Law and the meaning of our humanity

Thanks, all, for the very stimulating beginning! Since this is my first post, I thought I’d start with a couple of words about what I think our “experiment” is about, really. At some level, I don’t like the subtitle of our forum – “dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.” What I understand this discussion, and my work as a Catholic legal scholar, to be about is not “Catholic legal theory” so much as “legal theory” tout court. The Catholicity of it lies first in a commitment to all that is good and right and true – or, put another way, an openness to reality in the totality of its elements. Second, it lies in a conviction that He who is the meaning of all things, as he continues to be present throughout history in His Body (that is, the Church), is the only way to maintain that openness and thus the most complete way for humanity to even glimpse the unity of meaning of all reality and to remain in relationship with it. From that perspective, it would be a fundamental mistake to suggest that “Catholic” legal theory stands (or even could stand) alongside other “forms” or “modes” of legal theory with which it competes. That would perpetuate an understanding of reality, including the meaning of our humanity and its destiny, as essentially fragmented rather than unitary, which basically sells the store for the intellectual currency of modernity right from the start. In other words, my desire is not to develop Catholic legal theory, but to explore how the encounter with Christ, as illumined by the teaching and tradition of the Church, can make our understandings of law more intelligible, our judgments about it more reasonable, and our actions through law more fully human.

That finally brings me to the ongoing discussion below about philosophical anthropology (I would drop the “moral” from the label, which seems to me both redundant and a temptation to reduce the problem of human nature and law to moral questions in a narrow sense – even though I understand that’s not at all your intent, Rick). If a legal theory aspires to do what I described in the preceding paragraph, it must be able to offer an understanding of law that corresponds more fully to the totality of our human experience. This is true whether we speak in the language of classical natural law or Catholic Social Thought (I do not mean to suggest a dichotomy between them – merely that the vocabulary can be different at times). So, yes, I agree that good legal theory has to be about anthropology. But many centuries of legal thought have been devoted to eliminating those fundamental questions of the meaning of humanity from the scope of law, or at least to radically reducing the “answer” to those questions. If we are to renew legal thought on those grounds, it will take a long process of educating ourselves to have a genuine interest in and affection for our humanity, one that in turn provokes a sincere and open asking of the question of its meaning – because, to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, nothing makes less sense than the answer to a question that is not asked.