Law From a Catholic Lens

On the occasion of the publication of Recovering Self-Evident Truths:  Catholic Perspectives on American Law, Zenit interviewed Kevin Lee, MOJ friend and contributor to the book, on “Law From a Catholic Lens.”  What follows is a large excerpt of the interview.  For the full interview click here.

Q: Why is it necessary to ground an understanding of a legal system in a distinctively Christian anthropology?

Lee: It is not "necessary," in the sense that it is possible to create a legal system rooted in some other anthropology.

Much of contemporary American legal theory, for example, can scarcely be considered compatible with a Christian anthropology.

But I think Catholic anthropology has a contribution to make. It offers a unique understanding of the irreducible dignity of the person and the giftedness of the community.

Catholic thought affirms that human beings are creatures with particular natures, capacities and limitations.

We all have dignity as bearers of the "imago Dei," but we are also sinful and prone to weaknesses. We form communities naturally, through small acts of love and kindness, but that does not mean that we are not capable of meanness and selfishness.

The Anglo-American legal system could simply abandon its Christian roots as archaic or nonsensical, but doing that would mean abandoning our tradition and denying that tradition has anything to offer.

Anyone who would advocate that position would bear a heavy burden of proof.

Q: A number of scholars are rediscovering the Catholic influence on the formation of Western legal systems -- an influence that lasted well into the last century. Does the Catholic conception of reciprocal rights and duties, so long a part of Anglo-American law, continue to govern our legal system, or have individualistic and modern liberal theories such as those of John Rawls transformed American law?

Lee: There is no doubt that the contemporary Anglo-American legal system has been massively influenced by modern liberal democratic theories.

But, I don't think that Catholic thought is in total opposition to either modernity or liberalism. It is much more complex than that.

Modern liberals, like Catholics, are concerned with rights and justice.

For example, Pope John Paul II's passion for individual freedom against totalitarian rule found support among liberals.

The critique is more nuanced than a simple rejection of modernity and liberalism.

Q: What role does natural law play in Catholic legal theory? Is the natural law the "self-evident truths" that the American founders asserted governed political life?

Lee: Natural law is based on the belief that nature has rational purposes. It seeks to read moral precepts from such purposes as they are visible in nature.

Citing St. Paul's letter to the Romans, Christian natural law theorists have held that these precepts are based on self-evident foundational principles. But, it is a theory that is no longer widely accepted.

Modern science opposes the idea that there is any purpose to nature, moral or otherwise.

Contemporary secular philosophy largely denies moral truth altogether, and even contemporary Christian ethicists tend to look to virtue rather than law when speaking about morality.

Nonetheless, natural law theory still offers many insights and poses interesting questions.

For Christians, natural law theory has to be worked out in relation to the creation stories of Genesis. There are of course two antithetical natures for human beings in Genesis: one of eternal innocence and integrity, and the other of the fall and fragmentation.

The fall suggests a limit to our ability to gain moral knowledge from examining nature. It is possible to read the signs of nature correctly only if we understand the realities to which the signs refer.

But the fall impedes our capacity to know the ultimate reality because we no longer read the signs correctly. So a complete reading of the natural law will always elude our fallen, temporal selves.

Catholics typically have been more optimistic than Protestants in assessing the depth of our fallen nature. They have tended to argue that even the fall calls us to salvation because we can remember something of our pre-fallen state.

Protestants are more likely to see the fall as a complete forgetfulness of God that can only be healed by God's initiative. Nonetheless, Catholics and Protestants agree that we are deeply marked by the fall, and reason alone does not secure our ability to "read the signs" that tell of the purposes of nature.

That is why reason alone offers no sure guide to moral life. Benedict XVI has referred to the "pathologies of reason" to suggest this danger.

Christian moral theory must always be sensitive to excessive claims about the role that nature and natural reason can play in the moral life.

God's gifts of grace -- or example what St. Thomas called the infused virtues: faith, hope and charity -- are essential to the moral life, but they are typically discounted in natural law theories because they suggest limits to natural reason, and therefore moral knowledge is not self-evident.