An Ontario judge engaged in a tirade when, ignoring a deal proposed by the Crown and the defence, he sentenced Canadian pro-life activist to an additional 92 days in jail for mischief and failing to comply with probation orders; Ms. Wagner walks into clinics and engages women there, in the waiting rooms, giving them a rose and pro-life counseling. According to LifeSiteNews.com, the Justice, S. Ford Clements, said the following:
“She can sit in jail, if that’s the only way to protect people,” [Clements] fulminated, calling Wagner “cowardly” for “abusing other human beings” and not having the courage to make her views known through other channels. “This is an extraordinary waste of resources. Get a grip!”
“You don’t get it, do you? What’s the rule of law? You’re required to abide by it … You’ve lost the right as a citizen to be anywhere near an abortion clinic or to speak to an employee,” he said.
“You’re wrong and your God’s wrong,” he continued. “You have complete contempt … There is a right to (abortion) in this country … You don’t have a right to cause (abortion-seeking women) extra pain and grief the way you do.”
I don’t doubt Mary Wagner’s faith informs her faith and motivates her actions. But the judge is wrong in implying pro-life passion is purely religious. Indeed, thanks to the historic and deleterious fissure between faith and reason that opened up in the middle ages, most people on whatever side of the political, cultural, and religious spectra today assume social conservatism and concomitant political action is motivated purely by religion.
But this is not true, and social conservatives has failed to make this crucial point. Our “no” to things like abortion and same-sex marriage is rooted in our “yes” to fundamental natural truths about the human person and the human community accessible by reason. Reason teaches it is not natural to eliminate the living fetus from the womb. Reason teaches it is not natural to regard the union of two members of the same sex as a marriage.
Why, then, is it mostly religious people — not just Christians, but also Jews and Muslims and others — who advocate social conservatism, who protest at clinics, who run charities serving those in crisis pregnancies, and stand up for authentic marriage?
The answer: Religious people are the only ones remaining who really believe in the categories of reason and nature. What passes for reason in the secular world is a cold copy of the authentic thing that devolves into irrationality and nihilism, as Pope Benedict has made clear again and again. Just trace intellectual history from Descartes to Nietzsche.
Speaking as a Catholic Christian, reason is at the heart of our conception of the divinity. One can translate John 1:1 as follows: “In the beginning was the Divine Reason (logos), and the Divine Reason was with God, and God was the Divine Reason.” We’re then told in John 1:3 that this Divine Reason, this logos, was the agent of creation. Thus, the created order — nature — is intelligible and rational. It can be read so that one learns truths about nature and man’s place therein. And read rightly, it can lead back to the creator God.
Faith and reason are thus complementary in historic Christian understanding. In terms of a Venn diagram, the circles would overlap. I often ask my students: “‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Truth of faith, or truth of reason?’” Just because God forbids something doesn’t mean it’s not also a rational truth of nature.
Or take abortion. The Bible says precious little about it, as pro-abortion folk point out. But this is a point in our favor, actually. We don’t oppose abortion because God simply said so in an arbitrary fashion as the voluntarists would have it. Rather, we oppose abortion because it is unnatural and irrational.
Unfortunately, many Christians — protestant, Catholic, evangelical — are unaware of the complementary nature of faith and reason, and so frame their arguments in passionate religious terms, and thus play right into the modern faith and reason split, enabling the marginalization of social conservatism as something merely religious and doing subtle damage to the pro-life, pro-marriage cause.
We have tough sledding ahead, for reason and nature are metaphysical concepts, and we live in a radically anti-metaphysical, pragmatic age, where positive law, severed from natural law, has really devolved to mere might makes right, into will to power. But we may hope enough of a divine spark remains in our countrymen and governing officials that they might respond to arguments rooted in right reason reading nature.
Ardent Catholic G.K. Chesterton famously observed that the madman is not the man who has lost his reason but the man who has lost everything but his reason. To put it mundanely, the man who reasons accurately from warped or impoverished premises will reach warped or impoverished conclusions precisely _because_ he is reasonable.
Beginning from a rich apprehension of nature, as you rightly say, a man can use reason profitably, perhaps even to find God. But reason itself can do little to correct those whose apprehension of nature is warped, which is to say almost our whole society, myself included. I think C.S. Lewis addresses this in his famous essay “Men Without Chests,” arguing that it is not our critical faculties but our affections that need training. We may benefit somewhat from reasoning more accurately, but we stand in far greater need of learning to love what is truly lovely.
RD, thanks for the reminder. Part of the problem with natural theology (or here, better, natural anthropology), natural law, and appeals to reason involves precisely what you’ve identified: We’re fallen and thus intellect, will, appetites, etc., are all damaged. How and to what extent depends on whether one is Protestant or Catholic.
I do think, though, that our appeals to reason and nature regarding the human person and the family aren’t sterile logic, but as arguments they’d have a certain elegance, a certain beauty, and by calling attention to the truth of the human person, to the truth of marriage, we’d subtly invite people to contemplate beauty, for beauty is the clear revelation of ontological reality. And once you bring ontology into it — that things have a nature, that persons have a nature, that marriage is something, and not what a particular rapid society makes of it — you can speak of truth, for you can speak truly or falsely about things that exist. In any event, I think reason involves both truth and beauty (as God indeed is Reason, Truth, and Beauty, among other things), and so perhaps our arguments can reorder affections.
The question is, do humans after the fall have a sufficient capacity to perceive beauty and truth if they encounter it? I tend to think so. But people write long books about these things.
Reason as a subtle invitation to and example of beauty? Now that is a lovely idea, and you present it winsomely. And I agree enthusiastically that if you can persuade a man “that things have a nature, that persons have a nature, that marriage is something,” as you aptly put it (for, as best I can tell, the denial of natures is the heart of secularism), then you have laid the foundation for profitable discussion of truth — indeed you have probably won the man over.
I agree that after the Fall, and especially after the cross, man has the capacity (with God’s grace) to perceive beauty and truth — otherwise how would any be saved? I judge, though, that our own society is uncommonly virulent and successful at stunting that capacity in its members through relentless indoctrination, appeals to our appetites, and, when those fail, outright coercion, as in the case of the judge your cite, who backs up punishment with ghoulish moral outrage against a woman guilty of the “crime” of trying to hinder murder. It is in some sense nothing new, being as the Apostle Paul puts it, the “godlessness and wickedness of men who supress the truth by their wickedness”; but it seems uncommonly potent, from a historical perspective, and I fear it will render difficult or impossible the sort of reasonable discussions you propose. Of course I have no better solution to propose, and I continue to puzzle over whether the Church has any better response to make than simply continuing in quiet faithfulness.
Well, if nothing else, faithfulness is all we can do, but maybe that’s all that’s called for. Living life according to the Pastorals may be in order — living quiet lives in peace as the Church, bearing witness.
Wow. . .
Careful, Your Honor; you’re not the first demagogue to set himself up against God. I’m just a little stunned that you’re willing to state it quite so baldly. . .