Natural Law and Culture: The 'Explosive Problematic' in Gaudium et spes

THE WEAKNESS OF THE SECOND Vatican Council's treatment of modern culture in Gaudium et spes is perhaps attributable to its generally Maritanian trajectory. If Cardinal Garrone is to be believed, it was Maritain's thinking, of which rapproachement with the Liberal-humanist (modern) tradition (as contained, say, in his work Integral Humanism) is central, that the guided the Conciliar fathers.*  This is unfortunate in Tracey Rowland's view, in that the deeper, more critical analyses of culture found in the works of Erich Przywara, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Romano Guardini, and (even earlier) in John Henry Newman, seem to have been overlooked.

In her book Culture and the Thomist Tradition, Professor Rowland gives a number of examples of the "explosive problematic" contained in Gaudium et spes.  She points to Gaudium et spes, No. 56, where the following question is asked:

What is to be done to prevent the increased exchanges between cultures, which should lead to a true and fruitful dialogue between groups and nations, from disturbing the life of communities, from destroying the wisdom received from ancestors, or from placing in danger the character proper to each people?

This appears to be a reference to Kultur.**  Taken at face value,*** what does this say to Christian missionaries who confront non-Christian cultures, some of which have anti-Christian or even anti-human elements?  Is it disturbing the life of communities and destroying the wisdom of ancestors or placing in danger the character of African tribal communities by insisting in monogamy and in battling polygamy?  Are all parts of all cultures to be preserved so as to avoid insult to "each people"?  This suggests putting manacles on the Gospel, something entirely impossible to comprehend in a Church document.

As another example, Professor Rowland turns to Gaudium et spes, No. 57:

Furthermore, when man gives himself to the various disciplines of philosophy, history and of mathematical and natural science, and when he cultivates the arts, he can do very much to elevate the human family to a more sublime understanding of truth, goodness, and beauty, and to the formation of considered opinions which have universal value. Thus mankind may be more clearly enlightened by that marvelous Wisdom which was with God from all eternity, composing all things with him, rejoicing in the earth, delighting in the sons of men.

This is a reference to culture as Bildung.**  This language, if understood within the "implied Trinitarian framework that draws attention to the relationship between spiritual formation and intellectual formation, and gives a specific Christian content to the concept of truth, beauty, and goodness," it can be construed in a manner perfectly compatible with Church Tradition.  If understood in the sense that this section is promoting Maritain's "theocentric humanism," and not in the sense of "anthropocentric humanism," it can find a home in the Church.

Yet, if it is wrested from this implied context, "the section is more immediately evocative of the works of Wilhelm on Humboldt and Friederich Schiller on the self-development and the 'aesthetic education of man.'"  Rowland, 24.  In other words, this section can appear to advocate an "Arisocratic Liberal" conception of self-development, one that looks as "education" as the means for inculcating "virtue," and thus can appear to be plugging itself into the "subterranean link between the Encyclopaedist and Genealogical traditions."  Surely the Church had no intent to listen to the voices of Voltaire or of Nietzsche?  Did the Church really intend to promote the Kierkegaardian "aesthete"?

To put it bluntly: where is grace?  Is the grace of Christianity irrelevant to culture in the sense of Bildung?

In this criticism, Professor Rowland is not alone.  In what can only be categorized as blunt and strong criticism of this section, Rowland points to Joseph Ratzinger's early (1969) commentary on Gaudium et spes, where he described sections of it as containing "eine geradezu pelagianische Terminlogie," "a downright Pelagian terminology."  As particular examples of this tendency, Ratzinger pointed to Gaudium et spes, Nos. 17, 41, where there seems to be an overemphasis on freedom and autonomy understood in a modern liberal manner, and not in a manner as freedom as "living in the presence of God."  There appears to be a de-emphasis of grace and an over-emphasis of self-development, self-will, self-perfection.

As Rowland summarizes these various sections of Gaudium et spes dealing with Bildung: "The need for the personality to have a Christian form of development might therefore be implied [in Gaudium et spes], but the whole tone of the discourse remains suggestive of the Liberal-humanist tradition with its idea of self-perfection through education and exercise of will-power."  Rowland, 25.

Another defect in Gaudium et spes seems to be in its rather uncritical handling of the problem of "mass culture" (see Gaudium et spes, No. 54).  How does the Kultur in modernity's "mass-culture" affect the ability for authentic Christian Bildung?  This fundamental question is largely overlooked.

As one final example, this time more in the area of Geist or ethos,** Professor Rowland points to Gaudium et spes No. 57, and the invocation of the "expert." The text speaks of the need to obtain "a clearer awareness of the responsibility of experts to aid and even to protect men . . . especially for those who are poor in culture or who are deprived of the opportunity to exercise responsibility."  As Professor Rowland puts it, this section of Gadium et spes

immediately raises the question: What is the basis for the authority of these benevolent 'experts'? . . . . [T]he whole notion of 'government by experts' stands in tension with the tradition of Catholic social thought which emphasises the importance of the principle of subsidiarity, and the tradition of governance in Catholic institutions, which has favoured what in Weberian terms would be classified as 'charismatic authority' over 'bureaucratic authority.'

Rowland, p. 26-27.  Did the Church really intend to baptize the modern bureaucrat?  Did it bless a modern peritocracy?  That is rather dubious, but the text would give support to such a view.

Finally, one might point out that the suggestion that "experts" can solve the problems of the "cultural poor" or the "poor in culture" is rather shallow.  Is the expert really the one that can provide, like a magician pulling a white rabbit out of the hat, technical solutions that will ipso facto aid the "culturally poor"?  There is a little bit of elitism in the air here.

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*Although unmentioned by Prof. Rowland, one might mention Maritain's less ebullient and more sober later work, A Peasant of the Garrone, where he appears to re-think some of his earlier optimism.  One might also point out the accommodationism in Fr. John Courtney Murray, which, although focused more on the religious freedom issue, also seemed quite open to the Liberal-humanist tradition.  It should be noted, in any event, that both Maritain and Fr. Murray were and would have been appalled at the "hermeneutic of discontinuity" that followed VII.
**For Rowland's categorization of Kultur, Bildung, and Geist, see the posting "Natural Law and Culture: Towards a Better Definition of Culture."
***The language can be interpreted in a Herderian sense (i.e., in the manner of the German Romantic Johann Gottfried Herder).   It can also be interpreted in other senses.  Hence, in Rowland's view, the language "requires further clarification."  Rowland, 23.  There has to be some to distinguish between "a Christian conception of inculturation," which is entirely legitimate, and a "Herderian promotion of the preservation of all cultures that exhibit the Romantic qualities of individuality and originality," which seems relativistic and suffers from a cultural indifferentism.  

Natural Law and Culture: Towards a Better Definition of Culture

PERHAPS THE MOST important Vatican II document as it relates to the Church's' relationship with the world at large, the Church's relationship ad extra, is Gaudium et spes. Unfortunately, there are some intrinsic weaknesses with the document arising from the fact that it was a compromise document (thereby often suffering from ambiguity or a lack of clarity), that the Conciliar fathers lacked a full understanding of modernity (particularly in its cultural manifestations), that the form of the document was innovative, indeed unprecedented (a "pastoral Constitution" as distinguished from a "dogmatic Constitution," and yet a "Constitution" without legal form, but instead a rather loose, hortatory and pastoral, form), its lack of definition of some essential  and frequently used terms (e.g., "modern man" and "modern world").  Moreover, these problems, which are already present in the Latin text, seem to have been exacerbated in the vernacular translations.  As Tracey Rowland summarizes it in her book Culture and the Thomist Tradition:

When taken together, the fact of compromise, the multiple contrasts, the unprecedented form, the absence of a clearly defined theological framework for its interpretation, the alternation between dogma and pastoral appeals and the terminological looseness all contributed to the complexity of the 'explosive problematic'.

Rowland, 19.

Then, as if to add insult to injury, the problems associated with the text were compounded by "the most commonly applied hermeneutical key to the interpretation of this document," a concept as banal and amorphous as aggiornamento.*  It seems like "openness" became "accommodation" became "capitulation."  It is no wonder the Church's message to the modern world--whatever it was in Gaudium et spes--was further muddled.  Instead of fresh air out, it was foul air in.

The problems with Gaudium et spes generally also find themselves exhibited in its definition of "culture."  The definition of culture in the Conciliar document is found in Paragraph 53.   Culture, it states, "in the general sense refers to all those things which to to the refining and developing of man's diverse mental and physical endowments."  As Rowland critiques it, "this definition is extremely broad in coverage, but shallow in analysis, and not explicitly related to the grace-nature problematic as one would expect in a theological document."  Rowland, 20.

What Rowland suggests would have behooved the Conciliar Fathers is to have adopted a little more rigorous  understanding of culture.  She draws from T.S. Eliot (and the subtleties of the German language as exploited by the German Kulturgeschichte scholars) and the Greek concepts of nomos, ethos, and logos, to expand the notion of "culture" into three separate senses:

1. Culture of the individual (a specific form of Bildung, or self-development; nomos is "the element that gives each conception of self-formation or Bildung its guiding principles or laws");
2. Culture of the group (the Geist or ethos of a specific civilization or institution = ethos)
3. Culture of society as a whole (the Kultur or civilization of a society; logos = "that which give a given civilisation or Kultur its overarching and particular form.")

Rowland, 20-21.**

Taking these concepts and knitting them together within the context of her "Augustinian Thomist conception of culture," Rowland comes up with this definition of culture, which seems superior at once to the rather one dimensional definition found in Gaudium et spes, 53.

[A]n Augustinian Thomist conception of culture can be defined as one in which any given ethos is governed by the Christian virtues, the process of self-formation or Bildung is guided by the precepts of the Decalogue and revealed moral laws of the New Testament, and the logos or form is provided by the 'identities-in-relation' logic of the Trinitarian processions.

Rowland, 21.
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*Even the term aggiornamento, the main "hermeneutical key," was ambiguous.  As Rowland notes, instead of mere uncritical accommodation  it probably was originally intended to "mean an updating or development of theological resources to provide a coherent critique of the culture of modernity, rather than a simple accommodation to it."  Rowland, 19.  Against the accomodators, it is this notion of aggiornamento that may be said to have been behind John Paul II and Benedict XVI's efforts to rectify this problem.
**Rowland cites to the classic study of T.S Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and to R. Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History.

Natural Law and Culture: Recognizing Modernity

RECOGNIZING THE ROLE THAT CULTURE, especially modern culture, plays in the formation of persons is important.  There has been a tendency to view modernity as a separate superstructure with its own philosophical assumptions which, often, are in opposition to the natural moral law and the Faith.  Charles Taylor, one scholar of modernity, its history, and its development, has defined culture as a "specific understanding of 'personhood, social relations, states of mind, and virtues and vices' or 'constellation of understandings of person, nature, society and the good.'"  It includes, within this "constellation of understandings," the "relationship of the human person to 'God, the cosmos and other humans."  (Rowland, 12)  In short, it is a sort of an enfleshed or socially-institutionalized Weltanschaung.

Unfortunately, modern culture is not like a monastic habit.  One cannot look at a society and call it "modern" or "Christian" or "Muslim" like one could call a friar a Dominican if he wears a white habit with black scapula and a Franciscan if he wears a brown one.  Cultures blend, and, more often than not, especially in times of transition, one will have to struggle to determine what is what.  For this reason, the concept of "modernity" as a culture is not simply contemporaneous culture.  Contemporaneous culture in the West is the culture of modernity mixed in with the past culture of Christendom.

Modernity did not come upon us as a culture in one fell swoop.  Rather, the dismantling of Christianity culture came through a process of change, addition, subtraction, reconstruction during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.  While the Popes of this time attacked individual phenomena, one cannot say that they ever constructed an exhaustive or plenary critique of modernity.  Rather, their attacks on the modernity as it evolved was more or less on an ad hoc basis.

Even during the Second Vatican Council, a council supposedly dedicated to the issue of the Church in modernity, seems to have failed to engage in a "theological examination of this culture phenomenon called 'modernity' or the 'modern world.'"  (Rowland, 13)  Its almost as if the Church fathers looked at the phenomenon of modernity as a social accident--sort of like a hurricane that causes damage--and not as a social substantive--like a plague that gets progressively worse without some sort of sustained effort at diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis.  As Rowland in her book Culture and the Thomist Tradition puts it:

There was no consideration, at least not at a philosophical and/or theological level, of the question of what is, in essence, the culture of modernity, and how such a culture affects the spiritual and intellectual formation of persons and thier opportunites for evangelisation.

Rowland, 13.  There seems to be a time when the Gospel is preached without purse, shoes, or bag, but also a time when it needs a purse, and indeed, a sword.  (Luke 22:35-36).  In confronting modernity in the Second Vatican Council, the Church seems to have gone the former route, and so Catholics were rather vaguely enjoined to be "authentic," and "relevant," and "open" to "modernity" with joy and hope.

In the view of John O'Malley in Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II, this sort of je ne sais quoi attitude with respect to modernity contained an "explosive problematic" attached to it.  It was like sending lambs to wolves, mice to serpents.

The Church was ill-prepared to address the issue of modernity, especially in its cultural aspects.  As Rowland observes:

[T]he notion of "modernity" as a "cultural formation" had not yet arrived within the theological frameworks of the Conciliar fathers in 1962. In this context Hervé Carrier has observed that "prior to the Council, the capacity for cultural analysis was almost whooly ignored in the theological formation provided at the time"--the word "culture" did not even appear as an entry in the Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique..

Rowland, 14.  It was sort of like believing one had to take care of a simple wart, when one was in reality confronting something as complex, as serious, as dangerous, and as alive as a cancerous tumor.

Not informed by a clear sense of modern culture, the Church--then guided by Pope John XXIII--seemed (certainly in retrospect) altogether naïve about what it confronted.  In his opening address to the council fathers, Pope John XXIII spoke of modernity as something provided by God's Providence, something even that fulfilled "God's superior and inscrutable designs," something that was bound to lead "to the good of the Church."  In short, there was a "belief in the latently Christian orientation of the social trends."  (Rowland, 14).

This attitude was already seen in John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris.  In that encyclical, John XXIII naïvely assumed, without any analysis, that the "mutual acknowledgement of rights and duties in society" presented the Church with a "kind of preparatio evangelii" because it made humans open to values such as "truth, justice, charity, and freedom."

However, as Rowland sees it, this supposed link between modern "rights and duties" and an openness to the Gospel was simply presumed.  Hobbesian rights, Beccarian justice, Rawlsian duties may not be the same as rights, justice, and duties from the perspective of the Gospel.  There may be an entire closure to transcendent values.

"[W]hat is missing from Pacem in Terris and John XXIII's optimistic judgements about the directions of social values in the 1950s is precisely what Taylor calls a cultural analysis--an understanding of the clusters of values fit together into constellations that become embodied in the practices and beliefs of individuals and the institutions in which they work."  (Rowland, 15).  This incorrigible optimism, founded largely upon a failure to undertake a cultural analysis adequate to the task, was continued by John XXIII's successor Paul VI.

If culture has a role in thought, in other words, if culture has a role in influencing conceptions of justice, of rationality, and of virtue (as is argued by Alasdair MacIntyre and those of the Geneological tradition) then to ignore its role is a huge error. What are "universal values" to a Liberal may not be "universal values" to one of the children of Abraham.

Culture and Natural Law: Introduction

WE ARE GENERALLY FAMILIAR with the maxim that grace builds upon nature. We might also extend that maxim out a bit and observe that grace may also build upon those aspects of human nature that extend beyond man's mere substance (a rational soul), but into that substance's external constructs: politics, family, history, in short, culture. We might say that grace builds upon nature, and nature builds upon culture, and so ultimately grace also builds upon culture.

When culture was in the main Christian--as in the high Middle ages when St. Thomas Aquinas, in what may have been the height of Christendom, wrote his Summa Theologiae--the importance of culture seemed to have been overlooked somewhat.  As Professor Tracey Rowland put it in her introduction to her book Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican II,* the "given" nature of Christendom all about him resulted in the fact that the "rôle of culture in moral formation was not a problematic requiring his attention."  (p. 2)  Modernly, when our culture is so adverse to Christian morals and the Christian narrative (i.e., the Gospel), the importance of a right culture (like right reason) is increasingly recognized.  In the West, of course, we live in a culture where moral liberalism and moral nihilism reign supreme, where that amorphous and highly malleable "rights talk" entirely unanchored from nature or objective value is the language of the day.

The modern culture is highly anti-Catholic and anti-Christian, and the few remaining remnants of Christendom--which already appear as the ruins of the monasteries, friaries, convents, and priories after the their dissolution by the tyrant King Henry VIII--are still being dismantled.  Like the French Huguenots and Revolutionaries, modern barbarians are unhappy with the little of the Abbey of Cluny that remains in our culture: they want to continue taking the ashlar stones in place and haul them away for their own pet projects, their own homes and mills and stables and barns.  In such hostile cultural environment, neither the natural moral law nor grace flourishes.

To state a truism: since the high middle ages to modernity, the cultural narrative as changed.

The role of culture, both its hindrance to and its support of, a life of human flourishing, is painfully apparent to anyone sensitive to Christendom's demise, "when Christendom is but a historical memory for a significant proportion of the population, and the Christian soul is forged within a complex matrix of institutions founded upon a mixture of theistic, quasi-theistic and anti-theistic traditions."  (Rowland, p. 2)  This is the culture of modernity.  This is the culture we confront.

Additionally, culture has an effect even on reasoning.  Someone steeped in the Thomist tradition reasons differently from someone steeped in Enlightenment-derived Liberal or Romantic Genealogical philosophies, say, Locke, or Hume, or Rousseau,   or Nietzsche, or Marx.  These divided ways of thinking is a reality we also confront.

To some extent, there has been a certain diffidence in approaching the issue of culture and its effect on moral formation and moral flourishing.  The fear is that too much emphasis on culture in moral formation and moral flourishing seems to concede to much to the Genealogical school that, at root, all values are conventional, cultural.  The desire to emphasize that there are objective moral values, that there is a universally applicable natural moral law that is not conventional or culturally grounded, to avoid yielding ground to historicism or relativism, has seemed to contribute to trepidation in engaging the issue.  Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.  Thomists appear to avoid being fools; and their courage has been less than that of angels.  But according to Professor Rowland, this fear is unwarranted, and, in light of current circumstances, indefensible and irresponsible.  She urges the "need for an account of the rôle of culture in moral formation which does not undermine other elements of the tradition."  (Rowland, p. 7)

Professor Tracey Rowland

How does a Christian, in particular a Catholic Christian, approach this world of dismantled Christendom, where there is this admixture of "theistic, quasi-theistic, and anti-theistic traditions," and where, moreover, the reigning spirit seems to be concerned with yet the further minimization of the "theistic" and "quasi-theistic" remnants, and maximization of the "anti-theistic" traditions?

There seems to be somewhat of a division among Catholic thinkers regarding how we should best approach the problem with modernity.  Some believe that the "culture of modernity is neutral in relation to the flourishing of Christian practices, or even a second praeparatio envangelii in the manner of classical culture."  (Rowland, p. 2) We might call these the naive optimists.  This attitude appears to have been institutionalized in a manner in Vatican II's optimistic and perhaps somewhat naive (or perhaps now even dated) pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes.

Other scholars or authorities have the opinion that regards "the culture of modernity as the very solvent of Christian practices."  The scholars that we might put in this group include Catherine Pickstock (who speaks of a "polity of death"), David Schindler (who regards modern culture akin to a grace-resistant machine), and Alasdair MacIntyre (who sees modern culture as "toxic to the flourishing of virtue and the precepts of the natural law," Rowland, p. 2).  Even within the Church, the tocsin has been sounded.  Blessed Pope John Paul II's "culture of death," and Pope Benedict XVI's "tyranny of relativism" appear somewhat less embracing of modernity than Gaudium et spes.  We might call this view the realist view.

It seems that there is a disconnect between Gaudium et spes and reality, and so, to a certain extent, Catholics confront a sort of crisis.  Is it the accommodation of aggiornamento or the challenge of the New Evangelization?

It seems that Catholic leadership has begun to ask the question, "Foundations once destroyed, what can the just man do?" as did the Psalmist.  (Ps. 11:3 [10:4])  Ultimately,  Professor Rowland, whom we categorize with the realists, addresses this question in her book Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican II.    Rowland's treatment is engaging and seems to bring forth out of the subtraditions of classical and analytical Thomism (in particular relying on Alasdair MacIntyre's work, but also on the work of David Schindler and Kenneth Schmitz, a sort of patchwork which she categorizes with the somewhat cumbersome term "postmodern Augustinian Thomism"), the Nouvelle Théologie, and Radical Orthodoxy We will spend our next series of postings on this highly-recommended work.

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*Hereinafter in this in subsequent blog postings, identified as "Rowland."

Freedom's Conscientious Limits: The Natural Law

IN OUR LAST POST WE QUOTED that part of the Compendium which stated that the proper exercise of personal freedom demands not only specific conditions of economic, social, political, and cultural order to be properly exercised, but that, moreover, these must be conformed to the natural law, since "[b]y deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.'" (Compendium, No. 137) (quoting CCC, § 1740)

The natural law is therefore behind all of man's economic, social, political, and cultural life. It follows that the natural law is an essential part of the social doctrine of the Church. Indeed, the natural law is an essential part of man's freedom, for any action outside of the pale of the natural moral law is by definition a movement from the real, from what is, to the unreal, to what is not. As John Paul II vividly taught us in his Encyclical Veritatis splendor, there is an intrinsic connection between freedom and living in the truth. The negative is likewise true: there is an intrinsic connection between living in falsehood and slavery.

Freedom is not boundless. It must be exercised responsibly which means according to rule. Who can advocate an irresponsible freedom? As Solzhenitsyn pointed out in his famous Harvard Commencement Address (June 8, 1978), an "irresponsible freedom" granted "boundless space" is "destructive," and leads, moreover, society into "the abyss of human decadence."*

To avoid this fall into the "abyss of human decadence," therefore, we must exercise freedom responsibly. This means that freedom must conform itself to the judgment of conscience. Freedom is therefore restrained by conscience. Indeed, to place freedom under the judgment of conscience "leads to the acceptance of responsibility for the good accomplished and the evil committed." (Compendium, No. 139)

Conscience is therefore the lode star of freedom. Focus on the pole star of conscience keeps society from falling into the "abyss of human decadence," as Solzhenitsyn warned. But conscience serves a double purpose since it also keeps us out of the abyss of Hell. "Quidquid fit contra conscientiam, aedificat ad gehennam," the Fourth Lateran Council taught. That which goes against conscience, conduces one to Gehenna, a place where--one might to one's edification recall--both body and soul are destroyed. (Matt. 10:28)

If for both society and soul's sake freedom must be exercised responsibly, and this means in accordance with conscience, then what is to inform the conscience? Can conscience dispense with conscience? Surely not. Is conscience under no law? Surely not, for to judge means there is some law by which to judge. And if conscience is necessarily under some law, whose law, man's or God's?

If conscience is to be regarded as nothing more than vox hominis, the voice of man, then man is the measure of all things, and the law that governs conscience is nothing other than "self-law," a declaration of autonomy from external or objective rule. Conscience would then be nothing but the application of arbitrary rule. Conscience thought of in this way is, as Newman called it, in his famous Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, "counterfeit."** It is, in fact, rebellion.

Tower of Babel (Breughel)

Such a notion of conscience cannot support life in common. "Those who proclaim themselves to be the sole measure of realities and of truth cannot live peacefully in society with their fellow men and cooperate with them." (Compendium, No. 142) So there is an ominous harbinger of things to come when a Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy can say, in what his much more sensible fellow Justice Scalia mocked as "the famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage," that "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (Planned Parenthood v. Casey)

No, Justice Kennedy. The "right to define one's concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," is not at the heart of liberty, it's at the heart of slavery.

Conscience, Justice Kennedy plainly forgot, is not the voice of man, it is vox Dei, the voice of God. And this suggests that God, and not man, is the measure of all things. There is then a measure or rule outside ourselves to which we must conform. And this outside measure or rule--which finds its source in God and his eternal law and as it applies to man-- is known as the natural law.

For this reason, the Compendium states that the "exercise of freedom implies a reference to a natural moral law, of a universal character, that precedes and units all rights and duties." As if bullet points, the Compendium insists on the following:

• The natural law is "nothing other than the light of intellect infused within us by God."***
• By the natural law we "know what must be done and what must be avoided."†
• "This light or this law has been given by God to [man in] creation."††
• The natural law consists in the participation of God's eternal law, "which is identified with God himself."
• The natural law is called "natural" "because the reason that promulgates it is proper to human nature."
• The natural law "is universal, it extends to all people insofar as it is established by reason."
• The natural law, in "its principal precepts," is presented "in the Decalogue," that is, the Ten Commandments, "and indicates the primary and essential norms regulating moral life."
• The natural law's "central focus is the act of aspiring and submitting to God, the source and judge of everything that is good."
• The natural law's "central focus" also includes the "act of seeing others as equal to oneself."
• The natural law "expresses the dignity of the person and laws the foundations of the person's fundamental duties" to both God, to himself, and to man."
  

(Compendium, No. 140)

The natural law is the law among all people, and it traverses all culture, all convention, all human law. It is the law under all laws, over all laws, and within all laws. It is "immutable," constant, a reliable lode star, even "under the flux of ideas and customs," though it is also flexible, and "its application may," where exceptionless or absolute norms are not at issue, "require adaptations to the many different conditions of life according to place, time, and circumstances."††† (Compendium, No. 141)

It is true that man can reject the natural law, and in the main our society seems to have rejected its guidance. But "[e]ven when it is rejected in its very principles," the Compendium states quoting the Catechism, "it cannot be destroyed or removed from the heart of man. It always rises again in the life of individuals and societies." (Compendium, No. 141) Indeed, the "natural law, which is the law of God, cannot be annulled by human sinfulness."

Not only is it true that man can reject the natural law, it is also true that we can simply be ignorant of the natural law. The voice of the natural law is sufficiently quiet that particular individuals or whole societies fail to hear it. "Be still and know that I am God," says the Psalter. (Psalm 46:10 [45:11]) The "stillness" rule applies to the natural law: "Be still and know the natural law." And most of us are not still enough to hear the natural law. Most of us listen to other, louder voices: selfish regard, the poisons and conventions of our culture, the stupid, trite, and shallow aphorism of the day, the rule of expediency. Additionally, our inner ear is muffled by the ease of torpid conscience, the inconvenience even sacrifice demanded by a life lived by principle, or by an all-too-frequent acedia in moral life.

Since most of us are not still enough, listen to other voices, or have a sort of lint in our heart's inner ear, the natural law's "precepts . . . are not clearly and immediately perceived by everyone." It is therefore the case that, as a matter of practical necessity in a world that has lapsed after the Fall, religious and moral truths can be known "with facility, with firm certainty, and without the admixture of error" only "with the help of Grace and Revelation."

As Matthew Arnold said in his poem, "Pis Aller":‡

Man is blind because of sin,
Revelation makes him sure;
Without that, who looks within,
Looks in vain, for all's obscure.

The natural law is not only the recipe for individual morality, it is the recipe for social life. The natural law is, in fact, the foundation upon which the Church's social doctrine is built, and is the foundation upon which every society bar none must be built.

The natural law "lays the indispensable moral foundation for building the human community and for establishing the civil law that draws its consequences of a concrete and contingent nature from the principles of the natural law." (Compendium, No. 142) Without the natural law, in vain do men build their societies, found their governments, and attempt constitutions devoted to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

"Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain." (Psalm 127 (126):1) Build a society without reference to the natural law, build a society of relativism and moral pluralism without reference to God and his law, and you have built not on Mount Zion. Rather, you have built its ersatz, a fake substitute, a tower of Babel. And we all know what happened to that tower.

They who did labour Babels tower to'erect,
Might have considered, that for that effect,
All this whole solid Earth could not allow
Nor furnish forth Materials enow;
And that his Center, to raise such a place
Was far too little, to have been the Base;
No more affords this worlds, foundation
To erect true joy, were all the means in one.
But as the Heathen made them several gods,
Of all God's Benefits, and all his Rods,
(For as the Wine, and Corn, and Onions are
Gods unto them, so Agues be, and war)
And as by changing that whole precious Gold
To such small copper coins, they lost the old.

If we think like Justice Kennedy, we have traded precious Gold of the natural law, for the small copper coin of relativism, and with the loss of capital and the loss of coin, we have sold ourselves to slavery. And all this not even for a mess of pottage, but for such enormities such as contraception, abortion, homosexual marriage, and pornography.

________________________________
*"Harvard Commencement Address," by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Lewis Copeland, et al, eds., The World's Great Speeches 4th ed. (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999), 837.

**John Henry Newman, A Letter addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1875), 75, 82.
***Quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas, In Duo Praecepta Caritatis et in Decem Legis Pracepta Expositio, c. 1. ("nihil aliud est nisi lumen intellectus insitum nobis a Deo")
†Id. ("per quod cognoscimus quid agendum et quid vitandum")
††Id. ("Hoc lumen et hanc legem dedit Deus homini in creatione")
†††As an example, the distinction between extraordinary medical care (which one is not required to render a person) and ordinary medical care (which one is) varies "according to place, time, and circumstances." Similarly, the right to a living wage and what that means varies "according to place, time, and circumstances." Some norms--like the prohibition against murder or adultery--are exceptionless and do not admit of change "according to place, time, and circumstances."
‡See The Need for Revelation: "Pis-Aller" by Matthew Arnold.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the Natural Law, Part 11

IN HIS AUTO SACRAMENTAL, A Dios por razón de estado, the Catholic playwright Calderón has expressed a vision of reason at odds with those of the Protestant reformers, and, a fortiori, the modern secularist progeny spawned, albeit unintentionally, by the Protestant reformer's theological and moral teachings. Calderón insists that reason is human ("Ingenio soy humano"), a faculty by which man participates in the divine, and which is not entirely destroyed by the Fall. Man's reason therefore plays an important role in the discovery of Truth, and this whether philosophical, moral, or religious. Through the use of reason, man can attain a knowledge of God through natural theology, a knowledge of good through the natural law, and can attain sufficient knowledge so as to guide him even up to the threshold of the Christian Trinitarian and Incarnational Faith. While reason cannot take one beyond Faith's threshold into the bosom of the Church--that requires Faith a gift of God and is a product of Grace--reason can be used as a means to determine which religions are unreasonable and therefore do not merit belief. As Fiore puts it, "Calderón demonstrates that man can know God through natural reason's observance of the governance of things--the natural law. That knowledge is then perfected by written law and faith." (34) Thus, right reason will take one to the conclusion that--since Christi's coming, redeeming passion and death--the Catholic Faith is the most reasonable of the three great monotheistic religions, promotes the greatest good, and is the only that religion merits being the basis of establishing a government that promotes the common good. The reverse side of this coin is that governors must respect that their authority comes from God, that it ought to be exercised for the common good, and that they themselves are limited by the moral teachings and religious precepts of the Catholic Faith.

The use by Calderón of the notion razón de estado is itself interesting and warrants further study. It probably plays at least two roles in Calderón's message. First, it refers to yet another of the Thomistic proofs of God or ways of knowing God exists, this one relating to St. Thomas Aquinas's fifth proof based upon the existence of order or governance. Second, it is meant to criticize Machiavellian politics, which insinuated a division, a separation between the practical politics required to run a State and the virtues of religion.

With respect to the first use, as a reference to St. Thomas Aquinas's fifth proof, we might simply begin by quoting Fiore (33-34):

Thus Calderón, following the precepts of natural law, demonstrates that man, through natural reason, can come to know and believe in God por razón de estado if not by faith. . . . With the statement por razón de estado, Calderón refers to Aquinas's fifth demonstration of God which has to do with the governance of things.

St. Thomas Aquinas's fifth "proof" may be quoted here in full:

The fifth proof arises from the ordering of things for we see that some things which lack reason, such as natural bodies, are operated in accordance with a plan. It appears from this that they are operated always or the more frequently in this same way the closer they follow what is the Highest; whence it is clear that they do not arrive at the result by chance but because of a purpose. The things, moreover, that do not have intelligence do not tend toward a result unless directed by some one knowing and intelligent; just as an arrow is sent by an archer. Therefore there is something intelligent by which all natural things are arranged in accordance with a plan---and this we call God.

Quinta via sumitur ex gubernatione rerum. Videmus enim quod aliqua quae cognitione carent, scilicet corpora naturalia, operantur propter finem, quod apparet ex hoc quod semper aut frequentius eodem modo operantur, ut consequantur id quod est optimum; unde patet quod non a casu, sed ex intentione perveniunt ad finem. Ea autem quae non habent cognitionem, non tendunt in finem nisi directa ab aliquo cognoscente et intelligente, sicut sagitta a sagittante. Ergo est aliquid intelligens, a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur ad finem, et hoc dicimus Deum

[S.T. I, q. 2, art. 3]

The fact that there is an Eternal Law under whose governance, that is, God's Providence, the entire world thrives, has great implications for human government. Man and his governments participate in God's government, participate in His providence, and so can never act at odds with it without "kicking against the goad." See Acts 9:5, 26:14. Thus human government is both empowered and limited. It finds justification in participating in the loving Providence of God.

A Dios por razón de estado defends the medieval idea of a universe ordered by eternal law (Hillach 95). Because the eternal law informs all that stands beneath it in the fourfold hierarchy, this defense bears on the laws and the reason of state through which govern their communities on earth. Calderón appeals here to the Neoscholastic concept of law in order to refute the postulates of Machiavellian statecraft and to question the assumption of realist political thinkers that the Christian prince may isolate a limited field in which he is free to proceed according to the demands of secular politics. Calderón’s strategy of applying reason of state to divine positive law denies the autonomy that Machiavelli claims for the political sphere, but it is consistent with the Neoscholastic view that all law are ranged in a single coherent hierarchy. And the proposition that reason of state enjoins obedience to the eternal law has clear implications for those who preside over human society. In this auto, as in many political comedias of the period, the law stands as the pattern of a beneficient order, and human actions are just to the extent of their conformity with higher laws. Through this argument Calderón offers an astute and sophisticated defense of the central axiom of ethicist political thought: that true reason of state cannot be separated from the orders of law and of providence. He sustains this anti-Machiavellian position throughout his political theater, both by exploring the haste with which the procedures of realist politics descend into a self-replicating tyranny and by aligning the institutions and diplomacy of the Hapsburg monarchy with the cycles of providential history. In the affairs of a Christian state, as in the spiritual life of an individual believer, fidelity to the law secures human participation in the order of Creation.”

Rupp, 76.

The term razón de estado may literally find its genesis in Machiavelli's "Ragion de Stato." But one must not think thereby that Calderón intended it in a Machiavellian sense. Indeed, the truth is exactly the opposite. Calderón's use of it was precisely anti-Machiavellian, in line with, for example, the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Botero's (c.1544–1617) use of it, or in the sense of the myriad Spaniard theologians or political philosophers, an example of which may the Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Rivadeneyra (1527-1611). Rivadeneyra wrote his Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el Príncipe Cristiano para gobernar y conservar sus Estados (Treatise on the Religion and Virtues that a Christian Prince Ought to Have to Govern and Conserve his States), published in 1595, clearly against Machiavelli's immoral concepts of political virtú. Machiavelli was referred to by Rivadeneyera as an "hombre impío y sin Dios, así su doctrina," an "impious man without God, and similarly so his doctrine." Rivadeneyra argues that Machiavelli's political theory is nothing other than the Averroist philosophical "double truth" theory applied to politics. But Rivadeneyra insisted that, in writing against Machiavelli, he was not to be understood as rejecting the reality of reasons of state; rather, the notion of reason of state had to be understood not as being against the natural law and religion, but consistent with it.

Ante todas cosas digo que hay razón de Estado, y que todos los príncipes la deben tener siempre delante de los ojos, si quieren acertar a conservar y gobernar sus Estados. Pero que esta razón de Estado no es una sola, sino dos: una falsa y aparente, otra sólida y verdadera; una engañosa y diabólica, otra cierta y divina; una que del Estado hace religión, otra que de la religión hace Estado; una enseñada de los políticos y fundada en vana prudencia y en humanos y ruines medios, otra enseñada de Dios, que estriba en el mismo Dios y en los medios que Él, con su paternal providencia, descubre a los príncipes y les da fuerza para usar bien de ellos, como Señor de todos los Estados. Pues lo que en este libro pretendemos tratar es la diferencia que hay entre estas dos razones de Estado, y amonestar a los príncipes cristianos y a los consejeros que tienen cabe sí, y a todos los otros que se precian de hombres de Estado, que se persuadan que Dios sólo funda y los da a quien es servido, y los establece, amplifica y defiende a su voluntad, y que la mejor manera de conservarlos es tenerle grato y propicio, guardando su santa ley, y obedeciendo a sus mandamientos, respetando a su religión y tomando todos los medios que ella nos da o que no repugnan a lo que ella nos enseña, y que ésta es la verdadera,cierta y segura razón de Estado, y la de Maquiavelo y de los políticos es falsa, incierta y engañosa. Porque es verdad cierta e infalible que el Estado no sepuede apartar bien de la religión, ni conservarse sino conservando la misma religión.

Before all else, I say that there is such a thing as reason of State, and that all princes ought to always have it before their eyes, if they desire to assure the conservation and governance of their States. But this reason of State is not one, but two: one false and apparent, one solid and true; one tricky and diabolical, the other certain and divine; one where the State makes religion, the other which religion makes the State; one taught by politicians and founded in vain prudence and in human and ruinous means, the other taught by God, which is founded upon the same God and in the means which He, in his fatherly providence, unveils in his princes and gives them the power that He, as Lord of all States, gives them to use for good. So what we will address in this book is the difference that exists between these two reasons of State, and we admonish Christian princes and their counselors and all those who fashion themselves as men of State, that they persuade themselves that God only upholds them and and their power to serve, so long as it establishes, amplifies and defends His Will, and that the best way of conserving the State is by staying in his grace and favor, guarding his religion and taking all the means that religion provides, and not running afoul of it, and that this is the true, certain and secure reason of State, and that of Machiavelli and those of the politicians is false, uncertain, and deceiving. Because it is certain and infalible truth that the State cannot separate itself from the religion, nor conserve itself without at the same time conserving the same religion.

Thus through the natural law and the moral guidance it gave, Intellect was able to see what was true in the Gentile's religion, and what was corrupt. He was able to reject the polytheism and the pagan gods because their immoral behavior, which offended the natural moral law, and was not consonant with the perfection required by the First Cause. Intellect could also reject Atheism, as simply unitellectual and unreasonable. Similarly, Intellect was able to understand that God as First Cause implied that there was governance and order, and therefore there had to be Law. Without Law there was no God, and God's existence implied Law. Though he found what was true in Africa's faith, namely its monotheism, appealing, reason eventually led him to reject Africa's faith before the coming of the prophet Muhammad as vacuous. The natural moral law also allowed him to reject the anticipated prophet himself, as the law he revealed allowed for polygamy, something that violated fundamental precepts of contract and justice, even love, as found in the natural law. Finally, reason allowed Intellect to appreciate the law of the Jew, and see how its completion was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Through reason, he was able to see that the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were not repugnant to reason. He was also able to appreciate the Law of Grace. The Law of Grace aided men to comply with the Decalogue, which was nothing other than an enumeration, an amplification through Revelation, of the natural law. Thus reason would find nothing unwanting and untoward in Christianity, and though reason alone may not be able to elicit and Act of Faith, it could bring a man sufficiently close to Faith's threshold so as to say that the existence of one God, and the binding nature of the Natural Law and the Decalogue apply universally to all men, because of razón de estado, because of the reason in the way things are, that is, the way things have been Created and the way things are ruled by the loving Providence of God.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the Natural Law, Part 10

THE SYNAGOGUE THREATENS PAUL AND INTELLECT, but they recruit the protection of Gentility. The Synagogue respects Gentility's power, as she is crowned with the laurel of the power of the Emperors of the Roman Empire. Jerusalem, Synagogue concedes, is a colony of the vast Roman Empire. But why is she here to protect Paul when she usually governed by the local vice-regent, leaving Palestine more-or-less in benign neglect? Gentility brings its troops to assure that Synagogue does justice. This is an implied reference to Gentility's earlier threat to Thought and Intellect that Gentility would destroy he who was responsible for the earthquake and other prodigies. The emperors Titus and Vespasian were involved in the Jewish wars that resulted in the destruction of the Temple.

Paul finds it fitting that Gentility should defend him against the hostility of the Synagogue.

Porque la predicación
Hoy de la tercera ley,
Que á la gentilidad pasa.
Con esto explicada esté.

Because the preaching
Today of the Third Law
Which passes to the Gentiles
With this I will explain myself.

What Third Law? Synagogue asks. Gentility is similarly interested in what Third Law Christ intended to introduce. Synagogue suggests that this Third Law is none other than her own, which is the Natural Law as raised by the Divine Law, from two precepts to ten.

La ley
Misma que yo me tenía
(Como ya dije) en Moisés,
Creciendo la natural
De dos preceptos a diez.

The same law
That I had
(as I've already stated) in Moses,
Growing from the natural law
Two precepts to ten.

The Natural Law, Gentility asks, what law was that? The Natural Law itself will tell you, Synagogue defers, and points to the Natural Law at the foot of a tree which is wrapped about by a serpent. The Natural Law speaks at Gentility's approach:

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

¿Quién
De las malicias del mundo,
Huyendo el vago tropel,
Vuelve á pisar mis umbrales?

Who
Of all the evils of the world
Fleeing from the uncultivated heap
Comes now to step on my thresholds?

Gentility answers:

Quien de tí intenta saber
Los fundamentos que Dios
Puso en tu primero ser.

He who intends to know of you
The foundations that God
Put in your first being.

The Natural Law responds:

Que amase á Dios más que á mí,
Y á mi prójimo después
Como á mí, cuyo suave
Yugo, paz y sencillez
Se perturbó en este árbol,
Pues desde entonces quedé
Sujeta á las inclemencias
De saber del mal y el bien.

That you love God more than yourself,*
And then your neighbor as
Yourself, which gentle
Yoke, peace and simplicity
Became disturbed in this tree
And since that time I remained
Subject to the inclemencies
Of the knoweldge of good and evil.

(*Natural Law uses the first person in Spanish, but it is clear she is reciting the first principles as if it is what Gentility should say, in a fashion that one may read a Catechism to a Catechumen (otherwise she would be saying that Gentility ought to love God more than the Natural Law, and then love one's neighbor as one loves the Natural Law, which is clearly nonsense). Perhaps the author was trying to emphasize the personal nature of the Natural Law. I have translated it into second person as if the Natural Law is speaking to Gentility. )

The Natural Law here speaks of Adam's fall, and how the knowledge of good and evil obtained as a consequence of the Fall, has disturbed man's ability to know the Natural Law and to follow it.

From these two precepts of the Natural Law, those that were later obtained, what are they? Gentility asks. Paul lets the Written Law speak for itself, for that Law apears on a crag, with tablets in hand, and a serpent of brass, not unlike Moses is depicted.

Moses with Law and Brazen Serpent

Sí haré,
Pues á la Ley Natural
Seguir la Escrita se ve,
No tendrás ajeno Dios,
Ni el nombre jurarás del;
Santifícale sus fiestas;
Honra á quien te ha dado el ser;
Ni homicida ni lascivo
Seas; el ajeno bien
No envidies, ni quieras de otro
La hacienda ni la mujer.

I will,
Now from the Natural Law
One sees the Written follow,
You shall not have alien Gods,
Nor shall you swear before God's name;
Keep Holy his feasts;
Honor those who have given you life;
Be not murderous, nor lascivious
Do not envy the other, nor desire
Another's home or woman.

What, Gentility asks, did Christ add or take away from the Natural Law and the Written Law? Hereupon comes the Law of Grace, with a cross in hand, and its eyes bound, like Faith is typically depicted.

Eso yo lo explicaré,
Pues por Ley de Gracia soy
La superior á las tres.
No sólo esos diez preceptos
Confirmó en mí; mas porque
Su cumplimiento tuviese
Fianza á no fallecer,
Los fortaleció de siete
Sacramentos, que allí ves
De la Fuente de la Gracia
Perennemente correr.

This will I explain,
As Law of Grace, I am
The superior of the three.
Not only are the ten precepts
Confirmed in me; but because
There was need for confidence that
Compliance with them would not fail,
He strengthened them with
Seven Sacraments, which you see
From the Fount of Grace
Perenially flowing.

The Seven Sacraments of the Law of Grace

The Seven Sacraments--Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, Extreme Unction, Orders, Matrimony--then introduce themselves, each holding in its hand a white sash, that reaches, like pipes or tubes, toward the Eucharist, as if all grace comes from that preeminent Sacrament.

Intellect then summarizes the import of these three laws, the Natural Law, the Decalogue, and the Law of Grace:

Hasta aquí todo tan justo
Y tan suave yugo es
El de una ley que conserva
Los preceptos de las tres,
Que debe el ingenio humano,
Restituido al papel
De Dionisio Areopagita,
Llegándose á convencer
De la doctrina de Pablo,
Con la experiencia de que
Nada su ley nos propone,
Que bien á todos no esté
El creerlo y el amarlo,
Llegando á amar y creer
Por razón de estado cuando
Faltara la de la fe.

Until this point everything is just
And so light a yoke
As one law that conserves
The precepts of all three.
What should human Intellect
Reestablished on the writings
Of Dionysius the Areopagite
Coming to convince itself
Of the teachings of Paul
With the experience that
Nothing that his law proposes for us,
Is not good for all
In believing it and loving it
Coming to love and believe
For reason of State when
Fails that of the Faith.

Synagogue, and likewise Africa, will not accept Intellect's summary, and would rather see the world end. Atheism and Gentility stand by Intellect. And Paul suggests that even Synagogue and Africa will follow, when the world comes to an end, and there is only one Shepherd and one Flock.

Thought, silent until know, suggests that the Truth of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Natural Law, the Decalogue, and the Law of Grace be celebrated, with feasts and with rejoicing. And all now join in unison:

Y contigo
Todos diciendo otra vez,
Que debe el ingenio humano
Llegarlo á amar, y creer
Por razón de Estado cuando
Faltara la de la fe.

And with you
All of us saying once again
That the human Intellect ought
To come to love and believe
For reason of State when
Fails that of the Faith.

Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the Natural Law, Part 9

PABLO, POR QUÉ ME PERSIGUES? Paul, why do you persecute me? both Intellect and Thought hear amidst the thundering roar as they see Paul of Tarsus thrown from his horse, foot in stirrup, being drug to certain death. Thought, faster than Intellect, lends Paul a helping hand, but needs Intellect's greater strength, to lift the shaken Paul to his feet.

Caravaggio's Paul in Damascus

Out comes Synagogue concerned about its favorite child.

Si Pablo muere, yo muero:
¿Qué es esto, Pablo?

If Paul dies, I'll die:
What's this, Paul?

"I've fallen into Thought, and then Intellect," he tells Synagogue, and he is physically blind, but he sees more than he has ever seen before in his life.

Ciego estoy; pero mal digo,
Que nunca he llegado á ver
Más que cuando estoy más ciego.

Blind am I, but I would be lying
If I didn't say that never have I been able to see
More than when I have been blind.

Synagogue wants to know what it is that his favorite son sees, but Paul stammers. It is hard to say what it is hard to know. All he can say is that he has gone about it backwards. Whereas others fall when climbing, he has climbed while falling. He claims that he went to the Third Heaven, whether in body or spirit he does not know. (cf. 2 Cor. 12:2-4).

Synagogue is solicitous, asks Paul to come to him for rest, but Paul has changed, and sees Synagogue as untrustworthy:

La acción deten,
No halagüeñamente fiera
Te acerques.

Stop now!
Do not come near me
You flattering fiend.

Paul flees the embrace of the Synagogue, and the disbelieving Synagogue asks if Paul flees him:

Sí, escandalosa; sí, infiel;
Sí, tirana; sí, alevosa;
Sí, traidora; sí, cruel.

Yes, scandalmonger, yes, unfaithful on,
Yes, tyrant, yes, treacherous,
Yes, traitor, yes, cruel one.

Is this Paul? No, it is no longer Paul. Who then?

Cristo es el que vive en mí.

It is Christ who lives in me.

It is Paulus Christianus, not Paulus Judaeus. Synagogue is flabbergasted. Is this not the very same Christ against whom Paul was sent to battle? But Paul has learned, through God's grace, that the Christ that was crucified was, in fact, truly the Son of God. Synagogue's flabbergastedness turns to fury, but she stays her hand because her favorite son is blind. And Intellect seizes the opportunity to address Paul to see if he can convince him on behalf of Synagogue, only to become convinced of Paul's faith himself. And so the following dialogue:

Intellect: The Crucified One, you say that he was the Son of God?

Paul: Yes.

Intellect: Well, is there more than one God, then?

Paul: No.

Intellect: Well how is he Son of God without being God as well?

Paul: He is also God.

Intellect: How, if he is also God, is the one God two persons?

Paul: More than two, because there are three.

Intellect: Three, and yet one God?

Paul: Yes.

Intellect: How?

Thought interjects to the audience that it is important to attend to the conversation that follows, because Intellect here is now the Dionysius that Paul historically converted in the Areopagus. Paul then enters into a Trinitarian theology: God, who is all good, must needs communicate his infinity. Since God is infinite, however, he cannot communicate himself fully to an finite being. So it follows that God, in his infinity, must communicate to someone with infinite nature as well. If he could not communicate with someone perfectly, then he would be imperfect. So the perfection of God requires that there be another infinite person in God with whom he fully can communicate his infinity. Thus, it was part of God's essence, and a perfection of God's being, that through an infinite act of understanding, he engendered a Son, that is the Son, to whom communication was infinite. The Father, then, who saw the Son, and the Son who saw the Father, shared in the infinite and faithful love for each other, which is nothing other than the Spirit who, being infinite, is equal to the Father and the Son, proceeding from them both. None of these persons was before or after any other, first or last relative to each other, greater or lesser between each other, but they are all equally and substantially God. And so the dogma that Paul saw in the Third Heaven:

Una en los tres la deidad,
Uno en los tres el poder,
Uno en los tres el amor,
Y uno en los tres el saber,
Cierto es que en la esencia es uno,
Siendo en las personas tres.

One and three in Godhead,
One and three in Power
One and three in Love,
And one in three in Knowledge,
Certain it is that they are in essence one
Being in persons three.

The Intellect is absolutely not offended by this mystery, as it does not contradict any tenet of reason:

Sobre la natural luz
Del Ingenio, que al fin es
Parte del alma, he quedado
Satisfecho, al parecer,
Hasta aquí.

With regard to the natural light
Of Intellect, which in the end is
Part of the soul, I remain
Satisfied, it appears,
Up to this point.

Even Synagogue is not offended by this doctrine, as it accords with the faith of Abraham:

Y hasta aquí yo
Poco me debo ofender,
Pues ver tres, y adorar uno,
Me enseñó de Abraham la fe.

And to this point
I also am little offended,
In that seeing three, but adoring one
Is what Abraham taught of the faith.

Abraham Entertains Three Vistors, Father, Son, Holy Spirit

(The reference is to Genesis 18:1-3:

1 And the Lord appeared to him in the vale of Mambre as he was sitting at the door of his tent, in the very heat of the day. 2 And when he had lifted up his eyes, there appeared to him three men standing near him: and as soon as he saw them he ran to meet them from the door of his tent, and adored down to the ground. 3 And he said: Lord, if I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away from thy servant.

This is a classic Trinitarian source text. As one example of many, one may quote St. Augustine's exegesis on this passage in his On the Trinity (De Trinitate):

But since three men appeared, and no one of them is said to be greater than the rest either in form, or age, or power, why should we not here understand, as visibly intimated by the visible creature, the equality of the Trinity, and one and the same substance in three persons?

Cum vero tres visi sunt nec quisquam in eis vel forma vel aetate uel potestate maior ceteris dictus est, cur non hic accipiamus visibiliter insinuatam per creaturam visibilem trinitatis aequalitatem atque in tribus personis unam eandemque substantiam?

On the Trinity (De Trinitate) II.X.20)

Intellect the asks about the purpose of the Son's coming to earth. To which question Paul replies that, in offending against God, man's fault was infinite. Infinite man could not render satisfaction for an infinite offense. It was out of the bounty of God's mercy that the Son came to make infinite satisfaction for man's sin. Incarnate of the Virgin Mother, who was Virgin ante partum, in parto, post partum, without breaking, in the most delicate language, by the "rude pride of human contact, the purity of the white lilly, nor of carnation's hood." (Grosero cierzo de humano / Contacto la candidez / Del botón de la azucena, / Ni el capillo del clavel.)

This also does not offend reason, and Intellect is able to go this far. Likewise, Synagogue accedes, though it believes it will occur in the future, though it has not yet. And still, Paul insists, the Messiah is come.

At this point in the play, Synagogue and Paul get into a religious dispute, almost a litany of opposition, in fact what is technically known as a stichomythia, about whether Jesus Christ is the Messiah, largely based upon whether or not he met with scriptural prophecies concerning the Messiah. It is obvious that neither is making progress convincing the other, and finally Intellect interrupts. At its kernel, Synagogue's grievance is that Christ, being man, claimed to be the Son of God. And Intellect obtains concessions from Synagogue that, beyond this claimed sin, Christ's life was without obvious flaw. One would think, Intellect reasons, that someone who made this claim duplicitously would show in other behavior the effects of have a duplicitous heart. Yet, Synagogue is unable to proffer any evidence of such.

And so Intellect is ready to render his judgment, and he calls Gentility, Atheism, Africa, and Synagogue before him. "Why do you call us again?" they ask:

Para que todos notéis,
Sin que ninguno alegar
Pueda ignorancia después,
Que el Dios ignoto pasible,
Que ojos, manos y oidos es,
Y primer causa de causas,
En boca de Pablo hallé.

So that all of you may note,
Without any of may assert
Ignorance at a later time,
That the unknown, passible God,
That is eyes, hands, and ears,
And that is First Cause of all causes,
I've found in the mouth of Paul.

By ‘doctrine’ and ‘experience’ [Intellect] accounts himself obliged to love and believe in the deity whose ‘law’ has established a rational order beneficient to all humanity. And he now perceives the law in its fundamental unity. The various kinds of laws discovered in the final apariencias are all specific manifestations of the eternal law through which God has created and ordered the universe. The auto’s procedure of applying reason of state to the diverse laws of human religion has ended in an apprehension of the one supreme law. Because reason disposes the human soul to put itself in harmony with the eternal law, this procedure alone is sufficient to lead man to God. Dionysius has turned to the Christian confession for reasons of state, in an act that parallel's Paul’s conversion for reasons of faith

Rupp, 75.

Natural reason accepts the Apostle's preaching as not against reason. Synagogue is incensed, draws forth a sword, and threatens to slay both Paul and Intellect, when Paul and Intellect seek out the protection of Gentility.

Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the Natural Law, Part 8

SYNAGOGUE IS CLOTHED AS A JEW, and Paul, as yet unconverted, dressed in Roman garb. This is Paul, "a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated under Gamaliel, strictly according to the law of our fathers, being zealous for God." Acts 22:3. Synagogue is speaking frankly with Paul about the crucifixion of Christ. Synagogue is amazed at the centurion's comment ("Indeed this was the Son of God," see Matt. 27:54) after Christ's death, and is similarly amazed at the Penitent Thief's remarkable conversion and statement ("Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom," see Luke 23:42). Christ's death itself, and the sorrow it brought enlightened men, similarly tugs at him. From a natural perspective, these things are marvelous, Synagogue concedes. But he will not yield to these, and must remain firm in his resolve against Christ's teachings. And this is why he speaks with Paul.

pues muerto ha de ser mayor
contra cuantos promulgar
su Ley intentan; y así,
Pablo, pues de ti me fío,
toma este decreto mío.

Even dead, we ought to take greater
Actions against those who
Intend to promulgate his law; and so,
Paul, well in you I trust,
Take this decree of mine.

He instructs Paul to depart to Damascus, as he has heard that four humble fisherman, disciples of Christ, are there preaching the bizarre errors of Christ's law, "los extraños errores de aquella ley."

Paul Learning from Gamaliel, St Mary's, Melton Mowbray.

Paul accepts the honor and the charge, and informs Synagogue that he may consider it as good as done. He will squash the inchoate Christians. He will do so in his capacity as Hebrew of the tribe of Benjamin and as Roman citizen, to the applause of both Jew and Gentile. Paul is extremely dubious that God and Crucifixion are signs of God, and he begs to be granted leave so as to be, to the dismay of this errant band of fishermen, the lightning, thunder, and ray against the new faith.

As Synagogue and Paul take leave of each other, Thought and Intellect begin to speak, and Thought suggests that Intellect speak to Paul his old friend. But Paul is in too much a hurry to speak to Intellect. He cannot be detained by Intellect, they must speak another day. He knows that he is distancing himself from Intellect, but justifies it because of the alacrity associated with his charge:

Ya lo veo, mas hoy
déjame, Ingenio, que voy
tan veloz que hacer quisiera
que mi pensamiento fuera
mi caballo.

I am aware, but today
Leave me, Intellect, in that
I go so quickly that I wish
That my thought was my
Horse.

Thought chimes in. Vulgar is Thought that leaves Intellect behind, "bruto es el Pensamiento de quien el Ingenio va atrás dejándose."

Unmoved by Intellect and Thought's efforts to delay him, Paul exits, and Intellect decides to converse with Synagogue, as he is marveled by him. Synagogue is clearly unsettled, however, by the prodigies that have occurred, and, as if with bad conscience, wants to be told that the earthquake, eclipse, and lightning and thunder have nothing to do with its role in Christ's crucifixion and its rejection of his Messianic claims. Synagogue perhaps seeks Intellect's enlightenment. But Intellect was seeking the same from Synagogue, as he has not the answer. Intellect thought that the world was ending or the Creator was suffering, but as the world seems to be continuing, and so he is leaning toward believing that the world's Creator suffered. But Synagogue resists such an idea because of its implications:

No ha sido, no ha sido,
si ya no quieres que sea
autor suyo un sedicioso
nazareno, escandaloso,
que en Palestina y Judea,
en Samaria y Galilea,
predicando aquestos días
dio a entender que era el Mesías,
Hijo de Dios verdadero,
que ha tantos siglos que espero.

It was not, it was not
Unless you want your creator
To be a seditious
Nazarene, a scandal-monger,
Who in Palestine and Judea,
In Samaria and Galilee
Preached these last days,
And gave to understand he was the Messiah,
Truly the Son of God,
Which for many centuries I've expected.

But Synagogue is anxious, if for no other reason than because the signs that all are speaking about and trying to explain occurred contemporaneously with Christ's death. And this linkage Intellect finds compelling him to believe that it was not chance that tied them with Christ's death. Synagogue suggests that Intellect may be unfaithful in leaning in that direction, daring to doubt Synagogue's divine election, so as to throw himself to believe that Christ was the Messiah.

Marc Chagall's Praying Jew

Synagogue then undertakes a long and thorough explanation of why her rejection of Jesus as the Messiah was justified, beginning with her election, her divine pedigree, her Mosaic experience, the divine grant of the Promised Land, and all the divine favors--manna from heaven, water from rock, the Red Sea miracle. How could the recipient of such divine favor err in regard to the Messiah? Synagogue then throws in some technical arguments: that the weeks of Daniel and the prophecies of Isaiah concerning the Messiah were arguably not fulfilled. Synagogue pays short shrift to the miracles of Jesus, suggesting that they were nothing but magical arts. Synagogue also wonders how Jesus could save others if he could not even save himself from the ignominious death on the Cross. And he ends his discourse with a threat:

no en el eclipse me arguyas,
que habrá para ti también
otro rencor, otra ira,
otra saña, otra esquivez,
otro azote u otro acero,
otra cruz u otro cordel.

Do not argue with me about the eclipse
Or there will be for you as well,
Another resentment, another anger
Another malice, another disdain,
Another scourge, another steel,
Another cross, and another cord.

Synagogue leaves, and Thought and Intellect converse. Thought notes that the Synagogue has the two indicia Intellect sought in his search for truth:

Que has hallado
en la Sinagoga ley.
Que adora a un Dios primer causa,
que ojos, manos y oídos es,
y con todo eso te queda
de averiguar y saber
lo que a lo posible toca.

That you have found
In the Synagogue law.
That it adores one God as First Cause,
That he is eyes, hands, and ears,
And with all this yet it remains
That you want to investigate an know
Things that may be possible.

All this is true, but Intellect is troubled. If the Synagogue awaits the Son of God, how can there be one God? Does this not suggest two? And why, to what effect, asks Intellect, would God send his Son as Synagogue believed? And how would this be done? If he came as man, would not that mean he was both God and man? How, moreover, could Jesus have introduced himself as both God and man? And if he was not both God and man as he claimed, how explain the darkness over earth's green carpet and the sky's blue canopy, that were concomitant with his funeral rites? Who was there, Intellect frustratingly asks Thought, who can answer these questions?

Lightning flashes, thunder sounds again, and a voice from the Heavens states, "Paul." Thought and Intellect by some miracle find themselves on the road to Damascus.

Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the Natural Law, Part 7

AFRICA IS DRESSED AS A MOOR, accompanied by men and women, feverishly dancing, perhaps not unlike David before the Ark or as a whirling dervish, as music sings the following refrain, one may imagine in the strains of the muezzin to come:

Bailad, africanos, bailad,
que ya se os acerca el profeta
de Alá.

Dance, Africans, dance,
As soon to you is coming the prophet
Of Allah.

Africa, we learn, has misconstrued the prodigies that accompanied the death of Christ on the Cross, and erroneously interpreted them as signs of the coming of its anticipated prophet, Muhammad.

Intellects asks her:

¿Cómo, África hermosa, el día
de tan grande sentimiento
en tierra, agua, fuego y viento,
celebras con alegría?
¿Qué causa te mueve?

How is it, beautiful Africa, in a day
Of such great expression
On earth, water, fire, and wind
You celebrate with happiness?
What is it that moves you?

Whirling Dervish

Africa recalls meeting Intellect, but cannot recall his name, and admits she does not know him well. Intellect, in a self-deprecating way, suggests that few men know him well: El Ingenio soy humano. And that introduction refreshes Africa's memory.

Africa remembers knowing Intellect in the house of Abraham, who worshiped one sovereign God, and remembers him in Ishmael, source of her monarchy. But from the time Ishmael was cast out from Abraham's tribe because he fancied some idols, she no longer remembers knowing him. Idolatry, Intellect points out, is inconsistent with his presence. But the days of idolatry appear cast aside, as Africa worships one God.

Que un Dios se ha de venerar
ni lo niego ni lo dudo.

That one ought to venerate one God
I neither deny nor doubt.

And this warms Intellect heart to Africa, so that he asks what feast they celebrate, and Africa's answer spills over into her history. She is a descendant of Ishmael and Hagar, both Ishmaelite and Hagarite, who now shuns idols and worships but one God, and yet she has no law. She worships

sin preceptos, porque espero
que de este Dios verdadero
un profeta me los dé,

Without law, because I await
That from this true God
A prophet will give them to me.

So she has been promised by her wise men(morabitos sabios). She celebrates in anticipation of this prophet's imminent coming. So the earthquake, thunder, lightning, all assuage the confident yet anxious anticipation of Muhammad's birth. After patient listening, Intellect states that if that is so, then Africa still does not know him (or his companion Thought) well.

ÁFRICA: ¿Por qué?
INGENIO Porque si buscando
hoy a un Dios vamos los dos,
adonde no hay ley no hay Dios,
y pues le estás esperando,
es precisa consecuencia
que mientras sin ley estés,
estés sin Dios, con que es
más justo hacer de ti ausencia
que no asistirte.

AFRICA: Why?
INTELLECT: Because if today us two
Are looking for one God,
Where there is no law there is no God,
And so it is that you are awaiting it,
And the precise consequence is
That while you remain without law
You are without God, in which case
It is more just for us to absent ourselves
And not assist you.

(Calderón here displays a knowledge of Islam. Generally speaking, in Islam, the only law, Shari'a (شَرِيعَةٌ), is God's revealed or positive law as contained in the Qur'an (القرآن‎ al-qur’ān) and the Hadith (الحديث al-ḥadīth) as may be interpreted by religious authority. All law is revealed. All law is will. Law is good because commanded by Allah. It is true that in the 9th century, the mu`tazilah or mutazilite school (المعتزلة al-mu`tazilah) advanced the concept that good and evil were intrinsically so, and not simply because commanded so. They saw some behaviors as good or bad in themselves, and indeed bad or good by their nature, even prior to the divine law that commands them or forbids them. The mutazilites believed that human beings could know by reason good and bad, and so it may be said that they recognized a natural law. However, this school represents a small minority in Islam. The Ash’ari school or asharites (الأشاعرة al-asha`irah), which are dominant in the Sunni orthodoxy, support a contrary theory. They propose a theory of moral occasionalism, do not recognize any consistency in nature, advance the notion that only the positive revelation of God defines good and evil, the just and the unjust, and so do not believe in the natural law. Following the majority school, then, there could not have been a natural law prior to the coming of Islam. Law only came with Muhammad. Prior to his coming, all was a state of ignorance, of Jahiliyah (جاهلية). So Intellect is right according to Islam's own teaching, Africa is worshiping one God in ignorance since they do so, in this point in history, without Law.

Africa's worship of God without law in the times of the Jahiliyah were thus, in Intellect's view, in error. "A donde no hay ley no hay Dios," where there is no law there is not God. That is as true as the Latin statement, ubi caritas, ibi Deus est, God is where love is. Thus, the presence of both love and law is evidence that God is in the room.)

Africa is, however, satisfied in her present state of lawlessness, and retreats into relativism to justify her condition. But Intellect will have none of that. If God is one, there can only be one law. He cannot be served by the anticipated law of the Muslims on the one hand, and the law of the Jew on the other or any other law for that matter. If there is one God, there must be one Law, as the law points to an end, and if the end is the same one God, all law must be one. And so for Intellect there is no cause for celebration. Africa, however, disdains argument:

A mí
no me toca disputar
ley, que espero no tener;
sólo el acero ha de ser
el que la ha de sustentar;
y así, si apurar no quieres,
mira, has de ver y callar,
vuelva a cantar y bailar
cada uno con sus mujeres.

To me
I am not disposed to dispute
Law, which I expect not to have;
Only steel is what ought to be
That which should sustain;
And so, if you do not wish to hurry,
Look, you ought to see and hush,
Return to singing and dancing,
Each one with his women.

Women? Intellect asks. Africa explains that his rite allows for polygamy, that any man may marry as many women as he can support. Thought thinks (with sarcasm? and maybe lasciviously or with incipient chauvinism?): ¡Linda ley! "Pretty law!" This concept offends the more sober Intellect, as it is to him against the natural law, nay, against even love itself, to support a contract wherein a man expects each woman to give her entire self to him, and he gives her but a portion.

Si es contrato natural
amor que confirma el trato,
¿cómo puede ser contrato
lícito el que no es igual?
¿Yo he de querer y ofender
a sus ojos lo que quiero?
¿Pues cómo ofendida espero
que no ofenda la mujer?
Si aun obligada no es prenda
segura en ellas amor,
¿cómo lo será el honor
ofendido?

If it is a natural contract
love that confirms the agreement,
How can it be a licit contract
When it is not equal?
I ought to both love and also cause offense
To the eyes of the one I love?
How, love and fairness offended, can I expect
That such a contract will not offend the woman?
Though she is obligated, she has no surety
Of love in such contracts.
How can it be with honor offended?

African polygamist

Intellect then asks Africa if the anticipated prophet will change or will preserve this barbaric law.

INGENIO ¿Y este precepto también
has de conservar en ti
venido el Profeta?
ÁFRICA Sí.

INTELLECT: And this precept will also
be preserved in you,
the Prophet having come?
AFRICA: Yes.

This clinches it for both Intellect and Thought. Not only is Africa operating under no law, and acting against natural law principles in their marriage customs, but the very prophet that they anticipate will confirm them in their barbarism.

PENSAMIENTO ¿Qué será?
INGENIO Secta.
PENSAMIENTO Y aun hongo.

THOUGHT: What is this?
INTELLECT: A Sect.
THOUGHT: And yet still a sickness.

Africa resumes her singing, refusing to entertain any more argument, and sings for the coming of her anticipated prophet, Thought joins, and Intellect mutters:

¿De un abismo en otro abismo,
dónde, Pensamiento, vas?

From one abyss into another abyss,
Where, Thought, are you going?

Thought observes that Africa has one and only God. Yet Intellect insists that they are without Law, and that is equivalent to not having God. To which Thought suggests they pay visit to the Synagogue, as it has both one God and one Law. And they see Synagogue and Paul (before his conversion) advancing.

At first, Intellect is pleased, as he remembers Paul who was his faithful friend when he studied at the school of Gamaliel. But Intellect sees Paul speaking with Synagogue enveloped in anger and zeal, and he wisely decides it is not time to speak, and retires. Thought ends the scene saying:

No es bueno lo que hablan, pues
el Ingenio se retira.

What they are speaking about is not good, as
Intellect retires.

Calderón de la Barca