John Lawrence Hill - After the natural law : how the classical worldview supports our modern moral and political values

AFTER THE NATURAL LAW

John Lawrence Hill

How the Classical Worldview
Supports Our Modern Moral
and Political Values

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations (except those within citations) are from the Revised Standard Version of the BibleSecond Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition)
2006 by the National Council of the Churches of Christ
in the United States of America.
All rights reserved.

Cover images from us.fotolia.com

Cover design by Carl E. Olson

2016 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-017-2 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-700-6 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2015930773
Printed in the United States of America

To my children, Ananda, Gwyneth, John, and Devin

The Sea of Faith ,

Was once, too, at the full, and round earths shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furld .

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar ,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear ,

And naked shingles of the world .

Matthew Arnold

The Origins of Western Philosophy

Materialism

The Moral and Political Consequences of Early Materialism

The Fate of Materialism

Plato and the Teleological Worldview

Naturalizing Teleology: Aristotle

Aristotles Ethical Philosophy: Teleology and Virtue Ethics

The Stoics: The Origins of the Natural Law

The Limits of (Greek) Philosophy

Thomas Aquinas: Christianity Meets Aristotle

Aquinas Ethical Theory

The Natural Law

Natural Law and the Dilemma of Moral Obligation

Three Objections to Natural Law Considered

Introduction: The Significance of the Self

The Materialist and Platonic Theories of the Soul

The Hylomorphic Theory of the Person

St. Augustine and Free Will

Aquinas Theory of Decision Making

The Care of the Self: Moral Virtue and the Psychological Integration of the Person

William of Ockham and the Rise of Nominalism

Descartes: Between Two Worlds

John Locke and the Decline of the Natural Law

Thomas Hobbes: The Rebirth of Materialism

Dualism and Its Discontents: Descartes and the Rationalist Tradition

Dissolving the Substance of the Person: Locke, Hume, and the Empiricist Tradition

From the Spiritual Soul to the Secular Self

Dissolving the Secular Self

The Self in Modern Psychology

The Triumph of Materialism?

Broken Machines

The Classical Theory of Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment

The Decline of Free Will in Modern Thought

Indeterminism

Scrapping Freedom and Responsibility: Hard Determinism

Redefining Freedom and Responsibility: Soft Determinism

Natural Law without Teleology

Moral Objectivity without Natural Law: Utilitarianism

Some Problems with Utilitarianism

Kantian Morality

The Slide into Moral Subjectivism

The Triumph of Nihilism

The Divorce of Law and Morality

Freedom and the Natural Law

Free Will and Liberty

Responsibility

Human Dignity

In 1948 the Atlantic Monthly published a remarkable essay by the philosopher W. T. Stace, a man of little religious sentiment. His essay, Man against Darkness, opened with a startling pronouncement: The Catholic bishops of America have recently issued a statement in which they said that the chaotic and bewildered state of the modern world is due to mans loss of faith, his abandonment of God and religion. For my part I believe in no religion at all. Yet I entirely agree with the bishops. Stace went on to claim that our loss of the sense of a purposeful plan for the world is nothing short of an unmitigated catastrophe for humanity. A world destitute of all spiritual foundations is a world devoid of meaning, purpose, and ultimately morality.

Only half a century earlier, another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, pronounced God dead with Promethean glee:

The greatest recent event that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God is no longer believable is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe... [A] long plentitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin and cataclysm... is now impending... Indeed, we philosophers and free spirits feel, when we hear the news that the old god is dead, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonition, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again.

Sadly for Nietzsche, his horizon was far from as open as he thought. He wrote these words in 1882, six years before he lost his sanity at the age of forty-four, and spent the last decade of his life in a syphilitic haze. Yet his words were eerily and horribly prophetic. The half century or so that separates Nietzsche from Stace was quite plausibly the worst period of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm in world history: two world wars, worldwide economic depression, the rise of global communism and National Socialism, the carpet bombing of industrial centers in London, Dresden, and other cities on a mass scale and the use of the atom bomb on noncombatants in Japan. Easily one hundred million lost their lives in the trenches, the gulags, and the concentration camps in a period of only three decades.

The new dawn that Nietzsche celebrated and Stace lamented was both more and less than the loss of God. It was the twilight of a worldviewthe classical worldview that had slowly assumed its form over the course of some twenty-five hundred years, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with Thomas Aquinas grand synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy. The classical worldview first took root in the soil of a philosophical system known as teleology. The teleological idea holds that the world is an ordered, purposeful, and ultimately intelligible place. As Plato put it almost four hundred years before the birth of Christ, the world is the product of a Mind which sets everything in order and produces each individual thing in the way that is best for it.

Platos vision of reality presaged the Christian worldview in striking ways. His student Aristotle also prepared the way by implanting Platos transcendent Forms in the real world of material things. The transcendent was mingled with the terrestrial, and the eternal with the evanescent. Aristotles philosophy came to represent the middle way between Platos idealism and philosophical materialism, which was already being defended in Platos time. From the soil of Aristotles philosophy and the life-giving water of Christianity flowered the natural law tradition. This tradition achieved its most luminous synthesis in the thirteenth century, in the Christian teleology of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas theory of the natural law was the theological, philosophical, and moral completion of the classical worldviewa worldview that retains a powerful hold on our own contemporary moral, philosophical, and political ideals.

Nevertheless, all Creation groans in futility: even great theories are destined to decay. Within half a century of Aquinas death, William of Ockham and those who followed him laboredsometimes from purer motives, sometimes for political reasonsto jettison from Christian thought what they regarded as the contaminating influences of pagan philosophy. Ockham is the true originator of modern thought. Underlying the Platonic vision was the striking intuition that reality falls along an ontological continuum, that different kinds of things such as material objects, ideas, numbers, shadows, thoughts, and God must possess varying degrees of Being . For Plato and those who followed him, some things are literally more real than others. Ockham denied this. He insisted that only individual things exist and that anything that exists is as real as any other thinga position known as nominalism. Ockhams denial of the Forms was a fateful philosophical move that began a cascading series of intellectual consequences that unfolded over the course of the succeeding four or five centuries. The ultimate result was a disaster, not only for theology but for philosophy.

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