticism. In the DDs framework, where the person is reducible to his or her immaterial self, it seem inescapable that we’re doomed to doubt everything – the existence of other minds (philosophical zombies), the external world (world-as-computer simulation), even our own bodies (brain in a vat). Only philosophers like Chalmers are crazy enough to think about these things—common sense flies in the face of all three—but the problems remain.

Another problem is the relationship between soul and body. How does the immaterial soul or self “operate” the material body? When I decide to raise my arm, and I do it, where is the link between my immaterial thought and my material action? (Descartes’ guess was the pineal gland, which scientists have since deemed an endocrine organ.) DDs are stuck with the Cartesian catastrophe of the “ghost in the machine,” an incoherency that effects oscillation between the two extremes to this day (what novelist Walker Percy, inspired by Jacques Maritain, termed “angelism-beastilism”).

(In an effort to avoid these and other problems presented by dualism, philosophers like Nagel are increasingly considering a sort of Emersonian view called panpsychism, the belief that consciousness pervades all of reality, that it’s “awareness all the way down.” This view may have some explanatory power, but there are glaring difficulties: how could a mini-consciousness, which is simple and indivisible, inhere in the elementary particles which constitute the physical world? And how do the mental aspects of these infinite particles, which constitute even our brain, combine into our one consciousness?)

A third position, which avoids the pitfalls of both materialism and dualism, is that of the Aristotelian Animalists (AAs).

Aristotle wrote in De Anima that the soul is: “(a) the source or origin of movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of the whole living body.” For Aristotle, there are different kinds of souls (plant, animal, and human) with varying degrees of biological and cognitive activity. The human soul is the animating form of the matter of the human animal, the actuating “breath” of what a body is and does. Aristotle thus distinguishes the soul from the material body, but not as a ghost from a machine. Unlike Plato, Aristotle concluded that the soul is “inseparable from its body,” although the highest faculty of the soul—the mind—is “immortal and eternal.”

Aristotle's earthy notion of the soul was picked up by scholastic philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that “it belongs to the notion of a soul to be the form of a body,” and that although a human soul’s rationality points to its subsistence after death, the disembodied soul is a form without matter, and therefore incomplete. Death does not result in the final liberation and fulfillment of the soul, but a dislodging of the body’s essence, our being “not wholly at rest.”

Thomism, informed by this Aristotelian view of the person, has held to this unity of body and soul and fought fiercely against the two alternatives. As one Notre Dame philosopher puts it, the Thomistic view is that “dualism is just as wrongheaded and, in the end, just as pernicious as physicalism.” Why pernicious?

Because dualism “has the dire moral consequence of leaving the body bereft of more than merely external or instrumental moral significance.” Materialism, on the other hand, leaves the apparent “limitlessness and lucidity” of our freedom and rationality bereft of much significance at all. AAs, in contrast, account for the whole person—thought, freedom, will, as well as qualia—a philosophical account which has informed and paralleled Catholic theology (e.g., the sacraments, the resurrection of the dead, and the theology of the body). As the Catechism states it: “spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”

The position of the AAs seems to be the most coherent and plausible of these three camps, since it leaves us with the fewest problems and has the most explanatory power. Still, asking about the soul and answering it in philosophical terms is one thing. Hearing the question sung from the pit of a soul is another. I have to answer, after everything, “a mystery.”

Based on article originally posted at By Way of Beauty. Used with permission.