Voluntarism

Judging or Banning?

in Catholic Church, Moral Theology, Voluntarism 12 Comments Tags: , ,

John Allen wrote about the papal election:  “No matter what happens, the church almost certainly won’t reverse its bans [my emphasis] on abortion, gay marriage or women priests.”

Ralph McInerney, who should have known better, also referred to the Church’s “ban” on contraception.

The use of the words “ban” or “prohibition” are profoundly misleading, since these words refer to an act of the will.

However, the magisterium of the Church is not an act of the will, but of the intellect. It is matter of judgment. That is, the Church through its various organs, councils, synods, popes, and theologians, makes a judgment about a matter of the moral law. This judgment is guided by the Holy Spirit into a gradual attaining of the truth. At certain points the judgment becomes infallible – that point is sometimes a matter of debate.

The Church has not “banned” contraception or abortion; it has made a judgment that these actions are intrinsically wrong and contrary to the structure of reality that God has created.

Similarly, although it is matter of the sacramental order rather than the moral law, the Church has decided that only bread made from wheat (not rice) and only wine made from grapes (not cherries) can be made into the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass. Any attempt to use other materials would not work, as it is contrary to the sacramental structure. In the same way only a male can be ordained a priest; a woman cannot be ordained a priest; any attempt to ordain a woman would not work. Nor, for example, can a person be baptized with rose petals, as some liberal Protestant churches occasionally do.

This does not say that rice is inferior to wheat, or cherries to grapes, or women to men, but that in the structure of sacramental reality only certain things are possible. It is a matter judgment about the structure of sacramental reality.

Of course some people disagree with the judgment, and we must weigh the relative authority of those making the judgment.

Underlying the use of words like “ban” is a voluntarist conception if law– that the Church or the Pope makes the moral law, and can change or dispense from it. An over-emphasis on obedience, or rather on what the Jesuits all “corpse obedience” as opposed to Dominican “rational obedience” contributes to this misunderstanding.

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Triumph of the Will

in Vatican, Voluntarism 5 Comments Tags: , ,

In all the talk about Benedict’s comments on the use of condoms to avoid transmitting AIDS, the words use have been “ban.” “allow,” “permit,” etc, all referring to acts of the will. 

But the Pope was not making an act of the will, he is not making a law, but expressing a judgment. Moral discourse is infected with nominalism and voluntarism, which regards the moral law as an act of the will (either of God or the hierarchy) rather than a judgment, an act of reason. 

Catholics believe that the judgments of the official teachers in the Church are guided by the Holy Spirit, and are reliable, and indeed in certain cases infallible. But they are judgments, not acts of the will.  

In any case the scope of the Church’s teaching on contraception applies to married couples, no one else. As Martin Rhonheimer, a priest of Opus Dei who teaches at the Opus Dei university in Rome, explained:

The teaching of the Church is not about condoms or similar physical or chemical devices, but about marital love and the essentially marital meaning of human sexuality. It affirms that, if married people have a serious reason not to have children, they should modify their sexual behaviour by at least periodic  abstinence from sexual acts. To avoid destroying both the unitive and the procreative meaning of sexual acts and therefore the fullness of mutual self-giving, they must not prevent the sexual act from being fertile while carrying on having sex.

But what of promiscuous people, sexually active homosexuals, and prostitutes? What the Catholic Church teaches them is simply that they should not be promiscuous, but faithful to one single sexual partner; that prostitution is a behaviour which gravely violates human dignity, mainly the dignity of the woman, and therefore should not be engaged in; and that homosexuals, as all other people, are children of God and loved by him as everybody else is, but that they should live in continence like any other unmarried person.

But if they ignore this teaching, and are at risk from HIV, should they use condoms to prevent infection? The moral norm condemning contraception as intrinsically evil does not apply to these cases. Nor can there be church teaching about this; it would be simply nonsensical to establish moral norms for intrinsically immoral types of behaviour. Should the Church teach that a rapist must never use a condom because otherwise he would additionally to the sin of rape fail to respect mutual and complete personal self-giving and thus violate the Sixth Commandment? Of course not.

Whatever one thinks of the magisterium’s judgment on contraception, it simply does not apply to sex outside of marriage.

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Ashes and Augustine

in Augustine, guilt, Responsibility, Uncategorized, Voluntarism 2 Comments Tags: , ,

I have been reading Augustine’s letters. They reveal a lot of how his mind works; they also contain the good and bad things that he embedded in the Western Church.

Augustine interpreted all Scriptures passages and Church practices so as to narrow the scope of salvation. Humanity was a massa damnata, from which a few of the elect were saved. The universalizing passages in Scripture Augustine interpreted as tautologies: “God will have mercy on all [of those on which he has mercy- who are very few].

Because the Church baptized infants, Augustine was determined to interpret this practice to mean that unbaptized infants went to hell. This unsatisfactory doctrine was softened into the idea of Limbo, a place of natural happiness without the vision of God, and it has taken the Western Church a millennium and a half to escape Augustine on this matter. Benedict has indicated that Limbo was always a theological speculation, that God has not told us what happens to unbaptized infants, but that we may trust in His mercy and love for all he has created.

Augustine insisted that it was not contrary to justice to punish unbaptized infants in hell, that we could not say that God was unjust. But the idea of damning unbaptized infants is so contrary to any human notion of justice that to say that God is just when he damns unbaptized infants is to use the word equivocally. This explains why the Jansenists were voluntarists: things are right and wrong purely because God wills them. There is no rational basis for the divine actions: the divine omnipotence creates justice: might makes right.

Since baptism and membership in the invisible Church were essential for salvation, Augustine also accepted the use of the civil arm to compel heretics to enter the Church. The Emperor confiscated all Donatist property and gave it to the Catholic Church. The Donatists complained that the apostles never compelled anyone to believe – Augustine replied that the apostles did not have Christian kings to enforce the laws of the Church.

Because he believed that explicit penitence was necessary for the forgiveness of sins Augustine pleaded with Imperial officials to be humane in treating criminals, not to use torture or execute criminals, even Donatists who had maimed and murdered Catholic priests. Augustine wanted criminals to be shown mercy, so that that hearts would be touched, and that they be given time to repent, because the unrepentant faced the everlasting fires of hell. So Augustine’s narrow views of salvation led him to advocate humane practices in this world.

When reading his letters, I often feel like arguing,” “O Augustine Aurelie, does not the desire to receive to bestow baptism have the same effect as baptism? Do unbaptized catechumens who doe or are martyred go to hell because water has not been poured over them? Why does not the Church baptize infants the second they or born, or catechumens the second they express desire for baptism? Christ said “Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.” Why does not the Western Church communicate infants when they are baptized, as the Eastern Church does?” And so on. But then Augustine’s meditations on time, and how all the scattered leaves of the universe are gathered into the single book of love, make one humble before the light of one the greatest geniuses of the Western Church, a light that is shot through with mysterious darknesses.

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The Aroma of Voluntarism

in Moral Theology, Voluntarism 1 Comment Tags: , ,

On dotCommonweal someone commented

The question that occurs to me is that some things now considered “intrinsically evil,” such as slavery, can be recognized as evil at the time, if not by the perpetrators, at least by the victims. But it seems like other “intrinsic evils” (mainly those involving sexual behavior) are kind of like victimless crimes. And if the perpetrators don’t know they are evil — how can I put this? — where does the evil go? For example, suppose in the movie Blue Lagoon, the two youngsters that grew up on the island together had not been Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins, but two males or two females who developed, in all innocence, a sexual relationship. They would not be guilty of doing anything wrong, and assuming it was a loving, caring relationship, no harm would come of it. So where there is no culpability and no negative outcome, what does it mean to say that objectively there was evil? Are some “intrinsic evils” kind of like “technical violations”?

“They would not be guilty of doing anything wrong.” What I find interesting in this comment is the underlying voluntarism: that harm is done only by disobeying a known law. That is, actions are wrong because God forbids them; God doesn’t forbid them because they are wrong in themselves. This error still pervades many Catholics’ approach to moral questions.

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