Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Fordham University, NY
The first half of this chapter examines Augustine of Hippo's use of philosophical distinctions to clear away various difficulties that stand in the way of pursuing such questions as the existence of God and the relations between some of the attributes normally attributed to God (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence) and the problems presented by evil and freedom. The second half of the chapter examines natural law theory to make a case that morality requires the existence of God.
Even the vast size of this book cannot exhaust discussion about the merits of the arguments for and against theism. Rather than review what has been said, however, I would like to use this final chapter as a way to encourage readers to continue the quest for the truth about this subject. In my view, there are no more important questions than whether God exists, whether God made the cosmos, and whether God loves creatures like us enough to preserve us in existence, to help us on our journey, and to keep us free enough to make good choices about how we stand toward him and one another. These are choices that will determine our everlasting destiny. Should the answer to the first of these questions be negative, one will be free of nagging worries about the rest of the list. Conversely, if the answer to the first question is affirmative, or even could be so, then the supreme importance of the others is clear. Every human generation has felt the significance of these questions.
In the first half of this chapter, I would like to consider the way Augustine of Hippo found philosophy useful in the service of faith. Prior to accepting religious faith, he employed a number of crucial philosophical distinctions to help resolve various difficulties that had prevented him from seeing clearly how best to address the great questions just mentioned. Following Augustine's story will help us to see that religious faith is not irrational and that, quite to the contrary, it allows us to fulfill our human drive to know the truth about things. In the second half, I consider a part of the case for the existence of God that has long struck me as profoundly compelling—the need for a transcendent source of morality. To examine this theme, we will consider the philosophical underpinnings of traditional natural law theory.
As a personal record of the journey that led Augustine to accept religious faith, the Confessions draws its name from two senses of the term confession. It refers not only to the admission of faults with real contrition but also to the admission of creaturely dependence on God as the creator of all things, the redeemer of the human race, and the sanctifier of souls. Augustine understood his profession of faith as a choice that he made in response to a gift of grace from God. His decision to believe was not simply the result of seeing the implications of any philosophical argument; in the process of coming to his decision, philosophical meditation played an indispensable role both in awakening his quest and in clearing the path of various obstacles. We shall see, for example, that philosophy allowed Augustine a way to think of God as spiritual rather than material, to cease holding material things in suspicion and instead to see them as made by God but capable of misuse by us, and to grasp that to admit the reality of human free choice does not imperil the omniscience, omnipotence, or omnibenevolence of God. Gaining these philosophical insights helped him to get beyond what had been major stumbling blocks for him.
It was while studying rhetoric in Carthage at age sixteen, he explains, that he fell into a “cauldron of illicit loves” (Confessions, III.1). In that same period of his life, he read the Hortensius of Marcus Tullius Cicero and felt a burning desire “to seek and win and hold and embrace not this or that philosophical school but Wisdom itself, whatever it might be” (III.4). Hard as it proved for him to sort through various intense but shallow friendships, the arousal of his passions at the theater, the heady joys of professional success as a rhetorician, and the seductive promises of Manichaeism, Augustine from this time forward displayed a passion for finding knowledge, truth, and wisdom and a discomfort with ersatz substitutes: “O truth, truth, how inwardly did the very marrow of my soul pant for you” (III.6).
Dao
Dharma
Manichaeism
Natural Law
Neoplatonism
Perdurance
Representationalism
Supereminent Theology
By pondering a few unnamed books of Platonic philosophy, Augustine began working his way through an interlocking set of problems. Scholars speculate that he may have read portions of the Enneads of Plotinus or perhaps works by his disciple Porphyry, a bitter critic of Christianity. The problems were admittedly those that had come to bother him in the course of his own history, but they do not seem terribly different from the kind that anyone thinking about these issues has to face at some point.
Throughout the Confessions, Augustine shows himself grateful to have received from God the gift of faith in his early thirties, but his embrace of religious faith came only after a period of intense struggle over such questions as the origin of evil, the freedom of the will, and the nature of God. The outcome of his inquiry was not clear to him in advance. Like the chapters in this volume on Theism and Atheism, the pages of the Confessions (especially book 7) show the need to take the questions seriously and the obligation in conscience to follow where truth leads.
From the Confession's record of Augustine's experience it is possible to learn the paradoxical lesson that good and careful reasoning can help us break free from the constraints of rationalism. By that term I mean the philosophical position that tries to make reality conform to the categories of one's own typical ways of reasoning. I use the term realism here to designate the philosophical stance that tries instead to conform our thinking to reality. The relevance of this distinction for the case of Augustine can be seen in his long struggle to resist the tendency to impose on God the categories of thought appropriate to the spatiotemporal realm (e.g., having sensory experience of specific shades of color, particular fragrances and tastes, and so on). Because all the objects that Augustine had ever come to know experientially had such properties, he quite naturally assumed that all possible objects of knowledge have such properties, and for this reason he invariably imagined any divine being as having them too.
As Augustine envisioned his situation, there was an interwoven cluster of problems facing him. If there were such a thing as a god, that god (however powerful) would have to be a being within the cosmos (where else is there to be?) and thus a finite being (because there are other things in the cosmos that are not this god, there must be some limit to the being of god, and thus god must be finite). A finite being (however knowledgeable and well disposed toward us), however, would at best be locked into an endless struggle with other forces (for Augustine at the time, the forces of darkness and fate) that also appeared to be at work in the cosmos and in human choices. In addition to such metaphysical questions, questions of moral psychology also pressed on his mind, such as finding a satisfying explanation for how one could possibly know what was good and right and yet still sometimes do what was bad or wrong. These problems long seemed deeply mystifying to Augustine.
His reading in platonism did not seem to give him a totally satisfying answer, but it did strike him as a better way to grapple with the difficulties than other approaches he had considered. Years earlier, Augustine had read Aristotle's Categories with understanding and appreciation, but at the time, he explains, he had misapplied its teachings when considering the case of God. For he had imagined that anything real should be classifiable within those ten categories (substance, quality, quantity, relation, action, passion, time, place, habit, and posture). God, he presumed, must be some corporeal substance in which qualities such as beauty and powers like intelligence adhered (IV.16). With the candor that his conversion made possible, Augustine later admits that at the time his mind was still enthralled by disordered desires and that he could not conceive of an incorporeal substance (IV.15), and so he could not yet see clearly enough to get beyond thinking that God was some “luminous immeasurable body” and that he himself was “a kind of particle broken from that body” (V.10).
Real openness to belief came only with a better understanding of what kind of being was at issue in questions of religious belief. To come to this understanding there was first the need to recognize a crucial distinction in kind between sensation (the power to perceive things with our senses, for instance, specific shades of red or green that we experience by seeing an individual apple or a leafy tree or particular degrees of sweet or sour in tasting a specific drink) and understanding (the power to grasp mentally what, for instance, color in general or flavor in general is or what an apple in general or a tree in general is).
As Augustine discovered by reading treatises in rhetoric and in philosophy, the terms by which we know these things in general are called universal terms, and that by which we hold them before the mind's gaze is called an idea or concept. So long as he thought of an idea or concept as merely a picture or an image, these ideas seemed just as particular and material as the images from which they were drawn. What made progress possible for Augustine was grasping the difference in kind between sensory images and mental concepts. The former are particular and material, and the latter are universal and immaterial. The former are sensory impressions, and the latter are the result of our powers of judgment about what the things under consideration are and what they are like.
The intrinsic materiality of our sensory knowledge is such that every sensation we have is a sensation of some particular quality within a given range on a continuum appropriate to each sense organ. When we understand what a color is or what a tree is, however, there is something of general applicability that we hold before the mind by means of our ideas or concepts. It is not only when we understand immaterial things such as God or angels but even when we turn the attention of the mind to understanding material objects, our mental grasp of them has a spiritual (that is, immaterial) aspect. When we understand what a sensory quality such as red or blue or what a sensory object like an apple or a planet is, we do so in an immaterial way, that is, by a general or universal term. As an orator with a deeply philosophical bent, Augustine, in his love of words and how they signify, was able to reflect on the difference between sensation and understanding, and this distinction proved crucial for his consideration of the question of God.
While initially the human mind has nothing on which to focus without receiving images from outside through the senses, it is able to reflect on what it receives and to go beyond the limits of sensory experience. In fact, it must do so in order to attain real understanding of anything. Augustine writes: “My mind was in search of such images as the forms that my eye was accustomed to see; and I did not realize that the mental act by which I formed these images was not itself a bodily image; yet it could not have formed them unless it were something and something great” (VII.1). Augustine here records a moment of insight about the spiritual character of the mind—that it is something real but immaterial. This recognition would be crucial for all of the other steps that he would come to make on this journey to accepting religious faith, and yet it was not itself directed by faith, for he did not have such faith at the time of the insight.
In due time Augustine applied to the question of God the recognition that what we attain in knowing is not merely another sort of picture or image but an idea by which to grasp what something is and what it is like. This insight about the nature of the faculties of the mind gave him important tools for seeing that God must be understood by thinking rather than by sensation or imagination. It had been perplexing to Augustine what the Supreme Being could possibly be. He employed this distinction to make the sort of progress that he could not make so long as he envisioned knowing as simply another kind of sensing or imagining. So long as he still regarded all thinking as picture-thinking, his thinking about God had foundered on the latent discrepancies that emerged from picturing God in one or another finite form (VII.1–2).
With these insights about the nature of human cognition and with certain metaphysical arguments in place for the existence of a first cause, Augustine was equipped to understand how God could be a being but an incorruptible one. It amounted to seeing that God is real and present everywhere but is not limited by some finite extension in space. God is present to all moments of time but not with the finite perdurance for a limited period that is typical of temporal beings.
This realization about the nature of divine being did not force Augustine's hand or bring him to the point of a decision to make a profession of faith (for that, see VIII.12), but it freed him from one of the stumbling blocks of the rationalism that had conscripted his intellectual vision, namely, the presumption that for God to be real, God would have to be a finite being of the same sensory sort that daily fills anyone's experiences and imagination.
Later religious thinkers would take up the same lines of reflection and articulate the insight systematically. In Anselm, for example, this is a constitutive part of thinking through the idea of God as “that than which none greater can be conceived” (Proslogion, chap. 3). For Pseudo-Dionysius, it would be expressed (e.g., The Divine Names, chap. 4) through the combination of the methods proper to negative theology, the denial of any limitation, and to supereminent theology, the use of finite qualities as a base from which to point out the direction of absolute perfections that lie beyond anything that the human mind can encompass.
These refinements are a crucial part of the history of theology, for they express with greater precision what we can come to know of a being that always exceeds our own categorization. To undertake these refinements, the first steps have to be of the sort that Augustine describes in the process of coming to understand more about what God is. Such knowledge comes through thinking in a way that can get beyond the contradictions that invariably surface so long as we imagine the divine nature along the lines that we are used to from ordinary experience.
For us today, the situation is no different in principle even though the details of our background worldview may have changed. So long as we presume that for anything to be real it must be material, there will be no adequate way to consider the question of a divine being or to answer questions about the sufficient reason for what we directly experience. We tend to picture the cosmos as immeasurably vast but entirely constituted by beings that are in one way or another forms of matter and energy. It is entirely understandable that we do so, for the advances in each domain of science have come about by a rigorous application of methodological materialism—that is, the commitment of scholars in a given discipline to seek answers to the questions proper to that discipline only by recourse to objects and forces within a given set of physical entities and energies.
There is a pervasive tendency to mistake this methodological materialism for metaphysical materialism—the position that the only sort of things that are real are material entities and forces. As Augustine's experience shows us, there are various sorts of problem that flow from coalescing these two forms of materialism. What can truly help us make progress within the sphere of a given discipline (methodological materialism) can render us blind to the sphere of what is real but immaterial and not just invisible to the color range accessible to human vision (metaphysical materialism).
Coming to an awareness of immaterial reality began for Augustine with his recognition that our human knowledge is not identical with the images and sensations that are the basis for our thinking. His further progress in understanding other aspects of human experience also required him to grant that there are immaterial realities. One sees this point in Augustine's efforts to consider the metaphysics of freedom. He came to grasp that no human choice could be free unless it was the result of something truly independent of the fully determined nexus of physical causality. Still further advances came for him when he learned to envision divine reality as semper maior—always greater—than any of the limiting forms by which we distinguish one kind of thing or quality from another.
Our reflection on Augustine's experiential account can show us, among other things, the need to get beyond a representationalist epistemology of the type championed by John Locke and popular in many forms today. There are various strategies for doing so. One might think, for instance, of the devastating critique of representationalism offered by works like Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and of the inexorable logic that Thomas Nagel uses in Mind and Cosmos to point to the irreducibility of mind to matter. Even though Nagel stops short of accepting theism, his book does invaluable service in the work of clearing the ground in epistemology.
Happily, the alternatives to representationalism are not limited to theories that envision human knowledge as ultimately mind-constructed, for the position that all that we can ever know is limited to our own perceptions provides no framework for ever getting knowledge of the other as other. Rather, a better alternative is an epistemology in the Aristotelian and Augustinian tradition that respects the primacy of intellectual receptivity and a rational openness to independent reality. Among contemporary efforts in this direction we might think, for example, of the one developed by John McDowell's Mind and World as part of his account of how the active work of conceptualization requires ongoing receptivity to the world known by our senses. It is by considering such contemporary ventures into philosophical realism that we can become confident about developing the kind of openness that was crucial to Augustine's pathway.
The next major obstacles that Augustine found to block his way were the puzzles that he perceived in regard to the paired issues of evil and freedom. Granting the differences between the circumstances of his situation and ours, both of these issues can still prove to be stumbling blocks to faith today. Part of Augustine's early attraction to Manichaeism was its apparent ability to provide an explanation for evil in the world by tracing it back to a principle somehow envisioned as equal to God but qualitatively opposite: material rather than spiritual, dark rather than light, and so on (Confessions, III.6–10, V.3–7). The dualist metaphysical underpinnings required to support such a notion led him to a dualist notion of the human being as a light-filled spirit trapped in the darkness and disorder of a corporeal body (III.6). As Patrick Lee and Robert George have convincingly shown in Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics, there are strong proclivities to a related form of dualism in the intellectual culture of our own day.
Augustine's two-pronged response to this challenge was to develop certain hints found in the Platonic books about the privative character of evil and others that he drew from the Stoics and Saint Paul about weakness of the will. Stymied for a long while by the dilemma of thinking that the presence of evil in the cosmos would force us to choose between unlimited divine power and unlimited divine goodness, Augustine discovered an alternative position in Platonic thought on the question of the nature of evil that helped him to resolve that dilemma. To hold that God was all-good had seemed to require that there must be some other force responsible for whatever is evil or destructive. To hold that the omnipotent God was the cause of absolutely everything that exists, however, seemed to require that the creator was not all-good, or perhaps not all-knowing, or that (inconceivably) evil, suffering, and pain were not real.
For Augustine, it was possible to make progress on the issue of evil by developing an insight traceable to Plotinus. Admittedly, Plotinus provides an inconsistent treatment of the topic, sometimes regarding evil as a positive reality in its own right and taking matter as evil and as a source of evil in the soul (see Enneads I.8) and at other times recognizing that evil is the absence of good (Enneads III.3–4). The notion that evil may be understood as the absence of something sparked the realization in Augustine that it was possible to account for the reality of suffering, pain, and destruction without compromising the omnipotence or the perfect goodness of God.
To do this requires that we come to understand the privative character of evil not merely as the lack of something but as the lack of some due good in a being that has positive reality in its own right. The phrase due good here refers to a good that is expected in a being on account of its nature. That plants do not have vision is not an evil or defect in their being, but for a dog or a cat to be blind (whether it comes about by a genetic defect or by an injury received in an accident or a fight) would be deleterious for such animals.
The difficulty of the problem should not be understated, for we are inclined to label things that are the source of pain and destructive as evil. Such things are not mere absences. They are powerful precisely because they are real beings. Our attribution of “evil” to them does not pertain to a lack of being in such objects but instead to the effects they have, including the damage or destruction that they bring about and perhaps to some disorder (that is, a lack of due order) within them that explains why they act in such a way as to bring about damage or destruction.
To use the terminology developed later in the history of thought for the articulation of Augustine's insights in this area, both physical evil and moral evil may (with the appropriate distinctions in place) be described as privations. Moral evil refers to those free choices that a person deliberately makes that exhibit the absence of the right order of love. Physical evil refers not to a thing in itself (VII.16) but to the absence of some feature that belongs to a being's nature (for instance, the deafness of an animal that by its nature has the power of hearing). For Augustine, the absence of a due good of a physical nature connotes no moral wickedness in the one who suffers from a defect or injury, except in those cases where the privation of some good quality or feature is the result of deliberate choices made by the one who then suffers as the result of those choices.
At issue for Augustine in this account of physical evil is not merely the absence of some feature that might be desirable (human beings, for instance, do not by nature have wings for flying or gills for breathing under water) but, indeed, the absence of some due good (congenital defects, the damage done to an organ or limb by disease or by accident, and so on). Putting the matter in this way allows Augustine to affirm the reality of pain and suffering and at the same time to explain the origin of physical evil by recourse to this worldly causation, for example, the damage that unfolds from a genetic defect or the damage that one object does to another. Considered in this way, a physical evil is something that God allows rather than something that God directly and positively chooses to bring about, except for cases of the punishments that God brings about for moral evil.
Like physical evil, moral evil also has a privative character. Moral evil, for Augustine, occurs when our deliberate choices contradict the objective hierarchy of goods in the universe. This hierarchy of goods has God as the Supreme Being, rational beings such as angels and humans below God, and then animals, plants, and inanimate objects lower still. Augustine holds that moral evil involves the absence of the proper order of a person's loves (IV.12), whether a person chooses to love the right object at the wrong time or in the wrong way, or to love the wrong object, or to love a higher good too little or a lower good too much.
In giving human beings the power of free choice of the will, God has given human creatures a great gift. For those creatures truly to be free, God allows them to exercise that power in ways that can transgress the proper order of loves that ought to govern their use of this gift. As Augustine ponders this matter, it becomes ever clearer to him that there is a goodness in all things and that all things derive their being from God, either directly or by the mediation of worldly causes (VII.12). Although Augustine's account of evil as privative has its roots in various Neoplatonic texts, his understanding of moral evil moves beyond the Platonic position that moral wrongdoing may be laid at the feet of ignorance of the good. As Hannah Arendt explains, Augustine follows the lead of Saint Paul (see Romans 7:19) in creating a genuinely new idea of the will in the course of his reflection on the times when we fail to do the good we want to do and when we do the evil that we do not want to do.
In addition to consulting the texts of Augustine himself on this question (e.g., VII.3), one may find an insightful elaboration of this position in the opening chapters of C. S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain. In good Augustinian fashion, Lewis makes the case that God could have created a world without suffering or pain but that there would be a logical contradiction if we were to suppose that God could have simultaneously created a world in which there could be no damage or destruction and one in which rational creatures have free choice of the will. The reason is that genuinely to have free choice of the will implies that freely chosen actions will have their consequences, and for actions to have their consequences requires that there be a world with stable natural laws in which the interactions among physical objects have their effects. Such interactions can bring about damage and even destruction when things collide.
In passing, I should point out that Lewis, like G. K. Chesterton (see “The Ethics of Elfland” in Orthodoxy), deliberately resists what he takes to be mistaken in the Humean criticism of causality as if it were a misplaced claim about some logical necessity; rather, he takes causality as Aristotle, Augustine, and their traditions took it, as the actualization of a potency for change by a real being with sufficient power to induce that change.
To put Augustine's point rather succinctly, the possibility of pain and suffering is an inescapable aspect of physical reality if there are to be creatures with the power of free choice. He explains his approach to this problem biographically. During his Manichaean period, he had been partial to the notion that we could take credit for our good choices while chalking up our moral failings to the flesh. At the time, he thought human flesh derived from material that was knocked off the co-principle of darkness and evil in the course of its endless clashes with the co-principle of light and goodness (III.8). Augustine examined this notion carefully, especially through his conversations with the Manichaean bishop Faustus. Faustus, however, proved unable to resolve the questions that had been troubling him. Augustine reports that he could not abide the contradiction of claiming credit for the good that he made while avoiding blame for his bad choices (V.6–7) and that, as a result, he came to see human free choice and not some cosmic principle as the cause of wickedness, pain, and suffering.
A bit later, in connection with the famous garden scene in which he records his conversion (VIII.10–11), Augustine formally renounces the Manichaean doctrine that our inner conflicts of will are evidence of a dual nature within us. He insists instead that having a power of genuinely free choice means that we can be attracted to any number of apparent goods. We manage to make a choice only by saying no (at least for the time being) to all the options before us except one. While human beings find themselves necessarily attracted at least to some extent by any apparent good that comes to our awareness, there is no guarantee that an apparent good will be a genuine good. There is need to use our minds to examine the attractions and revulsions that we feel and to make judgments and choices.
It is worthy of note that neither Augustine nor any thinker in the Latin-speaking tradition of the patristic age and Middle Ages ever spoke about free will (libera voluntas). They invariably used the phrase free choice of the will (liberum arbitrium voluntatis). Their reason, I believe, was that they took the power of will in human beings to have as a natural property an orientation of being necessarily attracted to anything that appeared to be good. In this respect human beings are like other creatures that have appetites and desires. What makes human beings free not merely in the sense of being able to act spontaneously (as any other animal would do) but also in the sense that is distinctive of our species is the capacity to make a judgment or choice (arbitrium) about whether or not to take the means necessary to pursue the apparent good to which we are attracted. To make such choices well, reason needs to consider whether these apparent goods are genuinely good and thus choice-worthy as well as whether we are willing to take the means necessary to pursue them.
In describing this situation, Augustine resists what might be called the hydraulic model of the will, according to which we deterministically yield to the strongest pressure (in pursuit of an apparent good or in flight from an apparent evil). Rather, he sees that it is possible for us to act against even a very strong inclination and to choose even that to which we are strongly averse, for the will is a spiritual power that transcends the causal nexus of physical determinations (see especially Augustine's postbaptismal account of the natural powers of memory, understanding, and will and the effects of divine grace in restoring these powers, X.29–41).
As the story of Augustine's moment of conversion that is recounted in the eighth book of the Confessions makes clear, it was the grace of God and not Augustine's own reasoning that strengthened his will and made possible his choice to make a profession of faith (VIII.12). As this chapter has tried to show, however, philosophical considerations played an enormous role in clearing away certain difficulties that came from mistaken assumptions, overly limited imagination about possible explanations, and self-serving rationalizations.
My hope is that this review of the use that Augustine made of philosophical reasoning in search of wisdom and knowledge may be useful for readers at some stage or other of their own journey to answer the great questions. Let me now turn from the consideration of a figure such as Augustine and his concerns with understanding the claims of revealed theology to a different aspect of the theistic tradition—one that is primarily rooted in natural (that is, philosophical) theology. This is the argument that reflection on morality gives its own support for taking the theistic position. Examining this argument should help us to see some of the differences between the theism to which Augustine came by grace and the theism that one might feel the need to accept by the force of certain philosophical arguments.
In Real Ethics, a book on the foundations of morality, John Rist has argued that the practical result of much contemporary discussion of ethics has been moral confusion, inside the academy and without. Like Alasdair MacIntyre's observations in After Virtue about the shrill tones typical of interminable debates that seem to make no discernible progress, Rist's diagnosis of professional ethics has been severe.
What Rist calls the “mindless attachment to an ethics of rules” (whether consequentialist or deontological) devised by calculative rationality has proved to be forgetful of what makes human life truly happy and deeply satisfying (2002, 10). The tendency to rationalize even certain brutalities in practice and the self-deluding readiness to indulge certain personal proclivities while fending off their natural consequences have made for a dire situation in philosophical ethics. Rist sees two alternatives: either a genuine reconstruction of the foundations of moral theory along Platonic and Augustinian lines or a readiness to embrace an amoral individualism in which people construct their own moral universes and then use the powers put at their disposal by a highly technological culture to stave off any unpleasant consequences of their actions, regardless of the cultural implications.
As we might expect, Rist finds the moral nihilism of the second option, often disguised as democratic egalitarianism, to be repugnant. That some thinkers take the route of religious fundamentalism in the face of the impasse created by skepticism and nihilism he considers somewhat understandable but not a properly philosophical response to the problem. At the root of the situation, in Rist's view, is the tendency to understand ethics as a kind of free-floating discussion that depends only on prudential judgments or on arbitrary beliefs about the good.
In Real Ethics he observes that either an ethical theory has a transcendent foundation (whether explicit or implicit), or it lacks one. In the latter case, he believes that it can be shown to be ultimately incoherent and that whatever strength it has rests on some philosophically inadequate foundation such as power. His book displays in great detail the emptiness of attempts to do moral reasoning without recourse to adequate metaphysical foundations and the inevitable sophistry that comes to the fore once we make the assumption often championed today that human beings are merely the autonomous products of blind evolution.
What is the alternative? Rist argues that “real ethics” involves discovering values that we do not invent (2002, 47). His view is that the divine mind alone offers a suitable explanation about the source of the transcendent reality of values that is needed for an adequate foundation for ethics, that is, an understanding of a provident God as the final cause whose goodness orders the universe.
One of the most compelling themes of the book is its recurrent attention to a basic mistake in regard to what ethical reasoning is about. It is not about how to shape some self-justifying vision of the good that may then be used to rationalize the conduct needed to accommodate our wants and desires. The point of undertaking an academic study of ethics is not to become a logical enabler. Rather, Rist argues, ethics is about how to shape our souls so that we will want and desire what is really satisfying and really perfective.
Moral realism requires that we learn how to form our characters, not how to shape our arguments for self-serving purposes. What most needs to happen in moral formation is that it would help us to come to want the sort of things that are genuinely good, not that it would teach us how to manipulate reasons and arguments so as to get what we happen to want, especially given the ebbs and flows of emotional life and the shifts in what we find desirable and gratifying.
Speaking more broadly, ethics is about genuine human flourishing and so needs to be built on a solid philosophical anthropology, and that, in turn, needs secure metaphysical foundations. The alternative would be to create some moral bungalow in the hope of enjoying the pleasures of living near the shore, regardless of the fact that the way in which we have propped it up will be insufficient to withstand beach erosion, let alone the gales and storms that regularly occur in life. Building more securely, in a more reasonable location, is not only more prudent as a calculation but also more reasonable in a universal sense. It involves cultivating an appreciation for goodness that is not of our own making through cultivating respect for the structures of reality, including reverence for the author of all reality. Following in the footsteps of Augustine, Rist thus moves us beyond the admittedly important contributions to the recovery of moral realism made by such neo-Aristotelians as Philippa Foot to a sense of why we need recourse to God for a realist account of the good (see especially Rist, chap. 9).
In my judgment, the form of moral theory that is best suited for this task is traditional natural law theory. Despite the reference to law in the name, this approach to ethics is not primarily a system of rules, obligations, and prohibitions. (For a discussion of the role of virtue in moral realism see Anscombe 1958.) Rather, it is a program for guiding human behavior (individual and social) toward the kind of free choices and to an ordered life of the virtues (see Sanford 2015) that will respect the intentions of the designer of human nature and will bring individual human beings to the happiness without end that comes from union with God.
One can find proponents of some aspects of natural law reasoning in the ancient strata of various cultures (e.g., the Dao of the Chinese Confucian tradition and Dharma in the Indian Buddhist tradition), but its classic articulation comes from Thomas Aquinas. His Summa theologica locates the natural moral law as our human participation in the eternal law. By the term eternal law, he means God's providential plan for each type of being within creation. As I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely in Aquinas's treatment of the natural moral law that he has integrated the Augustinian understanding of the transcendent source of ethical normativity at the core of biblical ethics with the Aristotelian concept of nature and natural virtue (see Koterski 2016). Within his treatise on the natural moral law (Summa theologica, I–II, qq. 90–97), Aquinas gives a detailed consideration of how the natural law matches what has been divinely revealed and recorded in the scriptures (see q. 91, aa. 4–5). There he argues for a considerable overlap between the natural law and the divine law that God explicitly revealed in the Ten Commandments and that God did this so that people could know with greater certainty what they could, in principle, discover on their own about the natural law.
Within the Summa, the treatise on natural law is part of a larger theological program that sees beatitude as the happiness of everlasting union with God and that outlines a program of law and virtue that is not so much about laying out a rule-based ethics of what we ought to do as it is about articulating a virtue-based ethics of what we ought to be (see especially q. 94, a.2).
A central claim of this approach to ethics is that the natural moral law is an objective reality that can be discovered within each human being in every culture and every epoch. Its proponents admit that the knowledge of this moral law may decline in regressive cultures and increase in cultures that are more alert to what human flourishing requires. Likewise, they grant that the sensitivity of individuals to its moral demands may diminish when a person's conscience grows dull or when a culture's formation of its members becomes distorted.
To articulate the natural law as a body of knowledge, complete with an adequately formulated set of justifications, much reflection is needed. It is for just this reason that a work like Aquinas's Summa theologica devotes so much attention to providing a metaphysical grounding for all his assertions about moral obligation by offering a detailed account of human nature, of the intrinsic orientation of rational creatures to find the fulfillment of their potentialities in union with God, and of a description of the virtues that are constitutive of a good human life.
A proper understanding of traditional natural law theory requires preliminary comments, for a broad range of moral theorists have laid claim to the term. In particular, we need to distinguish between the laws of nature in the moral sense and the “laws of nature” that theorists in various disciplines have formulated to articulate the regularities that have been discovered about the way physical objects and forces work. As Robert Spitzer notes, discoveries about the fine-tuning of various cosmological constants reinforce the notion of divine design throughout the cosmos and permit us to make a compelling argument for the existence of God on the basis of the laws of nature operative in the physical realm. At issue here, however, is a separate but not unrelated concern with the laws of nature that govern human conduct—which is what has traditionally been meant by the natural moral law.
The precepts of the natural moral law, in its classical understanding, refer to the self-evident standards by which human conduct is to be judged (Summa theologica, I–II, q. 94, a.2). The most fundamental of these standards (e.g., that good is to be sought and done, that evil is to be shunned and avoided) are so basic that they are as inescapable for practical reasoning as are the first principles of theoretical reason, for example, the principle of noncontradiction (that one cannot meaningfully assert and deny the same proposition at the same time) and the principle of sufficient reason (that for anything whatsoever, there must be an adequate explanation, either in itself or in its causes). While there is, in principle, no way to derive these first principles from anything yet more basic, there are informal routes for illustrating their self-evidence, for there is no way to go forward in reasoning if one holds that something both is and is not the case at the same time, considered from the same respect. Likewise, it makes no sense in the sphere of practical reasoning to imagine holding as a basic principle that good is to be avoided and evil sought. Even villains pursue their villainy under the formality of goodness, for they desire something that appears good to them and choose the means by which to pursue it.
The specification of just what is authentically good requires further work in the sphere of practical reasoning, to be sure. For this reason the mainstream of classical natural law theorists (from Sophocles and the Stoics, Cicero and Aquinas, Locke and the judges at Nuremberg, through a variety of present-day proponents) have relied on our knowledge of what human beings are and what sorts of things genuinely fulfill or frustrate their growth and their lives (individually and as members of societies of various sorts).
The proponents of the “basic goods” school of thought sometimes label their efforts a “new natural law” theory that is derived analytically by examining a range of propositions about the objects of human desire to identify self-evident fundamental goods (see, e.g., Finnis 2011). The classical theory of the natural moral law, however, provides more compelling arguments than do such intuitionist accounts. Proponents of the traditional form of natural law theory insist on the need to understand human nature in order to see why a given practice is virtuous or vicious, why it deserves to be regarded as obligatory or permissible or forbidden. Even though it goes behind the scope of this chapter to deal with the brutalities that have unfortunately been committed in the name of religion or the natural law, there is a suitable response, namely, that the very fact that religious people have sometimes acted against their religion and against the natural moral law shows us all the more reason why there must be an objective moral order with a transcendent basis, for it is on this basis that we can recognize and condemn these brutalities. In fact, this is why any sound ethics must distinguish between authority and the power with which authority is entrusted. It is only by properly understanding the difference between authority and power that there is a basis for distinguishing between what is genuinely authoritative and what is authoritarian. (For further discussion of this, see Simon 1962.)
Admittedly, anyone who does not recognize the possibility of moral precepts that are always and everywhere in force will not find this argument for theism compelling, but for most of human history the statement of these obligations and prohibitions has been taken to express what we already know about their universally binding character. These are such precepts as that the innocent may never be deliberately killed, that what belongs to others may not be taken without their permission, that the spouses of others may not be legitimately pursued, and so on. The content of these precepts is prior to its formulation in various religious traditions, whether as the Golden Rule or as the Dao or as the Dharma. Yet the recognition of these basic points in diverse traditions shows that there are invariant norms for human life that are recognized across cultures.
As Russell Hittinger argues (2003), there are three main assumptions in any genuine form of natural law theory: one that is anthropological, one of an epistemological sort, and one that is theological. With regard to the first point, unless there is such a thing as human nature (the thing, not necessarily the specific terminology of “human nature”), there would be no justification for holding that there are basic human rights that need to be respected regardless of whether it is convenient and independently of whether those rights are yet codified in the positive law of any given culture. The alternative to this position would inevitably require us to hold that ethical norms are impositions of restraint by force or by choice rather than discoveries by reason. The forcefulness of this position is readily seen by considering the arguments against Thrasymachus voiced in the first book of Plato's Republic and again in the Gorgias.
The second point is epistemological. Unless human reason is capable of understanding human nature and its intrinsic orientation toward things genuinely good, there will be no foundation for any claims about moral truth that can legitimately be thought to be objective, universal, and intelligible. To be sure, establishing this point is a project beyond the scope of the present chapter, which is concerned only to show the reasonableness of theism on the basis of certain assumptions (in this case, the reality of such moral norms). There is much in the area of moral psychology that depends on practical reasoning about how to deliberate about possible courses of action so as to achieve various goals. There would be no reason, however, to take such reasoning as based on anything but hypothetical imperatives unless theoretical reasoning is able, in principle, to recognize ends that are given in our nature prior to our purposive choice of means suitable to the realization of those ends (see “What Is Natural Law? Human Purposes and Natural Ends” in Sokolowski 2006, 214–233).
The third aspect is theological, and it is, of course, this aspect that is most relevant to our concerns in this volume. Unless there is a transcendent source for the natural law that human reason can discover within human nature, there will be no sufficient ground for its categorical normativity. For the mainstream natural law thinkers such as Aquinas, this means a recognition that God is the author of human nature and that the human nature that God designed includes an intrinsic directedness (teleology) of human beings to what is for their genuine good. In his accounts of this telic orientation, he includes detailed arguments about the inclination of human beings at various levels, including the inclinations that human beings feel to sustain their lives by seeking healthful food, cleanliness, and exercise; the inclinations to procreate and to live in familial societies; the inclinations to seek knowledge useful for their lives and for their eternal destiny; the inclinations to love and be loved in appropriate ways; and the inclinations to create and sustain other forms of society in which they can live and prosper. Aquinas is ever mindful that there may be wayward inclinations as well as genuine ones, and so he has a detailed treatment of the prudential discernments that reason must make to sort out the trustworthy inclinations from those that are untrustworthy. In describing these aspects of moral psychology, he is ever at pains, however, to locate the metaphysical grounding for all these claims in God's creation of human nature. For him, it is precisely by the way in which God included trustworthy telic inclinations and the power of reason to discriminate trustworthy from unworthy inclinations that God promulgated the natural moral law for human beings.
The naturalized versions of ethics that flourished in the early modern period (Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Locke, and others) had adopted as their starting point a deliberate rejection of this transcendent source (that is, as if God did not exist—si velut Deus non daretur). By doing so, however, they also lost the grounding for their claim to categorical normativity and could at best claim a kind of hypothetical imperative that quickly degenerated into an ethics of rules made on the basis of enlightened self-interest. From this perspective, Immanuel Kant (whose third formulation of the categorical imperative preserves the very terminology natural law) saw deeply into the character of the theoretical problem here and tried to replace the missing third leg of this stool (the theological) by reassigning the role of promulgating the natural law to human reason. In doing so, however, he needed to stress that it was practical reason (not theoretical reason) that generates the categorical imperative (see Rist, chap. 7). No longer is ethics rooted in a divine source but rather in practical reason and the primacy of autonomy. The danger of this approach is that what is asserted on the basis of will may be denied on the same grounds. To resist the charge of arbitrariness, however, requires that there be a basis in what we do not create, control, or alter—that is, in what has traditionally been called nature and the designer of nature.
The purpose of the second portion of this chapter has been to make the case that morality is ultimately dependent on God. In its first part we saw the usefulness of philosophical reason for clearing away various obstacles that may prevent us from seeing how well theism answers some of the perennial questions of human existence.
It remains my hope that the discussion of these great questions between contemporary theists and atheists may be an occasion for fruitful dialogue. The ultimate grounding of moral norms seems to me to be a question on which much turns, as is the question of the ultimate source of the deep intelligibility of all reality. The story of Augustine's search for compelling answers may prove to be an opening to others to conduct a similar quest, and the study of the cross-cultural recognition of certain moral truths may be conducive to an investigation of the requirements for norms that transcend particular societies and contingent choices.
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