“Love was our Lord’s Meaning”

From Chapter 86 (the final chapter) of Revelations of Divine Love, St. Julian of Norwich (1393).

“Love was our Lord’s Meaning”

Statue of Julian of Norwich,
west front, Norwich Cathedral
(thanks to Poliphilo)

THIS book is begun by God’s gift and His grace, but it is not yet performed, as to my sight.

For Charity pray we all; [together] with God’s working, thanking, trusting, enjoying. For thus will our good Lord be prayed to, as by the understanding that I took of all His own meaning and of the sweet words where He saith full merrily: I am the Ground of thy beseeching. For truly I saw and understood in our Lord’s meaning that He shewed it for that He willeth to have it known more than it is: in which knowing He will give us grace to love Him and cleave to Him. For He beholdeth His heavenly treasure with so great love on earth that He willeth to give us more light and solace in heavenly joy, in drawing to Him of our hearts, for sorrow and darkness which we are in.

And from that time that it was shewed I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after, and more, I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus: Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.

And I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein He made us was in Him from without beginning: in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall we see in God, without end.

Natural Law: A response to D.B. Hart

In Understanding Natural Law, R. J. Snell, an associate professor of philosophy and director of the philosophy program at Eastern University, responds to David Bentley Hart's original First Things article about natural law.

Here's the second part of Snell's article; the first part is a summing-up of Hart's original argument.  This is especially interesting to me at the moment; what's being said bears strongly upon what human beings can say about "morality" in language that doesn't depend directly on religious ideas, or on "revelation."   This is one of the basic conversations happening all around us now, and so much of what's said currently is entirely dependent upon unexamined premises.

Natural Law Doesn’t Derive Ought from Is

First, despite its centrality to Hart’s rejection, in no way does natural law theory derive what ought to be from what is; if anything, contemporary theorists are often criticized precisely for refusing to ground practical reason on theoretical anthropology or metaphysical claims about nature.

In Natural Law and Natural Rights, for instance, John Finnis writes that natural lawyers “have not, nor do they need to, nor did the classical exponents of the theory dream of attempting any such derivation . . . the most popular image of natural law has to be abandoned. The corresponding and most popular objection to all theories of natural law has to be abandoned, too, and the whole question of natural law thought through afresh by many.” “It is,” he continues, “simply not true that ‘any form of a natural-law theory … entails the belief that propositions about man’s duties and obligations can be inferred from propositions about his nature.’”

Principles of practical reason are not derived from factual claims about nature or metaphysics, not only because Hume was correct on that point, but because first principles are not derived from anything—they are entirely underived. Neither are they innate, although they are self-evident; grasping them entails “no process of inference” but rather an “act of non-inferential understanding.”

Such understanding is hardly supernatural, for it is the ordinary act of insight whereby we grasp what is intelligible. For Finnis, we begin with the data of our own inclinations and purposes for acting; some goods, we realize, are insufficient reasons for acting and thus merely instrumental—we do not brush our teeth as an ultimate good but as conducive to health, and do not seek money for itself but for what it allows—while other goods require no further explanation. I can intelligibly ask “why do you want the promotion?” in a way I cannot ask “why do you want to be happy?” The answer to both those questions might be “to be happy, of course,” indicating that happiness is ultimate in a way the promotion is not. But I’ve not inferred anything from nature in doing so; I’ve just recognized what it is that makes my action purposive.

Similarly, Martin Rhonheimer agrees that natural law does not “read off” morality from nature, a naïve physicalism. Natural law does not have physical nature (ordo naturae) as its measure, but rather the governance of reason (ordo rationalis) insofar as practical reason intends goods attainable by action. In desiring goods, practical reason directs action—Seek this! Avoid that!—and it is precisely these judgments (not deductions or derivations from nature) that are the natural law operative in voluntary action.

Unlike the Hart/Potemra version, Finnis and Rhonheimer never consider reading ethics off human nature but rather develop their anthropologies and metaphysics of human nature from their account of practical reason. Finnis, for instance, suggests in Fundamentals of Ethics that “epistemologically . . . human nature is not ‘the basis of ethics’; rather, ethics is an indispensable preliminary to a full and soundly based knowledge of human nature.” Likewise Rhonheimer, for whom knowledge of one’s own nature “cannot be derived from metaphysics or anthropology,” but rather “metaphysics and anthropology . . . are not even possible without” practical reason’s reflection on its purposes and inclinations. Hart and Potemra have it precisely backwards.

The Difference Between Practical Reasoning and Morality

Second, it is not the case, as Hart claims, that the natural lawyer “insists that the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind.” Not only is moral meaning not derived from nature, but the relation between principles of practical reasoning and principles of morality is more nuanced than Hart indicates, and it takes reasoning—not immediate and obvious intuition—to arrive at moral knowledge.

The first principle of practical reasoning is not as yet a moral principle, for the first principle of practical reasoning—“good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided”—directs us to intelligent and purposive choice without yet telling us the proper way to conduct that choice. The difference is subtle but substantial, implying that basic human goods are, as yet, pre-moral. While directing us toward purpose, practical reasonableness is in itself no guarantee of moral action, merely of intelligible action, and immoral action need not be senseless.

Distinctly moral principle is needed to determine how we are to keep the precept of practical reasonableness, “the way we are to pursue the good and avoid evil,” as William E. May articulates the distinction. The first principle of morality is not “do good and avoid evil”—for even immoral choices might do this—but rather “one ought to choose and otherwise will those and only those possibilities whose willing is compatible with a will toward integral human fulfillment,” a notion requiring yet additional specification of moral norms and even further application regarding issues such as abortion, lying, marriage, and so on.

In fact, if one reads very much of contemporary natural law theory, one finds that applying specific moral norms can be rather taxing, as, for example, when the norm “direct killing of an innocent life is always wrong” does not tell us if craniotomy is direct killing in cases when a physician attempts to save the life of a woman in delivery by crushing the head of the baby.

Rather than Hart’s “clear commands” for “any rightly attentive intellect,” contemporary natural law requires sophisticated casuistry, which perhaps explains why moral theologians most persuaded by physicalism sometimes accuse contemporary natural law theorists of permissiveness, since natural law theory readily admits the complexities and vagaries of the agent’s intentions. In short, determining the rightness or wrongness of concrete actions takes thought, not just a passive gaping at nature. That natural law theorists conclude that some acts are intrinsically evil, without exception, does not mean that conclusions are immediate, obvious, and attained without thought.

What’s Self-Evident in Natural Law?

Third, while it is true that the first precepts of practical reasonableness are self-evident, natural lawyers certainly don’t suggest wickedness or stupidity as the necessary cause when someone fails to reach proper conclusions about concrete actions. As articulated above, self-evidence means only non-inferred or underived, suggesting neither innateness nor immediacy.

The distinction between something self-evident “in itself” or “to us” is an old one: A proof in geometry may be perfectly self-evident in itself, as well as to one who understands, yet remain opaque to one who does not understand, not because the student is depraved or moronic but simply because he or she does not yet understand.

For theorists like Finnis or Rhonheimer, self-evidence doesn’t mean that we don’t require insights that help us understand our purpose in acting. These insights are not deductions, but neither are they intuitions or introspections by which all but the wicked or stupid have a god’s-eye view into themselves, or nature, or morality. In no way does self-evidence mean that either one immediately receives “clear commands” in “the content of true morality,” as Hart suggests, or that one is barbaric.

I cannot help but think that the commentators have assumed that the self-evidence of basic human goods somehow implies a corresponding belief that metaphysics, applied ethics, and public policy are also self-evident, but that’s not the theory. Natural law might be rooted in reason, but it’s still human reason. As for those persons of practical reason who cannot know the natural law without supernatural assistance and metaphysical enlightenment? I suspect they no more exist than do those unnamed straw men critiqued by Hart and Potemra.

Tomorrow I discuss the usefulness and danger of natural law, and argue that the skeptics’ very act of denying natural law demonstrates they are already following that same interior law, and, further, that human dignity is thereby revealed.

"A Cloistered Life" (AKA, Regina Laudis and "that simplest of happiness")

Here's a great piece - a 1993 article written by one Simon Sebag Montefiore and published in Psychology Today.   (I added the images.)

 I have two images of a monastery: one is a sinister place of dank corridors, icy cells, and cold stone; the other a kind of medieval, Monty-Pythonesque farce. The Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where I stayed for several days as a guest of the Benedictine Order, is neither. Entering this world is like stepping back into a quaint, rustic paradise that existed long ago-- in the age of oxen-yoked plows and horse-drawn carriages.

I visited the abbey--working with the nuns as they brought in their harvest--because it was the home of a romantic and true story of Hollywood, God, and Elvis that has mystified America for 30 years. In 1962, Dolores Hart was a 24-year-old movie star with Grace Kelly looks and 11 films already to her credit, including Where the Boys Are, Loving You, and King Creole. In the latter two she costarred with Elvis Presley. There were rumors of a love affair and, later, of a child born of the couple's supposed tryst. Then, in 1963, she gave it all up to become a nun--joining a cloistered monastery and disappearing from celebrityhood forever.

Ever since, Hart's exquisite beauty and her friendship with Elvis Presley in the fresh dawn of his fame have made her the subject of lurid legends. In a society that regards Hollywood fame as Heaven, we presume that someone who gives it all up must be either crazy, ungrateful, or tainted by some terrible scandal.

Her religious vows have prevented Mother Dolores (as she is now known) from answering such questions as: Did she have a love affair with Elvis? Did she bear the King's child--a Dauphin of rock 'n' roll? What kind of life does she lead today and does she ever regret giving up her star's crown for a nun's halo? More generally, why give up the routines of the rat race for the rigors of the monastery?

When an ex-lion tamer named Philip Stanic from Gary, Indiana, changed his name to Elvis Presley, Jr., in 1990, began a career as an Elvis impersonator, and claimed he was the fruit of Elvis's passionate affair with Dolores Hart in 1961, the press leapt on the story. Mother Dolores, banned from formal interviews by the Archbishop of Hertford, could not answer the accusations against her. Despite the attempts of a series of investigative journalists, they could not speak with her, nor even confirm that it was her they had seen while attending services at the monastery's quaint chapel. But as it seemed to me that she would want the truth told, I began a personal quest to speak with her that was almost as weird but ultimately as satisfying as Hart's own spiritual journey.

A combination of talent and looks--that cherubic innocence mixed with feline sensuality--made Hart a star almost overnight. She survived her turbulent family (her parents were alcoholics) by converting to Catholicism at the age of 10. At 18, in 1956, Paramount signed her to a seven-year contract.

Thirty-seven years later I called the abbey for the first time and asked to speak to her. The nun at the gate took a message but warned me that Mother Dolores was unlikely to return the call. Minutes later, my phone rang. It was a woman named Barbara Simon, who said she was calling "on behalf of the abbey" to say that Dolores Hart would not speak but that the allegations of the young man calling himself Elvis Presley, Jr., were lies. When I asked her where she was calling from, the phone went dead.

Now fully intrigued, I set out to enlist the help of another classic character of the silver screen: Patricia Neal, the stunning, Oscar-winning star of Hud and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Once Roald Dahl's wife, once Gary Cooper's lover, she had been felled in her prime by a near-fatal stroke. She recovered, I knew, with the help of...the Abbey of Regina Laudis.

THE FORMIDABLE MISS NEAL--charming, gravelly, and outrageous, met me in a New York City diner and told me that it was Maria Cooper, daughter of Gary Cooper, who introduced both her and Dolores Hart to Regina Laudis. She and Dolores spoke often and perhaps, if I was a good boy, she purred, she would mention me to Mother Dolores. "If you're lucky," the old screen siren added raffishly.

Days passed without a word. Just when it seemed my quest was over, the phone call came. I recognized the voice on the telephone the moment I picked it up. Even if I did not remember its distinctive trill from all those films, it was possibly the softest and most graceful voice I had ever heard:

"My name is Mother Dolores. I know that you called for me."

At once I asked if we could meet, but she reminded me that they were a closed order at the abbey: "The only reason I am talking to you is out of courtesy to your relationship with Patricia." Afraid that our conversation might end as abruptly as the mysterious Ms. Simon's, I wasted no time in asking her about Elvis Presley. Mother Dolores denied she ever had any love affair with him, quaintly calling him "Mr. Presley."

"I had a very good and sound and clean relationship with Mr. Presley; we were good friends. Mr. Presley was one of the finest persons I ever worked with in Hollywood. So no one can spoil our association. During the time we worked on it, we were good friends on the set and we had a good working relationship. We liked each other but we were not...we were never romantically linked. I was never in that kind of association with him."

I asked about the ex-lion tamer who claimed to be her son.

"There is no truth in what that young man has said," she answered. "He has abused both my name and Mr. Presley's. My name is not nearly as interesting to the press, but it does make a good story. So it is not right for this young man to try to create such an atmosphere in order to further his career."

There was no reason to disbelieve her, since many of the nuns happily admit love affairs before taking holy orders--as well as temptations afterward. I asked her what kind of life she led there? Did she work or just pray?

"I do all sorts of work here. In fact, I would like to invite you to visit and stay at the abbey because you have certainly been gracious and kind to me. I would like to extend our hospitality. Monastic life is very simple. You'd have to come up and see. But I cannot promise you we would ever meet. Would you like to stay?"

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND THE CROTCHETY, BESPECTACLED SISTER Mary Elisabeth picked me up at the bus station in a big, scarred station wagon and drove me toward the aptly named Bethlehem. Only seven of the 47 nuns ever leave the estate to do chores--such as collecting me. The rest spend the remainder of their lives there.

"I hope your cell's not too hot," said the sister. "We have no air-conditioning, and it's almost 100 degrees today. Hot for haymaking."

I stayed at a cottage for male visitors. My cell was tiny, hot, austere: exactly like the nuns' cells in their quarters. As I stood peering at the "enclosure"--a wall surrounding the sisters' living area--I heard the roar of a tractor as it whizzed by, just missing me by a hair--a determined and somewhat ancient nun at the wheel, driving at top speed.

Later, I heard bells ringing and saw a nun driving a chariot pulled by two oxen--my introduction to the bucolic pleasures of Mother Dolores' life after Hollywood.

WANDERING around the 400 acres, I found the most active nuns I could have imagined: Mother Stephen, head of the farm (she bears one of the abbey's splendid array of medieval titles: Land Master), was feeding cows, supervising strawberry picking, haymaking, and milking. She called each cow by its nickname and fed it by hand. When I asked her about Mother Dolores, she shrugged as she poured out the hay: "Everyone here is blessed with some special gift."

In between all this muscular activity, the nuns have a praying routine that fills up most of their days. They must also rise at 1:15 A.M. to sing Matins for an hour and then again at 6:15 A.M. for Lauds. Bells ring to summon them to prayer.

At 8 the next morning I attended Mass. The nuns were huddled on the other side of the altar, behind a wooden grille, singing like celestial canaries in incomprehensible Latin. I could not see whether Mother Dolores was there or not--the grille was too dense, the curtain too opaque.

By a rather bizarre coincidence that Mother Dolores would most likely call the "Will of God," Father-Abbot Matthew Stark's "early morning homily" (as the nuns call his sermon) began: "in a time when the word 'awesome' is used to describe a slice of pizza and it is said that Elvis lives while God is dead, it is easy to see how out of touch we are with the glory of the Lord."

After Mass I was summoned by the Guest Master (another medieval title), Mother Placid, who has been at the abbey since 1949. I walked to the edge of the enclosure wall and around the back of it to a little door. I knocked. A voice said "Enter.' There was another door on which a sign read SAINT PLACID. I knocked again and entered. The jolly and energetic nun sat on the other side of a wooden grill to enlighten me about the lives of the saints. It was so hot that both Mother Placid, who was 66 and of course wearing her full habit, and I were sweating profusely in the little parlor of Saint Placid.

She asked if I would like to work that day, and I told her I would like to help with the harvest. "Mother Stephen will be delighted," she smiled.

"And will I able to meet Mother Dolores?" I asked.

Mother Placid shrugged gaily. "She's very busy, but maybe you'll be lucky...."

THE SUN WAS BEATING down on the rich, golden fields. It was the hottest day of a record-breaking heat wave. Mother Stephen was driving a bale-making machine behind her tractor while I worked with some nuns and volunteers piling up the bales, throwing them onto trucks, and then unloading them into bales near the dairy cows. It was hard work. Mother Stephen insisted we drink every five minutes, and the nuns prepared huge vats of iced lemon juice to prevent us from getting heat stroke.

The scene was surreal if idyllic--something from another century. But the strangest part was that the nuns were harvesting in their black habits as if they were in chapel. Yet they worked very hard, sweating and laboring in the dust and heat as if they were farmers.

But there was still no sign of Mother Dolores.

I must admit that I had expected long, cold, stone corridors and nuns lamenting in Latin behind iron grilles--not this sort of rural paradise. These nuns were so muscular that they could throw bales of hay 10 feet in the air, to the very top of the stack. When I tried the same feat, I almost dislocated my arm. The nuns, their habits covered in hay stubble and earth, hooted with laughter at my lack of strength.

When I was summoned by Mother Placid a second time, it was the end of the day. I was tanned and aching from the work, and I was becoming anxious: Would I ever meet the enigmatic Mother Dolores? I knew it was unlikely but still, I hoped....

THE CELIBATE LIFE OF THE NUNS IS THE source of the most misunderstandings and humor about monastic life. I asked Mother Placid about the Benedictine Order's attitude toward female sexuality.

"Is that your favorite subject?" she chuckled. I blushed. It was the third time I had asked her about it.

"For us in the outside world, the celibacy is the most inexplicable part of your life. I mean, what's wrong with pleasure?"

"Outsiders think we're shocked by sex," she said. "We're not opposed to sexuality here, except when it is soulless and empty. Don't you ever feel empty inside if you have sex without the community of love and creation?"

Strangely enough, I admitted this had sometimes happened to me.

"There you are," she answered.

"But I'm not about to give it up. Don't you ever feel sexual desire here?"

"Of course. We are human. We also see the animals on the farm. We know temptation and sometimes it is a good test. But we have given up all selfish personal appetites. We have no property of our own. We don't say anyone else should live this life. Just that we have been selected to do so. Our vocation is to serve the Lord and devote all our energy to Him."

"What happens if you join and then feel you're missing out on sex?"

"That has happened. We've had nuns leave. Of course, it is hurtful and difficult. It is a great challenge and discipline. That is why we prefer our recruits to be at least 25, because we like them to know enough about life to make the decision to join us."

"Do you want them to be virgins? Can they know about love?" I was only partly thinking about Dolores.

"Of course they can. I was in love several times as a young girl. Why not? Besides, a couple of the nuns here are widows who joined when their husbands died. That's fine, too."

Then she smiled and asked: "Have you ever been in love?"

Since she had been honest, I saw no reason to lie. "No. I thought I was a couple of times, but when I look back, I'm not so sure I ever was."

Now she was asking the questions.

"You are an intelligent young man and I feel you have a lot of love to give. Do you have a girlfriend?"

"Not exactly a girlfriend. She's more like a lover," I answered.

"Never been in love," she muttered, almost to herself.

Silence.

Then there was a knock at the door on her side of the grille. Was it Dolores Hart at last? Was this the end of the quest? The door opened....

MOTHER DOLORES'S full-lipped face with its high cheekbones and retrousse nose is unchanged by her 54 years. She also possesses an extraordinary calmness in her cherubic expression and that most lilting of voices. Certainly the face was redder than it bad been 30 years ago--she has worked out on the farm, haying and baling as I had that afternoon--but it is still a face of undeniable beauty. Her hair is covered by her wimple, but other nuns told me later that it is still a luscious blonde. Thirty years on, this is still undeniably the face to launch a thousand ships.

We shook hands through the old wooden grille as Mother Placid looked on beneficently.

"Welcome," Dolores said angelically, her face close to the grille. "I hope you are enjoying your stay and seeing how we live."

"I hope the trouble with the young man called Elvis Presley, Jr., is over," I said.

They both looked rather shocked at the mention of Elvis and the son he never had.

"It's gone quiet now, mercifully. The young man's real mother is looking for him and actually called here. It's unfortunate, but the mother said he won't respond to her because she knows Elvis was not the father. I feel sorry for him."

Our meeting, said Mother Placid, was almost over. Dolores said she was sorry we could not meet face-to-face, or for longer. She is busy. It is harvest. There is also the ban of the Archbishop.

"Obedience and stability," explained Mother Placid, "are the foundations of our Order."

Mother Dolores bowed to me again; when I peered through the grille that divided us, she was already gone.

She had only stayed a minute or two. But it reminded me of our earlier phone conversation, when I asked if she had enjoyed her fame.

"Oh, by all means," she'd replied without any hint of regret.

"But how and why did you decide to leave Hollywood?"

"Only soul-searching brings a knowledge of what your life will be. It only sounds sudden when you announce it because people don't know what has gone on before."

"Don't you ever want to go back to being an actress?"

"There's always continuity. In the dimension of monastic life, there is a role in prayer that certainly keeps me very much a part of it. You see for me being a nun is being an actress."

That was when I understood that the answer to the riddle of Mother Dolores is as simple as this: You only have to experience the richness of the austere life at the abbey to understand how Dolores Hart gave up Hollywood to come here.

THAT NIGHT was my last at the abbey. I felt absolutely rejuvenated and sorry to leave after so short a stay. I retired to bed early after dinner as is the way there. My prickly, driven tension had been massaged into a generous goodwill towards the world that surprised me more than any one. I felt an intense calm.

Mother Dolores had neither said much nor stayed long, yet the riddle of why she left Hollywood was suddenly selfevident: The happiness of the nuns speaks for itself.

Like many others, I could not imagine how anyone could give up the pleasures of being a movie star to live and work in a monastery. Yet when Mother Placid talked to me about love, which she said she felt all around her, I could see that she experienced it in its most austere yet warmest sense. And she could see that while I was bathed in sensualism, I had quite forgotten about love.

I HAD GONE TO THE ABBEY TO SEARCH FOR Dolores Hart. But I did not discover any lurid secret about Hollywood or Elvis Presley. Instead, I discovered a warm and neglected part of myself.

I did not become religious. No one tried to convert me to anything. Looking back, I realized that when I left I took something with me and left something behind. Somewhere amongst the golden fields and the flying bales, the giggling nuns and the relentless embrace of the sun, I had left a bit of myself that will always be there. And when the reservoir of that simplest of happiness gets low again, I might go back and visit them.

If I ever do return, I am sure I will find it there again, untouched, just where I left it.

It is late at night. My tiny cell in the cottage called "Saint Joseph's" is stiflingly hot. I cannot sleep. I wait for the bell to ring for Matins.

The old-fashioned telephone begins to ring in the very still night. It makes an archaic "dring-dring" sound like a phone in an old Dolores Hart film from the Fifties.

I pick it up.

It is Mother Placid.

"You touched my heart when you said you had never been in love," she says. "Please could you tell me what is the name of the girl who is your lover. I know your name already. All I need is her first name."

"Her name is Nicola. Why do you ask?"

"So I can pray for you both," she says. "Good night."

"Natural law," and all that....

Ever since a session in a writing class I took about 25 years ago, during which the Professor expressed her incomprehension of "Natural Law," I've been trying to understand the concept.

Somehow I stumbled on Edward Feser, a philosophy professor at a California college (and a Catholic), who likes to write about it.   Feser has been engaged for at least a couple of months now in an online debate about "Natural Law" with David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian.  This is the most recent post about all this from Feser's blog:

In a widely discussed piece in the March issue of First Things, theologian David Bentley Hart was highly critical of natural law theory.  I was in turn highly critical of his article in a response posted at First Things (and cross-posted here).  Hart replied to my criticisms in a follow-up article in the May issue of First Things.  I reply to Hart’s latest in an article just posted over at Public Discourse.

For related recent posts, see my responses to Hart’s defenders Rod Dreher and Thaddeus Kozinski.

I'm slogging my way through these things at this moment.  I don't have a single bit of training in philosophy, so a lot of what is said simply eludes me.  Slowly, though, a little bit of light is getting through, and I don't feel as ignorant about it all as I used to.

As far as I can tell, the basic assumption of "Natural Law," is the (widely and often disputed) premise that you can, in fact, "derive an ought from an is."  That is to say, Natural Law assumes that we can reason out "morality" from what we find in "nature."  

It's seemed to me for a long time, after I first got an inkling of the outlines of what "natural law" was, that it's really a statement coming from a particular point of view that describes, basically, "the way we think things ought to be."  There seems, in other words, to be a lot that's just plain subjective about the whole thing - and that you could come up with diametrically opposed premises, depending in particular upon what you wanted to emphasize as "the good." 

I've just finished reading the Hart article in the May First Things; below are the last three paragraphs.   I think he's saying something really interesting here in the last paragraph, about what sorts of things we all bring to bear on understanding reality and "how we ought to live."  I don't know if what he's saying is new, or if it's a commonplace, though.  Probably you should go read it all - but this is a powerful section that I think can stand on its own.

The question relentlessly left open in all of this is what “reason” really is. It is perfectly possible to believe that the whole natural dynamism of our reason and will is toward the good, and even to desire a true moral cultural renewal, and yet still to deny that natural law theory provides a sufficiently rich or logically coherent model of how the intellect can know moral truths. There is nothing scandalous in this unless one creates a false dilemma by imagining a real division between the discrete realms of supernatural and natural knowledge. Feser thinks of revelation as an extrinsic datum consisting in texts and dogmas, and of the supernatural as merely outside of nature, and believes there really is such a thing as purely natural reason. From that perspective, one cannot deny philosophy’s power to demonstrate objective moral truth without denying reason’s intrinsic capacity for the good. Like a Kantian (the two-tier Thomist’s alter ego), one must believe that philosophical theory’s limits are also reason’s.

These divisions are illusory. What we call “nature” is merely one mode of the disclosure of the “supernatural,” and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason’s ascent into the light of God. Nowhere, not even in the sciences, does there exist a “purely natural” realm of knowledge. To encounter the world is to encounter its being, which is gratuitously imparted to it from beyond the sphere of natural causes, known within the medium of an intentional consciousness, irreducible to immanent processes, that grasps finite reality only by being oriented toward a horizon of transcendental ends (or, better, “divine names”). There is a seamless continuity between the sight of a rose and the mystic’s vision of God; the latter is in fact implicit in the former, and saturates it, and but for this supernatural surfeit nothing natural could come into thought.

It does not then represent some grave failure of natural reason that philosophy cannot achieve definitive moral demonstrations, or that true knowledge of the good is impossible without calling upon other modes of knowledge: the (ubiquitous) supernatural illumination of a conscience—a heart—upon which the law is written, Platonic anamnesis (of the eternal forms or of what your mother taught you), cultural traditions with all their gracious moments of religious awakening (Jewish, pagan, Christian, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and so on), prayer, inspiration, the cultivation of personal holiness, love of the arts, and so on. There is no single master discourse here, for the good can be known only in being seen, before and beyond all words. Certain fundamental moral truths, for instance, may necessarily remain unintelligible to someone incapable of appreciating Bach’s fifth Unaccompanied Cello Suite. For some it may seem an outrageous notion that, rather than a collection of purportedly incontrovertible proofs, the correct rhetoric of moral truth consists in a richer but more unmasterable appeal to the full range of human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual. I, however, see it as rather glorious: a confirmation that our whole being, in all its dimensions, is a single gracious vocation out of nonexistence to the station of created gods.

From what I understand and have read myself, Catholic teaching does use "natural law" - does, that is, use reasoning (perhaps from Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas?) that "derives ought from is."   You can find the phrase within the Catechism itself; for instance, paragraph 1952 says:  "There are different expressions of the moral law, all of them interrelated: eternal law - the source, in God, of all law; natural law; revealed law, comprising the Old Law and the New Law, or Law of the Gospel; finally, civil and ecclesiastical laws."

And in Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est, you find this statement:  "The Church's social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being."

So, I'm trying to find out more about this.  What's actually quite interesting here, when you think about it, is that First Things - a Catholic publication - is giving space to David Bentley Hart - an Eastern Orthodox theologian - in a dispute over one of the basic underpinnings of Catholic teaching.  This is the way things ought to be!

David Bentley Hart: "Christianity and Its Fashionable Enemies"

I don't know if anybody's got any energy for the "new atheists" debate any longer, but here's a lecture given (somewhere) by David Bentley Hart at least a couple of years ago on the topic .  (He speaks of Christopher Hitchens in the "is" tense, so it was before he died.) It's an interesting discussion, if a bit dated now; I'm thinking this talk was probably part of a promotion for his 2010 book.

For me, one highly entertaining moment comes when Hart describes exactly how Richard Dawkins constructed his "proof" against the existence of God!  Hilarious, and worth listening to, I think, if only for that.  But there's something interesting stuff about Nietzsche, too.


HT All Manner of Thing.

"The Society of St. Julian"

How does that grab you as the namesake and patron for our new lay religious society?

I'd wanted to be a bit more "ecumenical" - that is to say, to avoid a specifically English slant on the thing.  But then, if I'd chosen St. Francis it would be an Italian slant.  If St. John of the Cross (definitely another possibility) it would be a Spanish slant.

So one way or another, we're going to have to deal with geography.  Perhaps The Society of St. John and St. Julian?  That way we mix it up a bit - and "reform" comes into the mix, too.

I really have to finish Revelations of Divine Love, though!  It's actually a little bit embarrassing that here I am proposing to name a society after her - and I haven't even read all the way through her only work.  I'm in the middle of reading it now - but I have read a lot of St. John, so I've at least got that going for me. 

Full Homely Divinity uses St. Julian as an unofficial patron - and our old friend The Postulant has written liturgies based on her writings.  I'm pretty sure that's good enough for me.

What about you?  I do hate to leave St. Francis out of it, but some guy already went there this year, so maybe that's enough....