Juan Luis Lorda Iñarra - Beyond Good Intentions: The Art of Christian Living

From the original Spanish Moral: El Arte de Vivir 2006 Ediciones Palabra, S.A., Madrid, Spain, 1993 Juan Luis Lorda. Translated by Raul Alessandri and Bernard Browne and reprinted with permission.

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CONTENTS

Every book has its own story, and every reader has a right to know something about it.

This book had its origin when Professor Luis de Moya suffered a terrible accident that made it impossible to continue teaching his course on moral theology and I had to step in for him. I prepared a brief course presenting Christian morals as best I could. I had some prior ideas. I wanted to show that morality is linked to our natural human feelings and can lead us to fulfillment. So I taught the classes, answered questions, made notes of students criticisms and suggestions.

Then I thought of writing a book. It seemed to me that this would be the right time, considering how many books on ethics are already available that try to offer a substitute for Christian morality, with greater or less success.

I once read an interview with film director George Lucas in which he said he tried to make movies hed like to see. In writing this book, Ive adopted the same good idea. I like books that are brief, profound, well organized and easy to read. A book on morals needs to show the reasonableness and beauty of Christian living and encourage readers to improve. Thats what I have tried to do. I have done a lot of rewriting, for a book is a work of art, not just a bowl of ideas but more like a painted landscape in which each stroke requires consideration (to be in the right place) and must be corrected many times.

Within the limitations of its few pages and simple approach, this little volume does not confine itself to repeating well-known ideas. If it has any value, thats because it presents ideas in circulation among people whove tried to present a positive and responsible approach to morality. Christian reflection of this sort has been particularly rich in recent years, culminating in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor of John Paul II. (At the conclusion, I list some of the sources Ive used.)

So that is this books history, and why I chose to dedicate it to Luis de Moya.

JUAN LUIS LORDA

PAMPLONA, SPAIN, 2006

I

TRUTH

The five chapters of this first part explain (1) what morality is, and how the moral sense arises and develops as a person reaches maturity; and (2) the goods and duties that provide the basis for human choices. This leads to (3) the role of conscience, including values and the order of priority among them; (4) human weakness, including the strange and mysterious conflict between what one is and what one ought to be; and finally (5) freedom, the framework in which morality exists and is realized.

Part I is titled Truth because all the elements considered lead to knowledge of the truth and the possibility of acting according to itwalking in the truth, as St. Teresa might have said, or living in the truth, as Vaclav Havel or Pope John Paul II would put it. The moral life as a whole consists of the effort to live in accordance with the truth of things and of man.

We need to begin with what morality is not in order to explain later what morality is. Unless the prejudices and misunderstandings are removed, we cant move forward.

People speak of morality all the time: in the family, with friends, at work, in the media, in government. Everyone is interested because everyone is affected, and everyone has something to say. That makes it both difficult and easy to talk about morality. Easy because everyone has an opinionwhich in turn makes it hard to get others to listen and agree. About no other topic do people argue so much. The clashing opinions rule out compromise. This lends support to the notion that right and wrong exist in the realm of personal opinion, where each individual can and should think as he likes and no particular opinion can be imposed. The only consensus, it seems, is that nothing is certain here.

In scientific and technical fields that deal with objective matters, sure knowledge is possible and there are few opinions: one either knows or does not know a matter of fact. He or she who knows the facts gets to say what they are. But in art and in morality its apparently different: instead of facts, were dealing with feelings and preferences, interests or points of view. Everything is subjective, a matter of opinion.

Morality also seems to vary with peoples, cultures, and eras. This makes it seem even more unstable and provisional. People today have the sense of living in a new epoch that has moved beyond the morality of ages past. Traditional morality in the West, which used to have a Christian foundation, seems to have been superseded. The image of it that remains is quite negative and strange, though somewhat vague inasmuch as people dont really know what it was. Traditional morality for too many consists of a set of normsfixed, strict commandments, especially in sexual mattersthat people learned while growing up and that kept them more or less repressed all their lives, worrying about whether they would end up in heaven or hell.

Christian morality, according to this thinking, could be compared to a pinball game. Life begins when the metal ball starts its run, and it proceeds as the ball meanders here or there, gaining or losing points. At the end, the points are added up, and if you have enough points, you win a prize. Otherwise you lose. And so also with Christian morality: total up the sins and good actions, then go to heaven or to hell.

By this standard, weve made considerable progress. Society has sloughed off excessive restrictions and achieved a much freer and open mentality. Progress apparently has come from getting rid of those external, arbitrary norms designed and imposed by narrow-minded people in order to keep everybody under control. As the old joke said, everything thats good is either fattening or a sin. Morality like that seems to be a thing of the past. Prohibitions and repressions have disappeared, and the world keeps going around just as it always has.

With that mountain of precepts overcome, the only moral principle remaining for most people is good intentions. A good person has good intentions, and thats enough. Then you can act and think however you want, provided you let your neighbor do the same.

What a person wants to do with his life is thus a private matter, and nobody else can enter someone elses private life without authorization. No one can set himself up as judge of his neighbors morals or place restrictions on the other fellow beyond those arising from the clash of individual rights, where its the job of government to adjudicate. (But the minimum regulation required for peaceful coexistence is best, with good intentions otherwise sufficient.)