The Dignity of a Human Being as a Creation of God Leads to Obedience of the Natural Law - Gary L. Morella

It is not news that the Church faces considerable difficulty today in finding a way to convey its moral teaching to a modern world that could care less about the moral presuppositions of the Church. Many views that the Church holds are anathema to the "disciples of the endarkenment." That there are universal moral absolutes which are invariant, that suffering can be a redemptive good, and that we should readily sacrifice possession of the goods of this world in preference to securing the goods of Heaven, being the primary examples. The Church’s view of freedom is an authentic freedom to do what we ought, not what we want. The latter is called license, which has absolutely nothing to do with freedom but rather the inevitable anarchy awaiting any civilization living by its creed. The Church is concerned with liberation from sin and the right to do what is good, which is why it embraces the sinner but hates the sin. Christians understand that the supernatural is always penetrating this world to help souls attach themselves to what is good and holy. More importantly, they also understand that something else, something very real, is doing just the opposite. This rebellion against truth, in fact, Perfect Truth Who is Jesus Christ, a Somebody not a something, is fueled by the confusion of "rights talk" where license is mistaken for authentic freedom. [See "Rights, The Person, And Conscience In The Catechism", Janet Smith, Catholic Dossier, Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1997, pp. 29-37.]

Universal declarations of human rights seem to provide a kind of backdrop against which cross cultural discussions of morality and politics can proceed. This becomes the mode of moral discourse, a kind of universal currency that is the language of human rights in a modern world, so pluralistic in its moral thinking that there is no common moral discourse. The Church itself, in many arenas, of late the conferences in Cairo and Beijing, has found "rights language" playing an almost dominant role in its position for the "culture-of-life" over the "culture-of-death." The reason for this is twofold: First, the aforementioned commonality of "rights language", and second, the ability of "rights language" to combat a principal area of ethical confusion – relativism. While relativism dominates modern moral judgments, "rights language", with its primary reference to inalienable rights, carries with it the sense that there is a universal and absolute set of moral demands, true at all times and places.

How can the Church more effectively convey her moral message to the modern world confused about freedom and license, rights and wrongs? To find the answer we need to look to the writings of Pope John Paul II and the Catechism Of The Catholic Church to see the relationship between God’s laws and the inherent dignity of man as a creation of the Almighty in His image and likeness. He does this through a new mode of reasoning called "personalism", which maps the cosmological or ordered universe to a Christological or Christ-centered universe, which is still ordered per the Natural Law, but has the added bonus, especially for unbelievers, of relating the dignity of man in his essence as higher being, due not only to the intellectual capacity of his soul, but also his status as a free and self-determining creature, to obedience to the Natural Law. The grounding of morality via personalism emphasizes Christ as our model of perfection and human dignity while in no way demeaning God the Father as Lawgiver Who has written His will into the laws of nature. His gift of the Ten Commandments remains the prime example of the Natural Law to be adhered to for the sake of man’s physical and spiritual well-being. It does not require much thought to see that total ignorance of the Commandments leads only to physical and spiritual ruin, with emphasis on the latter since killing the soul far exceeds killing the body. In effect, through personalism, the Pope shows that it is not just a question of obeying laws because they are laws, but obeying them because to not do so inflicts mortal wounds to the dignity of man, reducing him to a lower animal. In short, from a human standpoint, it doesn’t make common sense to engage in activities which are unnatural because the dignity of the human person is seen as rooted not so much in his status as a rational creature whose mind is able to grasp reality, but in his status as a free and self-determining creature who must shape himself in accord with Truth spelled with a capital "T". This is the reason for the Catechism’s emphasis on Christ as the paradigm of the perfect human being.

"Rights language" impoverishes our moral discourse because it reduces all moral claims to claims of justice, to the total ignorance of all other possibilities. In order to see the truth of the Natural Law, the necessity for obedience to it, one has to first see that his dignity as a human being must be related to human goods, i.e., human perfection in the sense that Christ is Goodness personified. What is ultimately good for the human person is a proper relationship with God. Man is to worship God freely. Thus the Church places an enormous emphasis on the importance of conscience, because conscience properly formed, is properly allied not with radical autonomy but with the freedom to worship. The unbeliever will ask, "Well how does this apply to me?" Through the concept of personalism he will get an answer, an answer that he cannot ignore if human dignity means anything to him. He will be eventually made to see that human goods equates to human dignity equating in turn to obedience to the Natural Law, which in effect means that he is on the road to worshipping God despite his protestations to the contrary. From there, the final obstacles to conversion are greatly reduced. You have to walk before you can run. Never more so is this old adage correct than in a world where conversion of the heart is the only answer for what ails man.

The Christian moral vision sees the human person as indebted from the moment of conception and throughout his lifetime. He owes God and his parents, who cooperated with God in his creation by allowing God to be God, for his coming into existence and for his continued existence. He owes countless others for making his life and his enjoyment of life possible.

The moral section of the Catechism Of The Catholic Church begins with this passage:

We see in this passage the main concepts of a personalist approach to ethics; man as made in the image and likeness of God, man as determining himself by his deliberate and free actions, a concern with the interior life, the need of conforming our actions to the good that is made known to us by our conscience – an informed conscience of necessity whereby what is good is distinguished from what is bad, and the goal being attainment of Perfect Charity, which also refers to God, in particular Christ as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Personalism helps us to see that when we are obeying the laws of God, we are not just doing this to please a Lawgiver for His benefit, but for our benefits in both a physical and most especially a spiritual sense. What does it mean to say that a human being is a person? Dogs and cats are not persons. For the Pope the human person is an end unto himself. Certain things have instrumental value for our benefit. Trees have temporal worth; they will not last for eternity. Other things have intrinsic worth; they are valuable in and of themselves. If you had to choose between your most beloved pet and your child, say in a burning home, there would be no question regarding your choice, which would be made instantly. If you had to chop down the most beautiful, longest living tree in the world to save your child, similarly the choice is very easy because a man has intrinsic worth, infinite value. The human soul will last for eternity whereas a tree’s life is measured in centuries at most, i.e., is finite. Man will sacrifice what is temporal for what is eternal. There is an obvious hierarchy of goods here.

The Trinity itself is three Persons in one God – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. What it means to be a person is to be free; we are not simply programmed. We decide what choices that we want to make to determine our character as opposed to the instinctive reaction of animals. Human beings are also capable of grasping truth. We know something is eternal, lasting, and true, i.e., we can differentiate between the temporal and the eternal. This puts us on a transcendental level, a level consisting of things that are eternal, lasting, and true. This is what makes us persons. We cannot be treated as instruments in that we are for the sake of something else, to be used like a tree might be cut down for furniture. We do not fall into that category; rather, we are for ourselves, ends into ourselves.

The Pope makes this truth of the person an absolute fundamental basis of his ethics. He asks, "What is the right way to respond to a human person?" First, he tells us what is not the right way. We cannot use a human person; we are not to be used in that we do not have instrumental but intrinsic value. He talks about the tendencies to use each other. In his book Love And Responsibility, he says "The commandment laid down in the New Testament demands from man love for others, for his neighbors – in the fullest sense, then, love for persons. For God, whom the commandment to love names first, is the most perfect personal Being. The whole world of created persons derives its distinctness from and its natural superiority over the world of things (non-persons) from a very particular resemblance to God. The commandment formulated in the New Testament, demanding love towards persons, is implicitly opposed to the principle of utilitarianism, which is unable to guarantee the love of one human being, one person for another. The opposition between the commandment in the Gospels and the principle of utilitarianism is implicit only in that the commandment does not put in so many words the principle on the basis of which love between persons is to be practiced. Christ’s commandment, however, and the utilitarian principle, seem to be on different levels, to be norms of a different order. They do not deal directly with the same thing: the commandment speaks of love for others, while the utilitarian principle points to pleasure not only as the basis on which we act but as the basis for rules of human behavior . . . If we start from what utilitarians accept as the basis for the regulation of human behavior we shall never arrive at love. The principle of ‘utility’ itself, of treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love."

What does it mean to love a person? The Pope gives both a metaphysical (trying to get to the very being of something, its essence), and a psychological analysis of love. He uses an example which carried out to the fullest would lead to betrothal using seven different kinds of love, attraction, desire, good will, reciprocity, sympathy, friendship, and betrothal (romantic love). He makes the observation that all love starts with some sort of attraction toward an entity, a thing or person. This leads to a desire, a sense of possession albeit only momentary, possibly. You want to explore further what is best for this desire and for you in the case of say wanting to get to know someone better. If that someone you want to know is married, and you have courting as your ultimate objective, then you know that it is not good to pursue a courting goal further. Out of good will, out of concern for another, it might not be a good idea to pursue courting because of obvious conflicting ambitions in life. Love cannot go forward unless there is some kind of reciprocity, caring for the other, discovering each other. An important part of love is sympathy for the other’s condition, wants, putting the other before self, caring about the other enough so as not to use her as an object. You avoid doing anything that reduces the other to instrumental as opposed to intrinsic value. Mere recognition of another person’s worth is not love, hero worship maybe, but certainly not love. Only sympathy has the power to make people feel close to each other, which eventually builds to a friendship where we are a unit starting to look out for what is good for each other. Betrothed love is a move beyond friendship where the decision is made that we want to give our whole lives to each other with two becoming one, a mutual self-giving with the individuals involved being totally irreplaceable to each other. The Pope observes that certain of these types of love are applicable to parents, children, and friends but you do not make the same commitment in those cases as you would toward your spouse. For example, your children might be grown and moving to another part of the country. But your spouse desires to stay where you have lived for the last thirty years. This is her home. You would respect her decision and stay because she is first and foremost in your eyes, or at least, should be.

In a psychological sense the Pope talks about sensuality and sentimentality, and their interplay between men and women, noting that all of the information we get in the world comes from sense data. He concentrates on the physiological and psychological steps we must go through to choose a spouse arousing in us emotion, and attraction to another person. He states, "Sensuality by itself is not love, and may very easily become its opposite. At the same time, we must recognize that when man and woman come together, sensuality, as the natural reaction to a person of the other sex, is a sort of raw material for true, conjugal love. By itself, however, it most certainly does not play that role. The yearning for a sexual value connected with ‘the body’ as an object of use demands integration: it must become an integral part of a fully formed and mature attitude to the person (as outlined in the types of love using a metaphysical analysis); else it is certainly not love. A current of love as desire does, it is true, runs through sensuality, but if it is not supplemented by those other nobler, elements of love of which we spoke, if it remains desire and nothing more, then it is quite certainly not love. Sensuality must be open to the other, nobler elements of love." What the Pope is saying here is that you are short-circuiting your whole growth in love if you immediately jump into bed with someone whom you do not know as a person. This characteristic, the Pope notes, is more prevalent for males.

Another raw material of first element of love, which the Pope addresses, is sentimentality, which is more than just a physical value being an emotional value. A woman might be a picture of femininity, a man, of masculinity. "In the eyes of a person sentimentally committed to another person, the value of the beloved object grows enormously – as a rule out of all proportion to his or her real value. Sentimental love influences imagination and memory and is influenced by them in turn. This perhaps explains the fact that a variety of values are bestowed upon the object of love which he or she does not necessarily possess in reality. These are ideal values, not real ones. They dwell in the mind of a sentimentally committed person, often after sentimental love has summoned them up from their hiding place in the unconscious into the field of consciousness. Sentiment is fruitful within the subject: since it is the subject’s wish, desire, dream that these various values should be found in the object of his love, sentiment calls them all into being and endows that person with them so as to make the emotional commitment still further." These sensual and sentimental elements of love need to be balanced by looking to the feelings for the other person, realizing that each is properly necessary in an integral sense to understand the tendencies of each other psyches, thereby giving the best opportunity for a better, long lasting relationship.

The Pope observes that there is something divine about love. You have to truly know the other person in order to have love; physical or sentimental attraction is not enough. Love must be integrated between persons. "The Latin word ‘integer’ means ‘whole’ – so that ‘integration’ means ‘making whole’, the endeavor to achieve wholeness and completeness," or what might be referred to as "two becoming one." The process of integrating love relies on the primary elements of the human spirit – freedom and truth, authentic freedom as opposed to license in that you must do what you ought, not what you want, and truth, without which, the sacred bond of trust that is absolutely necessary for love is broken. The Pope continues, "A really free commitment of the will is possible only on the basis of truth. The experience of freedom goes hand in hand with the experience of truth." Thus, if you are going to truly love another person, you are going to have to make sure that you are free and she is free, and that you are both living in the truth to be absolutely sure that it is love being realized and not lust since, because of sexual or sentimental desire that is out of proportion, we may not be seeing the truth. Are we being deceived; are we deceiving ourselves?

How can you know that this is the person to whom you will make a lifetime commitment? You must understand that the value of a person is bound up with the whole being of the person and not with his or her sex: sex is only an attribute of that being. Continuing, the Pope says, "That being so, every person of the opposite sex possesses value in the first place as a person, and only secondarily possesses a sexual value. Psychologically, the love of woman and man is an experience at the core of which is a reaction to a sexual value. In the context of that experience the person is apprehended primarily as a human being of the other sex. But the mind is simultaneously aware of this ‘human being of the other sex’ as a person . . . So in every situation in which we experience the ‘sexual value’ of a person, love demands integration, meaning the incorporation of that value in the value of the person. This is where we see clearly expressed the fundamental ethical characteristic of love; it is an affirmation of the person or else it is not love at all. In essence, a person needs to be affirmed, not used. We must treat each other with respect. This is why "one-night stands", or promiscuous activity is so devastating to the human psyche. It forever leaves an indelible effect on what makes someone human, his or her being and essence. The ignorant may argue otherwise, given the hedonistic mentality of the age, but, if they are honest with themselves, they will see the truth of that statement.

The longing for true happiness with another person of the opposite sex in the natural state of marriage is a good in every sense of the word if a sincere devotion to each other’s good is paramount, putting the priceless imprint of altruism on love. A primary example of this devotion would be exhibition of the virtue of chastity that is in the service of love. This means that sexual desires are subordinate because you would not want to hurt the other person, e.g., putting her into an adverse situation by getting her pregnant outside of marriage as a result of your inability to respect her dignity as a person through unchecked sexual desire.

For the most part subjective realities have been the topic of discussion. What is the objective reality that must come into play? The answers are: A commitment to another must be rooted in the truth surrounding the individuals involved. Can I see myself spending my lifetime with this person? Do we have values in place to see that we want to get to know each other in a total self-giving respectful sense? Waiting until marriage to have sex is an objective indicator here. Do I want to be a parent with this person as marriage consists of the unitive and procreative acts per Genesis? Do I want my children to share my potential spouse’s values? It is absolutely imperative that the virtue of chastity is developed in any kind of a serious relationship leading to the married state as a goal so that these questions can be answered without the pressures of ungoverned sexuality, which can only give a biased response. Chastity is indicative of self-mastery and self-control, leading to a pledge of marital commitment that will last a lifetime. It is no secret, the statistics don’t lie, that with the advent of the pill and various other firms of artificial contraception, the social ills of our time to include abortion, sexual promiscuity, STDs, the devaluation of women into nothing more than sexual objects in an instrumental sense, teen pregnancies, and the divorce rate at nearly 50% with its corresponding damage to all parties concerned, in particular, children of broken marriages who never really recover, have skyrocketed. Heroic chastity outside and within marriage is the only answer to the ills of modernism, to an enlightenment needing the illumination of sanity from a Church much maligned and attacked because it stands out alone against the culture-of-death.

What the Pope has done in Love And Responsibility is to present a blueprint for a personal common sense Natural Law approach to dealing with your fellow human beings as persons, not tools to be used. Everything that he said in relation to the metaphysical and psychological aspects of love apply to relationships on all levels, not just those of a conjugal nature in marriage. He showed that the entire process of love is rooted in seeking out the good, which is the very essence of man, intrinsic to his dignity as a creation in the image and likeness of God. This "seeking out the good" is a fundamental principle of the Natural Law – man seeks what is good, and avoids what is bad.

The Pope has shifted the emphasis from the Natural Law to a Christological and personalist emphasis that is apparent in the Catechism Of The Catholic Church (Universal Catechism) which calls the Christian to "recognize your dignity" (1691) and calls him to a life in Christ, the prime example of perfection. A Christian anthropology is sketched in the Catechism beginning with the beatitudes, touching upon such topics as authentic freedom, and the conscience, and including a long section on man as a member of a community. This in no way means that the Natural Law has been put on the backburner. Rather, its relationship in regard to obedience to its tenets is shown to directly enhance the dignity of man, which is God’s intention. There is a two-way path between dignity and the Natural Law, both lead to each other; they are not divorced but forever married if man is to achieve his telos (final end) by contributing to the common good of society, which naturally leads ultimately to his salvation in Heaven, supernaturally. It is important to realize that the Natural Law has not been demeaned but reinforced in getting man to see that to seek his good for the sake of his dignity is the natural way to act. That is why the Natural Law themes of the moral act, virtue, sin and grace, and the Natural Law itself, are all covered in the new catechism, imbued with a personalist cast, i.e., the focus on man’s dignity as manifested in his power to determine himself freely in accord with the truth, a truth leading to Perfect Truth in Christ. The catechism’s emphasis of man as made in the image and likeness of God, man as determining himself by his deliberate and free actions, a concern for the interior life, the need of conforming our actions to the good that is made known to us by our conscience, with the goal being attainment of Perfect Charity in Christ, are major themes central to Natural Law ethics.

To get a better understanding of the Pope’s approach to ethics one has to clearly distinguish between nature as mechanistic vs. nature as rationality. The erroneous view of nature that the Pope combats is that held by phenomenalists and phenomenologists. (The Pope refers to followers of Kant as "phenomenalists" and to those who use the philosophic method of phenomenology as "phenomenologists. See Person And Community: Selected Essays, trans. By Theresa Sandok OSM.) This view is that nature has nothing to do with rationality and freedom; that it simply refers to the mechanistic laws of nature, i.e., to the natural impulses and responses of man’s somatic and psychic nature; to what "happens in or to man" rather than what he himself does. The Pope notes that Aquinas does not hold this view of nature. Thomistic philosophy speaks of nature in a metaphysical sense with the Natural Law pertaining not to acts of man, e.g., breathing, but to human action. The Pope insists that Aquinas’s view of Natural Law rests upon his understanding of the person as "an individual substance of a rational nature." He notes that Aquinas defines law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by one who has care of the community," and he defines Natural Law as "the participation of the Eternal Law of God in a rational creature." He maintains that man’s rational nature, which defines his manhood, intimately links man with the "ordinance of reason" that defines the Natural Law. This is another way of saying that reason gives rise to faith, and faith enables reason – the main topic of his encyclical on Faith and Reason, Fides Et Ratio. He contrasts Aquinas’s view of reason with that of Kant, who would have subjective reason impose its own categories on reality with each individual defining his own universal moral axioms. This is oxymoronic in the sense that what do you do when universal moral axioms collide? That was a question that the Supreme Court of the United States left unanswered in their debacle of a decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey where individuals are autonomous unencumbered selves freely able to define their own universes in which they live. It evidently never occurred to the justices voting for the majority that the only result to this madness is anarchy.

The Pope’s interest in subjectivity is not the same as Kant’s subjectivism. Aquinas’s reason has a completely different orientation and attitude, an attitude of reason discerning, grasping, defining, and affirming, all in relation to an order that is objective and prior to human reason itself. This objective order or ordinance of reason is the Eternal Law, which man through the Natural Law, in particular, because of his rational nature, participates in. Thus, man participates in God’s reason. In order to participate fully, man has to form a conscience in accord with God’s reason, His Natural Law. With a proper understanding of nature, there should be no conflict between the Natural Law and personalism. The person is not confined by the Natural Law but freely participates in God’s governance, and whatever subordination there is, is to God. It is man’s nature to be free and in that sense to transcend "nature"; he is not determined by any "natural law" to do the good; he may freely choose to do the good or not to do it. But the Natural Law lends itself to the formation of his conscience so that his gift of free will can be exercised properly, in a healthy, natural fashion, to choose good and avoid evil. The immediate consequences for bad choices may be purely physical, but the long-term effect is a matter of eternal spiritual life and death. The Natural Law leads to physical and spiritual health respectively, which is a good to be sought. The Pope in making these distinctions in his encyclicals, most notably, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor Of Truth), clearly rejects a definition of a person that elevates man’s freedom unduly, seeing man as some sort of pure consciousness ala Descartes, which makes the human being a kind of absolute affirmed on the intellectual plane subordinate to nothing. Such a person is not subject to the "ordinances of reason" that point the way to objective, universal, absolute truths but is free to form his own reality. Such persons today are found on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Saying that it is the understanding that man’s reason enables him to discover the "ordinances of reason" that govern the universe and thereby live in accord with it can summarize the Pope’s understanding of the Natural Law. Man does not have to define his own universe; the present one created by a Perfect God will do nicely, thank you. Nature here does not have the mechanistic, deterministic sense given to it by some modern philosophers. The notion of a person as a rational, self-determining creature does not entail that man’s consciousness and subjective state is superior to objective truth. Rather, it provides a bridge in a metaphysical sense of more clearly seeing objective truth as a good to be sought for much greater goals.

While the Pope accepts Aquinas’s view of the person, he supplements it. He summarizes Aquinas’s view in this way in his Person And Community: Selected Essays:

As pointed out by Dr. Janet Smith in her adaptation of her "Natural Law and Personalism in Veritatis Splendor" chapter 13 in Veritatis Splendor: American Responses, ed. by Michael E. Allsopp and John J. O’Keefe, "Here is where the Pope moves beyond Aquinas. He shares the modern interest in consciousness and self-consciousness, though he does not share the modern view that the person is consciousness. Rather, in the Acting Person, particularly in chapters 3 and 4, the Pope maintains that to actualize himself properly the human person must have an authentic grasp of values or goods and must work to determine himself in accord with objective goods; only thus is his freedom truly exercised, the major theme of Veritatis Splendor. The dignity of the human person for the Pope lies in this determination of the self through the free choice of what is good." The chief difference between the Pope and Aquinas here is that the Pope begins with and returns to subjectivity while Aquinas focuses on objective truths. Aquinas wants to determine what acts are good and evil; the Pope wants to show that man’s very subjectivity and freedom requires that he be concerned with the truth to such an extent that he sees clearly that it is in his best interest from the standpoint of seeking the good to only do good acts. In this way, man is not confronted with another set of laws that might so easily be dismissed as an infringement of freedom confused with license, but rather seen in the light of obedience to them being in man’s best interest due to his inherent dignity as a special creation of God.

Traditionally, man was defined as a social animal with much made of his need to write human laws in accord with the Natural Law to achieve harmony in the state. The Pope’s view of man as one who must give of himself to perfect himself gives a much more profound cast to the this traditional notion. It approaches a more theological understanding of the person who can only perfect himself by imitating Perfection itself, the total self-giving Christ. We can think of the Natural Law as interested in a universal absolute norm, whereas personalism is interested in the choices of the individual in accord with that universal norm. Natural Law is interested in the objectivity of moral norms; personalism is interested in the subjectivity of the individual, a subjectivity characteristic of all human beings, which must be properly ordered

to see the good in the objectivity of the moral norms. This "proper ordering" starts with basic common sense precepts that have been previously illustrated in terms of different types of metaphysical and psychological love.

Throughout Veritatis Splendor, the universality of the Natural Law is stressed, while care is taken to acknowledge the dignity of the individual. A passage from section 51 speaks especially to this point:

Again, we see the emphasis on man’s free will to do acts of his own choosing with the very important acknowledgment that these acts are to be inclined to the "true good", which is another name for God.

The best passage of Veritatis Splendor that shows the overlap of Natural Law and personalism is the first paragraph of section 90:

It is well known among factory workers that productivity increases when there is a rhyme or reason behind the orders given to them on the factory lines. They see that it is not only in the company’s best interest for them to be hard workers, but also theirs from the standpoint of the success of the company lending itself to a security about their employment and meeting future retirement needs. The goods of their endeavors are spelled out for them so that the company good becomes their good, not because the company demands it, but rather because they have come to see that there is no other way. Similarly, the Pope has introduced personalism as a compliment, not a substitute for Natural Law ethics so that mankind can see that it is in its best interests to adhere to the Natural Law written on its heart by a loving God concerned with the only goal for its creation, to know love and serve Him in this life, and to spend and eternity with Him in the next.