On Volume 124 of the Journal, we featured an interview with R. J. Snell about his book The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode. Our conversation about his book began (as did his book) with a recollection of a 2013 article written in First Things by David Bentley Hart called “Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws.” Hart’s article focused on the attempt by various philosophers, theologians, law professors, and others to import this tradition into public policy debates, in a way amenable to modern political culture. “What I have in mind,” Hart explained, “is a style of thought whose proponents (names are not important) believe that compelling moral truths can be deduced from a scrupulous contemplation of the principles of cosmic and human nature, quite apart from special revelation, and within the context of the modern conceptual world. This, it seems to me, is a hopeless cause.”
Hart went on to explain why he believed it to be hopeless, if well-intentioned. Hart may have understood before he wrote the first sentence of this brief article that persuading his adversaries that they were wasting their energies was an equally hopeless cause (although the tone of the article suggests that this wasn’t likely to cause him to lose much sleep).
Midway through the essay, Hart summarized what I took to be the most important point in his argument:
The assumption that the natural and moral orders are connected to one another in any but a purely pragmatic way must be logically antecedent to our interpretation of the world; it is a belief about nature, but not a natural belief as such; it is a supernatural judgment that renders natural reality intelligible in a particular way.
The piece concluded on a similar note:
Our concept of nature, in any age, is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions. And, in an age that has been shaped by a mechanistic understanding of the physical world, a neo-Darwinian view of life, and a voluntarist understanding of the self, nature’s “laws” must appear to be anything but moral.
I think it’s important here to recognize that the supernatural or metaphysical convictions Hart refers to need not be consciously, systematically, or consistently held for them to exert a controlling influence on what we think about natural matters. That’s why Richard Weaver refers to the governing power of a “metaphysical dream of the world,” an intuitive sense of the ultimate shape of things. As Hart has written elsewhere, modern culture nurtures and protects the metaphysical belief in “the unreality of any ‘value’ higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end.” His main argument in this article was that, in such a cultural setting — a setting that is fundamentally nihilistic — appeals to natural law quite simply make no sense.
There are, Snell’s book explained, other ways to frame natural law theory, other ways to make arguments about moral ends that set to one side metaphysical questions about the relationship between natural and supernatural realities. There are in fact many ways to defend the idea of natural law. The question remains as to how fruitful any of these approaches can be in overcoming the nihilistic prejudice that is so thoroughly embedded in modern culture. (I would be very interested to read some conversion accounts.)
In musing about these issues since talking with Snell, I came across an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre called “Natural Law in Advanced Modernity.” It was featured in an anthology entitled Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2000). Given the urgency that many Christians rightly feel about the difficulty of making public arguments about moral absolutes, it’s worth attending to MacIntyre’s argument in some detail.
He begins by emphasizing the differences between our cultural backdrop and that of earlier ages in which natural law arguments had a more compelling power.
[W]e find a remarkable difference between how matters are or were conceived by the exponents of these older views of natural law and the beliefs dominant in modern cultures. It follows that we should not expect those older conceptions of natural law to continue to flourish in the modern world. And they do not. What we find instead, for the most part, are very different theories of natural law, theories that have come to terms in greater or lesser degree with cultural modernity.
I’m going to argue that these latter theories all fail and that they fail in just those respects in which their adaptation to what is distinctively modern in modern culture is most evident.
MacIntyre then summarizes the principal objectives of all theories of natural law.
Every account of natural law, no matter how minimal, makes at least two claims: first, that our human nature is such that, as rational beings, we cannot but recognize that obedience to some particular set of precepts is required, if we are to achieve our good or goods, a recognition that is primarily expressed in our practice and only secondarily in our explicit formulation of precepts; and, second, that it is at least one central function of any system of law to spell out those precepts and to make them mandatory by providing for their enforcement.
Later in the essay, MacIntyre discusses the new natural law theory as put forth by John Finnis and Germain Grisez.
This theory was originally developed in part as an interpretation of the thought of Aquinas. But its differences from Aquinas’s standpoint, especially as that standpoint has been understood by most modern Thomists, are as noteworthy as its resemblances. It [the new natural law] does not, for example, rely upon an Aristotelian conception of essential human nature, defining goods in terms of the flourishing of such a nature and of the satisfaction of its various, hierarchically ordered inclinations. Instead it defines integral human fulfillment in terms of respect for and the achievement of a set of basic goods. It does not understand human individuals as essentially parts of larger wholes — of the family and of political community, for example — wholes apart from membership in which the human individual is incomplete. According to the Grisez/Finnis theory, individual goods are not understood in terms of a prior notion of the common good. Instead their theory defines the common good in such a way that the common good is nothing other and nothing more than one aspect of the set of fundamental human goods.
At this point in the essay, MacIntyre returns to the question of the cultural setting in which natural law arguments are to be made, a setting characterized by a deeply held misconception of human nature and the nature of the good.
Just as functioning well for human beings partially consists in individuals understanding themselves in a particular way, as engaged together with family, friends, and others in a shared discovery of what their individual goods and their common good are, so the malfunctioning of human nature is characteristically expressed in some kind of systematic misunderstanding. In the cultures of advanced modernity, and most notably in contemporary North America, the form often taken by this misunderstanding is one in which the individual is misconceived as someone who has to choose for himself what his good is to be. This conception of the sovereignty and central importance of individual choice is generated by several different but mutually reinforcing features of our dominant contemporary social and moral modes.
Here, MacIntyre underscores a key corollary to the historic understanding of natural law: that the shape of moral order can only be properly perceived by those who have benefited from some healthy moral formation. Systematic misunderstanding of the nature of moral order is now institutionalized; the instruments of moral perception have been retuned to play only in certain keys, recalibrated to detect only certain phenomena.
On a Thomistic view, it is to be expected that under certain social conditions in which adequate moral education is unavailable, the place of individual choice in the moral life will be misunderstood in precisely the way it has been misunderstood in the dominant cultures of advanced modernity.
The exercise of individual choice thus understood, that is, not choice as governed by principles but choice as prior to and determining our principles, is often identified in the contemporary world with the exercise of liberty. Liberty is therefore thought to be threatened whenever it is suggested that the principles that ought to govern over our actions are not in fact principles that are up to us to choose, but principles that we need to discover. But since a Thomistic understanding of natural law commits those who possess it to asserting that human nature is such that rational practical principles are antecedent to and govern choice in rational well-functioning human beings, and that therefore those principles have to be discovered, not chosen, any defense of a Thomistic understanding of natural law is very easily construed as a threat to liberty.
The arguments made by MacIntyre, Hart, and others stress the obstacle erected to any revival of natural law ideas — or any shared vision for the common good or “human flourishing” — by the zealous veneration of a modern view of freedom. That is the one subject that seems off-limits in public debate about moral matters, but I think it is the idol that must be toppled before any substantive moral content can be restored to public deliberation about public life.
Related reading and listening
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 163 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley
- The political wisdom of Edmund Burke — FROM VOL. 28 Daniel Ritchie discusses the enduring political wisdom of British statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke (1729–1797). (13 minutes)
- Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
- Christopher Hitchens vs. G. K. Chesterton — Ralph Wood compares Christopher Hitchens‘s view of the cosmos with that of G. K. Chesterton, arguing that Chesterton succeeded where Hitchens failed. (44 minutes)
- When is a market “free”? — William T. Cavanaugh argues for a richer conception of freedom than the reductionist one promoted by economist Milton Friedman. (44 minutes)
- The danger of not defining “freedom” — Richard Bauckham insists that an adequate understanding of freedom requires recognition of God as the ground of true human freedom
- The historian’s communal role as storyteller — FROM VOL. 127 Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
- When is civil disobedience necessary? — Douglas Farrow examines the relation between “the kings of the earth” and the law of Christ, particularly when governmental law is exercised without reference to natural or divine law. (49 minutes)
- The gift of objective reality — Moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan makes an argument for the consistency of the idea of law when it is conceived in a theological context. (40 minutes)
- Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
- Education, reason, and the Good — Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson on C. S. Lewis’s argument about natural law
- Faith and unbelief — FROM VOL. 98 This Archive Feature revisits two conversations, one with Roger Lundin and one with David Bentley Hart, on what makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers. (39 minutes)
- Creation as beauty and gift — FROM VOL. 67 David Bentley Hart describes how the Christian understanding of Creation as beauty and gift, as the outward expression of the delight the Trinity has in itself, reveals a vision of reality different from the pagan or fatalist vision of reality. (12 minutes)
- Mechanism and the abolition of meaning — On the occasion of philosopher Daniel Dennett’s death this week, Ken Myers presents an archive interview with David Bentley Hart in which he explains how pure naturalism leads to the un-doing of rationality. (37 minutes)
- Materialism and the problem of mind — David Bentley Hart on the evasiveness implicit on all efforts to explain away human consciousness
- Dreary atheist fundamentalism — David Bentley Hart defends the naturalness of religious belief against the assertions of the Naturalists
- The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
- The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
- The infinity of beauty in Bach — David Bentley Hart on why Johann Sebastian Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians
- Rejecting “two-tiered” Thomism — FROM VOL. 155 David Bentley Hart on how “two-tier Thomism” deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. (42 minutes)
- Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
- Light from Neither the East nor the West — Ken Myers reads an essay by theologian John Betz titled “Light from Neither the East nor the West.” It is the third of three essays by Betz in which he distinguishes a Christian understanding of freedom from the conventional modern definitions. (41 minutes)
- Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
- What makes our desires and action intelligible — David Bentley Hart on why we must believe that human beings are by nature inclined to the super-natural
- Recovering a sacramental imagination — Hans Boersma argues that we need to recover the pre-modern view that Creation not only points to God, but that it participates in the very being of God — that in God we live and move and have our being. (29 minutes)
- Freedom on Holiday: The Genealogy of a Cultural Revolution — In this second of three essays, John Betz argues that freedom for the sake of conforming to the Good has been replaced by freedom as the space to choose whatever we want. (52 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 155 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Donald Kraybill, Thaddeus Kozinski, David Bentley Hart, Nigel Biggar, Ravi Scott Jain, and Jason Baxter
- Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
- Freedom, real and counterfeit — D. C. Schindler contrasts the classical and Christian understanding of freedom with the modern understanding of freedom, and explains how true freedom is a condition of harmony with reality. (59 minutes)
- We Hold These Freedoms: Modern, Postmodern, Christian — An essay by John Betz explores the theological grounding of real freedom. He argues that human freedom cannot be understood apart from divine freedom. (36 minutes)
- God is not Zeus; you are not Prometheus — Ron Highfield addresses those who doubt Christianity’s goodness, especially as regards modern assumptions about identity, freedom, and dignity. (24 minutes)
- Power to the people — Nathan O. Hatch on the DIY spirit of early American Christianity
- Unreason destroys freedom — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the relationship between freedom and truth
- Beauty and a hermeneutics of creation — David Bentley Hart on the goodness of beauty
- Conventional “charismatic” speech, in service of the Zeitgeist — Richard Stivers on how the rhetoric of democracy invites tyranny
- Why churches should be more attentive to space — Eric O. Jacobsen discusses New Urbanism with a Christian perspective, imagining how we might organize places in which life may be lived at a human scale and in which real community is nourished. (26 minutes)
- Shrinking sources of causality — David Bentley Hart on the loss of a recognition of inherent meaning in the natural world
- Diagnosing our political conflicts — Michael Hanby explains why the modern pursuit of freedom — obeying its founding logic — has taken such a destructive turn. (36 minutes)
- The social context of freedom — Brad Littlejohn talks about the necessity of a more expansive understanding of freedom, one which recognizes that we are really only free within the social experience of shared meaning and mutual recognition. (17 minutes)
- The loss of awe, the idolatry of partial thinking — Thaddeus J. Kozinski on reading modernity’s symptoms wisely (and wonder-fully)
- The paradoxes of therapeutic culture — Stephen Gardner and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn discuss Philip Reiff’s diagnosis of how psychology replaced the social roles of religion, morality, and custom, redefining the meaning of what is public. (39 minutes)
- The Sixth Commandment and the obligation to protect public health — Ethicist Gilbert Meilaender explains why our experience with COVID-19 has made it difficult for many — citizens and officials — to honor a proper obligation to protect public health. (17 minutes)
- Freedom, ancient and modern — In a brief excerpt from David Bentley Hart’s book Atheist Delusions, and a longer excerpt from an Areopagus Lecture by D. C. Schindler, the modern view of freedom is contrasted with the understanding of freedom present in ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman thought. (27 minutes)
- Perceiving the common good during a pandemic — D. C. Schindler reflects on the shape of our way of life in wake of a killer virus, seeing signs both encouraging and sinister. (35 minutes)
- Loving your neighbor during a pandemic — Brad Littlejohn reflects on how best to ask and answer some of the questions raised by our current disease-ravaged circumstances, particularly questions related to Christian freedom and love of neighbor. (29 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 146 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Mark Mitchell, Hans Boersma, Henry T. Edmondson, III, Brian Clayton, Douglas Kries, Conor Sweeney, and Carole Vanderhoof
- Freedom and equality according to Flannery O’Connor — Three guests discuss Flannery O’Connor’s ideas: Henry T. Edmondson, III, on O’Connor’s understanding of political life; Ralph C. Wood, on O’Connor as a “hillbilly Thomist”; and Susan Srigley, on O’Connor’s sacramental and incarnational fiction. (18 minutes)
- D. C. Schindler: “For Freedom Set Free” — D. C. Schindler argues that the Christian notion of religious liberty is a synthesis of the Jewish, Roman, and Greek traditions. (61 minutes)
- Is the First Amendment religiously neutral? — David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. discuss how the First Amendment is not as sympathetic to religious freedom as is commonly believed, as it is based on contestable assumptions about the nature of “religion,” “freedom,” and “human nature.” (33 minutes)
- Fischer, Hart, and Highfield on freedom — Three past guests on the Journal explore the meaning of freedom and some common modern misunderstandings of the concept — errors with real consequences. (22 minutes)