My Journey to a Comp Exam - What I Have Learned Part VIII

This is the eighth installment in this series regarding my upcoming comprehensive examination in completion of my graduate program, and as is the case, this will be built around the "skeleton" of a study outline that either I or one of my classmates have created.  In this case, the class is Foundations of Moral Theology, and the outline is my creation.  Therefore, I will be constructing this study around my own pre-created outline.  This is the next to the last in the series, and in this case the question has two parts that will be dealt with separately.

One obvious thing about the morality of the West, although often contemporary society is trying to divorce itself from, is the fact that there are distinctive contributions that Christianity makes to our understanding of the basis, meaning, and content of morality.  This is particularly enunciated in the late Pope St. John Paul II's 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which has many important observations to make, and much of what we will be discussing at this point will reference that encyclical in more detail.  Morality and faith are seen as being connected, and hence that is where this aspect of the study proceeds from.

As has been seen in other sections of this study, the Church understands Scripture from the standpoint of the "Fourfold Hermeneutic," and here we begin to see that two of those - moral and anagogical - are intimately connected.  Pope St. John Paul II notes that "it is an essential and unavoidable question for the life of every man, for it is about the moral good which must be done, and about eternal life.  The young man senses that there is a connection between moral good and the fulfillment of his own destiny." (VS 1:8).  In other words, morality does have a part in where we will spend eternity, and to put it simply, even though obviously salvation is not based on works, it also is obvious that works are to be a fruit of living faith (James 2:14-26).  Without them, faith quickly dies, and the person then forfeits salvation based on the fact their dying faith no longer hopes in it.  Doing such works is also a sign of seeking what is good, and when one seeks the good, it will ultimately mean turning toward God, as the late Pontiff notes that "to ask about the good, in fact, ultimately means to turn toward God," (VS 1:9) which then makes this fundamentally a religious question rather than a philosophical one, although a metaphysical reality does lie at its core.   It therefore means that there is a very close connection between eternal life and obedience to God's commandments - it is again noted that the Gospels themselves affirm that "if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments" (Matthew 19:17).   This is why too that one of the earliest Scriptures I recall memorizing was Psalm 119:11, which I am also having my 6th-grade catechumens I instruct learn as well - Your Word I have hidden in my heart, that I may not sin against Thee.  As the late Pontiff also points out, this is an act of  man's free will and God's infinite love combined, as he notes that "the moral life presents itself as the response due to the many gratuitous initiatives taken by God out of love for man."  Following the Commandments then is a proof of love of God by demonstrating a love for neighbor based on a morality that respects the personhood of one's neighbor as being created of God.  The commandments therefore work together in that there can be no genuine love for God without love of one's neighbor - noting I John 4:20, the late Pontiff also notes that the way we respect and treat others reflects how we serve God, and the two are intrinsically related (VS 1:14).  The ultimate fulfillment of this, as noted, is in the person of Jesus Christ, who by seeking to indwell His disciples internalizes these convictions in such a way that they become part of a person's being.  Friendship with Christ informs and penetrates the entire human structure of action, and it causes us to participate in the ideal of communion with God (Livio Melina, The Epiphany of Love.  Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010. p. 17).  The destiny of action, therefore, is to be communion with God (Melina, p. 18).  With Christ being the efficient cause of love in us, at the origin of human action then is Christ Himself, and all that we are, do, and believe is rooted in Him.  This results in a supernatural grace being dispensed in our lives that demands a maturity in self-giving to which real human freedom is called (VS 1:17).  Human freedom and God's law therefore are not in opposition, but rather appeal to each other. Therefore, to the extent which we serve God, we are therefore truly free. 

Although ultimate salvation comes in Christ, and only those who believe in and accept what He offered us will inherit eternal life, at the same time there is an intrinsic part of human nature that still retains a vestige of what God created in it - the ideals of good morality and common decency are not solely the property of the Church, although in Christ they are perfected.  Rather, they establish a universal standard to which all of us are meant to observe.  This standard brings out the full meaning of love of neighbor, and the command "Come, follow me" is a new specific commandment form of the love of God.  However, Christ embodies and completes that concept, as the supernatural grace He makes available to us now perfects and clarifies the meaning of this to rise above mere humanitarianism or a response to aleve personal guilt for failing in responsibility, and by following Christ, we are conformed to a higher standard (VS 1:21).  It is the Church then who acts as the custodian and dispenser of this truth via living Tradition (VS 1:27), and within Tradition, the authentic interpretation of the Lord's law is developed, with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Pope St. John Paul II also notes that there is an intrinsic relationship between freedom and truth - "The fundamental question which the moral theories mentioned above pose in a particularly forceful way is that of the relationship of man's freedom to God's law; it is ultimately the question of the relationship between freedom and truth." (VS 3:84).  Freedom must submit itself to God's truth in order for God's truth to transform man's freedom into something genuine, and this is a reality which has been lost in today's culture.  In order for the Church to be effective in its mission in the current cultural climate, the rediscovery of this relationship is integral.  It is within the embodiment of a person, Jesus Christ, that this answer can be found; the central fact of the Passion of Christ is the answer to the problem of morality (or lack thereof).  As the eminent Anglo-Catholic theologian E.L. Mascall notes in his book The Secularization of Christianity (New York:  Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), the new creation (or "new man in Christ Jesus") is the life of the "man for others," and the love whereby we are brought into grounds our being in such a way that it is manifested outwardly (Mascall, p. 160).  Jesus is therefore the living, personal summation of perfect freedom in total obedience to the will of God.  The frank and open acceptance of the Truth is conditional to authentic freedom - Pope St. John Paul II cites John 8:32 ("You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free") as a premise for saying that true worship of the true God (embodied in Jesus Christ, God the Son) is the deepest and most profound foundation of freedom (VS 3:87).  And that leads to the consequence of what happens when man fails to do so.

When truth is separated from freedom, it ultimately leads to a separation of faith from morality (VS 3:88).  What that means in plain language is that a morality based on mere secularism may have the appearance of "good," but it lacks.  Also, freedom detached from universal truths leads to a radical redefinition of morality, and when that happens faith is rejected, truth is subjected, and morally adverse behavior is objectified.  Many may even "profess" being Christian, but the attitudes they espouse in their actions make them live their lives as though God doesn't exist - they become functional atheists, even if they themselves would deny the label.  This is why Christians have a mandate to rediscover the newness of their faith - including the timeless truth that embodies it - and its power to judge prevalent cultural norms that are often at odds with the Biblical worldview.  This means that faith possesses a moral content - "It gives rise to and calls for a consistent life commitment; it entails and brings to perfection the acceptance and observance of God's commandments." (VS 3:89).    When a matter of moral norms prohibits intrinsic evils, there are no exceptions allotted then to anyone, as we are all equal before the demands of morality (VS 3:96).  And, being God alone constitutes the unshakeable foundation and essential condition for morality, it is He that prohibits adverse behavior that demeans and violates dignity of personhood (VS 3:99).  Therefore, by this very nature, systems of totalitarianism (Nazism, fascism, Communism, socialist models, and "mob rule" like the French Revolution) arise because of the denial of truth in the objective sense.  Its roots indeed are found in the denial of the transcendant dignity of the human person as the visible image of an invisible God.  As Hilaire Belloc notes though, the oligarchic capitalist system can also be totalitarian in that it reduces the person to a commodity to enrich others - he says in relation to this that "it was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it was the loss of a free mind" (Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State.  London:  T.N. Foulis, 1912. p. 38).  The Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin also shares some detail in relation to this when he writes that "False teachings arise out of these preconceptions (distorted ideas of "fairness," in this case those embraced by totalitarian systems); they lead to violence and revolution.  And revolution brings only blood and suffering, in order to disenchant and sober those who are blinded by their passions.  So entire generations of men live in preconceptions and languish in disillusionment, and so it is that the word 'fairness' is sometimes met with a sarcastic smile and a sneer" (Ivan Ilyin, The Singing Heart, English translation.  Memphis, TN:  The Orthodox Christian Translation Society, 2016.  p. 22). The person is created by an invisible God as a visible image, and as such is subject of rights which cannot be violated, and an important principle here is the idea of persona est sui iuris, meaning a person belongs to himself and not to another.  This is why the virtue of temperance is also required regarding respect for human dignity in economic matters in particular, and why the preservation of our neighbor's rights to render what is his or her due requires the practice of the virtue of justice, and is an expression of the command to "love our neighbor as ourselves." (VS 3:100, CCC 2407).  As a society becomes more secularized, the decline and obscurity of the moral sense as well as the loss of faith is inevitable (VS 3:106).  This then aids in the rise of anti-Christian tendencies toward subjectivism, utilitarianism, and relativism.  To illustrate that, let us look at America in 2017 - the new "morality" is the idea that a person's feelings are the prime moral compass, and absolute truth is seen as "hate speech" and that attitude results in an obliteration of common sense - in some sectors it is even illegal to refer to a man as "he" or a woman as "she," as now even an obvious, visible fact such as gender identity is now up for debate.  Instead of the normal biological determination of gender, now one is what they "feel" like being, meaning that someone like Bruce Jenner can put on a dress, call himself "Cait" and is now a "woman" because he says he "feels like a natural woman."  There is something called extrinsicism which lies at the root of other false tendencies such as utilitarianism and the idea of proportionalism (to be discussed in more detail shortly) which essentially entails the divorce between faith and conduct in everyday life - a person's conduct, in other words, doesn't reflect the faith they profess.  We see this in many nominally Christian mainline Protestants who claim to follow the Gospel, yet they deny almost every cardinal doctrine of the faith.  It has even infected Evangelical Protestants and some Catholics to a degree recently as well, via the popularity of people such as Rob Bell and Brian McLaren in Evangelical circles - my own misguided brother-in-law, for instance, thinks that his definition of "grace" is his "salvation," to the point that he will even accuse others of treating doctrine as "idolatrous" - there is no way a faithful Christian can worship doctrine, for one thing, and the doctrine points us to Christ, so that is a weird conclusion my dear misguided brother-in-law has come to.  This denigration of doctrine by my brother-in-law is an example of extrinsicism - you "appear" Christian outwardly, but don't take your faith seriously enough to believe what it teaches.  It is becoming an epidemic in society these days, and its main problem is its attempt to divorce human freedom from its essential relationship to eternal truth (Melina, p. 69).  And, that leads to something then called proportionalism, which will have a considerable space devoted to it in the following paragraphs here.

To define proportionalism, it is a system of thought that essentially states that one can determine the right course of action by weighing up the good and the necessary evil caused by the action.  These "goods" and "evils" are seen as pre-moral (whatever that means!) and the proportionalist in essence separates the goodness of an action from its rightness, and the action itself is reduced to a mere technicality.  This has given it a rather unique understanding of human action and its moral evaluation, in particular when it comes to intention/foresight distinction and the meaning of the term "object."  "Right" or "wrong" to the proportionalist doesn't necessarily equal "good" or "bad," but rather is only possible to the proportionalist by the will of the person choosing to do the action.  That being said, only those consequences which are means to ends need be considered according to the proportionalist (Christopher Kaczor, Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition.  Washington, DC:  Catholic University of America Press, 2002. p. 62).  Therefore, that which is foreseen but not intended is not necessarily a bad thing to the proportionalist, and only results in tragic collateral damage rather than direct consequence.  The intention is driven by a desire, and if the effect is not intended but the desire is, then it is not "bad" to the proportionalist.  Then there is the issue of GRD (goodness/rightness distinction) which is not synonymous but distinct from proportionalism but advocated by proportionalists themselves. What is known as I/F (intent/foresight) distinction is more directly associated with proportionalism - I/F is the distinction between the intent of an act differing morally from the foresight of its commission and consequence.  This then begs an explanation of what the proportionalist means by the term "object."  In some instances, the "object" is coupled with the "subject" and is therefore not merely an external event.  The moral action of an external event therefore, to the proportionalist, cannot be determined detached from the human subject.  This has a serious theological consequence, as it makes sin a relativistic thing in that although two people do the same thing, for one it is a "sin" while for another it is not.   This places the object of a human act in determination by proximate intention.  The proportionalist requires a motive or a remote intention to be included in the object of an act, and therefore it is treated as proximate.  It therefore expans the notion of "object" for the proportionalist.  To define what that all means, a proximate is something where the motive and intention are both realized.  A remote is where the motive is unrealized but the intention is realized. It makes sin again a relative concept, and thus defines "sin" based on the conclusions of the proportionalist based on the lens through which the person is viewing the whole action.

In contrast to the proportionalist position, an understanding of human action and its moral evaluation is found that is more consistent with traditional views in the writings of Kaczor, Pope St. John Paul II, and St. Thomas Aquinas.  How they view intent/foresight is somewhat different than the proportionalist, and to begin we look at Kaczor's evaluation of Aquinas's Prima secundae, and this is embodied in its Prologue, which begins with St. John of Damascus and his affirmation that man is made in the image of God (Kaczor, 45).  Therefore, as God acts freely, so does man as the image of God.  Man therefore has a degree of dominion over his personal acts - and an accompanying responsibility for the consequences of his actions - that God endows via free will.  For Aquinas then, the end of all human striving is to be union with God.  He identifies then two types of action proper to human behavior.

The first type of action Aquinas identifies are what is called acts of a human being.  These are things such as the growth of hair, the digestion of food, and natural breathing.  These are acts that are intrinsic to our function and existence and are not subject to moral analysis as they are amoral actions - they just are.  Also included in those are emotions ("passions") such as anger, which are also common to all human beings and are likewise not subject to this analysis - an emotion cannot be right or wrong, although it must be understood that actions resulting from emotions can be right or wrong. So then, emotions motivate action.  Although imperfect due to the effects of the Fall, these things are not morally right or wrong in themselves.

The second type of action are what are classified as human acts.  These proceed from individual reason and will.   St. Augustine contends that moral acts and human acts are one and the same, a conclusion that Aquinas also concurs with.  Aquinas further divides these acts into two categories.  The first of these are interior acts, which lead the person toward or away from God based on influences within ourselves.  The second are exterior acts, which lead the person toward or away from God based on an outside influence (in this case, God or Satan).  Therefore, sinful acts lead a person away from God, and may be the result of both internal and external in tandem.

Aristotle also notes that there are actions to the sake of ends, meaning simply that the motivation of the act is toward something - if it is away from God then, it is toward eternal punishment, to put into the context of Christian theology.  These are also characterized by actions that are "knowing willing," meaning that there must be an outward understanding of the action, as well as a knowledge of what could exist rather than what already does.  The action then proceeds through willing, intention, consent, choice, command, and use. 

In regard to the moral act itself, Pope St. John Paul II notes first that there is a solid relationship between man's freedom and God's law which is centered on moral conscience.  This is manifested then and realized in human acts.  The morality of the acts is defined by the relationship of man's freedom with the authentic good (ultimately God Himself) (VS 2:4).  An action therefore is morally good when it entails choices of freedom that are in conformity with man's true good (again, God).  This then means that, as we saw earlier, that there is a connection between morality and anagogy, and only an act in conformity with good can be a pathway to life. 

In conclusion, the Christian life makes man aware, through God's revelation, of the newness which characterizes morality of action.  Showing ourselves good in our works reflects the beauty of the image of Christ in us. It also ensures the ordering of human acts to God's will.  As to the intention of the acting subject, there are circumstances in which the action takes place to be considered as well as resulting consequences. In other words, what we do has consequences, and therefore we have to discern our actions wisely, and be dependent on God for directing our actions.

So, that is it for this week, and will be back next time with the final question and its commentary.