2 Ockham’s Children: Nomolatry, Nominalism, and Contemporary Moral Culture

Ockham’s Children: Nomolatry, Nominalism, and Contemporary Moral Culture

Charles Taylor is one of those rare thinkers who casts light on virtually every subject he addresses. His account of the perils of moralism is no exception. Indeed, I find myself in broad agreement with the main thrust of his analysis. It is impossible to disagree with his contention that what he terms “nomolatry” or “code fetishism” is one of the dominating features of the contemporary moral landscape. Equally persuasive are his claims that we were initially set on the road to nomolatry by certain developments in Latin Christianity and that modern culture has been marked by a succession of revolts against the understanding of moral and religious life it embodies. He is clearly right, furthermore, that nomolatry reflects an impoverished understanding of moral and religious life.

What I want to focus on here is contemporary moral culture. More specifically, what I want to try to do is to flesh out our understanding of this culture (and the crisis which I believe besets it) by briefly identifying two highly influential currents that coexist in it alongside nomolatry and by sketching the broader horizon within which this culture emerges. I’ll conclude by offering a brief suggestion about where we might discover the better understanding of moral life Professor Taylor persuasively argues we need.

Before turning to these subjects, however, I wanted first to briefly touch on the concept of nomolatry itself. One wishes that Professor Taylor had defined this concept a little more precisely lest the impression be created that nomolatry should be identified with the idea of a moral code as such and can only be avoided through the embrace of a thoroughgoing relativism. His point, if I am understanding him correctly, is that there exists an alternative to both nomolatry and relativism in which such a code plays an indispensable role, namely, authentic moral life. The hallmark of nomolatry, therefore, is not the idea of a moral code as such, or even of a moral law embodying exceptionless norms, but a desicated understanding of moral life (rooted in a flawed conception of human existence) which effectively reduces this life to nothing more than a matter of obedience to a set of rules.

In any case, I would argue that to grasp what’s going on in contemporary moral culture, it is essential to take cognizance of two factors that shape it over and above nomolatry. The first is what John Paul II describes as a pervasive “skepticism regarding the very existence of ‘moral truth’ and an objective moral law,” the denial “that there exists a moral law inscribed in our humanity, which we can come to know by reflecting on our nature and our actions, and which lays certain obligations on us.”[1] Pervading not just the contemporary academy (where it is championed under a variety of rubrics, most notably that of post-modernism) but popular culture as well (as anyone who’s taught college students today can attest), this skepticism is a defining feature of the contemporary moral scene.

The second phenomenon is the ascendancy of a view that might be called radical freedom. In this view, free choice—regardless of the object or objects chosen—is not only viewed as an absolute value in and of itself, but effectively elevated to the status of the highest human good. Indeed, in its most extreme formulations, radical freedom exalts choice to the point where, in Francis Canavan’s apt phrase, it “establishes” the true and good rather than being “governed” by them.[2] Truth and goodness thus become creations of freedom, and each person comes to possess his or her own unique truth, different from the truth of others.

It’s true, of course, that human beings frequently hold incompatible ideas and often fail to appreciate the full implications of their premises. The proponents of postmodernism, for example, often combine a radical skepticism about the capacity of the human mind to attain moral truth with an intense (and often quite doctrinaire) moralism encompassing claims about the right of all human beings to be treated with equal concern and respect, and devotion to of a host of trendy causes. Likewise, although perhaps few would embrace (or even recognize) the full implications of “radical freedom” sketched earlier, it nevertheless has become an important factor on the contemporary cultural scene. Indeed, today both public law and social institutions face massive pressure to bring themselves in closer accordance with its dictates.

Nevertheless, like nomolatry, moral skepticism and radical freedom have powerfully influenced the contemporary moral landscape. They help explain the ascendancy of what Sandel terms the liberalism of the unencumbered self with its vision of human beings as sovereign wills free to make of themselves and the world whatever they please. They help explain our tendency to reduce moral judgments to the status of subjective preferences and thus to embrace the view that, in James Hitchcock’s words, “personal feelings and desires largely define acceptable and unacceptable behavior.”[3]

They help explain our temptation to reduce all truth claims to impositions by others and to view the very idea of a knowable and universally obligatory moral order as a threat to freedom. They help explain what Jean Bethke Elshtain describes as the “radical antinomianism” that looms so large in our cultural universe “in which all constraints placed on the self tend to give rise to cries of oppression.”[4] They help explain our seeming inability to sustain moral absolutes and the rise of what has been termed “absolutophobia.”[5]

Indeed, I would suggest that in the confluence of nomolatry, moral skepticism, and radical freedom, we encounter the proximate cause of the crisis that besets contemporary moral culture. If under the impact of nomolatry we reduce moral life to a simple matter of obedience to rules, moral skepticism and radical autonomy make it impossible for us to understand these rules as anything other than subjective preferences of individuals or social groups. As a result, we have difficulty understanding not only how we can be justified in “imposing” these rules on others, but even why—when they involve some serious sacrifice or conflict with our deep-seated desires—we should bother to “impose” them on ourselves.

The reasons for the ascendancy of nomolatry, moral skepticism, and radical autonomy are undoubtedly complex. What I want to suggest is that this ascendancy is attributable, at least in part, to what Servais Pinckaers terms “the nominalist revolution."[6] Nominalism, of course, originated in late medieval theology and found preeminent expression in the thought of William of Ockham. But, as a host of thinkers have suggested (including Pinckaers, Canavan, Kenneth L. Schmitz, David A. J. Richards, Thomas A. Spragens, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Michael Oakshott, and Hans Blumenberg), nominalism has had a profound impact on modern Western thought and culture.

What needs to be emphasized here is what Pinckaers describes as “the veritable revolution” that “nominalism stirred up in the moral world, and its ideological structures.”[7] If nomolatry, moral skepticism, and radical skepticism loom so large in contemporary moral culture, I would argue, it is because this culture unfolds within a horizon decisively shaped by nominalism, because our moral thinking takes place largely within the conceptual framework nominalism establishes and in the idiom it prescribes. Indeed, modern moral theory consists largely in an exploration of the implications of this framework for our understanding of moral life. Nomolatry, moral skepticism, and radical autonomy are all possible outcomes of the effort to construct a moral theory on nominalist foundations.

I do not mean to suggest, it should be stressed, that nominalism alone is responsible for the state of contemporary moral culture. Contemporary moral culture, after all, is not reducible to nomolatry, moral skepticism, and radical autonomy; and these three phenomena, in any case, have causes other than nominalism. Nor do I mean to imply that the proponents of the moral postures with which I am concerned here are conscious of the ways in which their thinking reflects the impact of nominalism. Nominalism’s influence is so pervasive that the categories through which it conceptualizes moral life have become part of the very intellectual air we breathe and are taken for granted not only by multitudes who have never heard of nominalism, but also by many who view themselves as its adversaries. (Pinckaers, for example, shows that while rejecting nominalist metaphysics modern neo-Thomist thought tended to view moral life through nominalist lenses.)

Recognizing the formative role of nominalist categories of thought in contemporary moral culture, furthermore, isn’t necessarily inconsistent with Professor Taylor’s insistence on the role played by Latin Christianity in engendering nomolatry. It is only to recognize the ways in which Latin Christianity—in both its Catholic and Protestant forms—has itself been profoundly shaped by nominalism.

Nominalism, of course, is best known as a doctrine about the ontological status of universals. Insisting that only individual things are real, Canavan writes, it asserts that universal terms

like human being, cat, dog, rosebush, pine tree, iron, or gold are just names that we attach to clusters of sense impressions that resemble each other. We group them under such names for convenience in thinking and talking about them, but the names we give them are only names, and do not stand for what they really and substantially are.

Universal terms, therefore, are simply mental constructs we impose on reality for reasons of convenience in dealing with it. Indeed, when all is said and done, “we cannot know the substance and nature of anything.”[8]

Nominalism, however, encompassed more than a doctrine about the ontological status of universals. “At the heart of nominalism,” as Pinckaers reminds us, is found a revolutionary conception of freedom that he labels the “freedom of indifference.” In this understanding, freedom means simply “radical indetermination,” namely, “the power to choose between contraries, independently of all causes except freedom, or the will itself.”[9] Freedom, therefore, is not grounded in reason, nature, sensibility, and inclination. When understood in this fashion, as W. Norris Clarke observes, freedom possesses no “a priori, preconscious orientation” to an “ultimate end or ordered set of ends,”[10] and thus possesses no given, determinate content. Freedom thus does not fulfill itself in law, virtue, or grace. Indeed, rather than realizing “itself by choosing a good already prescribed for it or inscribed in it,” as Schmitz remarks, it realizes itself in and through choices, in and through the exercise of “the power not only to choose but also to relinquish that choice and take up another.”[11]

This was coupled with a moral theory in which law and obligation “held the central position” that had previously been occupied by “happiness and virtue.” For nominalism, human actions in themselves “could be called indifferent, like the freedom that formed them. They became moral through the intervention of law” which is thus “the origin of morality.” Law is here understood as something “external and accidental,” issuing not from the nature of things but “from another freedom, another will confronting us.” Law was simply the command of “a higher will” exerting “pressure and constraint upon a lower one.”[12]

Obviously, this understanding of freedom, law, and morality had profound implications for reason’s role in the moral life. Inasmuch as morality was reducible to law and law to an expression of will, reason’s role was no longer to discern moral imperatives embedded in the dynamic orientation of human nature toward its fulfillment, but was instead limited to discerning the identity and content of the will or wills to which we are subject. It also had profound consequences for the relationship of freedom to law. From the perspective of the freedom of indifference, authentic freedom is incompatible with constraint, even if some form of the latter is, for practical reasons, sometimes necessary. Thus, far from being complementary, freedom and law now are in conflict—law results in “freedom’s being limited and constrained”[13] by the edicts of an alien will. In fact, nominalism divorces law from any intrinsic connection not only to reason and freedom but to virtue, inclination, happiness, and human flourishing as well.

Here, I would suggest, we arrive at a principal—perhaps even the principal—source of dichotomies that loom so large in the contemporary moral theory: autonomy versus heteronomy, freedom versus law, nature versus freedom, individual versus society, etc. Here, I would also suggest, we encounter one of the most important sources of the code fetishism that Professor Taylor rightly laments. The reduction of moral life to a matter of conformity to rules follows from the nominalist reduction of morality to law and law to command.

Simultaneously, nominalism severs moral life from any intrinsic connection to what Professor Taylor terms the transcendent horizon of human existence. The nominalist freedom of indifference divorces morality from any inner orientation to happiness, from any intrinsic ordering to a summum bonum. By doing so, it prevents morality from opening out, as it were, to the divine. There’s ultimately no room in the nominalist universe for the Augustinian and Thomistic understanding of the human will as, in Clarke’s apt phrase, “radically ‘magnetized’ or drawn by its very nature” toward “the good without restriction of limitation,” and thus toward “God as the infinite plentitude of all goodness.”[14]

Likewise, nominalism plays a pivotal role in fostering the moral skepticism that figures so prominently in contemporary culture. Although nominalism has often been combined with a commitment to one form or another of moral cognitivism, the inner logic of nominalism’s own metaphysic propels it slowly but inexorably toward an ever deeper and more corrosive skepticism. The dominant premodern moral traditions, as Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us, distinguished between “man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature.” Ethics was “the science” that enabled “men to understand how they make the transition from the former to the latter state.” Its “precepts instructed” us “. . . how to realize our true nature and to reach our true end.”[15] For these traditions, therefore, men’s moral good was thus rooted in his natural good, in the ends or goals inherent in his nature.

By pushing thought relentlessly toward the denial of the existence of a knowable human nature with natural needs and tendencies, therefore, nominalism struck at the very foundation of these traditions. To their credit, modern moral thinkers have recognized the problem. Indeed, modern moral theory has largely consisted of the effort to construct a new foundation for an objective ethic, to show how the idea of an objective moral order can be sustained even in the absence of a knowable and teleologically ordered human nature. The story of modern moral philosophy is the story of the failure of this effort.[16] With regard to Locke’s attempts to elaborate a moral philosophy, Eric Voegelin once remarked that it produced “not a new philosophy of morals but a thorough devastation on which nobody could build anything.”[17] Something similiar might well be said of the broader effort by modern thinkers—of which Locke’s work was an early and influential expression—to reconstruct moral theory on nominalist foundations. The result of this failure is the corrosive moral skepticism we see today.

Finally, it is no accident that the ascendancy of nominalism has been followed by contemporary celebration of radical freedom. The radical implications of the nominalist understanding of “freedom of indifference” were originally blunted by the intellectual horizon within which nominalism originally operated—a horizon in which the idea of a lawgiving God (knowable through the certitude of faith and/or rational demonstration) was taken for granted. The very metaphysical premises that push nominalism relentlessly toward moral skepticism, as Canavan points out, also move it inexorably toward a philosophical “agnosticism” and religious “fideism.”[18] These premises thus combine with other factors at work in modern thought and culture to render the idea of a lawgiving God problematic.

And, once this idea becomes problematic, the nominalist freedom of indifference leads to what we have termed radical freedom. Once there no longer exists a higher will possessing “the power to impose itself upon us with the force of obligation,”[19] nominalism’s divorce of freedom from reason, denial that freedom is of its nature oriented to an inscribed good, and identification of free choice as the human person’s defining attribute and perfection, lay the groundwork for the elevation of freedom to the status of the highest human good. In the godless, meaningless, and ultimately unintelligible universe in which nominalism issues, moreover, the human will becomes by default the source of law and obligation, the author of the only obligations that constrain, and the ultimate arbiter of true and false, right and wrong.

The obvious question is where we might find the better understanding of the moral life we so badly need. If the bad news is that a certain turn in Latin Christianity—the nominalist revolution—helps explain the difficulties besetting contemporary moral culture, the good news, or at least so I would argue, is that Latin Christianity can help supply us with the resources we need to transcend the suffocating confines of this culture. Christianity long predates the nominalist revolution, after all, and through the patristic and scholastic traditions we can make contact with a metaphysics, anthropology, and understanding of moral life decisively richer than those that emerge under the auspices of nominalism.

All I can do here is to touch briefly on the understandings of freedom and law that inform these traditions. Freedom, in this view, is grounded in both reason and will, originating in the human intellect’s natural inclination to truth and the human will’s natural inclination to goodness. Here, therefore, it does not mean sheer indetermination. In sharp contrast to the nominalist freedom of indifference, in this understanding, freedom possesses what Schmitz describes as a “directional” character, “a noncompulsive original orientation.”[20] It finds fulfillment not in itself but in and through the goods to which it is ordered, the goods that are inscribed on its very structure. Thus, in Aquinas’ formulation, inasmuch as “free will is ordered to the good, and tends to evil only by defect,” it follows “the angels, who cannot sin, enjoy greater freedom of choice than do we.”[21]

Law, in turn, as Pinckaers writes, is now understood not as “the work of a will external and foreign to us” whose “demands . . . restrict our freedom.” Viewed instead as “a work of wisdom, first engaging the intelligence, and only then the will,” the moral law is a “dynamic interior law” expressive “of our natural inclinations” toward “truth and goodness.”[22]

The ruptures that characterize nominalist thought—the separation of law and freedom, etc.—are absent here, as the dichotomies in which they issue. Freedom, for example, finds fulfillment in law: far from being opposed to freedom, the moral law is inscribed on its very structure and guides its development. Indeed, in this view, freedom, inclination, law, happiness, reason, nature, grace, and virtue are essentially complementary. Here, furthermore, moral life is reintegrated with the vertical dimension of human existence. At the heart of human existence is found a natural desire for the beatific vision, and the quest for the good that animates moral life ultimately finds fulfillment only in communion with the Infinite Good that is God Himself.

This leads to the whole question of Pope John Paul II. Professor Taylor appears to view John Paul as an ambiguous figure. Much of the time, he seems to suggest, John Paul operated as a proponent of a Catholic form of code fetishism which responds to secular nomolatry with a “counter-code” of his own. On occasion, however, (e.g., World Youth Day), he suggests that John Paul offered us a glimpse of what Christian life freed from the taint of nomolatry might look like.

To see John Paul in this fashion, I would argue, is to miss both the extraordinary unity of profession and practice that characterized his extraordinary papacy and the nature and significance of the pope’s moral teaching. What we encounter in John Paul’s thought, I would suggest, is nothing less than a recovery of the older patristic and scholastic understanding of moral life mentioned above and a creative development of this understanding in the light of the insights of modern philosophies of subjectivity and freedom. Indeed, the significance of John Paul’s moral teaching is found in the fact that it affords us an alternative not merely to nomolatry but, even more fundamentally, to the whole nominalist framework that has haunted modern moral culture.

In opposition to nominalism, John Paul embraces a metaphysical and moral realism. If he affirms the existence of moral law, moreover, his understanding of the nature of both this law and moral life as a whole differ decisively from those which emerge under the auspices of nominalism, as does the understanding of human freedom—with its distinctive insistence on the essential and constitutive relationships of freedom and truth—that figures so prominently in his thought. Far from embracing nomolatry, at the very heart of John Paul’s thought is found a profoundly personalistic anthropology and the affirmation that moral life can ultimately be understood only in the light of the fundamental vocation of the human person to self-giving love, a vocation extending beyond the boundaries of time to encompass participation in the very inner life of the Holy Trinity.

When all is said and done, or so at least it seems to me, Professor Taylor’s real quarrel with John Paul isn’t really about nomolatry at all. Rather, it is about the substance of the moral norms that should be affirmed by those committed to saving moral life from both the Scylla of nomolatry and the Charybdis of sheer relativism.

NOTES

1. “Freedom and the Moral Law,” in Springtime of Evangelization: The Complete Text of the Holy Father’s 1998 Ad Limina Address to the Bishops of the United States, ed. Thomas D. Williams, L.C. (San Diego: Basilica Press, 1999), 111–12.

2. Francis Canavan, “The Empiricist Mind,” The Human Life Review 25 (Spring 1999): 77.

3. James Hitchcock, Years of Crisis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 42.