‘Nature and Nature’s God’

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI was the topic of all ‘The Mail’ in The New Yorker, September 5 2005, ‘Getting to know the Pope’. Ardnt von Hippel ended his letter ‘. . . Ratzinger (circa 1990) declared that the Church was correct to condemn Galileo’s heliocentric views’. This is very odd. The Church in Galileo’s time seems to have given an entirely literal reading to Joshua 10:13, where Joshua gets extra time to kill off his enemies while God stops the sun in its tracks. The text bears witness to God’s relationship with Israel: but its ‘astronomy’ was down to the culture in which the text was written. An up-down flat earth view of things physical.

In the Galileo case the Church may – more likely – have been attempting to assert its absolute hold on human knowledge rather than upholding Holy Writ. Science was eventually entirely to escape this ecclesiastical monopoly.

Galileo’s hypothesis was correct, as everyone at the Vatican’s Observatory will now tell you. And the Higher Criticism has left the literal interpretation of the Joshua 10:13 Biblical text – among others – a matter for interpretation. I do not know why Cardinal Ratzinger – as the present Pope was – should think it any way ‘correct’ for the Church ever to have got something so very wrong.

It got it wrong, because it did not realize that it was not the only source of knowledge, and that God and His ‘Nature’ have other business afoot than Church business. God made the world before making the Church.

It is now clear that Science is not the Church’s business: it is the business of its practitioners. Its discoveries may well have real-life, real-life-moral implications. And the Church has a great deal to say about morals. Alas some of it in pre-scientific ways. Some of it properly. The task is to sort it out. Faith now, to be in good faith, needs to be C/critical.
Who Owns the Natural Law?

Taught by good Marist priests, I knew early in my education about the Natural Law, and still have Catholic texts on it on my bookshelves. ‘Apologetics’ was taught in a Cartesian way, more geometrico from ‘proofs for the existence of God’ to ‘The commandments of the Church’. So I was surprised as an undergraduate, reading a book on Natural Law by A.P. D’Entrèves, to find that its foundations lay, if at bottom in Nature, in part at least on consensus. Different cultures, trading and mixing, came up with – ‘discovered’ if you like – certain ground-rules. These were ‘certain’ by discovery, not altogether by deduction. Deductions were sparse.

Those who are more impressed than I with David Hume on ‘is and ought’ might ask why Nature – most of the ‘all that is the case’ – as fact should entail value. Into this I do not wish to go here. But: if consensus about the structure of – some – things is part of the root of the Natural Law, that law’s interpretation is a matter of common sense – in several senses of ‘common sense’ – and would not seem to be solely the province of the Church; this even if the Church sometimes lets it be thought that the Pope, ‘Infallible on Faith and Morals’ has all the say. Non-Catholics would not concede that H.H. had all the say, or the last say. Just an important bit of it. Catholics may themselves even feel it necessary to sort out what is said into the sensible and the Doctrine-aire.

If the Church ‘Owns’ neither Nature nor the Natural Law, what then?

In a ‘Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons’, October 1986, the then Cardinal Ratzinger made a number of remarks, some genial some less so. One highlights:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. (Italics Editorial)

Adequately to tease out the logical grammar of ‘intrinsic’ in ‘intrinsic moral evil’ would exceed our present space. What then of ‘objective disorder’?

Homosexuality is non-economic with respect to human reproduction. This is clearly true. But it does not follow that homosexuality is non-economic with respect to the whole larger economy of Nature. Though one cannot – at this time – point to an obvious end which it fulfils, this does not mean that there is not one. Or: homosexuality may be, or more likely be analogous to, a genetic ‘sport’. Without seemingly chance genetic changes, evolution could not, on a fairly standard theory, proceed. It does not follow of course that every genetic change is beneficial. But it might be argued – much as it is argued by some in Theodicy – ‘if you want the survival-change you must put up with the non-survival changes’. Take some bad even as a condition of some good. Not that one wishes to say that all difference is a function of defect. Difference can be just that, difference.

If homosexuality were shown to be economic – even in a ‘negative’ way – with respect to Nature as a Whole, then homosexuals would still be homosexual by Nature. (‘Nature-as-a-whole is a mere Regulative Principle of which Science at time t is a partial fulfillment.) If Homosexuals were so by N/nature, then Scholastic thinkers would be hoist on the petard of their own truism/‘metaphysical principle’ that: ‘things behave according to their nature’, ‘(after Nature)’. Inanimate things and beasts cannot but follow their nature: but if any humans are by-nature of a ‘third’ sex, then their actions would seem to be not able to be judged with respect to the – logically possibly questionable – commonplace that: ‘male/female exhausts the domain of mammalian sexuality, human sexuality’.

Cardinal Ratzinger made, in his ‘Letter’, much of ‘free-will’ a necessary but often over-convenient principle of human action, and of its possibility. If human NM was of Sex3 Sexn, what would be their obligation to behave as if of sex m, sex f, in the procreative economy? I do not know the answer to this question: but it is obvious enough that it must arise. It is not in ‘The Tradition’: but it may be in the air. It is ‘The Tradition’1 which is appealed to in the Letter, not Natural Law, but we choose here to deal with Natural Law as a topic suited to a philosopher.

The phrase ‘objective disorder’ raises the natural philosophical question ‘ “dis” with respect to what “order”?’ To the, (1) order: ‘sex as a domain is exhausted by m and f ’. Or (2), to a larger – and still fairly opaque – order of Nature? That order (1) overrides order (2) would be odd, since ‘N’ is the System S of which all other systems, including the biological, are subsets, ss, in some loose sense of ‘subset’. If Natural Law rules, then Nature is its necessary condition. As is, of course, is human n/Nature. Itself a given, with self-consciousness and a degree of moral autonomy. That homosexuals could freely act as if ‘the total domain is: m & f ’ does not of itself entail that they are obliged, morally, so to do.

*

Like Cardinal Ratzinger – as he was – I do not at all favour PoMo and its relativism. But (a), the Natural order is one in which – logically – relations must obtain: so x is relative to y on n occasions. And, (b) the Enlightenment of which PoMo’s are enemies, enjoins on us C/critical reason, and – as was so historically important – appeals to the opinion ‘of a candid world’. Vatican II was about ‘The Tradition’ in dialogue with ‘a candid world’. What happened to it?

Much relative to the Natural Law remains open, to research and to – moderated – judgement. ‘Still, it moves.’

Patrick FitzGerald Hutchings

Endnotes

1. ‘The Tradition’ in so far as it is – highly – consistent instances a coherence theory of truth. As thought of as – in some fashion – under Divine Inspiration, it scores exceptionally on the – Scholastically preferred – rule of the correspondence theory of truth. Such access to truth is so extraordinarily splendid that it may result in a disposition to foreclose issues still, yet, open. But ‘The Tradition’ is no more to be followed, uncritically, than is Holy Writ on which it is, in effect, more or less an historical commentary. ‘The Tradition’ is as liable to cultural-contextual contamination as is the text of the Bible, and so to misreading, at any time. ‘The Tradition’ itself must be carefully scrutinized with respect to the bearings which it has on ‘the course of human events’. The Reformation and Vatican II raised this issue, the one ‘negatively’, the other, positively. Resolution of these epochal events remains the task: it is still before us. It follows that it is still before The Church. As a PreSocratic might have put it: ‘You cannot swim upstream in the same river, twice’.