Pinker and the Pope Condemn Religious Violence

Steven Pinker and Pope Benedict XVI seem to agree with one another in condemning religious violence.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker explains the Darwinian evolutionary process by which violence has declined in human history.  For Pinker, one manifestation of this evolutionary shift is that while "the Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery," most biblical believers today--Jews and Christians--reject the sanctified cruelty of the Bible.  "Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible.  They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles" (10-12).

Pinker explains this as showing the "benevolent hypocrisy" of biblical believers:

Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people.  Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado.  The question is why they don't, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good.  The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology.  When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years.  But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful. (17)

A few days ago, the Pope acknowledged that violence has often been religiously motivated, while insisting that religious people should find this disturbing, and Christians should feel shame for the history of Christian violence.

As a Christian, I want to say at this point: yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith.  We acknowledge it with great shame.  But it is utterly clear that this was an abuse of the Christian faith, one that evidently contradicts its true nature.  The God in whom we Christians believe is the Creator and Father of all, and from Him all people are brothers and sisters and form one single family.  For us the Cross of Christ is the sign of the God Who put 'suffering-with' (compassion) and 'loving-with' in place of force. . . . It is the task of all who bear responsibility for the Christian faith to purify the religion of Christians again and again from its very heart, so that it truly serves as an instrument of God's peace in the world, despite the fallibility of humans.

In other statements, the Pope has made clear that what he is condemning, in particular, are the faults of the Catholic Church in sanctioning the propagation of the faith through violence--as in the Inquisition and the Crusades.

But while Pinker sees this as the "benevolent hypocrisy" of biblical believers who reject the religious violence of the Bible, the Pope sees this as recognizing that religious violence is "an abuse of the Christian faith."

In asking forgiveness for the faults of the Church in promoting religious violence, Pope Benedict XVI continues a position that began with his predecessor--John Paul II.  This is remarkable, because as far as I know, this is the first time in the history of the Church that Popes have asked forgiveness for the sinfulness of the Church in supporting unjustified violence.

As Cardinal Ratzinger, and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pope has previously endorsed a remarkable statement of the International Theological Commission (ITC) in 1999 on "The Church and the Faults of the Past." 

Following the lead of Pope John Paul II, this statement explores the reasoning for the Church's confession of faults and asking forgiveness.  This is recognized as a radical move: "in the entire history of the Church, there are no precedents for requests for forgiveness by the Magisterium for past wrongs" (1.1).

This is an amazing confirmation of Pinker's argument about the power of the evolutionary historical forces in pushing for a decline in violence, including religious violence.

As the ITC statement makes clear, there are two interrelated problems.  How can the Church confess the faults of the past without denying the divine authority of the Church?  And how can the Church condemn the religious violence of the Bible without denying the divine authority of the Bible?

To the first question, the answer is that the Church is "at the same time holy and ever in need of purification" (sec. 3).  This is supported by Thomas Aquinas's claim that the Church cannot be sinless in its earthly pilgrimage, because the fullness of its holiness will be achieved only in Heaven (3.3, quoting ST, III, q. 8, a. 3, ad 2).

To the second question--about the authority of the Bible--the answer is ambiguous.  The ITC statement agrees with Pinker's comment about the Bible--particularly, the Old Testament--being "staggering in its savagery."  It is troublesome, then, that the Old Testament never shows the people of Israel asking forgiveness for their unjustified violence against their enemies.  Although we see people confessing their sins before God, we don't see them confessing their sins before the people they have injured.  Why not?

We can propose various hypotheses in response to this question.  First, there is the prevalent theocentrism of the Bible, which gives precedence to the acknowledgement, whether individual or national, of the faults committed against God.  What is more, acts of violence perpetrated by Israel against other peoples, which would seem to require a request for forgiveness from those peoples or from their descendants, are understood to be the execution of divine directives, as for example Gn 2-11and Dt 7:2 (the extermination of the Canaanites), or 1 Sm 15 and Dt 25:19 (the destruction of the Amalekites).  In such cases, the involvement of a divine command would seem to exclude any possible request for forgiveness.  The experiences of maltreatment suffered by Israel at the hands of other peoples and the animosity thus aroused could also have militated against the idea of asking pardon of these people for the evil done to them. (2.1)

If one reads this passage carefully, one can see a quiet admission that we must recognize that the Bible is mistaken when it reports God as commanding unjust violence.  The people of Israel saw no need to be forgiven for acts of violence that they "understood to be the execution of divine directives," and thus "the involvement of a divine command would seem to exclude any possible request for forgiveness."  Is this a hint that they were mistaken?  That what the Bible reports as "divine directives" for unjust violence is wrong?

Turning to the New Testament, the ITC statement emphasizes that the "frailties of Jesus' disciples" are acknowledged, especially in the gospel of Mark, and this includes Peter, whom the Church regards as the first Bishop of Rome and the source of the apostolic succession for the divine authority of the popes (2.2).

And yet, the New Testament never shows the first Christians confessing the faults of the Old Testament past.  Consequently, John Paul II's calls for admitting the guilt of the Church in religious violence "do not find an exact parallel in the Bible" (2.4).

So how do we explain this move by John Paul II, which has been continued by Benedict XVI?  One answer suggested by the ITC statement is that there has been a "paradigm change":

While before the Enlightenment there existed a sort of osmosis between Church and State, between faith and culture, morality and law, from the eighteenth century onward this relationship was modified significantly.  The result was a transition from a sacral society to a pluralist society, or, as occurred in a few cases, to a secular society.  The models of thought and action, the so-called "paradigms" of actions and evaluation, change.  Such a transition has a direct impact on moral judgments, although this influence does not justify in any way a relativistic idea of moral principles or of the nature of morality itself. (5.1)

Pinker stresses the importance of Enlightenment thought in supporting the "humanitarian revolution" (129-188) as one of the historical trends favoring a decline in violence.  This was part of a larger shift in thought towards classical liberalism, in which religious belief became a matter of individual liberty and conscience expressed in the voluntary associations of civil society but not coercively enforced by government.  Now, it seems that the Catholic Church has embraced liberalism in accepting the move from a premodern "sacral society," in which violence could be used to enforce religion, to a "pluralist society" or "secular society," based on religious toleration and nonviolence.

Rather than seeing this as a break from traditional Christianity, we might see it as a return to the position of the first Christians in the New Testament.  After all, with the possible exception of the book of Revelation, the Christians of the New Testament are never presented as using coercive violence to compel religious belief.  Believers punish heretics by expelling them from their churches, but they never try to execute them.  The execution of heretics in the Inquisition had no clear basis in the New Testament.  That's why Christians like Roger Williams could argue that a policy of absolute toleration--even for atheists--was part of the New Testament teaching of Christianity, as opposed to the theocracy of the Old Testament.

The evolutionary history of strengthening the "better angels of our nature" to promote a decline in unjustified violence can be rightly understood as a fulfillment of true Christianity.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Does the New Testament Teach Classical Liberalism?

The second half of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (Parts 3 and 4) is devoted to the interpretation of the Bible.  For many readers today, this seems odd, because giving so much attention to biblical theology seems out of place in a treatise of political philosophy.  When the Leviathan is used as a text in undergraduate political science classes, it's common for the teacher not to assign any reading from the second half of the book.  Some editions of the Leviathan reprint only the first half of the book.  But having just completed another reading of the whole of the Leviathan in my graduate seminar on Hobbes, I am reminded of how important the interpretation of the Bible has been for the history of political philosophy, and particularly for the history of liberal political philosophy.

A new book that has helped me to see this is Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture, 1300-1700 by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker (Crossroad Publishing Company, 2013).  Hahn and Wiker show how the "historical-critical method" in the scholarly study of the Bible arose in the 19th century as the culmination of a political interpretation of the Bible that began with Marsilius of Padua and continued with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke.  The purpose of that political interpretation of the Bible was to secularize politics and privatize religious belief so that the aim of politics would be securing the peace and security of the body rather than the salvation of the soul.  (Hahn has summarized the argument of his book in a YouTube video lecture.)

Hahn and Wiker repeatedly quote a remark by Jon Levenson that "historical criticism is the form of biblical studies that corresponds to the classical liberal political ideal," and they say that Levenson "has hit the bull's-eye" (7-9, 11, 296, 364, 388).  Their book is an elaborate argument to demonstrate this claim--that the historical-critical method for studying the Bible was developed to advance classical liberal politics.  That's their explicit argument.  Their implicit argument is that this liberal bias requires a distorted interpretation of the Bible.

I am persuaded by their explicit argument but not by their implicit argument.  I agree with them that some of the early modern political philosophers initiated a tradition of Biblical interpretation that would support classical liberalism by radically separating Church and State, doing this in such a way as to promote the liberal principles of political secularism, religious liberty, and the privatization of religious life.  I don't agree, however, with their implied claim that this liberal interpretation of the Bible is clearly contrary to the true teaching of the Bible (see, for example, 11, 364, 445, 484).  I would argue that the secularization of politics through the liberal principles of religious toleration and privatization of religious belief is largely a product of New Testament Christianity.  In other words, the liberal reading of the Bible is a plausible reading.  Indeed, it's so plausible that most Christians today--including the Catholic Church--have embraced this liberal interpretation of the Bible.  I suspect that even Hahn and Wiker ultimately accept Biblical liberalism.

It might seem odd, however, to put Hobbes in the tradition of Biblical liberalism.  After all, much of what Hobbes says about church-state relations seems illiberal in that he argues for the absolute power of the political sovereign over an established church, which includes the right of the sovereign to interpret the Bible, so that the sovereign acts as the "supreme pastor," who "ought indeed to direct his civil commands to the salvation of souls" (ch. 33, 254-55 [268-69]; ch. 36, 283-85 [298-300]; ch. 39, 306 [321-22]; ch. 43, 355-56 [372-73], 379 [396]).

And yet one should notice that Hobbes's illiberal argument for the political regulation of an established church is based on his interpretation of the Hebrew theocratic state in the Old Testament, and as he moves into the New Testament, he begins to move towards a separation of church and state.  Critical for Hobbes's political interpretation of the New Testament is the declaration of Jesus that "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) and that Christ's kingdom will not begin until his second coming.  During the first three centuries of Christianity, the Christian churches were voluntary organizations that enforced doctrinal orthodoxy through the threat of excommunication from the church but without any coercive force or violent persecution of heretics or infidels.  Hobbes concludes that among the early Christians, "there was then no government by coercion, but only by doctrine, and persuading" (ch. 42, 348 [365]).  The political enforcement of church authority did not arise until the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 AD (ch. 42, 322 [338], 342-44 [359-61]).

By the time he reaches the end of Leviathan, Hobbes is ready to endorse the position of the Independents in Parliament, who wanted no politically enforced church at all and free toleration of religious diversity.  "And so we are reduced to the Independency of the primitive Christians, to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best," and if this promotes religious peace, it is "perhaps the best" (ch. 47, 456 [479-80]).

Thus does Hobbes move towards complete religious toleration and the privatization of religious belief as rooted in the New Testament as the best way to secure peace.  In effect, Hobbes adopts the interpretation of the Bible advanced by Roger Williams, who argued that while the Old Testament teaches theocratic enforcement of religious belief, the New Testament teaches religious toleration.  As I have argued in a previous post, Williams was right in interpreting the New Testament as supporting a classical liberal conception of religious toleration and liberty.

We should realize, however, that Hobbes was right in arguing that no matter how much religious liberty might be allowed, even in a state that practices toleration, the sovereign must have the ultimate power to rule against religious doctrines that promote violence, and in that way the sovereign is still the "supreme pastor." 

Consider, for example, what happened after the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001.  When it was discovered that the terrorists were members of al-Qaida, who believed they were obeying the teaching of the Koran in commanding holy war against infidels, this provoked a political debate over whether Islam was a threat to the peace of the world, which would make it impossible to tolerate Islam in a liberal regime that must suppress religious violence. 

In his speech to a Joint Session of Congress, nine days after the terrorist attack, George Bush had to offer his own authoritative interpretation of the Koran.  He said that the terrorists "practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam."  He declared that the teachings of Islam "are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah." 

Bush is a Christian who interprets the New Testament as teaching that religious belief is a voluntary activity of private individuals that can be properly protected from coercive persecution.  But any religious belief that promotes unjustified violence cannot be tolerated by any government that aims to secure peace and liberty.  Consequently, Bush believes that government can rightly interpret religious doctrines to protect the peace while generally tolerating religious beliefs and practices that are non-violent.

This is the Christian understanding of liberal toleration that emerged in the English Civil War and in the writings of Roger Williams.  It was later elaborated by Spinoza, Locke, and others.

Do Hahn and Wiker agree with this interpretation of the Bible as supporting liberal toleration?  They are strangely evasive about this.  They generally present the liberal interpretation of the Bible as driven by a liberal bias that is not really true to the Biblical text.  But then they sometimes speak of liberal toleration as something that "may appear quite ordinary to us," as if they endorse it (446).  Moreover, they often concede that the liberal interpretation of the Bible was an understandable reaction against the brutal violence and moral corruption of the Catholic Church in its exercise of authority over politics (15, 390-91).  And yet they never explicitly concede that the liberal reading of the Bible is plausible.

Hahn and Wiker claim to be following the recommendation of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, who called for "a criticism of criticism" in Biblical interpretation (8).  But they are oddly silent about the statements of Pope Benedict XVI that support the liberal interpretation of the Bible, particularly the liberal argument that the violent persecution and brutality of the Old Testament must be seen as morally inferior to the peaceful toleration and love of the New Testament.

In his Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini (November 11, 2010), Benedict XVI indicated that the Old Testament had "dark passages" containing "violence and immorality" (sec. 42).  We must remember, he advised, that "biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history."  He explained: "Revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times and thus describes facts and customs, such as cheating and trickery, and acts of violence and massacre, without explicitly denouncing the immorality of such things."  Notice the implication here that "the cultural and moral level" of the Old Testament was lower than that of the New Testament, because the God of the Old Testament did not explicitly denounce the immorality of the unjust violence perpetrated by the Hebrew people.

Moreover, Hahn and Wiker are silent about the actions of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI in asking forgiveness for the history of religious violence condoned by the Catholic Church.

They are also silent about how the Catholic Church endorsed liberal toleration as rooted in the New Testament in the "Declaration of Religious Liberty" (1965) at Vatican II.

Would Hahn and Wiker agree with these moves of the Catholic Church towards liberal toleration?  Hahn seems to agree with this in his book Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith (Doubleday, 2007).  Throughout this book, he uses persuasion to try to convert his readers to Catholicism, but he never suggests that violent persecution or coercion would ever be justified by the Catholic Church.  He writes: "We cannot impose orthodox conclusions on our unbelieving friends.  To borrow words from Benjamin Franklin: The mind changed against the will is of the same opinion still.  God endowed every human being with freedom, and we are always free to choose unbelief" (39).  So here he seems to accept Franklin's argument for toleration and conversion only through peaceful persuasion.

And yet I can't be completely sure about this, however, because of what Hahn says about papal infallibility.  He says that although the popes have made some mistakes, they are infallible in matters of Christian faith and morals.  "God has never permitted even the scoundrels to teach error in matters of faith and morals" (130).

This is disturbing.  Does he really mean to say that all the popes who authorized the persecution of heretics--for example,  Innocent IV in his Bull Ad Extirpanda--were infallible?  If so, then were John Paul II and Benedict XVI fallible in asking forgiveness for such religious violence?  Does Hahn agree with Thomas Aquinas that the Church can even authorize the execution of heretics (ST, II-II, q. 11, a. 3)?

I have elaborated some of these points in previous posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Budziszewski's Critique of Darwinian Natural Law

J. Budziszewski (pronounced "Boojee-shef-skee") is a professor in the Departments of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas.  He is a prolific author best known for his writings on his Christian interpretation of natural moral law, which he finds in the work of Thomas Aquinas. His most recent book is a commentary on Aquinas's "Treatise on Law."

In a series of papers, Budziszewski has criticized my defense of natural law or natural right as grounded in a Darwinian account of human nature.  He criticizes me for my "determined attempt to make natural law safe for atheists."  For "natural law," he argues, one must "regard nature as the design of a supernatural intelligence."  By contrast, for "naturalism," one must "regard nature (in a physical or material sense as all there is."  What I defend, he says, is not "natural law" but "naturalism," and thus atheism.

I have responded to his criticisms in previous posts (here and here).

I was reminded of this debate while attending the recent meeting (October 28-29) of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  There was a special panel on Budziszewski's interpretation of natural law. 

As some of the panelists indicated, one of Budziszewski's main ideas is to oppose what he calls "the Second Table Project."  It is said that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone.  Traditionally, the first four commandments are identified as the first tablet or table, and they concern the worship of God; the last six commandments (beginning with honoring father and mother) are identified as the second table, and they concern moral laws.  Some Christians (Roger Williams, for example) have seen here a separation of Church and State, in that the Church enforces the first table of theological law, while the State enforces only the second table of moral law.  The first table requires religious faith.  But the second table can be known by natural reason.  The first table corresponds to divine law that can be known only by those who are believers in the Bible as divine revelation.  The second table corresponds to natural law that can be known by all human beings, even those who are not biblical believers, because it depends on natural human experience.  The second table can stand on its own natural ground without any necessary dependence on the supernatural.  But this is exactly what Budziszewski denies, because, he insists, there cannot be a natural law if there is no divine lawgiver.

I have argued that if we see what Aquinas calls natural law as corresponding to what Darwin calls the natural moral sense rooted in evolved human nature, then those people who have been infused with religious faith can understand that evolved human nature as the product of God's creative design working through the natural history of evolution, while those people who lack such faith can understand that evolved human nature as the product of an unguided natural history of evolution. 

Darwin leaves open the possibility of theistic evolution by employing Aquinas's idea of "dual causality"--the religious believer can see natural causes as secondary causes, as distinguished from divine causes as primary causes (the subject of a previous post).  (I have also written posts on the Catholic Church's acceptance of Darwinian evolution.) 

Whether we have faith or not, whether we are on the side of revelation or on the side of reason, we can all recognize the common morality of natural law or natural right.  Religious belief can reinforce that natural morality for those who are religious believers.  But those who lack any religious belief can still recognize that natural morality as dictated by our natural experience and natural reason.

Some of my critics--not only Budziszewski, but also Craig Boyd, C. Stephen Evans, John Hare, Carson Holloway, Matthew Levering, Stephen Pope, Richard Sherlock, John West, and Benjamin Wiker--have complained that this distorts Aquinas's teaching by ignoring the ways in which Aquinas makes natural law dependent on God as the creator of that law.  After all, Aquinas indicates that natural law belongs to God's eternal law, because a human being as a rational creature "has a natural inclination to his proper act and end, and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law" (ST, I-II, q. 91. a. 2).  Moreover, Aquinas indicates that human beings are directed to eternal happiness in Heaven as their final end, and for this they need divine law--the divinely revealed Biblical law of the Old and New Testaments--to instruct them how to achieve that eternal happiness (ST, I-II, q. 91, aa. 4-5).

But doesn't this confirm my claim about the autonomy of natural law as separated from divine law?  By natural law, Aquinas says, human beings are directed to their natural end of earthly happiness, which is "in proportion to the capacity of human nature."  Human beings cannot recognize their supernatural end--eternal happiness in Heaven--unless they believe in the divine law of the Bible (ST, I-II, q. 91, a. 4, ad 1).  The need for divine law to reveal supernatural ends shows that natural law by itself is directed to purely natural ends that can be known by natural experience without any belief in God or His commands.

Moreover, it is only by recognizing the autonomy of natural law that allows us to use the natural law to correct the divine law of the Bible.  Budziszewski's denial of natural law's autonomy makes this impossible.  Consider three examples of how natural law can correct the moral mistakes in the Bible.

First, Budziszewski says that recognizing "the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life" is part of the natural law.  And yet, according to the Bible (Genesis 22), Abraham showed his faith in God by being willing to obey God's commandment to murder his innocent son Isaac.  Some Christians like Soren Kierkegaard have seen this Biblical story as teaching us "the suspension of the ethical" in our faith in God.  We must obey God's commands even when they are unethical.  But most people see this Biblical teaching as wrong, because we recognize that wrongness of killing innocent children, and thus our natural moral sense corrects the Bible.

Aquinas explains: "that which is done miraculously by the Divine power is not contrary to nature, though it be contrary to the usual course of nature. Therefore, . . . Abraham did not sin in being willing to slay his innocent son, because he obeyed God, although considered in itself, it was contrary to right human reason" (ST, II-II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2).  Here Aquinas shows us a direct contradiction between reason and revelation, natural law and divine law, and if we take the side of revelation and divine law, we must allow--even honor--the killing of innocent people whenever we think God has commanded it, even though this is "contrary to the usual course of nature" and "contrary to right human reason."

For Aquinas, there is no way of escaping this shocking contradiction between natural moral law and arbitrary divine command, because if he appeals to natural law to correct the Biblical story, he will be exposed to persecution from church authorities.  In fact, the Bishop of Paris had condemned faculty at the University of Paris who were accused of teaching pagan natural philosophy that was contrary to the Christian faith, and there were suspicions about Aquinas being one of that group.  We might consider the possibility that this forced Aquinas to engage in esoteric writing.

A second example of how natural law might correct the Bible is in correcting the religious violence of the Old Testament.  The last three popes--John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis--have all acknowledged that the Church needs to ask forgiveness for the religious violence practiced by the Church and endorsed by the Bible, including violence against heretics and apostates.  As Cardinal Ratzinger, and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Benedict XVI endorsed a remarkable statement of the International Theological Commission in 1999 on "The Church and the Faults of the Past."  This statement indicates that we must recognize that the Bible is mistaken when it reports God as commanding unjust violence.  This is said to require a "paradigm change"--"a transition from a sacral society to a pluralist society, or, as occurred in a few cases, to a secular society." 

So now, it seems that the Catholic Church has embraced liberalism in accepting the move from a premodern "sacral society," in which violence could be used to enforce religion, to a "pluralist society" or "secular society," based on religious toleration and nonviolence. (This has been the subject of a previous post.) 

At the conference at Aquinas College, conservative Catholics argued that the only escape from the morally corrupting relativism of America's liberal culture was to restore faithfulness to the moral teaching of the Catholic Church's Magisterium.  But they were largely silent about how the Church (beginning with Vatican II) has accepted the liberalism of toleration and pluralism as a correction of the illiberal religious violence endorsed by the Bible and by the premodern Church.  Until recently, the Church saw Protestant Christians as heretics who could be properly persecuted and even executed (see Robert Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority [Liberty Fund, 2012], 79-120).  Aquinas endorsed the Inquisition (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3). Now, even conservative Catholics like Budziszewski recognize that this was wrong in violating natural law.

A third example of natural law correcting the Bible is recognizing the wrongness of the Bible's endorsement of slavery.  While the Bible sanctions slavery (see my post here, which includes links to other posts), Budziszewski knows by natural law that this is wrong, and therefore he looks for some way to correct the Bible to conform to his natural moral knowledge that slavery is wrong.  He writes: "Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave.  At least they did eventually.  Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did--not spontaneously" (The Line Through the Heart, 36).  The explicit teaching of the Bible is that the "brotherhood of master and slave" is consistent with preserving slavery as a moral good, and this was the understanding of many Christians in the American South before the Civil War.  But Budziszewski rightly judges that Christians had to correct the Bible by seeing that human brotherhood demands the abolition of slavery as a great moral wrong.

As I have argued in Darwinian Natural Right, Darwin and others were able to see the wrongness of slavery as a violation of evolved human nature, and particularly of the natural desire for justice as reciprocity.

My Debate with Ken Ham: Darwinian Morality or Biblical Morality?

When I toured the Creation Museum, I was reminded of the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye at the Creation Museum in 2014, which was the subject of a post.  I was also reminded that I had once debated Ham in 2009--not in person but on the online website of Forbes magazine.  February 12, 2009, was the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth.  An editor at Forbes invited a number of people to write essays for the occasion.  I wrote an essay entitled "We Are the Moral Animals," in which I argued that Darwin had explained the natural grounding of morality in evolved human nature.  Ham wrote an essay entitled "Darwinian Dangers," in which he argued, on the contrary, that Darwin had destroyed the grounding of morality in Christianity by denying the moral uniqueness of human beings as created in God's image.  This shows the true motivation for Ham and other creationist scientists.  Their primary concern is not the truth or falsity of the science but its moral consequences: we should accept Biblical science because it supports morality, and we should reject Darwinian science because it corrupts morality.

At the Creation Museum, Ham begins his attack on evolution's moral dangers in the "Starting Points" exhibit.  Are Human "Races" Equal? is the question for one display (CMS, 15).  For the "Naturalistic Evolutionist Worldview," the answer is: "While most evolutionists reject racism, their philosophy is inherently racist."  To support this, the display quotes Stephen Jay Gould saying that "biological arguments for racism" have been common.  The same quotation appears in Ham's Forbes.com essay.

For the "Biblical Creationist Worldview," the answer is: "All human beings are made in God's image and are descendants of Adam, so there is no basis for racism from a biblical perspective."

Although there have been "biological arguments for racism," they have never been properly rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science and evolutionary moral psychology.  As I have pointed out, Darwin was a vehement opponent of slavery who wrote The Descent of Man to show that all human beings were equally human as members of the human species.  Ham and the Creation Museum are silent about this.

They are also silent about the fact that wherever the Bible speaks about slavery, it endorses it.  The Ark Encounter does have one display with the question, Was the Bible Used to Promote Racism?  The answer is: "Sadly, some professing Christians have misused passages of the Bible to spread racist ideas, such as slavery based on a person's skin tone or the notion that 'interracial' marriage is sinful" (AE, 101).  "But what does the Bible really teach on these matters?"  They answer with four verses about all of us being created in God's image, all one race, and all loved by God.

But they cannot cite any Biblical passage that directly condemns slavery.  And they are silent about the many passages that endorse it.  As I have indicated, those who defended the Biblical basis of slavery (like Fred Ross) wrote meticulous studies of the Bible to show that it consistently supported slavery.  To the claim that God's creating men in His image makes all men equal, Ross responded by pointing out that the "image of God" teaching is compatible with a divinely ordained hierarchy among human beings.  

For example: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen. 1:27).  Far from creating all men equal, Ross observed, God here created humanity as "male and female," so that they are not equal in body and mind.  God made the woman "out of the man" (Genesis 2:23); and He made "the man the image and glory of God, but the woman for the glory of the man.  For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man" (1 Corinthians 11:7-9); and he made the woman to be the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7).   Moreover, just as wives are to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their masters (Ephesians 5:22-24, 6:1-5).  Insofar as slaves are inferior in body and mind to their masters, the slaves are naturally better off being ruled by their masters.  

Ham and the Creation Museum make no attempt to refute this scriptural argument for slavery.  Instead, they have silently corrected the Bible by reading it through the lens of their natural moral sense, which Darwin explains as a product of human evolution.  Their knowledge that slavery is wrong comes from that natural moral sense not from their reading of the Bible.

They also silently correct the Bible's moral mistakes by refusing to even mention those many places where the Bible endorses immoral violence.  For example, in a display on "God's Promise to the Nations," they reproduce Rembrandt's painting of Abraham preparing to kill his son Isaac; but they do not explain that this murder of a child was commanded by God (Gen. 22).

Similarly, while they refer to the Israelites being commanded by God to fight against the Canaanites (CMS, 55), they are silent about God ordering a "curse of destruction," in which the Israelites would slaughter everyone, including women and children, but keep alive the young virgins so that the Israelite men could rape them (Deu. 20:10-18; Numbers 31:7-20).  Previously, I have written about how Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have condemned this religious violence in the Bible as immoral.  Ham and the Creation Museum do not do this, because in doing so, they would have to admit that the Bible's moral mistakes need to be corrected by our natural moral sense.

Philosophy and Theology in Raphael's "Stanza della Segnatura"

In his book God and Morality: A Philosophical History (2009), John Hare argues that morality is impossible without religious belief--particularly, some kind of theism. In developing his reasoning, he tries to show the importance of theism for the moral philosophy of Aristotle, Duns Scotus, ImmanuelKant, and R. M. Hare. In doing that, he criticizes me for not seeing the theism in Aristotle's teaching. I have responded to this criticism in a previous post.

Hare also argues in this book that Raphael's frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura--particularly, the School of Athens and La disputa del sacramento--illustrate his view of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christian theology.

A good website for viewing these frescoes can be found here.

Since I have long been fascinated by Raphael's frescoes, I would like to offer an alternative reading of Raphael's artistic rhetoric in these frescoes. I will lay out my thinking in four steps. First, I will raise four general questions. Second, I will offer a brief survey of the frescoes in their political, philosophical, and theological circumstances. Third, I will summarize Hare's interpretation. Finally, I will answer the general questions, while also answering Hare.

FOUR GENERAL QUESTIONS
There are at least four general questions that we might raise about Raphael's frescoes.

1. How do we judge the rhetorical persuasiveness of a painting as a visual argument?

2. Can such painting teach us something that we could not learn in any other way? Or is painting at best only an illustration of ideas derived from intellectual activity outside of the art of the painting?

3. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about Greek philosophy?

4. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about the relationship of Greek philosophy to Christian theology?

A BRIEF SURVEY
Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 at the age of 25. The frescoes were painted between 1508 and 1511. These were originally designed to adorn the walls of the personal library for Pope Julius II. It is unlikely that Raphael's education in philosophy and theology was extensive enough for him to design the Stanza della Segnatura by himself. He probably followed a program designed for him by a humanist scholar. Hare thinks this was Egidio da Viterbo, a prominent orator and Augustinian in the papal court. But I think Christiane Joost-Gaugier makes a good case--in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura (2002)--that Raphael's program was designed by Tommasio Inghirami, the papal librarian. In any case, whoever helped Raphael was deeply influenced by the Renaissance humanist thought of Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and other Christian Platonists who were trying to unify Platonic philosophy and Christian theology.

Julius II was Pope from 1503 to 1513. He was one of the Renaissance popes during the period of moral and political corruption in the Vatican that provoked the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of the Church at Wittenburg in 1517. The gross decadence of the Church became especially apparent with the pope before Julius--Alexander VI, the father of Cesare Borgia, who turned the Vatican into a personal source of wealth, power, and mistresses.

One dramatic example of those calling for moral and religious reform of the Church was Girolama Savonarola, a Dominican friar in Florence. His sermons moved the Florentines to establish a Christian Republic. But when he called for a Church Council that would remove the Pope, because he was no longer a true Christian, the Pope excommunicated him and demanded that he be punished. In 1498, he was hanged and burned. He thus became Machiavelli's best example of an "unarmed prophet" who was ruined because he relied on religious belief without military power to enforce his religion.

Julius II came to power with the promise of reforming the Church, but he never fulfilled his promises. He was preoccupied with expanding the political power of the Papacy by fighting wars to secure the power of the Papal States in Italy, which brought factional violence to his fellow Christians.

Machiavelli spoke of Julius as showing "impetuosity and fury" in his military leadership (Discourses, III.9). He was also impressed by Julius's boldness in removing Giovampagolo Baglioni as tyrant of Perugia so that he could replace him with a ruler who would support the Vatican. Julius showed his furious courage in walking into Perugia with his Cardinals, but with only a single guard. Baglioni could have killed the Pope and all his Cardinals. Baglioni was a vicious man who had murdered his relatives and taken his sister as his incestuous lover, but, amazingly, he did not dare to kill the Pope, and he allowed the Pope to lead him away. For Machiavelli, this illustrates how "very rarely do men know how to be altogether wicked or altogether good." Baglioni was wicked, but not wicked enough to secure the glory that would have come from killing the Pope (Discourses, I.27).

Machiavelli lamented that the "wicked examples" of the Papal court had destroyed the Roman religion by not preserving the religion as established by Jesus, and this had ruined Italy by depriving it of its religious support for political order (Discourses, I.12).

In this situation, Raphael's art became a tool of papal propaganda in promoting the glorious display of Julius's grandeur.

The ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura is divided into patterns of four (a divine number for the Pythagoreans--four elements, four directions, etc.). Over the four walls of the room are four female personifications of philosophy, poetry, jurisprudence, and theology, which indicate the four divisions in the books of the library. Over the School of Athens, the motto is "knowledge of causes." Over the Disputa, the motto is "knowledge of divine things."

The School of Athens represents philosophy on the east wall, while on the west wall, the Disputa represents theology.

The perspectival center of the School of Athens highlights Plato and Aristotle, posed so as to suggest that they are opposed to one another--Plato being more "vertical," while Aristotle is more "horizontal"--and yet the balanced symmetry of the painting suggests that they are complementary sides of the same dualistic reality.

In the center of the Disputa, the Host is at the center of the Eucharist.

Some of the human figures in the paintings are easily identified, but many are not. There are 44 books in the paintings, some clearly identified by their titles, while others are untitled.

Plato's vertical gesture seems to be fulfilled by the vertical movement in the Disputa from the Host through the Holy Spirit dove to Jesus to God the Father and the highest Heaven--as if to suggest that the ascent to Heaven and return to God is the fulfillment of Platonic philosophy.

The Church's theologians had been divided over Plato and Aristotle. Among many of the early Church fathers--especially, Augustine--Plato was seen as the pagan philosopher who foreshadowed Christian theology by his teaching that philosophy was a contemplative activity of ascent to the divine. Plato's Timaeus was combined with the Bible to support the Cosmic Model of the Middle Ages ("The Great Chain of Being").

Aristotle's writings were largely lost in medieval Christendom. But in the 13th century, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas led a revival of interest in Aristotle.

Renaissance philosophers like Pico della Mirandola argued for Plato and Aristotle as unified in their complementarity--Plato stressing the immortal side of human beings as contemplators of the divine, while Aristotle stressed the mortality of human beings as embodied animals. Christianity could then be seen as the fulfillment of Greek philosophy through the incarnation of Jesus and the ascent to Heavenly contemplation of God.

JOHN HARE
Hare uses his interpretation of the Stanza della Segnatura to support his argument for a divine command theory of morality. He claims that we need to bridge the "moral gap" in our experience: we have an intuition of our moral duty, but we are unable to fulfill that duty without God's assistance.

For Hare, the School of Athens suggests the theistic longings of the Greek philosophers, which unites Plato and Aristotle. Plato's theological cosmology in the Timaeus is echoed in Book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where the highest human life is said to be the contemplative beholding of the divine.

According to Hare, this theistic morality and philosophy of the Greeks finds its completion in Christian theism. Christian theism as depicted in the Disputa improves upon Greek philosophic theism in three ways. First, the two semicircles in the Disputa depict a clear separation between the supernatural and the natural realms. Second, we see that God cares for human beings and moves toward them through the Son and the Holy Spirit. Third, what we see most clearly is Jesus as the visibly incarnate union of the divine and human.

MY RESPONSE
Here's how I would answer the four general questions.

1. How do we judge the rhetorical persuasiveness of a painting as a visual argument?

We might consider painting as employing the rhetorical technique of metaphor--an artistic "likeness" of something. Then we would have to judge the truthfulness of the "likeness."

Don't we often see visual metaphors in philosophic texts? Consider, for example, Plato's "divided line" and his image of the cave in the Republic or his "ladder of love" in the Symposium.

In the case of Raphael's frescoes, we have visual references to many philosophers and theologians, and so we can judge the accuracy of these references.

We also have references to 44 books, some of which are clearly identified--Plato's Timaeus, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Euclid's Elements, Augustine's City of God, the Bible, and others. So we can judge the plausibility of how these texts are presented. (Books became especially important in the Renaissance because of the new technology of printing presses.)

2. Can painting teach us something that we could not learn in any other way? Or is painting at best only an illustration of ideas derived from intellectual activity outside of the art of painting?

I'm not sure how to answer this question. But it does seem hard to me to see how painting teaches us anything that we couldn't learn from other sources.

3. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about Greek philosophy?

Raphael's depiction of the relationship between Plato's teaching in the Timaeus and Aristotle's teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics as showing both conflict and complementarity is defensible, and it certainly was a historically influential reading of these books.

But doesn't this overlook Aristotle's criticisms of Plato at the beginning of the Ethics? And doesn't this overlook the subtlety of the books? In the Timaeus, Timaeus gives a long speech without any questioning from Socrates (although Socrates does say that Timaeus represents the "peak of philosophy"). In the Ethics, the arguments in Book 10 for the divinity of the contemplative life are remarkably strange and contradictory (as I have indicated in some recent posts).

4. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about the relationship of Greek philosophy to Christian theology?

To me, this teaching is utopian in a way that fails to resolve the moral, political, and intellectual problems left to us by Greek philosophy. Let me offer just a few examples of what I have in mind.

At the center of the Disputa, we see the doctrines of Transubstantiation and the Trinity. But why should we expect that Greek philosophers would accept such miracles without skepticism? Don't even Christians disagree about these doctrines? After all, within a few years after Raphael's death, Christendom will be divided over such issues, and they will begin slaughtering one another in religious wars.

In Heaven, we see Abraham with a knife, which reminds us of his faith in being willing to obey God's command to kill his son Isaac. Doesn't this cast doubt on the moral teaching of the Bible? Don't we have to invoke a natural moral sense to correct this biblical story? Hare speaks about this "terrible story" (80). He refers to Duns Scotus, who tries to read Genesis 22 in the light of Hebrews 11: Abraham believed that Isaac would be resurrected if we were killed. But this is not clearly said in the Old Testament text. Moreover, there are other places in the Old Testament where human sacrifice is endorsed (Judges 11:29): Jephthah sacrifices his daughter to Yahweh to fulfill a pledge he had made to Yahweh to secure victory over the Ammonites. Here, then, is the classic problem for divine command theory. (Kierkegaard used the Abraham and Isaac story as an example of the "suspension of the ethical.")

Raphael depicts Heaven, but not Hell. Why not? Does he mean to imply that there is no Hell? If so, he would be denying a fundamental doctrine of orthodox Christianity, and he would be adopting the heresy of Origen.

If Raphael believes in Hell, and if he believes that most human beings will be eternally condemned to Hell, does this mean that the Greek philosophers and all those in the tradition of Greek philosophy will be in Hell forever? If so, doesn't this deny his attempt at reconciling pagan philosophy and Christian theology? Or would Raphael incline towards Dante's solution to the problem by putting the philosophers in Limbo?

Why does Raphael allow himself to be used as a propagandist for Julius II, as a time when the Church was morally and politically corrupt, and Julius failed to act to reform the Church? Is Raphael's utopian vision blind to the corruption of religious authority?

Hare thinks the face of Savonarola appears in the Disputa. But Hare doesn't acknowledge that Julius II failed to support the reforms called for by Savonarola.

Why doesn't Raphael give us some warning about what's to come with the Protestant Reformation? In 1512, at the first meeting of the Fifth Lateran Council, Edigio da Viterbo gave the opening oration in the presence of the Pope. He pointed to the bloodiness of Julius's wars, and he warned that the corruption of the Church had provoked scorn for the Christian religion and a split among believers. Why doesn't Raphael show the same courage in challenging Julius?

Greek philosophy offers us no escape from our moral, political, and intellectual imperfection as human beings. Plato's Republic attempts to construct a utopia in which we could escape our imperfections. But it fails. Any attempt to put the Republic into practice would promote tyranny.

Raphael presents Christian theology as fulfilling Plato's utopia in a supernatural utopia beyond the natural world. But it's hard to see how Christian utopianism is any better than Platonic utopianism.

Maybe Nietzsche was right: Christianity is Platonism for the common people.

Some related posts can be found here, here, and here.

The Lucretian Modernity of Darwinian Liberalism

Modern science, modern liberalism, and even the whole of modern culture began in January of 1417.  That's when Poggio Bracciolini was looking for old books in a monastic library in southern Germany, and he discovered a copy of Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things.

Written near the middle of the first century B.C., Lucretius' book was a poetic exposition of the philosophical atomism of Epicurus.  Although Epicurus and Lucretius professed to believe in the existence of gods, they argued that the gods were immortal but natural beings who had no care for human beings, and who never interfered with the natural order of the cosmos.  That natural cosmic order was explained as the product of atomic particles combining and dissolving by chance and material necessity.  As part of that natural motion of atoms, human beings were purely material beings--in their bodies and their minds--and as such they were mortal.  Religious beliefs in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife in which those immortal souls were to be eternally rewarded or punished should be recognized as delusions.  Indeed, those delusions based on religious fears were the primary source of human anxiety.  To be happy, to be able to enjoy the pleasures of mortal life, human beings needed to overcome their fear of death and of divine judgement.  They could do that, Epicurus and Lucretius believed, by understanding the way things really are as a product of the evolutionary history of the world as atoms in motion.

This materialist cosmology of Epicureanism was a radical alternative to the other views of cosmic order in the ancient Greek and Roman world--including Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism.  And while many of the early Christian theologians could accommodate modified forms of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism as compatible with Christianity, they had to reject Epicurean materialism as utterly contrary to Christianity.  The Christian fear of the Satanic temptation of Epicureanism was so deep that the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius were hidden away and largely disappeared from medieval Christendom.

But then with the passionate revival of ancient learning in the European Renaissance, there was a curiosity, even among some devout Christians, about the long forgotten writings of Epicureanism.  As one of the greatest hunters of ancient books in the Renaissance, Poggio was elated to finally discover a copy of Lucretius' text in 1417.  But he had no idea that his discovery would lead to a renewal of Epicurean thought that would transform the culture of the Western world.  In fact, we can make a good argument that what makes the world modern is the materialist cosmology presented in Lucretius' On the Nature of Things.  We are all Epicureans now.

This story has recently been told in a most engaging way by Stephen Greenblatt in his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton, 2011), which has received the National Book Award for nonfiction for 2011.  The book is wonderfully well-written, perhaps reflecting the fact that Greenblatt is a professor of English literature at Harvard. 

It's surprising that Greenblatt never mentions another book published 10 years ago that covers much of the same ground as his book--Benjamin Wiker's Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (InterVarsity Press, 2002).

Greenblatt and Wiker agree in their historical narrative of the modern world as a product of the turn away from the Christian cosmology of intelligent design to the Lucretian cosmology of evolutionary atomism.  They disagree, however, in their assessment of this historical turn:  Greenblatt celebrates it as moral progress, while Wiker laments it as moral degeneration.  Comparing the two books illuminates this fundamental cosmological debate, a debate that runs through much of my writing for this blog.

Wiker is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and he wrote his book with the financial support of the Discovery Institute as part of their "wedge strategy" for overturning the modern culture of Darwinian materialism and replacing it with a Christian culture of intelligent design.  The back cover of Wiker's book bears endorsements from many of the luminaries of the intelligent design movement, and the Foreword is written by William Dembski.

Dembski indicates the fundamental issue in declaring that Wiker's book poses the primary question between intelligent design and Darwinism:  "Is reality fundamentally mindful and purposive or mind-less and material?" (13).

Christians must see the world as intelligently designed by the divine Creator, who exercises providential care over human beings and who judges them in the afterlife as deserving heavenly rewards or hellish punishments for eternity.  Christians can interpret many of the ancient philosophers--Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics--as teaching that the world is "fundamentally mindful and purposive" and thus supporting a Christian cosmology.  But they can't do this with the atomistic cosmology of Epicurus and Lucretius, which must be seen as the fundamental rival to Christianity.

Moreover, Wiker argues, one must defend Christian cosmology if one wants to defend Christian morality.  As a comprehensive account of the universe, every cosmology implies a morality, because every account of nature as a whole implies an account of human nature--the moral and intellectual life of human beings--as part of cosmic nature.

With this in mind, Wiker argues that "the culture wars are cosmological wars" (314).  The current debates over the morality of abortion, gay marriage, sexual conduct generally, biotechnology, and the teaching of evolution in public schools are all ultimately rooted in an irreconcilable choice between intelligent-design cosmology and materialist cosmology.  The cosmology of intelligent-design provides cosmic support for Christian morality.  The cosmology of materialist atomism promotes an individualistic hedonism free from any absolute standards of right and wrong.

Wiker would seem to agree with Greenblatt's summary of the 20 fundamental propositions of Lucretius' account of "the way things are" (182-202):

1.  Everything is made of invisible particles.
2.  The elementary particles of matter--"the seeds of the things"--are eternal.
3.  The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
4.  All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
5.  The universe has no creator or designer.
6.  Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.
7.  The swerve is the source of free will.
8.  Nature ceaselessly experiments.
9.  The universe was not created for or about humans.
10. Humans are not unique.
11. Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
12. The soul dies.
13. There is no afterlife.
14. Death is nothing to us.
15. All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
16. Religions are invariably cruel.
17. There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
18. The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
19. The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
20. Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

Greenblatt and Wiker show how these Lucretian ideas shaped the leading modern thinkers in philosophy and science--including Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Hume, Spinoza, and Darwin.  

The one person overlooked here, I think, is Nietzsche.  Particularly, in his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science--Nietzsche develops one of the most elaborate modern statements of Epicurean and Darwinian Enlightenment.  In his earlier and later writings, however, Nietzsche essentially agrees with Wiker that human beings cannot live well as Darwinian Epicureans without a redemptive cosmology, and we see Nietzsche striving for a cosmology of atheistic religiosity.  The agreement between Wiker and Nietzsche is most evident in their scorn for David Friedrich Strauss in his failing to see the nihilistic consequences of Darwinian science.  Some of my posts on this point can be found here, here, and here.

Although there is no evidence that Darwin read Epicurus or Lucretius, one can clearly see the fundamental ideas of Darwinian evolution in Book 5 (see lines 837-877) of De rerum natura, although one does not see a clear account of the gradual transmutation of one species into another.  Moreover, one sees the fundamental agreement between Lucretius and Darwin in their general cosmology of a world in which complex order arises through a natural evolutionary process that does not require miraculous interventions by an intelligent designer.

Although I find Wiker's intellectual history illuminating, we fundamentally disagree in that I don't share his apocalyptic fear of what he sees as the moral nihilism of the Lucretian/Darwinian cosmology.  The disagreement was evident some years ago when Wiker and I had an exchange in the pages of First Things.  In the November 2000 issue of First Things, I wrote an article defending "Darwinian Conservatism," which was followed by critical responses from Michael Behe and Bill Dembski, and then my response to them.  A year later, Wiker wrote an article in First Things attacking me, and much of his argument was incorporated into his book (see pp. 245-46).  There was then a brief exchange between us in a later issue of First Things.

Our disagreement comes at two levels.  At the first level, Wiker refuses to see--as I do--that a purposeful human nature can arise within a purposeless cosmic nature.  I believe that we can judge the moral and intellectual virtues as contributing to the flourishing of evolved human nature, even when we think those virtues have no correspondence to any cosmic order of intelligent design.  Thus we can recognize that there is a natural law for human beings rooted in their evolved natural inclinations without any need to see this natural human order as the fulfilment of some intentionally designed cosmic order.

At the second level of our disagreement, I find Wiker sophistical in his writing.  By that, I mean that he intentionally suppresses evidence and arguments that counter his case for Epicurean Darwinism as morally degrading.  For example, in trying to cite evidence in Darwin's Descent of Man that he promoted the eugenics that would lead to Hitler's eugenics, Wiker carefully omits any passages that would contradict his interpretation.  One illustration of this is how he selectively quotes from a paragraph near the end of Descent (1871, 2:402-403).  In his book (252-53), Wiker quotes the following:  "Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes such care. . . . Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known.  All do good service who aid towards this end."  Wiker says this last sentence is a "most damning remark" showing his endorsement of eugenics. 

But Wiker is quoting here from one paragraph that concludes with this one sentence that he fails to quote: "When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan of ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man."  This makes it clear that Darwin's concern here was to study the possibly injurious effects of incest.  In particular, he had proposed that the British Parliament should sponsor a study of the effects of first-cousin marriages to see if they had a high rate of physical and mental birth defects in their children.  Darwin had a personal interest in this, since his wife Emma was his first cousin, and he worried about whether the ill health of some of his children might be a consequence of inbreeding.  Eventually, Darwin's son George carried out the research Darwin sought, and George concluded that the danger of inherited defects from first-cousin marriages was very low. 

Here then is an example of what I have called "good eugenics," the kind of eugenics that almost all of us would support.  For instance, many Ashkenazi Jews have voluntarily organized genetic testing of their children, so that when they want to marry, they can investigate the probability of birth defects in their children (such as Tay Sachs disease), and then decide whether they want to marry and have children.  This is eugenics.  Indeed, all the laws that prohibit incestuous marriages are based on eugenics--trying to promote "good births."  But this is good eugenics.  Wiker hides this from his reader because it would weaken his moral denunciation of Darwin.

Similarly, Wiker strengthens his case for the moral superiority of Christian cosmology by carefully refusing to mention any Christian teachings or practices that his readers might find troublesome.  For instance, in presenting the moral teachings of the Bible, Wiker never mentions the fact that the Bible endorses slavery and genocide.  He speaks of infanticide as a moral abomination.  But he never mentions the troublesome story of Abraham being commanded by God to kill Isaac.  Nor does he mention Jeptha's murdering of his daughter as a sacrifice to God.  As I have noted in some recent posts, even Pope John II and Pope Benedict XVI have asked foregiveness for Christian traditions of violence.  Wiker is silent about all of this.

Moreover, Wiker is also silent about the Epicurean books of the Bible--Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs--both of which teach the goodness of pleasure. The Song of Songs celebrating erotic love without reference to marriage or reproduction contradicts Wiker's claim that sexual pleasure must always to directed to producing children.  The Epicureanism of Ecclesiastes was noted by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles, III.27.11).

Wiker accuses Darwin of racism, but never mentions that much of the argument for the unity of the human species in the Descent of Man was part of Darwin's argument against slavery.

Another troubling part of Wiker's writing is how he warns against the "secularization" of the modern world as the source of our moral degradation, and thus implies that what we need is a "sacralization" of the world, but he never explains what this would mean.  Would he have us revert to the world of medieval Christendom based on its intelligent-design cosmology?  He mentions those Epicurean Christians--like Giordano Bruno--who were burned at the stake for their Epicureanism.  He doesn't condemn this.  So would he want to bring back such executions? 

Similarly, Wiker condemns homosexuality as evil because it goes against Christian cosmology and Biblical teaching.  He doesn't mention that the Bible commands the killing of homosexuals.  For centuries, homosexuality was a capital crime.  Would he endorse this?  If not, would that mean that he doesn't really want to enforce Christian cosmology and abolish Epicurean cosmology?

Furthermore, Wiker assumes that intelligent design reasoning is not only morally but also scientifically superior to evolutionary reasoning, because the evolutionists cannot explain exactly the step-by-step pathway by which all complex forms have evolved.  But then he never offers any account of how the intelligent design proponents would explain exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer did this.

And while Wiker criticizes Darwinism as based on faith rather than demonstration, he never demonstrates the truth of the anthropomorphic analogy behind all intelligent design reasoning--the idea that we can infer divine intelligent agency from what we know about human intelligent agency.  As I have argued in some previous posts, this is dubious assumption that needs to be proven.

The Evolution of Heaven and Hell (5): Dante

The evolution of Heaven and Hell illustrates that one dimension of evolution that is uniquely human--symbolic evolution.

As I have indicated in a previous post, I agree with Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb that the genetic system of inheritance is only one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance. All organisms have two systems of inheritance--the genetic system and the epigenetic system. Many animals have a third system--the behavioral system--by which learned traditions of behavior are passed from one generation to another. Human beings are unique in that they have not only these three forms of evolutionary inheritance, but also symbolic inheritance.

Symbolism is distinctively human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions far beyond our concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution.

Dante's Divine Comedy is the supreme literary moment in the symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell--and of Purgatory, by the way! He inherited 2,000 years of oral, visual, and written symbolism of the afterlife. He appropriated and transformed that inheritance by passing it through his individual experience and judgment and then passed it on to future generations. He thus introduced variations into the imagery of the afterlife that would compete in the evolutionary battle of symbols that constitute the spiritual history of humanity. His success depended upon his astute artistic judgment as to what kind of symbolism could survive and reproduce itself in the mental space of human intellectual and emotional responses, as constrained by the capacities and propensities of the human brain and nervous system as modulated by the behavioral and symbolic history of human culture over the past 50,000 years.

An evolutionary explanation of The Divine Comedy must move through at least three levels of evolutionary history--the natural history of the human species, the cultural history of Dante's world, and the individual history of Dante's life. His writing would be unintelligible and uninteresting if it were not responsive to our universal human nature--our natural desires and inclinations. And because of that appeal to human nature, a book like The Divine Comedy will resonate with human readers for as long as human beings have natural desires that are satisfied by the symbolism of an afterlife. But within the broad constraints of human nature, Dante's work was also constrained by the cultural history of Christendom and of Dante's Italy. And yet, natural history and cultural history constrained but did not determine exactly what would emerge from the individual history of Dante's unique mind.

NATURAL HISTORY
From the beginning of Dante's Inferno, we see what he calls the principle of contrapasso--"counter-penalty" or "retaliation" (28.142). The punishment fits the crime as appropriate retribution. Dante learned this principle from Thomas Aquinas who defined contrapassum as "equal passion repaid for a previous action; and the expression applied most properly to injurious passions and actions, whereby a man harms the person of his neighbor; for instance, if a man strike, that he be struck back" (ST, II-II, q. 61, a. 4). He also learned this from Aristotle who identified antipeponthos--"reciprocity"--as a fundamental principle of justice (NE, 1132b21-23). He also learned this from the Bible's teaching "an eye for an eye" and "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen. 9:6

Of course, Dante didn't need to learn this principle from reading Aquinas or Aristotle or the Bible, because he could have learned it from his own natural experience. Indeed, all human beings--even those who have never read Dante, Aquinas, Aristotle, or the Bible--understand the principle of reciprocity, because there is a natural human desire to respond in kind--returning benefit for benefit and injury for injury. That's why I have identified the desire for justice as reciprocity as one of the twenty natural desires that belong to our evolved human nature.

The symbolic world of an afterlife might seem so far beyond our natural human experience that a skillful artist like Dante would have a completely free hand in designing that world in any way he pleases. That's not true, because the evolutionary success of an artist in constructing a symbolic world depends on his satisfying the natural desires of his human audience. We naturally want people to be rewarded appropriately for their virtues and punished appropriately for their vices. The ideas of Heaven and Hell have evolved in response to those natural human expectations, and so we will judge the plausibility of those ideas by how well they fit our expectations for fair reciprocity of rewards and punishments.

Much of the power of Dante's art in describing the afterlife comes from his skill in depicting appropriate punishments and rewards. For example, he presents the second circle of Hell as reserved for those being punished for the sin of lust. Although lust is one of the seven deadly sins, Dante ranks it as one of the least of the mortal sins. The more serious sins--violence, fraud, and treachery--are punished in the deeper circles of Hell.

In the second circle, the punishment of the sin of lust conveys the passionate power that drives the lustful by having the lovers blown about incessantly by a hurricane:

"I reached a place where every light is muted,
which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest,
when it is battered by opposing winds.
"The hellish hurricane, which never rests,
drives on the spirits with its violence:
wheeling and pounding, it harasses them.
"When they come up against the ruined slope,
then there are cries and wailing and lament,
and there they curse the force of the divine.
"I learned that those who undergo this torment
are damned because they sinned within the flesh,
subjecting reason to the rule of lust.
"And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks,
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:
now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
"There is no hope that ever comforts them--
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain" (V.28-45).

Here the punishment fits the crime, because the lustful reenact the restless obsessiveness of their lust eternally. The natural punishment for a vice is to be driven forever by one's vicious activity.

Nevertheless, Dante feels compassion for these lovers, particularly, Francesca and Paolo. Francesca had been unhappily married to Giancotto, and she had fallen in love with his handsome brother, Paolo. When Giancotto discovered their adulterous love, he murdered both of them. Francesco tells Dante how she fell into sin. She and Paolo were reading a romantic story about how Lancelot fell into an illicit love for Guinevere. When they read how Lancelot and Guinevere kissed for the first time, Francesca relates, "this one, who never shall be parted from me, while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth," and "that day we read no more." As Francesca finishes telling her story, Paolo weeps, and then Dante faints with pity.

We the readers are made by Dante to feel the sweet power of romantic lust, and so we also feel Dante's pity for these lovers, which persuades us to agree with Dante's judgment that their sin is lighter than the sins punished deeper in Hell. But we also know that adultery is so disruptive to social life that it deserves some punishment.

Some scholars have argued that romantic love is not a universal natural desire but a cultural invention of the medieval courtly love tradition. If so, then those readers who have not been shaped by that cultural tradition might not share Dante's sympathy for these doomed lovers. But if romantic love is a natural desire of our evolved human nature--as I believe it is--then Dante's depiction of the temptations of this passion should evoke some agreement from most readers universally.

Even readers who don't believe in the reality of an afterlife with Heaven and Hell can be moved by, and learn from, Dante's Divine Comedy because its poetic symbolism illuminates natural human experience.

CULTURAL HISTORY
But within the limits set by our universal human nature, there is room for cultural variation. And so conceptions of the afterlife will express both the natural universality and the cultural variability of our experience. Although our 20 natural desires are universal, different cultural traditions will rank and organize those natural desires in different ways, and this will be manifested in views of the afterlife.

For example, the cultural history of medieval Christendom had shaped a view of the afterlife in which the supreme good of religious understanding was to be recognized by being placed at the peak of heavenly rewards. All other goods were to be ranked as inferior to this dominant good. The goods of the body were inferior to the goods of the mind. The goods of the political life were inferior to the goods of the contemplative life. And of the goods of the mind, philosophic or scientific understanding was inferior to the religious understanding that would come from the eternal contemplation of the Christian God.

Moreover, the traditional Christian doctrines of original sin and predestination dictated that all human beings were condemned to eternal punishment, and that those few who attained eternal salvation did so only by the unmerited grace of God through the atonement of Christ. Therefore, all those outside the tradition of Christian revelation were to be condemned forever.

Dante's Divine Comedy is constrained by this Christian cultural history, which provides him the symbolic material for his poetic art. But even so, if he is crafty enough, he can exercise his individual judgment in altering and even criticizing that cultural tradition. And, certainly, the individual readers of his poetry, including many who might be skeptical of Christian culture, can engage in a critical assessment of the Christian afterlife and Dante's representation of that afterlife, which contributes to the continuing symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell.

For instance, one might question the assumption of eternal punishments in Hell. Why do they have to be eternal? Even if Francesca and Paolo deserve punishment for their adulterous lust, do they deserve it for eternity? Doesn't it seem unfair and unreasonable that God would never give them a chance to repent of their momentary yielding to the seductive sweetness of romantic love? If so, then why not agree with Origen that the punishment of Hell is to have a purging effect, so that eventually all those in Hell can feel the pangs of conscience and then ask for, and receive, forgiveness? After all, doesn't the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory concede Origen's arguments for sinners being able to undergo purgation and thus open themselves to the love and forgiveness of God?

Dante's answer seems to be drawn from Aristotle's account of how habituation shapes character. If we choose often to engage in vicious behavior, then eventually we become habituated to it, it becomes our enduring character, and then it's hard, maybe impossible, to turn away from our vicious path. In much of the Divine Comedy, Dante seems to endorse the traditional Christian view that sin is so obsessive that at death the sinful will is unchangeable.

But how is this consistent with the idea of depravity as original sin? If we are so depraved that we have no choice but to sin, how is it just to punish us eternally? Aristotle thinks we have some choice in the matter, and therefore we can be held responsible for our choices. But if we are responsible for our conduct, why can't we choose to change, to reform, to turn back?

Is the idea of total depravity even intelligible? If we were totally depraved, how would we be able to recognize depravity as depravity? If we were totally depraved, how could be make the judgments of better and worse ways of acting that are reflected in the gradations of vicious and virtuous conduct in the Divine Comedy?

Such questions illustrate the freedom we have to criticize the cultural history of the afterlife.

INDIVIDUAL HISTORY
Within the limits set by his Christian culture, Dante had some freedom to exercise his individual judgment about how to depict the afterlife. He was able to use the Divine Comedy to criticize the Catholic Church in ways that prepared the way for the Protestant Reformation. He also implicitly endorsed a pre-Christian or pagan conception of politics and philosophy that some readers have seen as suggesting a secret teaching at odds with Christian culture (see Inferno, 9.61-63; Purgatorio, 8.19-21; Paradiso, 2.1-9, 13.121-23, 23.64-69).

Dante identifies himself with the "honorable men" and "great-hearted souls" in Limbo--pagan poets, politicians, scientists, and philosophers. At the center of the list of people in Limbo are Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. He even includes three Muslims--Saladin, Avicenna, and Averroes. These people "did not sin," but since they "lived before Christianity" or "did not worship God in fitting ways," they cannot enter Heaven, but neither are they in the depths of Hell (Inferno, V).

As Dante finally ascends to the tenth heaven, the Empyrean, which is the highest realm of spiritual reality, the seat of imperial sovereignty is reserved for Henry VII, the Emperor, whom Dante had hoped would restore the Roman Empire. And it is prophesied that Henry's opponent--Pope Clement V--will be eternally condemned for simony (Paradiso, XXX).

As John Casey correctly notes, Dante depicts at the end of the Paradiso the supreme happiness of the eternal contemplation of God, which is the beatific vision. Dante sees the eternal light of God. "Within its depths, I saw ingathered, bound by love into one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe" (XXXIII.85-87). Here then is the traditional idea of Christian culture that what human beings really want, what they most deeply desire, is to see God and thus to contemplate the whole order of things forever, which shows that a purely contemplative life is the only true good for human beings.

But what Casey does not notice is that even as Dante appears to endorse this, his placement of the Emperor Henry on a seat in the highest heaven suggests that political life is part of the supreme good, perhaps also suggesting that the contemplative life (whether religious or philosophic) cannot be separated from the political life, because human beings are political animals as well as rational animals.

Some posts on related themes can be found here, here, and here.

The Catholic Integralist Critique of Locke on Toleration: The Holy Spirit Cannot Overcome Religious Pluralism

Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604.  He is Writing in his Study.  The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear.  Below, Scribes Copy His Work.  A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

 

I have long argued that the desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  If the good is the desirable, then we can judge the goodness of a social order by how well it secures the conditions for human beings to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires. 

The Catholic Integralists say that a Catholic Integralist regime is the best social order because it enforces belief in the one true religion in a Catholic confessional state, and thus satisfies the natural desire for religious understanding.  But they are mistaken because they fail to see that the evolved natural desire for religious understanding is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  And there has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  Whatever the Holy Spirit might have whispered to Pope Gregory the Great was not clearly heard by others.

The evolutionary science of religious pluralism supports John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every Church is orthodox to itself," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians, except perhaps the belief that Jesus is the Messiah; and therefore, there is no one orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.  

For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty and religious toleration is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness.  It does this by creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.  I have elaborated this argument in some previous posts.

But I haven't yet responded to Derek Remus's integralist critique of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration.  This was originally published at the website for The Josias, the main online outlet for integralism, and then published in print in Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from The Josias, volume 2: The Two Powers, edited by P. Edmund Waldstein (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2022), 335-371.  Remus first wrote this paper as an undergraduate thesis at Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, California).  Father Remus is now an Associate Pastor at St. Luke's Catholic Church in Calgary, Canada.

Remus's introduction to his paper is a brief history of Christianity and the relation between church and state.  He then states his thesis--that the Catholic Church is right about the proper relation between church and state, and Locke is wrong.

To support this thesis, the main body of his paper has three parts:  a summary of Locke's claims in A Letter Concerning Toleration, an exposition and defense of the Catholic Church's position on church and state that relies largely on Thomas Aquinas's teaching, and then a Catholic refutation of Locke's position.  

Finally, Remus adds an Appendix on the question of whether the Catholic integralist understanding of church and state can be defended in the modern world where Catholics are in the minority in many Western countries (such as the United States).

I will respond to each of these parts of his paper.  My references to Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration will be to the Liberty Fund edition edited by Mark Goldie (2010).

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE

Remus's first two paragraphs survey the first 1600 years of the history of Christianity in relation to the state:

"The first three centuries of the Catholic Church's existence were a period of violent and bloody persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire--that is, the state.  The Church persevered through this trial, however, and, instead of diminishing, increased in proportion to the persecutions she suffered, until at last she was granted freedom of worship and hers was made the official religion of the Empire.  This was the beginning of that harmonious union between Church and state which gave rise to Christendom--a union in which the state recognized that its proper good was ordered toward a higher good, namely, eternal beatitude, and the Church, to the extent that affairs of state bore upon the salvation of souls, was solicitous about those affairs."

"This union lasted throughout Europe for twelve hundred years.  Then came the Protestant Reformation.  The divine origin of the papacy was challenged; the religious unity of Europe was shattered; Christendom unraveled.  The Church still existed, however, and the question of how governments ought to deal with her under the new order of things became an urgent problem for political philosophers" (335).

Remus then notes that while political philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza thought the head of state should also be the head of the Church to ensure religious peace, Locke thought there should be a separation of church and state, with the church devoted to the salvation of souls in the afterlife, and the state devoted to securing the earthly goods of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Moreover, Locke thought the state should tolerate all religions except when religious doctrines or practices threatened the peace of the community.

Remus observes that the United States has clearly adopted the Lockean position through Locke's influence on American Founders like Thomas Jefferson who insisted on "a wall of separation between Church and State."  Consequently, many American Catholics have adopted the Lockean view of church-state relations as the ideal that all nations should follow.

But this kind of thinking, Remus asserts, is "clearly opposed to that of the Church's Magisterium."  The "Magisterium" of the Catholic Church is its "teaching" function--the authority of the Church through the popes and the bishops to truthfully interpret the revealed Word of God as conveyed through the Bible and the Church's tradition.  So, here, Remus interprets the Church's Magisterium on the relation between Church and state by quoting from the papal pronouncements of three popes--Pius IX (1846-1878), Leo XIII (1878-1903), and Pius XI (1922-1939).  They all agree, in the words of Leo XIII, that the state is bound by divine law to support the "public profession of religion . . . not such religion as [men] may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only true religion"--the religion of the Catholic Church (337).  Here Remus is quoting from the encyclical Immortale Dei (par. 6).  This shows, then, that Locke is wrong in arguing for the separation of church and state, because this contradicts the Catholic Church's teaching.

In this introductory section of his paper, Remus makes three dubious claims.  The first is that from the beginning of Christianity, the Catholic Church has been "the Church," the only Church, because it is the only truly Christian Church, or even "the only true religion," as Leo XIII declared, as confirmed by "certain and most clear marks."  

This denies the historical fact of religious pluralism in Christianity.  Contrary to Remus's assumption that there was no religious pluralism in Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation, the history of Christianity beginning with the first Christians has been a history of disagreement over Christian doctrines and practices as manifest in the many schisms and heresies among Christians.  A Christian schism is when one Christian group divides into two groups that cannot live together as one religious community.  A Christian heresy is one Christian's religious belief that is considered false by other Christians.

Beginning in the early history of the Christian Church, there have been constant battles with one group of heretics after another.  For example, between AD 150 (with the Marcionist schism) and 1054 (with the Great Schism that separated the Latin Church in the West from the Greek Orthodox Church in the East), there were at least twenty-two major schisms in Christianity.

The Church Councils that met during the first five centuries of Christianity were called to rule against the numerous heresies that sprang up, many of which had to do with how to understand the place of Jesus Christ in the Trinity.  The first Council of Nicaea in 325 ruled against Arianism--the anti-Trinitarianism of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, who believed that while Jesus was the Son of God, he was not equal to God.  The Council of Ephesus in 431 ruled against Nestorianism--the teaching of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, that the incarnate Christ had two separate natures--one divine and the other human--and that Mary was only the mother of the human Jesus, and thus not the Mother of God.  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ruled against the view of the Coptic Churches that Christ had only one divine nature (monophysitism) and in favor of the view that Christ had two distinct natures, one divine and one human, but united in one person (dyophysitism).  The Coptic Churches continue today in North Africa, the Near East, and Ethiopia.

Surveying the entire history of Christianity, Wikipedia has lists of over 50 schisms and over 40 heresies.  That's what I mean by religious pluralism in Christianity.  Later in his paper, Remus speaks of "that great achievement of contemporary man called religious pluralism" (370), as if there had been no religious pluralism until recently.  But that is obviously not true.

This religious pluralism in Christianity also denies Remus's second dubious claim in his introductory section--that there was a "harmonious union between Church and state" that sustained Christendom for twelve hundred years prior to the Protestant Reformation.  Beginning with Constantine, rulers who tried to enforce Catholic orthodoxy, often through violent coercion, were frustrated by the heresies and schisms that made it impossible to sustain any "harmonious union" of Christians.

In 313, the Roman Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan that granted religious freedom: Christianity and all other religions would be free from persecution.  Later, in 380, the Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica that declared Christianity as defined by the Nicene Creed of 325 as the official religion of the Empire; and those who disagreed with any part of the Nicene Creed--such as the Arians who denied that Jesus was of "the same essence" as God--could be punished by the Church and the state.  But the debate over trinitarian theology--often a violent debate--continued to fester for centuries.  These and other theological disputes created a religious pluralism among Christians that neither the Church nor the state could suppress.  Remus is silent about all of this theological conflict within Christianity.

The irresolvable problem of religious pluralism in Christianity eventually forced the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council to issue the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" or Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration.  This denied the teaching of Leo XIII that divine law requires the state to enforce Catholicism as the true religion.  

This refutes the third dubious claim in Remus's introduction to this paper--the claim that the Church's Magisterium opposes Lockean religious liberty.  Strangely, however, Remus never even mentions Dignitatis Humanae anywhere in his paper.

Remus might agree with Thomas Pink's argument that Dignitatis Humanae was a change in policy but not a change in doctrine.  Pink explains: "The Church is now refusing to license the state to act as her coercive agent, and it is from that policy change, and not from any change in underlying doctrine, that the wrongfulness of religious coercion by the state follows."  The unchanged doctrine is that while the state has no authority on its own to coerce religious belief, because the ultimate authority over religious belief belongs to the Church, the Church can authorize the state to act as the "secular arm" of the Church in enforcing religious belief.  In particular, the Church can ask the state to punish those baptized Christians who have been condemned by the Church as heretics, apostates, or schismatics.  

Pink relies heavily on a passage in the first section of Dignitatis Humanae: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society.  Therefore, it leaves unchanged (integram) traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ."  Pink infers that if "traditional Catholic doctrine" remains "unchanged" by Dignitatis Humanae, that must mean that the traditional doctrine about the Church's authority to use the state as the "secular arm" of the Church in coercing religious belief has not been changed by Vatican II.  That Remus agrees with Pink about this is perhaps suggested by the fact that Remus's paper in Integralism and the Common Good is immediately preceded by a paper by Pink, and both papers are in a section of the book with the title "Religious Liberty."

As I have argued, there are lots of problems with Pink's reading of Dignitatis Humanae.  One is that there is no reference anywhere in Dignitatis Humanae to the "secular arm" doctrine of the Catholic Church.  Another problem is that when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2105) quotes the passage about the "unchanged traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion," the Catechism explains this as affirming the moral duty of the Church to be "constantly evangelizing men," and nothing is said about the possibility of using a "secular arm" to coerce Catholic faith.  Remus is silent about all of this.

LOCKE'S FIVE ARGUMENTS FOR TOLERATION

In summarizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Remus correctly identifies four of Locke's main arguments (341-42).  But he fails to recognize the importance of a fifth argument, which is actually Locke's primary argument.  

Remus also fails to see the importance of Locke's numerous references to the New Testament as providing crucial scriptural support for his arguments.  Unlike Locke, Remus provides almost no scriptural support for his arguments--he quotes from the New Testament only once.  Consequently, Remus seems unwilling or unable to refute Locke's claim that the New Testament teaches liberal toleration.

Locke makes four arguments for why the state (or "Commonwealth" as Locke calls it) secures only the "civil interests" or "civil goods" in caring for "the things of this World," and therefore it must be separated from the churches that secure the salvation of souls in "the World to come."

First, the care of souls has not be committed to any civil magistrate by anyone--neither by God nor by consent of the people (LCT, 13).

Second, "the care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force: But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind; without which nothing can be acceptable to God" (LCT, 13).

Third, even if outward force could influence people's religious beliefs, this would not necessarily lead to the salvation of their souls, because given "the variety and contradiction of Opinions in Religion" among political rulers, most rulers would favor false religions that would lead to the eternal damnation of most people (LCT, 14-15).

Fourth, the duty of the magistrate to secure the civil interests of everyone does not require enforcing any religious belief, because my neighbor's religious beliefs do not affect my civil interests (LCT, 20, 37, 44-46).  Thomas Jefferson expressed this Lockean argument for religious liberty in a memorable way: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Notes on Virginia, Query XVII).

Although Remus rightly identifies these four arguments, he ignores Locke's primary argument set forth in the first pages of the Letter Concerning Toleration--that toleration is "the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church," because "every one is Orthodox to himself," and Jesus taught Christians to show "Charity, Meekness, and Good-will in general towards all Mankind," so that the "Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is . . . agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ" (7-12).

To prove this, Locke quotes from the New Testament 6 times in this introductory section, and a total of 14 times in the whole of the Letter Concerning Toleration.  He also quotes from the Old Testament 5 times in order to contrast the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament and the religious liberty of the New Testament.  The "Commonwealth of the Jews" was an "absolute Theocracy," so that there was no difference between the Commonwealth and the Church; and "God himself was the Legislator."  "But there is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth," because Jesus "instituted no Commonwealth."  "Nor put he the Sword into any Magistrate's Hand, with Commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former Religion, and receive his" (42).

As I have argued in previous posts, the proponents of early modern classical liberalism like Locke could plausibly read the New Testament as teaching religious toleration and religious liberty.  Remarkably, Remus is silent about all this.  He quotes from the Bible only once when he quotes Matthew 28:19: "Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (357).  So, he never attempts to refute Locke's interpretation of the Bible.

Last year, I wrote about how the coronation of King Charles III of Great Britain showed the acceptance of Locke's liberal interpretation of New Testament Christianity as supporting toleration and religious liberty. 

REMUS'S REDUCED INTEGRALISM

After explaining Locke's account of the separation of church and state, Remus turns to "the way things really are," or to "the truth about Church and state" as taught by the Catholic Church.  This is a teaching about "the primacy of the common good," and defending this teaching must move through five steps, as explained by "the Common Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas" (337, 346-47).

First, Remus shows how the common good is preferable to the private good.

Second, he shows how the end of the state is the political common good.

Third, he shows how religion promotes the political common good.

Fourth, he shows how the end of the Church established by Christ is the common good of eternal beatitude.

Fifth, the rulers of the state are subject to the rulers of the Catholic Church in so far as the lower common good of politics must serve the higher common good of eternal beatitude.

Although Remus does not explicitly say that this teaching is Catholic Integralism, it clearly is.  But what's remarkable about Remus's account of this teaching is that it is a reduced Catholic Integralism.  A full Catholic Integralism, such as found in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and in the history of the Catholic Church prior to Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, includes the claim that the Catholic Church has the divine right to employ the state as its secular arm in persecuting and even killing heretics.  Remus rejects this claim because he agrees with Locke about "the unjustness of using the state to kill and persecute one's neighbor on account of religion" (338, 362).  Although he does not explicitly explain to his reader what he is doing, Remus is reducing or revising the Catholic tradition of integralism by rejecting the traditional integralist claim that the Church is divinely commanded to persecute and even kill heretics.

The clearest indication of what Remus is doing is in his selective reading of Thomas Aquinas and of the history of the Catholic Church's persecution of heretics.  Remus is silent about Aquinas's endorsement of the Inquisition.  Aquinas taught that heretics--those who claim to be Christians but deny some of the doctrines of the Church--can be rightly compelled to keep the faith.  Heretics must be given repeated chances to recant their heretical beliefs, but if they refuse, they can be rightly executed (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3).  Aquinas cannot cite any passages from the New Testament that condone the killing of heretics, because as Locke pointed out, there are none.  Remus says nothing about this.

Remus also says nothing about the history of the Catholic Churches execution of heretics.  For example, in 1415, Jan Hus, a Catholic priest who sought to reform the Church, was condemned by the Council of Constance to be burned at the stake for heresy.  He sang hymns as he was burned to death.  Hus was a charismatic priest who inspired his followers in Bohemia to defeat five consecutive papal crusades against them from 1420 to 1431--the Hussite Wars.  Hus and the Hussites were intensely pious Christians.  Similarly, Martin Luther and the other Protestant Reformers were all intensely pious.  Thus does the mystical experience of grace--of being divinely inspired with an experience of the transcendent--often move Christians to dissent from Catholic orthodoxy.

Remus says nothing about this.  He claims that God's revealed truth is conveyed to believers by the "grace of the Holy Spirit" (356).  But he is silent about how pious Christians like Jan Hus and the Protestant Reformers were inspired by the Holy Spirit to dissent from the Catholic Church, which exposed them to the violence of the Inquisition.  This shows that the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by conveying the message of revelation so clearly that all or most believers can agree on that revealed truth.

Remus also says nothing about how some of the recent popes--John Paul II and Benedict XVI--have asked forgiveness for the Church's history of violence against heretics.

A REFUTATION OF LOCKE'S "GODLESS STATE"?

Remus begins his paper by promising his readers that he will refute Locke's position on church and state in the light of the Church's position.  But when Remus comes to that part of his paper, his supposed refutation of Locke's "godless state" actually agrees with Locke on some crucial points, which explains why his reduced Integralism is so different from the Church's traditional Integralism.

As already indicated, Remus agrees with Locke that it is unjust to persecute and kill people because of their religious beliefs.  He also says that "the Catholic Church agrees with Locke that it is unjust for the state to force its citizens to perform acts whereby they become members of a given religion, even if that religion is the true one" (362).  The reason for this is that Locke is right in saying that faith is not real if it depends on "outward force" without "inward and full persuasion of the mind."

But still, Remus observes, Locke is wrong not to see how even though the coercive force of the state cannot influence the mind and will directly, that force can influence the mind and will indirectly by creating social conditions that help Catholic citizens fortify their faith and become more effective in persuading non-Catholic citizens to become Catholics. 

Remus says that "in a nation where most people are Catholic," and the rulers are Catholic, there are four ways in which the state can rightly use force to indirectly favor the Catholic Church without directly forcing anyone to become a Catholic (360, 362).   The state can refuse to give marriage licenses to Catholics who have been married in a non-Catholic marriage ceremony, because according to the Catholic Church, this is not a real marriage.  The state can require that students in state schools are instructed in the Catholic faith.  The state can prohibit the building of non-Catholic schools.  And, finally, "the state also has the right to prohibit the propagation of opinions in the press which are opposed to its citizens' attainment of heaven, such as opinions that are blasphemous or constitute an attack on the Church" (360).  This is what I mean by Remus's reduced Catholic Integralism: the state uses force to favor the Catholic Church, but without the killing of people for public heresy and blasphemy that was part of traditional Integralism.

But notice that Remus recommends this only for countries where the majority of the citizens are Catholic, and the rulers are Catholic.  Why couldn't Protestants turn this argument around to say that these same four ways for the state to enforce religious belief could be used to enforce a Protestant religion in countries where most of the people and the rulers are Protestant?

In fact, that was the argument of the High Church Anglican Protestant Jonas Proast, who wrote three tracts criticizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, which provoked a prolonged debate between Proast and Locke.  Like Remus, Proast argued that while Locke was right in saying that the mind cannot directly be coerced into religious belief, Locke failed to see how legal coercion with moderate penalties without persecution could indirectly dispose men's minds to submit to religious instruction.  Also like Remus, Proast insisted that this use of legal coercion to enforce religion was proper only for enforcing the "true religion."  But, of course, for Proast, the evidence clearly showed that Anglicanism was the true religion, and Catholicism was a false religion.  (Proast's three tracts are available in the 5th volume of The Reception of Locke's Politics, edited by Mark Goldie [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999], 25-128.)

Here's Remus's response: "To say that the state has a care of souls and that it has a duty to worship God, however, is not to say that the state may adopt whatever religion it happens to like or even judges to be true.  Rather, it is to say that the state has a duty to adopt the religion which has truly been revealed by God, namely, the Catholic religion" (363).  Remus then quotes from Leo XIII's Immortale Dei (1885), saying that "it is evident that the only true religion is the one established by Jesus Christ Himself, and which He committed to His Church to protect and to propagate."  Remus does not notice, however, that Leo cited many New Testament verses as supporting this claim.

The most important New Testament text for Leo and other Integralists as establishing Catholicism as the true religion was Matthew 16:18-19, where Jesus says to Peter: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."  The Latin version of these words is inscribed around the base of the dome of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, in letters six feet high.  On these few words rests the entire structure of the Roman Catholic Church.  Catholics interpret these words as teaching that the Apostle Peter was chosen by Jesus Christ Himself to be the first pope--the Bishop of Rome--and all the other popes have been the direct successors of Peter as the Bishop of Rome, and thus have had the papal authority granted originally by Jesus.

                                                      The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica

Remarkably, Remus says nothing about Matthew 16:18-19.  Locke denies that Jesus ever conferred on any bishop of a church "Ruling Authority derived from the very Apostles, and continued down unto the present times by an uninterrup0ted Succession" (16).  But, oddly, Locke never mentions Matthew 16:18-19.

Locke could have argued that there are good reasons to doubt the Catholic interpretation of these verses.  First of all, these words in the Gospel of Matthew do not appear in any of the other Gospels, which should make one suspicious.  Secondly, it's not clear what Jesus meant by these words.  The word for "church" (ecclesia) occurs only twice in the four Gospels, and it's not clear that Jesus was really thinking about founding a church.  Moreover, Jesus says nothing about Peter having an endless number of successors who would inherit his apostolic authority; and Jesus says nothing about there being bishops in Rome.  And one would think that Jerusalem would be more important than Rome for Jesus.  Furthermore, there is no evidence in the New Testament that Peter ever went to Rome.  There is no contemporary reference to Peter as having been a bishop in Rome.  And the first indications of there being a bishop in Rome come from the second century.

What is said in the New Testament about the first Christian churches confirm Locke's claim that they were "voluntary and free societies" that did not use violent coercion to enforce belief, although they did excommunicate those they deemed deviants from church norms.  And while these churches had bishops, there is no evidence that there was a strict hierarchy of bishops with the bishop of Rome enforcing orthodoxy on all the churches.

So, again, it seems that the New Testament teaches the classical liberal principles of religious liberty and religious toleration.

INTEGRALIST CATHOLICS ARE INTOLERABLE

In his Appendix, Remus responds to the objection that in modern countries like the United States with religious pluralism, and where Catholics are in the minority, it seems absurd to propose that the Catholic Church should be the established church enforced by the state.  Remus's answer is that yes, in these circumstances, a Catholic confessional state is not practicable, and so it would be imprudent for the Catholic Church to insist that the governments in these countries should subject themselves to the religious rule of the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, Remus argues, the imprudence of doing this does not deny the truth of what he has said about the proper relationship between the Church and the state.  Consequently, Catholics are obligated to strive to win as many converts to Catholicism as they can, as they work toward achieving the social and political power over their societies that will someday allow the Catholics to establish the rule of the Catholic Church and to use legal force to restrict the religious freedom of non-Catholics.

Locke argued that churches that do not teach and practice religious tolerance of other religions cannot themselves be tolerated.  Remus agrees!  "A government which holds in principle that it must treat all religions within its domain equally and that those religions must in turn refrain from any intervention in politics cannot tolerate the Catholic Church and be consistent with itself" (371).

Amazingly, the final conclusion of Remus's argument for Catholic Integralism and against Lockean toleration is that Lockean liberal regimes like the United States must not tolerate Catholic Integralists.