Month: March 2013

Dylan Pahman

At Ethika Politika today, I examine the recent critique by David Bentley Hart in the most recent issue of First Things of the use of natural law in public discourse in my article, “Natural Law, Public Policy, and the Uncanny Voice of Conscience.” Ultimately, I offer a measured critique—somewhat agreeing with, but mostly critical of Hart’s position—pointing out Hart’s oversight of the vital role of conscience in classic natural law theory.

What I find so bizarre, and have for some time now, is the relative ambivalence, at best, of many contemporary Orthodox writers when it comes to natural law. Hart, for example, hints that he might approve of natural law reasoning so long as all parties involved hold to a metaphysic that acknowledges “a harmony between cosmic and moral order, sustained by the divine goodness in which both participate.” However, even then he is not clear. Indeed, he begins his article by writing,

There is a long, rich, varied, and subtle tradition of natural law theory, almost none of which I find especially convincing, but most of which I acknowledge to be—according to the presuppositions of the intellectual world in which it was gestated—perfectly coherent. (emphasis mine)

Hart is not alone among Orthodox writers in this regard. With the notable exceptions of Stanley Harakas, Tristram Engelhardt, and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (if there are others I apologize for my ignorance), contemporary Orthodox writers scarcely have employed natural law in their social ethics, if they even endorse it at all. Often it gets thrown under the bus in ill-advised false dichotomizing between all that is Eastern and therefore wonderful and all that is Western and therefore overly rationalistic.

The reason I find this all bizarre is that even looking only to the Greek fathers one can very easily find widespread endorsement of some form of natural law reasoning. The most prominent, perhaps, would be St. John Chrysostom, who I quote from his Homilies on the Statues 12.9 in my Ethika Politika piece. One can find him speaking of the law of nature in his Homilies on Romans quite extensively as well. Furthermore, St. John of Damascus writes that “evil is not any essence nor a property of essence, but an accident, that is, a voluntary deviation from what is natural into what is unnatural, which is sin” (An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.20). And a text attributed to St. Maximos the Confessor in the Philokalia states that the function “of the natural law is to grant equal rights to all men in accordance with natural justice” (Various Texts 2.41). I could, in fact, go on and on ad nausium, but I will stop at this point.

While it may be that there are important differences between a Thomist understanding of natural law and an Orthodox understanding of natural law, the historic difference is most assuredly not that Thomists accept it while the Orthodox do not. Furthermore, there often seems to be little care in differentiating between Enlightenment versions of the natural law, which may in fact be overly rationalistic, and other Western versions, such as the Thomist articulation, rooted in Christian convictions and augmented by faith.

All this, I suspect, has led to the relative cacophony among Orthodox writers with regards to social thought more generally. For example, without natural law, what basis do we have for the rule of law in political matters? Or, without natural law, what basis do we have for declaiming fraud, exploitation, and other forms of theft in economic matters? If, according to Hart, what the fathers assumed to be basic dictates of conscience actually require “an apocalyptic interruption” for anyone to grasp, public engagement in our pluralistic society without the natural law would, itself, be “a hopeless cause” … but perhaps that explains the current cacophony, at least in part.

Wesley Pruden

The new pope is a puzzle to nearly everybody, particularly to the politicians, pundits and other know-it-alls. He looks and sounds like a remnant of a previous time, thrown up in the squalid swamp of a trashy and superficial age. He’s not at all hip and “with it.” He’s not interested in “moving forward,” as in the current cliche. He projects humility and kindness and speaks of his Christian faith as if he really believes in the amazing grace of the Gospel. This makes the intellectual elites, and even some “holy men” of the various bureaucracies of modern Christendom, incredulous, nervous and embarrassed.

The elites are willing to tolerate religious faith as long as a believing Christian keeps it to himself and never acts on it or even talks about it. It’s OK, barely, to be a “cultural Christian,” who often isn’t really a Christian at all as Christ defined the faith in the New Testament. The new pope rebukes this synthetic Christianity, urging a return to “the Christ of the Cross” who came to redeem humankind with a sacrificial death on Calvary. This puts Pope Francis clearly at odds with cultural Christians who would reduce the faith of our fathers to a catechism lifted from the pages of The New York Times.

“I don’t think he’s what we need right now in the Catholic Church Madeline Cuomo, the sister of the current governor of New York and member of a powerful family with a lot of the vowels in their name that Daddy Cuomo imagined kept him out of the White House, tells Crain’s New York Business magazine. “We’re looking to move the Church forward, with gay marriage and women priests. He’s going to turn back the clock.”

Her father, Mario Cuomo, a former governor himself, offers more unsolicited advice for the new pope, with an avuncular pat on the head: “The way he’s lived has been simple and admirable, but it has not taught him how to deal with the high pressure of huge problems in the Church … The whole question of women, the question of marriage — not even the question of same-sex marriage, which is a recent development — but the whole idea of priests not being allowed to be married. That’s led to a lot of unhappy relationships and ugly relationships by people who are basically sick. That’s something this new pope will have to deal with.”

And he had better deal with it at once, and deal with it in the “forward” way that will please those for whom the Cuomos, pere and fille, speak.

Women, wedding bells and furtive sex are much on the mind of the new pope’s critics and tutors. Some of them obviously expected a lady, perhaps someone nominated by the National Organization for Women, to succeed Benedict XVI. (Hillary Rodham Clinton was currently between engagements, and as a Methodist she could have been a two-fer, a bow not only to feminism but to the spirit of ecumenical sisterhood.)

The media, big and little, insist on running everything through the filter of the modern, the secular and the political. The Associated Press, perhaps being deliberately provocative, suggests that the election of Francis might have been, if not illegal, at least offensive to “international standards for the election of a world leader.”

The Associated Press man at the State Department asked the department spokeswoman whether she “thinks the election of the pope was OK. [Does it meet] the free and fairness standard? No, I’m curious. I mean, and with all due respect. I’m not accusing the Vatican of doing anything improper, but you seem to take issue with theocracies in places like Iran, and you celebrate the theocracy in the Vatican.” This exchange followed:

The State Department flack: “He is the head of the [Catholic] Church.”

The reporter persisted: “Is it then correct that the United States does not take a position on whether the election of the pope was free and fair and transparent? Without universal suffrage …”

The State Department spokesman, after further research, returned to the podium to say that since the government regards Vatican City a sovereign juridical state, if a request from the international organization monitoring elections were to “come forward, we would take it very seriously.”

The question was hardly off the wall, whence come so many press questions. President Harry S. Truman, a Baptist, tried to recognize the Vatican just after World War II, but outraged objections on First Amendment grounds from Protestants and others prevailed. Religion and the Constitution were taken more seriously then. Ronald Reagan succeeded in 1985, and the U.S. has since recognized the Catholic Church as its diplomatic equal.

Odd, but true.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.