An unusually bad essay crossed my computer screen the other day, by Peter Kreeft, who is apparently a kind of figure in Conservative Catholic circles. To give a sense of what sort of person he is, supposedly he was asked whether a Catholic could be a liberal, and he said it was “a very challenging question.” He has also said that “to be a Catholic is to take the whole deal.” I am a little astounded to think that there is nothing in the entire Church he would reject, but I suppose that “self-deception” or “blithe ignorance” (see below) play a part in the explanation of that mystery. I know I should just live and let live, but since he is a Catholic, I feel a bit responsible to police the intellectual dishonesty of other Catholics. So I have spent some words on him.
His essay was about liberal arts education and traditional sexual morality. His conclusion was that they are similar, and so, “If you want to restore liberal education, restore sexual morality. And if you want to restore sexual morality, restore liberal education.”
Needless to say, there is absolutely no data for this, and probably, even just based on his own essay (again, see below), the opposite is true; a liberally educated person will reject the sexual morality he espouses. He claims that true liberal education is only found in a few “crackpot colleges” like St. John’s or Thomas Aquinas or Christendom; I did not go to any such school, but I will venture to say that I ended up with a liberal education nonetheless, as I bet this essay will prove. If he really wants to put it to the test, I’d gladly debate him on the topic of his essay, or most anything else, in the place of his choosing – in Latin, of course. (Surely not too much to ask from a “whole deal Catholic”? It is “the language of the universal Church,” is it not?).
The reasoning he uses may be found in his essay, and I do not find it very compelling and will not follow it step by step. I will note that he claims that what is principally remarkable about a liberal education is that it pursues the truth for its own sake, and not for any advantage deriving therefrom. I think this is a false definition and hardly describes the colleges he mentions, but of course his definition of truth is conformity to a religious system, because God is Truth; his wording hence sounds very “liberal,” but is not different from the rationales used by other “whole deal” Catholics to suppress Galileo, ban books (including translations, or even accurate recensions, of the Bible), close down the schools of philosophy, fire liberal theologians, etc. From what follows in his writing I am not confident that inquiry, empiricism, or data have a great deal to do with the variety of “the pursuit of truth for its own sake” he is talking about.
I would rather focus on the part where he gets to sex, because here this indifference to the data which would be the point of entry to the truth is most evident.
He uses as a linchpin a very nice quotation from Lewis’s excellent little book The Abolition of Man. It is worth reproducing because it is so good:
There is something that unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the ancients, the cardinal problem of human life had been how to conform the human soul to objective reality; and the means were knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of the soul; and the solution is a technique.
I agree. Applied science is not wisdom. This is of course not news. Life requires both applied science and wisdom. If your leg is hurting, you will need to inspect it; if there is a thorn in it, I advise you to remove it; if there is some more serious problem you cannot solve, you may want to go to the doctor (or Jesus, if he is around) to seek a cure; and this may work; but if it is incurable, and some of our pains are, then you must learn to live with it. A well-formed human being should have some grounding in both conforming reality to his wishes and conforming his soul to reality.
But for Kreeft this is a dichotomy, and the former is suspect, while the latter is praiseworthy (which is why, I suppose, these liberal arts colleges he praises do not help us with medical breakthroughs). The former is equivalent or at least analogous – and he makes this claim, I do not – to prostitution. Of course this is madness, and the Christian religion has very nicely always respected people who alter reality for the sake of other people, calling their particular form of activity “good works.”
Thus he makes it, finally, by means of the claim that now “truth is a prostitute,” to sex; he claims that there is a new vision of sex in our society:
The change is this: The old contemplative attitude of objectivity, wonder, and respect is replaced by a new activist attitude of conquest, use, and subjective satisfaction – in relation to women just as in relation to truth. The old poets used to sing of women as ends, as objects of admiration, awe, contemplation, and even worship; the new ones sing of them as means rather than ends, as objects of use (and, if we are to call rappers poets, of domination, rape, murder, and mutilation). We have transformed women from Beatrice to Barbie, from the Madonna to Madonna (what a difference a “the” makes!), from images of God to occasions for self-gratification.
This is ignorance and indifference to truth. Let us start with Homer – he is old, and he is a poet. He wrote a poem about a hero who was offended when another hero took away his “prize” – and he continually talks about how humiliated he was by having his “prize” taken away, which he had won fair and square when he sacked a city and picked her it out, as his “booty” (a word which has managed to make it through the entire Western tradition to the rappers Mr. Kreeft despises). Later all the Trojan women, because their husbands lost the war, managed to be turned into sex-slaves for the heroes. This is known to a great number of people who have far more excuse for ignorance than Mr. Kreeft. And what of Romulus, who orchestrated the Rape of the Sabines, and the Greek and Roman gods, whose customary mode of interaction with human women was rape, not to mention old poets like Ovid, whose lasciviousness got him banned from ancient Rome. Can Kreeft really say that “woman as ‘occasion for self-gratification’” is new? Let’s toss in all the dynastic marriages of the Western tradition, where women have been pawns of diplomacy (those marriages sanctified by the Church, of course). And while we’re on the Church – Mr. Kreeft is a Catholic, and a staunch supporter of Its Truth – I’m sure he is aware that the Catholic Church, as defender of the truth, permits its own sacrament of marriage, which it typically considers absolutely binding until death, to be considered null and void if a woman is infertile, and thus unable to serve in her role as a means of reproduction. She is not an end – she is a means, according to the sacramental theology. For the longest time the entire Christian tradition tolerated conjugal rape, because it was believed that a man had a right to his wife’s body for purposes of self-gratification. (Spousal rape was criminalized only in the late 20th century as a byproduct of modern secularism, and it was opposed by churches). How can Mr. Kreeft be ignorant of the long, long human tradition of women as means? Prostitution, he may be enlightened to know, has been called “the oldest profession,” not because it is a new thing someone came up with sometime around Vatican II. He uses the term, amazingly, as a metaphor for this new way of looking at women he talks about.
Kreeft then disapprovingly quotes a series of philosophers – Machiavelli, Bacon, Nietzsche – as all supporting the “new” outlook he despises, pushing the change back, seemingly, at least five hundred years. He further notes that “all the classical early modern philosophers” agree with each other and disagree with him. He can go back further than that. St. Augustine, in his De Doctrina Christiana, absolutely, positively one of the most important books in the Western tradition, immensely influential in the Middle Ages, quoted again and again by all later Church writers, and said to describe “the fundamental plan of Christian culture,” says, famously (to those who are liberally educated) [numbers provided by me]:
1. “Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used… To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love, provided it is worthy of love.” (I.3-4)
2. “The things which are to be enjoyed are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a single Trinity, a certain supreme thing common to all who enjoy it.” (I.5)
3. “We who enjoy and use other things are things ourselves.” (I.22)
4. “It is to be asked whether man is to be loved by man for his own sake or for the sake of something else. If for his own sake, we enjoy him; if for the sake of something else, we use him. But I think that man is to be loved for the sake of something else. In that which is to be loved for its own sake the blessed life resides; and if we do not have it for the present, the hope for it now consoles us. But ‘cursed by the man that trusteth in man.’ No one ought to enjoy himself either, if you observe the matter closely, because he should not love himself on account of himself but on account of Him who is to be enjoyed…. He did not leave any part of life which should be free and find itself room to desire the enjoyment of something else.” (I.22)
This is the famed uti/frui – use/enjoyment – distinction. It became of course a defining characteristic of the Middle Ages, that it was wrong to enjoy anything other than God. People were only means, and not significant in themselves. This is in many ways an overthrow of the whole idea of the Incarnation, and Augustine, called a “doctor of the Church,” in this book (and its twin, City of God) did as much violence to Western civilization as any writer who has ever lived. Augustine goes so far with his certainty of man’s status as a means that he even scratches his head about the whole notion of a “loving God”:
It may still seem ambiguous when we say that we have full enjoyment of that thing which we love for its own sake, and that we enjoy anything only insofar as it makes us blessed, merely using everything else. For God loves us, and the Divine Scripture comments on his great love for us. How does He love us? So that he may use us, or so that He may enjoy us? If He enjoys us, He needs some good of ours, but no sane person would say this. For every good of ours is God or comes from God. To whom is it obscure or doubtful that a light does not need the brightness of the thing it illuminates? For the prophet says most openly, ‘I have said to the Lord, thou art my God, for thou has no need of my goods.’ Therefore he does not enjoy us but uses us. For if He did neither, I cannot see how He could love us. (I.31)
What Kreeft does not understand – because he is not well educated enough, I suppose – is that modern “every person must be an end, not a means” theology is just that, modern, and its roots are in philosophers who were independent of or even hostile to the Church. Kant is the most famous expositor of this philosophical idea, but it is implied by most of the rights-based philosophers that the Church hierarchs exprobated for centuries.
And think about it: of course Medieval theology looked like this: if you were going to have a public burning of a human being, and call it an “act of faith” (auto-da-fe), you could not possibly really believe in a theology where a person was an end in himself, an “object of awe, admiration, worship” and so forth. He was a means, and if the best way to make him a means to having people love God alone was to light him on fire, he could be lit on fire for the emolument of the crowd. If the pope believed that every person was an end in himself, and all life sacred, he would not have kicked off the Carnival – the Carnival! – with a few executions to increase the general hilarity. He would not have rounded up a bunch of Jews every year to run for him in the yearly “palio degli Ebrei” in Rome. So much for the idea that “using” people is a modern idea the Church has been doggedly anathematizing and protecting people from.
And as for the dignity of women, worthy of “admiration, awe, contemplation, and even worship,” needless to say the Church Fathers are a sea of misogyny with a few islands of faint praise – and those who disagree with this are welcome to take the trouble to compile every reference to women and publish it (for truth for its own sake is to be pursued) – those who have read widely in them know well that what I am saying is true. If I am wrong, prove me wrong, a compendium of the Church Fathers Celebrating Women would be useful for the world, if you can find enough pages to fill it. The Beatrice-idea found in Dante is mostly the inheritance of the troubadours, who of course influenced Christianity but (as with most progress in the Church) almost entirely from the outside. St. Augustine would have considered Kreeft’s notion of women as an object of “something close to worship” unadulterated nonsense and nearly blasphemy. (Speaking of Augustine, his relationship to the “pursuit of truth for its own sake” is a bit complicated; he of course attacks curiosity as evil, and a source of temptation, the spider in his cell (Confessions 10.35) being the most famous example).
Kreeft then moves on to “natural law,” another very tired old concept which survives only in the field of Catholic sexual moral reasoning. Kreeft says:
Our culture no longer understands the most basic meaning of a term like “natural law” or “unnatural acts.” “Nature” used to mean “the intelligible principle [source] of characteristic activity from within any being.” But that is a metaphysical definition, and metaphysics has gone into the garbage can. Nature means now merely what we can kick or all that we can observe with our five senses or all that we have not yet turned into technology.
I don’t think Kreeft actually gets the irony in insisting upon a “metaphysical definition” of the word nature (“metaphysic” in Greek means “after/beyond nature” and refers to all that is not covered by the term physis, “nature”), but I can find him ten examples right now of Cicero using the word “natura” precisely as every normal person understands the term today (just for your use and enjoyment I will offer: De Natura Deorum 2.57.142; De Finibus 2.11.34; Fin. 2.14.45; Fin.2.33.110; Fin.3.19.62; Fin.4.7.16; Fin.5.15.41; 5.20.56; Academicae Quaestiones 1.5.19; and my favorite, “Cleanthes gives the name of ‘God’ to the mind and soul of all nature,” N.D.1.14.97. Try to swap in the definition “the intelligible principle [source] of characteristic activity from within any being” while reading that sentence. I guess Cicero didn’t know what the word meant). Caesar uses the word to mean nothing metaphysical at all – another person in need of a liberal education, I suppose – but to mean “the way stuff just is” – he has scouts go to find out the “natura montis,” the shape of the mountain. (Hell that’s in the first book of the Gallic Wars, Kreeft must have gotten that far in his Latin studies.) My guess is that Kreeft is like many other conservative Catholics I know – they all think the idea of Latin is just great, and they think these dumb modern kids should get off their computers and crack a copy of Wheelock, but they have not the brains or dedication to actually learn the language. Then they ironically profit off of the general cultural ignorance, trotting out a word on occasion, like a magician’s trick, to conjure up the idea of discipline and erudition, with ancien-regime flavor.
Just so I don’t leave my readers in ignorance, the word ‘natura‘ originally means the way things are born (natus); it refers to what is innate, unshaped by effort; hence in general it came to mean “the way stuff just is,” as opposed to the way we make or mar it. Certain philosophers attempted to give verbal definition to the nature of particular things; but of course not all of them believed that nature was intelligible, or definable, and many of their definitions – “tailless, featherless biped” and so forth – became philosophical jokes. Cicero (for example), greatest of the ancient Roman philosophers, considered himself an Academic who did not accept that anything could be known, much less that the “principle of characteristic activity of any being” could be grasped by the intellect (“intelligible”). In other words, Kreeft’s definition implies an entire philosophy, a logical sleight of hand leading to a tautology which a liberally educated person will reject as inherently useless in an inquiry. This is the kind of argumentation conservatives generally tell us “Great Books” programs and the Trivium and Quadrivium and an unflinching commitment to The Truth prevent.
But to return to “natural law.” This concept in the main we associate with Aristotle, who was (God bless him) a scientist who believed in observation (in Greek, theoria, a word which the Catholic philosophical tradition has utterly subverted and perverted into our word “theory”). Aristotle used his position at the court of Macedonia to have sent to him, by royal edict, all natural curiosities such as fossils and strange animals (compare him with Augustine). In other words, he was gathering data, because the physis or natura of a being could not be determined without such observation. The conservative Catholic tradition has become utterly unmoored from this observation – all they think they need to do is regurgitate the approved philosophers within the tradition, and let them define something’s nature, without any reference to natura itself – the way things are. (It is sometimes funny to see the Catholic philosophers like Albertus Magnus (Aquinas’s teacher) parroting things they have read (or misread) in Pliny, who was writing more than a thousand years earlier. Sometimes the same words are used, with no new observations at all).
We have a great deal more data now, including about such things as the “sexual sins” Kreeft mentions: “sodomy, adultery, fornication, contraception, and masturbation.” In fact, all are found in some form in nature, utterly unaffected by human volition or the modern media, which means that by any respectable definition these things are natural. In fact some of them, like adultery, seem to play a fairly substantial role in nature. In fact, to complete the irony, evolutionary biologists – who are often particularly committed to the quest for truth for its own sake, learning about fruit flies and finches and the like – have even effectively hypothesized intelligible principles for such things as adultery. They are exploring and grasping the “nature of adultery,” while Catholic theologians are prattling on about how adultery itself is, in Kreeft’s terms, a “sin against truth, against being, against reality.” Like all things truly comical, this is also very sad. I am no fan of adultery, but I do not mistake my condemnation of it for a serious inquiry into its nature.
Kreeft concludes with a diatribe about the importance of honesty. This cannot be taken as anything but hypocrisy given his resistance to nature – the way things just are – when it comes to sex. There is much observed homosexuality in nature, and some evidence that human homosexuality is natural, i.e. innate – this is certainly the claim of many homosexuals. In other words, they contend that it is according to “the principle of characteristic activity from within their being.” To simply dismiss such a claim, without due investigation, is hardly intellectual honesty or the pursuit of truth for its own sake. And his description of people who accept homosexuality sounds precisely – precisely – like what we know and have observed in people who deny their homosexuality:
Dishonesty with truth provokes dishonesty with sex and dishonesty with sex provokes dishonesty with truth. You can’t be a totally honest thinker if you are living a lie. Your lived sexual lie will make everything in your life a little lie-like. There will be a vague shuffling, a hiding, an escapist politeness that will come to settle on everything you say or do like a fog. You will not dare to speak out clearly lest you offend someone. You will begin to sound more like a bishop than a saint. You will be nice instead of being holy. And so you will miss the meaning of liberal education and of sex.
Part of honesty is intellectual honesty, which in this case means “physics before metaphysics.” If your metaphysical definition of a man is “someone who is sexually paired with a woman,” and then you find a man sexually paired with a man, you don’t call such a man “a sin against nature” – you go back and revise your definition. Plato in the 4th century B.C., discussing love, famously records that there are three types of people, heterosexuals, gays, and lesbians; he observed that this was part of the nature of certain people. His observation may have been wrong, but that is precisely what real liberal arts institutions are investigating – while the “crackpot colleges” are satisfying themselves with echoing whatever comes out of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Kreeft also touches on the other main argument of conservative Catholicism – there really aren’t too many, are there? – which is the hatred of “moral relativism.” This issue probably deserves larger and repeated treatment, but moral relativism is no threat to real Christianity. Real Christianity will gobble up moral relativism very quickly. The only danger is that real Christianity will get eaten by this legalistic Phariseeism and know-nothing existential certitude known as Conservatism. If that occurs, then of course, moral relativism will destroy this Phariseeism, and Christianity with it, because it is neither true in itself nor desirable for any but the sick and immature: it is a cave outside of which the sun will continually shine to beckon people away. But moral relativism is no danger. First of all, its most extreme forms are not respected by hardly anyone: vanishingly few argue for an “everything is permitted” morality, as Kreeft himself acknowledges:
Almost the only reason anyone in our society ever believes and teaches a philosophy of moral relativism is to justify sexual immorality. All the controversial issues in the culture war are sexual. How often have you heard arguments for moral relativism to justify nuclear war, or insider trading, or child abuse, or genocide, or racism, or even environmental pollution?
The above is very damning, of course, because it makes it clear that the conservatives actually accept all of modern society except for the sex part, which is actually quite pathetic, because the greed and militarism of modern life are of very questionable compatibility with Christianity. But conservatives are not worried about this problem. (Liberals would hardly state that “all the controversial issues in the culture war are sexual” – because they care also about things that do have something to do with Christianity, like “nuclear war, or insider trading, or child abuse, or genocide, or racism, or even environmental pollution.”) The reason why sex is such a battleground issue is that the most basic formulation of modern secular morality – which gave us the “woman as an end in herself” idea Kreeft would like to claim as a conservative notion – is not to do to others what you would not have done to yourself, and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Even lions of atheism like Hitchens consider this a good and possibly foundational principle. It is a highly relativistic formulation; indeed it is fundamentally relativist, as it derives its tenets from the relation between yourself as an end and every other person as an end, and not from an immutable code. It is also, of course, from the Gospels, and is Jesus’s summa of Christian morality. Paul reasoned from it to proclaim the death of the Law and dispense with circumcision, though Jesus himself did not do so, and the “Pope” Peter did not either – but Paul realized that the new idea of the good did not require circumcision anymore, even if “the Bible” did. Sexual morality received no similar examination then, but it is receiving it now. The same principle applies: every aspect of sexual morality which can be justified by the golden rule will survive in real Christianity, and everything else which was merely cultural will become a matter of culture and choice (“cafeteria Catholicism”). The end result will probably be something very similar to “modern” sexual ethics. In general, what the conservatives call moral relativism is frequently the continued operation of the idea of the Golden Rule on the Law. It is opposed by the same element, the “scribes and experts in the law,” the literalists and legalists. In fact the replacement of a legal code – “absolute truth,” “intrinsically immoral acts” – with a relativistic morality is a large portion of what made the good news good. It works too – despite the claims of Christians that moral relativism will result in a pandemic of vice, the safest places on earth are the places where it is most prevalent. A person committed to the truth cannot help concede this. Conservatives reassert their conviction that relativism will lead to moral disaster by focusing entirely on sex – well, modern morality gives us peace and prosperity, eliminates poverty, cares for the sick, provides for the elderly, insane, etc. far better than Christendom ever did – “but look at those girls in skimpy clothes on the t.v.! Terrible.” To return to Jesus: “So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Needless to say, it is hard to derive from this rule Kreeft’s prohibition on “sodomy, adultery, fornication, contraception, and masturbation.” Which is why Conservative Catholics look instead to “natural law.” Jesus was smart enough, by the way, to have said simply, “follow natural law, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Or even just “follow the Law and the Prophets.” And yet he did not.
Let me close with one more stupid formulation by Kreeft:
I have always thought that the essential difference between a conservative and a progressive is simply that the conservative is happy and the progressive is unhappy. Why else would the conservative want to conserve something unless it made him happy, and why else would the progressive prefer to change a thing unless it made him unhappy?
It would be nice to get some data on this, but most of us know that if you want to hear a diatribe from an unhappy man, sit down next the conservative old curmudgeon. Kreeft is not advocating the preservation of what is; he is advocating a return to what never was. The past is useful to him precisely because he knows so little about it, and it provides him with a blank canvas for his projections. One of the great problems with his piece is that he quotes, disapprovingly, men like Machiavelli and Nietzsche and Bacon, who were all far better educated than he, in precisely the way he believes will restore old-time sexual morality to us. Does he not see that the data suggests exactly the opposite? These men overthrew the old system precisely because they knew it so well, and would not defend it the way Kreeft does because they were not ignorant of it as he. He claims that conservatives are all happy; the adjective he was looking for, I think, was “smug.”
(More on Kreeft here).
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