Over at First Things, Andrew Peach has written a beautiful reflection on fatherhood in the context of lamenting its demise. You should read the whole thing, but here's a snippet:
Faith in fatherhood, when such faith has existed, has always been faith in a tradition, which is to say faith in a communally and historically based institution that is wiser and more robust than any individual’s desires, whims, or considered judgments. Even before the children arrive and he is standing on the altar, the young father-in-the-making can hardly be said to be giving full consent to his marriage vows. The groom has little idea what he is getting himself into when he agrees to love his bride “for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Legally speaking, no groom could ever satisfy the criterion of assent necessary for a binding contract; he only understands the content of the vows he has made long after he has uttered them.
To speak more metaphorically, what vowing spouses are doing is putting up a fence around themselves so that the seeds of the relationship will have the protection and space needed to grow. In a negative sense, they are barring the exits, but they are doing so because the positive goods to be attained—for them, their children, and society—are too good and often too unexpected to be entrusted to fleeting feelings of fidelity. As horse farmer and communitarian author Wendell Berry observes, marriage—like friendships, families, and neighborhoods—“is a form of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape. . . . But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness.”
Compare this to the essay by Jeff Redding that I posted a couple of days ago, in which the self-transcendence of marriage is dismissed as a "mausoleum" and marriage participants as being "held hostage." Now ask, which view is more firmly grounded in an authentic vision of human nature? The marginalization of marriage cannot help but marginalize the understanding of the human person as a social creature who is capable of -- and suited for -- relational commitments that are deeper and more foundational (to both personal identity and society) than those that are entered into based on readily discernible and calculable self-interest (especially to the extent that self-interest is equated with short-term gratification).
The Catholic Legal Thought Conference rolled into Washington, D.C. this week, and our nation’s capitol will undoubtedly never be the same.The conference’s growing and rollicking cacophony of personalities, friendships, and booming ideas brings to mind a larger-than-life 1970s rock band, and given this week’s extended, late-night run at one of the best Irish pubs around, I think the rock band image might be the best vehicle for explaining what went on during this year’s installment.Just as the best 1970s albums were inspired by a single concept (e.g., “The Wall"), we centered our discussions on the work of Pope Benedict, specifically Deus Caritas Est and Spes Salvi.
Patrick Brennan, playing the part of Jimmy Page, can always jump-start the arena with a tour de force display of natural law theorizing.He noted the strange notion of American lawyers, for whom the law has a tenuous (at best) connection with “the good,” looking to the pope for jurisprudential guidance, since for the Church, the law is all about the good.He also noted the ambiguity in Benedict’s discussion of the natural law.Sometimes Benedict refers to the natural law as reflecting the order in nature or the order that can come to be in the human mind, and sometimes (but not always) he refers to its reflection of the order in the divine mind.This latter understanding is important, in Page's Brennan's view, in order to remind the human legislator that they operate under divine authority.
Greg Kalscheur, playing the part of Greg Allman as a technically proficient musician who brings an added dimension of soul to his performances, explored Benedict’s concept of “healthy secularity” and how it differs from “unhealthy secularism.”Part of healthy secularity entails making Christian insights perceptible and plausible to the citizenry in order to help form the good state, regardless of how those insights are ultimately labeled.
One session was devoted to the concept of hope.Amy Uelmen, the anti-Yoko Ono who is always working to keep the band together, addressed the relationship between eschatology and spirituality.John Breen, the Paul McCartney who wants the band to stay true to its musical heritage and not start venturing into disco, distinguished the theological virtue of hope from today’s materialist forms of hope, but noted that some non-theological forms of hope can facilitate a self-transcendence that can ultimately bring one closer to the theological.Ed Gaffney, the keyboardist whose powerful, moving, and nearly psychedelic keyboard solos transfix the audience, told stories of hope, God’s absence, and the law’s absence in a range of human dramas.
In my session, we talked about love and justice, working with Deus Caritas Est.CUA philosophy prof Brad Lewis, playing the part of the Edge (yes, U2 started in the 70s) with his understated yet hauntingly beautiful guitar work, asked several penetrating questions:What significance should we draw from the difference between John Paul II’s “civilization of love” and Benedict’s “church as a community of love?” Does Deus Caritas Est seem to be primarily addressed to bishops, and how should that affect our reading of it?Why is Benedict repeatedly raising and criticizing Marxism, when very few people are still taking Marxism seriously?Is it accurate to say that charity happens within the political order, but not through the political order, as justice does?
I then stepped up in the role of both Captain and Tenille during their “Muskrat Love” days.(The audience knows it’s wrong, but it is still somehow endearing.)I asked why the state should care about the practice of Christian charity.First I suggested that we need to specify what sort of love we are talking about, because if agape love is simply, as Anders Nygren suggests, a disinterested, unmotivated form of love that creates value, rather than recognizes value, Christian love looks a lot like the state’s “love.”If, instead, agape love is active, interested, motivated, and personal, as Pieper suggests, then Christians are not just passive conduits for love; they are subjects who love as acts of will, and their love is aspirational – directed toward human flourishing, not just the facilitation of autonomy.Christian charities should embody dynamic relationships of love with aspirations of substance, not just provide goods and services to facilitate an open-ended and substance-less autonomy.The latter might look like justice, but it’s not love.Because the state does not have the moral resources needed to build in these substantive and aspirational commitments, they also lack the resources to rule what those commitments should (or shouldn’t) be, but they should care that the needy are being loved in this way.
In any event, it was a wonderful, enriching time.We didn’t trash any hotel rooms or scare small children.Next year, the band rolls into Chicago.See you there.
(For a more refined reflection on the conference, read Susan's post.)
I'm not a biblical scholar, but I'm fascinated by debates between biblical scholars. Bart Ehrman, Wheaton College grad turned agnostic, has been attracting a lot of attention (and readers) with his book, Jesus Interrupted. New Testament scholar Ben Witherington responds to the book's claims here.
Check out Regent law prof (and MoJ-friend) Mike Schutt's "Cross and Gavel" website, which is designed to be a "comprehensive resource for Christian lawyers and law students who believe that faith is central to law practice and study." He has just added the "Essential Law Student Reading List." I'm sure Mike would welcome your feedback.
I recently asked whether Anders Nygren's view of agape love is consistent with Catholic teaching. As Fr. Araujo and Mike Moreland pointed out, it's not. Josef Pieper, in his remarkable Faith, Hope, Love, takes on Nygren directly. It is well worth reading. Here is a snippet:
[Our love] never creates 'values' or makes anything or anyone lovable . . . . What comes first is the actual existence of lovability, independently presented to us. Then this existence must enter into our experience . . . 'It's good that you exist' has justification solely in the actual goodness of the beloved, that this is its basis in reality; and that this order of things applies not only to our love for material goods and our fellowmen but likewise to our love for God and still applies in the eternal life. . . . The call for an utterly disinterested, unmotivated, sovereign agape love that wishes to receive nothing, that is purged of all selfish desire, simply rests upon a misunderstanding of man as he really is.
In other words, it's all self-love, properly understood as the "desire for fullness of being."
Valpo law prof Zachary Calo has posted his new paper, Catholic Social Thought, Political Liberalism, and the Idea of Human Rights. Here is the abstract:
As the dominant moral vocabulary of modernity, the language of human rights establishes significant points of contact between the religious and the secular. Yet, the human rights movement increasingly finds itself in a contested relationship with religious ideas and communities. Even as the idea of human rights draws on the inherited moral resources of religion, the movement, at least in many of its dominant institutional and intellectual expressions, has established itself as an autonomous moral discourse. In this respect, the human rights movement, as an expression of western liberalism, presents itself as a totalizing moral theory that challenges countervailing theological accounts of human rights. This paper considers the distinctive account of human rights which has emerged out of Catholic social thought’s engagement with political and economic questions. Particular attention is given to the process by which Catholic thinking about human rights has embraced the possibilities of political liberalism while also bounding liberalism within a particularistic theologically-informed account of the human person. The distinctiveness of the Catholic account of human rights raises questions about the role of Catholicism, and religious communities more generally, in shaping the law of human rights. To what extent can secular and religious approaches to human rights law find common cause and overlapping consensus? How does a Catholic account of human rights rooted in theological anthropology relate to a regnant secular tradition which rests on theological categories shorn of religious content (and which has become its own intellectual and moral tradition that is, in important respects, a counter-theology)? While a Christian theological jurisprudence must maintain a concern with the common good, the fractured moral consensus of late modernity equally demands that the goods identified be described with reference to the internal resources of the tradition. Catholicism, in this respect, might both advance and challenge the universalistic impulses of the human rights movement.
My guess regarding the compatibility of Bishop Nygren's view (that God's agape love creates human value, rather than recognizes human value) with Catholic teaching (a guess based on human dignity deriving from the Imago Dei, which itself can be seen as an act of God's value-creating love) may be off-base, judging by Fr. Araujo's helpful post. Villanova law prof Mike Moreland shares the skepticism, offering this response:
I think you've put your finger on a very important question or series of questions. . . but I'd resist at the outset the assertion that Nygren's Lutheran account of agape is easily reconciled to the Catholic tradition on charity as love of friendship of God . . . Three quick points:
(1) For Aquinas, we love in charity "for God's sake" (II-II, 25.5 ad 1), which means loving the neighbor as "belonging" to God, but that is different than saying, as does Nygren, that agape creates value in the neighbor (it's the difference between Aquinas' metaphysics of participation and the good, on the one hand, and the Lutheran doctrine of sin and grace, on the other).
(2) In contrast to the Lutheran view of agape as a replacement of the natural order of love, Aquinas builds his discussion of charity on Aristotle's account of friendship. For Aquinas, we love another in charity on account of God's goodness, which, in turn, creates other forms of friendship that are retained in the order of charity (II-II, 26.2). Natural emotional ties are not eliminated by charity but are instead perfected by charity (II-II, 26.6). Not surprisingly, then, Luther speaks of our relation to God in terms of fides but not of caritas, amor, or philia. In fact, Luther thought the smuggling of Aristotelian friendship (and its attendant egoism) into the account of charity was nothing short of blasphemous. Nygren's contrast of eros and agape, with some qualification, replicates that tension.
(3) The final and harder question (and where your post was driving in the end) is how Thomistic charity and its outward acts or effects of beneficence and benevolence toward others stand in relation to modern conceptions of dignity and respect, which are indebted to Kant's argument in the Groundwork and in the Metaphysics of Morals that we owe by pure practical reason respect to an autonomous will of absolute moral worth and fitting to the rational nature of persons. That's an extremely difficult question, but, crudely, I think one can fall into either the continuity camp (see Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy--Kant was a Prussian Lutheran, but he inherited some attenuated elements of the scholastic tradition from Christian Wolff, who was, in turn, influenced by Suarez and Spanish Jesuit scholasticism) or decline and fall camp (see MacIntyre, After Virtue).
I am not a theologian, but I occasionally play one in my scholarship. As part of a project exploring the theological sources that shaped Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work (and the lessons King offers for our understanding of a lawyer's work), I'm reading Agape & Eros by Anders Nygren. "Agape" love is a recurring and central theme in King's work, and he apparently was influenced by Nygren's book. Here's a quote from Nygren that warrants further reflection:
Agape is creative love.God does not love that which is already in itself worthy of love, but on the contrary, that which in itself has no worth acquires worth just by becoming the object of God’s love.Agape has nothing to do with the kind of love that depends on the recognition of a valuable quality in its object; Agape does not recognize value, but creates it.Agape loves, and imparts value by loving.The man who is loved by God has no value in himself; what gives him value is precisely the fact that God loves him.Agape is a value-creating principle.
Is Nygren (a Lutheran bishop and theologian) correct from the perspective of Catholic theology? (I'm guessing that he is.) Does a human being have any value apart from God's love for her? Does agape -- particularly as practiced from one human person to another -- recognize value or create value? Maybe this is just semantic given that we do not exist apart from God's love, and God's love is evidenced by the very fact of creation. But does framing the relationship between God's love and human value in this way make natural law appeals to human dignity (even more) difficult for those who do not believe in a loving God?
It is striking that a majority of Americans consider themselves "pro-life" (though, like Rick, I'm not exactly sure what that means). Two aspects of the results are less cheery: no uptick in the percentage of Democrats identifying as "pro-life" and no significant difference in "pro-life" self-identification among Roman Catholics versus the general population (52% vs. 51%).
