The Thomist Vol. 58 (1994) 171-195

HOW CAN WE LEARN WHAT

VERITATIS SPLENDOR HAS TO TEACH?

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana

VERITATIS SPLENDOR can be read in two very different ways. It can be read, and of course it should be read, as a papal encyclical, a piece of authoritative Christian teaching. As such, it is addressed to the Catholic bishops and its subject-matter is not only Christian moral teaching in general, but more particularly the present condition of the academic discipline of moral theology. I of course am neither a bishop nor a theologian, so it might seem that all that I can be asked to do in reading Veritatis Splendor is to listen quietly to what is being said in a conversation between others. Yet the complexity of the experience of reading Veritatis Splendor makes it impossible for me to restrict myself to this role of a more or less innocent bystander. For Veritatis Splendor is not only a work of authoritative Christian teaching about moral judgment and the moral life, it is also a striking contribution by the Polish phenomenological and Thomistic philosopher, Karol Wojtyla, to ongoing philosophical enquiry, one in which an incisive account is advanced of the relationship between biblical and other Christian teaching, the various moralities of the various cultures of humankind and the argumentative conclusions of moral philosophers. (I am well aware that generally several anonymous writers contribute to the drafting of encyclicals, and doubtless they did so on this occasion. But any reader of Karol Wojtylas major philosophical writings, from his doctoral dissertation onwards, will recognize, both in the style of arguments and in the nuances with which particular arguments are developed, a single nameable authorial

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presence in this text.) The central theses of this encyclical thereby challenge a range of rival philosophical accounts of that relationship: Kantian, utilitarian, and Kierkegaardian, to name only the most important. But how can any one text perform both of these very different tasks? Insofar as Veritatis Splendor genuinely contributes to argumentative moral philosophy, must it not be precluded from presenting itself as authoritative teaching? And insofar as it is authoritative Christian teaching, how can it possibly be a contribution to the contentious debates of moral philosophy? Part of what is impressive about Veritatis Splendor is that in the course of answering a number of other questions, it also answers these questions about itself.

Even so, any philosophical discussion of this encyclical which finds its argumentative conclusions compelling will be committed to an acknowledgment that philosophy itself, what it is and what it can legitimately hope to achieve, has to be understood in the light afforded by the Christian gospel. Veritatis Splendor never lets us forget this, so that even if I begin from the philosophy in the encyclical, I do so already knowing that it is going to direct me beyond philosophy. Nonetheless this is where I do have to begin, and this for two reasons. First of all this encyclical has an important argumentative structure and arguments are always matter for philosophy. Secondly, quite apart from any concern with Veritatis Splendor itself, what is inescapable for moral philosophers who are also Catholics, such as myself, is a strongly felt need for some definitive answer to the question of how their own peculiar philosophical conclusions about the nature of moral judgment and the moral life are related both to the dominant moral theories and practices of their own culture and to the biblical and Christian teaching by which they have been instructed. Each of these three presses upon us its own type of claim to our attention and allegiance and these sometimes conflicting claims define the situation in which and formed by which each of us encounters the theses and arguments of Veritatis Splendor. What then is my particular situation in these three respects, as Thomistic Aristotelian, as North American immigrant, and as Catholic?

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Thomists do of course quarrel a good deal among themselves. But there are two distinctive sets of conclusions which many of us take to be of crucial importance in the practical life. What are they? A first set concerns those rules which we take practical reason to apprehend as precepts of the natural law. Those rules enjoin and prohibit certain types of action as such. It is only insofar as our actions conform to what those precepts require, and do so just because those precepts require it, that we can become the kind of people who are able to achieve that final good towards which we are directed by our nature. So the human good can be achieved only through a form of life in which the positive and negative precepts of the natural law are the norms governing our relationships.

Thomists support this first set of conclusions by a variety of arguments drawn from Aristotle, Aquinas and others. These arguments can be reinforced by a second set of considerations which concern not so much the theories, but rather the practices of their anti-Thomistic philosophical critics, whether these are Humeans, Kantians, utilitarians, existentialists, relativists, or what you will. For it is a Thomistic contention that such anti-Thomistic philosophers inadvertently give evidence by and in their activities of the truth of just that Thomist view of the practical life which as theorists they suppose themselves able to refute. What is it about those activities which warrants this conclusion? Such philosophers generally and characteristically pursue the truth about moral and philosophical matters in a way and with a dedication that acknowledges the achievement of that truth as one aspect at least of what seems to be being treated as a final and unconditional end. They do so moreover generally and characteristically under constraints imposed by rules which prescribe unqualified respect for those with whom they enter into debate, precisely as enjoined by the primary precepts of the natural law. So we find that relationships within philosophical debate about morality are themselves governed to a surprising extent among a variety of non-Thomists and anti-Thomists by a practical recognition of exceptionless norms whose point and purpose is the achievement of the final end of that activity, thus exemplifying

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something that Thomists take to be characteristic of well-ordered human activity in general. For it is indeed a Thomist thesis that all practical reasoners, often unwittingly and often very imperfectly, exhibit in significant ways the truth of the Thomist account of practical reasoning by how they act, even when, as in this case, they are engaged in the enterprise of constructing anti-Thomistic philosophical theories.

That this is so would of course be strenuously denied by such anti-Thomistic moral philosophers, moral philosophers who not only are in a large majority among our academic colleagues, but who enjoy one great advantage over us in contemporary debate. For they, unlike us, generally represent in their theories the standpoints of the dominant moral culture of everyday life in modern North America. Even in their fundamental disagreements with each other--Kantians against utilitarians, both against Humeans, all three against Nietzscheans--they articulate at the level of theory standpoints and disagreements which inform a good deal of everyday practice in our culture. This is after all a culture in which there is an unusual degree of awareness that moral thought and practice have varied from one culture to another and that disagreement between and within cultures has often been intractable. So that a Thomistic Aristotelian, unlike most of her or his philosophical colleagues, must in certain respects find her or himself at odds with this dominant North American culture, involved in recurrent argument and contention at the levels both of philosophical debate and of everyday practice. We are participants in a conversation with many disputing voices.

Yet as Catholics we have to listen first to what a very different set of voices have to say to us, those inspired and authoritative voices which declare the Word of God concerning those same moral matters about which our own culture speaks to us so vociferously and about which we have arrived at our own philosophical conclusions. Part of what we have to learn, or rather to relearn, from Veritatis Splendor is that, at least so far as the fundamental and central precepts of the moral law are concerned, the truths about those precepts declared to us by God through Moses

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and the prophets, in the revelation by Jesus Christ of the New Law and in the teaching of the Catholic Church, culminating in this very encyclical, are no other than the truths to which we have already assented as rational persons, or rather to which we would have assented, if we had not been frustrated in so doing by our own cultural, intellectual, and moral errors and deformations. Yet the encyclical also teaches us that what we encounter in Jesus Christ is immeasurably more than this. We also have to learn of our forgiveness and our redemption and of the transformation made possible in our acknowledgment of law when we come to understand it in the light afforded by Jesus Christ. Nonetheless the law declared to us by God in revelation is the same law as that which we recognize in the moral requirements imposed by our own human practical understanding and reasoning, when they are in good order. So that when we become able to hear and to respond to what Jesus Christ has to say to us, we do not have to leave behind or discard anything that we had genuinely learned concerning the moral law through reasoning. Grace often corrects, as well as completes, what we have so far taken to be conclusions of reason, but, when grace does so correct us, it is always because we have in some way failed as reasoners. And therefore Veritatis Splendor, just because it is true to this biblical teaching, will be grotesquely misunderstood if it is understood as an act of coercive imposition by an external authority, rather than an invitation to become more thoughtful and more perceptive. It does indeed speak in the name of an authority external to us, God, but that to which it invites us--that to which He invites us--is in part an act of moral and rational self-recognition. And Veritatis Splendor as a work of philosophy does itself exhibit just that moral and rational awareness to which as an encyclical it invites its readers.

What then are those truths to which we are invited to attend? In Veritatis Splendor we are presented not only with a reassertion of central truths, but also with a characterization of a number of types of contemporary error--philosophical, theological and moral. It would be a great mistake to treat this focus upon errors as merely an irritable expression of the censoriousness of

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authority. It is rather that unless and until we have understood these particular errors, and why they are errors, we shall have failed to grasp important features of the relevant set of truths. So, we cannot begin by attending exclusively to the statements of the truths and only afterwards go on as a secondary matter to that of the errors, for the exposition of the truths will remain radically incomplete until the four types of error have been characterized. What then are these truths which we shall sufficiently understand only by considering some mistakes about them into which we and our contemporaries are peculiarly liable to fall? Veritatis Splendor begins with biblical and Christ-centered meditation and exegesis, as all Christian theology must begin. But, because my commentary is that of a philosopher, I take the liberty of beginning elsewhere--in fact at a middle point in the encyclicals argument. I begin with the encyclicals creative and constructive restatement of what I have already noticed as the Thomistic account of natural law, an account which, as the encyclical stresses, the Church has included " in her own teaching on morality" (Section 44, p. 59; page references are to the Vatican translation into English, Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1993). And here in consequence there is a tension and a danger peculiarly for Thomists. We, like all other Catholics, have to receive this teaching with attentive obedience, and we must not be misled into thinking that our own philosophical conclusions, as philosophical conclusions, can make our attentive obedience unnecessary. Indeed, we, more than anyone else, may be tempted into treating Veritatis Splendor as a restatement of what was already sufficiently known, so deceiving ourselves about our own need to learn. What then is it that we do need to learn?

"The negative precepts of the natural law," the encyclical reminds us, "are universally valid. They oblige each and every individual, always and in every circumstance. It is a matter of prohibitions which forbid a given action sem per et pro sem per, without exception, because the choice of this kind of behavior is in no case compatible with the goodness of the will of the acting person, with his vocation to life with God and to communion with his neighbor" (Section 52, p. 70). The examples given are from

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Jesus reaffirmation of the Decalogue (Matthew 19: 17-18):

You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness" (p. 71). What we are told in these and other passages is that we cannot adequately characterize--adequately, that is, for practical life, let alone for theory--that good towards the achievement of which we are directed by our natures and by providence, except in terms which already presuppose the binding character of the exception-less negative precepts of the natural law. And correspondingly we cannot characterize adequately that in our natures which alone makes us apt for and directed towards the achievement of that good except in the same terms. Unless our passions, habits, motives, intentions, and purposes are ordered by the negative as well as the positive precepts of the natural law, they will not be ordered towards our own good and the good of others. For the negative precepts structure or fail to structure our relationships with others as well as our characters. "They oblige everyone regardless of the cost, never to offend in anyone, beginning with oneself, the personal dignity common to all" (p. 70).

Obedience to these negative precepts is then enabling, both individually and communally. It frees us from a variety of hindrances and frustrations that would otherwise bring to nothing the pursuit by each of us of our own positive good and that of others. And they can be universally apprehended by rational persons as at once required and enabling, for they are "valid for all people of the present and the future, as well as those of the past" (Section 53, p. 71). They belong to "the permanent structural elements" of human beings. What God commands of us in commanding these precepts is therefore what we already knew or could have known for ourselves as required for our good. What God asks of us, both in the Old Law and in its reaffirmation by Jesus Christ, is what, if we were adequately rational, we would ask of ourselves. Gods commands are to be and do what will restore us to our freedom and the Churchs teaching concerning the divine commands has the same aim and content. "Hence obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy .

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(Section 41, p. 57). We are not to have divided wills, divided minds, or divided hearts.

The use of a Kantian idiom in this passage is instructive. For the encyclical is both in agreement and in disagreement with Kant. It is in agreement in understanding the negative precepts of the moral law as exceptionless prohibitions. It is in disagreement in its assertion that human reason needs to be instructed and corrected by this revelation of Gods law. For not only is it the case that what God commands coincides with what is demanded of us by our own rational natures--that is something to which Kant could have assented--but to act in some particular way, just because God commands us so to do, is always to conform our wills to the good will, knowing that what His goodness requires of us is what goodness requires of us. So the " self -determination" of human beings is compatible with a "theonomy" of the reason and will, since "free obedience to Gods law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in Gods wisdom and providence" (p. 57). But this is not the only difference from Kant.

According to Kant we are to do our duty by obeying the moral law for its own sake. The doctrine of the encyclical is that we are also to obey that law for the sake of the further good of ourselves and of others. The natural law teaches us what kinds of actions we need to perform, what kind of actions we need to refrain from performing, and what kinds of person we need to become, if we are to achieve our own final end and good and to share with others in achieving our final end and good. In achieving that good we shall be perfected, something possible for us sinful human beings only by grace. And what we shall lose, if we fail to achieve it, will, Jesus taught us, be God Himself "who alone is goodness, fullness of life, the final end of human activity and perfect happiness" (Section 9, pp. 19-20). "To ask about the good, in fact, ultimately means to turn towards God, the fullness of goodness" (p. 19).

What this underlines is that the conception of a final good for human beings is that of a good that cannot he weighed against any other, a good whose loss could not be compensated for by

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any other. It is not merely that of some good which contingently happens to outweigh all other goods, so that one might intelligibly ask about it how far it outweighs them and whether or not some combination of other goods might not possibly outweigh it. But, if obedience to the precepts of the natural law, including the negative exceptionless precepts, is necessary for the achievement of a final good of this kind, is indeed partly constitutive of a life whose choices are directed towards that good as its end, then it makes no sense to ask whether some particular violation of one of those negative precepts might not be justified, because some good to be brought about by that particular violation in these circumstances on this occasion would or might outweigh the good to be achieved by conformity to that particular precept. The notion of outweighing cannot have this kind of application.

It may be instructive to consider--the example is mine, not that of the encyclical--the difference between St. Thomas Aquinass view of why I may not be guilty of murder, even if, in the course of defending myself as a private person from a murderous onslaught by someone else, I happen to kill the aggressor, and a utilitarian view of why in those same circumstances I may not be guilty. The utilitarian will weigh the consequences of my undertaking an effective defence of myself or others--let us suppose that we are dealing with a case in which the only available effective defence will as a matter of fact result in the death of the aggressor--against the consequences of my failing to do so. If, as will commonly be the case, the benefit to be produced by an effective defence will in fact outweigh the harm of killing the aggressor, then, so the utilitarian will conclude, it will be right for me to mount an effective defense and I will do no wrong, if I intend, because of having so concluded, to kill the aggressor as the means of producing this balance of benefit over harm.

Aquinass view is importantly different (Sunima Theologiae IIa-IIae, 64, 7). I may not, whatever the predictable outcome in terms of a balance of benefit over harm, intend the death of the aggressor. What I may and should intend is only to defend myself--or other innocent persons--by using the minimum force necessary, even if in the course of so doing I do have to act so

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as to bring about the aggressors death. The intentional killing of another by a private individual is prohibited by the natural law as a wrong which cannot be outweighed by any benefit whatsoever.

One recurrent source of error here has been too simple a view of what some of the negative precepts of the natural law require and a consequent misunderstanding of how certain practical conclusions follow from them. For some negative precepts of the natural law have a certain complexity. Consider the act of theft. "The primary and decisive element for moral judgment is the object of the human act, which establishes whether it is capable of being ordered to the good and ultimate end, which is God" (Section 79, p. 100). St. Thomas first identifies the object of the act of theft as to take possession of what is the property of another where what is taken is a thing possessed (and not the others person or some part of it) and to do so secretly (this distinguishes fart urn, theft, from rapina, robbery). But a right understanding of what the precept of the natural law forbidding theft requires is therefore impossible without a right understanding of the concept of property. To own something is not, as in some views, to have inviolable rights over it. Owners hold their property as stewards for those in need, and in cases of extreme and immediate need, need which can only be met by taking what is otherwise to be regarded as your property, I do no wrong in taking what, because of that need, has become my property as much as yours, common property, and my taking is not rightly to be called theft or robbery, even if you have not consented to it (Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae 66, 7).

Compare this mode of argument once again with an erroneous method which might in some particular situations lead to the same practical conclusion. A utilitarian might suppose that what has to be done is to weigh the good of upholding property rights against that of aiding this particular individual in need, in each case taking the relevant set of consequences into account, and perhaps arriving at the conclusion that, on balance, good will be maximizing by aiding the needy individual. Two prima facie moral principles are in conflict and the utilitarians conclusion re-

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solves the dilemma by appeal to the principle of utility. But of course some change in contingent circumstances, such that the upholding of property rights became of greater and more urgent importance, might well lead by the same utilitarian mode of argument on another occasion to the conclusion that the needy person should be allowed to starve to death. The consistent utilitarian has to deny that it could be right to hold that no one should ever be allowed to starve to death, when there are any resources available to prevent this, whatever the consequences. But just what the utilitarian denies the natural law affirms.

So even when in particular cases and circumstances what the negative precepts of the natural law enjoin does coincide with what a consequentialist would prescribe, they do so on a basis that is deeply at odds with all notions of weighing and balancing consequences or of giving proportionate weight to different considerations. It is not of course that there are not greater and lesser goods. To do evil is always to prefer a lesser good to a greater. But the good at stake in all situations in which obedience or disobedience to the natural law is in question is such that no other can be weighed against it. Hence, when the encyclical explains the mistake made by those consequentialists and proportionalists who have supposed that somehow or other some good can be weighed against the evil of violating some particular negative precept, this identification of error is not just one more addendum to an exposition of Gods law, whether understood as the natural law or as received through revelation from Moses and Jesus Christ. It is rather that recognizing that and why this is an error is itself a sine qua non, a necessary condition, of any well-founded understanding of the natural law and of our human relationship to it.

This is also true of a different, but not unrelated, error concerning the intentions of agents. It has been sometimes supposed that an intention or purpose can be good prior to and in independence of the character of the actions in which it is embodied, and that the goodness of that intention or purpose can make the acts that flow from it good, independently of their character in respect of the precepts of the natural law. Here the mistake is to

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suppose that the agents willing, expressed in the formation of its intentions and purposes, can derive its goodness or badness from any source except the object of the act deliberately chosen in that xvilling. The object of each particular action is the proximate end of that action, embodied in that action, and unless that action so characterized, accords with the precepts of the natural law, the action cannot be good and the willing cannot be good either. And to xvill badly, as to act badly, is to fail in the achievement of human freedom. In making this claim about freedom Veritatis Splendor challenges a good deal of what is commonly received nowadays as wisdom.

There is in the dominant moral culture of our particular time and place a widespread and influential conception of human beings as individuals who initially confront a range of possible objects of rational desire, a range of goods, among which each of them has to make her or his own choices, and which each individual has to rank order for her or himself, in accordance with her or his set of preferences. It is in accordance with those choices and that rank ordering that individuals formulate their principles, attempting in so doing to arrive at agreement with other rational persons, so that each in affirming and implementing her or his own preferences and choices may do so in a way consonant with those of others. Hence it is on the basis of individual preferences and choices that values and norms, including those of morality, come into being and from those preferences and choices that they derive their authority. Different versions of this view have been presented in the idioms of more than one type of philosophical theory. But the view itself is tacitly presupposed by many people who are quite unaware of themselves as having any philosophical commitments. And such people have often come to believe that this purported ability to create moral values and norms is central to their freedom. Their choices and preferences are to be treated as sovereign and their liberty consists in the exercise of this sovereignty. Hence any assertion of the objective authority of norms and values seems to constitute a serious threat. So, for example, during the Senate Judicial Committees hearings on the nomination of Mr. Justice Thomas,

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Senator Joseph Biden expressed a fear "that natural law dictates morality to us, instead of leaving matters to individual choice" (Washington Post, September 8, 1991). But this conception of moral freedom as a power in each of us to make our own fundamental premoral choice of moral norms and values is illusory and deceptive.

What freedom is for human beings depends upon what their capacities are, upon what difference it makes to them how they set about actualizing those capacities, and upon what success they are able to have in so doing. To have become free is to have been able to overcome or avoid those distractions and obstacles which frustrate or inhibit the development of a capacity for judgment by standards whose rational authority we are able to recognize for ourselves and for action in accordance with such judgment. To have failed to become free is to have rendered oneself subject to frustration or inhibition in respect of such development. And the exercise of choice as such may contribute as easily and as often to failure as to success in becoming free. What we all have to learn is how to make right choices, on the basis of judgments that are genuinely rational and genuinely our own, so that our choices contribute to the development and exercise of our capacities. The virtue which we need if we are to become capable of right choice is the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis, prudentia. The acquisition of that virtue is impossible without a recognition of the rational authority of the precepts of the natural law, most of all perhaps of the negative exceptionless precepts. Thereby we become able to choose in a way that is not self-frustrating, but liberates our capacities for judgment and action directed towards our good. This is why the negative precepts are what I called them earlier, enabling, and why acknowledgment of their rational authority is a constitutive element of human autonomy. But just how is this so? We can usefully begin by considering first how they structure our relationships to others and then how they correspondingly structure our relationship to ourselves and so our selfhood.

We find ourselves engaged with others in a variety of ongoing institutional and informal enterprises and projects, through which

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we and they seek to achieve a variety of goods, goods of enduring relationships in the family and in friendship, goods of productive work, of artistic activity and scientific enquiry, goods of leisure, goods of communal politics and of religion. In each of these projects and types of activity individuals have to learn how to discern and to order the specific goods of each area and how to make those choices through which they can be achieved. How those goods are understood and what means there are for achieving them will of course vary a good deal from culture to culture. What will not vary is two-fold: the need for a presupposed understanding that such goods will contribute to the achievement of the human good and the need for recognition of a set of requirements which enable human beings to benefit from the disciplines of learning. Those universal and invariant requirements specify the preconditions for the kind of responsiveness by one human being to others which makes it possible for each to learn from the others questioning. They are the preconditions of a kind of rational conversation in which no one need fear being victimized by others as the outcome of their engagement with those others. Without acknowledgment of them, implicit or explicit, there would be lacking the basis for rational conversation about goods and about the good and for rational cooperation in achieving good and the good either within cultures or between cultures. They are definitive therefore of what human beings share with one another by nature, as rational beings. And they are in fact the requirements imposed by the precepts of the natural law.

What is true of relationship with others also holds of our relationship with ourselves. The same preconditions necessary for rational conversation with others are necessary also for rational deliberation with and by myself. My ability to learn from my own experiences in a way that will conduce to the achievement of my good depends upon my adopting a certain standpoint toward myself, a standpoint in which I am able to evaluate myself as a rational agent with, so far as possible, the same objectivity that I would evaluate another. Truthfulness, the courage of endurance and the courage of patience, a considerateness and a generosity

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which avoid both mean-spiritedness and self-indulgence, are as necessary in my treatment of myself as they are in my treatment of others. And the minimal requirements of those virtues are none other than the precepts of the natural law.

If then conformity to the precepts of the natural law is a precondition of the kind of learning, both for oneself and in relationship to others, which develops maturity of rational judgment, any attempt to locate human freedom in a freedom to make choices which are prior to and independent of the precepts of the natural law is bound to be not only theoretically mistaken, but also practically misguided. Theoretically those who accept such a view understand law as primarily a constraint upon, rather than an enabling condition of freedom. And this is why they suppose that acknowledgment of the natural law is incompatible with freedom. As the encyclical puts it, they posit "an alleged conflict between freedom and law," supposing that individuals and social groups have a "right to determine what is good or evil" (Section 35, p. 51). Their belief has practical consequences. It leads them on to a reformulation of moral rules, so that no moral rules are held unconditionally and unqualifiedly. The rule about truth-telling, for example, becomes "Never tell a lie, except when .

and there then follows a list of types of exception, a list which will vary from person to person and group to group, except that all their lists are apt to end with an "etc.," and, as ~vith the rules about truth-telling, so also with other moral rules. The social and political consequences are those described in Sections 100 and 101 of the encyclical.

What this erosion of rules is always apt to lead to is a surrender of human relationships to competing interests, economic interests which, if not shaped by temperateness and justice, will reduce persons " to use-value or a source of profit " (Section 100, p. 122, quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2407), political interests which, if not likewise shaped, will threaten integrity and legality. These are evils not only of totalitarianism. They may also result from "an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism" (p. 123), a relativism according to which each

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individual was treated as free to decide upon her or his own moral rules.

One strong contention of the encyclical is that the only barrier to such an erosion and its consequences is a recognition of the objective authority of the precepts of the natural law, a recognition not only of the significance of the content of the natural law, but also of its function in structuring human nature. Each individual human being is a unity of body and soul and the body is to be understood in terms of this soul-informed unity. Bodily inclinations are of moral significance and bodily movements give expression to meanings. Human bodies are more than physicochemical and biological structures, although they are both these things. This conception of the body as primarily a bearer of meanings links Aristotelian themes in the philosophy of mind and body with perspectives developed within Polish phenomenology by, among others, Karol Wojtyla, but also, of course, by a variety of followers of Husserl, there and elsewhere, most notably perhaps by Merleau-Ponty, but also, earlier and as strikingly, in her dissertation by Edith Stein. It is "in the body," the encyclical declares, following both St. Thomas and Stein, that the person discovers those "anticipating signs" which are "the expression and the promise of the gift of self" (Section 48, p. 66). Moral direction therefore is not something to which the body is merely subjected as something alien and external. Physical activity is intelligibly structured towards the ends of the whole person, something that is rendered invisible by any reductive physicalism. It is the whole human person as a unity of body and soul which is ordered to its ends by the natural law, when the human being is in good functioning order. The truth that it is by being so ordered that the person is enabled and empowered--a bodily enabling and empowerment--is among those truths without a grasp of which an understanding of freedom cannot be achieved (Section 50, pp. 67-8).

The concept of truth here invoked is, in some sense of that variously employed adjective, a realist one. Our judgments about how it is right for us to act and about how human nature is structured have authority only in virtue of their conformity to

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standards independent of and prior to judgment, desire, choice and will, standards of truth as well as of rational justification. Conscience has no authority in and by itself, but only insofar as its subjective deliverances conform to those objective standards. "Once the idea of universal truth about the good is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes" (Section 32, p. 48). And it is not just that conscience is thereby accorded a false self-sufficiency and a misleading authority, important although that is (pp. 48-9). There is also a consequent failure in our self-knowledge, a failure to identify and to recognize that in our human nature which makes our freedom a real possibility, and beyond this sometimes a denial of the reality of a determinate human nature. An inadequate conception of truth is thus not just a source of failure in semantics or epistemology. Both the relationship of our understanding of truth to our understanding of freedom and the relationship of our capacity for achieving truth to the actuality of freedom make it crucial for moral philosophy and also for moral theology that we should have an adequate conception of truth. But the required standard of adequacy is of course compatible with more than one philosophical theory of truth.

What is required is that truth should be understood to be something other and something more than warranted assertibility. What we take to be warrantedly assertible is always relative to the standards of warrant presently upheld in our particular time and place, in our particular culture. But in asserting that something is true we are not talking about warrant or justification, but claiming rather that this is in fact how things are, whatever our present or future standards of warrant or justification may lead us to state or imply, that this is in fact how things are, not from the point of view of this or that culture, but as such. Such assertions of course often turn out to be false, but once again what they turn out to be is not false-from-a-point-of-view, or false-by-this-or-that-set-of-standards, but simply false. Without this culture and standpoint transcending aspect of the true and the false, those twin concepts could not play the part that they do in our lives. Without them we could not be the culture-transcending rational animals that we are.

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It is only of course in terms provided for each of us by our own culture that human beings can initially formulate whatever truths we may apprehend about human nature and about the natural law. And it is from the resources provided by our own culture that we first set about trying to provide "the most adequate formulation" for those truths (Section 53, pp. 71-2). But insofar as the conception of human nature which we arrive at is indeed that of human nature as structured by the natural law, we will have succeeded in transcending what is peculiar to our own or any other culture. It will have become a conception of that which "is itself a measure of culture," of that in human beings which shows that they are "not exhaustively defined" by their culture and are not its prisoner (Section 53, p. 71). So once again a connection between truth and freedom appears. Just as we are not to be explained as wholly determined by our physical and biological make-up, so we are not merely products of our cultural environment, but actual or potential creative shapers of it, precisely insofar as we can evaluate its perspectives in terms which are nonperspectival, the terms of truth.

What I have tried to do so far is no more than to sketch the philosophical content of Veritatis Splendor, and I hope that something at least of the coherence and the complexity of that content has emerged. But, if the encyclical is not to be seriously misrepresented, another dimension needs to be added. Someone might well remark that, if and insofar as the encyclical is philosophy, it does indeed have one characteristic property of philosophy: every thesis thus presented is one treated as contestable within contemporary academic philosophy and denied by the protagonists of one or more influential philosophical standpoints. Moreover nothing in the encyclicals presentation is going by itself to change the philosophical convictions of any of those engaged in the debates of contemporary moral philosophy. The question therefore arises: Is anything achieved by the encyclical other than a salutary reminder both to Catholic philosophers and to others of some of the philosophical commitments and presuppositions of Catholic Christianity? The answer is: a good deal more is achieved, both at and beyond the level of philosophy, for

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the encyclical not only spells out the philosophical commitments and presuppositions of Catholic Christianity, it also explains just why these commitments and presuppositions are going to be regarded as contestable, at what points their rejection is of the greatest significance, and what the intellectual and moral costs of such rejection are. It does so by presenting us with what is in effect a theology of moral philosophy embedded in a theology of the moral life.

The starting-point for the reflections which yield that theology is a meditation on the conversation of Jesus with a rich young man in the nineteenth chapter of Saint Matthews gospel (Sections 6-27). We are to recognize in that young man "every person who, consciously or not" (p. 17) poses to Christ the Redeemer questions about morality which are in fact questions about the meaning of ones own life. This is a form of unquiet questioning, present in everyone, to which each significant action and decision implicitly or explicitly proposes an answer. The rich young man makes explicit both the question and his own answer.

Jesus redirects the young mans questioning from the law to God, who is not only the author of the law, but is Himself the final end of the law, "the final end of human activity" (pp. 19-20). What is required of the rich young man, and so correspondingly of each of us, is that he give up everything to God, so that by holding back nothing he will acknowledge that God, the supreme good, his supreme good, cannot be weighed against any other good. He must go beyond mere conformity to the law to a kind of obedience which understands the point of the law as an expression of Gods love. But it is not in the young mans power to achieve this by himself. That is a possibility opened up to him and to others "exclusively by grace" (Section 24, p. 37), grace which Jesus offers as a gift to the young man, who, even although he has observed all the commandments, "is incapable of taking the next step by himself alone" (Section 17, p. 29). But the young man refused Jesus invitation and "went away sorrowful, for he had many possessions" (Mt. 19:22). What did the young man lose by preserving his attachment to his possessions? Veritatis Splendor does not answer this question directly

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in the sections which bring this initial scriptural meditation to a close. But in an important way the whole of the rest of the encyclical constitutes an answer to it.

Unless, unlike the rich young man, we respond to Gods offer of grace by accepting it, we too shall be unable fully to understand and to obey the law in such a way as to achieve that ultimate good which gives to such understanding and obedience its point and purpose. But unless we can understand and obey the law adequately, we will be unable to recognize the truth concerning our own natures and to realize their potentiality for an exercise of rational freedom through which we can perfect our individual and communal lives (Section 38-40). This inability would constitute a loss in ourselves of that which is of most value to ourselves and to others. What we have to learn from the story of the rich young man is that attachments to what it seems to us that we cannot bear to lose--in his case his possessions--may, if they come between us and the possibilities that obedience to the law and grace together open up for us, that is, if they come between us and God, result in a far more radical loss to and of the self. But what has this to do with the philosophical parts of the encyclical?

Each of the errors about the natural law and its relationship to the human good identified in the encyclical is a dangerous obstacle to the achievement of right understanding of and fruitful obedience to the law. It is not too much to say that each represents an attachment comparable to the rich young mans attachments to his possessions. But how can this be so? I have so far presented these errors very largely as philosophical errors--although I have at certain points gone a little further than this-- and we are generally unaccustomed in our culture to think of philosophy as having so interesting a potentiality as that for moral danger. But in fact those errors identified in the encyclical which I catalogued earlier are not only philosophical mistakes. They are the articulation at the level of moral philosophy, at the level, that is, of rational and reflective argument, of everyday practical, moral errors and ones that are peculiarly influential in our own particular culture. They can be usefully classified under three headings. And in each of the three types of case particular

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mistakes are symptomatic of some more general habit of mind and practice.

First then there are those mistakes which derive from distorted conceptions of the freedom and autonomy of the individual self, mistakes which involve a repudiation of the Kantian standpoint just as much as of the Thomistic. One expression of these conceptions is attachment to some notion of the self as constituted in key part by its prerational and premoral choices, an attachment sometimes expressed in resentment and indignation that moral standards should be thought to have any other authority than those choices. From this point of view claims about the objectivity of the natural law are construed as attempts at an alien imposition upon the self of something that it has not chosen. Another expression of this distorted view of the self is the conferring upon the individual conscience of a sovereign independence of any standards external to its own judgments. Both these distortions are commonplaces of the justifications for actions and judgments often offered in the everyday life of our culture, in families, in workplaces, and in schools. What each presupposes is a denial of just that connection between the objectivity of the law and the autonomy and freedom of the self which is asserted in the encyclical. And therefore any philosophical theorizing which seems to afford sufficient rational grounds for denying this connection lends dangerous credibility to everyday error.

Secondly there are those mistakes which derive from the tendency in our culture to conceive of all practical situations as ones in which it is appropriate for rational agents to weigh benefits and costs, and in which every benefit and every cost can be weighed against every other, so that each may achieve for her or himself the greatest possible, or at least a satisfactory, balance of benefits over costs. This generally has two bad consequences. If and whenever changing social circumstances alter the balance of costs and benefits, so that what was hitherto a profitable principle for me to live by becomes an unprofitable one, then it also becomes, on this view, rational and right for me to exchange that principle for another. So it comes about that no principles are held unconditionally, no commitments are unqualified. But, insofar

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as this is so, human relationships are fundamentally altered. Unconditional trust in another becomes a form of moral superstition. Temporariness becomes a crucial feature of the moral life and the virtue of integrity, of a willingness and an ability to stand by ones central commitments, whatever the consequences, becomes thought of not as a virtue, but as a piece of moral irrationality. So a consistent consequentialism in everyday life would entail the loss of what is from the standpoint of the natural law a constitutive virtue of the mature self.

Another consequence of this same attitude, according to which all rational decision issues from this kind of calculation of benefits and costs, is that what is in fact incommensurable is too often treated as though it were commensurable and, when this is so, what is presented in the guise of rational calculation in fact conceals, usually unwittingly, an underlying set of evaluative judgments of quite another kind. The apparently rational may thus disguise, and often enough does disguise, arbitrariness of preference and power. And the self is once again injured by such concealment and deception.

To this someone may respond that I--and by implication the encyclical--seem to have contradicted myself. I insisted a little earlier, as does the encyclical, that the precepts of the natural law are to be obeyed, whatever the consequences. But now I am emphasizing, as also does the encyclical, the bad consequences of certain errors which both derive from a disregard for and serve to obscure the character of the natural law. How can I first deny the relevance of consequences and then assert it? The answer is that consequences are wholly irrelevant to the prohibitions of the negative precepts of the natural law. The rational justification of those precepts is not a matter of the consequences of disobeying them and to justify my actions and omissions by reference to what those precepts forbid is not to appeal to consequences. Among the positive precepts of the natural law however is that we should all have an abiding concern for the flourishing of our families, our social and political order, and our culture. Here right action does involve the promotion of certain consequences and the avoidance of others, so far as that is possible. Some goods

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in these areas are indeed greater than others. Hence derives the moral relevance of the consequences for familial, social, and cultural life of widespread disobedience to and confusion concerning the natural law. There is no inconsistency.

It is just this type of concern for the condition of our culture, as well as for individuals, which receives expression in the encyclicals insistence that for any culture to flourish those whose culture it is must recognize the need to call upon those intellectual and moral resources which belong to human beings as such and not only to what is specifically its own. The belief that our only resources are those provided by and specific to our own particular culture and the corresponding belief that the highest standards that we can know are the highest standards of that culture sometimes present themselves in our own culture in the form of a crude relativism. But even the sophisticated who disown any such relativism in theory often behave in practice as if something very like it were true, by their attitude to alien cultures, engaging with those cultures only on assumptions that take for granted the superiority of the dominant standards of our own culture. So far too often, for example, North Americans treat human beings everywhere as though it could be taken for granted that they are primarily consumers of whatever the most advanced technology is able to supply.

This attitude allows people to conceal from themselves what they are and have become, for they lose sight of any standard more fundamental than those upheld in their own culture by which important aspects of that culture might be judged defective. And without an adequate acknowledgment of the natural law, which provides just such a standard, we can have no sound basis for the kind of conversation with the representatives of alien cultures in which we might learn how to see ourselves from their point of view and so learn further about ourselves. Such failure can '' eliminate awareness of ones own limits and of ones own sin~~ (Section 105, p. 127), so leading to a further deprivation of the self. We can avoid such failure not only by calling upon what is already ours, but also by recognizing what is to be learned from a variety of other traditions, "the great religious and sapi-

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ential traditions of East and West, from which the interior and mysterious workings of Gods Spirit are not absent" (Section 94, p. 116).

Relativism is then a third type of error identified in the encyclical which appears both in everyday life and as a contending position in the enquiries of moral philosophy. The importance which attaches to the identification of all three kinds of error is thus both moral and intellectual. And, if moral philosophers are to dispose themselves rightly in relation to those errors, they need not only what can be afforded by their own enquiries, but much more than this, that grace necessary for the redirection and restoration of the self of which the gospel speaks. Each of these three kinds of error turns out to be an attachment to something which in the end deprives us not only of our good, that is, of God, but also of something crucial in ourselves, something without which we will become incapable of achieving that which alone in the end gives point and purpose to our activities. One central moral and theological lesson of the encyclical is that, without understanding of and obedience to Gods law, we become self-frustrating beings.

Yet, if this is so, if, that is to say, both our moral lives and our philosophical enquiries are bound to be ultimately frustrated, unless we are able to learn what the gospel has to teach, then it would be tragic and seemingly paradoxical, if what interposed itself between us and the gospel, obscuring what the gospel has to say about these errors, was some aspect of the discipline of Catholic moral theology. The history of Catholic theology suggests however that this can indeed happen and in two ways. One is by some theologians making themselves independent of authoritative Catholic teaching, so that for premises derived from that teaching they substitute premises of their own. And this is most notably and harmfully the case when they try to make themselves the authority which declares what authoritative Catholic teaching

is. The other is by theologians deriving from such premises particular erroneous conclusions. How the pope and the bishops should respond is for them and, happily, not for me. But were they to have failed to respond, this would itself be a failure quite

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as great as that of any theological error. Even so, the significance of theological errors becomes somewhat different, when those errors providentially provide matter and occasion for a declaration of the truths of the gospel. One way of missing the point of Veritatis Splendor would be to tie its reading too closely to the work of those particular moral theologians whose writings may

have been the occasion for its composition. For, quite apart from any errors that they may have committed, Veritatis Splendor is and will remain a striking Christian intervention in moral debate, at once authoritative teaching and a voice in that continuing philosophical conversation between Christianity and modernity to which Pascal and Kierkegaard, Newman and Barth and von Balthasar, have all been contributors. Veritatis Splendor continues the same evangelical and philosophical conversation with secular modernity, and the appropriate initial response of each of us to it should concern our own past and present defects and errors rather than those of others. There is much work to be done.¹

¹I am indebted for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper

to my colleagues Alfred J. Freddoso, Ralph M. Mclnerny, and W. David

Solomon, as well as to the participants in a discussion sponsored by the John

Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Communio, The

Thomist, and the American Maritain Society.