Nature and Supernature

At Mass yesterday Father remarked that it is not the heart but the crucifix which is the real symbol of love.  A truism, perhaps, for a practicing Catholic, but one worth repeating to oneself from time to time.

I am working on a dissertation that deals—in a more direct fashion than I expected it would when I began—with the clash of medieval and Renaissance views of nature and society, or natural and human law.  The older medieval view was that nature and natural law were responsible for much of what was good in man; in the high Renaissance this view was sometimes warped into a Pelagian worship of man-as-natural being, in much the same way that post-Cartesians worshipped man-as-thinking-thing.  One of the many facets of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation was a reaction to this excessive Renaissance optimism.  Thus reformers of both stripes and secular Renaissance skeptics joined in emphasizing the insufficiency of human nature for salvation, and perhaps even for social and political life.  The later, Hobbesian view of a warlike state of man has real connection to the strong Calvinist notion of man as totally depraved.

Between their ideas and the Platonic-Aristotelian image of simple shepherds, devastated by the elements and bonding together to ensure survival for themselves and their families, gapes a wide gulf.  For the ancients and medievals nature was lively and dangerous, and human beings bonded together to find their natural place in it.  But beginning with the early modern era, nature became subject to the conquering techne of man, while human beings themselves became less and less worthy of trust and less and less natively inclined to order.

Who is right?  Both; neither; I’ll get back to you on that.  I have strong sympathies with the older view, of course; but … This much I will grant to the modern view.  On a day-to-day level, mere human virtue however advanced seems to be but rarely sufficient to deal with the trials and tribulations of ordinary life.

Too bad I wrote an undergraduate thesis arguing in the opposite direction!

But the older I become, the more convinced I am that sanctity is necessary not merely for entry into heaven, but also to live a tolerably happy life on earth.  At a certain point after being woken up for countless times in the middle of the night, nature is no longer sufficient; supernature becomes necessary.  The heart will always remain, but it can only beat on the blood of the cross.

The Death Penalty and the Nature of Human Government

As the Register has reported, Pope Francis’s recent request for a reformulation of the catechism’s language on the death penalty (as relayed in the official CDF letter, which can be read here) has met with both cheers and concern among faithful Catholics.  While theologians and philosophers debate the proposed change and its implications for understanding the Church’s development of doctrine, a certain amount of confusion has arisen among ordinary lay Catholics due to the language used in the letter.  The key paragraph (#2) gives three reasons for revising the Church’s standard language on the death penalty.

If, in fact, the political and social situation of the past made the death penalty an acceptable means for the protection of the common good, today [1] the increasing understanding that the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes, [2] the deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State, and [3] the development of more efficacious detention systems that guarantee the due protection of citizens have given rise to a new awareness that recognizes the inadmissibility of the death penalty and, therefore, calling for its abolition.

The third reason is one that applies to modern states (if not, perhaps, to some third world countries), and constitutes a simple reiteration of an argument made by many Catholics, including notably Pope John Paul II — namely, that modern prisons being more or less break-proof and humane, the common good is equally protected by the incarceration of criminals as by their execution.  This is a prudential judgment—a claim that the death penalty is not necessary, rather than that it is absolutely wrong—and as such is readily aligned with previous generations of Catholic teaching.

The first reason is more complicated.  The wording—“the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes”—presumes (a) that the death penalty necessarily is more contrary to human dignity than life imprisonment and (b) that there is only one sense of human dignity.  It is largely on these two points that theologians and philosophers have their debates; and as I am only an amateur on this topic, I will not venture into that minefield.

The second reason, however, is a matter of history; and here I have something to suggest.  The CDF letter says that today we have gained a “deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State.”  The words are vague.  One plausible reading is that we now realize (based on new psychological studies, etc.) that penalties such as life in prison are in fact appropriate and sufficient responses to crimes such as murder, while the penalty of execution is excessively cruel.  (Of course, what constitutes the appropriateness of a punishment is another question—one to which, again, the professional philosophers and theologians are welcome.)

There is, however, another sense in which the modern mind has gained a new notion of the state’s penal sanctions; and it has to do with our understanding of the nature of the state.

Read the rest at the Register.

Why the Martyr Wears a Crown

At the end of June and beginning of July the calendar of the universal Church is marked by the feasts of a number of well-known martyr-saints.  June 29th marks the solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, preceded on the 28th by Irenaeus and followed on the 30th by the First Martyrs of Rome; Thomas More and John Fisher had their feast the previous week; Oliver Plunket, Thomas the Apostle, and Maria Goretti the following week.  Mid and late July is thinner, but the little-known bishop St. Apollinaris has his feast on the 20th, and St. James on the 25th.

The presence on the calendar of so many martyrs raises the question—more striking with the martyrs of more recent eras—of the martyr’s crown.  The phrase is a familiar one, and the concept is old: a fifth-century fresco from the catacomb of St. Gennaro (unfortunately under copyright) shows Sts. Peter and Paul carrying their crown of martyrdom in their hands.

The crown is perhaps a puzzling symbol in our day and age.  The martyr’s palm is more easily explained: the palm branches from Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, linked to the suffering and the victory of his passion and death, makes their association with the martyr’s sufferings commonsensical.  But in our (almost) post-royalty age, the martyr’s crown may seem outdated: a relic of times when we thought leaders of countries required a shiny thing on their heads to impress their subjects, or possibly to mark them out in battle.

I would not deny that a crown serves those functions as well: like any singular article of clothing, it marks its wearer out.  But there is a significance to decorating, indeed, to glorifying the head, which goes beyond mere convenience.  The head contains the brain, the seat of the mind; it is associated with wisdom, insight, good judgment … Perhaps the king wore a crown not merely to impress, but to remind his people and himself that his job was above all to be wise, to rule justly, to judge with “epikeia” (roughly: “reasonableness”).  That perhaps is part of the reason why English judges long retained the practice of wearing enormous and ridiculous wigs: because (on some unconscious level) people felt that they looked more impressive and specifically more wise and therefore worthier to be judges.

Read the rest at the Register.

Homo Erectus

My long-running obsession with justice and judgment (fed by the current dissertation chapter) has made the words pop out everywhere; Scripture, of course, is full of the ideas.  And in mulling over the Hosea reading mentioned in my last post, it occurred to me that the obsession may appear a little grisly to anyone not writing an academic chapter focused on the topic.  “Justice” brings to mind such disturbing phrases as “the justice system” or “Justice Kavanaugh”; our ear catches at a word and surrounds it with the auras of other words with which we are used to hearing it matched.  Nor is it of any help if our mind interposes the more apropos phrase “a just God,” for it is generally uttered these days in doubt or mockery or, at best, when trying to lay doubt and mockery to rest.  Justice sounds like a sham; and if it dares enter our heads to think of real justice, most of us (we tell ourselves rightly) tremble.

I think it need not and ought not to be that way.  The Hosea reading suggests that there is a sort of incipient “justice” we human beings should cultivate in our lives on earth; if we do that, we need not fear when Divine Justice rains down.  But I think one can go farther than the cryptic metaphors of the Old testament prophet.  His image of our justice springing up to meet Another’s coming down, with its insistence on the perpendicularity of the arrangement, calls to mind another common translation of whatever biblical word is being rendered in English as “just”: upright.

Just, upright, erect.  The former two are synonyms, as are the latter two, although the first and the third do not share a common meaning.  But with good reason Hosea calls up the image of grain growing erect towards the sky: there is a coordination between standing erect and being just, an inherent symbolism that is not a merely human invention.  The etymology tells the story: the thing that we call just is also called being upright; to be just is our birthright as human beings, and what distinguishes us from other animals; it is no terrifying external imposition; it is as natural to us (in one sense) spiritually as walking erect is physically.  We stand erect because that is an image of how we ought to stand internally: upright.  To be upright, that is, pointing up at the sun, is natural for flowers that draw from its rays their strength.  In an upright human being who does the same, we say briefly and without comprehension that he is “just.”  What we really mean is that, like the sunflower, he stretches naturally towards the Sun of Justice from which all the rectitude of his nature comes.