The Ethical Pause + John Paul Vincent + Professor of English & Chair of the Division of English Asbury College Barbara Pym was a mid-twentieth century British novelist of English country life, rural manners, and the quiet ordinariness of the everyday. In the radical 1960s, her popularity sank dramatically; indeed, for fourteen years she remained unpublished-the infamous "silent period" from 1963 to 1977. Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin included her name on a list of underrated writers for the Times Literary Supplement. "If only somebody," she wrote a friend, "would have the courage to be unfashionable."1 Perhaps anyone attempting to defend a natural law theory of ethics in our time will find some of the same resistance. And, at a time when traditional liberal arts curricula are being deconstructed or discontinued, the thought of proposing a natural law orientation for moral education may seem a wild return to antiquity. When we think of the students we face in the classroom, the notion may seem even more untenable. Our students, first, are American students. Our national literature is filled with wandering and rootless heroes, people traveling light, out on the open road, restless, endlessly experimenting. In the mid-nineteenth century, Tocqueville described the type: "The American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and 1 ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it; more, he loves it; for the instability instead of meaning disaster to him seems to give birth only to miracles about him.2 Music videos hit the charts one week and disappear the next; songs are introduced one year and become "golden oldies" or "classics" the next. The idea, then, that there might be a universal or permanent human nature seems an unwanted constraint on the freedom of the young American. Our students are also modern students. Ralph Turner has argued that American life has witnessed a change in recent years from an "institutional" model of selfhood to an "impulsive" model.3 When the individual is seized by an expressive outburst of spontaneous emotion, he may find himself in a quandary. The institutional view of the self finds the emotion an invasive threat to the "true self" while the impulsive view interprets the same emotion as a liberation of the "true self" from artificial constraints. For the institutional model, the true self is present when the conscious individual is in complete control; for the impulsive model, the true self is present when conscious control is loosened, when inhibitions are relaxed or abandoned. Linton's findings seem relevant to our focus on moral education. The typical young person does not want to be reminded of limits, laws, rules, action-guiding principles. Our students, finally, are adolescent students. George 2 Santayana once remarked that "scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer."4 Surely Santayana is right. A natural skepticism seems characteristic of adolescent life. It is not our task, it probably should be said at the outset, to drive young students out of this natural, protective skepticism into premature commitments. Nevertheless, at some point the commitments must be made. Especially in the moral domain, these fundamental commitments are not some optional emergency kit which might come in handy some time. G. K. Chesterton always carried a penknife with him whether he was in the street, on a bus, or at home in his sitting room. It was the kind of knife, he said, which could be used to take a stone out of a horse's hoof. Now Chesterton, of course, didn't own a horse. But if he ever had the money he might buy one. And if that horse ever got a stone in its hoof, he was ready with the knife. A penknife is a potentially useful, though dispensable, item of personal property. But moral convictions are an integral part of our humanity, essential to proper human functioning. A Time for Reflection When I arrive at work in the morning, I am almost daily surprised by the sight of a college secretary sitting in her car in the parking lot; typically, she is sipping orange juice from a cardboard carton, and listening to the radio. My surprise comes from the fact that I don't like to sit in 3 my car at any time. Sometimes when I go to the mall, I arrive early-maybe ten minutes before the stores are scheduled to open; even then, I get out of my car, walk to the curb, and do my waiting on foot. When as a college student I worked in a grinding wheel factory during the summers, co-workers would often arrive a half hour early and sit in their vehicles drinking coffee from a thermos, idling the engine, and reading the morning paper. The whole ritual mystified me then and it mystifies me now. But I think I am beginning to understand. That secretary probably begins her day by rising early, getting dressed, preparing breakfast for a family, packing lunches, seeing schoolchildren off to the bus. When she arrives at work, there is mail to open and sort, a backlog of typing, a phone ringing at irregular intervals throughout the day. The moment in the parking lot is an intermission, a time to regain composure and prepare herself for the routine of the day. Rollo May speaks of the ethical significance of the "pause." The ability to pause is a distinctly human capacity. One breaks the chain of cause and effect and comes to a full stop. The world becomes available for reflection. In much the same way, Irving Babbitt used to speak of the "inner check." Ordinarily, we go with the flow of temperament. Sometimes, though, on the very brink of placing an action in the world, we experience a hesitation; we find ourselves called upon to reconsider our decision, perhaps to set the proposed act into a larger context. 4 Robert Penn Warren uses the metaphor of the "ringmaster self" to speak of this characteristically human ability. The self transcends its temperament, its motives, its roles, its circumstances. Like a ringmaster in a circus, directing our attention to one ring or another, to the trapeze or to the lion's cage, the self is able to review its own inner life and to choose the motives on which it will act. In the religious life, the term is "recollection." Much of our life is spent in a "distracted" or "dispersed" state. When we are watching a sitcom on television, for example, we find ourselves lulled into a state of passivity as the images and dialogue roll over us. But when the program is concluded we rise and take possession of ourselves. We take ourselves into our own hands. We take ourselves back. My point has been a long time coming. It is this. A college education in our day is a four-year pause. In her book, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, Eva T.H. Brann describes the college years: "For the student, the collegiate years are traditionally those between sixteen and twenty-two, late adolescence and early youth. They seem to be appointed by man and nature for a special interlude."5 Students come to us at a wonderfully opportune time-for them and for us. Natural Law Thinking In his book Acts of Recovery, Jeffrey Hart describes author-teachers like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton as "substitutes for tradition."6 Before modern times, 5 according to Hart, people received a knowledge of religious and moral matters by a sort of "cultural osmosis." With the arrival of modernity, humanity has experienced a dramatic break of cultural continuity. But the good teacher, even a teacher much less skilled than Lewis or Chesterton, can in a small way compensate for our impoverished condition by providing reminders of a long, lost wisdom-the idea, for example, that morality is rooted in nature and that moral norms are discoverable by reason-the ancient notion of a natural law. The presupposition of natural law thinking is that man is a created being. He is created by God to be intelligent and free. When we speak of a "natural law" of human conduct, we are not speaking of laws like gravitation which operate without us. A rosebush produces rosebushes unconsciously and involuntarily. When we speak of a natural moral law, however, we are speaking of a law requiring a responsible exercise of human freedom. The law is "natural" not because it functions automatically but because it is an expression of our human nature; that is, it requires intelligence to discover it and freedom to follow it. Many Protestants prefer to speak of "divine commands" as the ground and origin of human ethical obligation. Here the "will of God" becomes central. Certainly, we must agree that God has issued clear moral directives. But if the moral life originates in the will of God, in commands issued to creatures, we have difficulty seeing how those commands 6 can avoid a degree of arbitrariness. Why is a creature obligated to obey such commands? Because God is God? Because he is, as someone has rather irreverently remarked, "the biggest bully on the block"? Surely this is a nonmoral reason even if it carries a certain initial plausibility. Shouldn't we say, rather, that we feel the obligation to obey the commands of God not because God is God but because God is good? But, then, as soon as we say that God is good, it appears that we already possess the moral equipment to discern in some measure God's goodness and to make the judgment that he is good. Could it be that we do not become moral beings by the receipt of a command, but that we are already moral beings when the command comes? I am trying to say that the natural moral law is not the ceiling of our moral life, but it is the floor. As Christians, we need to say that everything derives ultimately from God. He is the Lord of heaven and earth. He is the supreme lawgiver. He is, moreover, the creator of all that is natural. St. Thomas distinguished four orders of law. All of creation is an expression of divine wisdom, a divinely ordained order. Things are what they are by virtue of the Eternal Law. Human beings, of course, participate in the eternal law inasmuch as they are creatures of God with determinate natures and insofar as they become aware of the law of their nature (the Natural Law) as normative for guiding conduct. In addition, God has explicitly revealed his purposes for human beings through 7 divine commands addressed to them in revelation, the Divine Law. Lastly, human beings have been given the power to form laws of their own for the regulation of social life: the Positive Law. A curfew in a dorm and a speed limit for a highway are examples of man-made laws. Two Versions of Natural Law Thinking C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man posits the existence of a moral tradition containing the collective wisdom of the human race, a transcultural and transpersonal source of moral knowledge he labels the Tao. It is Lewis' assumption that by the exercise of common sense, human beings become aware of the moral commonplaces of life as self-evident truths. Presupposed is an underlying attitude toward reality: "For wise men of old," he says, "the cardinal problem had been to conform the soul to reality and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue."7 When we adopt this posture, one of humble submission to the nature of things, we discover objective values in the creational order by the use of our natural reason. If these values are embodied and retained in a moral tradition, each man or woman may find them ready to hand; the need to search them out for oneself is obviated. Lewis begins his study with an aesthetic example, the celebrated waterfall. We are accustomed to describing waterfalls as beautiful. In calling them beautiful, we are saying something significant about waterfalls, not merely indulging a subjective effusion of emotion. Values, in 8 other words, are resident in things. Our responses do not confer value on things; rather, we find value there. Waterfalls are not beautiful because we have certain feelings when they are present. No, we have certain feelings because waterfalls are in fact beautiful. Values, that is, are objective rather than subjective. Lewis goes so far as to say that the universe demands certain value responses. Objects do not merely receive our approval or esteem; they can be said to merit or require it. To think unbeautiful what is in fact beautiful is somehow to fail the universe. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. When we move to the moral realm, we find that certain basic moral axioms (that natural affection is good, that we should tell the truth, that we should not do injury to others) are not merely human conventions or sentiments or hypothetical imperatives but real moral truths. If we want to maintain our sanity, we cannot do without them. "Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of actions what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatsoever."8 The direct challenge ("Yes, but how do you know?") is unanswerable. A self-evident truth cannot be defended by an appeal to a more basic principle. One can only point to the truth and hope the other person sees it too. Last year, our sister institution-Asbury Theological Seminary-held a holiday potluck for faculty and spouses during the Christmas season. As he walked along the buffet 9 tables, one professor noticed a small slip of paper protruding from beneath a casserole. The note read: "This dish is marvelous. Could you send me the recipe?" The words were followed by the name of a faculty spouse making the request. For a moment, our professor paused with the note in hand, then, with a twinkle in his eye, returned the note to the table-this time sliding it under a small dish of carrot sticks. This little episode amuses me. I think of the poor family coming to retrieve the dish of carrots and their confusion at the note. How absurd to need a recipe . . . for carrot sticks! Surely we do unnecessarily complicate some of our moral deliberations; we press for epistemological precision when we ought simply to do the decent thing we know to do. On the other hand, those attempting to develop a moral theology may need to exchange recipes. That is what this conference is about. Furthermore, we need to dialogue about ethics because "self-evident" does not always mean "obvious." To see what "ought" to be done may involve a great deal of study. Even "self-evident" truths can be what Josef Pieper calls "steep truths." Thomistic natural law theory is a more technical matter. We will only be able to present the sketchiest overview here. All human beings, says Thomas, have a natural desire for God. We are ordained to him; an orientation to God is in-built-part of our very humanity. That God is the ultimate end of our being is not naturally 10 discerned. But on the natural level this desire manifests itself in a proximate way as a natural ordination to the good. All things naturally seek the good. Now the good for a human being is that which perfects and completes the person. The true "nature" of a being is that being at its most accomplished point and in its completed state. Our natural reason, says Thomas, is able to identify what is really good for human beings, the objective good for us. Reason can distinguish between the temperamental self (what we happen to be at any given time) and the essential self (what we should be). Reason can distinguish between the apparent good (what we happen to want) and the real good (what we should want). Reason can distinguish between the subjective or psychological good (what we think will please us) and the objective or ethical good (what will fulfill us as human beings). The good for human beings is always to act in accord with this true nature. The evil is to act in ways that thwart the true self, divert us, shunt us out of the path of development, flourishing, and perfection. That which is really good for us is also our duty. As Mortimer Adler puts it, "We ought to desire everything really good for us and nothing else."9 Human beings, of course, have an array of natural inclinations, dispositions, tendencies, drives. A child possesses a natural curiosity, the embryonic stage of a later drive toward knowledge. People enjoy companionship, a manifestation of the nature human drive to enter into 11 satisfying social relationships. These natural inclinations are uniquely human potentials which indicate the direction human fulfillment will take. Reason, we are saying, is able to know our nature in its general contours and to dictate those ways of behaving which will realize or actualize our nature. Some ways of conducting ourselves are "fitting," some are not. Married love will contribute to our final fulfillment, rape will not. When a human being acts in ways consistent with her essential nature, she finds herself in a state of well-being, happiness, fulfillment. All of this is premised on the assumption that a human being's nature is given. We cannot choose our natures or change them. We cannot choose what values will make for our fulfillment. We can, however, choose to seek those things which are really good for us and to avoid those things which have a superficial appeal but are only apparent goods-temporary wants stimulated by the popular press or generated by peer pressure. From this perspective, we can legitimately speak of a human duty to be happy. A utilitarian or self-realization theory of the psychological type defines our happiness subjectively and egoistically. Thomas, however, sees happiness as consisting in the fulfillment of what man was meant to be in the nature of things. The end of man is given by God in creation. The conditions that make for happiness have been established by God. But we can know them, cooperate freely with them, and by so doing conform 12 our lives to the created order as designed by our Maker. Does this approach to ethics ignore the fact that we are fallen creatures? Not at all. Good ethics cannot save a soul. Only the blood of the cross of Jesus Christ can cure the deep heart problem of modern man. Only faith in Our Lord's atoning sacrifice can bring the forgiveness and cleansing we need. When we find Christ, we learn that he is just what we needed all along. He is the home of the soul. As we walk with him, by grace he enlarges our hearts to contain the supernatural happiness he wants us to possess. But even in our fallen condition, before the intervention of salvific grace, we human beings are moral creatures. As Bruno Schuller has put it, "The believer can only hear and understand the message of Christ because he understands and expresses himself as a moral being prior to God's word of revelation."10 Though a fully developed Christian ethic will transcend any natural morality, even a fallen creature can decide to do good rather than evil. St. Augustine says that "The natural law is written in the hearts of men which iniquity itself effaces not." We should also say that our natural experience is revelatory of moral truth. R. Eric O'Connor, for example, tells how he learned the value of truthfulness: "I learned what truthfulness was by being believed when I was a young boy telling a lie. I was believed so clearly and the man believing me was a teacher. . . . And he took it so simply that I've found it very hard to lie ever since."11 Our 13 natural experience of being believed, even in a "fib," instructs us that truthtelling is "natural" to human relationships and to all healthy social intercourse. Those to whom we speak expect us to tell the truth; indeed, they look in our eyes and study our faces without suspicion or doubt. Human interaction, even with strangers, begins with a buoyant sense of good will and the inevitable throb of gratuitous trust. Even when we have been hurt, betrayed, disappointed again and again, we tend, however hesitantly, to hope that "this time" our newfound friend will turn out to be reliable and true. This dynamic is quite simply an in-built feature of creation so familiar as to be instantly recognizable by all. In like manner, our discontent in an atmosphere of deceit and betrayal ("Don't trust anybody") is more than a utilitarian judgment or an expression of preference. It is an assurance that our God has not left Himself without a witness in the moral dimension of life. Exodus 20:16 is a biblical reformulation of an insight so stubbornly persistent as to be nearly unavoidable in natural experience. The natural law, I mean to say, may not be the alpha and omega of human ethical life. But it is the alpha. Advantages of a Natural Law Ethic 1. Natural law theory makes morality natural to us. Morality is not something imposed upon our true natures. It is not something alien which comes from outside and subdues and coerces. When we live in accord with the dictates of the natural law, we are aligning ourselves with the divinely 14 designed order for human life. 2. A natural law ethic allows us to dialogue with non-Christians. When Muddy Waters used to play his sweet blues numbers at Mississippi juke houses, his motto was "there wasn't no such thing as you couldn't get in." The natural law includes all humanity regardless of individual, cultural, religious differences. The norms of morality are available because of our shared human nature. Carl Braaten has recently argued that natural law philosophy may serve as an "apologetic bridge"12 between the Christian and the non-Christian. 3. The natural law notion restores to us a truly Christian conception of creativity. Contemporary man finds himself burdened with an inflated sense of his own radically undetermined will and its capacity for original creation. C.S. Lewis, certainly no enemy to spontaneity, freedom, creativity, counters with the corrective that "the human mind has no more power of inventing a new value that of imagining a new primary color, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in."13 Ethical life begins when the individual decides to abandon the attempt to define or create himself; when, instead, he agrees to conform himself to the natural law, to seek those things which are objectively good for him. But God wants us to be creative. The stern moralist may insist that it is better to be good than to be original, but God encourages human creative experiment. "The moral ideal," says Ralph McInerny, "is 15 open to an infinity of realizations."14 We must be honest, that is, but there are a thousand ways to be honest. "If the universal end is rightly understood," says John Wild, "it leaves an infinite variety of different ways by which it may be realized in divergent circumstances."15 The natural law dictates that we tell the truth, but there are many truths to tell. 4. The natural law tradition returns us to a more holistic theological position. For one thing, it puts creation in focus. Modern man doesn't take the fall of man seriously enough. But it is possible so to emphasize our noetic incapacity that we no longer see human beings as capable of discerning the fundamental structures of God's world. Surely this is an error. If basic morality is a divine mystery, the unbeliever is excluded from even the most primitive levels of moral awareness. Dialogue with non-Christians will come to seem impossible for the believer and rational persuasion futile without some common ground. Then, the only recourse will be to leave the marketplace of ideas and to enter the political arena of power relations and ideological self-promotion. But all human beings do find moral truth in the creation. They can follow after that truth and they do. Ethics will not save anyone's soul. Were we to follow the natural law to perfection, we would no more merit salvation that the most unrepentant sinner. As I say, it is the floor and not the ceiling. My point is that as redeemed persons 16 we should rejoice that we have the ceiling over our heads. But without the floor we have no place to stand. Notes 1Barbara Pym, as cited by Joseph Epstein, Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), p. 130. 2Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America. I have been unable to locate the chapter from which this was taken. 3Ralph H. Turner, "The Real Self: From Institution to Impulse," American Journal of Sociology 81 (1976): 989-1016. 4George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, as cited in John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Paragon House, 1988), p. 253. 5Eva Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p.19. 6Jeffrey Hart, Acts of Recovery (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1989), p.113. 7C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: MacMillan, 1986), p.88. 8Ibid., pp. 52-53. 9Mortimer Adler, Desires Right and Wrong: The Ethics of Enough (New York: Maxwell, 1991), p. 33. 10Bruno Schuller, "Can Moral Theology Ignore Natural Law?" Theology Digest 15 (1967): p. 96. 11R. Eric O'Connor, as cited by George Anastaplo, "Liberation Pedagogy: R. Eric O'Connor and the Thomas More Institute," Cross Currents 39 (Winter 1989-90): 468. 12Carl Braaten, "Protestants and Natural Law," First Things 19 (January 1992): 21. 13C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 56-57. 14Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1982), p. 33. 15John Wild's writings on ethics are models of clarity. See, for example, "Natural Law and Modern Ethical Theory," Ethics 62 (October 1952) and Introduction to Realistic Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1948). 17