Four

RIGHT AND WRONG

On Doing and Denial

Every culture agrees, in general terms, that good is to be done and evil avoided. In the last chapter I alluded to the universality of certain moral norms, and I mentioned courage and cowardice as examples of traits that are everywhere—and without exception—recognized, respectively, as a virtue and a vice. You and I could multiply other examples. Most cultures condemn most forms of murder and theft.

Now, some people might argue that these behaviors are commonplace today and even tacitly approved in modern Western society. Many people cheat on their spouses, pilfer office supplies, falsify tax returns, and even arrange for the destruction of their unborn babies. Do these people really believe that they’re doing the wrong thing?

The answer, I believe, is yes. They do, at some level, know that they’re doing wrong. I acknowledge that some people tell lies, even habitually; but even the most egregious liars do not want people to lie to them. Many people commit adultery; but even the most notorious lothario does not want to be betrayed in turn. Tax evaders do not want to be cheated by others. And no abortionist wants the instruments of his trade to be turned against his own limbs and vital organs. So even those who act against the most basic moral precepts bear witness to those same precepts by their own personal aversions and by their deepest sense of justice. They may not behave justly, but they want others to act justly toward them.

It is no accident that murder, theft, lying, and adultery are among the sins prohibited by the Ten Commandments, the essence of the law that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. But there is nothing special about these laws, nothing peculiarly “Jewish” or “Christian” about them. They are universal, and even the prophets of Israel recognized that fact. Isaiah and Amos inveighed against the gentile nations because they held gentiles accountable to those same basic standards, and so judged them to be guilty of grave transgressions.

Some people do try to raise doubts about the possibility of universal moral norms. Yet their very arguments, like the arguments against logic we discussed in chapter 2, are self-refuting. They say, for example, that “there are no absolutes”—yet that itself is an absolute statement! Or they say, “You should never impose your morality on other people”—which is itself a moral prescription! In rejecting morality, people must paradoxically embrace a morality that is opposite and equally imposing.

Other opponents will take a different and more subtle approach. They’ll start by citing so-called “hard cases,” moral decisions involving ambiguous and extenuating circumstances. But that is a poor place to begin. Religious moralists, too, will recognize all those factors in determining a person’s guilt or innocence.

The gray areas will always provoke debate. We should acknowledge, however, that there are actions that evoke an unqualified response of horror. I have yet to meet anyone who contends that the torture of children is a matter of moral indifference. A person who would advocate that position might rightly be judged insane; for our standards of sanity imply that certain thoughts are natural and others are mad, certain thoughts are human and others are not. The acceptance of child torture is deeply unnatural.

And, when people visit the death camps of Auschwitz or Birkenau—or when they read about the killing fields of Cambodia, or tribal genocide in Rwanda—they don’t just smile and say, “Those perpetrators had values so different from my own. This world is wonderfully diverse!” No, they say, “This is evil.” No one needs to carry out a cost-benefit analysis before passing judgment on mass murder and sadism. The blood of the victims seems to cry out from the ground for justice.

People will usually recognize evil, even if they are reluctant to recognize good. Some might look at an apparently heroic action and imagine a selfish motive behind it—the desire for fame, or praise, or monetary reward. Few people, however, will hesitate to call evil by its name.

Yet, once they have done so, they have placed themselves in a bind. Indeed, they have bound themselves by law. Because evil is possible only as the perversion of something good, the opposite of something good, the denial of something good. Once people have judged something evil, they have acknowledged a transcendent standard of good. They themselves have placed the world under a law.

Nor can they escape the bind by saying that law exists, but merely as a utilitarian stopgap, to ensure the safety of the greatest number of people. For even then they are invoking transcendent standards: the notion, for example, that the common good is greater than the individual good; or that anyone should be concerned with another person’s safety. Utilitarianism cannot suffice to prevent murder or theft, because some individuals sometimes find these actions quite useful.

Yet they are actions universally condemned, by civil law and common morals. Such condemnations are among the moral truths that human beings naturally know. These norms witness to something that philosophers describe as the “natural law.”

HEARTWRITING

The natural law is not only universally human; it is distinctively human. It is consonant with the “law of nature” that governs the movements of nonhuman creatures; but it is not identical with that law, because for other creatures, law is inexorable. Gravity, for example, cannot be disobeyed. Neither can animal instinct. Humans, however, have the power of choice; they can choose certain actions and avoid others. According to the natural law, they should do good and avoid evil.

My friend Russell Hittinger calls the natural law “the first grace,” because it is every human being’s direct participation in God’s eternal law. It comes with the basic equipment of our creation “in God’s image” (Gen 1:26–27). St. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, said that the righteous gentiles “do by nature what the law requires [and] are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law” (Rom 2:14). The pagans do not know God’s special revelation to Israel; yet “what the law requires is written on their hearts” (v. 15).

That’s why people in every time and place have been able to appeal to a common sense of justice. That’s why people in every time and place have shown admiration for the same basic set of virtues and abhorrence of the same basic set of vices.

The natural law is a beautiful reality, an empirically verifiable fact of creation. Together with natural theology, it is accessible to everyone as a kind of “natural religion.”

But it is fair to ask, again, why a world equipped with such a religious sense should need a supernatural revelation. And why, too, if the entire human race is so equipped, is the world in such a moral and religious muddle?

Earlier in his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul anticipates these questions. He establishes what can be known about God by reason alone: “Ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature, namely, His eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20). But with that sure knowledge came a natural obligation of praise and worship; and it is this obligation that people neglected: “for although they knew God they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him”(v. 21). This failure had the effect of pulling down the blinds against the sunlight: “they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (vv. 21–22).

The gentiles’ refusal to worship began a spiral of sin. Sin, in turn, further darkened the intellect and eclipsed even the attributes of God that could be known by nature. Yet humankind is by nature religious, and so people turned to worship what they loved most: the things of the world. They “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” (Rom 1:23). It’s not that they worshiped bad things; men and birds and reptiles are good creatures of God. But they do not suffice as objects of worship. We should worship God alone, in whose image we are made. When people begin to worship anything less than God—even if they worship the crown of His creation—they begin to degrade themselves. They refashion not only their worship, but themselves as well. As they worship, so they live, now imitating animal instinct rather than any truly human morality.

And God respects their decision: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (vv. 24–25).

Paul goes on to describe the downward spiral of sin, as he recounts how so many people “by their wickedness suppress the truth” (v. 18). In Paul’s view, immorality and unbelief are codependent dispositions. People must ignore or deny God if they want to do things that are objectively wrong. And as these actions become habitual, so does their ignorance or denial of God.

Paul does not treat atheism as an intellectual problem. He assumes that God is knowable and known. He assumes that people know, quite naturally, the difference between right and wrong.

No, Paul treats atheism as a problem of the heart and will—a failure of nerve. People want their way, and atheism is the price they pay for insisting on having their way.

Nevertheless, if atheism is not at root an intellectual problem, it manifests many intellectual symptoms; and we have to treat the symptoms if we want to eradicate the problem. So it’s necessary for us to develop proofs for God’s existence and for the existence of the natural law—effectively closing in on the problem from both sides.

THE FATHER OF INVENTION?

I have to admit: It was a contrarian student who helped me to see this matter clearly.

Once, in the classroom, while I was expounding on St. Thomas’s Five Ways, a young guy named John raised his hand and said, “You know what I think, Professor Hahn?” He hardly paused before saying, “I think that, if God didn’t exist, we’d invent Him anyway. And we did. What do you say to that?”

He was asking a hard question. What, after all, can we say to people who dismiss our idea of God as merely a pleasant fantasy?

Then, rather suddenly, I remembered that passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and I knew how I should answer.

“You know what I say, John? I say, if God did exist, we’d invent atheism anyway. And we did.”

John raised an eyebrow. He was surprised.

“John,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re like, but I know what I’m like. And I know what God is like—at least the God I say I believe in. That God is infinite; and He’s all-wise, so He knows everything about me. He’s all-good, too, and all righteous, and perfectly holy. And He commands me to be perfectly holy, too. Since He’s all-wise, he knows exactly when I’m not very holy or good, and He judges me based on what He knows. Oh, and He’s immutable, too, so He’ll never change. He’ll always be the way He is now; so He’ll always hold the same standards; and He’s always going to judge me by every idle word I utter.”

I could tell by John’s expression that he saw where I was going. I continued: “I have to admit, John, that that kind of God threatens my present state of existence and my lifestyle. If I were going to invent a god, I’d probably make one more congenial to my whims. And if I didn’t have the sense to invent him that way in the first place, I’d at least invent a god who could change his mind.”

John had simply repeated a slogan the modern world learned from Ludwig Feuerbach in the nineteenth century. Feuerbach believed that human beings invented God because they needed a crutch and a consolation. God was their substitute for reason—a projection of their irrational desires in the face of inevitable death. The idea of God was, in Feuerbach’s view, especially useful to men who possessed power and authority, who were only too eager to use a divine mandate to justify their agenda. “God” was the wily monarch’s way of keeping the ignorant and superstitious rabble on their best behavior.

To discredit Feuerbach’s ideas, it might be enough to point out that they profoundly influenced two other thinkers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, who were in turn the forerunners of communism and Nazism, two ideologies both godless and deadly. It was Feuerbach who made Stalin and Hitler possible, because he assured them that they acted in the absence of God. And, as we learned from Feuerbach’s contemporary, the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”—everything, even murder on an epic scale. It turned out that godlessness was a much more useful weapon in the hands of a despot than God ever had been—even the fantasy “God” imagined by Feuerbach.

Ideologues first fabricated God’s absence. Then they acted as if it were true. Their denial of even natural theology permitted them to flout the natural law with impunity. Their rejection of natural law, in turn, closed off reason’s natural pathway to God.

But nature reveals God the lawgiver as well as God the creator. Every human being has to come to grips with that, or live with the consequences: “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them” (Rom 1:28–32).

My student John was surely wrong, but it was his boldness that helped me understand the profound logic of St. Paul’s argument. If human beings had really tried to invent a god, we would never have invented the God of Christianity. He’s just too terrifying. Our God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-holy, and omnipresent. There’s no place to run and hide from Him, no place where we might secretly indulge a favorite vice. We can’t even retreat into the dark corners of our minds to fantasize about that vice without God knowing it right away.

Such a God makes any violation of the natural law a very uncomfortable business. If determined sinners could find a way to dispel such a notion of God, imagine their feeling of liberation. If your imagination fails you, then try reading the history of the wars and genocides of the atheist regimes of the twentieth century: Nazi Germany, Communist China and Cambodia, and the Soviet Union.

THE ONLY PROBLEM

Recent history is indeed an overwhelming chronicle of blood-shed—wholesale slaughter with the speed and efficiency of a modern factory. With St. Paul we say that this is what humankind will do in the pretended absence of God.

But how do we respond to those who cite these evils as evidence of God’s real absence? What do we say to those who argue that a good God could not have permitted evil to persist—and seemingly prevail, as at Auschwitz and Rwanda and in the killing fields.

The problem of evil is the problem. The novelist Muriel Spark referred to it as “the only problem.” We study the animal kingdom and see that nature is red in tooth and claw. We turn on the news and see violence, death, and suffering all around the globe. While the arguments against God’s existence may not be very persuasive, the arguments against His goodness are, to some people, overwhelming.

How should we respond when people raise the problem of suffering? First, we should admit that the problem plagues us, too, and brings us to tears and to prayer. Even St. Paul felt the force of the problem with all his heart and mind. He called it the “mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess 2:7). It is a mystery, something hidden even from so great a saint.

Why is there evil if God is both all-powerful and all-good? If He is all-good, His creation should reflect that perfection. If He is all-powerful, then He should be able to prevent evil from happening.

Yet we cannot solve the problem by dismissing God. In fact, such a denial only makes the problem worse. Denying God’s existence in order to solve the problem of evil is like burning your house down in order to get rid of termites, or cutting off your head to stop a nosebleed. People who allow evil to drive them to atheism suddenly have no standard by which to judge something evil. Instead of solving the problem, they’ve institutionalized it—written it into the very fabric of the cosmos. If there is no God, then there is no transcendent, ultimate goodness, no perfect measurement of righteousness; and so there can be no true evil, either. Without God, everything becomes a matter of moral indifference or mere human preference.

Some non-Christian religions claim that both moral and physical evils are just part of the balance of life—like male and female, or light and darkness—and that all these opposites ultimately reside in God. This view is known as “dualism,” and it is one way that people have tried to account for evil amid the good that’s in the world. Dualism traces it all back to God, who created the world just the way it is, with all its ups and downs.

That, however, leaves the dualist no better off than the atheist; because, if good and evil are co-ultimate, once again we have no standard by which to judge an action. If good and evil both originate in God, they are morally equal phenomena, and we must accept them on equal terms.

WHAT’S MISSING

But dualism is not a valid Christian understanding, because Christian faith asserts that God made the world and everything in it, and it was good (see Gen 1). There was no admixture of evil in God’s original plan. There was no taint in His creation.

To achieve any clarity in the matter, we should first determine what evil is—or rather isn’t, because Christians believe that evil has no existence of its own. I’m not saying that evil is not real. It is painfully real, but it is always a lack of something good, something that should be present. It is a diminishment, a privation.

We further distinguish between two types of evil: physical evil and moral evil, because these two present problems are related but not identical.

Physical evil is something negative that happens—sickness, blindness, pain, natural disasters, and death. All are privations. Sickness is the absence of health; blindness is the absence of sight; death is the privation of life; and so on.

Moral evil is something that’s done. It is the action of a culpable actor. Moral evil is unrighteousness, wickedness, sin. Moral evil, too, represents a lack, but now a privation of a moral good. Adultery is a lack of fidelity. Lying is the absence of truth. Murder is the taking of life.

Once we establish that evil is not a thing, then we see that it is alien to God’s creation; because He made the world and everything in it, but (to put a new emphasis on a familiar Scripture) “nothing is impossible with God” (Lk 1:37).

So evil does not originate in God. But we still have to account for its reality and its possibility. For how could a good God permit such privation?

When God made both human beings and angels, he made us rational, free, and capable of loving. This means, however, that we have the possibility of choosing something other than God. It was necessary for us to have this choice, because true love cannot be coerced. If we did not have the freedom to say no to God, we could not truly love Him. Thus, God could not create a species with free choice without also permitting the possibility of evil.

To move beyond this problem, we need to move from the philosophical to the theological, from reason to revelation, because iniquity is a mystery, and it is only by revelation that we can gain any insight into the true mysteries of faith.

FALLING UPWARD INTO MERCY

Why does God permit evil? Again, the doubter will observe that God must not be all-good, or else His creation would reflect that perfection; He must not be all-powerful, or else He would have fixed the problem by now.

But what if God were able to use evil to show forth His infinite goodness and power? What if, through an act of salvation, He could bring about a greater good than would have been possible, apart from the reality of evil?

If you’ve ever attended the Easter Vigil liturgy of the Latin Rite, then you’ve heard the ancient hymn with the line “O happy fault! O necessary sin of Adam!” Well, did it make you wonder why the Church would celebrate a sin and a fault as “happy”?

As great as unfallen human nature could be, it could not compare to what God has given us in Christ. We might say that God let us break a bone so that He Himself could reset it, making it not just stronger but unbreakable. God has allowed us to lose not only divine grace, but also the standing we had as His servants, His obedient slaves. He foresaw that we would fall. He didn’t cause it, but He did freely permit it. He did so in order to bring about a glorious new creation that exceeds every possibility belonging to human nature. So Christ took our fallen human nature, and didn’t merely bring it back to life. He united it to Himself, so that the life He restored in us was divine life. The grace He gave us was His own sonship.

We share in the divine sonship of Jesus Christ. This is the essence of salvation and the substance of Catholicism. Baptized into Christ, we are partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). We live the life of the Blessed Trinity, calling upon Christ’s Father as “Our Father.” Life doesn’t get any better than that, or any more perfect. And none of this would have been possible without the original fall from grace—an event that depended, in turn, upon God’s permitting the possibility of evil.

The Gospel, according to the Catholic Church, is more than just a legal declaration of our innocence. It’s not just that we stand before God the Father looking like Jesus. We are filled with the very life of God, as much as a creature can be. We could never have achieved this ourselves. That’s why God let us fall, in order to let us creatures discover our weakness and dependence, and the greatness of His mercy.

Many people today think that salvation is something God owes us. They don’t recognize the gravity of sin, and they don’t understand the true purpose of law.

The law of God in all its forms—even the natural law—is a program for our maturity, so that we can pile up habits upon habits. The virtues are nothing but forms of love, which is the essence of the law. Love is manifest in self-giving, self-sacrifice, and self-denial. God is commanding us to an absolute unswerving commitment to holiness, because He knows that our happiness and fulfillment depend upon it. If we obey completely and totally, all we’ve done is pay the minimum requirement. “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty” (Lk 17:10).

It isn’t that God comes out a richer deity because of what we give Him. The law is not for His sake. Our holiness is not for His gain. It’s for us. He gives us the law because of His mercy. Again, because of His mercy, He allows violations of the natural law to have severe consequences. For even the natural law has incentives and disincentives, so that we’ll learn from experience to do good and avoid evil. God allows us to suffer, too, because of His mercy. He won’t allow us to escape the plan of maturity that even Jesus Christ had to complete.

With eyes of faith, we do not wonder why God allows so much suffering, but rather why He doesn’t allow more. We’re not looking at a world full of innocent people suffering unjustly. We’re looking at a world soaked through with oceans of mercy, because all of us are sinners, and none of us deserves even the next breath we’re going to take.

St. Paul put suffering in an eternal perspective: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18). For Christ Himself suffered great physical evils and even moral evils at the hands of the people He came to save. If that is our lot, He wanted it to be his lot, too. So, if that was His lot, we should be content with it as our own as well. For “we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him” (Rom 8:16–17).

BACK TO NATURE

Even in the natural order, our actions have consequences. The natural law, like all real laws, must decree real penalties. You don’t need faith to see that the wages of sin is death. A dissolute lifestyle dissolves life. Sinners are miserable people; and there is no life so impoverished as that of a sinner who no longer recognizes his misery. Think, for example, of the drunk in denial, embarrassing himself in the course of another lost evening.

The penalty of the morning after is painful. But God established the penalties of the natural law to be remedial punishments—the discipline of a good Father, who denies His children one thing in order to give them something far better. The hangover should be enough to put the drinker off the drink. If he chooses to ignore the discipline, then his habit will become worse and more severe consequences will surely follow, because his own faculties will grow weaker and will require more drastic measures for correction. This will continue until the poor fellow accepts the mercy of the remedy—a painful moment, but the beginning of a new life. Yet he always remains free. If he declines the mercy, he chooses the means of his own destruction.

The natural law exists in order to prepare human beings for supernatural grace. Grace does not destroy nature, but builds upon it, repairs its every privation, perfects it, and then elevates it.

Some people charge that Christian “supernaturalism” somehow diminishes nature. But it doesn’t at all. God made nature good; and the more we realize its goodness, the more that grace will have to build upon. A Christian like St. Paul wished not to overwhelm nature, but to praise it, even as it was manifested in natural law, natural theology, natural religion, and the religious lives of righteous pagans.

This is an important lesson for us to learn and re-learn in every generation. In the mid-1940s, when various peoples of the world met to form the United Nations, they were at first stalled in their discussion because of the diversity of their philosophical, religious, and moral perspectives. How could communists, Christian Democrats, Muslims, and red-blooded Americans even begin to work toward common goals? It took a Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, to lead the nations (or at least their representatives) beyond the philosophical impasse, and the natural law was the means by which he could do it.

Imagine, then, what breakthroughs this language might facilitate in the so-called “culture wars” that divide peoples today.

It is our common nature that gives us a common language for conversation. And it is in this common language that we can begin to proclaim our reasons to believe, especially to the righteous unbelievers we encounter today. Consider the loving approach of St. Paul, as he preached to the Athenians: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you—the God who made the world and everything in it, the Lord of heaven and earth!” (see Acts 17:22–24).