Angilbert (fl. ca. 840/50), On the Battle Which was Fought at Fontenoy

The Law of Christians is broken,
Blood by the hands of hell profusely shed like rain,
And the throat of Cerberus bellows songs of joy.

Angelbertus, Versus de Bella que fuit acta Fontaneto

Fracta est lex christianorum
Sanguinis proluvio, unde manus inferorum,
gaudet gula Cerberi.
Showing posts with label Religious Freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religious Freedom. Show all posts

Monday, March 26, 2012

Religious Freedom for the Church of Christ

THE ISSUE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM is cleft into two. There is the religious freedom and freedom of conscience that is part and parcel of the natural man who seeks the truth, the homo quaerens Deum. But there is also the religious freedom and freedom of conscience that arises out of the Deus quarens in homine hominem, that is to say the God who seeks man in man, God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, and the Church which he founded.

The Church was founded by Jesus Christ, and so we have to focus on who this Jesus Christ was, and what authority in heaven and earth was given him in order to understand what authority in heaven and on earth was given to the Church. As the Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith puts it in Dominus Iesus, "The Lord Jesus, before ascending into heaven, commanded his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world and to baptize all nations . . . . The Church's universal mission is born from the command of Jesus Christ and is fulfilled in the course of the centuries in the proclamation of the mystery of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the mystery of the incarnation of the Son, as saving event for all humanity." DI, 1. We have here two realities: Jesus and the Church. We shall briefly treat of who Jesus is, and then what the Church Jesus established sees herself to be.*



This reflection will take us directly into what the Protestant theologian Gerhard Kittel, in Mysterium Christi, called "das Ärgernis der Einmaligkeit," which been translated as "the scandal of particularity," the scandal of particularity of Christ.** Because of the Catholic Church's doctrine that there is a unity between Christ and his Church, the "scandal of particularity" also includes the Church. The "scandal of particularity" wholly rejects a religious indifferentism, and this "scandal of particularity" has a great effect upon the Church's understanding of her freedom as against the various States.

The Church firmly believes "that, in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, who is 'the way, the truth, and the life' (Jn 14:6), the full revelation of divine truth is given." DI, 5. She is convinced that in the revelation of God in Jesus, "the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines forth," as he is "at the same time the mediator and the fullness of all revelation." DI, 5. Jesus ushered into the history of man a new dispensation, a Christian dispensation, and this is "the new and definitive covenant," one which "will never pass away," and one which expects "no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ." God's revelation to man is fully completed in Christ. There is for man no other Savior. There is for man no other Way.

There is only one salvific economy of the One and Triune God, realized in the mystery of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, actualized with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, and extended in its salvific value to all humanity and to the entire universe: "No one, therefore, can enter into communion with God except through Christ, by the working of the Holy Spirit."

DI, 12 (quoting John Paul II, Redemptoris missio, 5)

"The Lord Jesus, the only Savior," continues Dominus Iesus, "did not only establish a simple community of disciples, but constituted the Church as a salvific mystery: he himself is in the Church and the Church is in him (cf. Jn 15:1ff.; Gal 3:28; Eph 4:15-16; Acts 9:5). Therefore, the fullness of Christ's salvific mystery belongs also to the Church, inseparably united to her Lord." In short, just as there is one mediator, there is one Church. "[T]herefore, there exists a single Church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him."* DI, 17.

The Church was given a mission by the God who revealed himself in Christ. "With the coming of the Savior Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31)." DI, 22 (citing VII, Lumen gentium, 17; JP II, Redemptoris missio, 11). "The mission of the Church is 'to proclaim and establish among all peoples the kingdom of Christ and of God, and she is on earth, the seed and the beginning of that kingdom." DI, 18 (quoting VII, Lumen gentium, 5) She has been divinely appointed to proclaim and to establish, to say and to do.

What rights, then do Jesus and his Church have against civil society, in particular against the political community which orders civil society? Those answer to that question is briefly treated in sections 424-27 of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.

Like the State, the Church manifests itself in a "visible organizational structure." It is, along with the State, a "perfect society" with all the means at its disposal for its function. (Compendium, No. 445) To be sure, the "organizational structures . . . are by nature different because of their configuration and because of the ends they pursue." (Compendium, No. 424). Their respective ends principally determine their spheres, although, since societies and the men which compose them are one and not divided, they may be some overlap. "The Second Vatican Council," the Compendium states, "solemnly reaffirmed that, 'in their proper spheres, the political community and the Church are mutually independent and self-governing.'
The Church is organized in ways that are suitable to meet the spiritual needs of the faithful, while the different political communities give rise to relationships and institutions that are at the service of everything that is part of the temporal common good. The autonomy and independence of these two realities is particularly evident with regards to their ends.
(Compendium, No. 424)

The State must not only respect the religious freedom of its citizens and of the religious bodies in which they, as demanded by the natural moral law which impels those of good will to seek truth, to accept it once recognized, and to live their life in accordance with their well-formed conscience as they travel--knowingly or in ignorance--to the one True God. The State must in particular respect the religious freedom of the Church, as a perfect society, one whose constitution and function is by divine warrant. With respect to the Church, "[t]he duty to respect religious freedom requires that the political community guarantee the Church the space needed to carry out her mission." (Compendium, No. 424) Failure to do so is against the will of God.

It should be noted that though the State and the Church have their separate spheres, this separation does not exclude overlap, nor does it exclude cooperation. In those areas that are the States, the Church has no role, but in those areas of overlap, the Church does have say, even in democratically-organized societies:

"The Church respects the legitimate autonomy of the democratic order and is not entitled to express preferences for this or that institutional or constitutional solution." nor does it belong to her to enter into questions of the merit of political programs, except as concerns their religious or moral implications.

(Compendium, No. 424 (quoting JP II, Centesimus annus, 47)

In a well-ordered society, the political community and the Church will not be at odds, but will cooperate for the benefit of the common good and salvation of souls:
The mutual autonomy of the Church and the political community does not entail a separation that excludes cooperation. Both of them, although by different titles, serve the personal and social vocation of the same human beings. The Church and the political community, in fact, express themselves in organized structures that are not ends in themselves but are intended for the service of man, to help him to exercise his rights fully, those inherent in his reality as a citizen and a Christian, and to fulfill correctly his corresponding duties. The Church and the political community can more effectively render this service "for the good of all if each works better for wholesome mutual cooperation in a way suitable to the circumstances of time and place."
(Compendium, No. 425 (quoting VII, Gaudium et spes, 76)

The Church likewise claims rights, rights which every State is duty-bound to recognize, as it is God's will as reflected in the fullest revelation of that will in Christ the Lord. We might therefore craft a sort of "Bill of Rights" of the Church as summarized by the Compendium:
  • The right to the legal recognition of her proper identity
  • The right to express her moral judgment on "all of human reality," to the extent that it may be needful to "defend the fundamental rights of the person or for the salvation of souls."
  • The right to freedom of expression
  • The right to teach and to evangelize
  • The right to worship God in a public manner
  • The right to her own organization, her own internal government, without interference from the State, including the right to select, educate, name, and transfer ministers
  • The right to construct religious buildings
  • The right to acquire and possess sufficient goods for her activity
  • The right to form associations not only for religious purposes, but also for educational, cultural, health case, and charitable purposes


This is the "elbow room" that is her right, by natural and divine law.***

The relationship between Church and State may be further ordered through agreements between them. As the Compendium concludes:

In order to prevent or attenuate possible conflicts between the Church and the political community, the juridical experience of the Church and the State have variously defined stable forms of contact and suitable instruments for guaranteeing harmonious relations. This experience is an essential reference point for all cases in which the State has the presumption to invade the Church's area of action, impairing the freedom of her activity to the point of openly persecuting her or, vice versa, for cases in which church organizations do not act properly with respect to the State.
(Compendium, No. 427)

_________________________________________
*I am dealing with the core reality of Jesus and his Church. I do not intend to address the more difficult issue of how other adherents of other religions and other Christian churches and ecclesial communions may relate to Christ and his Church and implicitly, and despite their various errors or deficiencies, may participate in a way known to God alone who desires the universal salvation of mankind, in the salvation of Christ which is to be found in his Church. See generally Dominus Iesus. These subsidiary issues, while important, do not change the central reality of Jesus and his Church which is what drives the Church's understanding of her particular religious freedom and freedom of conscience.
**The Oxford English Dictionary states (s.v. "scandal of particularity") the following:
scandal of particularity [tr. Ger. (see quots. 1930, 1936)], the difficulty of seeing the particular man, Jesus, as the universal Saviour. Cf. PARTICULARITY 1.
1930 tr. G. Kittel in Bell & Deissmann Mysterium Christi ii. 31 The scandal of particularity..is the problem of history. Can a particular historical happening be peculiar? Can it be significant sub specie aeternitatis? And above all, can this particular occurrence be either peculiar or significant? 1936 C. H. Dodd Apostolic Preaching & its Development iv. 219 ‘Like a strange people left on earth After a judgment day.’ This view of the historical status of the events comprised in the coming of Christ introduces us at once to what Professor Gerhard Kittel, in Mysterium Christi, calls ‘das Ärgernis der Einmaligkeit’, ‘the scandal of particularity’. 1961 Listener 9 Mar. 435/2 We do no service to religion by reducing either term of the problem, the total mystery of the Godhead or the scandal of particularity. 1979 C. F. D. Moule in M. D. Goulder Incarnation & Myth iv. 86 The ‘scandal of particularity’ is by no means a denial but rather a confirmation of the ubiquity and continuity of God's activity.

It should go without saying that by quoting this valuable concept, I abjure any of Kittel's anti-Semitism.
***Communist governments (e.g., China) and Islamic governments (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.) grossly violate these rights, and so, in their laws which prevent the Church from exercising freely her mission, may be said to be acting manifestly against the will of God as revealed both in the natural moral law and in divine law as contained in the Gospels. Particularly offensive are the actions of the Islamic countries which, ostensibly in name of God act against the will of God.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Religious Freedom and Freedom of Conscience

IN EXPLORING THE ISSUE OF RELIGIOUS freedom, we may conveniently divide the issue into two. The first, the issue of religious freedom as a fundamental human right. The second, the relationship between that fundamental human freedom and the Catholic Church. In this blog posting we shall deal with the first issue. In the next blog posting, we shall deal with the second.

For the first matter, we must turn to human nature which, indeed, is the source and foundation of the natural moral law, and hence also the source of human right. Man has a natural inclination, an intellectual and felt need, to seek the truth and to worship God. He has this inclination to seek the truth and to worship God irrespective of, one might say "before" coming upon, God's own revelation of Himself as Truth, and God's revelation to man as to the means of worship.

In short, there is in man a religious impulse. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: "The desire for God is written in the human heart," and this desire is satisfied only with the God that reason only outlines in the most vague way. This religious impulse, of course, is what explains the world's religions, since these represent cultural expressions of man-seeking-God, of homo quaerens Deum. We find it so beautifully displayed--albeit with admixture of error--in, for example, the writings of Plato, in Cicero, and in some of the sacred and philosophical texts of Hinduism.* In dealing with the issue of religious freedom and freedom of conscience, we are not yet dealing the God of revelation, the Deus revelatus. We are not yet dealing with the Deus quaerens hominem, the God seeking man of the Old Testament, much less the Deus quaerens in homine hominem, as St. Augustine so beautifully put it in one of his sermons, the God seeking man in man of the New Testament. (375/C)

This religious impulse or natural inclination is of the natural law, and the natural law is therefore the source of those rights, specifically, the right to religious freedom. Man, alone and with others of his kind, must be free to exercise this religious impulse, to search for the truth and for God in freedom, to find that balm of Gilead for his restless heart. It is this natural inclination that is ordered to truth and to God that the Church seeks to protect when she proclaimed in the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae the right of the person and of communities to social and civil freedom in religious matters. As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church elaborates:

In order that this freedom, willed by God and inscribed in human nature, may be exercised, no obstacle should be placed in its way, since "the truth cannot be imposed except by virtue of its own truth." The dignity of the person and the very nature of the quest for God require that all men and women should be free from every constraint in the area of religion. Society and the State must not force a person to act against his conscience or prevent him from acting in conformity with it.

Freedom of conscience and religion 'concerns man both individually and socially." The right to religious freedom must be recognized in the judicial order and sanctioned as a civil right . . . . .

(Compendium, No. 421) (quoting DH, 1; citing DH, 2, 3; CCC 2106, 2108)




Inextricably intertwined with religious freedom is the freedom of conscience, since conscience, though not infallible, is nothing less than man's internal window to God, a "window through which one can see outward to that common truth which founds and sustains us all." It is the aperture of the soul wherein man finds an "openness to the ground of his being, the power of perception for what is highest and most essential." It is the soul's route by which "the way to the redemptive road to truth," into "a 'co-knowing' with the truth" that is God, is gained. This is the conscience which Cardinal Ratzinger once described as "an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine."**

The right to religious freedom and freedom of conscience is therefore one ordered to truth and to God. It is for this reason, that the the Church distinguishes between "religious freedom" and "freedom of conscience," and what might be called "religious license" or moral libertinism. "Religious freedom is not a moral license to adhere to error," nor should it be viewed as "an implicit right to error." (Compendium, No. 421) (citing CCC 2108) It is ordered to the truth and to good, ultimately God who is the source of both truth and good.

Properly understood, therefore, freedom of conscience and of religion "is not of itself an unlimited right." (Compendium, No. 422)

What, then, are the just limits of this freedom?
The just limits of the exercise of religious freedom must be determined in each social situation with political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority through legal norms consistent with the objective moral order.
(Compendium, No. 422)

The "objective moral order" is a reference to the natural law. Therefore, there is no religious freedom or freedom of conscience that would justify a right to breach the natural moral law. Consequently, the just limits of religious freedom or freedom of conscience may include prohibitions of practices against, or offensive to, the natural moral law. For example, it would not be a violation of religious freedom or freedom of conscience to prohibit polygamy or family intermarriage, human or animal sacrifice, or religions that practiced offensive sexual religious rituals or which advocated assassination, violence, or disobedience to positive laws that were in accord with natural law.

The reason behind imposing just limits on freedom of religion and of conscience relates to the public order and the common good:

Such norms are required by "the need for the effective safeguarding of the rights of all citizens and for the peaceful settlement of conflicts of rights, also by the need for an adequate care of genuine public peace, which comes about when men live together in good order and in true justice, and finally by the need for a proper guardianship of public morality."

(Compendium, No. 422) (quoting DH, 7).

Since the natural moral law binds all men regardless of confession, and since religious freedom and freedom of conscience find their source in the natural moral law itself, it is reasonable to impose upon all men limits based upon that natural moral law. In other words, religious freedom and freedom of conscience (which are founded on the natural moral law) do not provide freedom or license for beliefs or acts that are contrary to that very same natural moral law.

Finally, the Church recognizes the intrinsic historical and cultural ties that a religious tradition may have with a people, and recognizes that the common good might allow for "special recognition" of that reality. Thus, the Church might recognize that the natural moral law would not be violated if special recognition were given to Islam in Saudi Arabia, Hinduism in India, Catholicism in Malta, or a more vague Christianity in the United States. These would be justified because of those particular religions' ties to those countries. But even so, religious freedom and freedom of conscience survive such "special recognition."
Such norms are required by "the need for the effective safeguarding of the rights of all citizens and for the peaceful settlement of conflicts of rights, also by the need for an adequate care of genuine public peace, which comes about when men live together in good order and in true justice, and finally by the need for a proper guardianship of public morality."
(Compendium, No. 423) (quoting JPII, Message for the 1999 World Day of Peace, 5)

____________________________________________
*I have in mind in particular the Katha Upanishad VI.12:
Not by speech, not by mind,
Not by sight can He be apprehended.
How can He be comprehended
Otherwise than by one's saying "He is"? . . .
I also have in mind the Shvetashvatara Upanishad III.7, 9:
Higher than this is Brahman. The Supreme, the Great,
Hidden in all things, body by body,
The One embracer of the universe--
By knowing Him as Lord, men become immortal.
. . . .
Than whom there is naught else higher,
Than whom there is naught smaller, naught greater.
Quotes from Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, eds., A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1957). I find the former eerily similar to the revelation of God to Moses, and the latter reminiscent of St. Anselm's ontological proof of God. Hinduism is, of course, an eclectic hodgepodge of a religion, and includes sects within it which are crassly materialistic as well as some which reach very near the heights of monotheism, and all sorts in between.
**Joseph Ratzinger, On Conscience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), passim. One cannot understand the Church's teaching on religious freedom without understanding what she means by "conscience." This is not a word by which one can excuse all manner of beliefs and activities, one's wishes, desires, tastes, or society's conventions. As the Puritan Thomas Brooks captured the concept it in his epistle "The Privy Key of Heaven": "Conscience is God's deputy, God's spy, God's notary, God's viceroy." Thomas Brooks, The Complete Words of Thomas Brooks, "The Privy Key of Heaven"(London: James Nisbet & Co., 1866), Vol. 2, p. 150.

It is also valuable to reflect on conscience along the lines of the Platonic anamnesis, which Ratzinger in his reflection does, or as a dim memory of Eden or an implanted proto-monotheism or urmonotheismus, as did the linguist, anthropologist, and ethnologist Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt, S.V.D.

In the words of Orestes Brownson:
The soul appears to every nice observer to retain traces of a lost grandeur, and to be filled with an undying regret for what once was, but is no longer, hers. She appears to be tortured by her reminiscences. Even before illumined by faith, she regards herself as expelled from her early home, as an exile from her native country, and a sojourn-er in a strange land. She bears with her the secret memory of a lost paradise, for which she sighs, and with her recollections of which, dim and fading though they be, she contrasts whatever she finds in the land of her exile. What is the poetry of all nations but the low wail or wild lament of the soul over her lost Eden, the music in which she expresses the wearisomeness of her banishment, and her longing to return and dwell again in the sweet bowers of her early youth, of her childhood's home?
Orestest Brownson, "Admonitions to Protestants No. 3," Brownson's Quarterly Review (July 1848). Pascal referred to this as the feeling of unsettledness, unhappiness even, coming from the fact that we have fallen from a better nature that was once us, we are, as it were, fallen royalty. This is the "greatness" and yet the "wretchedness" of man. But it is what spurs him on, his hound of heaven:
In order to make man happy, it must prove to him that there is a God; that we ought to love Him; that our true happiness is to be in Him, and our sole evil to be separated from Him; it must recognize that we are full of darkness which hinders us from knowing and loving Him; and that thus, as our duties compel us to love God, and our lusts turn us away from Him, we are full of unrighteousness. It must give us an explanation of our opposition to God and to our own good. It must teach us the remedies for these infirmities, and the means of obtaining these remedies. Let us therefore examine all the religions of the world, and see if there be any other than the Christian which is sufficient for this purpose.
Pensées, No. 430. To preserve and allow for this Pascalian search for happiness, which first leads to the God of the philosophers and then quickly progresses further to the God of Christianity, is the reason for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. This uniquely human quest, this yearning for the Other, for the First Cause, for the One, the Good, the Beautiful, for the I am Who am, ultimately for the Triune God and communion with Him by Grace, is the most valuable human endeavor, greater far than any earthly good. It is therefore, the right of rights.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Freedom and Law: Pope Leo XIII's Libertas praestantissimum, Part 6

FREEDOM OF RELIGION, OF SPEECH AND THE PRESS, and of conscience are considered to be staples of modern political and civil organization in the Western and Western-style democracies. Though there is an authentic freedom of worship, of conscience, and of speech and the press, there is, in Pope Leo XIII's view, also an inauthentic or counterfeit freedom of religion, conscience, and speech, one based upon a misunderstanding of man. The misunderstanding stems from man's supposed autonomy from the natural law and the divine law. Some advocates of such extensive civil rights insist that these freedoms are beyond the reach of the natural or divine law: that these are temples where no man or even God can reach, or, what is the same thing, that such untrammeled freedom of religion, conscience, and speech are themselves mandated by the natural or divine law and so the natural law or divine law precludes any curb--individual or social--upon their exercise.

In his analysis of these liberties or freedom, Leo XIII does not begin with the liberty or freedom, but with its related virtue or good. Thus, with respect to the liberty of worship, he starts with the virtue of religion. LP, 19. With regard to the liberty of speech and and related liberties, he begins with truth. LP, 23. In approaching the rights of conscience, he begins with the duty of man to God. LP, 30. The only means of understanding these freedoms or these liberties is to understand their end. These freedoms are not without their end or purpose, and it is only in reference to their end that they, and any proper limits to them, can be understood. As Pope Leo XIII had earlier indicated, freedom does not consist in the liberty to do wrong, but freedom is the liberty to do right. The freedom of worship is the freedom to worship rightly. The freedom of speech is the freedom to speak truthfully. The freedom of conscience is the freedom conscientiously to determine and follow objective good. Another way of looking at it is to analyze the freedoms from the perspective of their analogous duty. The freedom of worship is tied to the duty to worship the one true God, and not idols of our own making. The freedom of speech is tied to the duty to speak the truth, and not to lie. The freedom of conscience is tied to the duty to form one's conscience in accordance, not with whim, not based upon subjective preference, but upon the foundation of an objective moral reality.

The liberty of worship that Leo XIII analyzes is a one that is based "on the principle that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none." LP, 19 (emphasis added). In assessing this freedom, Leo XIII points to what is "without doubt" man's "chiefest and holiest" duty, officiis . . . sine dubitatione maximum ac sanctissimum, which is the duty "to worship God with devotion and piety." LP, 20. Moreover, the choice of worship is not up to individual whim: the natural law and reason both give guidance here, and impose an affirmative moral duty on man:
And if it be asked which of the many conflicting religions it is necessary to adopt, reason and the natural law unhesitatingly tell us to practice that one which God enjoins, and which men can easily recognize by certain exterior notes, whereby Divine Providence has willed that it should be distinguished, because, in a matter of such moment, the most terrible loss would be the consequence of error.
LP, 20. Consequently, a liberty of religion that is framed as a liberty where "every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none," is palpably false. The choice of religion is not an autonomous choice, a choice or exercise of will with no duty but to ourselves and to our whim. It is a choice with a duty, a duty imposed by reason and the natural law. The duty is to the true God. The suggestion that man has the liberty of religion defined as a liberty to manufacture an idol of his own hand, or, if he is more sophisticate, and idol of his own mind, is to suggest that "the power is given him to pervert or abandon with impunity the most sacred of duties, and to exchange the unchangeable good for evil." LP, 20. The sort of notion of religious liberty that Leo XIII condemned is the one espoused by Justice Anthony Kennedy in the "sweet-mystery-of-life" (so-sarcastically referred to by Justice Scalia) passage in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and which he has been justly ridiculed as "New Age jurisprudence" (Robert Bork), "open-ended validation of subjectivism" (William Bennett), "gaseously" written (George Will), or a "thing of almost infinite plasticity" (Michael Uhlman), or as the editors of First Things called it, the "notorious mystery passage":
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
Justice Holmes, in his famous dissent in Lochner v. New York, stated that the "14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Spencer's Social Statics." Well neither, one should have thought, did the 14th Amendment enact Sartre's existentialism. I would call Justice Kennedy's "sweet-mystery-of-life" passage as--fittingly--nauseous, "nauseous words past mentioning or bearing." (Byron) For Leo XIII, these are the words of a man--probably through sheer philosophical ignorance or obtuseness or mindless acceptance of convention--which adopt Lucifer's "rebellious cry," and consequently substitutes "for true liberty what is sheer and most foolish license." LP, 14. One can virtually hear the voices of demons a-Maying, dancing as in a Mayfest around a phallic maypole, and chanting in dissipated glee and the rising of he coming mayhem:
La nausée reprend le pouvoir
La nausée reprend le pouvoir
La nausée reprend le pouvoir
La nausée reprend le pouvoir

Neo-Pagans celebrating the "Sweet-Mystery-of-Life"
before the Nausea sets in

The natural law obliges man to search for the truth in religious doctrine, to use all his tools at his disposal to seek for the truth, including both reason and prayer, and, if found, adopt and embrace the religion one believes to be true. That is the liberty protected by liberty of religion. There is no natural right to create our own religion, to create our own god, and to manufacture our own reality, as if religion is nothing other than ordering a Martini instead of a Bellini.

There is a concomitant duty upon the State equally to recognize God, to render homage to God, and to profess that religion which alone is true. Leo XIII labels as "manifestly false," the notions that "the State has no duties toward God, or that such duties, if they exist, can be abandoned with impunity." LP, 21.
[C]ivil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness-namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.

Quamobrem Deum civilis societas, quia societas est, parentem et auctorem suum agnoscat necesse est, atque eius potesta tern dominatumque vereatur et colat. Vetat igitur iustitia, vetat ratio atheam esse, vel, quod in atheismum recideret, erga varias, ut loquuntur, religiones pari modo affectam civitatem, eademque singulis iura promiscue largiri.
LP, 21. There will be, Leo XIII warns, a loss of liberty that will be engendered by a false notion of liberty of worship which relativizes all religions, which acts indifferently toward them, which advances a notion that religious truth and cult is what we craft and not what we discover. Religion conduces to pure morals and pure morals to liberty. Praetermittimus quantum religio bonis moribus conducat, et quantum libertati mores boni. LP, 22. In fact, if Leo XIII is to be believed, our false notions of freedom of religion and the rejection of any strict obligation, both individual and communal, to God and to objective truth in religion will lead to our demise because it will corrupt morals: "Reason shows, and history confirms the fact, that the higher the morality of States; the greater are the liberty and wealth and power which they enjoy." LP, 22.

(continued)

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Charter of Natural Rights

JACQUES MARITAIN PROVIDES us a summary, a charter, as it were, of fundamental natural rights in Section I of Chapter 4 of the book Natural Law: Reflections on Theory and Practice.

Enumerated, they are as follows:
  1. The right to existence and life.
  2. The right to personal freedom or to conduct one's own life as master of oneself and of one's acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community.***
  3. The right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life.
  4. The right to keep one's body whole (i.e., bodily integrity).
  5. The right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual.
  6. The right to marry according to one's choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it.****
  7. The right of association.
  8. The respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society.*
"All these rights," Maritain insists, "are rooted in the vocation of the person," that is, the vocation proper to "a spiritual and free agent," a vocation which is ordered and rooted in "absolute values and to a destiny superior to time." Maritain, 78.

This enumeration of rights bear some similarity to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence. Yet one must be aware of differences in rendition. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man** was rationalistic in origin. The American Declaration of Independence is somewhat more classical and Christian in character, though it to is marked or marred by the "influence of Locke and 'natural religion.'" Maritain, 78. The rationalism of the French version made the natural law "no longer an offspring of creative wisdom, but a revelation of reason unto itself," and thus changed natural law into "a code of absolute and universal justice inscribed in nature and deciphered by reason as an ensemble of geometric theorems or speculative data." Maritain, 78. Law and justice therefore became more like mathematics, geometry, and physics, and less like philosophy, music, or art. In Maritain's view, the blame is not to be placed entirely on the philosophes, but also on the leadership--civil and ecclesiastic--that supported the Ancien Régime, or, more precisely, refused to correct the corruption of Christian principles that had become ossified. The Christian bones of the French ruling bodies had become brittle, their hearts sclerotic, and their ears deaf to the plight of their neighbor. Maritain really believes the controversial proposition that the "consciousness of the rights of the person [in revolutionary France] really has its origin in the conception of man and of natural law established by centuries of Christian philosophy." Maritain, 79. I feel rather guarded about the accuracy of that statement.


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*Maritain does not put this in "right" form.
**For an English translation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, click here. For the text in French, click here.
***Maritain elaborates with respect to religious freedom:
The first of these rights is that of the human person to make its way towards its eternal destiny along the path which its conscience has recognized as the path indicated by God. With respect to God and truth, one has not the right to choose according to his own whim any path whasoever, he must choose the true path, in so far as it is in his power to know it. But with respect to the State, to the temporal community and to the temporal power, he is free to choose his religious path at his own risk, his freedom of conscience is a natural inviolable right.
Maritain, 79.
****Maritain elaborates on the rights of the family:
Here [in the family] the person is no longer considered merely an individual person. It is by virtue of the fact that it is part of a group that special rights are accorded at the same time to it and to the group in question. The rights of the family, the rights of the human person as father or mother of the family, belong to natural law in the strictest sense of the word.
The same must be said of the rights and liberties of spiritual and religious families, which are at the same time the rights and liberties of the person in teh spiritual and religious order. These rights and liberties belong to natural law--not to mention the superior right which the Church invokes by reason of her divine foundation.
Maritain, 80.