Contra Gentiles: SCG
Summa Theologiae: ST
Commentaria in Libros Aristoteles de Caelo et Mundo: Comm. De Caelo
Commentary on the Gospel of St. John: Comm. St. John
In Librum Beati Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus Expositio: DN
Scriptum Super Sententiis: In Sent.
De Ente et Essentia: De Ente
Quaestiones Disputate de Potentia Dei: De Pot.
De Veritate: DV
1
Quiet Homes: The Paradox of Freedom
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.1
Freedom is as much an accomplishment as a given,2 a non-temporal consequence of the intellectual-spiritual nature of human existence in its journey across time. The will follows upon human intentionality whether or not a choice of consequences is involved. We are in a situation at all because we are by nature free. We are in this situation as a consequence of our own, and others, freedom, though not at all necessarily as a result of choice. Being-in-a-situation is not the negation of freedom but the necessary prerequisite of freedom.3 The essence of freedom is identical to the paradoxical essence of human being,4 located in its natural intentionality: to be-come what I am, I must be-come what I am not: this is a necessity flowing from the radical non-necessity qua contingency of my being and action. My essence is not finished, a “done deal,” a made thing. It must be achieved. This “must” is the sign and guarantee of my freedom. Freedom is a primordial given, but more a lifelong struggle to accomplish. The long historical failure to distinguish these aspects, without absorbing or reducing the one into the other, leads to the muddle of opposing and equally fatuous theories of freedom, choice, and determinism. We may or may not be “responsible” for our situation. That is not the fundamental point. It is because, and only because, we are free that we have—must have—a situation. Cancel the situation and we cancel freedom. Both subjectivism and traditional objectivism fail miserably and utterly in understanding this. Thus, immanence and transcendence are not opposed.5 The transcendent act is not a merely transitive act.6 For the ultimate is attained not by corporeal steps but by the movement of the heart.7 And like a garden, freedom requires nurture, development, pruning, weeding. The given of human nature is a seed, not a fruit. Liberty is a tree: arbitrio/arbor: the free act is the rooted act, not, contra Gide,8 the gratuitous act. Freedom as accomplishment unites body and soul, and ethical, social, political freedom require the careful gardener. In this sense, politics and ethics are “a posteriori” while moral sensibility is “a priori.” Personal-social-political unity requires subordination to an underlying elan, towards a pure and purely Other, reversing in some sense and uniting in another sense, Bergson’s open and closed societies, for Being is the unitary root of the elan vital, of the gardens of society and the mystical soul where theoria reveals itself as praxis. The free ethical act is not “knowledge” in the sense of being in possession of the prescriptive rulebook; rather is it, to paraphrase Lonergan, freedom from the rulebook.9
The Predicament of the Natural Law
For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them. . . . When the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.10
The ethical life rooted in the natural law envisions a number of things, one of which is happiness, albeit a peculiar faith-demanding sort which must be distinguished from affectivity and pleasure and yet not isolated from them; fulfilled, in fact, by them in love.11 This love fulfills because it abolishes the speculative distance of the intellect.12 The intellect chastens the will so that the will achieves a martyrological violence, not to itself but to the intellect to which it had first and long-since surrendered. Such happiness invokes submission and rebellion, and the lines between the two are more blurred than one might even imagine. Our abidance by and adherence to the natural law requires us to become the delicate weight in the swinging pendulum between an affective dominance and an over-intellectualization of act-into-conceptio, somehow striking an unearthly middle ground—human flourishing.13 Happiness is triggered by the immediacy of the will but agonically lengthened into a distance by the intellect—into an end to be achieved, a teleological goal—which must turn away from and somehow retain this initial will-based trigger. It is precisely this “turning away” which initiates the ethical system, thus inevitably conceiving it as an imposition. In this jarring of orders, everything carries purpose unto glory; all persist with clean lines and harmony raised by the unseemly, uneven and forgotten. Ours is an order offering up its own iniquity, and yet it retains its beauty as neither figmentary nor spectral. 14 By its “imposition” ethics is, from the outset, a preparation for judgment. Because ethical meaning places us in the enactment of time as a participant, a moving finger that writes and then moves on15 in the order of things, all ethical action seeks the imprimatur of the Other. Even if an ethical system devolves into a progressivist materialist egoism where otherness is affirmed as nothing more than mere ontical validity—as token gratuity or obstacle—all imposition, by being artifice-intelligence, sustains itself because it invokes judiciary vision, requiring something other from the world than the world. Underneath all the falsehoods is the unstripped natural law; its placement lifts us from the world and strips us down; it is a supernatural ratification as much as it is a sacrificial disrobing of our being.
They must be stripped bare of all those things before they are tried; for they must stand their trial dead. Their judge also must be naked, dead, beholding with very soul the very soul of each immediately upon his death, bereft of all his kin and having left behind on earth all that fine array, to the end that the judgement may be just.16
The law is said to be “natural” and yet it opens the door to the meaning of our nature precisely because it must lift us out of our natural connaturality,17 reclaiming a new nature in order for it to be so enacted. We are seeking instead to step back, to reside in the ground before the imposition of the natural law becomes identical to the ethical-political structure it guides; before it takes on the character of habit from which, for Saint Thomas, it is distinct:
A thing may be called a habit in two ways. First, properly and essentially: and thus the natural law is not a habit. For it has been stated above (I-II:90:1 ad 2) that the natural law is something appointed by reason, just as a proposition is a work of reason. Now that which a man does is not the same as that whereby he does it: for he makes a becoming speech by the habit of grammar. Since then a habit is that by which we act, a law cannot be a habit properly and essentially. Secondly, the term habit may be applied to that which we hold by a habit: thus, faith may mean that which we hold by faith. And accordingly, since the precepts of the natural law are sometimes considered by reason actually, while sometimes they are in the reason only habitually, in this way the natural law may be called a habit. Thus, in speculative matters, the indemonstrable principles are not the habit itself whereby we hold those principles, but are the principles
