Lesson 12: Freedom and Law

AGENDA

• Freedom and Law

FREEDOM AND LAW

1. Now for Aquinas, virtue and law are the internal and external sides (or standards) in the same pursuit of goodness. Ideally, there will be no ultimate conflict between what the law requires and what virtue trains us to do.
1. Law he calls an external principle of act (a standard the guides us from the outside, just as the habit of virtue guides us from the inside
2. Law he also calls “an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by one who has care of the community.” (Q90, a1-4
3. All of the world is governed by the eternal law of God (that is, governed by a rational and rationally accessible order). If as Aquinas established earlier in his text, God exits [through the so-called five ways (Q1, a2): (1) from motion and prime mover; (2) from nature of first efficient cause; (3) from possibility and necessity [there must be something that exists necessary because a world of pure possibility would be imperfect]; (4) from gradation, ideas of better and worse; (5) from ordered governance)], then eternal law is nothing other than the idea of the rational ordering of the world by the eternal lawgiver
4. Natural Law: “is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law.” (Q91, a3)
5. Human Law: attempts by human agents to govern by reason; only those laws which cohere with natural law are worthy of the name and when the state tries to compel us to do otherwise, we are justified in disobeying
6. Divine Law: the law of God as it is expressed through revelation (roughly divided into the Old Law (as communicated in the Hebrew Scriptures) and the New Law (as communicated in the Christian New Testament)
2. John Paul II’s letter,Veritatis Splendor (1993) is a response to what he sees as the creeping threat of moral relativism both inside and outside the Church. There are really two points here.
1. Can we ever know that there are things which are ultimately good or evil; right or wrong? (moral knowledge)
2. Is such knowledge sufficient to become a virtuous person? Will this really lead us always to act in accordance with the law? What happens when the law of God is not specific enough for the case that confronts us
3. Is the world basically tragic or is it always possible to do the good and avoid any final conflicts among goods?
3. Basic Issue: “What Must I Do to Have Eternal Life? (Mt. 19:16)
1. What is morally good is essentially a religious question because God alone is good and is the ultimate source of good (par. 9
2. The moral life fundamentally has the characteristic of a response: all of your freely chosen actions orient you to God in the form of response to (affirming or rejecting) the gift of God’s love
3. We respond as whole persons (that is, as unities of body and soul), seeking to answer this fundamental question, and in each moral choice we communicate fundamentally who we are and what we love (a theme we saw developed by Augustine)
4. Obedience to the law and love of the good God are one and the same (the summary of Mt. 19)
5. God who is all good gives us the law, and it does not change just because we are unable to live up to it (and this is rooted in the fact that God is the souce of all goodness, where creation and the giving of law are the primary expressions of God's love, the ways that this goodness is communicated to the world
6. God’s commandments are basic communications of goodness waiting to be fulfilled
7. How does God communicate God’s goodness? (note how these same themes were developed in Benedict's letter as well)
1. Creation and its order
2. Law (explicit and implicit)
3. Incarnation
4. Paschal mystery
4. Next time, we will be transitioning into the writings of John Paul II on the topic of truth and conscience. Among the questions we will consider is the following:
1. Whether a person can maintain a fundamental orientation to God in the course of doing an action contrary to the law of God?